testant friends, in their anxiety to get rid of S. Paul, are unconsciously arguing against themselves upon another count. Luther was at least consistent when he denied both the apostolicity of the Epistle and its authority.

In the African Church we find Tertullian denying, and S. Cyprian apparently ignorant of, S. Paul's share in the matter; and this seems the sum total of the evidence to be gathered in that portion of the Church up to the time of S. Augustine. Tertullian quietly, and without comment, in his Montanist work, "De Pudicitia," ascribes the Epistle to S. Barnabas. S. Cyprian never uses the Epistle once. But this need scarcely surprise us; for not only was he a devoted admirer of Tertullian, and in literary matters a faithful follower, accustomed to settle knotty points of criticism by a compendious "da magistrum "; but, moreover, he was engaged in hot dispute with Novatian, and as long as Novatian was willing to keep aloof from the Epistle to the Hebrews, S. Cyprian would not be over eager to furnish his adversary with new weapons of attack, even supposing that he entertained on this point different views from his master.

By the time of S. Ambrose a change seems to have set in. This great bishop and doctor quotes the Epistle freely, and fearlessly ascribes it to S. Paul. In his treatise "de Pœnit." he devotes two whole chapters (cc. ii. and iii.) to a vindication of Heb. vi., assuming it as S. Paul's.

It will be well to see what S. Jerome and S. Augustine thought about the subject before we pass on to the Eastern Church.

S. Jerome constantly quotes the Epistle, and ascribes it to S. Paul, as if he had no doubt on the point; but he mentions more than once, as we have seen, the doubt which existed in the Roman Church. Some remarks which he makes in his letter to Dardanus (Ep. 129, §. 3) are by many thought to outweigh all his practical acceptance of the Epistle. We must judge for ourselves. In this letter, then, to Dardanus, S. Jerome, after making in immediate succession four somewhat lengthy citations, which he introduces with the remark,-"The Vessel of Election speaketh to the Hebrews," concludes with a passage which is very celebrated in this controversy:

"Those who belong to us" (i.e. Christians), he says, "will do right to maintain, that this Epistle, which bears title To the Hebrews,' is accepted as coming from the Apostle Paul, not only by the Churches of the East, but by all the ecclesiastical writers in the Greek language down to the present day, although many of them (plerique) * deem it the work either of Barnabas or of Clement; and that it really matters not from whom we

* This translation is justified afterwards.

have it, seeing that it certainly is from some approved ecclesiastical writer, and is authorized by daily reading in the churches. If, however, the practice of the Latins does not give it admission among the Canonical Scriptures, neither, be it remembered, do the Churches of the Greeks accept with the same facility the Apocalypse of John; yet we accept both these works, by no means following herein the practice of these times, but yielding deference to the authority of ancient writers, who very frequently (plerumque) adduce testimonies both from the one and from the other, not as they are sometimes wont to deal with apocryphal writings (occasionally they draw instances even from pagan literature), but as canonical and ecclesiastical writings." "*

There is a difficulty in this passage without doubt, and it even seems to contradict itself; but then Dean Alford's solution can scarcely be the right one. He pushes "plerique" to its fullest meaning, and then distinguishes between "suscipi" and "arbitrentur, assigning to the former term the narrow and exclusive sense of mere conventional accepting. His words are:

Now, though these expressions are not very perspicuous, it is not difficult to see what is meant by them. A general conventional reception (susceptio) of the Epistle as S. Paul's prevailed among the Greeks. To this their writers (without exception, according to Jerome; but that is a loose assertion, as the preceding pages will show) conformed, still, in most cases, entertaining their own views as to Barnabas or Clement having written the Epistle, and thinking it of little moment, seeing that confessedly it was the work of a "vir ecclesiasticus," and was stamped with the authority of public reading in the churches.

