arbitrates in an Alexandrian controversy. St. Athanasius, driven from his Church, makes all Christendom his home, from Treves to Ethiopia, and introduces into the West the discipline of the Egyptian Antony. St. Jerome is born in Dalmatia, studies at Constantinople and Alexandria, is secretary to St. Damasus at Rome, and settles and dies in Palestine. Above all, the See of Rome itself is the centre of teaching as well as of action, is visited by Fathers and heretics as a tribunal in controversy, and by ancient custom sends her alms to the poor Christians of all Churches, to Achaia and Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and Cappadocia.

Moreover, this universal Church was not only one; it was exclusive also. The vehemence with which Christians of the Ante-nicene period had denounced the idolatries and sins of paganism, and proclaimed the judgments which would be their consequence, in great measure accounts for their being reputed in the heathen world as "enemies of mankind." "Worthily doth God exert the lash of His stripes and scourges," says St. Cyprian to a heathen magistrate; "and since they avail so little, and convert not men to God by all this dreadfulness of havoc, there abides beyond the prison eternal and the ceaseless flame of the everlasting penalty. Why humble yourself, and bend to false gods? Why bow your captive body before helpless images and moulded earth? Why grovel in the prostration of death, like the serpent whom ye worship? Why rush into the downfal of the devil, his fall the cause of yours, and he your companion?. . . . Believe and live; you have been our persecutors in time; in eternity, be companions of our joy." 1 "These rigid sentiments," says Gibbon, "which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony."2 Such, however, was the judg Ad Demetr. 4, &c. Oxf. tr.

2 Hist. ch. xv.

ment passed by the first Christians upon all who did not join their own society; and such was the judgment of their successors on those who lived and died in the sects and heresies which had issued from it. That very father, whose denunciation of the heathen has just been quoted, had declared it in the third century. "He who leaves the Church of Christ," he says, "attains not to Christ's reward. He is an alien, an outcast, an enemy. He can no longer have God for a Father, who has not the Church for a Mother. If any man was able to escape who remained without the Ark of Noah, then will that man escape who is out of doors beyond the Church. What sacrifice do they believe they celebrate who are rivals of the Priests? If such men were even killed for confession of the Christian name, not even by their blood is this stain washed out. Inexplicable and heavy is the sin of discord, and is purged by no suffering. They cannot dwell with God who have refused to be of one mind in God's Church; a man of such sort may indeed be killed, crowned he cannot be." And so St. Chrysostom, in the following century, with an allusion to St. Cyprian's sentiment: Though we have achieved ten thousand glorious acts, yet shall we, if we cut to pieces the fulness of the Church, suffer punishment no less sore than they who mangled His body."2 In like manner St. Augustine seems to consider that a conversion from idolatry to a schismatical communion is no gain. "Those whom Donatists baptize, they heal of the wound of idolatry or infidelity, but inflict a more grievous stroke in the wound of schism; for idolaters among God's people the sword destroyed, but schismatics the gaping earth devoured." Elsewhere, he speaks of the "sacrilege of schism, which surpasses all wickednesses."4 St. Optatus,

3 De Baptism. 10.

too, marvels at the Donatist Parmenian's inconsistency in maintaining, what is true doctrine, that "Schismatics are cut off as branches from the vine, are destined for punishments, and reserved, as dry wood, for hell-fire."1 "Let us hate them who are worthy of hatred," says St. Cyril, "withdraw we from them whom God withdraws from; let us also say unto God with all boldness concerning all heretics, 'Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?" "2" Most firmly hold, and doubt in no wise," says St. Fulgentius, "that every heretic and schismatic soever, baptized in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, unless brought into the Catholic Church, how great soever have been his alms, though for Christ's Name he has even shed his blood, can in no wise be saved." The Fathers ground this doctrine on St. Paul's words that, though we have knowledge, and give our goods to the poor, and our body to be burned, we are nothing without love.

One more remark shall be made: that the Catholic teachers, far from recognising any ecclesiastical relation as existing between the Sectarian Bishops and Priests, and their flocks, address the latter immediately, as if those Bishops did not exist, and call on them to come over to the Church individually without respect to any one besides; and that because it is a matter of life and death. To take the instance of the Donatists: it was nothing to the purpose that their Churches in Africa nearly equalled those of the Catholics, or that they had a case to produce in their controversy with the Catholic Church; the very fact that they were separated from the orbis terrarum was a public, a manifest, a simple, a sufficient argument against them. "The question is not about your gold and silver," says St. Augustine to Glorius and others, "not your lands, or farms, nor even your bodily health

is in peril, but we address your souls about obtaining eternal life and fleeing eternal death. Rouse yourselves therefore. . . . . . . You see it all, and know it, and groan over it; yet God sees that there is nothing to detain you in so pestiferous and sacrilegious a separation, if you will not overcome your carnal affection, for the obtaining the spiritual kingdom, and shake off the fear of wounding friendships, which will avail nothing in God's judgment, in order to escape eternal punishment. Go, think over the matter, consider what can be said in answer.. No one blots out from heaven the Ordinance of God, no one blots out from earth the Church of God: He hath promised, she hath filled the whole world." "Some carnal intimacies," he says to his kinsman Severinus, "hold you where you are. . . What avails temporal health or relationship, if with it we neglect Christ's eternal heritage and our perpetual health?" "I ask," he says to Celer, a person of influence, "that you would more earnestly urge upon your men Catholic Unity in the region of Hippo. "Why," he says, in the person of the Church, to the whole Donatist population, "Why open your ears to the words of men, who say what they never have been able to prove and close them to the word of God, saying, 'Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the heathen for Thine inheritance?" At another time he says to them, "Some of the presbyters of your party have sent to us to say, 'Retire from our flocks, unless you would have us kill you.' How much more justly do we say to them, Nay, do you, not retire from, but come in peace to, not our flocks, but the flocks of Him whose we are all; or if you will not, and are far from peace, then do you rather retire from flocks, for which Christ shed His Blood."" "I call on you for Christ's sake,' he says to a late pro-consul, "to write me an answer, and to urge gently and kindly all your people in the district of Sinis or Hippo into the

communion of the Catholic Church." He publishes an address to the Donatists at another time to inform them of the defeat of their Bishops in a conference: "Whoso," he says, "is separated from the Catholic Church, however laudably he thinks he is living, by this crime alone, that he is separated from Christ's Unity, he shall not have life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." "Let them ascribe to the Catholic Church," he writes to some converts about their friends who were still in schism, "that is, to the Church diffused over the whole world, rather what the Scriptures say than what human tongues utter in calumny." The idea of acting upon the Donatists only as a body, and through their bishops, does not appear to have occurred to St. Augustine at all.1

On the whole, then, we have reason to say, that if there be a form of Christianity at this day distinguished for its careful organization, and its consequent power; if it is spread over the world; if it is conspicuous for zealous maintenance of its own creed; if it is intolerant towards what it considers error; if it is engaged in ceaseless war with all other bodies called Christian; if it, and it alone, is called "Catholic" by the world, nay, by those very bodies, and if it makes much of the title; if it names them heretics, and warns them of coming woe, and calls on them one by one to come over to itself, overlooking every other tie; and if they, on the other hand, call it seducer, harlot, apostate, Antichrist, devil; if, however they differ one with another, they consider it their common enemy; if they strive to unite together against it, and cannot; if they are but local; if they continually subdivide, and it remains one; if they fall one after another, and make way for new sects, and it remains the same; such a form of religion is not unlike the Christianity of the Nicene Era.

1 Epp. 43, 52, 57, 76, 105, 112, 141, 144.