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The firm belief in a point, the truth of which we have no means of certainly knowing, is, I fear, more closely allied to folly than to piety: for my purpose, however, the fair acknowledgment of the learned Cardinal is amply sufficient.

4. Let us now finally return to the question of evidence which the bold claim of primitive antiquity, so rashly put forth by the Tridentine Conventicle, has constituted an especial question between Papalists and Protestants.

(1.) Unable to produce any genuine conclusive testimony, the Latins, at one period, built much upon a pretended Apostolical Council at Antioch: in a canon of which, not only the use, but the very worship, of images, is exhibited as authorised by the Apostles.

The credit of this Synod was, in their day, strenuously defended by Baronius and Binius and other writers of the same stamp'. But the learned Jesuit Petavius, much to his credit, fairly confesses, that the alleged canon, which is to establish image-worship upon apostolical authority, is nothing better than a forgery: and, in strict ac

quamvis piè hoc credamus. Cajetan. in secundam secund. quæst. lxxxviii. art. 5.

1 Baron. Annal. A.D. 102, n. 19, 20. Bin. Not. in Concil. Antioch. Concil. vol. i. p. 62.

' Quod ad illum canonem apostolicum attinet, quem primus edidit in lucem Franciscus Turrianus, eum puto supposititium Petav. Dogmat. Theol. de Incarn. lib. xv. c. 14. n. 5.

esse.

cordance with this honest confession, he pronounces it to be a matter of absolute certainty, that, in the first ages of the Church, images of Christ were not substituted in the place of pagan idols, nor proposed to the veneration of the faithful'.

(2.) A similar confession, with respect to the invocation of saints, is made by Cardinal Perron.

He owns, that no traces of such a practice can be found in the authors who lived nearest to the times of the Apostles: but, for this indisputable and acknowledged fact, he would account by the allegation, that most of the writings of that early age have perished'.

The remains of more than twenty of the Fathers of the three first centuries have come down to us; some, to a very great amount of copiousness; others, in the form of fragments more or less extensive and, from the smallness of the benefit which they confer upon the hopeless cause of Romanism, we may well argue that the lost writers would have been perused with no greater emolument. It is, however, quite obvious, that the miserable excuse of Cardinal Perron is, in effect,

1 Certum est, imagines Christi et maxime statuas, primis Ecclesiæ sæculis, non fuisse substitutas loco idolorum, nec fidelium venerationi expositas. Petav. Dogmat. Theol. lib. xv.

c. 13. n. 3.

2 See Stillingfleet's Rational Account of the grounds of protest. Relig. part iii. chap. 3. § 19. p. 590.

neither more nor less than a full acknowledgment, which acknowledgment he makes indeed even in so many words, that the unscriptural practice of invoking the saints is totally unsupported by any ancient historical testimony.

CHAPTER VII.

CONCLUSION.

TAKING in regular succession the most prominent and marked peculiarities of Romanism, Infallibility, Papal Supremacy, Transubstantiation, Purgatory, Saint-worship, Image-worship, Relic-worship, and Cross-worship, I have now shewn, that, even according to the evidence produced by the latin advocates themselves, those peculiarities, whether in regard to their abstract truth, or in regard to the alleged fact of their universal reception by the primitive Church, rest upon no testimony either of Holy Scripture or of the writers of the three first centuries. Whence the conclusion is that such peculiarities cannot reasonably be obtruded upon us, under the aspect of a constituent portion of Christianity.

I. This very natural and very obvious mode of conducting the investigation, even when barely hinted at as indispensably requisite to the development of the truth, has produced no small measure of soreness and irritation on the part of a modern defender of Romanism.

Mr. Husenbeth is angry, because I am unable to see the glaring absurdity of the mode of conducting the inquiry, which, as I had imagined, plain common sense instinctively led me to adopt : for, by some mental process which transcends my own comprehension, he pronounces the requisition of distinct evidence, from the writers of the three first centuries, for the establishment of the alleged historical FACT, that, Quite up to the apostolic age the peculiarities of Romanism were universally received by the primitive Church on the professed authority of Christ and his Apostles themselves, to be nothing better than A GLARING ABSURDITY'.

1 The question of the apostolicity of our doctrines, says Mr. Husenbeth in his last pamphlet, is A QUESTION OF HISTORY. Hence Mr. Faber argues, that the whole vitals of the matter lie in the writings of the Fathers anterior to the first General Council at Nice in 325; and that we shall effect nothing in the way of testimony, unless, with specified dates, we mount step by step until we reach the age of the approving Apostles themselves. This, he contends, we have not done, and cannot do: for he has perused all the Antenicene Fathers; and there exists a lack of materials, which renders the proposed task impossible. This has been Mr. Faber's eternal statement: and the man will not see its glaring absurdity. p. 9, 10.

Mr. Husenbeth is grievously inaccurate in making me say, that I have perused all the Antenicene Fathers. Such an assertion was never made by me. I have indeed perused the greater part of their writings: and, in most instances, I have perused them severally from beginning to end: but I never said, what Mr. Husenbeth very inaccurately exhibits me as saying. Yet, though I have not read all their writings, I have

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