LECT. III. the barriers which they had raised. By exhibiting

To which

the Divine Word as the great distinguisher between the spirit in man which looks upwards after good, and the flesh which looks downwards to the earth, he vindicated the eternal distinctions which they were abolishing. But here, too, he had his infirmity. Sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, he was sure to be nearer the one rock than the other. He was more he inclined. afraid of being too general than of being too exclusive; more afraid of profaning the mysteries of the Gospel than of hiding them from those whom they were meant to bless. He had such a sense of God's love to men, and loved them so much himself, that the evil was counteracted in him, and only showed itself now and then. But it was there. He had the notion of a circle of refined and devoted men, to whom truths might be known which the vulgar could not reach. The thought was akin to reverence; but we may find hereafter, that it was akin also to that superstition which is most fatal to reverence. When men seek to put a veil upon that face which God in His Son has made open, they set up their wisdom against His; they lead men to fear something else than Him.

The
Stromata.

The third treatise of Clemens is the one from which I have taken my extracts respecting Basilides, Valentinus, and Carpocrates. It is a treasure-house of information respecting the opinions of men in the Church and in the world; a gathering together of the information which Clemens had been accumulating since he was a youth. But it is no mere magazine

of opinions. They are arranged and harmonized by a man who has entered into them, and feels how they are connected with human life, and who never loses sight of the purpose to which his life was devoted. He does not fashion these opinions into a great system; he does not attach himself to one school of opinion, or bring the doctrines of all schools into consent with his own. He believes that God is leading men through the maze of notions and opinions-of their own crude thoughts and fancies-into the clear day. He is ready and desirous to go down into the mines where they have been toiling, that he may rescue whatever treasures they have found, and that he may show them the open heaven and the bright sun, which he thinks God means them as well as him to enjoy.

LECT. III.

Their ob

ject and value.

On the whole, I do not know where we shall look Conclusion. for a purer or a truer man than this Clemens of Alexandria. I should like to be able to tell you something of his countenance and of his manner, as well as to give you more particulars of his history. But the facts are few and unimportant which his modesty has made known to us, or which his successors have preserved. We must be content to make his acquaintance through the words which he has spoken. Judging from them, he seems to me that one of the old Fathers whom we should all have reverenced most as a teacher, and loved best as a friend.

LECTURE IV.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

THE CHURCHES IN ITALY AND GAUL.

LECT. IV.
St. Paul.

Origin of the Roman Church unknown.

ST. PAUL did not go to Rome to establish a Church, but to dwell in a prison. He had already addressed his letter to the Christians there whilst he was still working in Greece: when he arrived, we are told that he gathered the Jews about him to explain the reason of his coming; we do not hear of any other interview with the members of the Church than that which took place when some of them met him on his way at Appii Forum.

How this Church was formed is altogether obscure; but so it is with most of the Churches we shall hear of. It is only now and then we can connect them with great names of Apostles or Evangelists. If we are not content to believe that the Spirit of God binds men together and teaches them of the meaning and mystery of their fellowship-if we have not accepted that testimony of the Divine record-if it seems to us unsatisfactory, we must, in general, do without information, or invent it for ourselves. For my own part, I think the darkness is better than the torchlight which we kindle. I would rather believe that

God founded a Church to which I belonged, than LECT. IV. guess what St. Peter or St. Paul may have had to do

with the foundation of it.

The members of the Church I am speaking of St. Peter. have been rather uneasy in their ignorance on this and many other topics. If they cannot distinctly say when the name of Christ was first heard and confessed among them, they think they can at least discover who first presided over them, who gave them the form and consistency of a society. They claim St. Peter as that person; they believe that he was the first Overseer of their Church, because they believe also that he was the first of the Apostles,the one to whom the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven were committed; the one whose name denotes the rock on which the whole Church stands.

or impro

bability

traditions

him.

I am not the least anxious to dispute the tradition, Probability evidently a very old one, that St. Peter went to Rome and suffered there. It is a question for antiquarians of the to settle according to the evidence. I would earn- respecting estly entreat you to believe that we have not the least interest in wishing it settled one way or the other. Nor have we any interest in proving that he did not occupy the position which has been assigned him in the Roman Church. For a reason I have given you already, it seems to me that we have no ground for supposing that either at Antioch or Rome he held the kind of office which belonged to St. James at Jerusalem. In both cities, of course, his authority will have been greatly reverenced; but I do not see why he should be supposed to have fixed himself

R

LECT. IV. in any one place, or to have exercised more than a general oversight over those whom he visited voluntarily, or among whom he was brought by necessity.

In what way they are in

structive.

Roman character.

Much, however, is to be learnt from these traditions respecting St. Peter, and from the fact that they are connected so closely with the Roman Church. The love of order, of organisation, was, as I have pointed out already, the characteristic of the Roman mind, that which had been expressed in all Roman history. Almost from the moment we get any glimpses of the Church in the capital, we perceive that it has inherited the qualities of the nation; that in these will lie its strength and its temptations. The impatience of any doubt respecting the person to whom it can refer its existence as a society— the impossibility of feeling that it is one till it has a man's name to give it unity-these are signs which may come out more clearly before us hereafter, but which we may notice at once. We are not to notice them only as signs of that which is evil. There was of the faith good in them as well as evil, just as there was good mixed with the evil in the party tendencies of the Greeks and in the Gnostical tendencies of the Alexandrians. If the Roman Christians felt that God was setting up a Kingdom which would, in a most real and practical sense, break in pieces the kingdom of the Cæsars, they believed a truth which history has established. And it was the truth which they, more than the inhabitants of other cities, had need to apprehend, the only one which could sustain them against the pomps of the imperial palace as well as

Special

tendencies

of Roman Christians.