Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 2.djvu/453

Rh would very much simplify the excessive mistiness of their own theological statements.

23 There is a confusion in the use of this word, which was perhaps unavoidable, but is certainly perplexing. It is generally used in the sense of hypostatic propriety, as indeed the "Proprium est Sp. S. procedere" shows. But yet in the text we read of a "deeleita of one Invisible Essence," which if translated hypostatical propriety, would either be nonsense or. And so in page 63.

24 That is, that they sometimes speak in an orthodox manner: but the sum and substance of preceding quotations is plainly heretical.

25 Had Mr. Badger been more practically acquainted with the Filioque controversy, perhaps he might have written this paragraph differently: at all events, whatever single expressions may be quoted here and there from Nestorian rituals, it is certain that they hold the Single Procession as strongly as any other Eastern Christians: 1. Because the Latin innovation has never been imputed to them by the orthodox Eastern Church. 2. Because Theodoret, their great pattern, used it as a reductio ad absurdum in his writings against S. Cyril.

26 27 28 It is difficult to see how these anathemas of two Catholic Verities,—that died,—and that S. Mary is the Mother of ,—and of one Catholic doctor, S. Cyril, are to serve the cause of Nestorian orthodoxy.

29 That some Nestorian writers have been heretical on the subject of Original Sin there can be no doubt. Sabarjesus, Catholicos of Chaldea, actually condemned the tenet in the synod of 596. And the Nestorian Ritual contains an office of burial for unbaptized infants.

30 This argument against all Creeds is a curious instance of that Protestant error which, alone of all the Christian communions of the East, seems to lurk among the Nestorians.

31 It is rather strange to have the point of Nestorian heresy alleged in proof of the XXIst Article.

32 On the present disuse of Confession among the Nestorians, Joseph II. thus speaks: "We say that, among all Christians, heretical as well as orthodox, confession of sins is in use: among you only it is obsolete, and its memory hath perished. … The rest come to sacramental communion as an ass to hay, without doing penance, or forsaking their sins."

33 All these extracts, it need scarcely be observed, are no more than might be found in any Roman work on the subject: though undoubtedly those given from the Khudhra, in pages 171 and 172, do seem at variance with the doctrine of the Latin and of the Eastern Churches.

34 I.e. Babæus II. (498,) and Silas, (503,) both men of infamous character. The former could neither read nor write.