THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME II SLICE III
Apollodorus to Aral

Articles in This Slice

APOLLODORUS, an Athenian painter, who flourished at the end of the 5th century B.C. He is said to have introduced great improvements in perspective and chiaroscuro. What these were it is impossible to say: perspective cannot have been in his day at an advanced stage. Among his works were an Odysseus, a priest in prayer, and an Ajax struck by lightning.

APOLLODORUS, an Athenian grammarian, pupil of Aristarchus and Panaetius the Stoic, who lived about 140 B.C. He was a prolific and versatile writer. There is extant under his name a treatise on the gods and the heroic age, entitled Βιβλιοθἠκη, a valuable authority on ancient mythology. Modern critics are of opinion that, if genuine, it is an abridgment of a larger work by him (Περὶ θεῶν).

Edition, with commentary, by Heyne (1803); text by Wagner (1894) (Mythographi Graeci, vol. i. Teubner series). Amongst other works by him of which only fragments remain, collected in Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, may be mentioned: Χρονικά, a universal history from the fall of Troy to 144 B.C.; Περιήγησις, a gazetteer written in iambics; Περὶ Νεῶν, a work on the Homeric catalogue of ships; and a work on etymology (Έτυμολογίαι).

APOLLODORUS, of Carystus in Euboea, one of the most important writers of the New Attic comedy, who flourished at Athens between 300 and 260 B.C. He is to be distinguished from an older Apollodorus of Gela (342-290), also a writer of comedy, a contemporary of Menander. He wrote 47 comedies and obtained the prize five times. Terence borrowed his Hecyra and Phormio from the Έκυρά and Έπιδικαζόμενος of Apollodorus.

Fragments in Koch, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, ii. (1884); see also Meineke, Historia Critica Comicorum Graecorum (1839).

APOLLODORUS, of Damascus, a famous Greek architect, who flourished during the 2nd century A.D. He was a favourite of Trajan, for whom he constructed the stone bridge over the Danube (A.D. 104-105). He also planned a gymnasium, a college, public baths, the Odeum and the Forum Trajanum, within the city of Rome; and the triumphal arches at Beneventum and Ancona. The Trajan column in the centre of the Forum is celebrated as being the first triumphal monument of the kind. On the accession of Hadrian, whom he had offended by ridiculing his performances as architect and artist, Apollodorus was banished, and, shortly afterwards, being charged with imaginary crimes, put to death (Dio Cassius lxix. 4). He also wrote a treatise on Siege Engines (Πολιορκητικά), which was dedicated to Hadrian.

APOLLONIA, the name of more than thirty cities of antiquity. The most important are the following: (1) An Illyrian city (known as Apollonia κατ᾽ Έπίδαμνον or πρὸς Έπιδάμνῳ) on the right bank of the Aous, founded by the Corinthians and Corcyraeans. It soon became a place of increasing commercial prosperity, as the most convenient link between Brundusium and northern Greece, and as one of the starting-points of the Via Egnatia. It was an important military post in the wars against Philip and during the civil wars of Pompey and Caesar, and towards the close of the Roman republic acquired fame as a seat of literature and philosophy. Here Augustus was being educated when the death of Caesar called him to Rome. It seems to have sunk with the rise of Aulon, and few remains of its ruins are to be found. The monastery of Pollina stands on a hill which probably is part of the site of the old city. (2) A Thracian city on the Black Sea (afterwards Sozopolis, and now Sizeboli), colonized by the Milesians, and famous for its colossal statue of Apollo by Calamis, which Lucullus removed to Rome.

APOLLONIUS, surnamed ὁ δύσκολος (“the Surly or Crabbed”), a celebrated grammarian of Alexandria, who lived in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. He spent the greater part of his life in his native city, where he died; he is also said to have visited Rome and attracted the attention of Antoninus. He was the founder of scientific grammar and is styled by Priscian grammaticorum princeps. Four of his works are extant: On Syntax, ed. Bekker, 1817; and three smaller treatises, on Pronouns, Conjunctions and Adverbs, ed. Schneider, 1878.

Grammatici Graeci, i. in Teubner series; Egger, Apollonius Dyscole (1854).

APOLLONIUS, surnamed ὁ μαλακός (“the Effeminate”), a Greek rhetorician of Alabanda in Caria, who flourished about 120 B.C. After studying under Menecles, chief of the Asiatic school of oratory, he settled in Rhodes, where he taught rhetoric, among his pupils being Mark Antony.

APOLLONIUS, surnamed “the Sophist,” of Alexandria, a famous grammarian, who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century A.D. He was the author of a Homeric lexicon (Λέξεις Όμηρικαί), the only work of the kind we possess. His chief authorities were Aristarchus and Apion’s Homeric glossary.

Edition by Villoison (1773), I. Bekker (1833); Leyde, De Apollonii Sophistae Lexico Homerico (1885); E.W.B. Nicholson on a newly discovered fragment in Classical Review (Nov. 1897).

APOLLONIUS MOLON (sometimes called simply Molon), a Greek rhetorician, who flourished about 70 B.C. He was a native of Alabanda, a pupil of Menecles, and settled at Rhodes. He twice visited Rome as an ambassador from Rhodes, and Cicero and Caesar took lessons from him. He endeavoured to moderate the florid Asiatic style and cultivated an “Atticizing” tendency. He wrote on Homer, and, according to Josephus, violently attacked the Jews.

See C. Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iii.; E. Schürer, History of the Jewish People, iii. (Eng. tr. 1886).

APOLLONIUS OF PERGA [Pergaeus], Greek geometer of the Alexandrian school, was probably born some twenty-five years later than Archimedes, i.e. about 262 B.C. He flourished in the reigns of Ptolemy Euergetes and Ptolemy Philopator (247-205 B.C.). His treatise on Conics gained him the title of The Great Geometer, and is that by which his fame has been transmitted to modern times. All his numerous other treatises have perished, save one, and we have only their titles handed down, with general indications of their contents, by later writers, especially Pappus. After the Conics in eight Books had been written in a first edition, Apollonius brought out a second edition, considerably revised as regards Books i.-ii., at the instance of one Eudemus of Pergamum; the first three books were sent to Eudemus at intervals, as revised, and the later books were dedicated (after Eudemus’ death) to King Attalus I. (241-197 B.C.). Only four Books have survived in Greek; three more are extant in Arabic; the eighth has never been found. Although a fragment has been found of a Latin translation from the Arabic made in the 13th century, it was not until 1661 that a Latin translation of Books v.-vii. was available. This was made by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Abraham Ecchellensis from the free version in Arabic made in 983 by Abu ’l-Fath of Ispahan and preserved in a Florence MS. But the best Arabic translation is that made as regards Books i.-iv. by Hilal ibn Abi Hilal (d. about 883), and as regards Books v.-vii. by Tobit ben Korra (836-901). Halley used for his translation an Oxford MS. of this translation of Books v.-vii., but the best MS. (Bodl. 943) he only referred to in order to correct his translation, and it is still unpublished except for a fragment of Book v. published by L. Nix with German translation (Drugulin, Leipzig, 1889). Halley added in his edition (1710) a restoration of Book viii., in which he was guided by the fact that Pappus gives lemmas “to the seventh and eighth books” under that one heading, as well as by the statement of Apollonius himself that the use of the seventh book was illustrated by the problems solved in the eighth.

The degree of originality of the Conics can best be judged from Apollonius’ own prefaces. Books i.-iv. form an “elementary introduction,” i.e. contain the essential principles; the rest are specialized investigations in particular directions. For Books i.-iv. he claims only that the generation of the curves and their fundamental properties in Book i. are worked out more fully and generally than they were in earlier treatises, and that a number of theorems in Book iii. and the greater part of Book iv. are new. That he made the fullest use of his predecessors’ works, such as Euclid’s four Books on Conics, is clear from his allusions to Euclid, Conon and Nicoteles. The generality of treatment is indeed remarkable; he gives as the fundamental property of all the conics the equivalent of the Cartesian equation referred to oblique axes (consisting of a diameter and the tangent at its extremity) obtained by cutting an oblique circular cone in any manner, and the axes appear only as a particular case after he has shown that the property of the conic can be expressed in the same form with reference to any new diameter and the tangent at its extremity. It is clearly the form of the fundamental property (expressed in the terminology of the “application of areas”) which led him to call the curves for the first time by the names parabola, ellipse, hyperbola. Books v.-vii. are clearly original. Apollonius’ genius takes its highest flight in Book v., where he treats of normals as minimum and maximum straight lines drawn from given points to the curve (independently of tangent properties), discusses how many normals can be drawn from particular points, finds their feet by construction, and gives propositions determining the centre of curvature at any point and leading at once to the Cartesian equation of the evolute of any conic.

The other treatises of Apollonius mentioned by Pappus are—1st, Λόγου ἀποτομή, Cutting off a Ratio; 2nd, Χωρίου ἀποτομή, Cutting of an Area; 3rd, Διωρισμένη τομή, Determinate Section; 4th, Έπαφαί, Tangencies; 5th, Νεύσεις, Inclinations; 6th, Τόποι ἐπίπεδοι, Plane Loci. Each of these was divided into two books, and, with the Data, the Porisms and Surface-Loci of Euclid and the Conics of Apollonius were, according to Pappus, included in the body of the ancient analysis.

1st. De Rationis Sectione had for its subject the resolution of the following problem: Given two straight lines and a point in each, to draw through a third given point a straight line cutting the two fixed lines, so that the parts intercepted between the given points in them and the points of intersection with this third line may have a given ratio.

2nd. De Spatii Sectione discussed the similar problem which requires the rectangle contained by the two intercepts to be equal to a given rectangle.

An Arabic version of the first was found towards the end of the 17th century in the Bodleian library by Dr Edward Bernard, who began a translation of it; Halley finished it and published it along with a restoration of the second treatise in 1706.

3rd. De Sectione Determinata resolved the problem: Given two, three or four points on a straight line, to find another point on it such that its distances from the given points satisfy the condition that the square on one or the rectangle contained by two has to the square on the remaining one or the rectangle contained by the remaining two, or to the rectangle contained by the remaining one and another given straight line, a given ratio. Several restorations of the solution have been attempted, one by W. Snellius (Leiden, 1698), another by Alex. Anderson of Aberdeen, in the supplement to his Apollonius Redivivus (Paris, 1612), but by far the best is by Robert Simson, Opera quaedam reliqua (Glasgow, 1776).

4th. De Tactionibus embraced the following general problem: Given three things (points, straight lines or circles) in position, to describe a circle passing through the given points, and touching the given straight lines or circles. The most difficult case, and the most interesting from its historical associations, is when the three given things are circles. This problem, which is sometimes known as the Apollonian Problem, was proposed by Vieta in the 16th century to Adrianus Romanus, who gave a solution by means of a hyperbola. Vieta thereupon proposed a simpler construction, and restored the whole treatise of Apollonius in a small work, which he entitled Apollonius Gallus (Paris, 1600). A very full and interesting historical account of the problem is given in the preface to a small work of J.W. Camerer, entitled Apollonii Pergaei quae supersunt, ac maxime Lemmata Pappi in hos Libras, cum Observationibus, &c. (Gothae, 1795, 8vo).

5th. De Inclinationibus had for its object to insert a straight line of a given length, tending towards a given point, between two given (straight or circular) lines. Restorations have been given by Marino Ghetaldi, by Hugo d’Omerique (Geometrical Analysis, Cadiz, 1698), and (the best) by Samuel Horsley (1770).

6th. De Locis Planis is a collection of propositions relating to loci which are either straight lines or circles. Pappus gives somewhat full particulars of the propositions, and restorations were attempted by P. Fermat (Oeuvres, i., 1891, pp. 3-51), F. Schooten (Leiden, 1656) and, most successfully of all, by R. Simson (Glasgow, 1749).

Other works of Apollonius are referred to by ancient writers, viz. (1) Περὶ τοῦ πυρίου, On the Burning-Glass, where the focal properties of the parabola probably found a place; (2) Περὶ τοῦ κοχλίου, On the Cylindrical Helix (mentioned by Proclus); (3) a comparison of the dodecahedron and the icosahedron inscribed in the same sphere; (4) Ή καθόλου πραγματεία, perhaps a work on the general principles of mathematics in which were included Apollonius’ criticisms and suggestions for the improvement of Euclid’s Elements; (5) Ώκυτόκιον (quick bringing-to-birth), in which, according to Eutocius, he showed how to find closer limits for the value of π than the 31⁄7 and 310⁄71 of Archimedes; (6) an arithmetical work (as to which see [Pappus]) on a system of expressing large numbers in language closer to that of common life than that of Archimedes’ Sand-reckoner, and showing how to multiply such large numbers; (7) a great extension of the theory of irrationals expounded in Euclid, Book x., from binomial to multinomial and from ordered to unordered irrationals (see extracts from Pappus’ comm. on Eucl. x., preserved in Arabic and published by Woepcke, 1856). Lastly, in astronomy he is credited by Ptolemy with an explanation of the motion of the planets by a system of epicycles; he also made researches in the lunar theory, for which he is said to have been called Epsilon (ε).

The best editions of the works of Apollonius are the following: (1) Apollonii Pergaei Conicorum libri quatuor, ex versione Frederici Commandini (Bononiae, 1566), fol.; (2) Apollonii Pergaei Conicorum libri octo, et Sereni Antissensis de Sectione Cylindri et Coni libri duo (Oxoniae, 1710), fol. (this is the monumental edition of Edmund Halley); (3) the edition of the first four books of the Conics given in 1675 by Barrow; (4) Apollonii Pergaei de Sectione, Rationis libri duo: Accedunt ejusdem de Sectione Spatii libri duo Restituti: Praemittitur, &c., Opera et Studio Edmundi Halley (Oxoniae, 1706), 4to; (5) a German translation of the Conics by H. Balsam (Berlin, 1861); (6) the definitive Greek text of Heiberg (Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant Opera, Leipzig, 1891-1893); (7) T.L. Heath, Apollonius, Treatise on Conic Sections (Cambridge, 1896); see also H.G. Zeuthen, Die Lehre van den Kegelschnitten im Altertum (Copenhagen, 1886 and 1902).

(T. L. H.)

APOLLONIUS OF RHODES (Rhodius), a Greek epic poet and grammarian, of Alexandria, who flourished under the Ptolemies Philopator and Epiphanes (222-181 B.C.). He was the pupil of Callimachus, with whom he subsequently quarrelled. In his youth he composed the work for which he is known—Argonautica, an epic in four books on the legend of the Argonauts. When he read it at Alexandria, it was rejected through the influence of Callimachus and his party. Disgusted with his failure, Apollonius withdrew to Rhodes, where he was very successful as a rhetorician, and a revised edition of his epic was well received. In recognition of his talents the Rhodians bestowed the freedom of their city upon him—the origin of his surname. Returning to Alexandria, he again recited his poem, this time with general applause. In 196, Ptolemy Epiphanes appointed him librarian of the Museum, which office he probably held until his death. As to the Argonautica, Longinus’ (De Sublim. p. 54, 19) and Quintilian’s (Instit, x. 1, 54) verdict of mediocrity seems hardly deserved; although it lacks the naturalness of Homer, it possesses a certain simplicity and contains some beautiful passages. There is a valuable collection of scholia. The work, highly esteemed by the Romans, was imitated by Virgil (Aeneid, iv.), Varro Atacinus, and Valerius Flaccus. Marianus (about A.D. 500) paraphrased it in iambic trimeters. Apollonius also wrote epigrams; grammatical and critical works; and Κτίσεις (the foundations of cities).

