Ix.] ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST. CYPRIAN. 145 Stephen had put forward his succession from St. Peter, and had demanded that the traditional practice of the Roman Church in this matter should be accepted, as having been delivered to it by St. Peter and St. Paul. 'No innovation on the tradition,' cries St. Cyprian. Whence comes that tradition? Does it descend from the authority of our Lord and the Gospels? Does it come from the commands and Epistles of the Apostles? God testifies that we must do the things that are written, saying to Joshua, "the Book of the law shall not depart from thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate in it day and night, that thou mayest observe to do all that is written in it. Likewise, the Lord, when He sent His Apostles, commanded them to baptize all nations, and to teach them to observe whatsoever He commanded. If, therefore, it is commanded, either in the Gospels, or in the Apostolic Epistles, or in the Acts, that those coming from any heresy should not be baptized, but only hands laid on them, then this is a Divine tradition, and let it be observed; but if in these books heretics are called nothing but adversaries and anti-Christs; if we are told to avoid them as perverse and self-condemned, why should we not condemn those who, the Apostle witnesses, are self-condemned?' Plainly, Cyprian here maintains that the way to find out what traditions are genuine is not to take the word of the Bishop of Rome, but to search the Scriptures as the only trustworthy record of Apostolic tradition. As he says further on in the same letter, 'What do you do when the water in a conduit fails? You go back to the source.' In this controversy the African bishops had extensive support in the East; in particular, the Churches of Asia Minor, who had been alienated from Rome by their quartodeciman practice, took part strongly against Stephen, and their leading bishop, Firmilian of Cappadocia, writing to Cyprian, rejects Stephen's authority in language more angry and contemptuous than Cyprian's. Dionysius of Alexandria interfered in the interests of peace. But what really silenced the controversy was the persecution which descended with equal weight on both parties, and gave alike to Stephen and to Cyprian opportunity to witness, that, whatever their differences, the cause of Christ was dear to both. L On the question of heretical baptism we have, as often happens, Father opposed to Father, and the views of Cyprian are refuted by Augustine; but the very disagreement brings out the fact, that there is a point on which all the Fathers are agreed, namely, the infinite superiority of Scripture to every other source of proof. Cyprian's doctrine about heretical baptism was an innovation at the time, as we may easily gather from the stand he takes on Scripture against tradition; and, as you know, it was not ultimately adopted by the Church. But his arguments were most acceptable to the followers of Donatus, who, in their controversy with St. Augustine, pressed him continually with the authority of that martyr saint, whose credit everywhere in the Church was so great, but naturally more particularly so in Africa. Now, Augustine differed from Cyprian in not thinking Scripture proof to be necessary in order to show a custom to be Apostolical. He thought, on the contrary, that the existence in the Church, from time immemorial, of a custom the origin of which could not be traced to the decree of a Council, or in any other such way accounted for, afforded a reasonable presumption that the custom was Apostolical. However this may be, I agree with him in thinking that the usage of the Church was justification enough for not re-baptizing those who had received heretical baptism. And when he was pressed by Cyprian's authority he replied, 'You are ever throwing in our teeth Cyprian's opinions, Cyprian's letters, Cyprian's Council. Who knows not that the Canonical Scripture of the Old and New Testament is contained within certain limits, and that its authority is so far to be preferred to all later letters of bishops, that no question can be raised whether what is found therein be true and right? Whereas the letters of bishops written after the settling of the Canon may be checked by the wiser language of any writer who happens to have more knowledge of the matter in question, or by the weightier authority of other bishops, and the skill of learned men, or by Councils; and particular or provincial Councils again must yield to the authority of General Councils gathered from the whole Christian world. Nay, earlier General Councils themselves may be corrected by Ix.] TERTULLIAN ON PRESCRIPTION. 147 later. And again, in graceful language, which gives due weight to the authority of Cyprian, while it refuses to set any uninspired authority on the level of Scripture; but, now, seeing that which thou recitest is not Canonical, with that liberty to which the Lord hath called me, I do not receive the opinion different from Scripture of that man to whose praise I cannot reach, to whose great learning I do not compare my writings, whose genius I love, in whose spirit I delight, whose charity I admire, whose martyrdom I reverence.'t I must not weary you with quotations; but you may take it as a general rule that there is not a Father who, if his own belief is demanded for something not contained in Scripture which he is not disposed to accept, will not reply in some such language as St. Jerome: This, because it has not authority from the Scriptures, is with the same easiness despised as approved.' As we accept those things that are written, so we reject those things that are not written.'