A Mother's Hymn.

The Right Use of the Early Fathers.

If the material principle of the Reformation, JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE, has always been justly esteemed the glory of the Lutheran branch of Protestantism, its formal principle, THE BIBLE ALONE, THE RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE, has from the first been no less the especial badge of the Reformed or Calvinistic communions. Of course in saying this it is by no means meant to affirm that either of the great twin truths has, at any time, been the exclusive property of but one wing of the anti-papal host, but simply that as the right division, with the monk of Wittenberg at its head, first stormed, and has since bravely held against all opposition, the one commanding post, so the defence of the other has been mainly the business of the left. It is, doubtless, to their profounder conviction of the sole authority of Holy Scripture, as the unique depository of the revealed will of God, that we are to trace the simpler worship and the less hierarchical polity which distinguish the Reformed from their Lutheran, and, we may add, their Anglican brethren. For the Church of England in these, and in other respects as well, is the insular counterpart of Lutheranism on the continent-the same in its proud exclusiveness and in its exaggerated notions of ecclesiastical office and sacramental grace. In like the Reformed there are the type of the Dissenting opposition

manner,

here.

It was quite in the spirit of the communion to which he belonged that JEAN DAILLE, one of the most learned theologians of his age, and the brightest ornament of the French Reformed Church of the seventeenth century, wrote his celebrated work, ' On the Right Use of the Fathers.' First composed in his native language, and published in 1631, it afterwards appeared in Latin, with his latest corrections and additions in 1656. It has since been translated into several modern languages, including our own, and has been often reprinted. It is acknowledged on all hands to have been what our German neighbours are wont to call an epoch-making work, and to have been the heaviest blow ever struck at the superstitious reverence in which the Fathers had till then been held, even amongst the Protestants. Luther and Calvin indeed, and others of the Reformers, had thrown out many obiter dicta, far from respectful to these worthies. The first in particular was very unceremonious at times in his language about them. Thus in his 'Table-talk' we hear him saying, 'Behold what great darkness is in the books of the Fathers concerning faith; yet if the article Matthew, upon the of justification be darkened, it is impossible to smother the grossest errors of mankind. St. Jerome, indeed, wrote upon

On the Right Use of the Early Fathers; Two Series of Lectures delivered in 8vo. Pp. xvi. 650. the University of Cambridge. By the Rev. J. J. Blunt, B.D., late Margaret Professor of Divinity.' London: Murray. 1857.

Epistles to Galatians and Titus; but, alas! very coldly. Ambrose wrote six books upon the first book of Moses, but they are very poor. Augustin wrote nothing to the purpose concerning faith, for he was first roused up and made a man of by the Pelagians in striving against them. I can find no exposition upon the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians wherein anything is taught pure and aright?' He says, 'they often stumbled and went astray, and mingled in their books many monkish things;' and ridicules, amongst other instances, Gregory's explaining the five pounds in the parable to be the five senses, which,' as the Reformer maliciously observes, the beasts also possess.' 'The more I read the books of the Fathers,' he adds, 'the more I find myself scandalized; for they were but men, and, to speak the truth, with all their repute and authority, undervalued the books and writings of the sacred apostles of Christ. It would be easy, were it necessary, to match these occasional outbursts of impatience from the writings of the Swiss and French Reformers. But this was not the usual way in which even these heroic men were wont to speak of the Fathers, and still less, before the appearance of Daille's work, was it that of their followers. It was reserved for the systematic and elaborate assault so skilfully planned and so learnedly executed by the friend of Milton's 'noble Du Plessis' to bring about a disenchantment in this respect, no less complete than the awakening from the nightmare of mediævalism, effected by the stinging satire of Cervantes. If to anyone belongs the honour of having smitten from its pedestal the idol of patristic authority, it is to Daillé.

Accordingly, when in the glow of the Tractarian controversy, ten or a dozen years ago, the party which imagined the safety of the Establishment to depend on its being revolutionized in a so-called Catholic sense, were moving heaven and earth to set this Dagon up again, it was found necessary for this purpose to bring into discredit Daille's masterly work. This task the Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge took upon himself in the first of the two courses of lectures of which the volume before us consists. It was delivered for the first time in the October term of 1845, and was repeated, as occasion served, with additions and alterations, till his recent death. The second series treats more positively of the Right Use of the Early Fathers.' We may make this the text of a subsequent paper on the same subject. At present, it will be possible only briefly to notice the assumed confutation of Daillé and his ally, Barbeyrac, Professor of Jurisprudence at Groningen, who, in 1728, published, a similarly damaging work on 'The Morality of the Fathers.'

Daille's elaborate treatise is arranged under two general heads. He first undertakes to show that the testimony of the Fathers, owing to various causes, which he details at length, is vague, uncertain, and obscure; and he next takes the high ground of principle, challenging their worshippers to prove why, even were it not so, their authority should be held decisive of our modern controversies. The counts of the indictment under the first division of the subject are such as these -the paucity of their extant writings, especially of those of the Ante

Nicene Fathers their necessary irrelevancy to the questions agitated in modern Christendom, particularly to the Romish controversy-their carelessness and dishonesty as evinced in their frequent citation of forged and apocryphal documents-the interpolations and suppressions with which their texts have been defaced by unscrupulous transcribers and editors—and the obscurity, shown to be often wilful, in which they shroud the most important doctrines and rites of the Church. This last topic, of course, involves the discussion of the so-called Disciplina Arcani, or the practice prevalent in ancient Christendom, of studiously concealing from the ears of the heathen, and even from the Christian catechumens, the most vital truths of Christianity, e. g. the Atonement, and especially the Sacraments. It will afford any one who is but moderately versed in Patristic literature a pretty fair idea of Professor Blunt's thorough-going determination to concede nothing to his opponent, if we mention that he actually as good as denies altogether the very existence of the Disciplina Arcani in the ancient Church. We note, by the way, this glaring instance of his flying in the face of notorious facts when the exigency of his argument demands it, because it is strikingly characteristic of his general method of dealing with Daillé, and because our limits forbid our criticising in detail our author's answer to the learned Frenchman's stubborn case.