Editio Princeps (Florence, 1496); Merkel-Keil (with scholia, 1854); Seaton (1900). English translations: Verse, by Greene (1780); Fawkes (1780); Preston (1811); Way (1901); Prose by Coleridge (1889); see also Couat, La Poésie alexandrine; Susemihl, Geschichte der griech. Lit. in der alexandnnischen Zeit.

APOLLONIUS OF TRALLES (in Caria), a Greek sculptor, who flourished in the 2nd century B.C. With his brother Tauriscus, he executed the marble group known as the Farnese Bull, representing Zethus and Amphion tying the revengeful Dirce to the tail of a wild bull.

See [Greek Art], pl. i. fig. 51.

APOLLONIUS OF TYANA, a Greek philosopher of the Neo-Pythagorean school, born a few years before the Christian era. He studied at Tarsus and in the temple of Asclepius at Aegae, where he devoted himself to the doctrines of Pythagoras and adopted the ascetic habit of life in its fullest sense. He travelled through Asia and visited Nineveh, Babylon and India, imbibing the oriental mysticism of magi, Brahmans and gymnosophists. The narrative of his travels given by his disciple Damis and reproduced by Philostratus is so full of the miraculous that many have regarded him as an imaginary character. On his return to Europe he was saluted as a magician, and received the greatest reverence from priests and people generally. He himself claimed only the power of foreseeing the future; yet in Rome it was said that he raised from death the body of a noble lady. In the halo of his mysterious power he passed through Greece, Italy and Spain. It was said that he was accused of treason both by Nero and by Domitian, but escaped by miraculous means. Finally he set up a school at Ephesus, where he died, apparently at the age of a hundred years. Philostratus keeps up the mystery of his hero’s life by saying, “Concerning the manner of his death, if he did die, the accounts are various.” The work of Philostratus composed at the instance of Julia, wife of Severus, is generally regarded as a religious work of fiction. It contains a number of obviously fictitious stories, through which, however, it is not impossible to discern the general character of the man. In the 3rd century, Hierocles (q.v.) endeavoured to prove that the doctrines and the life of Apollonius were more valuable than those of Christ, and, in modern times, Voltaire and Charles Blount (1654-1693), the English freethinker, have adopted a similar standpoint. Apart from this extravagant eulogy, it is absurd to regard Apollonius merely as a vulgar charlatan and miracle-monger. If we cut away the mass of mere fiction which Philostratus accumulated, we have left a highly imaginative, earnest reformer who laboured to infuse into the flaccid dialectic of paganism a saner spirit of practical morality.

See L. Dyer, Studies of the Gods in Greece (New York, 1891); A. Chassang, Le Merveilleux dans l’antiquité (1882); D.M. Tredwell, Sketch of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (New York, 1886); F.C. Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, ed. Ed. Zeller (Leipzig, 1876,—an attempt to show that Philostratus’s story is merely a pagan counterblast to the New Testament history); J. Jessen, Apollonius v. Tyana und sein Biograph Philostratos (Hamburg, 1885); J. Göttsching, Apollonius von Tyana (Berlin, 1889); J.A. Froude, Short Studies, vol. iv.; G.R.S. Mead, Apollonius of Tyana (London, 1901); B.L. Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies (New York, 1890); Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius (Eng. trans. New York, 1905); O. de B. Priaulx, The Indian Travels of Apollonius (1873); F.W.G. Campbell, Apoll. of Tyana (1908); see also [Neo-Pythagoreanism].

APOLLONIUS OF TYRE, a medieval tale supposed to be derived from a lost Greek original. The earliest mention of the story is in the Carmina (Bk. vi. 8, II. 5-6) of Venantius Fortunatus, in the second half of the 6th century, and the romance may well date from three centuries earlier. It bears a marked resemblance to the Antheia and Habrokomes of Xenophon of Ephesus. The story relates that King Antiochus, maintaining incestuous relations with his daughter, kept off her suitors by asking them a riddle, which they must solve on pain of losing their heads. Apollonius of Tyre solved the riddle, which had to do with Antiochus’s secret. He returned to Tyre, and, to escape the king’s vengeance, set sail in search of a place of refuge. In Cyrene he married the daughter of King Archistrates, and presently, on receiving news of the death of Antiochus, departed to take possession of the kingdom of Antioch, of which he was, for no clear reason, the heir. On the voyage his wife died, or rather seemed to die, in giving birth to a daughter, and the sailors demanded that she should be thrown overboard. Apollonius left his daughter, named Tarsia, at Tarsus in the care of guardians who proved false to their trust. Father, mother, and daughter were only reunited after fourteen years’ separation and many vicissitudes. The earliest Latin MS. of this tale, preserved at Florence, dates from the 9th or 10th century. The pagan features of the supposed original are by no means all destroyed. The ceremonies observed by Tarsia at her nurse’s grave, and the preparations for the burning of the body of Apollonius’s wife, are purely pagan. The riddles which Tarsia propounds to her father are obviously interpolated. They are taken from the Enigmata of Caelius Firmianus Symposius. The many inconsistencies of the story seem to be best explained by the supposition (E. Rohde, Der griechische Roman, 2nd ed., 1900, pp. 435 et seq.) that the Antiochus story was originally entirely separate from the story of Apollonius’s wanderings, and was clumsily tacked on by the Latin author. The romance kept its form through a vast number of medieval rearrangements, and there is little change in its outlines as set forth in the Shakespearian play of Pericles.

The Latin tale is preserved in about 100 MSS., and was printed by M. Velser (Augsburg, 1595), by J. Lapaume in Script. Erot. (Didot, Paris, 1856), and by A. Riese in the Bibl. Teubneriana (1871, new ed. 1893). The most widespread versions in the middle ages were those of Godfrey of Viterbo in his Pantheon (1185), where it is related as authentic history, and in the Gesta Romanorum (cap. 153), which formed the basis of the German folk-tale by H. Steinhöwel (Augsburg, 1471), the Dutch version (Delft, 1493), the French in Le Violier des histoires romaines (Paris, 1521), the English, by Laurence Twine (London, 1576, new ed. 1607), also of the Scandinavian, Czech, and Hungarian tales.

In England a translation was made as early as the 11th century (ed. B. Thorpe, 1834, and J. Zupitza in Archiv für neuere Sprachen, 1896); there is a Middle English metrical version (J.O. Halliwell, A New Boke about Shakespeare, 1850), by a poet who says he was vicar of Wimborne; John Gower uses the tale as an example of the seventh deadly sin in the eighth book of his Confessio Amantis; Robert Copland translated a prose romance of Kynge Apollyne of Thyre (Wynkyn de Worde, 1510) from the French; Pericles was entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1607, and was followed in the next year by George Wilkins’s novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre (ed. Tycho Mommsen, Oldenburg, 1857), and George Lillo drew his play Marina (1738) from the piece associated with Shakespeare; Orendel, by a Middle High German minnesinger, contains some of the episodes of Apollonius; Heinrich von Neustadt wrote a poem of 20,000 lines on Apollonius von Tyrland (c. 1400); the story was well known in Spanish, Libre de Apolonio (verse, c. 1200), and in J. de Timoneda’s Patrañuelo (1576); in French much of it was embodied in Jourdain de Blaives (13th cent.), and it also appears in Italian and medieval Greek. See A.H. Smyth, Shakespeare’s Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre (Philadelphia, 1898); Elimar Klebs, Die Erzahlung van A. aus Tyrus (Berlin, 1899); S. Singer, Apollonius van Tyrus (Halle, 1895).

APOLLOS (Άπολλώς; contracted from Apollonius), an Alexandrine Jew who after Paul’s first visit to Corinth worked there in a similar way (1 Cor. iii. 6). He was with Paul at a later date in Ephesus (1 Cor. xvi. 12). In 1 Cor. i. 10-12 we read of four parties in the Corinthian church, of which two attached themselves to Paul and Apollos respectively, using their names, though the “division” can hardly have been due to conflicting doctrines. (See [Paul].) From Acts xviii. 24-28 we learn that he spoke and taught with power and success. He may have captivated his hearers by teaching “wisdom,” as P.W. Schmiedel suggests, in the allegorical style of Philo, and he was evidently a man of unusual magnetic force. There seems to be some contradiction between Acts xviii. 25 a b and Acts xviii. 25 c, 26 b c; and it has been suggested that these latter passages are subsequent accretions. Since Apollos was a Christian and “taught exactly,” he could hardly have been acquainted only with John’s baptism or have required to be taught Christianity more thoroughly by Aquila and Priscilla. Martin Luther regarded Apollos as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and many scholars since have shared his view.

Jerome says that Apollos was so dissatisfied with the division at Corinth, that he retired into Crete with Zenas, a doctor of the law; and that the schism having been healed by Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Apollos returned to the city, and became its bishop. Less probable traditions assign to him the bishopric of Duras, or of Iconium in Phrygia, or of Caesarea.

See the articles in the Encyclopaedia Biblica; Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie; The Jewish Encyclopaedia; Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible; and cf. Weizsäcker, Das apostolische Zeitalter; A.C. McGiffert, History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age.

APOLLYON, the “foul fiend” who assaulted Christian on his pilgrimage through the Valley of Humiliation in John Bunyan’s great allegory. The name (Gr. Άπολλύων), which means “destroyer” (ἀπολλύειν, to destroy), is taken from Rev. ix. 11, where it represents the Hebrew word Abaddon (lit. “place of destruction,” but here personified). The identification with the Asmodeus (q.v.) of Tobit iii. 8 is erroneous.

APOLOGETICS, in theology, the systematic statement of the grounds which Christians allege for belief in (at least) a supernatural revelation and a divine redemption (cf. e.g. Heb. i. 1-3). The majority of apologists in the past have further believed in an infallible Bible; but they admit this position can only be reached at a late stage in the argument. We should note, however, that even a liberal orthodoxy, while saying nothing about infallibility, is pledged to the essential authority of the Bible; it cannot e.g. simply ignore the Old Testament with F.E.D. Schleiermacher. Catholic apologetics must further give a central position to Church authority, which Roman Catholics explicitly define as infallible; but this position too is debated in a late section of their system. On the other hand, there may be a Christianity which seeks to extricate the “spiritual” from the “supernatural” (Arnold Toynbee, characterizing T.H. Green). It would only lead to confusion, however, if we called this method “apologetic.” Any single effort in apologetics may be termed “an apology.” More elaborate contrasts have been proposed between the two words, but are of little practical importance.

I. The Word itself.—In Greek, ἀπολογία is the defendant’s reply (personally, not through a lawyer) to the speech for the prosecution—κατηγορία. Sometimes defendants’ speeches passed into literature, e.g. Plato’s splendid version of the Apology of Socrates. Thus, in view of persecution or slander, the Christian church naturally produced literary “Apologies,” The word has never quite lost this connotation of standing on the defensive and rebutting criticism; e.g. Anselm’s Apologia contra insipientem Gaunilonem (c. 1100); or the Lutheran Apology for the Augsburg Confession (1531); or J.H. Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua (1864); or A.B. Bruce’s Apologetics; or Christianity Defensively Stated (1892). Of course, defence easily passes into counterattack, as when early apologists denounce Greek and Roman religion. Yet the purpose may be defence even then. And there is perhaps a reason of a deeper kind for holding Apologetics to the defensive. Christianity is a prophetic religion. Now a prophet does not argue; he declares what he feels to be God’s will. For himself, he rests, like the mystic, upon an immediate vision of truth; but he differs from most mystics in having a message for others; and—again unlike most mystics—he addresses the hearer’s conscience, which we might call (in one sense) the mystic element in every man—or better, perhaps, the prophetic. Can the positive grounds for a prophet’s message be analysed and stated in terms of argument? If so, apologetics is literally a science, and it is pedantry to claim the defensive and pretend to throw the onus probandi upon objectors. But, if not, then apologetics is a mere auxiliary, and is only “a science” in so far as it presents a conscious and systematic plea. Bruce’s title, and his programme of “succouring distressed faith,” imply the latter alternative; the moral appeal of Christianity, primary and essential; its confirmation by argument, secondary. The view has its difficulties; but it is hignly suggestive.

The word ἀπολογία is used by Origen (Contra Cel. ii. 65, v. 19) of the general Christian defence. But the introduction of the adjective “apologetic” and of the substantive “apologetics” is recent. They are serviceable as bracketing together (1) Natural Theology or Theism, (2) Christian Evidences—chiefly “miracles” and “prophecy”; or, on a more modern view, chiefly the character and personality of Christ. The lower usage of Apology (as expression of regret for a fault) has tipped many a sarcasm besides George III.’s on the occasion of Bishop Watson’s book, “I did not know that the Bible needed an apology!”

II. Apologetics in the Bible.—The Old Testament does not argue in support of its beliefs, unless when (chiefly in parts of the Wisdom literature) it seeks to rebut moral difficulties (cf. T.K. Cheyne, Job and Solomon; A.S. Peake, Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament, 1904). The New Testament reflects chiefly controversy with Jews. Great emphasis is laid upon alleged fulfilments—striking or fanciful, but very generally striking to that age—of Old Testament prophecy (Matt. especially; rather differently Ep. to Heb.). The miracles of Jesus are also canvassed. Jews do not deny their wonderful character, but attribute them to black art (Mark iii. 22 &c., &c.). On the other hand, Christians and Jews are pretty well agreed on natural theology; so the New Testament tends to take its theism for granted. However, Rom. i. 20 has had great influence on Christian theology (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) in leading it to base theism upon reason or argument. One apologetic contention, aimed at Gentile readers, is found among the motives of Acts. Christianity is not a lawless but an excellent law-abiding faith. So (it is alleged) rulers, both Jewish and Gentile, have often admitted (xviii. 14; xix. 37; xxiii. 9; xxvi. 32).

III. Early Christian.—When we leave the New Testament, apologetics becomes conspicuous until the political triumph of Christianity, and even somewhat later. The atmosphere is no longer Jewish but fully Greek. True there are, as always, Jewish controversialists. Justin Martyr writes a Dialogue with Trypho; Origen deals with many anti-Christian arguments borrowed by Celsus from a certain nameless Jew. Yet Greece was the sovereign power in all the world of ancient culture. And so Christianity was necessarily Hellenized, necessarily philosophized. One result was to bring natural theology into the forefront. A pure morality, belief in one God, hopes extending beyond death—these appealed to the age; the Church taught them as philosophically true and divinely revealed. But, further still, philosophy offered a vehicle which could be applied to the contents of Christianity. The Platonic or eclectic theism, which adopted the conception of the Logos, made a place for Christ in terms of philosophy within the Godhead. (John i. 1 may or may not be affected by Philo; it is almost or quite solitary in the N.T.) Similarly, the immortality of the soul may be maintained on Platonic or quasi-Platonic lines, as by St Athanasius (Contra Gentes, § 33)—a writer who repeatedly quotes the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom, in which Platonism and the Old Testament had already joined partnership. This phase of Platonism, however, was much more slowly adopted. The earlier apologists dispute the natural immortality of the soul; Athanasius himself, in De Incarnatione Dei, §§ 4, 5, tones down the teaching of Wisdom; and the somewhat eccentric writer Arnobius, a layman—from Justin Martyr downwards apologetics has always been largely in the hands of laymen—stands for what has recently been called “conditional immortality”—eternal life for the righteous, the children of God, alone.

