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LECT. II.]

IMAGE WORSHIP.

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furnishes us with evidence on the same side of this question, and of the same indirect kind. When speaking of a certain sect of the followers of Carpocrates, he says, "they call themselves Gnostics, and adopt pictures and images of Christ, alleging that the original was made by Pilate, at the time when Jesus was among men. These they crown with chaplets, and expose them among the figures of the philosophers of this world, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest; treating them with the same kind of reverence as the heathens express for their images." It is impossible to believe that Irenæus would have penned a paragraph like this, if the Church of his day had been in the habit of presenting pictures and images of the Saviour to the devotions of the people.

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Another opportunity will occur hereafter of enlarging upon this subject, though under another head of the argument, and of showing, in yet more ample detail, how far Daillé is from being correct, when he represents the writings of the Fathers as inapplicable to present controversies; and, above all, when he exemplifies by the questions in dispute between the Reformed Church and the Church of Rome-another opportunity, I say, will shortly arrive for pursuing this investigation further, when I come to consider the allegation which he makes against the Church of Rome of corrupting the text of the Fathers to serve purposes of her own. For the present, let the instances I have adduced suffice to prove that the works of the Fathers may certainly be turned to account in the debate between these Churches, and that much information to the purpose is to be derived from them. Yet how incidentally do we get at it! How little would heads of chapters or tables of contents, help us to it! And who shall say that the Fathers are not to be read, because they are concerned with matters which have no relation to our disputes? Rather, I should say, they are not only to be read, but to be read most carefully, and with a spirit thoroughly on the alert for allusions in them which are thus latent, but which, nevertheless, are assuredly there no less careful investigation of them than this sufficing for mastering the most valuable of the matter of which they are made up.

1 Et reliquam observationem circa | Irenæus, I. c. xxv. § 6. eas, similiter ut Gentes, faciunt.2 In Lectures IV. and V.

LECTURE III.

Third argument of Daillé-its insufficiency to establish his proposition. The quotation of the Sibyl by the Fathers explained. Vindication of them from the charge of dishonesty in quoting Apocryphal books. Opinions of Vossius, Hammond, and others, on the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Pastor of Hermas. Arguments of Daillé against the Epistles of Ignatius inconclusive. Comparison of passages in Irenæus, Polycarp, Tertullian, with passages in those Epistles. Quotation of them by Origen. Improbability that Eusebius should have been deceived as to their genuineness.

THUS far we have found Daillé decrying the use of the Fathers, first by reason of the writings they have left being few, and often fragmentary; secondly, by reason of the subjects of those writings being altogether alien from the controversies of modern times.

The third ground on which he depreciates them is the suspicion of forgery and interpolation which affects many of their works.

Accordingly he produces a long catalogue of spurious compositions, bestowing a good deal of ostentatious pains on each, as it passes in review, and then concludes, that it is evident. very many persons, and, especially, the Latin monks and clergy, from the eighth century to his own, considered it lawful to invent, change, and interpolate, whenever such proceeding might seem to conduce to the advantage of their religion. And as whatever we possess of ancient books is derived to us from this quarter, he does not think it so wonderful, that numbers of these are now in circulation under the title of ancient, which are partly false and supposititious, partly vitiated and corrupted, as that there should be any, however few, which should have reached us pure and genuine.' But though this array of mendacious documents is very well calculated to produce an impression of distrust in antiquity on persons, who have not turned their attention to patristic theology, yet 1 Daillé, p. 46.

LECT. III.]

HE CHARGES THE FATHERS

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others would know that of these writings, which he produces in general the spuriousness is now and has long been universally admitted; and that when we urge the advantage of reading the Fathers, we are never contemplating these, but far other works. Surely it does not follow that because there is much that is false, there is nothing that is true: on the contrary, it is the existence of the genuine that gives occasion to the counterfeit. Irenæus expressly tells us, that the heretics "had concocted and put in circulation an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious Scriptures, to the confusion of illiterate persons and of such as were not acquainted with the writings of truth."1 And if you will look at Jones on the Canon of Scripture, you will see that the mere titles of apocryphal books, which issued in the very earliest age of the Church, and laid claim more or less to Apostolical authority, occupy five octavo pages. Are we then on that account to reject or suspect the canonical books of the New Testament? They are very few in comparison with the others; and it would be a very easy thing for a sceptic, arguing in the spirit of Daillé, to mislead people, too ignorant or too indolent to inquire for themselves, into a notion that in the midst of such a mass of moving quicksands, it was next to impossible to find any solid, trustworthy footing. Certainly it is credible that in the time of Daillé arguments might occasionally be drawn from one or other of the works on his condemned list; perhaps it may be alleged of some of our great divines of even the Augustan age of our Church, that they were not always sufficiently scrupulous in their appeals to ancient authority: indeed, the credit of some of the tracts they rely on, had not then, perhaps, been accurately tested; now, however, and for a long time past, controversialists would not have recourse to any such weapons; severer criticism and a more jealous public taste having superseded the more confiding temperament of former ages so that Daille's inflated difficulties on this subject need not disturb us.

