5.
Here, then, is a point of doctrine which must be carefully insisted on. The Fathers are primarily to be considered as witnesses, not as authorities. They are witnesses of an existing state of things, and their treatises are, as it were, histories,—teaching us, in the first instance, matters of fact, not of opinion. Whatever they themselves might be, whether deeply or poorly taught in Christian faith and love, they speak, not their own thoughts, but the received views of their respective ages. The especial value of their works lies in their opening upon us a state of the Church which else we should have no notion of. We read in their writings a great number of high and glorious principles and acts, and our first thought thereupon is, "All this must have had an existence somewhere or other in those times. These very men, indeed, may be merely speaking by rote, and not understand what they say; but it matters not to the profit of their writings what they were themselves." It matters not to the profit of their writings, nor again to the authority resulting from them; for the times in which they wrote of course are of authority, though the Fathers themselves may have none. Tertullian or Eusebius may be nothing more than bare witnesses; yet so much as this they have a claim to be considered.
This is even the strict Protestant view. We are not obliged to take the Fathers as authorities, only as witnesses. Charity, I suppose, and piety will prompt the Christian student to go further, and to believe that men who laboured so unremittingly, and suffered so severely in the cause of the Gospel, really did possess some little portion of that earnest love of the truth which they professed, and were enlightened by that influence for which they prayed; but I am stating the strict Protestant doctrine, the great polemical principle ever to be borne in mind, that the Fathers are to be adduced in controversy merely as testimonies to an existing state of things, not as authorities. At the same time, no candid Protestant will be loth to admit, that the state of things to which they bear witness, is, as I have already said, a most grave and conclusive authority in guiding us in those particulars of our duty about which Scripture is silent; succeeding, as it does, so very close upon the age of the Apostles.
Thus much I claim of consistent Protestants, and thus much I grant to them. Gregory and the rest may have been but nominal Christians. Athanasius himself may have been very dark in all points of doctrine, in spite of his twenty years' exile and his innumerable perils by sea and land; the noble Ambrose, a high and dry churchman; and Basil, a mere monk. I do not dispute these points; though I claim "the right of private judgment," so far as to have my own very definite opinion in the matter, which I keep to myself.