Allied with this more empiricist stand-point is the assertion that Greek philosophy borrowed from Moses; but in studying the Fathers we constantly find that groundless assertion uttered in the same breath with the dominant Idealist view, according to which Greek philosophy was due to incomplete revelation from the divine Logos.

On purely defensive lines, early apologists rebut charges of cannibalism and sexual promiscuity; the Christians had to meet in secret, and the gossip of a rotten age drew malignant conclusions. They make counter attacks on polytheism as a folly and on the shamefulness of obscene myths. Here they are in line with non-Christian writers or culture-mockers like Lucian of Samosata; or graver spirits like Porphyry, who champions Neo-Platonism as a rival to Christianity, and does pioneer work in criticism by attacks on some of the Old Testament books. Turning to Christian evidence proper, we are struck with the continued prominence of the argument from prophecy. The Old Testament was an immense religious asset to the early church. Their enemies had nothing like it; and—the N.T. canon being as yet but half formed—the Old Testament was pushed into notice by dwelling on this imperfect “argument,” which grew more extravagant as the partial control exercised by Jewish learning disappeared. An argument from miracles is also urged, though with more reserve. Formally, every one in that age admitted the supernatural. The question was, whose supernatural? And how far did it carry you? Miracle could not be to a 3rd century writer what it was to W. Paley—a conclusive and well-nigh solitary proof. Other apologies are by Aristides (recently recovered in translation), Athenagoras (“elegant”), Eusebius of Caesarea, Cyril of Alexandria; in Latin by Minucius Felix, Tertullian (a masculine spirit and phrase-coiner like T. Carlyle, if bitterer still), Lactantius Firmianus, &c., &c.[1]

As Christianity wins the day, a new objection is raised to it. The age is full of troubles; Christianity is ruining the empire! Besides notices elsewhere, we find the charge specially dealt with by St Augustine and his friends. Paulus Orosius argues that the world has always been a vale of tears. Salvian contends that not the acceptance of Christianity, but the sins of the people are bringing trouble upon them; and he gives ugly evidence of the continued prevalence of vice. Most impressive of all was Augustine’s own contribution in The City of God. Powers created by worldliness and sin are crumbling, as they well may; “the city of God remaineth!” Whether he meant it so or not, the saint’s argument became a programme and an apologia for the imperializing of the Western Church under the leadership of Rome during the middle ages.

IV. Middle Ages.—From the point of view of apologetics, we may mass together the long stretch of history which covers the period between the disappearance and the re-appearance of free discussion. When emperors became converts, the church, so lately a victim and a pleader for liberty, readily learned to persecute. Under such conditions there is little scope for apologetics. Force kills argument and drives doubt below the smooth surface of a nominal conformity. But there were two influences beyond the bounds or beyond the power of the christianized empire. The Jew remained, as always, stubbornly unconvinced, and, as often, fond of slanders. Many of the principal medieval attempts in apologetics are directed chiefly against him, e.g. the Pugio Fidei of Raymond Martini (c. 1280), which became one of Pascal’s sources (see V. below), or Peter Abelard’s Dialogus inter Judaeum Philosophum et Christianum. And the Moslem came on the scenes bringing, as a gift for Christendom, fuller knowledge of classical, especially Aristotelian, texts. The Jews, less bitterly opposed to Mahommedanism than the Christians were, caught fire more rapidly, and in some cases served as an intermediate link or channel of communication. These two religions anticipated the discussion of the problem of faith and reason in the Christian church. According to the great Avicenna and Maimonides, faith and the highest reason are sure to coincide (see [Arabian Philosophy]). According to Ghazali, in his Destruction of Philosophers, the various schools of philosophy cancel each other; reason is bankrupt; faith is everything. (So nearly Jehuda Halevi.) According to Averroes, reason suffices, and faith, with (what he considers) its dreams of immortality and the like, is useful only for the ignorant masses. Christian theology, however, strikes out a line of its own. Moslems and Jews were applying Aristotelian philosophy to rigorously monotheistic faiths; Christianity had been encouraged by Platonism in teaching a trinity of divine persons, and Platonism of a certain order long dominated the middle ages as part of the Augustinian tradition. In sympathy with this Platonism, the medieval church began by assuming the entire mutual harmony of faith and reason. Such is the teaching, along different lines, alike of St Anselm and of Abelard. But, when increased knowledge of Aristotle’s texts (and of the commentaries) led to the victory of a supposed Aristotelianism over a supposed Platonism, Albertus Magnus, and his still more distinguished pupil Thomas Aquinas, mark certain doctrines as belonging to faith but not to reason. They adhere to the general position with exceptions (in the case of what had been considered Platonic doctrines). From the point of view of philosophy, this was a compromise. Faith and reason partly agree, partly diverge. The tendency of the later middle ages is to add to the number of the doctrines with which philosophy cannot deal. Thomas’s great rival, Duns Scotus, does this to a large extent, at times affirming “two truths.” The latter position, ascribed by the schoolmen to the Averroists, becomes dominant among the later Nominalists, William of Occam and his disciples, who withdraw all doctrines of faith from the sphere of reason. This was a second and a more audacious compromise. It is not exactly an attempt to base Christian faith on rational scepticism. It is a consistent policy of harbouring inconsistencies in the same mind. A statement may be true in philosophy and false in theology, or vice versa. To the standpoint of Aquinas, however, the Church of Rome (at least in regard to the basis of doctrine) has more and more returned. The councils of Trent and of the Vatican mark the Two Truths hypothesis as heretical, when they affirm that there is a natural knowledge of God and natural certainty of immortality. Along with this affirmation, the Church of Rome (if less decisively) has adopted the limitations of the Thomist theory by the condemnation of “Ontologism”; certain mysterious doctrines are beyond reason. This cautious compromise sanctioned by the Church does not represent the extremest reaction against nominalism. Even in the nominalistic epoch we have Raymond of Sabunde’s Natural Theology (according to the article in Herzog-Hauck, not the title of the oldest Paris MS., but found in later MSS. and almost all the printed editions) or Liber Creaturarum (c. 1435). The book is not what moderns (schooled unconsciously in post-Reformation developments of Thomist ideas) expect under the name of natural theology. It is an attempt once more to demonstrate all scholastic dogmas out of the book of creation or on principles of natural reason. At many points it follows Anselm closely, and, of course, very often “makes light work” of its task.

The Thomist compromise—or even the more sceptical view of “two truths”—has the merit of giving filling of a kind to the formula “supernatural revelation”—mysteries inaccessible to reason, beyond discovery and beyond comprehension. According to earlier views—repeatedly revived in Protestantism—revelation is just philosophy over again. Can the choice be fairly stated? If revelation is thought of as God’s personal word, and redemption as his personal deed, is it reasonable to view them either as open to a sort of scientific prediction or as capricious and unintelligible? Even in the middle ages there were not wanting those—the St Victors, Bonaventura—who sought to vindicate mystical if not moral redemption as the central thought of Christianity.

V. Earlier Modern Period.—It will be seen that apologetics by no means reissued unchanged from the long period of authority. The compromise of Aquinas, though not unchallenged, holds the field and that even with Protestants. G.W. Leibnitz devotes an introductory chapter in his Théodicée, 1710 (as against Pierre Bayle), to faith and reason. He is a good enough Lutheran to quote as a “mystery” the Eucharist no less than the Trinity, while he insists that truths above are not against reason. Stated thus baldly, has the distinction any meaning? The more celebrated and central thesis of the book—this finite universe, the best of all such that are possible—also restates positions of Augustine and Aquinas.

Before modern philosophy began its career, there was a great revival of ancient philosophy at the Renaissance; sometimes anti-Christian, sometimes pro-Christian. The latter furnishes apologies by Marsilio Ficino, Agostino Steuco, J.L. Vives.

Early in the modern period occurs the great name of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A staunch Roman Catholic, but belonging to a school of Augustinian enthusiasts (the Jansenists), whom the Church put down as heretics, he stands pretty much apart from the general currents. His Pensées, published posthumously, seems to have been meant for a systematic treatise, but it has come to us in fragments. Once again, a lay apologist! A layman’s work may have the advantage of originality or the drawback of imperfect knowledge. Pascal’s work exhibits both characters. It has the originality of rare genius, but it borrows its material (as industrious editors have shown) from very few sources—the Pugio Fidei, M. de Montaigne, P. Charron. Ideas as well as learning are largely Montaigne’s. The latter’s cheerful man-of-the-world scepticism is transfigured in Pascal to a deep distrust of human reason, in part, perhaps, from anti-Protestant motives. But this attitude, while not without parallels both earlier (Ghazali, Jehuda Halevi) and later (H.L. Mansel), has peculiarities in Pascal. It is fallen man whom he pursues with his fierce scorn; his view of man’s nature—intellect as well as character—is to be read in the light of his unflinching Augustinianism. Again, Pascal, unlike most apologists, belongs to the small company of saintly souls. This philosophical sceptic is full of humble joy in salvation, of deep love for the Saviour.

Another French Roman Catholic apologist, P.D. Huet (1630-1721)—within the conditions of his age a prodigy of learning (in apologetics see his Demonstratio Evangelica)—is not uninfluenced by Pascal (Traité de la faiblesse de l’esprit humaine).

As we might expect, Protestant lands are more busily occupied with apologetics. Intolerant reliance upon force presents greater difficulties to them; soon it grows quite obsolete. Benedict Spinoza, the eminent Jewish pantheist (1632-1677), to whom miracle is impossible, revelation a phrase, and who renews pioneer work in Old Testament criticism, finds at least a fair measure of liberty and comfort in Holland (his birth-land). Bayle, the historical sceptic, lectured and published his learned Dictionnaire (1696) at Rotterdam. From Holland, earlier, had proceeded an apologetic work by a man of European fame. Hugo Grotius’s De Veritate Christianae Religionis (1627) is partly the medieval tradition:—Oppose Mahommedans and Jews! It is partly practical:—Arm Christian sailors against religious danger! But in its cool spirit it forecasts the coming age, whose master is John Locke. His Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) is the thesis of “a whole century” of theologians. And his Essay on the Human Understanding (1690) is almost a Bible to men of education during the same period; its lightest word treasured. Locke does not break with the compromise of Aquinas. But he transfers attention from contents to proof. Reason proves that a revelation has been made-and then submits. Leibnitz has to supplement rather than correct Locke on this point.

In such an atmosphere, deism readily uttered its protest against mysterious revelation. Deism is, in fact, the Thomist natural theology (more clearly distinguished from dogmatic theology than in the middle ages, alike by Protestants and by the post-Tridentine Church of Rome) now dissolving partnership with dogmatic and starting in business for itself. Or it is the doctrine of unfallen man’s “natural state”—a doctrine intensified in Protestantism—separating itself from the theologians’ grave doctrine of sin. If Socinianism had challenged natural theology—Christ, according to it, was the prophet who first revealed the way to eternal life—it had glorified the natural powers of man; and the learning of the Arminian divines (friends of Grotius and Locke) had helped to modernize Christian apologetics upon rational lines. Deism now taught that reason, or “the light of nature,” was all-sufficient.

Not to dwell upon earlier continental “Deists” (mentioned by Viret as quoted first in Bayle’s Dictionary and again in the introduction to Leland’s View of the Deistical Writers), Lord Herbert of Cherbury (De Veritate, 1624; De Religione Gentilium, 1645?—according to J.G. Walch’s Bibliotheca Theologica (1757) not published complete until 1663) was universally understood as hinting conclusions hostile to Christianity (cf. also T. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, ch. xxxi.; Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670, ch. xiv.). Professedly, Herbert’s contention merely is that non-Christians feeling after the “supreme God” and the law of righteousness must have a chance of salvation. Herbert was also epoch-making for the whole 18th century in teaching that priests had corrupted this primitive faith. During the 18th century deism spread widely, though its leaders were “irrepressible men like Toland, men of mediocre culture and ability like Anthony Collins, vulgar men like Chubb, irritated and disagreeable men like Matthew Tindal, who conformed that he might enjoy his Oxford fellowship and wrote anonymously that he might relieve his conscience” (A.M. Fairbairn). More distinguished sympathizers are Edward Gibbon, who has the deistic spirit, and David Hume, the historian and philosophical sceptic, who has at least the letter of the deistic creed (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion), and who uses Pascal’s appeal to “faith” in a spirit of mockery (Essay on Miracles). In France the new school found powerful speaking-trumpets, especially Voltaire, the idol of his age—a great denier and scoffer, but always sincerely a believer in the God of reason—and the deeper but wilder spirit of J.J. Rousseau. Others in France developed still more startling conclusions from Locke’s principles, E.B. Condillac’s sensationalism—Locke’s philosophy purged of its more ideal if less logical elements—leading on to materialism in J.O. de la Mettrie; and at least one of the Encyclopedists (P.H. von Holbach) capped materialism with confessed atheism.

In Germany the parallel movement of “illumination” (H.S. Reimarus; J.S. Semler, pioneer in N.T. criticism; and a layman, the great Lessing) took the form of “rationalism” within the church—interpreting Bible texts by main force in a way which the age thought “enlightened” (H.E.G. Paulus, 1761-1851, &c.).

Among the innumerable English anti-deistic writers (see W. Law, The Case of Reason; R. Bentley, or “Phileleutherus Lipsiensis”; &c., &c.), three are of chief importance. Nathaniel Lardner (Arian, 1684-1768) stands in the front rank of the scholarship of his time, and uses his vast knowledge to maintain the genuineness of all books of the New Testament and the perfect accuracy of its history. Joseph Butler, a very original, careful and honest thinker, lifts controversy with deists from details to principles in his Analogy of Religion both Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736). This title introduces us to a new conception. Deists and orthodox in those days agreed in recognizing not merely natural theology but natural religion—“essential religion,” Butler more than once styles it; the expression shows how near he stood intellectually to those he criticized. But morally he stood aloof. In part i.—on Natural Religion—he defends a moral or punishing Deity against the sentimental softness of the age. The God of Nature, whom deists confess does punish in time, if they will but look at the facts; why not in eternity? “Morality,” as others have confessed, is “the nature of things”! Not the Being of God is discussed—Butler will not waste words on triflers (as he thinks them) who deny that—but God’s character. Unfortunately (perhaps) Butler prefers to argue on admitted principles; holds much of his own moral belief in reserve; tries to reduce everything to a question of probable fact. If this hampers him in part i., the situation appears still worse in part ii., which is directly occupied with the defence of Christianity. Butler says nothing about incomprehensible mysteries, and protests that reason is the only ground we have to proceed upon. But by treating the atonement simply as revealed (and unexplained) matter of fact—in spite of some partial analogies in human experience, a thing essentially anomalous—Butler repeats, and applies to the moral contents of Christianity, what Aquinas said of its speculative doctrines. (Whether one calls the unknowable a revealed mystery or an unexplained and inexplicable fact makes little difference.) William Paley (1743-1805) borrows from many writers; he borrows Lardner’s learning and Butler’s “particular evidence for Christianity,” viz. miracles, prophecy and “history”; and he states his points with perfect clearness. No man ever filled a typical position more exactly than Paley. Eighteenth-century ethics—Hedonism, with a theological background. Empiricist Natural Theology—the argument from Design. Christian Evidences—the strong probability of the resurrection of Christ and the consequent authority of his teaching. Horae Paulinae—mutual confirmations of Acts and Epistles; better, though one-sided. When such exclusively “external” arguments are urged, the contents of Christianity go for next to nothing.

