UNITY OF ROMAN CHURCH.
The Council of Nice assembled in Asia Minor by the direction of Constantine in the year 325. Here we see more than two hundred and fifty bishops, mostly from the east, with presbyters, deacons and others, engaged in an effort to settle the Arian heresy, which consisted in maintaining that Christ was the most exalted of all created things, but inferior to God the Father. This opinion was first ventilated in the year 318. It was publicly condemned by the Council of Alexandria in the year 320, and then by the Council of Nice. This Council maintained the perfect equality of essence of both Father and Son, and could only express their relation by terming it eternal generation, which Dr. Adam Clark calls eternal nonsense.
"Arius and his partisans were banished by the Council of Alexandria, but as he had powerful adherents he found means to return at the express command of Constantine. He was on his way to receive the oath of ministerial allegiance when he very suddenly, as some say, died by poison. His death was in the year 336. It is said that Constantine was baptized into the Arian communion in the year 337. The followers of Arius increased greatly after his death. Under Constantius, called Flavius Julius, Arianism became the religion of the court, and it even penetrated as far as Rome, which was obliged to receive into its communion Felix, an Arian bishop. But the divisions which grew among the Arians themselves prepared for the Catholic church an easy victory over them and led to their final extinction." It is worthy of being remembered at all times, and under all circumstances, that this whole controversy is unauthorized in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, faith in him as the Son of the living God being the great truth upon which the Church of God is built. What eternal nonsense it is to be quarreling about whether he and his Father are of the same essence. The truths of Christianity and of Protestantism are found in the teachings of the anti-Nicene fathers, but we must remember that these were uninspired men, and therefore displayed no standard of truth. The term fathers, without qualification, includes a vast range, comprising a period of eleven hundred years, from Clemens to Bernard, from the Bishop of Rome to the Monk of Clairvaux.
Immediately after the Council of Nice their works took on the infections of popery. Each succeeding writer in each succeeding century added to the gathering mass of error and superstition. The filth and dirt accumulated until the system of delusion was fully developed in the "man of sin." The Fathers, as they are called, are entitled to no more than other men. They should never be resorted to as authoritative or inspired, for they were not. They may be used as witnesses to show the customs of their times. So far as they are concerned as the standard of truth, we may just as well, with safety and without remorse, deliver them to the Vatican to rot with the lumber and legends of the dark ages. The anti-Nicene fathers had many errors, but theirs were not the errors of Romanism. The religious productions of the first three centuries of our era contain, in the main, the principles of Protestantism. The post-Nicene fathers, or popery, may be compared to a field of wheat overrun with weeds. The great work of the Protestant reformers was to eradicate the weeds. Failing to accomplish this in the Roman field, they gathered the pure seed grain and sowed it in the Lord's field, "the world," where it now waves in beauty, tending to a glorious harvest. Once on a time a person was asked where Protestantism was before the Reformation. He answered in turn, It was where your face was this morning before it was washed. The reply was just. Dirt could be no part of the human countenance, and removing the filth by washing could neither change the features of the face nor destroy its identity. By this cleansing operation the face only assumed its normal and natural appearance. In like manner the superstitious traditions of the Roman church were no part of Christianity. It was but proper that the reformers should dismiss the adulterations of the ages and plant their feet away back in the land of Israel with the Christ of God.
Arius was regarded as an innovater on the true faith. The great enemy of Arianism was simply Trinitarianism. The council of Nice was presided over by Hosius. The assembled fathers declared the consubstantiality of the son for the establishment of Trinitarianism and the extermination of Arianism. This wonderful term, consubstantiality, had been rejected by the synod of Antioch sixty years before, and by Dionysius, of Alexandria, in opposition to Sabellianism.
In 359 the Emperor Constantius assembled the council of Rimini, a city of Central Italy. Six hundred bishops and a number of priests now undo all that the council of Nice had done. This council was as accommodating to Arian Constantius as to the Trinitarian Constantine. Constantius, forsaking the Trinitarian system, adopted Arianism, and Greeks and Latins complied with the imperial wishes, and, like dutiful subjects, signed the Arian and semi-Arian confessions of Sirneium, Seleucia, Milan and Ariminum. The western and eastern prelacy subscribed in compliance with their sovereign to the Arian creed, which, as Du Pin has shown, was signed by his infallibility, Pope Liberius.
