A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

PERPETUAL CURATE. The incumbent of a church, chapel, or district, which is within the boundaries of a rectory or vicarage; so called from a curate assistant, whose office expires with the incumbency of the person who employs him.

PERPETUALS. Twenty ministers of the choir at Lyons, so called from being bound to perpetual service there:—like our vicars-choral.

PERSECUTION. The sufferings which are inflicted by the world upon the Church in all ages, the most striking of which were those which are designated in history the Ten Persecutions, and which raged from the time of Nero, A. D. 64, to the accession of Constantine, under the successive Roman emperors, Domitian, (A. D. 81–86,) Trajan, Adrian, Aurelius, Antoninus, Severus, Maximus, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, and Maximian, under the last of whose rule the persecution raged against the Church in East and West for the space of ten years. Each of these periods swelled the list of the noble army of martyrs. Under Nero, the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul suffered. St. Clement, bishop of Rome; Simeon, bishop of Jerusalem; and Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, were put to death in the reign of Trajan. In the persecution of Aurelius, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Apollinaris, and Tatian presented their apologies, as did Tertullian in the next persecution under Severus (200). Nicephorus, an ecclesiastical historian, tells us that it were easier to count the sands upon the seashore than to number the martyrdoms in the persecution under Decius (249). The great St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, suffered under Valerian (14th of September, 258).

Though the above ten are the most memorable of the persecutions of the cross of Christ, the Church has ever been opposed by the world. Thus in our country, during the Rebellion, the king and primate underwent martyrdom, while thousands of faithful men suffered the loss of all things for the name of Christ. And, even in this day, though physical persecution is forbidden by the law, moral persecution is more or less endured by every self-denying Christian, who has to bear taunts and nicknames from ungodly men.

PERSEVERANCE, FINAL. According to the Calvinistic system, the elect receive the grace of perseverance, so that when grace has once been received, they cannot finally fall from it. This follows from their view of election. But, according to the Catholic view of grace and of election, men may fall, and fall finally, from the grace they have once received. The reader is requested to refer to the article on Election; this may be considered a continuation. Since the reformed Church of England (with the primitive and Catholic) regards election as an admission into the pale of the visible Church Catholic, not a necessary and infallible admission into eternal glory, she obviously could not teach the doctrine of the assured final perseverance of every individual among the elect; but, annexing a totally different sense to the word elect itself from that which is jointly advocated by Calvin and by Arminius, she consistently pronounces that the elect, as she understands the term, may finally fall away, and thence may everlastingly perish.

To this moral possibility of final apostasy the Anglican Church, as was felt by the Calvinistic party in the conference at Hampton Court, alludes, though she does not specifically there define the matter, in her sixteenth Article.

“After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given and fall into sin; and, by the grace of God, we may rise again, and amend our lives.”

Here it seems to be not obscurely intimated, that the elect, even after they have received the Holy Ghost, may so depart from grace given, and may so fall into sin, that they either may, or may not, be restored by the influential grace of God.

Such, accordingly, was doubtless perceived to be the case by the Calvinistic party; for otherwise it is impossible to account for their proposed alteration of the article, which would have made it speak the language of assured personal final perseverance.

They moved King James, that, to the original words of the article, “after we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin,” might be subjoined the following explanatory addition, “yet neither totally nor finally.”