VI. Later Modern Period.—Towards the end of the 18th century a new epoch of reconstruction begins in the thought and life of civilization. The leader in speculative philosophy is Immanuel Kant, though he includes many agnostic elements, and draws the inference (which some things in the letter of Butler might seem to warrant) that the essence of Christianity is an ethical theism. While he thus created a new and more ethical “rationalism,” Kant’s many-sided influence, alike in philosophy and in theology, worked to further issues. He (and other Germans, but not G.W.F. Hegel) was represented in England in a fragmentary way by S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834), probably the most typical figure of his period—another layman. His general thought was that “rationalism” represents an uprising of the lower reason or “understanding” against the higher or true “reason.” The mysteries of theology are its best part—not alien to reason but of its substance, the “logos.” This is to upset the compromise of Aquinas and go back to a Christian platonism. Of course the difficulty revives again: If a philosophy, why supernaturally revealed? Thomas Arnold, criticizing Edward Hawkins, appeals rather to the atonement as deeper neglected truth. So in Scotland, Thomas Erskine and Thomas Chalmers—the latter in contradiction to his earlier position—hold that the doctrine of salvation, when translated into experience, furnishes “internal evidence”—a somewhat broader use of the phrase than when it applies merely to evidence of date or authorship drawn from the contents of a book. This gives a new and moral filling to the conception of “supernatural revelation” The attempt to work out either of the reactions against Thomism in new theological systems is pretty much confined to Germany. Hegel’s theological followers, of every shade and party, represent the first, and Schleiermacher’s the second. Schleiermacher rejects natural religion in favour of the positive religions, while the school of A. Ritschl and W. Herrmann reject natural theology outright in favour of revelation—a striking external parallel to early Socinianism. British and American divines, on the other hand, are slow to suspect that a new apologetic principle may mean a new system of apologetics, to say nothing of a new dogmatic. Among the evangelicals, for the most part, natural theology, far from being rejected, is not even modified, and certain doctrines continue to be described as incomprehensible mysteries. No Protestant, of course, can agree with Roman Catholic theology that (supernatural) faith is an obedient assent to church authority and the mysteries it dictates. To Protestantism, faith is personal trust. But the principle is hardly ever carried out to the end. Mysterious doctrines are ascribed by Protestants to scripture; so half of revelation is regarded as matter for blind assent, if another half is luminous in experience. The movement of German philosophy which led from Kant to Hegel has indeed found powerful British champions (T.H. Green, J. and E. Caird, &c.), but less churchly than Coleridge (or F.D. Maurice or B.F. Westcott), though churchly again in J.R. Illingworth and other contributors to Lux Mundi (1890). Before this wave of thought, H.L. Mansel tried (1858) to play Pascal’s game on Kantian principles, developing the sceptical side of Kant’s many-faceted mind. But as he protested against relying on the human conscience—the one element of positive conviction spared by Kant—his ingenuity found few admirers except H. Spencer, who claims him as justifying anti-Christian agnosticism. Butler’s tradition was more directly continued by J.H. Newman—with modifications on becoming a Roman Catholic in the light of the church’s decision in favour of Thomism. A.M. Fairbairn (Catholicism, Roman and Anglican, ch. v., and elsewhere) and E.A. Abbott (Philomythus, and elsewhere) suspect Newman of a sceptical leaven and extend the criticism to Butler’s doctrine of “probability.” Yet it seems plain that any theology, maintaining redemption as historical fact (and not merely ideal), must attach religious importance to conclusions which are technically probable rather than proven. If we transfer Christian evidence from the “historical” to the “philosophical” with H. Rashdall—we surely cut down Christianity to the limits of theism. And the inner mind of Butler has moral anchorage in the Analogy, quite as much as in the Sermons. It is in part ii. more than in part i. of his masterpiece that the light seems to grow dim. Another of the Oxford converts to Rome, W.G. Ward, made vigorous contributions to natural theology.

VII. Contents of Modern Apologetics.—Superficially regarded, philosophy ebbs and flows, whatever progress the debate may reveal to speculative insight. Old positions re-emerge from forgetfulness, and there is always a philosophy to back every “case.” More visible dangers arise for the apologist in the region of science, historical or physical. There the progress of truth, within whatever limits, is manifest. Essays and Reviews (1860) was a vehement announcement of scientific results—startling English conservatism awake for the first time. And in the scientific region the great apologetic classics, like Butler, are hopelessly out of date. The modern apologist must do ephemeral work—unless it should chance that he proves to be the skirmisher, pioneering for a modified dogmatic. He holds a watching brief. While he must beware of hasty speech, he has often to plead that new knowledge does not really threaten faith; or that it is not genuinely established knowledge at all; or else, that faith has mistaken its own grounds, and will gain strength by concentrating on its true field. The work is not always well done; but the Christian church needs it.

1. Apologetics and Philosophy.—The main part of this subject is discussed under [Theism]. Some notes may be added on special points, (a) Freewill is generally assumed on the Christian side (R.C. Church; Scottish philosophy; H. Lotze; J. Martineau; W.G. Ward. Not in a libertarian sense; Leibnitz. New and obscure issues raised by Kant). But there is no continuous tradition or steady trend of discussion. (b) Personal immortality is affirmed as philosophically certain by the Church of Rome and many Protestant writers. Others teach “conditional immortality.” Others base the hope on belief in the resurrection of Christ, (c) Theodicy—the tradition of Leibnitz is preserved (on libertarian lines) by Martineau (A Study of Religion, 1883). See also F.R. Tennant’s Origin and Propagation of Sin (1902)—sin a “bye-product” of a generally good evolution. Others find in the gospel of redemption the true theodicy. (d) The problem of Christian apologetic has been simplified in the past by the prevalence of the Christian ethics and temper even among many non-Christians (e.g. J.S. Mill). But hereafter it may not prove possible for the apologist to assume as unchallenged the Christian moral outlook. Germans have suspected an anti-Christian strain in Goethe; all the world knows of it in E. von Hartmann or F. Nietzsche.

2. Apologetics and Physical Science.—(a) Copernicanism has won its battles and the Church of Rome would fain have its error forgotten. The admission is now general that the Bible cannot be expected to use the language of scientific astronomy. Still, it is not certain that the shock of Copernicanism on supernatural Christianity is exhausted. (b) Geology has also won its battles, and few now try to harmonize it with Genesis. (c) Evolution came down from the clouds when C. Darwin and A.R. Wallace succeeded in displacing the naïf conception of special creation by belief in the origin of species out of other species through a process of natural law. This gave immense vogue to wider and vaguer theories of evolutionary process, notably to H. Spencer’s grandiose cosmic formula in terms of mechanism. Here the apologist has more to say. The special Darwinian hypothesis—natural “selection”—may or may not be true; it was at least a fruitful suggestion. If true, it need not be exhaustive. Again, evolution itself need not apply everywhere. We are offered a philosophical rather than a scientific speculation when E. Caird (Evolution of Religion, 1893) tries to vindicate Christianity as the highest working of nature—true just because evolved from lower religions. The Christian apologist indeed may himself seek, following John Fiske, to philosophize evolution as a restatement of natural theology—“one God, one law, one element and one far-off divine event”—and as at least pointing towards personal immortality. But if evolution is to be the whole truth regarding Christianity, we should have to surrender both supernatural revelation and divine redemption. And these, it may be strongly urged, contain the magic of Christianity. Losing them it might sink into a lifeless theory.

As far as pure science goes, the inference from science in favour of materialism has visibly lost much of its plausibility, and Protestant apologists would probably be prepared to accept in advance all verified discoveries as belonging to a different region from that of faith. Roman Catholic apologetic prefers to negotiate in detail.

3. Apologetics and History.—History brings us nearer the heart of the Christian position. (a) Old Testament criticism won startling victories towards the end of the 19th century. It blots out much supposed knowledge, but throws a vivid and interesting light on the reconstrued process of history. Most Protestants accept the general scheme of criticism; those who hang back make not a few concessions (e.g. J. Orr, Problem of the O.T., 1906). The Roman Catholic Church again prefers an attitude of reserve, (b) New Testament criticism raises even more delicate issues. Positively it may be affirmed that the recovered figure of the historical Jesus is the greatest asset in the possession of modern Christian theology and apologetics. The “Lives” of Christ, Roman Catholic and Protestant; “critical” (D.F. Strauss, A. Renan, &c., &c.) and “believing,” imply this at least. Negatively, “unchallenged historical certainties” are becoming few in number, or are disappearing altogether, through the industry of modern minds. True, the Tübingen criticism of F.C. Baur and his school—important as the first scientific attempt to conceive New Testament conditions and literature as a whole—has been abandoned. (A. Ritschl’s Entstehung der alt-katholischen Kirche, 2nd edition, 1857, was an especially telling reply.) The synoptic gospels are now treated with considerable respect. It is no longer suggested in responsible quarters that they are party documents sacrificing truth to “tendency.” But not all quarters are responsible; and in the effort to grasp scientifically, i.e. accurately, the amazing facts of Christ and primitive Christianity, every imaginable hypothesis is canvassed. Even the Roman Catholic Church produced the Abbé Loisy (though he undertakes to play off church certainties against historical uncertainties). Hitherto at least the fourth gospel has been the touchstone. The authorship of the epistles is in many cases a matter of subordinate importance; at least for Protestants or for those surrendering Bible infallibility, which Rome can hardly do. (c) New Testament history, The apologist must maintain (1) that Jesus of Nazareth is a real historical figure—a point well-nigh overlooked by Strauss, and denied by some modern advocates of a mythical theory; (2) that Jesus is knowable (not one “of whom we really know very little”—B. Jowett) in his teaching, example, character, historical personality; and that he is full of moral splendour. On the other hand, faith has no special interest in claiming that we can compose a biographical study of the development of Jesus. Certainly no early writer thought of providing material for such use. It is a common opinion in Germany that our material is in fact too scanty or too self-contradictory. Yet the fascination of the subject will always revive the attempt. If it succeeds, there will be a new line of communication along which that great personality will tell on men’s minds and hearts. If it fails—there are other channels; character can be known and trusted even when we are baffled by a thing necessarily so full of mystery as the development of a personality. Notably, the manifest non-consciousness of personal guilt in Jesus suggests to us his sinlessness. (3) Apologists maintain that Jesus “claimed” Messiahship. There are speculative constructions of gospel history which eliminate that claim; and no doubt apologetics could—with more or less difficulty—restate its position in a changed form if the paradox of to-day became accepted as historical fact to-morrow. The central apologetic thesis is the uniqueness of the “only-begotten”; it is here that “the supernatural” passes into the substance of Christian faith. But most probably the description of Jesus as thus unique will continue to be associated with the allegation—He told us so; he claimed Messiahship and “died for the claim.” (See preface to 5th ed. of Ecce Homo.) Nor did so superhuman a claim crush him, or deprive his soul of its balance. He imparted to the title a grander significance out of the riches of his personality. (4) In the light of this the “argument from prophecy” is reconstructed. It ceases to lay much stress upon coincidences between Old Testament predictions or “types” and events in Christ’s career. It becomes the assertion; historically, providentially, the expectation of a unique religious figure arose—“the” Messiah; and Jesus gave himself to be thought of as that great figure. (5) It is also claimed as certain that Jesus had marvellous powers of healing. More reserve is being shown towards the other or “nature” miracles. These latter, it may be remarked, are more unambiguously supernatural. But, if Jesus really cured leprosy or really restored the dead to life, we have miracle plainly enough in the region of healing. (6) For Jesus’ own resurrection several lines of evidence are alleged. (i.) All who believe that in any sense Christ rose again insist upon the impression which his personality made during life. It was he whose resurrection seemed credible! Some practically stop here; the apologist proceeds. (ii.) There is the report of the empty grave; historically, not easily waved aside. (iii.) We have New Testament reports of appearances of the risen Jesus; subjective? the mere clothing of the impression made by his personality during life? or objective? “telegrams” from heaven (Th. Keim)—“Veridical Hallucinations”? or something even more, throwing a ray of light perhaps on the state and powers of the happy dead? (iv.) There is the immense influence of Jesus Christ in history, associated with belief in him as the risen Son of God.

In view of the claims of Jesus, different possibilities arise, (i.) The evangelists impute to him a higher claim than he made. This may be called the rationalistic solution; with sympathy in Christ’s ethical teaching, there is relief at minimizing his great claim. So, brilliantly, Wellhausen’s Gospel commentaries and Introduction. (Mark fairly historical; other gospels’ fuller account of Christ’s teaching and claims unreliable.) (ii.) The claim was fraudulent (Reimarus; Renan, ed. 1; popular anti-Christian agitation). This is a counsel of despair. (iii.) He was an enthusiastic dreamer, expecting the world’s end. This the apologist will recognize as the most plausible hostile alternative. He may feel bound to admit an element of illusion in Christ’s vision’ of the future; but he will contend that the apocalyptic form did not destroy the spiritual content of Christ’s revelations—nay, that it was itself the vehicle of great truths. So he will argue as the essence of the matter that (iv.) he who has occupied Christ’s place in history, and won such reverence from the purest souls, was what he claimed to be, and that his many-sidedness comes to focus and harmony when we recognize him as the Christ of God and the Saviour of the world.

To a less extent, similar problems and alternatives arise in regard to the church:—Catholicism a compromise between Jewish Christianity and Pauline or Gentile Christianity (F.C. Baur, &c.); Catholicism the Hellenizing of Christianity (A. Ritschl, A. Harnack); the Catholic church for good and evil the creation of St Paul (P. Wernle, H. Weinel); the church supernaturally guided (R.C. apologetic; in a modified degree High Church apologetic); essential—not necessarily exclusive—truth of Paulinism, essential error in first principles of Catholicism (Protestant apologetic).

Literature.—Omitting the Christian fathers as remote from the present day, we recognize as works of genius Pascal’s Pensées and Butler’s Analogy, to which we might add J.R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865). The philosophical, Platonist, or Idealist line of Christian defence is represented among recent writers by J.R. Illingworth [Anglican], in Personality, Human and Divine (1894), Divine Immanence (1898), Reason and Revelation (1902), who at times seems rather to presuppose the Thomist compromise, and A.M. Fairbairn [Congregationalist], in Place of Christ in Modern Theology (1893), Philosophy of the Christian Religion (1902). The appeal to ethical or Christian experience—“internal evidence”—is found especially in E.A. Abbott [Christianity supernatural and divine, but not miraculous], Through Nature to Christ (1877), The Kernel and the Husk (1886), The Spirit on the Waters (1897), &c., or A.B. Bruce, Chief End of Revelation (1881), The Miraculous Element in the Gospels (1886), Apologetics (1892), and other works; Bruce’s posthumous article, “Jesus” in Encyc. Bib., was understood by some as exchanging Christian orthodoxy for bare theism, but probably its tone of aloofness is due to the attempt to keep well within the limits of what the author considered pure scientific history. Scholarly and apologetic discussion on the gospels and life of Jesus is further represented by the writings of W. Sanday or (earlier) of J.B. Lightfoot. Much American work of merit on the character of Christ is headed by W. E Channing, and by H. Bushnell (in Nature and the Supernatural). For defence of Christ’s resurrection, reference may be made to H. Latham’s The Risen Lord and R. Mackintosh’s First Primer of Apologetics. For modification in light of recent scholarship of argument from prophecy, to Riehm’s Messianic Prophecy, Stanton’s Jewish and Christian Messiah, and Woods’s Hope of Israel. Roman Catholic apologetics—of necessity, Thomist—is well represented by Professor Schanz of Tübingen. The whole Ritschl movement is apologetic in spirit; best English account in A.E. Garvie’s Ritschlian Theology (1899). See also the chief church histories or histories of doctrine (Harnack; Loofs; Hagenbach; Shedd); A.S. Farrar’s Critical History of Free (i.e. anti-Christian) Thought (Bampton Lectures, 1862); R.C. Trench’s Introduction to Notes on the Miracles, and F.W. Macran’s English Apologetic Theology (1905). For the 18th century, G.V. Lechler’s Geschichte des englischen Deismus (1841); Mark Pattison in Essays and Reviews (1860); Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in 18th Century (agnostic); John Hunt, Religious Thought in England (3 vols., 1870-1873).

