of our hearts; that our choice is an awful giving forth of lots on which salvation or rejection is inscribed; that "before all things it is necessary to hold the Catholic faith;" that "he that would be saved must thus think," and not otherwise; that "if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding, if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasure, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God," this is the dogmatical principle, which has strength.

That truth and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that; that no one is answerable for his opinions; that they are a matter of necessity or accident; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess; that our merit lies in seeking, not in possessing; that it is a duty to follow what seems to us true, without a fear lest it should not be true; that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail; that we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure; that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not to the heart; that we may safely trust ourselves in matters of Faith, and need no other guide, this is the principle of philosophies and heresies, which is very weakness.

Two opinions encounter; each may be abstractedly true; or again, each may be a subtle, comprehensive doctrine, vigorous, elastic, expansive, various; one is held as a matter of indifference, the other as a matter of life and death; one is held by the intellect, the other by the heart: it is plain which of the two must succumb to the other. Such was the conflict of Christianity with the old established Paganism, which was almost dead before Christianity appeared; with the Oriental Mysteries, flitting

wildly to and fro like spectres; with the Gnostics, who made Knowledge all in all, despised the many, and called Catholics mere children in the Truth; with the Neo-platonists, men of literature, pedants, visionaries, or courtiers; with the Manichees, who professed to seek Truth by Reason, not by Faith; with the fluctuating teachers of the School of Antioch, the time-serving Eusebians, and the reckless variable Arians; with the fanatic Montanists and harsh Novatians, who hated the Catholic doctrine, without loving their own. These sects had no stay or consistence, yet they contained elements of truth amid their error, and had Christianity been as they, it might have resolved into them; but it had that hold of the truth which gave its teaching a gravity, a directness, a consistency, a sternness, and a force, to which they were strangers. It could not call evil good, or good evil, because it discerned the difference between them; it could not make light of what was so solemn, or fall off from what was so solid. Hence, in the collision, it broke in pieces its antagonists, and divided the spoils.

This was but another form of the spirit that made martyrs. Dogmatism was in teaching, what confession was in act. Each was the same strong principle of life in a different aspect, distinguishing the faith which was displayed in it from the world's philosophies on the one side, and the world's religions on the other. The heathen sects and the heresies of Christian history were dissolved by the breath of opinion which made them; paganism shuddered and died at the very sight of the sword of persecution, which it had itself unsheathed. Intellect and force were applied as tests both upon the Divine and upon the human work; they prevailed with the human, they did but become instruments of the Divine. "No one," says St. Justin, "has so believed Socrates as to die for the doctrine which he taught." "No one was ever

found undergoing death for faith in the sun.”1 Thus Christianity grew in its proportions, gaining aliment and medicine from all that it came near, yet preserving its original type, from its perception and its love of what had been revealed once for all and was no private imagination.

There are writers who refer to the first centuries of the Church as a time when opinion was free, and the conscience exempt from the obligation or temptation to take on trust what it had not proved; and that, apparently on the mere ground that the series of great theological decisions did not commence till the fourth. This seems to be M. Guizot's meaning when he says that Christianity "in the early ages was a belief, a sentiment, an individual conviction;"2 that "the Christian society appears as a pure association of men, animated by the same sentiments and professing the same creed. The first Christians," he continues, "assembled to enjoy together the same emotions, the same religious convictions. We do not find any doctrinal system established, any form of discipline or of laws, or any body of magistrates." What can be meant by saying that Christianity had no magistrates in the earliest ages? -but, any how, in statements such as these the distinction is not properly recognised between a principle and its developments, even if the fact were as is represented. The principle indeed of Dogmatism develops into Councils in the course of time; but it is active, nay sovereign from the first, in every part of Christendom. A conviction that truth was one; that it was a gift from without, a sacred trust, an inestimable blessing; that it was to be reverenced, guarded, defended, transmitted; that its absence was a grievous want, and its loss an unutterable calamity;—all this is quite consistent with perplexity or mistake as to what was truth in particular cases,

in what way doubtful questions were to be decided, or what were the limits of the Revelation. Councils and Popes are the guardians and instruments of the dogmatic principle: they are not that principle themselves; they presuppose the principle; they are summoned into action at the call of the principle, and the principle might act even before they had their legitimate place, and exercised a recognised power, in the movements of the Christian body.

The instance of Conscience, which has already served us in illustration, may assist us here. What Conscience is in the history of an individual mind, such was the dogmatic principle in the history of Christianity. Both in the one case and the other, there is the gradual formation of a directing power out of a principle. The natural voice of Conscience is far more imperative in testifying and enforcing a rule of duty, than successful in determining that duty in particular cases. It acts as a messenger from above, and says that there is a right and a wrong, and that the right must be followed; but it is variously, and therefore erroneously, trained in the instance of various persons. It mistakes error for truth; and yet we believe that on the whole, and even in those cases where it is ill-instructed, if its voice be diligently obeyed, it will gradually be cleared, simplified, and perfected, so that minds, starting differently, will, if honest, in course of time converge to one and the same truth. I would not imply that there is indistinctness so great as this in the knowledge of the first centuries; but so far is plain, that the early Church and Fathers exercised far more a ruler's than a doctor's office: it was the age of Martyrs, of acting not of thinking. Doctors succeeded Martyrs, as light and peace of conscience follow upon obedience to it; yet, even before the Church had grown into the full measure of its doctrines, it was rooted in its principles.

So far, however, may be granted to M. Guizot, that even principles were not so well understood and so carefully handled at first, as they were afterwards. In the early period, we see traces of a conflict, as well as of a variety, in theological elements, which were in course of combination, but which required adjustment and management before they could be used with precision as one. In a thousand instances of a minor character, the statements of the early Fathers are but tokens of the multiplicity of openings which the mind of the Church was making into the treasure-house of Truth; real openings, but incomplete or irregular. Nay, the doctrines even of the heretical bodies are indices and anticipations of the mind of the Church. As the first step in settling a point of doctrine is to raise and debate it, so heresies in every age may be taken as the measure of the existing state of thought in the Church, and of the movement of her theology; they determine in what way the current is setting, and the rate at which it flows.

Thus, St. Clement may be called the representative of the eclectic element, and Tertullian of the dogmatic; and Clement perhaps went too far in his accommodation to philosophy, and Tertullian asserted with exaggeration the immutability of the Creed. Nay, the two antagonist principles of dogmatism and development are found in Tertullian alone, though with some deficiency of amalgamation, and with a greater leaning towards the dogmatic. Though the Montanists professed to pass over the subject of doctrine, it is chiefly in Tertullian's Montanistic works that his strong statements occur of the unalterableness of the Creed; and extravagance on the subject is not only in keeping with the stern and vehement temper of that Father, but with the general severity and harshness of his sect. On the other hand the very foundation of Montanism is development, though not of doctrine, yet of dis