§ These things which they invent, as if by Apostolic tradition, without the authority of Scripture, the sword of God smites.'|| You will see, then, that if we were at the desire of the Romish advocates to leave the Scriptures and resort to the Fathers of the early Church for a decision of our controversies, these very Fathers would send us back to the Scriptures as the only guide to truth, the only safeguard against heresy. It is proper to mention the only set-off that I know of that can be made to the otherwise unanimous teaching of the Fathers on this subject-it is Tertullian's treatise on Prescription. And at first sight it might seem that this is opposed to our views, for the main point it is intended to establish is, that we ought not to argue with heretics out of the Scripture, but put them down by an appeal to antiquity or to the authority of the Church. And in reading this tract we recognize, with a little surprise, some of the arguments Roman Catholics are in the habit of employing against us. Now, in the first place, I must observe, that it is a misrepresentation * De Bapt. Cont. Donatt. II. 4, vol. ix., p. 98. + Cont. Crescon. II. 40, vol. ix., p. 430. In. Matth. xxiii. 35. § Adv. Helvid. of the sentiments of the Fathers, as it would be of any set of men, when arguments which they have used in one controversy are applied to another which was not in their minds when they were writing. Very few people are such cautious disputants as not occasionally to use arguments which prove too much; which, though very effective for the immediate purpose to which they are applied, might on another occasion prove very inconvenient. Not unfrequently at the present day Roman Catholics and Protestants arguing together, use arguments which an infidel might retort with effect against either; or, conversely, men arguing against infidels use principles which a Roman Catholic might be glad to have admitted. Now, on looking into this treatise on Prescription, you will find that nothing could be further from the mind of its author than to inculcate a belief in any doctrine not contained in Scripture. Neither here nor elsewhere does Tertullian show a wish to do so. The doctrines which in this tract Tertullian desires to defend are the most elementary Articles of the Creed, and all lie on the very surface of the Bible. You will find that there was reason in Tertullian's assertion, that it was not possible to dispose of the heretics with whom he had to deal by Scripture arguments: for you can only argue with people on principles which you and they hold in common, and the Scriptures were not common ground between the Church and the heretics of the second century. The Gnostic heretics whom he had in view denied the most fundamental Articles of the Christian faith. Their theories made matter the root of all evil consequently, they could not believe that the Supreme Being, whom they called the Good God, was the Creator of the world-a work which they attributed to some subordinate or even hostile Being. This Being they took to be the God of the Jews, who in the Old Testament had claimed the work of creation as His own; consequently, they held that the Old Testament was contrary to the New, and that Jesus was not the Messiah of the Jewish prophets. They could not believe that Christ had assumed a material body, that He had been really born, or really died, or that there would be any future resurrection of the body. Now, you can Ix.] TERTULLIAN ON PRESCRIPTION. 149 well believe that it was labour lost to argue out of the Scriptures with people who held such views as these. You could tell them nothing as to the difference between their teaching and that of the Bible that they must not have known perfectly well before you spoke to them. They were prepared, however, with different modes of meeting the difficulty. They generally claimed to be in the possession of secret traditions of our Lord or His Apostles; for it was in the Gnostic sects that the idea of supplementing or superseding Scripture by tradition first was conceived. They had a number of Gospels of their own containing these traditions, while they rejected some of the most inconvenient parts of our Canonical books. But one sect, the Valentinians, were content with the Church Canon, finding that the allegorical method of interpretation which prevailed in Egypt, the birthplace of that sect, might be used with as much success in eliciting the Gnostic tenets from the Bible, as it had been employed by orthodox interpreters in deriving the doctrines which they believed to be true. You can easily conceive that men who dealt in such arbitrary fashion with the Bible had no common ground on which the orthodox could battle with them by Scripture arguments. In order to refute the Gnostic pretence of secret traditions, the Churches took pains to establish their own connexion with the Apostles, so as to make it appear that if any such traditions there were, it must be the Churches which had the possession of them. It was with this object that we find pains first taken to trace the successions of bishops; for whatever opinion you may entertain as to the form of Church government in the primitive Church, this, at least, is indisputable, that at the beginning of the last quarter of the second century there were bishops everywhere, and no memory survived that any other form of government had ever existed. Several of the great Churches claimed to be able to give lists of their bishops reaching up to the Apostles' times, and so they conceived that they established their right against the Gnostics to be regarded as the sole possessors of genuine Apostolic traditions. With this explanation you can better appreciate the line taken by Tertullian in his treatise on |