(R. Ma.)

[1] While these writings are of great historical value, they do not, of course, represent the Christian argument as conceived to-day. The Church of Rome prefers medieval or modern statements of its position; Protestantism can use only modern statements.

APOLOGUE (from the Gr. ἀπόλογος, a statement or account), a short fable or allegorical story, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for some moral doctrine or to convey some useful lesson. One of the best known is that of Jotham in the Book of Judges (ix. 7-15); others are “The City Rat and Field Rat,” by Horace, “The Belly and its Members,” by the patrician Menenius Agrippa in the second book of Livy, and perhaps most famous of all, those of Aesop. The term is applied more particularly to a story in which the actors or speakers are taken from the brute creation or inanimate nature. An apologue is distinguished from a fable in that there is always some moral sense present, which there need not be in a fable. It is generally dramatic, and has been defined as “a satire in action.” It differs from a parable in several respects. A parable is equally an ingenious tale intended to correct manners, but it can be true, while an apologue, with its introduction of animals and plants, to which it lends our ideas and language and emotions, is necessarily devoid of real truth, and even of all probability. The parable reaches heights to which the apologue cannot aspire, for the points in which brutes and inanimate nature present analogies to man are principally those of his lower nature, and the lessons taught by the apologue seldom therefore reach beyond prudential morality, whereas the parable aims at representing the relations between man and God. It finds its framework in the world of nature as it actually is, and not in any grotesque parody of it, and it exhibits real and not fanciful analogies. The apologue seizes on that which man has in common with creatures below him, and the parable on that which he has in common with God. Still, in spite of the difference of moral level, Martin Luther thought so highly of apologues as counsellors of virtue that he edited and revised Aesop and wrote a characteristic preface to the volume. The origin of the apologue is extremely ancient and comes from the East, which is the natural fatherland of everything connected with allegory, metaphor and imagination. Veiled truth was often necessary in the East, particularly with the slaves, who dared not reveal their minds too openly. It is noteworthy that the two fathers of apologue in the West were slaves, namely Aesop and Phaedrus. La Fontaine in France; Gay and Dodsley in England; Gellert, Lessing and Hagedorn in Germany; Tomas de Iriarte in Spain, and Krilov in Russia, are leading modern writers of apologues. Length is not an essential matter in the definition of an apologue. Those of La Fontaine are often very short, as, for example, “Le Coque et la Perle.” On the other hand, in the romances of Reynard the Fox we have medieval apologues arranged in cycles, and attaining epical dimensions. An Italian fabulist, Corti, is said to have developed an apologue of “The Talking Animals” to the bulk of twenty-six cantos. La Motte, writing at a time when this species of literature was universally admired, attributes its popularity to the fact that it ménage et flatte l’amour-propre by inculcating virtue in an amusing manner without seeming to dictate or insist. This was the ordinary 18th-century view of the matter, but Rousseau contested the educational value of instruction given in this indirect form.

A work by P. Soullé, La Fontaine et ses devanciers (1866), is a history of the apologue from the earliest times until its final triumph in France.

APOLOGY (from Gr. ἀπολογία, defence), in its usual sense, an expression of regret for something which has been wrongfully said or done; a withdrawal or retraction of some charge or imputation which is false. In an action for libel, the fact that an apology has been promptly and fully made is a plea in mitigation of damages. The apology should have the same form of publicity as the original charge. If made publicly, the proper form is an advertisement in a newspaper; if made within the hearing of a few only, a letter of apology, which may be read to those who have heard what was said, should be sufficient. By the English Libel Act 1843, s. 2, it was enacted that in an action for libel contained in a newspaper it is a defence for the defendant to plead that the libel was inserted without actual malice and without gross negligence, and that before the commencement of the action and at the earliest opportunity afterwards he inserted in the newspaper a full apology for the libel, or, where the newspaper in which the libel appeared was published at intervals exceeding one week, he offered to publish the apology in any newspaper selected by the plaintiff. The apology must be full and must be printed in as conspicuous a place and manner as the libel was.

The word “apology” or “apologia” is also used in the sense of defence or vindication, the only meaning of the Greek ἀπολογία, especially of the defence of a doctrine or system, or of religious or other beliefs, &c., e.g. Justin Martyr’s Apology or J.H. Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua. (See [Apologetics].)

APONEUROSIS (ἀπο, away, and νεῦρον, a sinew), in anatomy, a membrane separating muscles from each other.

APOPHTHEGM (from the ἀπόφθεγμα), a short and pointed utterance. The usual spelling up to Johnson’s day was apothegm, which Webster and Worcester still prefer; it indicates the pronunciation—i.e. “apothem”—better than the other, which, however, is more usual in England and follows the derivation. Such sententious remarks as “Knowledge is Power” are apophthegms. They become “proverbs” by age and acceptance. Plutarch made a famous collection in his Apophthegmata Laconica.

APOPHYGE (Gr. ἀποφυγή, a flying off), in architecture, the lowest part of the shaft of an Ionic or Corinthian column, or the highest member of its base if the column be considered as a whole. The apophyge is the inverted cavetto or concave sweep, on the upper edge of which the diminishing shaft rests.

APOPHYLLITE, a mineral often classed with the zeolites, since it behaves like these when heated before the blowpipe and has the same mode of occurrence; it differs, however, from the zeolites proper in containing no aluminium. It is a hydrous potassium and calcium silicate, H7KCa4(SiO3)8 + 4½(H2O). A small amount of fluorine is often present, and it is one of the few minerals in which ammonium has been detected. The temperature at which the water is expelled is higher than is usually the case with zeolites; none is given off below 200°, and only about half at 250°; this is slowly reabsorbed again from moist air, and is therefore regarded as water of crystallization, the remainder being water of constitution. When heated before the blowpipe, the mineral exfoliates, owing to loss of water, and on this account was named apophyllite by R.J. Haüy in 1806, from the Greek ἀπο, from, and φύλλον, a leaf.

Fig. 1.	Fig. 2.

Apophyllite always occurs as distinct crystals, which belong to the tetragonal system. The form is either a square prism terminated by the basal planes (fig. 2), or an acute pyramid (fig. 1). A prominent feature of the mineral is its perfect basal cleavage, on which the lustre is markedly pearly, presenting, in white crystals, somewhat the appearance of the eye of a fish after boiling, hence the old name fish-eye-stone or ichthyophthalmite for the mineral. On other surfaces the lustre is vitreous. The crystals are usually transparent and colourless, sometimes with a greenish or rose-red tint. Opaque white crystals of cubic habit have been called albine; xylochlore is an olive-green variety. The hardness is 4½, and the specific gravity 2.35.

The optical characters of the mineral are of special interest, and have been much studied. The sign of the double refraction may be either positive or negative, and some crystals are divided into optically biaxial sectors. The variety known as leucocyclite shows, when examined in convergent polarized light, a peculiar interference figure, the rings being alternately white and violet-black and not coloured as in a normal figure seen in white light.

Apophyllite is a mineral of secondary origin, commonly occurring, in association with other zeolites, in amygdaloidal cavities in basalt and melaphyre. Magnificent groups of greenish and colourless tabular crystals, the crystals several inches across, were found, with flesh-red stilbite, in the Deccan traps of the Western Gháts, near Bombay, during the construction of the Great Indian Peninsular railway. Groups of crystals of a beautiful pink colour have been found in the silver veins of Andreasberg in the Harz and of Guanaxuato in Mexico. Crystals of recent formation have been detected in the Roman remains at the hot springs of Plombières in France.

(L. J. S.)

APOPHYSIS (Gr. ἀπόφυσις, offshoot), a bony protuberance, in human physiology; also a botanical term for the swelling of the spore-case in certain mosses.

APOPLEXY (Gr. ἀποπληξία, from ἀποπλήσσειν, to strike down, to stun), the term employed by Galen to designate the “sudden loss of feeling and movement of the whole body, with the exception of respiration,” to which, after the time of Harvey, was added “and with the exception of the circulation.” Although the term is occasionally employed in medicine with other significations, yet in its general acceptation apoplexy may be defined as a sudden loss of consciousness, of sensibility, and of movement without any essential modification of the respiratory and circulatory functions occasioned by some brain disease. It was discovered that the majority of the cases of apoplexy were due to cerebral haemorrhage, and what looked like cerebral haemorrhage, red softening; and the idea for a long time prevailed that apoplexy and cerebral haemorrhage could be employed as synonymous terms, and that an individual who, in popular parlance, “had an apoplectic stroke,” had necessarily suffered from haemorrhage into his brain. A small haemorrhage may not, however, cause an apoplectic fit, nor is an apoplectic fit always caused by haemorrhage; it may be due to sudden blocking of a large vessel by a clot from a distant part (embolism), or by a sudden clotting of the blood in the vessel itself (thrombosis). Owing to the prevailing idea in former times that cerebral haemorrhage and apoplexy were synonymous terms, the word apoplexy was applied to haemorrhage into other organs than the brain; thus the terms pulmonary apoplexy, retinal apoplexy and splenic apoplexy were used.

The term “apoplexy” is now used in clinical medicine to denote that form of coma or deep state of unconsciousness which is due to sudden disturbance of the cerebral circulation occasioned by a local cause within the cranial cavity, as distinct from the loss of consciousness due to sudden failure of the heart’s action (syncope) or the coma of narcotic or alcoholic poisoning, of status epilepticus, of uraemia or of head injury.

The sudden coma of sunstroke and heat-stroke might be included, although owing to the suddenness with which a person may be struck down, the term heat apoplexy is frequently used, and, from an etymological point of view, quite justifiably. The older writers use the term simple apoplexy for a sudden attack which could not be explained by any visible disease. Again, congestive apoplexy was applied to those cases of coma where, at the autopsy, nothing was found to account for the coma and death except engorgement of the vessels of the brain and its membranes. In senile dementia and in general paralysis the brain is shrunken and the convolutions atrophied, the increased space in the ventricles and between the convolutions being filled up with the cerebro-spinal fluid. In these diseases apoplectic states may arise, terminating fatally; the excess of fluid found in such cases was formerly thought to be the cause of the symptoms, consequently the condition was called serous apoplexy. Such terms are no longer used, owing to the better knowledge of the pathology of brain disease.

Having thus narrowed down the application of the term “apoplexy,” we are in a position to consider its chief features, and the mechanism by which it is produced. Apoplexy may be rapidly fatal, but it is very seldom instantly fatal. The onset is usually sudden, and sometimes the individual may be struck down in an instant, senseless and motionless, “warranting those epithets, which the ancients applied to the victims of this disease, of attoniti and siderati, as if they were thunder-stricken or planet-struck” (Sir Thomas Watson). The attack, however, may be less sudden and, not infrequently, attended by a convulsion; while occasionally, in the condition termed ingravescent apoplexy, the coma is gradual in its onset, occupying hours in its development. Although unexpected, various warning symptoms, sometimes slight, sometimes pronounced, occur in the majority of cases. Such are, fulness in the head, headache, giddiness, noises in the ears, mental confusion, slight lapses of consciousness, numbness or tingling in the limbs. A characteristic apoplectic attack presents the following phenomena: the individual falls down suddenly and lies without sense or motion, except that his pulse keeps beating and his breathing continues. He appears to be in a deep sleep, from which he cannot be roused; the breathing is laboured and stertorous, and is accompanied with puffing out of the cheeks; the pulse may be beating more strongly than natural, and the face is often flushed and turgid. The reflexes are abolished. Although apoplexy may occur without paralysis, and paralysis without apoplexy, the two, owning the same cause, very frequently co-exist, or happen in immediate sequence and connexion; consequently there is in most cases definite evidence of paralysis affecting usually one side of the body in addition to the coma. Thus the pupils are unequal; there may be asymmetry of the face, or the limbs may be more rigid or flaccid on one side than on the other. These signs of localized disease enable a distinction to be made from the coma of narcotic poisoning and alcoholic intoxication. It must be borne in mind that a person smelling strongly of liquor and found lying in the street in a comatose state may be suffering from apoplexy, and the error of sending a dying man to a police cell may be avoided by this knowledge.

If the fit is only moderately severe, the reflexes soon return, and the patient may in a few hours show indications of returning consciousness by making some movements or opening his eyes when spoken to, although later it may be found that he is unable to speak, or may be paralysed or mentally afflicted (see [Paralysis]). In severe cases the coma deepens and the patient dies, usually from interference with the breathing, or, less commonly, from arrest of the heart’s action.

The mechanism by which apoplexy is produced has been a matter of much dispute; the condition was formerly ascribed to the pressure exerted by the clot on the rest of the brain, but there is no increase of intracranial pressure in an apoplectic fit occurring as a result of the sudden closure of a large vessel by embolism or thrombosis. Suddenness of the lesion appears to be, then, the essential element common to all cases of apoplexy from organic brain disease. It is the sudden shock to the delicate mechanism that produces the unconsciousness; but seeing that the coma is usually deeper and more prolonged in cerebral haemorrhage than when occasioned by vascular occlusion, and that an ingravescent apoplexy coma gradually develops and deepens as the amount of haemorrhage increases, we may presume that increase of intracranial pressure does play an important part in the degree and intensity of the coma caused by the rupture of a vessel. Apoplexy seldom occurs under forty years of age, but owing to the fact that disease of the cerebral vessels may exist at any age, from causes which are fully explained in the article [Neuropathology], no period of life is exempt; consequently cases of true apoplexy are not wanting even in very young children. Recognizing that there are two causes of apoplexy in advanced life, viz. (1) sudden rupture of a diseased vessel usually associated with high arterial pressure, enlarged, powerfully acting heart and chronic renal disease, and (2) the sudden clotting of blood in a large diseased vessel favoured by a low arterial pressure due to a weak-acting heart, it is obvious that the character of the pulse forms a good guide to the diagnosis of the cause, the prevention and warding off of an attack, and the treatment of such should it occur.

Anything which tends directly or indirectly to increase arterial pressure within the cerebral blood-vessels may bring on an attack of cerebral haemorrhage; and although the identification of an apoplectic habit of body with a stout build, a short neck and florid complexion is now generally discredited, it being admitted that apoplexy occurs as frequently in thin and spare persons who present no such peculiarity of conformation, yet a plethoric habit of body, occasioned by immoderate eating or drinking associated with the gouty diathesis, leads to a general arterio-sclerosis and high arterial pressure. All conditions which can give rise to a local intracranial or a general bodily increase of the arterial pressure, i.e. severe exertion of body and mind, violent emotions, much stooping, overheated rooms, exposure to the sun, sudden shocks to the body, constipation and straining at stool, may, by suddenly increasing the strain on the wall of a diseased vessel, lead to its rupture.