Next in our programme comes Theodosius I., assembling a council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople in the year 381. Theodosius was a zealous Catholic; he was baptized before the end of the first year of his reign, and immediately published an edict in support of the doctrine of the Trinity, branding all who did not hold it as heretics. His council was presided over by St. Gregory Nazianzen. The chief work of this council was to anathematise the Council of Rimini, which was composed of six hundred bishops and a multitude of priests. This work was done, and so one hundred and fifty bishops curse and denounce as heretical and false six hundred bishops and a multitude of priests; so the voice of the many is not always the voice of God, nor yet the voice of a council the voice of a Pope; neither is the infallibility of a Pope always found in a council, nor is the infallibility of one Pope always found in the voice of another.
Theodosius II. convened a council in 431. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, seems to have been the cause of this convocation, having persecuted all who were not of his opinions; now undergoes persecution for having plead that the Holy Virgin Mary was not the mother of God. He plead that Jesus Christ being the word, consubstantial with the Father, Mary could not, at the same time, be the mother of God the Father and of God the Son. To settle this quarrel Nestorius demands a council and obtains it. This council condemned Nestorius, and one of its committees displaced Cyril. The Emperor, Theodosius II., reversed all that was done, and then permitted it to reassemble. The deputies from Rome, John, Patriarch of Antioch, with twenty-six suffragans, arrived five days after the transaction, and it is on record that his arrival was followed by one of the most distinguished cursing matches of antiquity. The Roman bishops on occasions of this character always had recourse to cursing, and they scarcely ever failed to ease themselves up with an overflow of anathemas and execrations. Cyril and Nestorius exchanged mutual imprecations, even before the sitting of the council. The saint, it is said, had launched twelve anathemas at the heretic in an Alexandrian synod in the year 430, and the heretic Nestorius thanked the saint by returning the same number of inverted blessings. This has been a heavy business among Popes for many centuries. John and Cyril engaged in the same kind of warfare immediately after John's arrival at Ephesus. John and his party congratulated Cyril, Memnon, and their accomplices by deposing and excommunicating them, and now the parties continue, for some time, to give vent to their feelings in mutual anathemas. These benedictions were the only articles of mutual exchange, current and of legal tender value between the parties. At last the Emperor had Nestorius and Cyril arrested, and ordered all the bishops to return each to his church, and so no conclusion was reached. The Greeks called the second assembly at Ephesus a gang of felons, but the first, it is said, excelled it in all the arts of villainy. The contest was finally ended, not by the church, but by the state. The Emperor reinstated Cyril and banished Nestorius, and the western diocese was in the end reduced to submission and the church to unity, not by ecclesiastical authority, but by imperial power. (See Evagrius 1, 5; Liberatus c. 6; Godeau 3, 310.) The Council of Chalcedon met in the year 451. St. Leo, bishop of Rome, took the advantage of the troubles which the quarrel about the two natures occasioned in the empire, and presided at the council by his legates, which was a new feature in councils. But the fathers of the council apprehending that the church of the west would, from this precedent, pretend to the superiority over the eastern church, decided, by their twenty-eighth canon, that the see of Constantinople and the see of Rome should enjoy alike the same advantages and privileges. This was the origin of the long enmity which prevailed and still prevails between the two churches, the eastern and the western. This council endorsed and established the "two natures in one person." The twenty-eighth canon of this council has been rejected and condemned by the Latins, yet Pelagius, Gregory, Pascal and Boniface acknowledged this council, thereby placing the seal of infallibility upon it as much as they ever did upon other councils.
In 553 Justinian assembled a council at Constantinople to discuss the three chapters, as they were designated, composed by Ibas, Theodoret and Theodorus. Vigilius, bishop of Rome, with bishops and deacons from Italy, Africa and the east, was in Constantinople during the entire sittings of this council, and refused to attend although invited. But the council went on, all the same. His infallibility, supported by his clique, opposed the emperor and his council, but in vain. He formed his bishops and deacons into a separate council, published a constitution defending, in modified terms, the three chapters, and interdicting all further discussion upon the subject by the authority of the Apostolic See; pronounced anathemas against the persons and defenders of the authors of the three chapters. Having now made himself a partisan of the authors, who were condemned by the emperor's council, he was cursed for promoting heresy, and banished in dishonor. This served to bring him to his senses upon several matters, and so he turned about and approved what he had before condemned. And so heresy was converted into orthodoxy by the magical power of an emperor at the expense of the infallibility of Vigilius. The Italians, Tuscans, Ligurians, Istrians, French, Illyrians and Africans, who took a stand against the emperor, were like the pope, the "vicar general of God," converted by the sword of Justinian. The Italian clergy who resisted were banished.
