to the servile labours of slaves and peasants in the fields of Utica. In the districts which had been peculiarly allotted to the Vandals, the exercise of the Catholic worship was more strictly prohibited; and severe penalties were denounced against the guilt, both of the missionary and the proselyte. By these arts, the faith of the barbarians was preserved, and their zeal was inflamed; they discharged, with devout fury, the office of spies, informers or executioners; and whenever their cavalry took the field, it was the favourite amusement of the march, to defile the churches, and to insult the clergy of the adverse faction. IV. The citizens, who had been educated in the luxury of the Roman province, were delivered, with exquisite cruelty, to the Moors of the desert. A venerable train of bishops, presbyters, and deacons, with a faithful crowd of four thousand and ninety-six persons, whose guilt is not precisely ascertained, were torn from their native homes by the command of Hunneric. During the night, they were confined, like a herd of cattle, amidst their own ordure; during the day they pursued their march over the burning sands; and if they fainted under the heat and fatigue, they were goaded, or dragged along, till they expired in the hands of their tormentors. These unhappy exiles, when they reached the Moorish huts, might excite the compassion ofa people, whose native humanity was neither improved by reason, nor corrupted by fanaticism; but if they escaped the dangers, they were condemned to share the distress, of a savage life. V. It is incumbent on the authors of persecution previously to reflect, whether they are determined to support it in the last extreme. They excite the flame which they strive to extinguish; and it soon becomes necessary to chastise the contumacy, as

See Procopius de Bell. Vandal. lib. 1. c. 7. p. 197, 198. A Moorish prince endeavoured to propitiate the God of the Christians, by his diligence to erase the marks of the Vandal sacrilege.

See this story in Victor. 2. 8—12, p. 30-34. Victor describes the distress of these confessors as an eye-witness.

well as the crime, of the offender. The fine, which he is unable or unwilling to discharge, exposes his person to the severity of the law; and his contempt of lighter penalties suggests the use and propriety of capital punishment. Through the veil of fiction and declamation, we may clearly perceive, that the Catholics, more especially under the reign of Hunneric, endured the most cruel and ignominious treatment. Respectable citizens, noble matrons, and consecrated virgins, were stripped naked, and raised in the air by pulleys, with a weight suspended at their feet. In this painful attitude their naked bodies were torn with scourges, or burnt in the most tender parts with red-hot plates of iron. The amputation of the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the right hand was inflicted by the Arians; and although the precise number cannot be defined, it is evident that many persons, among whom a bishop' and a proconsul" may be named, were entitled to the crown of martyrdom. The same honour has been ascribed to the memory of count Sebastian, who professed the Nicene creed with unshaken constancy; and Genseric might detest, as a heretic, the brave and ambitious fugitive whom he dreaded as a rival." VI. A new mode of conversion, which might subdue the feeble, and alarm the timorous, was employed by the Arian ministers. They imposed, by fraud or violence, the rites of baptism; and punished the apostacy of the Catholics, if they disclaimed this odious and profane ceremony, which scandalously violated the freedom of the will, and the unity of the sacrament. The hostile sects had formerly allowed the validity of each other's

* See the fifth book of Victor. His passionate complaints are confirmed by the sober testimony of Procopius, and the public declaration of the emperor Justinian. (Cod. lib. 1. tit. 27.)

1 Victor. 2, 18. p. 41.

m Victor. 5. 4. p. 74, 75. His name was Victorianus, and he was a wealthy citizen of Adrumentum, who enjoyed the confidence of the king; by whose favour he had obtained the office, or at least the title, of Proconsul of Africa,

n Victor. 1. 6. p. 8,, 9. After relating the firm resistance, and dexterous reply of count Sebastian, he adds, quare alio generis argumento postea bellicosum virum occidit.

• Victor. 5. 12, 13. Tillemont, Mem. Eccles. tom. 6, p. 609.

baptism; and the innovation, so fiercely maintained by the Vandals, can be imputed only to the example and advice of the Donatists. VII. The Arian clergy surpassed, in religious cruelty, the king and his Vandals; but they were incapable of cultivating the spiritual vineyard, which they were so desirous to possess. A patriarch might seat himself on the throne of Carthage; some bishops, in the principal cities, might usurp the palace of their rivals; but the smallness of their numbers, and their ignorance of the Latin language, disqualified the barbarians for the ecclesiastical ministry of a great church; and the Africans, after the loss of their orthodox pastors, were deprived of the public exercise of Christianity. VIII. The emperors were the natural protectors of the Homoousian doctrine: and the faithful people of Africa, both as Romans and as Catholics, preferred their lawful sovereignty to the usurpation of the barbarous heretics. During an interval of peace and friendship, Hunneric restored the cathedral of Carthage; at the intercession of Zeno, who reigned in the east, and of Placidia, the daughter and relict of emperors, and the sister of the queen of the Vandals. But this decent regard was but of short duration; and the haughty tyrant displayed his contempt for the religion of the empire, by studiously arranging the bloody images of persecution, in all the principal streets through which the Roman ambassador must pass in his way to the palace. An oath was requested from the bishops, who were assembled at Carthage, that they would support the succession of his son Hilderic, and that they would renounce all

P Primate was more properly the title of the bishop of Carthage; but the name of patriarch was given by the sects and nations to their principal ecclesiastic. See Thomassin, Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. 1. p. 155. 158,

9 The patriarch Cyrila himself publicly declared, that he did not understand Latin, (Victor. ii. 18, p. 42.) Nescio Latine; and he might converse with tolerable ease, without being capable of disputing or preaching in that language. His Vandal clergy were still more ignorant; and small confidence could be placed in the Africans, who had conformed.

r Victor. 2.1, 2. p. 22.

