where they thought the faith was in danger to be destroyed. In other cases, says Nazianzen," there is nothing so peaceable, so moderate as Christian bishops; but in this case they cannot bear the name of moderation, to betray their God by silence and sitting still; but here they are exceeding eager warriors, and fighting champions that are not to be overcome. He does not mean that the weapons of their warfare were carnal, that they used any pious frauds, or plotted treasons, or rebellions, or took up arms in defence of religion; but that with an undaunted courage and brave resolution they stood up firm in defence of truth, and mattered not what names they were called by, (contentious, unpeaceable, immoderate, factious, turbulent, incendiaries, or any thing of the like nature,) nor yet what they suffered in any kind, whilst they contended for that faith which was once delivered to the saints. Church history abounds with instances of this nature; but it will be sufficient to exemplify the practice of this virtue in a single instance, which Gregory Nazianzen" gives us in the Life of St. Basil, where he relates a famous dialogue that passed between Modestus, the Arian governor under Valens, and that holy man. Modestus tried all arts to bring him over to the party, but finding all in vain, he at last threatened him with severity. What, said he, dost thou not fear this power which I am armed with? Why should I fear? said Basil; what canst thou do, or what can I suffer? What canst thou suffer? said the other; many things that are in my power: confiscation of thy goods, banishment, torment, and death. But thou must threaten me with something else, said Basil, if thou canst, for none of these things can touch me. As for confiscation of goods, I am not liable to it; for I have nothing to lose, unless thou wantest these tattered and threadbare garments, and a few books, which is all the estate I am possessed of. For banishment, I know not what it means, for I am tied to no place; I shall esteem every country as much my own, as that where I now dwell; for the whole earth is the Lord's, and I am only a pilgrim and a stranger in it. As for torments, what can they do to him, who has not a body that can hold out beyond the first stroke? And for death, it will be a kindness to me, for it will but so much the sooner send me unto God, to whom I live and do the duty of my station; being in a great measure already dead, and now of a long time hastening unto him. The governor was strangely surprised at this discourse, and said, No man ever talked at this free and bold rate to Modestus before. Perhaps, said Basil, thou didst never meet with a bishop before: for if thou hadst, he would have talked just as I do, when he was put

51 Naz. Orat. 21. de Laud. Athan. p. 388. Oi kâv tåλλα ὦσιν εἰρηνικοί τε καὶ μέτριοι, τοῦτὸ γε οὐ φέρουσιν ἐπιεικεῖς εἶναι, Θεὸν προδιδόναι διὰ τῆς ἡσυχίας ἀλλὰ

In other

to contend about such matters as these. things we are mild and yielding, and the humblest men on earth, as our laws oblige us to be; we are so far from showing ourselves supercilious or haughty to magistrates in power, that we do not do it to persons of the meanest rank and condition. But when the cause of God is concerned, or in danger, then indeed we esteem all other things as nothing, and fix our eyes only upon him. Then fire and sword, wild beasts and instruments of torture to tear off our flesh, are so far from being a terror, that they are rather a pleasure and recreation to us. Therefore reproach and threaten us, do your pleasure, use your power to the utmost, and let the emperor know all this: yet you shall never conquer us, or bring us to assent to your impious doctrine, though you threaten us ten thousand times more than all this. The governor hearing this, and finding him to be a man of invincible and inflexible courage, dismissed him now not with threatenings, but with a sort of reverence and submission, and went and told the emperor, that the bishop of that church was too hard for them all; for his courage was so great, his resolution so firm, that neither promises nor threatenings could move him from his purpose. Nor was it only open violence they thus bravely resisted, but also the more crafty attempts of the enemies of truth, who many times went artificially to work against it; partly by blackening the characters of its champions and defenders, and representing them as base and intolerable men; and partly by smoothing their own character, and pretending unity in faith with the orthodox, and that their designs were only designs of peace, to remove unscriptural words and novel terms out of the way, that all men might be of the same opinion. These were the two grand artifices of the Arian party, whereby the leading and politic men among them, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Valens, Ursacius, and others, always laboured to overthrow the truth. Upon this account Athanasius was forced to undergo a thousand calumnies and slanderous reproaches. He was accused to Constantine, as one that assumed to himself imperial authority to impose a tax upon Egypt: as one guilty of murder, in cutting off the hand of Arsenius, a Meletian bishop; as guilty of treason, in siding with Philumenus the rebel, and furnishing him with money; as an enemy to the public, for attempting to hinder the transportation of corn from Egypt to Constantinople: which accusation so far prevailed upon the emperor, that he banished him to Triers upon it. In the next reign he was accused again of repeated murders; and of sacrilege, in diverting Constantine's liberality to the widows of Egypt and Libya, to other uses ;

καὶ λίαν εἰσὶν ἐνταῦθα πολεμικοί τε καὶ δύσμαχοι. 52 Naz. Orat. 20. de Laud. Basil. P. 319.