The outlook of apoplexy is generally unfavourable in cases where the coma is profound; death may take place at different intervals after the onset. If the patient, after recovering from the initial coma, suffers with continual headache and lapses into a drowsy state, the result is likely to be serious; for such a condition probably indicates that an inflammatory change has taken place about the clot or in the area of softening.

Treatment.—The patient should be placed in the recumbent position with the head and shoulders slightly raised. He should be moved as little as possible from the place where the attack occurred. The medical man who is summoned will probably give the following directions: an ice-bag to be applied to the head; a few grains of calomel or a drop of croton oil in butter to be placed on the tongue, or an enema of castor oil to be administered. He may find it necessary to draw off the water with a catheter. The practice of blood-letting, once so common in this disease, is seldom resorted to, although in some cases, where there is very high arterial tension and a general state of plethora, it might be beneficial. Depletives are not employed where there is evidence of failure of the heart’s action; indeed the cautious administration of stimulants may be necessary, either subcutaneously or by the mouth (if there exist a power of swallowing), together with warm applications to the surface of the body; a water-bed may be required, and careful nursing, is essential to prevent complications, especially the formation of bedsores.

(F. W. Mo.)

APOROSE (from Gr. ἀ, without, and πόρος, passage), a biological term meaning imperforate, or not porous: there is a group of corals called Aporosa.

APOSIOPESIS (the Greek for “becoming silent”), a rhetorical device by which the speaker or writer stops short and leaves something unexpressed, but yet obvious, to be supplied by the imagination. The classical example is the threat, “Quos ego——!” of Neptune (in Virgil, Aen. i. 135).

APOSTASY (ἀπόστασις, in classical Greek a defection or revolt from a military commander), a term generally employed to describe a complete renunciation of the Christian faith, or even an exchange of one form of it for another, especially if the motive be unworthy. In the first centuries of the Christian era, apostasy was most commonly induced by persecution, and was indicated by some outward act, such as offering incense to a heathen deity or blaspheming the name of Christ.[1] In the Roman Catholic Church the word is also applied to the renunciation of monastic vows (apostasis a monachatu), and to the abandonment of the clerical profession for the life of the world (apostasis a clericatu). Such defection was formerly often punished severely.

[1] The readmission of such apostates to the church was a matter that occasioned serious controversy. The emperor Julian’s “Apostasy” is discussed under [Julian].

APOSTIL, or Apostille (possibly connected with Lat. appositum, placed near), a marginal note made by a commentator.

APOSTLE (ἀπόστολος, one sent forth on a mission, an envoy, as in Is. xviii. 2; Symmachus, ἀποστέλλειν ἀποστόλους; Aquila, πρεσβευτάς), a technical term used in the New Testament and in Christian literature generally for a special envoy of Jesus Christ. How far it had any similar use in Judaism in Christ’s day is uncertain; but in the 4th century A.D., at any rate, it denoted responsible envoys from the central Jewish authority, especially for the collection of religious funds. In its first and simplest Christian form, the idea is present already in Mark iii. 14 f., where from the general circle of his disciples Jesus “made twelve (‘whom he also named apostles,’ Luke vi. 13, but doubtful in Mark), that they should be with him, and that he might from time to time send them forth (ἵνα ἀποστέλλῃ) to preach and to have authority to cast out demons.” Later on (vi. 6 ff.), in connexion with systematic preaching among the villages of Galilee, Jesus begins actually to “send forth” the twelve, two by two; and on their return from this mission (vi. 30) they are for the first time described as “apostles” or missionary envoys. Matthew (x. 1 ff.) blends the calling of the twelve with their actual sending forth, while Luke (vi. 13) makes Jesus himself call them “apostles” (for Luke’s usage cf. xi. 49, “prophets and apostles,” where Matthew, xxiii. 34, has “prophets and wise men and scribes”). But it is doubtful whether Jesus ever used the term for the Twelve, in relation to their temporary missions, any more than for the “seventy others” whom he “sent forth” later (Luke x. 1). Even the Fourth Gospel never so describes them. It simply has “a servant is not greater than his lord, neither an apostle (envoy) greater than he that sent him” (xiii. 16); and applies the idea of “mission” alike to Jesus (cf. Heb. iii. 1, “Jesus, the apostle ... of our profession”) and to his disciples, generally, as represented by the Twelve (xvii. 18, with 3, 6 ff.). But while ideally all Christ’s disciples were “sent” with the Father’s Name in charge, there were different degrees in which this applied in practice; and so we find “apostle” used in several senses, once it emerges as a technical term.

1. In the Apostolic age itself, “apostle” often denotes simply an “envoy,” commissioned by Jesus Christ to be a primary witness and preacher of the Messianic Kingdom. This wide sense was shown by Lightfoot (in his commentary on Galatians, 1865) to exist in the New Testament, e.g. in 1 Cor. xii. 28 f., Eph. iv. ii, Rom. xvi. 7; and his view has since been emphasized[1] by the discovery of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (see [Didache]), with its itinerant order of “apostles,” who, together with “prophets” (cf. Eph. ii. 20, iii. 5) and “teachers,” constituted a charismatic and seemingly unordained ministry of the Word, in some part of the Church (in Syria?) during the early sub-apostolic age. Paul is our earliest witness, as just cited; also in 1 Cor. xv. 5 ff., where he seems to quote the language of Palestinian tradition, in saying that Christ “appeared to Cephas; then to the Twelve; then ... to James; then to the apostles one and all (τοῖς ἀποστόλοις πᾶσιν); and last of all ... to me also.” The appearance to “all the Apostles” must refer to the final commission given by the risen Christ to certain assembled disciples (Acts i. 6 ff., cf. Luke xxiv. 33), including not only the Twelve and the Lord’s brethren (i. 13 f.), but also some at least of the Seventy. Of this wider circle of witnesses, taken from among personal disciples during Jesus’s earthly ministry, we get a further glimpse in the election of one from their number to fill Judas’s place among the Twelve (i. 21 ff.), as the primary official witnesses of Messiah and his resurrection. Many of the 120 then present (Acts i. 15), and not only the two set forward for final choice, must have been personal disciples, who by the recent commission had been made “apostles.” Among such we may perhaps name Judas Barsabbas and Silas (Acts xv. 22, cf. i. 23), if not also Barnabas (1 Cor. ix. 6) and Andronicus and Junia (Rom. xvi. 7).

So far, then, we gather that the original Palestinian type of apostleship meant simply (a) personal mission from the risen Christ (cf. I Cor. ix. i), following on (b) some preliminary intercourse with Jesus in his earthly ministry. It was pre-eminence in the latter qualification that gave the Twelve their special status among apostles (Acts i. 26, ii. 14, vi. 2; in Acts generally they are simply “the apostles”). Conversely, it was Paul’s lack in this respect which lay at the root of his difficulties as an apostle.

It is possible, though not certain, that even those Judaizing missionaries at Corinth whom Paul styles “false-apostles” or, ironically, “the superlative apostles” (2 Cor. xi. 5, 13; xii. 11), rested part of their claim to superiority over Paul on (b), possibly even as having done service to Christ when on earth (2 Cor. xi. 18, 23). There is no sign in 2 Cor. that they laid claim to (a). If this be so, they were “Christ’s apostles” only indirectly, “through men” (as some had alleged touching Paul, cf. Gal. i. 1), i.e. as sent forth on mission work by certain Jerusalem leaders with letters of introduction (2 Cor. iii. 1; E. von Dobschutz, Problems der apost. Zeitalters, p. 106).

2. The Twelve.—When Jesus selected an inner circle of disciples for continuous training by personal intercourse, his choice of “twelve” had direct reference to the tribes of Israel (Matt. xix. 28; Luke xxii. 30). This gave them a symbolic or representative character as a closed body (cf. Rev. xxi. 14), marking them off as the primary religious authority (cf. Acts ii. 42, “the apostles’ teaching”) among the “disciples” or “brethren,” when these began to assume the form of a community or church. The relationship which other “apostles” had enjoyed with the Master had been uncertain; they had been his recognized intimates, and that as a body. Naturally, then, they took the lead, collectively—in form at least, though really the initiative lay with one or two of their own number, Peter in particular. The process of practical differentiation from their fellow apostles was furthered by the concentration of the Twelve, or at least of its most marked representatives, in Jerusalem, for a considerable period (Acts viii. 1, cf. xii. 1 ff.; an early tradition specifies twelve years). Other apostles soon went forth on their mission to “the cities of Israel” (cf. Acts ix. 31), and so exercised but little influence on the central policy of the Church. Hence their shadowy existence in the New Testament, though the actual wording of Matt. x. 5-42, read in the light of the Didachi, may help us to conceive their work in its main features.

3. “Pillar” Apostles.—But in fact differentiation between apostles existed among the Twelve also. There were “pillars,” like Peter and John (and his brother James until his death), who really determined matters of grave moment, as in the conference with Paul in Gal. ii. 9—a conference which laid the basis of the latter’s status as an apostle even in the eyes of Jewish Christians. Such pre-eminence was but the sequel of personal distinctions visible even in the preparatory days of discipleship, and it warns us against viewing the primitive facts touching apostles in the official light of later times.

Consciousness of such personal pre-eminence has left its marks on the lists of the Twelve in the New Testament. Thus (1) Peter, James, John, Andrew, always appear as the first four, though the order varies, Mark representing relative prominence during Christ’s ministry, and Acts actual influence in the Apostolic Church (cf. Luke viii. 51, ix. 28). (2) The others also stand in groups of four, the first name in each being constant, while the order of the rest varies.

The same lesson emerges when we note that one such apostolic “pillar” stood outside the Twelve altogether, viz. James, the Lord’s brother (Gal. ii. 9, cf. i. 19); and further, that “the Lord’s brethren” seem to have ranked above “apostles” generally, being named between them and Peter in 1 Cor. ix. 5. That is, they too were apostles with the addition of a certain personal distinction.

4. Paul, the “Apostle of the Gentiles.”—So far apostles are only of the Palestinian type, taken from among actual hearers of the Messiah and with a mission primarily to Jews—apostles “of the circumcision” (Gal. ii. 7-9). Now, however, emerges a new apostleship, that to the Gentiles; and with the change of mission goes also some change in the type of missionary or apostle. Of this type Paul was the first, and he remained its primary, and in some senses its only, example. Though he could claim, on occasion, to satisfy the old test of having seen the risen Lord (1 Cor. ix. 1, cf. xv. 8), he himself laid stress not on this, but on the revelation within his own soul of Jesus as God’s Son, and of the Gospel latent therein (Gal. i. 16). This was his divine call as “apostle of the Gentiles” (Rom. xi. 13); here lay both his qualification and his credentials, once the fruits of the divine inworking were manifest in the success of his missionary work (Gal. ii. 8 f.; 1 Cor. xi. 1 f.; 2 Cor. in. 2 f., xii. 12). But this new criterion of apostleship was capable of wider application, one dispensing altogether with vision of the risen Lord—which could not even in Paul’s case be proved so fully as in the case of the original apostles—but appealing to the “signs of an apostle” (1 Cor. ix. 2; 2 Cor. xii. 12), the tokens of spiritual gift visible in work done, and particularly in the planting of the Gospel in fresh fields (2 Cor. x. 14-18). It may be in this wide charismatic sense that Paul uses the term in 1 Cor. xii. 28 f., Eph. ii. 20, iii. 5, iv. 11, and especially in Rom. xvi. 7, “men of mark among the apostles” (cf. 2 Cor. xi. 13, “pseudo-apostles” masquerading as “apostles of Christ,” and perhaps 1 Thess. ii, 6, of himself and Silas). That he used it in senses differing with the context is proved by 1 Cor. xv. 9, where he styles himself “the least of apostles,” although in other connexions he claims the very highest rank, co-ordinate even with the Twelve as a body (Gal. ii. 7 ff.), in virtue of his distinctive Gospel.

This point of view was not widely shared even in circles appreciative of his actual work. To most he seemed but a fruitful worker within lines determined by “the twelve apostles of the Lamb” as a body (Rev. xxi. 14). So we read of “the plant (Church) which the twelve apostles of the Beloved shall plant” (Ascension of Isaiah, iv. 3); “those who preached the Gospel to us (especially Gentiles)... unto whom He gave authority over the Gospel, being twelve for a witness to the tribes” (Barn. viii. 3, cf. v. 9); and the going forth of the Twelve, after twelve years, beyond Palestine “into the world,” to give it a chance to hear (Preaching of Peter, in Clem. Alex. Strom. vi. 5.43; 6.48). Later on, however, his own claim told on the Church’s mind, when his epistles were read in church as a collection styled simply “the Apostle.”

As the primary medium of the Gentile Gospel (Gal. i. 16, cf. i. 8, ii. 2) Paul had no peers as an “apostle of the Gentiles” (Rom. xi. 13, cf. XV. 15-20, and see 1 Cor. xv. 8, “last of all to me”), unless it were Barnabas who shares with him the title “apostle” in Acts xiv. 4, 14—possibly with reference to the special “work” on which they had recently been “sent forth by the Spirit” (xiii. 2, 4). Yet such as shared the spiritual gift (charisma) of missionary power in sufficient degree, were in fact apostles of Christ in the Spirit (1 Cor. xii. 28, II). Such a secondary type of apostolate—answering to “apostolic missionaries” of later times (cf. the use of ἱεραπόστολος in this sense by the Orthodox Eastern Church to-day)—would help to account for the apostolic claims of the missionaries censured in Rev. ii. 2, as also for the “apostles” of the second generation implied in the Didachē.

In the sub-apostolic age, however, the class of “missionaries” enjoying a charisma such as was conceived to convey apostolic commission through the Spirit, soon became distinguished from “apostles” (cf. Hennas, Sim. ix. 15.4, “the apostles and teachers of the message of the Son of God,” so 25.2; in 17.1 the apostles are reckoned as twelve), as the title became more and more confined by usage to the original apostles, particularly the Twelve as a body (e.g. Ascension of Isaiah and the Preaching of Peter), or to them and Paul (e.g. in Clement and Ignatius), and as reverence for these latter grew in connexion with their story in the Gospels and in Acts.[2] Thus Eusebius describes as “evangelists” (cf. Philip the Evangelist in Acts xxi. 8, also Eph. iv. 11, 2 Tim. iv. 5) those who “occupied the first rank in the succession to the Apostles” in missionary work (Hist. Eccl. iii. 37, cf. v. 10). Yet the wider sense of “apostle” did not at once die out even in the third and fourth generations. It lingered on as applied to the Seventy[3]—by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement and Origen— and even to Clement of Rome, by Clem. Alex. (? as a “fellow-worker” of Paul, Phil. iv. 3); while the adjective “apostolic” was applied to men like Polycarp (in his contemporary Acts of Martyrdom) and the Phrygian, Alexander, martyred at Lyons in A.D. 177 (Eus. v. 1), who was “not without share of apostolic charisma.”

