There was much controversy in the 18th century about the fathers, generally polemical, and inspired rather by the controversial spirit than by the love of truth. So Priestley attacked the fathers in his Corrup- tions <f Christianity (1782). Bishop Horslej- replied to him; and a voluminous issue of tracts followed from both parties (see Ilorsley, Tracts in cont7-ov(rsy with Dr. Priestley on the belief if the frst Ages with rigard to our Lord's divinity (3d ed. Dundee, 1812). Middleton's Free Inquiry into the miraculuns Pouers attriluted to the Early Church ( Works, 1755, vol. i) also gave rise to a copious controversy. John Wesley, in reply to it, saj's that "Middleton seeks to prove tliat all the iirimitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most of them Loth one and the other." He vindicates the ante-Nicene fathers from ISIiddleton's charge that they held to all the chief "corruptions of Popery." In his summing up he says of the early fathers, " I allow that some of these had not strong natural sense, that few of them had much learning, and none the assistances which our age enjoys in some respects above all that went before. Hence I doubt not but w hoover will be at the pains of reading over their writings for that ])Oor end will find many mistakes, uumy weak suppositions, and many ill-drawn concJMsions. And yni I exceedingly reverence tliem, as well as their writings, and esteem them very highly in love. I reverence them because they were Christians ; and I reverence tiieir writings because tliey describe true genuine Christianity, and direct us to tlie strongest evidence of the Christian doctrine" {Works, N. Y. ed., v, 705-761).
4. A new impulse was given to the study of the fa-
FATHERS OF THE CHURCH 501 FATHERS OF THE CHURCH
thers in England by the so-called Catholic revival in that Chin-chin the first half of the 19th century. Tlie old reverence for tlieir authority, and even more, a blind following of tlieir guidance, seemed to take pos- session of the leaders of that movement. One of its best fruits was the publication of the Library of the Fathers (sea below) The movement gave rise, as is •well known, to a bitter controversy, reopening the ■whole question of the character of tlie fathers, their trustworthiness as witnesses, their authority as teach- ers, and the general utility of studying their writings. We cite a few specimens :
Coleridge, in his Notes on Ilaclef, especiallv on his Sermons, remarks: '-Let any competent judge read Hacket's life of archbishop Williams, and then these ssrnions, and so measure the stultifying, nugifyiug ef- fect of a blind and uncritical study of the fathers, and the exclusive prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I" ( iVoj-ks, Harpers' ed. N. Y., v, 128).
Dr. Arnold, of RugUy, who was a heart}' hater of the Tractarim movement, writes on the authority of the fathars as follows: "In fact, it would greatly lielp to clear this question if we understand what we mean by allowing or denj-ing the authority of the so-called fa- thers. The term authnrity is ambiguous, and, accord- ing to the sense in which I use it, I should either ac- knowledge it or deny it. The writers of the first four or of the first seven centuries have authority just as the scholiasts and ancient commentators have ; some of them, and in some points, are of weight singly; the agreement of manj' of them has much weight; the agreement of almost all of them would have great weight. In this sense I acknowledge their authority, and it would be against all sound principles of criti- cism to denv it. But if by authority is meant a de- cisive authority, a judgment which may not be ques- tioned, then the claim of authority in such a case, for any man or set of men, is either a folly or a revelation. Such an authoritj' is not human, but divine : if any man pretends to possess it, let him show God's clear warrant for his pretension, or he must be regarded as a deceiver or a madman. But it maj'' be said that an authority not to be questioned was conferred by the Roman law on the opinions of a certain number of great lawyers : if a judge believed that their interpre- tation of tlie law was erroneous, he j'Ct was not at lib- erty to follow his own private judgment in departing from it. 'WViy may not the same thing be allowed in the Church? or wliy ma}' not the interpretations of Cyprian, or xVthanasius, or Augustine, or Chrysostom be as decisive, with respect to the true sense of the Scriptures, as those of Gains, Paulus, Modestinus, Ul- {)ian, and Papinian were acknowledged to be with re- spect to the sense of the Roman law ? The answer is, that the emperor's edict could absolve the judge from following his own convictions about the sense of the law, because it gave to the authorized interpretation the force of law. The text, as the judge interpreted it, was a law repealed ; the comment of tlie great law- yers was now a law in its room. As a mere literary composition, he might interpret it rightly, and Gaius or Papinian might be wrong ; but if his interpretation was ever so right grammatically or criticallv, yet le- gally it was nothing to the purpose ; Gaius's interpre- tation had superseded it, and was now the law which he was bound to obey. But in the Church, the only point to be aimed at is the discovery of the true mean- ing of the text of the divine law; no human power can invest the comment with equal authority. The emper- or said, and might say to his judges, "You need not consider what was the meaning of the decemvirs when they wrote the Twelve Tables, or of Aquillius when he drew up the Aquillian law. The law for you is not what the decemvirs may have meant, but what their interpreters meant; the decemvirs' meaning, if it was their meaning, is no longer the law of Rome.' But