St.

of treason, in joining interest with Magnentius the tyrant; and many other such charges were spitefully and diabolically levelled against him. Basil was likewise variously accused both by professed enemies and pretended friends; who, as is usual in such cases, brought charges against him directly contrary to one another. Some accused him of Tritheism, for defending the doctrine of three hypostases against the Sabellians; others, of Semiarianism, or heterodoxy in the article about the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, because in his church he sometimes used a different form of doxology from what was used in other churches. Some, again, accused him of Arianism, because he had received Eustathius of Sebastia into communion upon his professing the catholic faith; others said he communicated with Apollinaris the heretic, because upon some occasions he wrote letters to him. Thus were two of the greatest and best of men maliciously traduced and wounded in their reputation; both indeed for the same cause, but with this difference, that the one was prosecuted by open enemies without the church, the other chiefly by secret enemies within; of whom therefore he had reason to take up the prophet's complaint, and say, "These are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends." And these were such temptations as might have unsettled any weak and wavering minds, and made them turn their backs upon religion: but true zeal is above temptation, and can equally despise the wounds of the sword and the wounds of the tongue; having always the consolation, which Christ gives in his gospel, ready at hand to support it; "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake: rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven." Such examples show us, that innocence itself cannot always exempt men from calumny, but sometimes is accidentally the occasion of it: but then it has this advantage, that being joined with a suitable zeal, it never sinks under the weight and pressure of its burden, but always comes off conqueror at the last, as we see in the instances now before us.

The other artifice, which I said the Arians used to destroy the faith, was the specious pretence of peace and unity. The politic and crafty men among them in the time of Constantius, pretended that they had no quarrel with the catholic doctrine of the Trinity itself, but only were aggrieved at the novel and unscriptural words, such as the oμoovσiov, consubstantial, &c., which the council of Nice had used

Hieron. Dial. cont. Lucif. t. 2. p. 143. Concurrebant episcopi, qui Ariminensibus dolis irretiti, sine conscientia hæretici ferebantur, contestantes corpus Domini, et quicquid in ecclesia sanctum est, se nihil mali in sua fide suspicatos. Putavimus, aiebant, sensum congruere cum verbis ; nec in ecclesiis ubi simplicitas, ubi pura confessio est, aliud

to express it by: these, they said, were dividing terms, and the cause of all the quarrel and combustion: and therefore they still urged the removing these terms, as the great stumblingblock, out of the way, that the peace and unity of the church might follow upon it. But Athanasius and other wise catholics easily perceived whither this sly stratagem tended; being very sensible that their design was not against the bare terms, but the faith itself, and therefore they always stoutly and zealously opposed it. Nor could the Arians ever gain this point upon the catholics, till at last in the council of Ariminum, anno 359, by great importunity, and clamours for unity and peace, they were prevailed upon to sink the word consubstantial, and draw up a new creed without it, yet, as they thought, containing the very same doctrine, and in as full terms as could be expressed, save that the word consubstantial was not in it. But here it must be owned, these catholic bishops were wanting in their zeal, as they themselves were quickly after convinced. For no sooner was this concession made, but the Arians immediately gave out and boasted over all the world, that the Nicene faith was condemned, and Arianism established in a general council, though nothing was less intended by the catholic bishops that were present at it. But now they were sensible they had made a false step, by suffering themselves thus to be imposed upon by designing men: they now saw that they ought to have stuck to the Nicene terms, as well as the faith, since the faith itself so much depended on them. They now began to complain of the fraud, and asked pardon of their brethren for their want of foresight and caution in a case so tender and material. St. Jerom, who gives us this account of the whole transaction, from the acts of the synod and other records extant in his time, brings them in making this apology for themselves: The bishops, says he," who had been imposed upon by fraud at Ariminum, and who were reputed heretics without being conscious to themselves of any heresy, went about every where protesting by the body of Christ, and all that is sacred in the church, that they suspected no evil in their creed: they thought the sense had agreed with the words, and that men had not meant one thing in their hearts, and uttered another thing with their lips. They were deceived by entertaining too good an opinion of base and evil men. They did not suppose the priests of Christ could so treacherously have fought against Christ. In short, they lamented their mistake now with tears, and offered to condemn as well

in corde clausum esse, aliud in labiis proferri timuimus. Decepit nos bona de malis existimatio. Non sumus arbitrati sacerdotes Christi adversus Christum pugnare multaque alia quæ brevitatis studio prætereo, flentes asserebant, parati et subscriptionem pristinam et omnes Arianorum blasphemias condemnare.