This is ingenious and plausible enough; but, after admitting that the expressions are not very perspicuous, and that Jerome is making loose assertions, it would be a decidedly shorter way out of the difficulty to suppose that S. Jerome said "plerique," when it would have been better to have said "plures"; † and then we

*"Illud nostris dicendum est, hanc epistolam quæ inscribitur ad Hebræos, non solum ab ecclesiis Orientis, sed ab omnibus retro ecclesisiasticis Græci sermonis Scriptoribus, quasi Pauli apostoli suscipi, licet plerique eam vel Barnabæ vel Clementis arbitrentur; et nihil interesse cujus sit, quum ecclesiastici viri sit, et quotidie ecclesiarum lectione celebretur. Quod si eam Latinorum consuetudo non recipit inter Scripturas canonicas; nec Græcorum quidem ecclesiæ Apocalypsin Joannis eadem libertate suscipiunt; et tamen nos utramque suscipimus, nequaquam hujus temporis consuetudinem, sed veterum Scriptorum auctoritatem sequentes, qui plerumque utriusque abutuntur testimoniis, non ut interdum de apocryphis facere solent, quippe qui et Gentilium literarum raro utuntur exemplis, sed quasi canonicis et ecclesiasticis."

+ Our rendering of "plerique" receives some countenance from the use in this very passage of the kindred word, " plerumque." Certainly S. Jerome did not mean to say that the ancient writers drew their quotations for the most part from the Epistle to the Hebrews and from the Apocalypse.

may dispense with all subtilizing about conventional "susceptio as opposed to internal judgment, especially where the word suscipere" is immediately after employed twice over in its ordinary and fuller sense, and we have only to say that he shows his own opinion pretty clearly by the terms in which he speaks of the Epistle, not only where he quotes from it in his other writings, but also in this very passage, in which, as we have seen, he starts his observations with a "Vas electionis loquitur "; and that, nevertheless, while he thus discloses to us his mind on the subject, he is laudably careful not to force his own opinion on the acceptance of his readers. Might we not call it conventionalism run mad, thus to preface with an emphatic assertion of S. Paul's authorship that very passage in which he was undertaking to show that S. Paul was not really the author after all? The habit of appealing to the "Vas electionis" must have been very deeply rooted indeed if, in the very act of declaring its inaccuracy, he could not refrain from using the offensive formula. Add to this, that if S. Jerome did mean plerique" to be understood accurately, he would have intended to say what was either manifestly untrue, or a pure assertion, without proof or the possibility of proof. If we are to judge of what the Greek writers thought by referring to what they wrote, then, as we shall soon see, it is manifestly untrue that most of them (plerique) believed that the Epistle came from Clement or Barnabas. Olshausen (Opuscula, p. 95), quoted in the able summary of opinion upon the Epistle to the Hebrews in Dr. Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," says:-"No one is named, either in Egypt or in Syria, Palestine, Asia, or Greece, who is opposed to the opinion that this Epistle proceeds from S. Paul."

If, on the other hand, we venture to say, that the Greek writers wrote one thing and thought another, how can this ever be anything but the purest of unprovable assertions? What means have we, or had S. Jerome, of arriving at such a conclusion? To divine the thoughts of men, who are lying in their graves, and this not only without any clue from their writings, but actually in contradiction to all they ever wrote, would be a perfection of clairvoyance to which S. Jerome certainly was a stranger, for we have not arrived at it yet. Can there be a greater absurdity than to explain what a man has actually said by what he may be imagined to have thought, instead of trying to make out what he must have thought by examining what he actually said? It is difficult to see why those rather random words in the letter to Dardanus ought to be taken as by themselves alone sufficing to outweigh the practice of a lifetime, and a practice persevered in at the very time when S. Jerome (according to those who wish to have him on their side as the opponent of the Pauline authorship) is apologising for that practice, and making what excuse he can to save its truthfulness at the expense of its accuracy.

S. Augustine like S. Jerome quotes freely from the Epistle, which he sometimes ascribes to S. Paul, though more frequently he commits himself to no statement about the author. Like S. Jerome, again, he is laudably careful to record the doubts of others. In the work De Civitate Dei (l. xvi. c. 22), we find after an allusion to Melchisedech the addition: "Of whom many glorious things are written in the Epistle inscribed to the Hebrews, which according to many is from the Apostle Paul, though this is denied by some.