"In 681 there was a council at Constantinople, convoked by Constantine, the bearded. This council was called by the Latins 'in trullo,' because it was held in an apartment of the imperial palace. The emperor himself presided. The bishops of Constantinople and Antioch were on his right hand, and the deputies from Jerusalem and Rome were on his left. In this council it was decided that Jesus Christ had two wills." Here "Pope Honorius I. was condemned as a monothelite, that is, as wishing Jesus Christ to have but one will." O, shame! What will come next? Well, we are out at sea in the very darkest periods of the dark ages, and there is no telling how much our senses may be shocked. We find next what is known as the Second Council of Nice. It was assembled by a woman, Mrs. Irene, in the name of her son, whose eyes she had caused to be put out. Her husband, Leo, had abolished the worship of images as leading to idolatry. This woman re-established this worship. During Constantine's minority she executed the imperial power. She was a bold defender and patron of emblematic or image worship. It is said that she had the ambition of Lucifer and the malignity of a demon. She is accused of being connected with the murder of her husband. "She put out the eyes of Nicephorus, and amputated the tongues of Christopher, Nicetas, Athenius and Eudoxas, Constantine's sons, for suspicion of conspiracy. She destroyed the eyes of her own son." "No woman," says Bruys, "was ever less worthy of life than this princess." Her ambition, says Godeau, made her violate all the laws of God and man. Now listen, but first prepare to experience all that the opposite extreme can possibly produce. Is there any place in your nature where life and death, or heaven and hell, can meet in festive joys? No. Then bear with my story the best you can, for it must be told. Here it is: Theodorus and Theophanes extol that vile woman for her VIRTUE AND EXCELLENCE(?). The Greeks placed her among the saints in their menology, and in holy festivity celebrate her anniversary. Hartman and Binius, in more modern times, flatter her prudence and piety(?). Alexander lauds her religion and faith as worthy of immortal honor(?), though the blinding of her son, he admits, exposed her to reprehension. Baronius justifies the assassination of her son. He commends the inhumanity which arose from zeal for religion. Here let the curtain drop till my next on councils makes its appearance.
INFIDELS IN EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF CHRISTIANITY.
We should not be surprised when wicked men of every grade of character assail our religion, for its great Author erected a standard of duty too perfect to suit their unruly passions and lusts. Opposition to Christianity is the natural correllate of an unregenerated heart. This fact was the cause of all the sufferings of the primitive Christians, not the only cause, but the first and leading cause. One striking circumstance is worthy of notice, which is, that they have censured Christians for their zeal with an unsparing tongue, and, at the same time, they have shown as much if not more vehemence and obstinacy in their own good-for-nothing opposition. Every kind of opposition has been manifested which the ingenuity of man could dictate. Indeed, there is little urged against Christianity in our day that is original. Almost every cavil and argument may be traced to Voltaire, Porphyry, Celsus and Julian, the old enemies of the Christ. Infidels, who dislike (will you hear it?) the labor and trouble of investigating the question of the claims of the Christian religion upon their intelligence, seize with avidity upon the labors of others and parade them before the public mind. Just now there is no question put so often by men who feign to be unbelievers as, "What do you think of Colonel Ingersoll?" "He stirs you up." The little city of Logansport was favored not a great while in the past with a visit and lecture from the Colonel. After the lecture was over some half a dozen gentlemen were taking a lunch at an eating restaurant, and there was one very talkative creature in the group who had much to say of the Colonel's effort and of the "unscientific and absurd character of the Bible." Finally, one noble-hearted gentleman said to the boasting skeptic, Now you have said a great deal about the Bible, and I venture the assertion that you can't quote one verse that is in it. I challenge you to do it. Just give us one, long or short, from any chapter in all the Bible. The man failed. He couldn't do it. Then, said the Christian gentleman, you fellows are always talking about science and about the "unscientific character of the Bible," so I will now ask you one of the most simple questions known in science, and we will see whether you will answer it. It is this: How many teeth have you got in your mouth; how many does a man have? To the utter astonishment of the company the man failed again, and the company told him laughingly that he must treat to the cigars. Such fellows know comparatively nothing, and yet they are always championing their men, who contain all their knowledge and do their thinking for them. Ask the infidel who his leaders are and he will point you to Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, etc. Are Christians always holding up their great minds? Suppose we test the merits of the case in this manner, then who are your infidels that will compare with Jesus Christ and his apostles? or, with such men, even, as Milton, Clarendon, Hale, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, Newton, Addison, Lyttleton, West, Johnson and Campbell? Where are your persons of such profound understanding? To compare such persons as these with Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon and Thomas Paine, is as silly as to compare manhood with infancy. No infidels try Christianity upon its own merits. If they were candid men they would separate Christianity from all foreign and irrelative circumstances, and test its evidences seriously, as the magnitude of the question deserves. Apply the same unbelief to the common and ancient records of history and you will at once get the credit of being rash and foolish. The scoffs and sarcasms and sophistries of infidels are not from a love of truth. Whatever the cause or causes may be, one thing is certain, and that is, that they do not understand Christianity itself, nor the nature and magnitude of its evidences. They condemn that which they never gave themselves the trouble to investigate.