their own subscription, as all the Arian blasphemies. Any one that reads St. Jerom carefully, will easily perceive, that these bishops were no Arians, nor ever intended to subscribe an Arian creed; but their fault was want of zeal in parting with the Nicene creed, to take another instead of it without the word consubstantial; which though they subscribed in the simplicity of their hearts as an orthodox creed, (and indeed the words, as Jerom describes them, in their plain sense are sound and orthodox, as St. Jerom says in their excuse,) yet the Arians put an equivocal and poisonous sense upon them; giving out after the council was ended, that they had not only abolished the word consubstantial, but with it condemned the Nicene faith also. Which was strange, surprising news to the bishops that had been at Ariminum. Then, says St. Jerom, Ingemuit totus orbis, et Arianum se esse miratus est, The whole world groaned, and was amazed to think she should be reputed Arian. That is, the catholic bishops of the whole world (for there were three hundred of them present at that council) were amazed to find themselves so abused, and represented as Arians, when they never intended in the least to confirm the Arian doctrine. But now by this the reader will be able to judge, what kind of zeal the catholic church required then in her clergy, viz. that they should not only contend for the faith itself, but also for those catholic forms and ways of expressing it, which had been prudently composed and settled in general councils, as a barrier against heretics; the giving up of which to subtle and dangerous adversaries, would always give them advantage to make fiercer attacks upon the faith itself, and prove destructive to the catholic cause; as those bishops found by woeful experience, who were concerned in the concession made at Ariminum. It is candour indeed, when good catholics are divided only about words, to bring them to a right understanding of one another, which will set them at peace and unity again: but it is tameness to give up the main bulwarks of the faith to fallacious adversaries and designing men, whose arts and aims, however disguised, are always known to strike at the foundation of religion. And therefore, though no man was ever more candid than Athanasius toward mistaken catholics, yet neither was any more zealous in opposing the arts and stratagems of the Arian party; always sticking close to the definition of the Nicene council, and never yielding that any tittle or syllable of that creed should be erased or altered.

Cypr. Ep. 62. p. 197. Si qui presbyteri aut diaconi qui vel in ecclesia catholica prius ordinati fuerint, et postmodum perfidi ac rebelles contra ecclesiam steterint, vel apud hæreticos a pseudo-episcopis et antichristis contra Christi dispositionem profana ordinatione promoti sunt eos quoque hac conditione suscipi cum revertuntur, ut communicent

Sect. 11. Of their obliga Lions to maintain the

unity of the church;

and of the censure of

such as fell into be

resy or schusm.

Whilst I am upon this head, I cannot but take notice of the obligations the clergy lay under to maintain the unity of the church, both in faith and discipline, and what penalties were inflicted on such as made a breach therein, whether by falling into heresy or schism themselves, or giving encouragement to them in others. I shall not need to state the nature of church unity and communion in this place any further, than by saying, that to maintain the purity of the catholic faith, and live under the discipline and government of a catholic bishop, who himself lived in communion with the catholic church, were then, as it were, the two characteristic notes of any man's being in the communion of the church: and therefore, as every member was obliged to maintain the unity of the church in both these parts; so much more the clergy, who were to be the chief guardians of it: and if they failed in either kind, that is, if they lapsed either into heresy or schism, by the laws of the church they were to be deposed from their office; and though they repented and returned to the unity of the church again, yet they were not to act in their former station, but to be admitted to communicate only in the quality of laymen. This was the rule of the African church in the time of Cyprian, as appears from the synodical epistle" of the council of Carthage, to which his name is prefixed. For, writing to Pope Stephen, they tell him, their custom was to treat such of the clergy as were ordained in the catholic church, and afterward stood up perfidiously and rebelliously against the church, in the same manner as they did those that were first ordained by heretics; that is, they admitted them to the peace of the church, and allowed them the communion of laymen, but did not permit them to officiate again in any order of the clergy. And this, he says, they did to put a mark of distinction between those that always stood true to the church, and those that deserted it. Yet if any considerable advantage accrued to the church by the return of such a heretic or schismatic; as if he brought over any considerable part of the deluded people with him, or if he was generally chosen by the church, or the like; in such cases the rule was so far dispensed with, that the deserter might be admitted to his pristine dignity, and be allowed to officiate in his own order again. Upon this account, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, received Maximus the presbyter to his former honour upon his return from the Novatian schism." And in after ages both the

laici, et satis habeant quod admittuntur ad pacem, qui hostes pacis extiterint, &c.

