who dare say to a Christian, 'You need not consider what M'as the meaning of our Lord and his apostles ; the law for you now is the meaning of Cyprian, or Ambrose, or Chrysostom ; that meaning has supersed- ed the meaning of Christ.' A Christian must find out Christ's meaning, and believe that he has found it, of else he must still seek for it. It is a matter, not of outward submission, but of inward faith ; and if in our inward mind we are persuaded that the interpreter has mistaken our Lord's meaning, liow can we by possi- bility adopt that interpretation in faitli?" (^Miscellane- ous Works, N. Y. 1815, p. 274).
Archdeacon Hare (in his notes to the JIfission of the Comforter') seeks to show that even the greatest of the fathers were inferior, in their understanding of Scrip- ture, to the great divines of the Reformation. " There is much truth," he says, "though perhaps not without some exaggeration of plirase, in wliat Coleridge says (Remains, iii, 276) with reference to Luther, INIelanc- thon, and Calvin, that 'the least of them was not Infe- rior to Augustine, and worth a brigade of the Cyp- rians, Firmilians, and the like.' Surely there is noth- ing surprising in this. The marvel, the contradiction to the whole course of history would be if this were not the case, unless we suppose that the special illu- mination which was granted to the apostles was be- stowed on the chief teachers of Christianity down to the last of the fathers, was then withdrawn, and has been withheld ever since. But for such a limitation and restriction of tlie gifts of the Spirit no ground can be discovered, either in Scripture or in the nature of man ; nor does the history of the Church present any facts to support it. . . . It is next to a moral impossi- bility that men living in the decrepitude of the ancient world, under the relaxing and palsying influences of the Roman and Byzantine empires, when all intellec- tual and moral life was fost waning away, and the grand and stirring ideas and aims which had drawn forth the energies of the classical nations in their prime had been superseded by rhetorical tumor and allegorical and grammatical trifling, should have mounted to such a pitch of intellectual power as to bo beyond the reach of tiie noblest minds in the age when all the faculties of the now world were bursting into life, and when one region of power after another was laid open to man, and called him to rise up and take possession of it. . . . There is no antecedent improba- bility that a theologian in the sixteenth century should be quite as wise and as sound an expounder of theological truth as one in the fourth or fifth. Though the eai'lier divines may have had certain special ad- vantages, the advantages enjoyed by those in the later period were far greater and more important ; and if they had peculiar temptations to lend them astra}-, so had the others. The epoch at which a man lives does not afford us a criterion for judging of the truth of what he says, except so far as his testimony may be appealed to concerning fiicts ; in other respects the value of his writings must be determined on difierent grounds by candid and intelligent criticism. Nor is such criticism less needful with regard to the fathers than to any other body of writers. ... To those who study the fathers criticallv and discerningly they still yield grains of precious gold in abundance, as we see in the excellent exegetical writings of ]Mr. Trench. But the superstitious and idolatrous arc ever fond of displaying their doting by picking out as the special objects of their complacency not that whicli is really valuable — other men might approve of that — but that which in itself is worthless, nay, mawkishly silly or wildly absurd. . . . And with what exactitude is the training of some of our patrolaters who are lapsing into Romanism here described ! The issue, indeed, so for as wc are at present acquainted with it, has been mainly in one direction — towards Rome. This is not because the fathers of the first four or five centuries are favorable to the errors and corruptions of Rome.
FATHERS OF THE CHURCH 502 FATHERS OF THE CHURCH
The contest on this point has been waged again and again, and the victory, in tiic main, has always been on our side. But the ver}' habit of looking with pros- trate minds to outward human autliority, and that, too, authority so remote from the special wants and yearnings t)f our age, and incapable of speaking to us •with that intelligent fellow-feeling which elicits the responsive activity of our own spirits — to authority, therefore, which can only speak imperatively, except to the few whose understandings are mature enough to consult it critically, and to distinguish the true from the erroneous, the relevant from the irrelevant — tends to breed an imbecile tone of judgment which is incapable of standing alone, and will not be content ■with the helps wherewith God has supplied us, but craves restlesslj' for some absolute autliority whereby it may be enabled to walk in leading-strings all its life long. Such minds, when one prop after another gives ■way under them, as they find out that no father can be appealed to as an absolute authority, least of all on the particular questions which agitate our times the most, will try to save themselves from falling into in- fidelity by catching desperately hold of infallibility. And how how long will this bear them up?" (Hare, Vindication of Luther, p. 7G-82).