while the provincial tribunals dispensed anything rather justice to their victims, the verdict of an ecclesiastical functionary was looked upon as a decision from which appeal was fruitless. Amid knavery and violence compared to which that of Verres was tolerable, he manifested a precise morality which even the great accuser of Verres would have held to be fastidious.

We have thus far considered more particularly the moral influences of the doctrine, discipline, and example of the Christian clergy. Taking a more general view of the period before us, it at once strikes us as a remarkable fact, that the onward progress of the faith, which no one who compares the first with the fourth century can doubt, was owing not so much to the propagating activity of its teachers as to the silent influence excited by the energy and regularity of the ecclesiastical organization. We look in vain for any of the earnest missionary zeal which might have found its model in St. Paul, and which succeeding generations learnt to admire in Boniface. The first three centuries of the Church's history were so emphatically ages of internal stablishing and moral discipline, that even the terrors of reiterated persecution, originally instrumental in scattering. the truth from Judea throughout every civilized land, failed of removing the ancient Churches from their existing seats. The exertions of the clergy were spent in consolidating and perfecting what already stood, not in laying the foundations of new edifices; and it was well that it should be so; since it accorded admirably with

the whole Providential scheme, as we can now discern it, for the onward progress of the faith, that the powers of a devoted ministry should be employed in forming, amid the comparative repose of the empire of Rome, a system destined to be productive of so many blessings in the succeeding centuries of turmoil and convulsions.

It is true that in too many of the institutions and customs to which we have alluded, are plainly to be discerned the first germs of overwhelming and pernicious abuses; but we can scarcely be justified in attributing to the primitive clergy of the second and third centuries consequences whose true origin is to be found in the social corruptions of the middle ages; we ought, on the contrary, to rejoice that so intellectual and so practical a body of men should have been engaged in founding a system so well calculated to further the kingdom of God in their own days and in those of their children. A more minute inspection will often convince us that in the early progress of what to us, looking at them as we do through the prejudices of so many centuries, may appear to be unmitigated abuses, the guiding hand and watchful omniscience of the Great Head of the Church may be discerned, preparing it for the emergencies of its coming destiny.

But before we turn away from the consideration of the beneficial influence of the clergy on the members of the Church, we may notice another less direct, but still important mean by which their authority was heightened, and the effect of the purity of their example in some

measure enhanced. Whatever may be the exact opinion we may form, from the writings of the early Fathers, of the weight of the popular voice in Episcopal elections, we may be assured of this, that in no case did a nomination of so holy an office take place without the consent, more or less formally expressed, of the great body of the people, prior to the consecration of him who had been named, it might be, by the clerical body alone; and whatever may have been the steps of the process, we may well believe that a lively interest was awakened in the minds of the faithful*, regarding one who was thus in a measure their own choice. It is one of the earliest lessons we learn from the experience of life, that self-imposed obligations are the most binding and the most enduring; and we meet, in the chronicles of nations, with perpetually recurring evidences of the fact that men bow down more readily and willingly before an image of their own erection than before one to whose elevation they are strangers, or which they venerate at the beck of a supreme authority. Accordingly, the whole sacerdotal order, and above all the Bishops, of the early Church found themselves in possession of a moral and intellectual sway, resting not only on their own intrinsic claims to respect, but on the self-complacency, as we may style it, of those by whose suffrages they had risen1. The self-love of man often

* See Bingham, Orig. Eccles. B. iv. c. 2.

1 Thus Cyprian (Ep. 14), writing from exile to the presbyters and deacons, professes it to be impossible for him to act alone without the "plebs" in important Church affairs. Compare Ep.

D

delights in humbling itself before that which he has himself exalted, and in honoring, in the pre-eminence of another, the supremacy of his own judgment: and we can hardly imagine that the enthusiastic multitudes, whose acclamations raised Ambrose and Martin* to the Episcopal seats of Milan and Tours, would be willing to impugn the authority of prelates whose imperfections would have been chargeable solely on the precipitation of their elections.

Such, then, are some of the principal means by which the worthy followers of the Apostles dispensed the blessings of the Gospel to a world lying in wickedness: by which they not only instructed nations long destitute of all religious or moral guidance to look up to purer precepts and higher examples than the earth afforded, but accustomed them to become active members of a vigorous and self-governing community, in the very midst of the most hopeless and aimless society with which the world was ever cursed.

Before we pass to a consideration of our second head, and view the relations of the clerical body to the world without, we may give a few words to a subject which it seems advisable, in this and our future chronological sections, to include under this division-the effect of the

19. "Hoc et verecundiæ et disciplinæ et vitæ ipsi omnium nostrum convenit, ut præpositi cum clero convenientes, præsente etiam stantium plebe, quibus et ipsis pro fide et timore suo honor habendus est, disponere omnia consilii communis religione possimus."

• Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, [c. 7], quoted by Bingham, B. IV. c. 1. Sec. 3.

theological studies and writings of the time on the literature and philosophy of a degenerate age.

To dilate on the merits or demerits of countless ecclesiastical disputants, to particularize each shifting form of ingenious heresy, or to enumerate the goodly catalogue of Champions of the Faith, each armed for his own peculiar warfare, would be far to exceed our present limits or intentions. After the lapse of so many centuries, we may look back on some of these temporary discussions with far other sentiments than those of regret, and rejoice that, as the Church was taught the advantage of watchful discipline by persecutions from without, so she learnt the necessity of a yet more earnest solicitude by what might seem to be tribulation from within. It is assuredly not the least of the many blessings conferred upon humanity by the sacerdotal order of the first three centuries that it produced in the western lands so many stedfast advocates of ecclesiastical discipline and the seemly purity of Christian life, or that in the less practical regions of the East it included within its pale such zealous defenders of true doctrine alike against open enemies and against the more dangerous approaches of scepticism and false philosophy;—that the system of the Truth is maintained by the energetic rhetoric of a Tertullian, and by the learning and exegetical skill of an Origen. It would be an interesting but laborious task to trace, through each succeeding generation of Christians, the good fruit of the seed sown by the penetrating intellects and exemplary integrity of such men as these.