Whoever investigates the religion of Jesus Christ will find that the character of its founder is far superior to any other character, and his apostles far superior to any other fishermen. To believe that his religion is of simple human origin is like believing that a first-class ship of war is the invention of a child. "The majesty of Christ and the divinity of his religion appears in nothing more than this, that in proportion to our acquaintance with the Scriptures of the New Testament does the light of truth shine upon the mind." The seeming successes of infidelity, and the multitude of apostates scattered over our country, makes us naturally more anxious to warn the rising generation against the errors of those who would mislead them. But there is nothing in these fearful signs of the times to shake our faith or excite our fears, because the faithful Bible student finds the condition of our world just such as the Scriptures have foretold. All the surroundings that characterize the conduct of infidels; their expertness in ridicule; their extreme folly and resoluteness; their licentiousness and anxiety for change in laws as well as society; the snares laid out by them to catch the unsteadfast, and their vain professions to free the world from slavery, while they themselves are in bondage to corruption, are drawn by the divine pencil of prophecy with so much exactness that "he who runs may read." By examining the word of God you will find that the Free-thinkers of our country, the Illuminati of Germany, Darwin, Strauss, Huxley, Tyndal, Renan, and the man of our own land who is most noted in our midst for oratorical accomplishments without logic, argument or truthfulness of statements touching the Christian religion, are all present evidences of the divinity of the prophetic words of the New Testament.
WOMAN AND HER RANK.
I presume that Adam knew nothing of the subject of woman's inferiority. I do not think that he ever said to Eve, Don't soar so high nor dive so deep into philosophy, science and religion, because you are a woman. I don't think he ever said to his wife, Astronomy is beyond your reach, nor Science is too deep for your slender powers.
Home is a woman's empire, but this very fact demands that her intellectual powers should not be inferior to her husband's. A vast majority of people have their minds influenced and their characters formed by their mothers. Foolish and silly, as well as lazy women generally, have their counterparts in their offspring. By following the outlines of nature in her facts we have become scientific, and all the wisdom we can get from this source will be still more advantageous. The woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always destroys home. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this very reason he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod, Nantucket, and all along up and down the shore."
It is said that the English is the only language in which the word "home" occurs. What infamous hours many bachelors keep; many of them die of dissipation because they have no mother, sister, or wife to look after them and render their homes pleasant and attractive. What an odd looking thing a house is without a female occupant. "Won't you tarry awhile?" "Can't you stay awhile?" "O, don't be in a hurry." Such is often heard, and the reply is, "No, I am much obliged to you, I must go, for my mother, my sister, or my wife, is expecting me." But for these sentiments he would stay until midnight; so some unmarried men are the most contemptible bores. When you get acquainted with them you naturally hate to see them coming. Some married men fall into the same way of boring their neighbors. When I see a man doing this I suspect that he has lost his love of home associations, and ask myself the question, What is the trouble?
There is always an adequate cause for every effect. Modern "Freeloveism" looks to the annihilation of home, for the reason that it proposes no definite home for male or female. No people destitute of the light of the Bible ever possessed a home, such an one as ours.
One of the great abominations of infidelity is often met within the advocacy of Freeloveism, and matrimony binding at the option, simply, of the parties. What is a vagabond on the earth but a man without a home? Slaves have been the same in every age, and a government that does everything for its subjects will always keep them in degradation. A father and mother who would not effectually ruin their children must not raise them in indolence and affluence, doing everything for them and teaching them nothing in a practical way; even so a woman must be elevated until her post is one of honor. You might as well tie a man hand and foot, and command him to run a race, as to deprive women or others of their natural rights, and then expect them to rise or progress the same as those who are in the full possession of all their liberties. Give to all freedom and scope for their talents, and allow them to rise or fall at pleasure, but ever point them upward and onward.
