Advantages falsely ascribed to the early writers. PART II. The advantages The advantages possessed by the fathers, however magnified by some, were few and small. LECT. VII. We know, indeed, that it is said, "They lived near the times of the apostles, and heard either them or those that conversed with them." All this, however, is more certainly true of Simon Magus than of any father whose writings we possess. Yet, not everything that the apostles said and did, even if recorded by the most faithful witness would be to us a safe guide. He that had seen "Peter, after eating with the Gentiles, withdraw and separate himself from them, fearing those who were of the circumcision," might have reported, and taught others to imitate, what Paul afterwards blamed as "walking not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel." And how truly might some one have said, that he heard Peter swear that he knew not the man of Nazareth! Everything is to us as we are to it; and not merely what is seen and heard, but who sees and hears it, determines the character of a report. That generation of Israel which immediately succeeded those who saw the great things God did for their settlement in Canaan, having become corrupt, the Maccabees, in a far later age, were better Jews than the successors of Joshua; LECT. VII. as our reformers were better Christians than many of the successors to apostles; if that term can be applied to those who merely succeeded to their era of time. tures con tradition. The Scriptures inform us, that the earliest The Scriptradition was false, though handed down by demn sincere men who saw and heard that on which it was based. "Then went the saying abroad, that that disciple should not die; though Jesus said not to him, 'He shall not die;' " and it is now universally believed that he is dead. It was, perhaps, nothing but the event, the death of John, that opened the eyes of Christians to the falsity of this most early and recorded tradition. The Thessalonians supposed they had learned from Paul, that the day of the Lord was at hand, which the apostle assures them was not true. venerable There is scarcely any tradition of a sentiment Most or fact, not revealed in Scripture, that comes to tradition us in a form so definite and positive as that false. Christ lived and taught on earth till he was forty, or fifty, and declining towards old age." Thus speaks Irenæus, the disciple of Polycarp: "It is asserted by the gospel, and all the elders who in Asia met together with John, and John delivered that very thing to them. But he remained with them to the times of Trajan; and some of them not only saw John, but the other apostles, and heard these same things from them, and testify concerning this kind. of narrative." proved LECT. VII. Now, the advocates of tradition believe not one word of this; and yet expect us to believe traditions which have not a hundredth part of the evidence here adduced for what we know, and wonder that Irenæus did not know, to be false. Traditions branded It would be easy to heap up traditions of the excuse. with folly. early fathers, once generally adopted, but so branded with folly and falsehood, that they are universally abandoned; as if God designed to leave to their own counsels men whom he foresaw we should be called to idolize, that the authors of such a heresy might be without That Nero was the predicted antichrist was the opinion of men who lived in the apostles' days, and when he was dead, they still clung to the notion, which every one now discards, as so false that it is difficult to conceive how it should in the apostolic times have been thought true. Justin Martyr affirms, in his chief Apology, that "all those who lead a rational life, though deemed atheists, are Christians, as Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks, Abraham and Elias among the barbarians. What an association! Socrates and Abraham! Heraclitus and Elijah! Could this have come down from the apostle who made Abraham an example of justification by faith in Christ, and exhibited Elijah as an example of holy zeal against idols, which Socrates and the Greeks adored ?"* Heathens tianized. Worship bodies. Clement of Alexandria declares, not only that LECT. VII. the Greek philosophy was given to prepare men of the for the gospel, but also, that the worship of the heavenly heavenly bodies was to preserve us from the more gross adoration of images. Yet Job affirms, that the worship of the moon and stars was, in his time, "An iniquity to be punished by the judges." Jehovah denounced the adoration of the host of heaven as severely as that of images. abandoned successors. We are sent to the fathers as expositors of Fathers Scripture by virtue of their intercourse with by their men under divine inspiration; but the fathers expound, not on the principle of authority, saying, "This is the true meaning; for the apostles said so," but according to what they thought rational interpretation of the import of words and sentences. Here, also, we find they had no advantages; for their reasons are often unreasonable, and as they fail to commend themselves to our judgment, divines of every communion take the liberty to differ, neither binding themselves with Clement's scarlet thread, nor aspiring to drink with Irenæus of the gigantic vine. The brightest lights of the subsequent age, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, without scruple reject the interpretation of their predecessors, whenever the words of Scripture appear to demand a different exegesis. Nor is this an infrequent occurrence, for as the earliest fathers have shewn a luckless propensity to LECT. VII. dwell on the most difficult texts, where the version they employed was grossly false; so the next generations, abandoning the Septuagint, adopted more just views of the texts on which monstrous doctrines had been reared. The noble effort of Origen to improve upon the Septuagint, and the adoption of Jerome's version, cut from under the early fathers the ground on which they stood. Earliest writers in While he who would refer us to the fathers competent. for a knowledge of Scripture, because they lived near to the days of the apostles, must, in all consistency, attach the highest importance to the earliest writers; these are precisely the men from whom we can gather least, especially of the New Testament; and are as truly the teachers whose comments have been abandoned, in deference to the better judgment of their successors, who are now, both among Romanist and Protestant divines, lords of the ascendant. Nor are we always left to set up authority against authority, the later above the earlier; for of almost the whole of the New Testament we can gain from the apostolical fathers no information. When we consult them, we find that we have been sent to an oracle that is not false, but dumb. Tradition concerning Christ. But even when they speak, their most obsequious worshippers refuse to hear. One favourite opinion of the fathers, at least of Justin, Clement, and his disciple Origen, that Christ was, as a |