Victor. 5. 7. p. 77. He appeals, to the ambassador himself, whose name was Uranius.

foreign or transmarine correspondence. This engagement, consistent as it should seem with their moral and religious duties, was refused by the more sagacious members* of the assembly. Their refusal, faintly coloured by the pretence that it is unlawful for a Christian to swear, must provoke the suspicions of a jealous tyrant.

The Catholics, oppressed by royal and military force, were far superior to their adversaries in numbers and Catholic learning. With the same weapons which the frauds Greek" and Latin fathers had already provided for the Arian controversy, they repeatedly silenced, or vanquished, the fierce and illiterate successors of Ulphilas. The consciousness of their own superiority might have raised them above the arts and passions of religious warfare. Yet, instead of assuming such honourable pride, the orthodox theologians were tempted, by the assurance of impunity, to compose fictions, which must be stigmatized with the epithets of fraud and forgery. They ascribed their own polemical works to the most venerable names of Christian antiquity; the characters of Athanasius and Augustin were awkwardly personated by Vigilius and his disciples; and the famous creed, which so clearly expounds the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, is deduced, with strong probability, from this African school." Even the Scrip

Astutiores, Victor. 4. 4. p. 70. He plainly intimates that their quotation of the Gospel, Non jurabitis in toto," was only meant to elude the obligation of an inconvenient oath. The forty-six bishops who refused were banished to Corsica: the three hundred and two who swore, were distributed through the provinces of Africa.

u

Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspæ, in the Byzacene province, was of a senatorial family, and had received a liberal education. He could repeat all Homer and Menander before he was allowed to study Latin, his native tongue. (Vit. Fulgent. c. 1.) Many African bishops might understand Greek, and many Greek theologians were translated into Latin.

* Compare the two prefaces to the Dialogue of Vigilius of Thapsus. (p. 118, 119. edit. Chiflet.) He might amuse his learned reader with an innocent fiction; but the subject was too grave, and the Africans were too ignorant.

y The P. Quesnel started this opinion, which has been favourably received. But the three following truths, however surprising they may seem, are now universally acknowledged. (Gerard Vossius, tom. 4. p. 516-522. Tillemont, Mem. Eccles. tom. 8. p. 667-671.) 1. St. Athanasius is not the author of the creed, which is so frequently read in our churches. 2. It does not appear to have existed, within a century after his death. 3. It was originally composed in the Latin tongue, and, con

tures themselves were profaned by their rash and sacrilegious hands. The memorable text, which asserts the unity of the THREE who bear witness in heaven," is condemned by the universal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions, and authentic manuscripts. It was first alleged by the Catholic bishops whom Hunneric summoned to the conference of Carthage. An allegorical interpretation, in the form, perhaps, of a marginal note, invaded the text of the Latin Bibles, which were renewed and corrected in a dark period of ten centuries. After the invention of printing, the editors of the Greek Testament yielded to their own prejudices, or to those of the times; and the pious fraud, which was embraced with equal zeal at Rome and at Geneva, has been infinitely multiplied in every country and every language of modern Europe.

d

sequently, in the western provinces. Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople, was so much amazed by this extraordinary composition, that he frankly pronounced it to be the work of a drunken man. Petav. Dogmat. Theologica, tom. 2. lib. 7. c. 8.

21 John, 5. 7. See Simon, Hist. Critique du Nouveau Testament, part i. c. 18. p. 203-218. and part 2. c. 9. p. 99-121. and the elaborate Prolegomena and Annotations of Dr. Mill and Wetstein to their editions of the Greek Testament. In 1689, the Papist Simon strove to be free; in 1707, the Protestant Mill wished to be a slave; in 1751, the Armenian Wetstein used the liberty of his times, and of his sect.

a Of all the MSS. now extant, above fourscore in number, some of which are more than twelve hundred years old, (Wetstein ad loc.) the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors of Robert Stephens, are become invisible; and the two MSS. of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception. See Emlyn's Works, vol. 2. p. 227-255. 269–299. and M. de Missy's four ingenious letters, in tom. 8. and 9. of the Journal Britannique.

Or more properly, by the four bishops who composed and published the profession of faith in the name of their brethren. They style this text, luce clarius. (Victor Vitensis de Persecut. Vandal. lib. 3. c. 11. p. 54.) It is quoted soon afterward by the African polemics, Virgilius and Fulgentius.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicolas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum orthodoxam fidem. (Wetstein, Prolegom. p. 84, 85.) Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin MSS. (Wetstein, ad loc.) the oldest and the fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts.

d The art which the Germans had invented was applied in Italy to the profane writers of Rome and Greece. The original Greek of the New Testament was published about the same time A. D. 1514. 1516. 1520.) by the industry of Erasmus, and the munificence of cardinal Ximenes. The Complutensian Polyglot cost the cardinal fifty thousand ducats. See Mattaire Annal. Typograph. tom. 2. p. 2-8. 125-133. and Wetstein, Prolegomena, p. 116-127.

The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing a crotchet; and the deliberate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza.