of original Christendom. It was formed in Africa and in Carthage, not in Rome. Entire independence of Rome was steadily maintained under the founders of Latin theology,- Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Cyprian, Lactantius, Arnobius, and Augustine. Rome had no voice, in her own tongue, till the heretic Novatian first spoke in her and for her. From Clement to Hippolytus, and later, her few writers thought in Greek, wrote in Greek, and submitted their work to the maternal churches of the East, as filial and loyal sons. Το exhibit these facts is to dismiss the whole system of the Latin schools, based on unhistoric myths and fables, all as baseless as the "Donation of Constantine," and all as recent in their fabrication.

17. INSTITUTES.

In presenting these Institutes, then, to my young pupils in this University, I undertake to proceed upon a rigidly scientific plan, of which I have tried to explain the scientific grounds. I adopt the old word institutes to signify elementary instructions. They present, in outline, certain predominant features of history, which will guide to just conclusions in the further studies to which they introduce the learner. And now let me fortify my positions by citing the language of a man of science, who speaks for other purposes and with a different intent, upon the very matter which underlies my plan. He, too, gives token of the new era as at hand.1 Could any one have expected from the

1 See Note G.

apologist of Huxley and Darwin such a tribute to primitive Christianity as John Fiske has given us in the following passages? He says:

"It is interesting to observe the characteristics of the idea of God as conceived by the three great Fathers of the Greek Church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. The philosophy of these profound and vigorous thinkers was, in large measure, derived from the Stoics," etc.

"The views of Clement's disciple, Origen, are much like those of his master. Athanasius ventured much further into the bewildering regions of metaphysics. Yet in his doctrine of the Trinity ... he proceeded upon the lines which Clement had marked out."

"It is instructive to note how closely Athanasius approaches the confines of modern scientific thought, simply through his fundamental conception of God as the indwelling life of the universe."

Now, without pausing to correct some possible misconceptions of this great matter, I ask you to observe the phenomenon of this mind struggling out of "modern thought" towards what modern thought has affected to ignore, and finding himself met where he stands by these ancient Fathers of Christendom. Two reflections suggest themselves as pertinent to my subject: (1) It is to primitive Christianity that modern science must recur to find its "guide, philosopher, and friend"; and (2) It is to the East, and to Alexandria as the fountainhead, that the inquirer into the origin of Christian thought and dogma must have recourse.

18. TRUTH, OLD AND NEW.

Another suggestion, I trust, will arrest the attention of all who hear me. In guiding your thoughts towards primitive antiquity, I am preparing you for a wise and healthful investigation of recent research and discovery in scientific matters. How often you hear of these old Fathers as mere fossils; and of the Church of Christ as behind the age. Listen again to John Fiske, as he works his way through philosophy to Theism.1 He says:

"One has only to adopt the higher Theism of Clement and Athanasius, and the alleged antagonism between science and theology, by which so many hearts have been saddened, so many minds darkened, vanishes forever."

And now mark what he says of the dawn of Christianity, in the period illuminated by the Septuagint, and also what he adds of Ante-Nicene Christianity in Alexandria:

"The intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria for two centuries before and three centuries after the time of Christ was more modern than anything that followed, down to the days of Bacon and Descartes. . . . The system of Christian Theism was the work of some of the loftiest minds that have ever appeared on the earth."

Staking off these five centuries accordingly, during which the thought of Christendom was formed under Clement and his forerunners, reflect that between the two centuries of preparation for Christ and the three that ushered in the Great

1 See Note H.

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Council of Nicæa, our ultimate limit, stands the noble figure of Apollos, eloquent and mighty in the Scriptures," a monument of the Gospel in its power to unite the Jew and the Greek, and not less of the Church, to speak from her ancient throne to the hearts and minds of thinking men in our own distracted times.

19. CATHOLICITY.

Here observe a most important point. The centuries which a disinterested thinker has thus characterized, without a thought of aiding the position of the Christian, are precisely those to which the great Anglican doctors have appealed in their noble work of restoration. For the Anglican reformers were restorers rather; they brought back the primitive simplicity and the unadulterated catholicity of Nicæa, - the catholicity which is covered by its own appeal to "ancient usages," and by the formula of the Nicæno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Of course there can be no other. For there cannot be two catholic churches nor

two catholic theologies. But in this country and in England two antagonist systems claim to be catholic; which is most harmonious with the catholicity of Nicæa? If it be true that the first three centuries were in spirit, not medieval, but modern, the answer is apparent. If they correspond with Bacon and Descartes rather than with Aristotle and the Schoolmen, then the Anglican reformation is vindicated. The "Syllabus," which refuses all commerce with modern thought, shows

itself equally at war with Christian antiquity. The present venerable pontiff, a scholar and a most respectable character in all his personal qualities, has accepted the Syllabus of his unlettered predecessor, which denounces all that freemen hold dear, while, to give his thinking subjects something to do, he commands them to study St. Thomas Aquinas. That is, they must revert to the Middle Ages for all the thinking they are allowed to exercise. Precisely so. He rules out the masculine thought of genuine antiquity as modern. He thus convicts his theology of its mediæval origin, while we appeal primarily to the primitive Fathers, — to Clement of Alexandria, and to Athanasius, not undervaluing Aquinas so far as he agrees with antiquity. It is not difficult, then, to decide where catholicity is to be found, if the apostolic ages and the primitive Fathers supply the criterion. Ours is the old religion, because it is identified with the oldest. We appeal to the Holy Scriptures interpreted by the whole undivided Church at Nicæa.1 Leo XIII. appeals to Aquinas 2 and to the systems of a divided Christendom,-to the West and to the twelfth century with those that followed, down to the Trent Council. And this was a council of the West only, and of the sixteenth century, composed chiefly of Italians, and engineered by the Jesuits, who had just been created, and whose conduct excited the indignant remonstrances of all the abler theologians there assembled. Which, then, is the catholic system, ours or theirs? 3

1 A. D. 325.