Women were slaves in Egypt, in Babylon, in Ninevah, in Persia, in Greece and Rome, and all those nations sunk. She is now a slave in China, in India and in Turkey.
Adam said: "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Say what you will of gallantry, and of the flattery of the sex, but here you have the intelligent and affectionate language of the first man, which, for beauty and love, as well as simplicity, has never been surpassed. "She is bone of my bone," and consequently of my own rank. We are one. She is flesh of my flesh and therefore is my equal. "She shall be called woman," that is, a female man.
It is authoritatively asserted that the Hebrew term translated woman signifies a female man, just as in Latin "equa" is the feminine of "equus," "Julia" is the feminine of "Julius." But if she was a female man she possessed all the attributes of humanity, and therefore her dignity was and is the same as the other sex. Adam gave to Eve a position, an honorable position, for he took her in as a part of himself. His honor was her honor, his rank was her rank, and she was his helpmeet. My ideal woman is not one who is good for nothing, "bred only and polished to the taste of lustful appetence; to sing, to dance, to dress, to troll the tongue and roll the eye." She should be a helpmeet as termed in the Bible. She should be a creature not too bright and good to labor in her proper sphere, that is, to prepare daily food, serve it up and guide the house. A high legal dignitary placed an epitaph upon the tomb of his wife, that read: "An excellent woman and a good cook."
When a stout, able-bodied woman sits herself down and whines out, "I can't work," she gets down very low. What is such a woman good for?
It has been said that woman is man's imaginative side. Well, I imagine that there is a great deal of truth in the remark so far as many men are concerned, and this simple fact has ruined many a wife. A woman may operate very well upon a man's imagination, but that will never help him to make a living.
Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means. Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength, which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a reformation in her education. What is her education even now, and in our own country? Instead of being educated for health and long life, they are trained in many instances for disease and a premature death. The history of woman, as woman, is not in our reach; at least I am not prepared to say it has been written. I wish it had, for I am persuaded that woman has been the great redeeming element upon the human side of bliss, without which our world could not exist.
"And they charge that he (Thomas Paine) was a drunkard. That is another falsehood. He drank liquor in his day, as did the preachers. It was no unusual thing for the preacher going home to stop in a tavern and take a drink of hot rum with a deacon, and it was no unusual thing for the deacon to help the preacher home."—Ingersoll.
Therefore, if a man stops at a hotel and drinks till he has to be helped home, he is no drunkard? No! Ingersoll is a temperance man (?) and he knows.
THE TESTIMONY OF AN INFIDEL IN WHOSE HEART EVERY SPARK OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE WAS NOT EXTINGUISHED.
J.J. Rousseau says: The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction? This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and, after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates, could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.—J.J. Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39.
Have infidels been martyred on account of their infidelity? Men are not so foolish as to have themselves devoured by wild beasts or perish in slow fires rather than recant from a theory they never espoused, Col. Ingersoll to the contrary, notwithstanding. Men do not prefer red-hot iron chains to denying a Lord in whom they never believed. Infidels have nothing to lose by recanting. Colonel Ingersoll says, "I think I would. There is not much of the martyr about me," so we think of the Colonel!
THE JEWISH RELIGION AND INSTITUTIONS KNOWN AMONG HEATHEN WRITERS.
BY HENRY KETT, B.D.,
Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. Published first in 1812.
"The transactions and literature of the ancient Jews were too remarkable to escape the attention of the learned and inquisitive Pagans when Judea became a province of the Roman Empire. Many particulars relative to the eminent character of Joseph as a minister to Pharaoh, and as an inspired prophet, to the emigration of the Jews from Egypt, their miraculous passage through the Red Sea, their settlement in the Holy Land, the institutions and ceremonies of the law, the splendor of Jerusalem in its most flourishing times, the magnificence of the temple, and the supreme, eternal and immutable nature of their worship, are related by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Justin."
CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST.
The fragments of Sanchoniathon, the most ancient historian of Phenicia, who is supposed to have flourished not long after the death of Moses, confirms the Bible account of the origin of the world and of many men and places mentioned in the Pentateuch. Berosus, the Chaldean, and Manetho, the Egyptian, who lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, represent several circumstances known in the accounts given by Moses. They wrote about the time when the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Their evidence, to say the least, shows the honor that was paid by the most learned persons of the East to the records of the Bible.
I know the Bible is inspired, because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book.—Coleridge.
Transcriber’s Note
The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
A table of contents has been generated for the HTML edition.