Daillé supports his second proposition, viz., that even supposing the testimony of the Fathers to be clearer than it is, it is not of authority to decide our controversies,-by weighty considerations, both general and special. The former, e. g. that they were like other men, liable to error; that they have often a bias of their own towards this conclusion or that, which may mislead them in stating what they pretend to be the judgment of the Church; that their authority must rest on the same ground as that of other teachers; and that it is impious to put them on the same footing as canonical Scripture-these general impeachments, we say, Professor Blunt puffs away with the flippant remark that they carry along with them their own answers.' This is the usual way with special pleaders in meeting the unmanageable points of an adverse case. The principal of the special disqualifications of the Fathers to be our interpreters of the Bible brought forward by Daillé are two, viz., their notorious ignorance of Hebrew, with one or two partial exceptions, and their childish fondness of allegorizing. Neither of these facts, either of which would be alone fatal to their character as expositors, is their Cambridge advocate able to deny. He admits the first allegation fully in the following passage, and even adds fresh illustrations to those adduced by his opponent :

There is another class of errors on which Daillé animadverts, as shaking the authority of the Fathers-those which beset them through their ignorance of Hebrew-ignorance which he finds betrayed more particularly in their attempts at etymology. Some instances he gives; many more he might have given. Thus Justin derives the word "Satanas from Satan (aaràv), an apostate, and "nas" (vas), a serpent; Israel, from “Isra” ("loga), a man, and El" ("Ha), power. Irenæus says that, in the Hebrew tongue, Jesus signifies "that Lord who contains heaven and earth." He has equally strange interpretations of Sabaoth and Adonai; the former of which, he says, means "voluntarium," the latter "nomi

nabile," or, perhaps, it should be read innominabile," a substitute for the unutterable name, which Irenæus mistook for a word having the actual sense of "innominabile." Other stumbles, of the same kind, may be remarked in him. Clemens Alexandrinus tells us that Jacob was called "Israel," because he had seen the Lord God; and that Moses was so called, because, in the language of the Egyptians, "water is av, and "Hosanna" means "light, and glory, and praise, with supplication to the Lord," and that "Rebecca" is equivalent to" patience (Toμov), where he speaks with Philo, from whom he very often borrows his derivations, yet he elsewhere says that it is equivalent to "the glory of God." Theophilus of Antioch, who had an unhappy taste for etymology, seems to consider the Hebrew word "Sabbath" exactly translated by the Greek word doμás; though, certainly, in his interpretation of the word "Eden," and of the word "Noah," he is not liable to the same animadversion. There seems some reason to think, I will add, that even Origen—the single one of the Ante-Nicene Fathers whose works have come down to us supposed to have had much knowledge of Hebrew, had but a limited amount of it; for, though his "Hexapla" proves that such as he had he turned to the best account, and though the loss of that work is, perhaps, the heaviest of any that Biblical criticism ever sustained, still his writings yield incidental evidence that his acquaintance with Hebrew was not profound. Thus his correspondent, Africanus, having started an objection to the authority of the history of Susanna and the Elders, that it bore internal marks of not having been written in Hebrew; for, that, when one of the elders said he had seen Susanna in the act of adultery under a holm tree (vrò πgivov), Daniel's answer was, that the angel would saw him asunder (gig); and, when the other said, "under a mastic-tree (ò xivov), Daniel's answer again was, that he, too, would be cleft in twain (σχισθῆναι)—the similarity of the Greek words πρῖνον and πείσειν, σχίνον, and ox, suggesting the turn of the sentence, which similarity did not exist in the Hebrew; Origen replies, that, "finding himself at a loss, he had referred the question to Jews not a few, asking them what givos was called in their language, and what gay, how they would translate the plant oxivos, and they would render x; and though they profess themselves unable to tell him what trees were indicated by these names, and so far Origen might seem not more imperfectly informed in Hebrew than themselves, seeing that, what was a difficulty to him, was a difficulty to them; yet, no doubt, these Jews could have readily given the meaning of agile and oxile in the Hebrew, which Origen, it should appear, could not; and altogether his mode of putting the case argues that he had no confidence in his own judgment on this occasion, or in his possessing the means of forming one. Elsewhere he considers Sabaoth as in itself one of the names of God, and couples it with Adonai as another. And it is remarkable that, though the first two books against Celsus profess to be an answer to the objections of a Jew against Christianity, not a single argument in them turns upon the Hebrew, or touches on it; and yet this work was written after the greater part of his "Commentary on the books of Scripture, perhaps after the whole, except that on certain of the Prophets; so that we have here proof that the compositions, which have come down to us, were principally framed by Origen when his Hebrew scholarship was such as I have intimated."

And now what is our author's plea in arrest of judgment against his ignorant clients?

'But allowing that the early Fathers, with one or two exceptions, were ignorant of Hebrew, or, at least, imperfectly acquainted with it, that circumstance does not shake their authority as witnesses of the practices and doctrines of the primitive Church. It may make them in themselves less able expositors of the Old Testament, but that is not the question. The value of the primitive Fathers arises chiefly from this, that living soon after our Lord and the apostles, soon after the times when the Holy Ghost was most active in the church, leading the disciples into all truth, and being themselves trusted by the church with high offices, they can scarcely fail of reflecting in some considerable measure the impression which