"

These words were probably written about A.D. 416, and by that time we have had abundant proof of what S. Augustine himself thought about the Epistle. He was present as a priest at the Council of Hippo, A.D. 393, and as a bishop at the Third Council of Carthage, A.D. 398, and in both these Councils the Epistle was unequivocally ascribed to S. Paul.* In the acts of the latter Council (Can. 47: Labbe, t. 2, p. 1409) we find a list of the canonical books, exactly coinciding, except in the arrangement of some of the books of the Old Testament, with the Canon of Trent; and in their proper place we find, "thirteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul: one of the Hebrews by the same." An ancient copy bore an appended suggestion: "Let the Church across the sea be consulted touching the confirmation of this Canon." As a sufficient expression of what the Roman Church had by this time come to think on the subject, we may take the enumeration of canonical books in the letter of Innocent I., written in the year 405 (Ep. 6, ad Exsuperium Tolosanum, c. 7: Labbe, t. 3, p. 15), in which are included "fourteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul." Thenceforward we hear little more about Roman or African doubts. Not only at Councils in which he took a distinguished part, but expressly in so many words, and even before the year 400, S. Augustine had made his own profession of faith in his treatise, De Doctrinâ Christianâ (1. 2, c. 8), where he enumerates all the fourteen Epistles of S. Paul in their present order, saving that the two to the Thessalonians are put between the Philippians and Colossians. What does it matter to us, after this, if he introduces a quotation now and again with some such remark as (De Civ. Dei, 1. 10, c. 5): "In the Epistle which is inscribed to the Hebrews"? Are we to infer that he himself did not believe in S. Paul's authorship, after his express declaration to the contrary? or are we rather to suppose that, as he has told us already in the passage quoted from the sixteenth book of the same work, he, no less than S. Jerome, was perfectly cognizant of the existence of a doubt not then closed up by competent authority, and that, with a modesty for which he was conspicuous in those days of hot polemics, he

* See Hefele, Conciliengesch. Syn. zu Hippo (vol. ii. p. 55).

refused to lay down the law dogmatically until Rome had spoken in a definition on the matter? To admit that a question is still open in the Church is certainly not the same thing as to express personal doubt on the subject. Both S. Jerome and S. Augustine in several places admit that the claims of the Epistle to the Hebrews had been, and still were, controverted; but to which side of the controversy they themselves incline ought, we think, to be clear enough from the practice of S. Jerome, to which his hazy letter to Dardanus is no way opposed, if it be explained according to the hermeneutics of common sense, and from the express words of S. Augustine, which are nowhere contradicted by his practice, and are often helped out by it.

The great African councils of S. Augustine's time were the first utterances of authority which we find about our Epistle, and how much of their inspiration is due to his master mind all church-historians know. It might be nearer to the truth, if, instead of accusing S. Augustine of anti-Pauline views, we were to say that he has done more perhaps than any other individual man to bring about the "closing up for Romanists" of all views but one, namely, that S. Paul was at any rate the primary author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

То pass now to the East.

"

Clement of Alexandria, whose words are given by Eusebius (H.E., 1. 6, c. 14), affirms that S. Paul wrote the Epistle in Hebrew, and that S. Luke translated it, and he finds sufficient reason for the omission of S. Paul's name in his unpopularity with the Jews. Then he adds the reasons given by his master Pantænus, whom he calls "that blessed priest these are, that S. Paul (Heb. iii. 1) calls Christ an Apostle, and cannot bring himself almost in the same breath to apply the same title to himself; and also, that he was writing to the Jews, not as their own special apostle, but as one undertaking a work of supererogation (EK TEρLovσías). Whether these reasons are so silly as to make the testimony of Pantænus of small value, we leave to Dean Alford to decide; for ourselves, we care more for the fact of the testimony; and perhaps, the more it is shown that the "blessed priest" was an old simpleton, the less likely it will appear that he was originating an entirely new idea, and the more likely it will appear that he was only telling what he had been told by others; that he was in fact witnessing to a tradition.

Clement of Alexandria in his constant practice bears out his expressed conviction. We find him quoting the Epistle boldly as S. Paul's, quite undeterred by any consideration of the part which, according to him, S. Luke had had in reducing it to what was then, as now, the only known form. Origen did not adopt VOL. XV.—NO. XXIX. [New Series.]

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