Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/73

Rh find themselves mutually agreed, without previous concert, in their views of Scripture truth, and of the system established by the Apostles.

By such arguments in the first age were the enemies of Christ's Incarnation put to silence. It is plain, so far, how well the Episcopal succession answered the purpose assigned to it by our, of providing that the fruit of Apostolical teaching should remain; and how vigorously the Church's anathema, first pronounced by St. John, was followed up, to the confusion of those who "abode not in the doctrine of ."

Still more remarkable to the same purpose are the examples of the following age. There, too, we find the Apostolical succession the main out-work of Apostolical doctrine; the truth of Incarnation defended, not as in the former age by single writers appealing to the long lines of Bishops who had taught it, but by the Bishops of the Church themselves, synodically met to pass sentence on the questionable teaching of some of their colleagues. Being so met, they represented not simply the judgment of the contemporary Churches, but also that of each former generation of Christians, on the great mystery in dispute. Each Bishop taking part in a synodical decision on those cardinal points of the faith, was understood as avouching, besides his own opinion, the traditionary interpretation likewise which his Church had inherited from her first founder. A very little thought will show how greatly this adds to the support furnished by such meetings to orthodox and saving truth. A convention of learned theologians agreeing in their views of Scripture, would, no doubt, carry great authority. A council of Bishops, in the third century, was such a convention, and a great deal more: it was a collection of harmonious independent testimonies to the way in which the writers of Scripture had originally intended their writings to be understood.

The advantage of so meeting and comparing their respective traditions, was particularly evident in those cases in which any member of their own sacred order had countenanced, or seemed to countenance, heretical opinions. For instances of the kind occur in the age now under consideration; the one displaying in a peculiar way the scrupulous watchfulness of the early Church: the other, her uncompromising firmness;—both in vindication of the pure Gospel of manifest in the flesh.