55 Cornel. Ep. 46. al. 49. ad Cypr. p. 93. Maximum presbyterum locum suum agnoscere jussimus. See other instances in Socrates, lib. 7. c. 3.

56

Novatians and Meletians were particularly favoured with this privilege by the council of Nice, and the Donatists by the African fathers in the time of St. Austin, as I had occasion to note more than once before. But if they continued obstinate in their heresy or schism, then many times an anathema was pronounced against them, as in the second council of Carthage. If a presbyter, says the canon," that is reproved or excommunicated by his bishop, being puffed up with pride, shall presume to offer the oblation in a separate assembly, or set up another altar against him, let him be anathema. The council of Antioch, and those called the Apostolical Canons," have several decrees of the like nature. Yea, so careful were the clergy to be of the unity of the church, that they were not to give any encouragement to heretics or schismatics, or excommunicated persons, by communicating with them in prayer or other holy offices of the church, or so much as frequenting their society, feasting with them, or the like. But I do not enlarge upon these things here, because, being matters of discipline, they will come again to be considered under that head in another place.

58

I have now gone through some of the chief general duties, which more immediately concerned the office and function of the clergy; and by mixing public rules with private directions and great examples, have made such an essay towards the idea and character of a primitive clerk, as may (I hope) in some things excite both the emulation and curiosity of many of my readers, who may be concerned to imitate the pattern I have been describing. If here it be not drawn so full, or so exactly to the life in all its beauties, as they could wish, they will find their account in satisfying their curiosity, by having recourse to the fountains themselves, from whence these materials were taken. For many things, that might here have been added, were purposely omitted, for fear of drawing out this part of the discourse to a greater length than would consist with the design and measures of the present undertaking: and I had rather be thought to have said too little, than too much, upon this head, that I might not cloy, but leave an edge upon the appetite of the inquisitive reader.

CHAPTER IV.

AN ACCOUNT OF SOME OTHER LAWS AND RULES, WHICH WERE A SORT OF OUT-GUARDS AND FENCES TO THE FORMER.

HAVING thus far discoursed both of such laws as related to the life and

Sect. 1. No clergyman allinquish

and leave.

lowed to desert or reconversation of the primitive clergy, with his station and of those that more immediately concerned the duties and offices of their function; I come now to speak of a third sort of laws, which were like the Jews' sepimenta legis, a sort of by-laws and rules, made for the defence and guard of the two former. Among these we may reckon such laws as were made to fix the clergy to their proper business and calling; such as that which forbade any clergyman to desert or relinquish his station, without just grounds or leave granted by his superiors. In the African church, as has been showed before,' from the time that any man was made a reader, or entered in any of the lower orders of the church, he was presumed to be dedicated to the service of God, so as thenceforth not to be at liberty to turn secular again at his own pleasure. And much more did this rule hold for bishops, presbyters, and deacons. Therefore Cyril of Alexandria, as he is cited by Harmenopulus,' says in one of his canons, that it was contrary to the laws of the church for any priest to give in a libel of resignation: for if he be worthy, he ought to continue in his ministry; if he be unworthy, he should not have the privilege of resigning, but be condemned and ejected. The council of Chalcedon orders all such to be anathematized, as forsook their orders to take upon them any military office or secular dignity, unless they repented and returned to the employment, which for God's sake they had first chosen. The council of Tours' in like manner decrees, that whoever of the clergy desert their order and office, to follow a secular life and calling again, shall be punished with excommunication. The civil law was also very severe upon such deserters. By an order of Arcadius and Honorius, they are condemned to serve in curia all their lives, that they might never have the privilege of resuming the clerical life again. And by a law of Justinian's, both monks and clerks so deserting, were to forfeit whatever

6

3 Conc. Chalced. c. 7. Τοὺς ἅπαξ ἐν κλήρῳ τεταγμένους, μήτε ἐπὶ στρατείαν μήτε ἐπὶ ἀξίαν κοσμικὴν ἔρχεσθαι, &c. 4 Conc. Turon. c. 5. Si quis clericus, relicto officii sui ordine, laicam voluerit agere vitam, vel se militiæ tradiderit, excommunicationis pœna feriatur.

5 Cod. Th. lib. 16. tit. 2. de Episc. Leg. 39. Si qui professum sacræ religionis sponte dereliquerit, continuo sibi eum curia vindicet: ut liber illi ultra ad ecclesiam recursus esse non possit.

6

Cod. Justin. lib. 1. Tit. 3. de Episc. Leg. 55. Quod si