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However, Daillé at length escapes from this cloud of false witnesses, with which he has taken a good deal of trouble to compass his readers about, and proceeds to charge several of those Fathers, who certainly are genuine, with ministering to the system of fraud, which he is exposing, by themselves

1 Irenæus, I. c. xx. § 1.

2 Jones on the Canon, Part I. c. iii.

3 Daillé, p. 48.

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p. 53.

quoting as authority works which were of none. Thus Justin, Theophilus, and others, do not scruple to fetch arguments from the verses of the Sibyl; as if they were really oracular.' It is not quite clear, whether Daillé means to impute a fraudulent intention to these authors in this transaction or not. For he says, that the Fathers were not always gifted with powers to discover these impostures; but he insinuates the worse alternative. Now, undoubtedly, several of the early Fathers do quote the Sibyl; Justin and Theophilus amongst the rest; but in the first place it must be remembered, that on these occasions they were addressing heathens, often literary heathens, and that there was very little ground which they could occupy in common. It was in vain to plead with them Scripture testimony; for the authority of the Scripture they were not prepared to admit. Accordingly, whenever they can do it, they sustain their arguments on other evidence, which the heathens were accustomed to respect. Thus for some of the incidents of our Saviour's life, they would appeal to the Acts of Cyrenius or to those of Pilate'; for the mystical power of the Cross, to the writings of Plato, who found it in the letter X, with which he represented the world as impressed from one end to the other; and on numberless other occasions they make the sentiments of that philosopher tributary to establishing the facts and doctrines of the revelation they taught. And so in like manner they availed themselves of the writings of the Sibyl, which circulated very largely throughout the heathen world and were held in much reverence as prophetic by the class for whom they were writing, to give force to many arguments which might otherwise have seemed strange to them, and would have hardly obtained credence such as the creation of man-the final conflagration -the future Advent of the Messiah-and many of the circumstances which should attend it. There was nothing necessarily disingenuous in this. Doubtless in process of time verses of the Sibyl became multiplied without end, and bore on their very face the mark of the comparatively modern date at which they were composed, and yet were adopted by Christian writers. But from the beginning it was not so. Bishop

1 Daillé, p. 53.

2 Justin Martyr, Apol. I. §§ 34, 35.

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4 Justin Martyr, Cohort. ad Græcos,

§§ 37, 38; Apol. I. § 20.

LECT. III.]

THE SIBYL.

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Bull considers, and with the strongest grounds for doing so, that the Jewish prophecies pervaded a great part of the heathen world, more or less obscured, (for the Jews were dispersed over nearly the whole of it,) and that out of these prophecies many of the verses of the Sibyl (as they were called) were fabricated from times the most ancient. The Septuagint translation of the Scriptures, circulating, as it did, amongst the Jews of all nations, must have communicated its contents to many Gentiles'; and it may be added, that an early version of the Old Testament into Greek long before the Septuagint translation, of which Clemens Alexandrinus tells us on the authority of Aristobulus, would materially conduce to this.2 Prophetical the verses were, strictly prophetical, and not unworthy in such cases of being quoted by the primitive Fathers, as they were witnesses on their side; the Fathers themselves ascribing, no doubt, the truth they felt to be in them, either to the sacred channels, from which they supposed them to be derived-Justin, when giving the history of the Sibyl, expressly makes her to be born at Babylon, and thence come to Italy: where more likely that she should became acquainted with the writings of the Prophets?—or to the fact of her own inspiration, which was the vulgar belief; or at least it was the belief that there was one inspired Sibyl, the existence of whom occasioned a number of counterfeits, she, raised up by God as a prophetess amongst the Greeks, as the prophets, properly so called, were by Him to the Hebrews. Is there anything in this derogatory to the character of Justin for honesty, or even for judgment? What was Balaam but such a Prophet amongst the nations of the East, and Job amongst the Arabians, and Melchizedek amongst the inhabitants of Canaan? We read of prophetic

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! See Grinfeld, Apology for the Septuagint.

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κράτησις τῆς χώρας, καὶ τῆς ὅλης νομο θεσίας ἐπεξήγησις· ὥστε εὔδηλον εἶναι, τὸν προειρημένον φιλόσοφον εἰληφέναι πολλά γέγονε γὰρ πολυμαθής καθὼς καὶ Πυθαγόρας πολλὰ τῶν παρ' ἡμῖν μετενέγκας εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ δογματος ποιΐαν. Clem. Αlex. Stromat. I. § xxii. pp. 410, 411.

̓Αριστόβουλος δὲ ἐν τῷ πρώτῳ τῷ πρὸς τὸν Φιλομήτορα, κατὰ λέξιν γράφει: “ Κατηκολούθηκε δὲ ὁ Πλάτων τῇ καθ ̓ ἡμᾶς νομοθεσίᾳ καὶ φανερός ἐστι περιεργασάμενος ἕκαστα τῶν ἐν αὐτῇ λεγομένων. διειρμήνευται δὲ πρὸ Δημητρίου, ὑφ' ἑτέρου, πρὸ τοῦ ̓Αλεξάνδρου 3 Cohort. ad Græcos, § 37. He reκαὶ Περσῶν ἐπικρατήσεως, τά τε κατά presents her as the daughter of Berosus. τὴν ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐξαγωγὴν τῶν Ἑβραίων 4 Tertullian, Ad Nationes, II. § 12, τῶν ἡμετέρων πολιτῶν, καὶ ἡ τῶν γε- and Fragment attached to the Apology, γονότων ἁπάντων αὐτοῖς ἐπιφάνεια, καὶ | Ed. Havercamp, p. 443.

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