Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/81

III.] underlie and countersect the artificial distinctions on the surface of controversy. The ingenious essays in which Archbishop Whately traces "the errors of Romanism" to the general fallacies latent in every creed and every church, might be extended to all kinds of theological division. The celebrated treatise of Bossuet on "the Variations of Protestantism" might be overlaid by an instructive work on a larger basis, in a more generous spirit, and with a nobler object,—"the Variations of the Catholic Church," shewing how wide a range of diversities even the most ancient and exclusive communities have embraced; how many opposing principles, practices, and feelings, like the creeks or valleys of some narrow territory, overlap, traverse, enfold, and run parallel with each other into the very heart of the intervening country, where we should least expect to find them. Reformers, before the Reformation; Popes, in chairs not of St. Peter; "new presbyter but old priest writ large;" "old foes with new faces;" heresy under the garb of orthodoxy, orthodoxy under the garb of heresy; they who hold, according to the ancient saying,, and they also who hold ,—strange companions will be thus brought together from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south. Pelagius lurks under the mitre of Chrysostom or the cowl of Jerome; Loyola will find himself by the side of Wesley; John Knox will recognise a