3.
These Canons, well known to Antiquity, were at one time supposed to be, strictly speaking, Apostolical, and published before A.D. 50. On the other hand, it has been contended that they are later than A.D. 450, and the work of some heretics. Our own divines take a middle course, considering them as published before A.D. 325, having been digested by Catholic authorities in the course of the two preceding centuries, or at the end of the second, and received and used in most parts of Christendom. This judgment has since been acquiesced in by the theological world, so far as this—to suppose the matter and the enactments of the Canons to be of the highest antiquity, even though the edition which we possess was not published so early as Bishop Beveridge, for instance, supposes. At the same time it is acknowledged by all parties, that they, as well as some other early documents, have suffered from interpolation, and perhaps by an heretical hand.
They are in number eighty-five,[372] of which the first fifty are considered of superior authority to the remaining thirty-five. What has been conjectured to be their origin will explain the distinction. It was the custom of the early Church, as is well known, to settle in Council such points in her discipline, ordinances, and worship, as the Apostles had not prescribed in Scripture, as the occasion arose, after the pattern of their own proceedings in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts; and this, as far as might be, after their unwritten directions, or after their practice, or at least, after their mind, or as it is called in Scripture, their "minding" or "spirit." Thus she decided upon the question of Easter, upon that of heretical baptism, and the like. And, after that same precedent in the Acts, she recorded her decisions in formal decrees, and "delivered them for to keep" through the cities in which her members were found. The Canons in question are supposed to be some of these decrees, of which, first and nearest to the Apostles' times, or in the time of their immediate successors, were published fifty; and in the following age, thirty-five more, which had been enacted in the interval. They claim, then, to be, first, the recorded judgment of great portions of the Ante-Nicene Church, chiefly in the eastern provinces, upon certain matters in dispute, and to be of authority so far as that Church may be considered a representative of the mind of the Apostles; next, they profess to embody in themselves positive decisions and injunctions of the Apostles, though without clearly discriminating how much is thus directly Apostolical, and how much not. I will here attempt to state some of the considerations which show both their antiquity and their authority, and will afterwards use them for the purpose which has led me to mention them.