WHAT SAYS THE HISTORY OF APOLLINARIS?
In the judgment of the early Church, the path of doctrinal truth is narrow; but, in the judgment of the world in all ages, it is so broad as to be no path at all. This I have said above; also, that the maintenance of the faith is considered by the world to be a strife of words, perverse disputings, curious questionings, and unprofitable technicality, though by the Fathers it is considered necessary to salvation. What they call heresy, the man of the world thinks just as true as what they call orthodoxy, and only then wrong when pertinaciously insisted on by its advocates, as the early Fathers insisted on orthodoxy. Now do, or do not, Protestants here take part with the world in disliking, in abjuring doctrinal propositions and articles, such as the early Church fought for? Certainly they do. Well, then, if they thus differ from the Church of the Fathers, how can they fancy that the early Church was Protestant?
In the Treatise I have been quoting, Vincent gives us various instances of heresiarchs, and tells us what he thinks about them. Among others, he speaks of Apollinaris and his fall; nor can we have a better instance than that of Apollinaris of the grave distress and deep commiseration with which the early Fathers regarded those whom the present Protestant world thinks very good kind of men, only fanciful and speculative, with some twist or hobby of their own. Apollinaris, better than any one else, will make us understand what was thought of the guilt of heresy in times which came next to the Apostolic, because the man was so great, and his characteristic heresy was so small. The charges against Origen have a manifest breadth and width to support them; Nestorius, on the other hand, had no high personal merits to speak for him; but Apollinaris, after a life of laborious service in the cause of religion, did but suffer himself to teach that the Divine Intelligence in our Lord superseded the necessity of His having any other, any human intellect; and for this apparently small error, he was condemned. Of course it was not small really; for one error leads to another, and did eventually in his case; but to all appearance it was small, yet it was promptly and sternly denounced and branded by East and West; would it be so ruthlessly smitten by Protestants now?
A brief sketch of his history, and of the conduct of the Church towards him, may not be out of place in the experiments I am making with a view of determining the relation in which modern Protestantism stands towards primitive Christianity.