The authority attaching to apostles was essentially spiritual in character and in the conditions of its exercise. Anything like autocracy among his followers was alien to Jesus’s own teaching (Matt, xxiii. 6-11). All Christians were “brethren,” and the basis of pre-eminence among them was relative ability for service. But the personal relation of the original Palestinian apostles to Jesus himself as Master gave them a unique fitness as authorized witnesses, from which flowed naturally, by sheer spiritual influence, such special forms of authority as they came gradually to exercise in the early Church. “There is no trace in Scripture of a formal commission of authority for government from Christ Himself” (Hort, Chr. Eccl. p. 84) given to apostles, save as representing the brethren in their collective action. Even the “resolutions” (δόγματα) of the Jerusalem conference were not set forth by the apostles present simply in their own name, nor as ipso facto binding on the conscience of the Antiochene Church. They expressed “a claim to deference rather than a right to be obeyed” (Hort, op. cit. 81-85). Such was the kind of authority attaching to apostles, whether collectively or individually. It was not a fixed notion, but varied in quantity and quality with the growing maturity of converts. This is how Paul, from whom we gather most on the point, conceives the matter. The exercise of his spiritual authority is not absolute, lest he “lord it over their faith”; consent of conscience or of “faith” is ever requisite (2 Cor. i. 24; cf. Rom. xiv. 23). But the principle was elastic in application, and would take more patriarchal forms in Palestine than in the Greek world. The case was essentially the same as on the various mission-fields to-day, where the position of the “missionary” is at first one of great spiritual initiative and authority, limited only by his own sense of the fitness of things, in the light of local usages. So the notion of formal or constitutional authority attaching to the apostolate, in its various senses, is an anachronism for the apostolic age. The tendency, however, was for their authority to be conceived more and more on formal lines, and, particularly after their deaths, as absolute.

The authority attaching to apostles as writers, which led gradually to the formation of a New Testament Canon—“the Apostles” side by side with “the Books” of the Old Testament (so 2 Clement xiv., c. A.D. 120-140)—is a subject by itself (see [Bible]).

This change of conception helped to further the notion of a certain devolution of apostolic powers to successors constituted by act of ordination. The earliest idea of an apostolical succession meant simply the re-emergence in others of the apostolic spirit of missionary enthusiasm. “The first rank in the succession of the apostles” consisted of men eminent as disciples of theirs, and so fitted to continue their labours (Euseb. iii. 37); and even under Commodus (A.D. 180-193) there were “evangelists of the word” possessed of “inspired zeal to emulate apostles” (v. 10). Such were perhaps the “apostles” of the Didachē. Of the notion of apostolic succession in ministerial grace conferred by ordination, there is little or no trace before Irenaeus. The famous passage in Clement of Rome (xliv. 2) refers simply to the succession of one set of men to another in an office of apostolic institution. The grace that makes Polycarp “an apostolic and prophetic teacher” (Mart. Polyc. 16) is peculiar to him personally. But Irenaeus holds, apparently on a priori grounds, that “elders” who stand in orderly succession to the apostolic founders of the true tradition in the churches, have, “along with the succession of oversight,” also an “assured gift of (insight into) truth” by the Father’s good pleasure (“cum episcopatus successione charisma veritatis certum secundum placitum Patris acceperunt”), in contrast to heretics who wilfully stand outside this approved line of transmission (adv. Haer. iv. 26. 2). So far, indeed, the succession is not limited to the monarchical episcopate as distinct from the presbyteral order to which it belonged (cf. “presbyterii ordo, principalis consessio” in the same context, and see iii. 14. 2), though the bishops of apostolic churches, as capable of being traced individually (iii. 3. 1), are specially appealed to as witnesses (cf. iv. 33. 8, v. 19. 2)—as earlier by Hegesippus (Euseb. iv. 22). Nor is there mention of sacerdotal grace attaching to the succession in apostolic truth.[4] But once the idea of supernatural grace going along with office as such (of which we have already a trace in the Ignatian bishop, though without the notion of actual apostolic succession) arose in connexion with successio ab apostolis, the full development of the doctrine was but a matter of time.[5]

Literature.—In England the modern treatment of the subject dates from J.B. Lightfoot’s dissertation in his Commentary on Galatians, to which Dr F.J.A. Hort’s The Christian Ecclesia added elements of value; see also T.M. Lindsay, The Church and the Ministry, and articles in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible and the Ency. Biblica; A. Harnack, Die Lehre der Apostel, pp. 93 ff., and Dogmengeschichte (3rd ed.), i. 153 ff.; E. Haupt, Zum Verstandnis d. Apostolats in NT. (Halle, 1896); and especially H. Monnier, La Notion de l’apostolat, des origines à Irénée (Paris, 1903). The later legends and their sources are examined by T. Schermann, Propheten- und Apostellegenden (Leipzig, 1907).

(J. V. B.)

[1] By analogy, that is; for the wider sense of “apostle” in the Apostolic age need not be identical with a sub-apostolic use of the term (see below, 4 fin.).

[2] The tendency is already visible in the Lucan writings. An anologous process is seen in the use of “disciple,” applicable in the apostolic age to Christians at large, but in the course of the sub-apostolic age restricted to personal “disciples of the Lord” or to martyrs (Papias in Eus. iii. 39, cf. Ignatius, Ad Eph. i. 2).

[3] In the Edessene legend of Abgar, in Eus. i. 12, we read that “Judas, who is also Thomas, sent Thaddaeus as apostle—one of the Seventy,” where simply an authoritative envoy of Jesus seems intended. For traces of the wider sense of “apostle” in Gnostic, Marcionite and Montanist circles, see Monnier (as below).

[4] The above is substantially the view taken by J.B. Lightfoot in his essay on “The Christian Ministry” (Comm. on Philippians, 6th ed., pp. 239, 252 f.), and by T.M. Lindsay, The Church and the Ministry (1902), pp. 224-228, 278 ff. Even C. Gore, The Church and the Ministry (1889), pp. 119 ff., while inferring a sacerdotal element in Irenaeus’s conception of the episcopate, says: “But it is mainly as preserving the catholic traditions that Irenaeus regards the apostolic succession” (p. 120).

[5] See Lightfoot’s essay for Cyprian’s contribution, as also for that of the Clementines, which fix on the twofold position of James at Jerusalem, as apostle and bishop, as bearing on apostolic succession in the episcopate.

APOSTLE SPOONS, a set of spoons, usually of silver or silver gilt, with the handles terminating in figures of the apostles, each bearing their distinctive emblem. They were common baptismal gifts during the 15th and 16th centuries, but were dying out by 1666. Often single spoons were given, bearing the figure of the patron or name saint of the child. Sets of the twelve apostles are not common, and complete sets of thirteen, with the figure of our Lord on a larger spoon, are still rarer. The Goldsmiths’ Company in London has one such set, all by the same maker and bearing the hall-mark of 1626, and a set of thirteen was sold at Christie’s in 1904 for £4900.

See William Hone, The Everyday Book and Table Book (1831); and W.J. Cripps, Old English Plate (9th ed., 1906).

APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS (Διαταγαὶ or Διατάξεις τῶν ἁγίων ἀποστόλων διὰ Κλήμεντος τοῦ Ῥωμαίων ἐπισκόπου τε καὶ πολίτου. Καθολικὴ διδασκαλία), a collection of ecclesiastical regulations in eight books, the last of which concludes with the eighty-five Canons of the Holy Apostles. By their title the Constitutions profess to have been drawn up by the apostles, and to have been transmitted to the Church by Clement of Rome; sometimes the alleged authors are represented as speaking jointly, sometimes singly. From the first they have been very variously estimated; the Canons, as a rule, more highly than the rest of the work. For example, the Trullan Council of Constantinople (quini-sextum), A.D. 692, accepts the Canons as genuine by its second canon, but rejects the Constitutions on the ground that spurious matter had been introduced into them by heretics; and whilst the former were henceforward used freely in the East, only a few portions of the latter found their way into the Greek and oriental law-books. Again, Dionysius Exiguus (c. A.D. 500) translated fifty of the Canons into Latin,[1] although under the title Canones qui dicuntur Apostolorum, and thus they passed into other Western collections; whilst the Constitutions as a whole remained unknown in the West until they were published in 1563 by the Jesuit Turrianus. At first received with enthusiasm, their authenticity soon came to be impugned; and their true significance was largely lost sight of as it began to be realized that they were not what they claimed to be. Vain attempts were still made to rehabilitate them, and they were, in general, more highly estimated in England than elsewhere. The most extravagant estimate of all was that of Whiston, who calls them “the most sacred standard of Christianity, equal in authority to the Gospels themselves, and superior in authority to the epistles of single apostles, some parts of them being our Saviour’s own original laws delivered to the apostles, and the other parts the public acts of the apostles” (Historical preface to Primitive Christianity Revived, pp. 85-86). Others, however, realized their composite character from the first, and by degrees some of the component documents became known. Bishop Pearson was able to say that “the eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions have been after Epiphanius’s time compiled and patched together out of the didascaliae or doctrines which went under the names of the holy apostles and their disciples or successors” (Vind. Ign. i. cap. 5); whilst a greater scholar still, Archbishop Usher, had already gone much further, and concluded, forestalling the results of modern critical methods, that their compiler was none other than the compiler of the spurious Ignatian epistles (Epp. Polyc. et Ign. p. lxiii. f., Oxon. 1644). The Apostolical Constitutions, then, are spurious, and they are one of a long series of documents of like character. But we have not really gauged their significance by saying that they are spurious. They are the last stage and climax of a gradual process of compilation and crystallization, so to speak, of unwritten church custom; and a short account of this process will show their real importance and value.

These documents are the outcome of a tendency which is found in every society, religious or secular, at some point in its history. The society begins by living in accordance with its fundamental principles. By degrees these Origin and real nature. translate themselves into appropriate action. Difficulties are faced and solved as they arise; and when similar circumstances recur they will tend to be met in the same way. Thus there grows up by degrees a body of what may be called customary law. Plainly, there is no particular point of time at which this customary law can be said to have begun. To all appearance it is there from the first in solution and gradually crystallizes out; and yet it is being continually modified as time goes on. Moreover, the time comes when the attempt is made, either by private individuals or by the society itself, to put this “customary law” into writing. Now when this is done, two tendencies will at once show themselves. (a) This “customary law” will at once become more definite: the very fact of putting it into writing will involve an effort after logical completeness. There will be a tendency on the part of the writer to fill up gaps; to state local customs as if they obtained universally; to introduce his personal equation, and to add to that which is the custom that which, in his opinion, ought to be. (b) There will be a strong tendency to fortify that which has been written with great names, especially in days when there is no very clear notion of literary property. This is done, not always with any deliberate consciousness of fraud (although it must be clearly recognized that truth is not one of the “natural virtues,” and that the sense of the obligations of truthfulness was far from strong), but rather to emphasize the importance of what was written, and the fact that it was no new invention of the writer’s. In a non-literary age fame gathers about great names; and that which, ex hypothesi, has gone on since the beginning of things is naturally attributed to the founders of the society. Then come interpolations to make this ascription more probable, and the prefixing of a title, then or subsequently, which states it as a fact. This is precisely the way in which the Apostolical Constitutions and other kindred documents have come into being. They are attempts, made in various places and at different times, to put into writing the order and discipline and character of the Church; in part for private instruction and edification, but in part also with a view to actual use; frequently even with an actual reference to particular circumstances. In this lies their importance, to a degree which is only just being adequately realized. They contain evidence of the utmost value as to the order of the Church in early days; evidence, however, which needs to be sifted with the greatest care, since the personal preferences of the writer and the customs of the local church to which he belongs are continually mixed up with things which have a wider prevalence. It is only by careful investigation, by the method of comparisons, that these elements can be disentangled; but as the number of documents of this class known to us is continually increasing, their value increases even more than proportionately. And whilst their local and fugitive character must be fully recognized and allowed for, is it unjustifiable to set them aside or leave them out of account as heretical, and therefore negligible.

It will be sufficient here to mention shortly the chief collections of this kind which came into existence during the first four centuries; generally as the work of private individuals, and having, at any rate, no more than a local authority Other collections. of some kind, (a) The earliest known to us is the Didachē or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, itself compiled from earlier materials, and dating from about 120 (see [Didachē]). (b) The Apostolic Church Order (apostolische Kirchenordnung of German writers); Ecclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles of one MS.; Sententiae Apostolorum of Pitra: of about 300, and emanating probably from Asia Minor. Its earlier part, cc. 1-14, depends upon the Didachē, and the rest of it is a book of discipline in which Harnack has attempted to distinguish two older fragments of church law (Texte u. Unters. ii. 5). (c) The so-called Canones Hippolyti, probably Alexandrian or Roman, and of the first half of the 3rd century. It will be observed that these make no claim to apostolic authorship; but otherwise their origin is like that of the rest, unless indeed, as has been suggested, they represent the work of an actual Roman synod, (d) The so-called Egyptian Church Order, in Coptic from a Greek pre-Nicene original (c. 310). It is part of the Egyptian Heptateuch and contains neither communion nor ordination forms, (e) The Ethiopic Church Order, perhaps twenty years later than (d), and forming part of the Ethiopic Statutes. (f) The Verona Latin Fragments, discovered and published by Hauler, portions of a form akin to (e), which may be dated c. 340, though possibly earlier. It has a preface which refers to a treatise Concerning Spiritual Gifts as having immediately preceded it. (g) The recently discovered Testament of the Lord, which is somewhat later in date (c. 350), and likewise depends upon the Canones Hippolyti. (h) The so-called Canons of Basil. This is an Arabic work perhaps based on a Coptic and ultimately on a Greek original, embodying with modifications large portions of the Canons of Hippolytus. (On the relations between the six last-named, see [Hippolytus, Canons of].)

Here also may be noticed the Didascalia Apostolorum, originally written in Greek, but known through a Syriac version and a fragmentary Latin one published by Hauler. It is of the middle of the 3rd century—in fact, a passage in the Latin translation seems to give us the date A.D. 254. It emanates from Palestine or Syria, and is independent of the documents already mentioned; and upon it the Constitutions themselves very largely depend. It is a mixture of moral and ecclesiastical instruction. The Sacramentary of Serapion (c. 350), The Pilgrimage of Etheria (Silvia) (c. 385), and The Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem (348) are also of value in this connexion. In the (so-called) Constitutions through Hippolytus we have possibly a preliminary draft of the famous 8th book of the Apostolical Constitutions.[2]

The Constitutions themselves fall into three main divisions. (i.) The first of these consists of books i.-vi., and throughout runs parallel to the Didascalia. Bickell, indeed, held that this latter was an abbreviated form of books i.-vi.; Contents. but it is now agreed on all hands that the Constitutions are based on the Didascalia and not vice versa. (ii.) Then follows book vii., the first thirty-one chapters of which are an adaptation of the Didachē, whilst the rest contain various liturgical forms of which the origin is still uncertain, though it has been acutely suggested by Achelis, and with great probability, that they originated in the schismatical congregation of Lucian at Antioch. (iii.) Book viii. is more composite, and falls into three parts. The first two chapters, περὶ χαρισμάτων, may be based upon a lost work of St Hippolytus, otherwise known only by a reference to it in the preface of the Verona Latin Fragments; and an examination shows that this is highly probable. The next section, cc. 3-27, περὶ χειροτονιῶν, and cc. 28-46, περὶ κανόνων, is twofold, and is evidently that upon which the writer sets most store. The apostles no longer speak jointly, but one by one in an apostolic council, and the section closes with a joint decree of them all. They speak of the ordination of bishops (the so-called Clementine Liturgy is that which is directed to be used at the consecration of a bishop, cc. 5-15), of presbyters, deacons, deaconesses, sub-deacons and lectors, and then pass on to confessors, virgins, widows and exorcists; after which follows a series of canons on various subjects, and liturgical formulae. With regard to this section, all that can be said is that it includes materials which are also to be found elsewhere—in the Egyptian Church Order and other documents already spoken of—and that the precise relation between them is at present not determined. The third section consists of the Apostolic Canons already referred to, the last and most significant of which places the Constitutions and the two epistles of Clement in the canon of Scripture, and omits the Apocalypse. They are derived in part from the preceding Constitutions, in part from the canons of the councils of Antioch, 341, Nicaea, 325, and possibly Laodicaea, 363.

