Page:Petri Privilegium - Manning.djvu/535

Rh revelation is greater than that of Holy Scripture. Thus, it has been defined, for example, that even infants may and ought to be baptized, that Christ our Lord is wholly contained and received under one species of the most Holy Eucharist, that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, although theologians do not produce texts either implicit or explicit from Scripture in which such dogmas are taught.

4. Lastly, it is not necessary to have a series of fathers and testimonies reaching to apostolic times, in order to prove that such a proposition belongs to apostolic tradition. With respect to this, it was observed, that the assertion of such a necessity rests upon false hypotheses, and is refuted by the most palpable facts.

The false hypotheses are,

a. That all doctrine preached from the beginning has been committed to writing by the fathers.

b. That all the monuments of antiquity have come down to us.

c. That the entire object of faith has always been distinctly conceived and formally expressed;

d. That subsequent tradition may differ from the preceding;

e. That it cannot be legitimately concluded from the fact that a doctrine is held in any age, that the same doctrine was never denied by the majority, and that it was at least implicitly believed by the greater number.

The facts that refute such a necessity are manifold, but it suffices to mention the definition of Ephesus, of Chalcedon, of the Lateran Synod under Martin I. or the dogmatical letters of St. Leo and St. Agatho, in which appeal is made to the faith of the fathers and to tradition, and where there appears to be no anxiety to produce testimonies of the first three centuries, on the contrary, authors are quoted, who in those times were of recent date.

Having thus laid down by common agreement that which was not necessary, they passed on to discuss what was sufficient in order that an opinion should be defined as an article of faith.

The five following characters were proposed and decided upon as being sufficient.

I. A certain number of grave testimonies containing the controverted proposition.

This after thorough discussion was unanimously acknowledged to be a sufficient character, and it was said that to deny it would be going against the councils, the dogmatic bulls of pontiffs, and the economy of the church itself. Thus with a certain number