ов, THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE CHURCH OF ROME UNDER COMMODUS AND ALEXANDER SEVERUS: AND ANCIENT AND MODERN CHRISTIANITY AND DIVINITY COMPARED. BY CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, D.C.L. IN FOUR VOLUMES. VOL. IV. The Apology of Hippolytus, and the Genuine Liturgies of the Ancient Church. WITH BERNAYSII EPISTOLA CRITICA. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 1852. PREFACE. I CONCLUDE this work about the anniversary of the day on which, last year, I wrote the first of my Letters to Archdeacon Hare. The first two Volumes, together with the Apology of Hippolytus, were written and printed in the last six months of 1851; the third and fourth in the first six months of 1852. The Apology of Hippolytus is designed to complete the picture of a man and of an age representing the beginnings of Christianity, and throwing therefore a new light on its prospects, which are those of the human race. The second part of this Volume presents a succinct account of the gradual formation of the Christian worship and rituals in the ancient Church, and gives the texts of the liturgies for the first time critically and historically arranged. But I cannot take leave of my readers without adding a word on the Ignatian question, upon which the work of Hippolytus bears, directly or indirectly, in so many respects. I believe I have done something in this book to wards bringing it nearer to a complete solution. I have shown the prevalence of an early systematic corruption of the ancient texts in the East by the Byzantines, exactly as such a fraud was practised later by the Romanists in the West. I have in particular shown that the text of the first six books of the Apostolic Constitutions exhibits corruptions and interpolations perfectly similar to those which even in Eusebius' time had made a sad twaddler out of that most energetic and original martyr and Father, Ignatius, and a legend out of his true history. Curiously enough, the most striking instance is here also found in a Syriac text. That separation of the original contents of the first six books of the Constitutions from the later interpolations, which I had endeavoured to establish by the mere application of sound critical principles, is confirmed by a Syriac manuscript at Paris. Finally, I have restored the historical character of Ignatius of Antioch more completely than before, by showing in the Introduction to the Liturgies, and in the Reliquiæ Liturgicæ themselves, that the tradition about his influence upon the formation of the worship of the Church over which he presided is borne out by corresponding cotemporary facts and testimonies, and by the documents of the Antiochene liturgy. These circumstances may perhaps induce some German critics to reconsider their doubts as to the genuineness of what we possess of Ignatius, and as |