Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/245

 pist writers to have solemnly and formally founded. This important fictitious event is dated with the most exact particularity, on the fifteenth of February, in the forty-third year of Christ, and the third year of the reign of the emperor Claudius. The empty, unmeaning pomposity of this announcement is a sufficient evidence of its fictitious character. According to the story itself, here Peter had been preaching nearly a whole year at Rome; and if preaching, having a regular congregation, of course, and performing the usual accompaniments of preaching, as baptism, &c. Now there is not in the whole apostolic history the least account, nor the shadow of a hint, of any such ceremony as the founding of a church, distinct from the mere gathering of an assembly of believing listeners, who acknowledged their faith in Jesus by profession and by the sacraments. The organization of this religious assembly might indeed be made more perfect at one time than at another; as for instance, a new church, which during an apostle's stay with it and preaching to it, had been abundantly well governed by the simple guidance of his wise, fatherly care, would, on his departure, need some more regular, permanent provision for its government, lest among those who were all religious co-equals, there should arise disputes which would require a regularly constituted authority to allay them. The apostle might, therefore, in such advanced requirements of the church, ordain elders, and so on; but such an appendix could not, with the slightest regard to common sense or the rules of honest interpretation of language, be said to constitute the founding of a church. The very phrase of ordaining elders in a church, palpably implies and requires the previous distinct, complete existence of the church. In fact the entity of a church implies nothing more than a regular assembly of believers, with an authorized ministry; and if Peter had been preaching several months to the Jews of the trans-Tiberine suburb, or to the Romans of the Viminal mount, there must have been in one or both of those places, a church, to all intents, purposes, definitions and etymologies of a church. So that for him, almost a year after, to proceed to found a church in Rome, was the most idle work of supererogation in the world. And all the pompous statements of papist writers about any such formality, and all the quotations that might be brought out of the fathers in its support, from Clement downwards, could not relieve the assertion of one particle of its palpable, self-evident absurdity. But the fable proceeds in the account of this important movement, da