All the Councils, and the Universal Church, which we must briefly notice. It is not our fault if he compels us to display him in his true character, and our unkindest wish towards him is only that which S. Augustine expressed to a heretic of his day, when he said: "May God teach you the truth which you think you know-nosse te faciat quod nosse te putas." our enmity towards him is contained in that prayer. We have seen what Dr. Barker thinks of the Bible and the Church, and have no reason to be surprised if he is equally accurate and devout in his estimate of the Pope. His capacity of error is as unlimited in the one direction as in the other. "For six centuries," he says, "the Roman supremacy was unheard of in the universal Church." He might as well have said that for six centuries the sun and moon refused their light, to mark their disapprobation of Christianity, and the indignant earth declined, for the same reason, to rotate on its axis. Ne quid nimis is evidently a maxim not much appreciated by Dr. Barker. It is a common failing of weak logicians to try to prove too much. Dr. Barker, as a controversialist, shares the ambition of the aspiring individual who offered to jump over the moon. He should content himself with lower flights. If there was any truth plainly taught by the Word of Truth, with a truly marvellous iteration, it was the Roman supremacy; and for this reason all the Saints and Councils in the East as in the West, proclaimed, from one end of Christendom to the other, that the authority of the Roman Pontiff was established, as the Greek Patriarch Mennas said, "by the sentence of the Lord." It was not created, as Dr. Barker dreams, "by forgeries," but, as even the self-sufficient Milman reluctantly confesses, by the unanimous testimony of the Christian conscience to its divine origin. "The Bishop of Rome," he says, "had floated onwards towards his supremacy on the full tide of dominant opinion." All the Popes, without exception, claimed their prerogative as the gift of God; and all the Saints, without exception, exalted it for the same reason, and for no other. It would have been vain and useless to claim it, unless Christian faith had been enlightened by the Holy Spirit to admit the claim. "The secret of that power," continues Milman, "lay in Rome's complete impregnation with the spirit of the age; and this lasted, almost unbroken, until the Reformation. It were neither just nor true to call this worldly policy, or to suppose that the Bishops of Rome dishonestly conformed, or bent their opinions to their age, for the sake of aggrandizing their power. Their sympathy with the general mind of Christianity constituted their strength." Finally, he is constrained to admit, what only such ignorance as prevails in Australia can dispute, that "their infallibility was but the expression of the universal, or at least predominant, sentiment of mankind."* No doubt Milman was of opinion that, in spite of the solemn promises of God to preserve His Church from error, "the general mind of Christianity," and "the universal sentiment" of all faithful men, were infected with falsehood and delusion. Anglicanism, like every other heresy, can only maintain its life on that hypothesis. Let God be a mocker of men, the Church a teacher of lies, and the Saints the sport and victim of both, since on no other supposition can the hydra of Protestantism wag its myriad heads, and shoot out its forked tongues of slander, contradiction, and revolt. Dr. Barker exults in that view of the Christian religion, and of its mournful and depraved history. For him the condition of the redeemed world was, for more than a thousand years, "a long night of darkness." It was not till licentious and brutal apostates, who were a scandal even to one another,-Luther, Tyndal, and Miles Coverdale with the "frisky wife," in whose lenient judgment he was a portent of immorality,-appeared on the scene of this world, that "light broke in upon an awakened Europe." So says Dr. Barker. No Jew or Pagan, from Caiaphas and Herod to our own day, was ever more dismally abandoned to a darkened mind than the author of such a sentiment, in which nonsense and impiety struggle together for the mastery. Let Dr. Barker ask himself, on some leisure day, when the Australian sun is not too fierce for tranquil meditation, the following momentous question. "Who am I, and who were Tyndal and Coverdale, or any of their depraved crew, that He who is just and holy should reserve for us incomparable favours, which He refused for long ages to the purest and most exalted of the children of men; should keep promises to us, to whom He never made any, and not keep them to the Saints or to His Church, to whom He had pledged His solemn word; should abandon them to error, whom the torrents of His grace enabled to lead a visibly supernatural life, and disclose truth only to us, though we are defiled with human lusts and passions, dwarfs in virtue, and as far below their spiritual stature as the deepest abyss of earth is below the loftiest peak of the Andes ? Does He, then, prefer the little to the great, the foolish to the wise, the animal to the spiritual, and frothy words to sublime deeds? And, if He does, how shall we explain the curious fact, that while the general mind' of Christianity, though plunged in error, * "Latin Christianity," bk. ii. ch. 2, p. 155. adhered to one interpretation of the Bible and professed one faith, we Protestants have a thousand different interpretations of Scripture' which can never cease,' and though a new revelation has given us a perfect and unclouded 'knowledge of truth,' no two of us can agree what it is?" If "Europe was awakened" from "a long night of darkness," only to be plunged in a deeper gloom, and to enter upon such a chaotic and barren existence as this, it seems to us that it might as well have remained asleep. For it is evident that its supposed sleep of a thousand years was more like the blissful life of heaven, more cheered with visions of God, than the gross, inarticulate, and trivial yawning of the new epoch, which is neither rational speech nor fruitful silence, neither peaceful rest nor wholesome activity, neither conscious life nor tranquil oblivion, but in which Dr. Barker sees, or thinks he sees, the ideal felicity of "emancipated" souls, and the exuberant vitality of "liberated" minds. The Roman supremacy, he says, was unknown "for six centuries." Unknown to whom? It was known to all Christians, and even to a good many pagans. Porphyry knew it so well as a notorious Christian doctrine, that he founded a specious argument against Christianity on the fact, which he naturally misunderstood, that