tion of Christianity. The mind comes to think it unnecessary to trouble itself about details, so long as the one apprehended truth is certain. "Christ died for us, no matter how," is the whole needful dogma of an evangelical mind.

But there is another view from which the Protestant eye habitually shrinks, but one which the Catholic boldly contemplates; it is that which completes the circle, by joining the beginning and the end of the Gospel together, steadily uniting the incarnation and the death. The first of these great mysteries receives but little prominence in modern Protestantism, because it lacks the daring of faith, to believe that He who died was the Word incarnate. And it is this feebleness of belief that leads to that vagueness and generalization in doctrine, which we have described. Say to a Protestant, "God was struck in the face; God was scourged; God was crowned with thorns," and he dares not trust himself to look upon the doctrine. The eagle eye that can gaze upon the sun belongs not to his system; it is but a craven bird. He feels himself unable to grasp the awful mystery. If he deny the divinity of our Lord, his atonement is gone. But he dares not contemplate the dogma through its various applications, and he shrinks from such phrases as we have given with a misgiving terror. They sound shocking and almost profane. And thus he is driven to suppress in his thoughts those detailed sequels of the incarnation, and dwell upon only obscure perceptions of two doctrines, which he has not heart to firmly combine. Socinianism thus becomes the refuge of a vacillating attempt at faith.

The Catholic Church is a stranger to this wavering She pursues one doctrine through all the mazes of the other, and combines the two inextricably. The Infant and the Victim are equal realities, nay, a unity, beginning in God, and in God ending; God throughout, in feebleness as in might, in obscurity and in brightness, in suffering and in glory. Nothing in Him is little, nothing unworthy; the fool's garment on Him is as sacred as the snow-bright vesture of Thabor; the scourge of cords in His uplifted hand is as powerful as the thunderbolt; the first lisping of His infant tongue as wisdomful as His sermon on the mount, a bruise upon His flesh as beautiful to angels' eyes, as adorable to man's soul, as His first smiling radiance shed upon his virgin mother. Thus does the

Church believe, thus realise her faith. She alone understands the true doctrine of her Saviour's death, as He Himself expounded it; for none other has learnt this lesson from His actions, that love is an essential condition of forgiveness as well as faith, and love it is that will linger over every detail of love.

ART. IV. The History of the Church of Rome, to the end of the Episcopate of Damasus, A.D. 384. By EDWARD JOHN SHEPHERD, A.M., Rector of Luddesdown. 8vo. London: Longmans, 1851.

66

Do

"do

O you think," said Pere Hardouin, to a friend who remonstrated with him on some of those historical paradoxes, which have made his name so notorious; you think that I have been rising all my life at four o'clock in the morning, merely to say what every one has been saying before me?" It would be too much to expect the same significant avowal from every imitator of Pere Hardouin; but there can be no doubt that the love of new and startling views is one of the most dangerous temptations which beset the path of the antiquarian; and that for each fresh investigator the danger increases in the exact proportion of the industry and research which have been bestowed upon the subject by his predecessors in the career of investigation.

And certainly, if the mantle of the learned but eccentric Jesuit still remains on earth, we cannot help suspecting that, by some strange caprice of fortune, it has fallen upon the shoulders of the Rector of Luddesdown. The imputation of such an affinity, we fear, will be distasteful to the religious prejudices which his book betrays; but it is inpossible to read even a single section, without recognizing it as an emanation of the same paradoxical school. The scepticism which Pere Hardouin carried into the study of classical antiquity, Mr. Shepherd has indulged, with even more reckless audacity, in the investigation of the histori

cal records of primitive Christianity. There is no opinion too firmly established, or too universally received, to be proof against his daring criticism: no fact is too clearly demonstrated to withstand his suspicious scrutiny: the Christian history is, in his view, but a vast field of doubt and uncertainty; and his only rule of criticism appears to be, to question, or rather to deny, the genuineness, or, at least, the authority, of everything which, before his time, had passed under the denomination of authentic history, and, in his own phrase, "had floated down its broad stream, if not unsuspected, yet, as far as he knew, unchallenged." (Preface.) Pere Hardouin held that, except the works of Cicero, and a few of those of Pliny, Horace, and Virgil, all the so-called "classics," are forgeries of the monks of the middle ages. The Eneid of Virgil he believed to be a religious allegory of the thirteenth century. He looked upon the Odes of Horace as an emanation of the same school, and held the Lalage of that witty poet to be but a mystical impersonation of the Christian religion. Mr. Shepherd applies just as reckless a hand to the entire fabric of early patristic literature. There is scarcely a record of the first ages which he does not pronounce to be either wholly spurious, or, at least, interpolated; many of them he even represents as the fruits of an extensive and systematic scheme of forgery, and as composed or modified for the purpose of supporting each other; and he applies this undiscriminating scepticism not alone to the genuineness of the writings of the period, but to the reality of the characters and the truth of the events of its reputed history. Thus he "has his doubts" about the visit of St. Polycarp to Rome, in the time of Anicetus (p. 12); he "doubts" the letter of Dionysius of Corinth to Soter, (p. 17.) and the letter of Dionysius of Alexandria, preserved by Eusebius (p. 29); he entertains a suspicion of the truth" of the reference of the Donatist controversy to Constantine (p. 38); he thinks that the statement of Pope Sylvester's sending legates to Arles and to Nice," may be doubted" (p. 50); he "is not clear" as to the exile of Liberius (p. 90); nor as to his recall (ibid); he "questions whether any of the documents connected with it are genuine" (p. 99); he holds that the very existence of the council of Alexandria, [on the accession of Julian,] is doubtful" (p. 103); and declares that "there is scarcely an event in the pontificate of Damasus, on which any reliance

