Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 1.djvu/559

Rh the search after salvation; run over the Apostolic Churches, in which the very chairs of the Apostles still hold place of honour, in which the very letters they wrote are recited, echoing the voice, and imaging the person of each of them. Is Achaia nearest to you? You have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you have the Thessalonians. If you can reach Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are in the neighbourhood of Italy, you have Rome, whence we also draw our own authority. How happy is that Church! where the Apostles poured forth their whole doctrine together with their blood; where Peter is likened in suffering to the Lord; where Paul is crowned with an end like the Baptist's; where the Apostle John, having been plunged in heated oil and suffered nothing, was banished to his island. Let us see what this Church has learned, what she has taught, what tokens she has sent of doctrine to the African Churches. She knows One God, the Creator of the universe, and Christ Jesus of the Virgin Mary, the Son of the Creator, and the resurrection of the flesh: she unites the law and the prophets with the Evangelical and Apostolical writings, and thence brings her faith. This she signs with water, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the eucharist, encourages by martyrdom, and therefore will acknowledge no one who opposes it. This is the teaching, I say not now which foretold future heresies, but out of which heresies have arisen, though they ceased to be scions of it from the time that they opposed it. Even from the kernel of the mild rich and serviceable olive, a harsh wild olive springs; even from the seed of the most delicious and sweetest fig, a wayward and barren wild fig-tree arises. Thus, also, heresies are from us, not of us, degenerate from the stock of truth, and running into weeds of falsehood.