S. Paul dared to remonstrate with S. Peter, who was "the head of the Church." The pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, knew it so well, that he styled the Pope of his day "Christianæ legis antistes." The very heathen were better acquainted with the constitution of the Christian Church than Dr. Barker. Even heretics so far shared what Milman calls "the general mind of Christianity," that both Eutyches and Dioscorus, as well as the Montanists, affected to consult the Holy See; and S. Jerome told S. Damasus that three rival sects in Antioch all pretended to be in communion with him. From the first hour of Christianity, from the moment in which our Divine Lord said, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church," all Christians confessed the truth expressed by the Angelic Doctor, "quod subesse Romano Pontifici sit de necessitate salutis." It was God only who could prescribe the conditions of salvation, and He made communion with the Holy See, as all saints and martyrs proclaimed, one of them. This truth, says the unwise Dr. Barker, was not known "for six centuries." Yet S. Clement, whose name was "in the book of life," used the pontifical authority. Hermas, saluted by S. Paul, acknowledged it. S. Ignatius of Antioch called the Roman See "the Church presiding in love," or rather the very source and bond of love-προκαθημένῃ τῆς ἀγάπης. S. Irenæus, VOL. XXVII.—NO. LIV. [New Series.] 2 D another disciple of the Apostles, proclaimed the Christian law that "every Church must be in communion with this Church," because only so can it maintain "the tradition that was delivered by the Apostles." It is true that he went to Rome to dissuade S. Victor from excommunicating the Asiatic Churches, and in doing so emphatically confessed his supreme authority; for if he had shared the wild opinions of Dr. Barker, he would have said, "You have no power to do this thing," instead of saying, as he did, "You have the power, but I beseech you not to use it." S. Cyprian said that "to be united with the Roman See is to be united with the Catholic Church," that "error can have no access to it," and that "all Churches turn their eyes to the chair of Peter, and to the principal Church, whence sacerdotal unity takes its rise"; and Neander, alluding to these words, confesses that " men began to consider the Roman Church the Cathedra Petri," the title applied to it by the venerable president of the Council of Nicæa, and that "in S. Cyprian we find this transference already complete." Even Tertullian called the Roman Pontiff "the Bishop of Bishops," as S. Cyril of Alexandria called him "the Archbishop of the whole world," and S. Gregory Nazianzen "the President of all." S. Chrysostom and S. Athanasius appealed to his supreme authority, and invoked his decrees; and S. Jerome said that "he is a profane person-profanus est-who is an alien from the Roman Church," and that every adversary of the Apostolic Throne "is of Antichrist." S. Augustine joyfully admitted that the sentence of Rome was the judgment of the whole Church of God, and that "in the Roman Church the principality of the Apostolic Chair has always flourished." S. Ambrose called the Roman Pontiff "the shepherd of the flock of Christ"; and in saying "I desire in all things to follow the Roman Church," added, "because in doing so we follow the Apostle Peter himself." All these, and many more whom we might have quoted, lived long before the year 600. The "Roman supremacy" was as certain a revealed truth for all the Saints of the first four centuries as the Holy Trinity or the Incarnation, though Dr. Barker says it was not known in the Church for the first six. Did he ever hear of the General Councils? At all events it is too certain that he never read their Acts. If he had, he would probably have rejected them, as too flagrantly in contradiction with the Anglican and every other form of Protestantism. There was no truth to which these majestic assemblies bore witness with greater energy than that "Roman "Church History," vol. i. p. 280. Supremacy" of which Dr. Barker cannot find a trace in the first six centuries; though even Dr. Döllinger would tell him that "its birth begins with two weighty, pregnant, and farreaching words of the Lord," and that "even in the times of the Roman Empire, the Popes are the guardians of the whole Church," and "never is the Papal authority contested."* It certainly was not contested by the General Councils. We cannot, indeed, quote them all, for lack of space, but invite the attention of Dr. Barker to the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, held in the year 451. The Fathers of the Vatican Council in 1870 did not, and could not, affirm the Roman supremacy with a deeper conviction than was displayed by these Eastern prelates, 150 years before the time when, according to Dr. Barker, it had never been heard of! Dr. Barker will be surprised to hear that the first act of this purely Oriental council was to depose Dioscorus from his see, because he had "dared to rage against the Apostolic See itself." Dr. Barker, if he had been there, would have loudly applauded him, and, unpleasant as the position of Dioscorus was in the Council, it is to be feared that that of Dr. Barker, or of any other Anglican, would have been still worse. Dioscorus seems to have repented, or at least begged permission to refer his cause to the judgment of the Pope. Dr. Barker, who, like every member of the Anglican sect, imitates his crime, is perhaps not likely to imitate his repentance. The same Council wrote to S. Leo the Great, the reigning Pope, "You have presided over us as the head over the members," proclaimed by acclamation that "Peter hath spoken by Leo," and entreated him to shed over them "the splendour of your Apostolic power." We have no space to quote the long line of Greek Patriarchs who, during eight centuries, obeyed with the docility of children the mandates of the Apostolic Throne, nor would the serene composure of Dr. Barker be in the least disturbed if we did. But if he has only contempt for the decrees of the Holy Spirit by the General Councils, he has his own eminent authorities, whom he greatly prefers to any saint, either of the East or West, who devoutly confessed the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff, as established for all time, in the words of successive patriarchs of Constantinople, "by the sentence of the Lord." He laughs at S. Leo, S. Cyril, S. Innocent, and S. Gregory, in whom the angels of God admired the triumphs of omnipotent grace, but swears by Tenison! His merit in * "The Church and the Churches," quoted by Hergenrother, "AntiJanus," ch. vi. p. 106. |