66

66

can be placed" (p. 106)! In truth, if there ever has been, since the days of the renowned Governor of New Amsterdam, surnamed "THE DOUBTER, an individual who may legitimately succeed to the honours of the title, Mr. Shepherd may fairly claim to be the man!

be"

66

There is one very important difference, however, between the system of doubting adopted by Mr. Shepherd, and that of his illustrious predecessor. It is recorded of "Walter the Doubter," that he could never "make up his mind on any doubtful point." Now Mr. Shepherd appears to doubt solely for the purpose of deciding the point on which his doubt is expressed; and his decisions never fail to run all in the same direction; that is to say, against the authenticity of any work, or the truthfulness of any. statement, which he may happen to have called into question. Thus he declares Eusebius's history of Polycarp's visit to Rome to be, as a whole, incredible." (p. 210.) He holds the history of the controversy of Pope Victor with the Asiatics, and the Pope's threatened excommunication of the latter, to be a pure fabrication. (p. 27.) The similar excommunication issued by Pope Stephen, and, indeed, the whole controversy in which it originated, he holds to equally fabulous." (p. 28.) He rejects, as spurious, the whole series of the "so-called Cyprianic Letters, and thinks it "extremely doubtful whether there ever was such a person as Cyprian at all." (p. 185.) He rejects with contempt the alleged charge of heterodoxy made to Pope Dionysius of Rome, against his namesake, the patriarch of Alexandria. (p. 32.) He considers, in like manner, the Spanish appeals to Rome; the reference of the case of Marcian of Arles to Pope Cornelius; the Donatist trial at Rome; the Council of Arles; the Council of Laodicea; and above all, that of Sardica, to be mere "Roman fabrications." In the same spirit, and with the same view, he disbelieves the entire history of the flight of Athanasius to Rome; the letter of the Eusebian party to Pope Julius; Julius's reply to them, and his authoritative decision in the merits of the case of Athanasius; the similar appeal of Marcellus of Ancyra, and his restoration to his see by the judgment of Rome; and, in a word, all the hitherto received details of the history of the life and times of Athanasius, and of the later Arian controversy.

But there is one opinion, which, more than all the rest of Mr. Shepherd's book taken together, may illustrate the

wholesale scepticism that pervades it. With all his antiRoman tendencies, he abandons, without a struggle, what have been the traditionary strongholds of the enemies of Roman supremacy, whenever the maintenance of their genuineness would clash with the sceptical theory which it is the main object of his work to uphold. We have already seen him sacrifice, without a sigh, the angry and intemperate invectives of Firmilian and Cyprian. He relinquishes, with equal indifference, the fierce and arrogant rejoinder made to Pope Julius by the Arian antagonists of Athanasius (225); and, most wonderful of all, he discards, as an idle tale, the long-cherished history of the fall of Pope Liberius, and rejects as spurious, every single historical document upon which it is ordinarily believed to rest! These histories he holds, like all the rest, to have been fabricated for the purpose of sustaining and extending the ambitious pretensions of Rome; and lest it should appear strange that a clever fabricator should have gone to the trouble to invent records so ill-calculated to forward his views for the aggrandisement of Rome, as those which represent the Roman bishop as insulted, despised, set at defiance, weakly betraying the cause of truth, and lapsing into a hideous heresy, he coolly avers that all this but shows the craft and ingenuity of the fabricator, who threw in all these seemingly unpalatable adjuncts in order "to render the forgery less suspicious!" (p. 144.)

What we have said may suffice to supply some idea of the lengths to which, as regards the facts of history, this strange writer has carried his wild and reckless scepticism. Considered, therefore, as a historical composition, or tested according to any recognised principles of historical authority, we need hardly say that his work is almost beyond the pale of sober or serious criticism. But we cannot help, nevertheless, regarding it as one of the most remarkable, though unconscious, tributes to the self-evidence of the claims of Rome, which has ever been laid at her feet by a reluctant enemy. We shall make no apology, therefore, for dwelling at some length upon its general argument. For the simple truth is, that, in order to bear out the anti-Roman position which he assumes, Mr. Shepherd is compelled to discard almost everything in the shape of history which has come down to us from those times! Not content with this wholesale scepticism regarding the writings of the first three centuries, of which we have