A comparison of the Constitutions with the material upon which they are based will illustrate the compiler’s method. (a) To begin with the Didascalia already mentioned. It is unmethodical and badly digested, homiletical in style, and abounding in biblical quotations. There is no precise arrangement; but the subjects, following a general introduction, are the bishop and his duties, penance, the administration of the offerings, the settlement of disputes, the divine service, the order of widows, deacons and deaconesses, the poor, behaviour in persecution, and so forth. The compiler of the Constitutions finds here material after his own heart. He is even more discursive and more homiletical in style; he adds fresh citations of the Scriptures, and additional explanations and moral reflexions; and all this with so little judgment that he often leaves confusion worse confounded (e.g. in ii. 57, where, upon a symbolical description of the Church as a sheepfold, he has superimposed the further symbolism of a ship). (b) Passing on to books vii. and viii., we observe that the compiler’s method of necessity changes with his new material. In the former book he still makes large additions and alterations, but there is less scope for his prolixity than before; and in the latter, where he is no longer dealing with generalities, but making actual definitions, the Constitutions of necessity become more precise and statutory in form. Throughout he adopts and adapts the language of his sources as far as possible, “only pruning in the most pressing cases,” but towards the end he cannot avoid making larger alterations from time to time. And his alterations throughout are not made aimlessly. Where he finds things which would obviously clash with the customs of his own day, he unhesitatingly modifies them. An account of the Passion, with a curiously perverted chronology, the object of which was to justify the length of the Passion-tide fast, is entirely revised for this reason (v. 14); the direction to observe Easter according to the Jewish computation is changed into the exact contrary for the same reason (v. 17); and where his archetype lapses into speaking of a lull in persecution he naïvely informs us that the Romans have now given up persecuting and have adopted Christianity (vi. 26), forgetting altogether that he is speaking in the character of the apostles. Above all, he both magnifies the office of the Christian ministry as a whole and alters what is said of it in detail (for example, the deaconess loses rank not a little), to make it agree with the circumstances of his day in general, and with his own ideas of fitness in particular. It is here that his evidence is at once most valuable and needs to be used with the greatest care. To give one striking example of the value of these documents. The Canones Hippolyti (vi. 43) provide that one who has been a confessor for the faith may be received as a presbyter by virtue of his confessorship and not by the laying on of the bishop’s hands; but if he be chosen a bishop, he is to be ordained. This provision passes on into the Egyptian Ecclesiastical Canons and other kindred documents, and even into the Testamentum Domini. But the corresponding passage in the Apostolical Constitutions (viii. 23) entirely reverses it: “A confessor is not ordained, for he is so by choice and patience, and is worthy of great honour.... But if there be occasion, he is to be ordained either a bishop, priest, or deacon. But if any one of the confessors who is not ordained snatches to himself any such dignity upon account of his confession, let the same person be deprived and rejected; for he is not in such an office, since he has denied the constitution of Christ, and is worse than an infidel.”

Who, then, is the author of the Constitutions, and what can be inferred with regard to him? (i.) By separating off the sources which he used from his own additions to them, it at once becomes clear that the latter are the work of one Authorship, place, and date. man: the style is unmistakable, and the method of working is the same throughout. The compiler of books i.-vi. is also the compiler of books vii., viii. (ii.) As to his theological position, different views have been held. Funk suggests Apollinarianism, which is the refuge of the destitute; and Achelis inclines in the same direction. But the affinities of the author are quite otherwise, the most pronounced of them being a strong subordinationist tendency, denial of a human soul to Christ, and the like, which suggest not indeed Arianism but an inclination towards Arianism. Above all, his polemic is directed against the dying heresies of the 3rd century; and he writes with an absence of constraint which is not the language of one who lives amidst violent controversies or who is conscious of being in a minority. All this points to the position of a “conservative” or semi-Arian of the East, one who belongs, perhaps, to the circle of Lucian of Antioch and writes before the time of Julian. It is hard to think of any other time or circumstances in which a man could write like this, (iii.) The indications of time have been held to point to a different conclusion. On the one hand, the fact that the attempt to rebuild the temple by Julian in 363 is not mentioned in vi. 24 points to an earlier date; and the fact that the κοπιᾶται are not mentioned amongst the church officers points in the same direction, for elsewhere they are first mentioned in a rescript of Constantius in A.D. 357. On the other hand, in the cycle of feasts occur the names of several which are probably of later date—e.g. Christmas and St Stephen, which were introduced at Antioch c. A.D. 378 and 379 respectively. Again, Epiphanius (c. A.D. 374) appears to be unacquainted with it; he still quotes from the Didascalia, and elaborately explains it away where it is contrary to the usages of his own day. But as regards the former point, it is possible that the Apostolical Constitutions constantly gave rise to these festivals; or, on the other hand, that the two passages were subsequently introduced either by the writer himself or by some other hand, when the last book of the Constitutions was being used as a law-book. And as regards the latter, the fact that Epiphanius does not use the Constitutions is no proof that they had not yet been compiled. (iv.) As to the region of composition there is no real doubt. It was clearly the East, Syria or Palestine. Many indications are against the latter, and Syria is strongly suggested by the use of the Syro-Macedonian calendar. Moreover, the writer represents the Roman Clement as the channel of communication between the apostles and the Church. This fact both supplies him with the name by which he is commonly known, Pseudo-Clement, and also furnishes corroboration of his Syrian birth; since the other spurious writings bearing the name of Clement, the Homilies and Recognitions, are likewise of Syrian origin. Moreover, the spurious Ignatian epistles, which are also Syrian, depend throughout upon the Constitutions, (v.) But this is not all. It was long ago noticed that Pseudo-Clement bears a very close resemblance to Pseudo-Ignatius, the interpolator of the Ignatian Epistles in the longer Greek recension. Usher, as we have seen, identified them, and modern criticism accepts this identification as a fact (Lagarde, Harnack, Funk, Brightman). Lightfoot, indeed, still hesitated (Ap. Fathers, II. i. 266 n.) on the ground that Pseudo-Ignatius occasionally misunderstands the Constitutions, that the two writings give the Roman succession differently, and that Pseudo-Clement shows no knowledge of the Christological controversies of Nicaea. But as regards the first of these, it is rather a case of condensed citation than of misinterpretation; the second is explained by the writer’s carelessness as shown in other passages, and all are solved if a considerable interval of time elapsed between the compilation of the Constitutions and the spurious Ignatian epistles.

It seems clear then that the compiler was a Syrian, and that he also wrote the spurious Ignatian epistles; he was likewise probably a semi-Arian of the school of Lucian of Antioch. His date is given by Harnack as A.D. 340-360, with a leaning to 340-343; by Lightfoot as the latter half of the 4th century; by Brightman, 370-380; by Maclean, 375; and by Funk as the beginning of the 5th century.

Authorities.—W. Ueltzen, Constitutiones Apostolicae (Schwerin, 1853); P.A. de Lagarde, Didascalia Apostolorum Syriace (Leipz., 1854); Constitutiones Apostolorum (Leipz. and Lond., 1862); M.D. Gibson, Didascalia Apost. Syriace, with Eng. trans. (Horae Semiticae, i. and ii., Cambridge, 1903); J.B. Pitra, Juris Ecclesiastici Graecorum Historia et Monumenta, i. (Rome, 1864); Hauler, Didascaliae Apostolorum Fragmenta Ueronensia Latina, (Leipzig, 1900); Bickell, Geschichte des Kirchenrechts, i. (Giessen, 1843); F.X. Funk, Die apostolischen Konstitutionen (Rottenb., 1891); A. Harnack, Geschichte d. altchristl. Litteratur, i. 515 ff. (Leipz., 1893); F.E. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, I. xvii. ff. (Oxford, 1896); H. Achelis, in Hauck’s Realencyklopadie, i. 734 f., art. “Apostolische Konstitutionen und Kanones” (Leipz., 1896); A.S. Maclean, Recent Discoveries illustrating Early Christian Worship (Lond., 1904); J. Wordsworth, The Ministry of Grace, pp. 18 ff; J.P. Arendzen, “The Apostolic Church Order” (Syriac Text, Eng. trans. and notes) in Journ. of Theol. Studies, iii. 59. Trans. of Apost. Constitutions, book viii., in Ante-Nicene Christian Library.

(W. E. Co.)

[1] Why he did not go on to give the remaining thirty-five is not clear; they belong to the same date as, and are not inferior to, the first fifty.

[2] At a later date various collections were made of the documents above mentioned, or some of them, to serve as law-books in different churches—e.g. the Syrian Octateuch, the Egyptian Heptateuch, and the Ethiopic Sīnōdōs. These, however, stand on an entirely different footing, since they are simply collections of existing documents, and no attempt is made to claim apostolic authorship for them.

APOSTOLIC CANONS, a collection of eighty-five rules for the regulation of clerical life, appended to the eighth book of the Apostolical Constitutions (q.v.). They are couched in brief legislative form though on no definite plan, and deal with the vexed questions of ecclesiastical discipline as they were raised towards the end of the 4th century. At least half of the canons are derived from earlier constitutions, and probably not many of them are the actual productions of the compiler, whose aim was to gloss over the real nature of the Constitutions, and secure their incorporation with the Epistles of Clement in the New Testament of his day. The Codex Alexandrinus does indeed append the Clementine Epistles to its text of the New Testament. The Canons may be a little later in date than the preceding Constitutions, but they are evidently from the same Syrian theological circle.

APOSTOLIC FATHERS, a term used to distinguish those early Christian writers who were believed to have been the personal associates of the original Apostles. While the title “Fathers” was given from at least the beginning of the 4th century to church writers of former days, as being the parents of Christian belief and thought for later times, the expression “Apostolic Fathers” dates only from the latter part of the 17th century. The idea of recognizing these “Fathers” as a special group exists already in the title “Patres aevi apostolici, sive SS. Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis floruerunt ... opera,” under which in 1672 J.B. Cotelier published at Paris the writings current under the names of Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Hermas, Ignatius and Polycarp. But the name itself is due to their next editor, Thomas Ittig (1643-1710), in his Bibliotheca Patrum Apostolicorum (1699), who, however, included under this title only Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp. Here already appears the doubt as to how many writers can claim the title, a doubt which has continued ever since, and makes the contents of the “Apostolic Fathers” differ so much from editor to editor. Thus the Oratorian Andrea Gallandi (1700-1779), in re-issuing Cotelier’s collection in his Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum (1765-1781), included the fragments of Papias and the Epistle to Diognetus, to which recent editors have added the citations from the “Elders” of Papias’s day found in Irenaeus and, since 1883, the Didachē.

The degree of historic claim which these various writings have to rank as the works[1] of Apostolic Fathers varies greatly on any definition of “apostolic.” Originally the epithet was meant to be taken strictly, viz. as denoting those whom history could show to have been personally connected, or at least coeval, with one or more apostles; and an effort was made, as by Cotelier, to distinguish the writings rightly and wrongly assigned to such. Thus editions tended to vary with the historical views of editors. But the convenience of the category “Apostolic Fathers” to express not only those who might possibly have had some sort of direct contact with apostles—such as “Barnabas,” Clement, Ignatius, Papias, Polycarp—but also those who seemed specially to preserve the pure tradition of apostolic doctrine during the sub-apostolic age, has led to its general use in a wide and vague sense.

Conventionally, then, the title denotes the group of writings which, whether in date or in internal character, are regarded as belonging to the main stream of the Church’s teaching during the period between the Apostles and the Apologists (i.e. to c. A.D. 140). Or to put it more exactly, the “Apostolic Fathers” represent, chronologically in the main and still more from the religious and theological standpoint, the momentous process of transition from the type of teaching in the New Testament to that which meets us in the early Catholic Fathers, from the last quarter of the 2nd century onwards. The Apologists no doubt show us certain fresh factors entering into this development; but on the whole the Apostolic Fathers by themselves go a long way to explain the transition in question, so far as knowledge of this saeculum obscurum is within our reach at all. It is true that they do not include the whole even of the ecclesiastical literature of the sub-apostolic age, not to mention what remains of Gnostic and other minority types. The Preaching and Apocalypse of Peter, for instance, are quite typical of the same period, and help us to read between the lines of the Apostolic Fathers. Yet they do not really add much to what is there already, and they have the drawbacks of pseudonymity; they lack concrete and personal qualities; they are general expressions of tendencies which we cannot well locate or measure, save by means of the Apostolic Fathers themselves or of their earliest Catholic successors.

(A) In external features the group is far from homogeneous, a fact which has led to their being disintegrated as a group in certain histories of early Christian literature (e.g. those of Harnack and Krüger), and classed each under its own literary type—so sacrificing to outer form, which is quite secondary in primitive Christian writings, the more significant fact of religious affinity. Its original members, those still best entitled to their name in any strict sense, are epistles, and in this respect also most akin to Apostolic writings. Indeed Ignatius takes pleasure in saluting his readers “after the apostolic stamp” (ad Troll. inscr.), while yet disclaiming all desire to emulate the apostolic manner in other respects, being fully conscious of the gulf between himself and apostles like Peter and Paul in claim to authority (ib. in. 3, ad Rom. iv. 3). The like holds of Polycarp, who, in explaining that he writes to exhort the Philippians only at their own request, adds, “for neither am I, nor is any other like me, able to follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul” (in. 2). Clement’s epistle, indeed, conforms more to the elaborate and treatise-like form of the Epistle to the Hebrews, on which it draws so largely; and the same is true of “Barnabas.” But one and all are influenced by study of apostolic epistles, and witness to the impression which these produced on the men of the next generation. Unconsciously, too, they correspond to the apostolic type of writing in another respect, viz. their occasional and practical character. They are evoked by pressing needs of the hour among some definite body of Christians and not by any literary motive.[2] This is a universal trait of primitive Christian writings; so that to speak of primitive Christian “literature” at all is hardly accurate, and tends to an artificial handling of their contents. These sub-apostolic epistles are veritable “human documents,” with the personal note running through them. They are after all personal expressions of Christianity, in which are discernible also specific types of local tradition. To such spontaneous actuality a large part of their interest and value is due.

Nor is this pre-literary and vital quality really absent even from the writing which is least entitled to a place among “Apostolic Fathers,” the Epistle to Diognetus. This beautiful picture of the Christian life as a realized ideal, and of Christians as “the soul” of the world, owes its inclusion to a double error: first, to the accidental attachment at the end of another fragment (§ ii), which opens with the writer’s claim to stand forth as a teacher as being “a disciple of apostles”; and next, to mistaken exegesis of this phrase as implying personal relations with apostles, rather than knowledge of their teaching, written or oral. Whether in form addressed to Diognetus, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, as a typical cultured observer of Christianity, or to some other eminent person of the same name in the locality of its origin, or, as seems more likely, to cultured Greeks generally, personified under the significant name “Diognetus” (“Heaven-born,” of. Acts xvii. 28 along with § iii. 4)—the epistle is in any case an “open letter” of an essentially literary type. Further, its opening seems modelled on the lines of the preface to Luke’s Gospel, to which, along with Acts, it may owe something of its very conception as a reasoned appeal to the lover of truth. But while literary in form and conception, its appeal is in spirit so personal a testimony to what the Gospel has done for the writer and his fellow Christians, that it is akin to the piety of the Apostolic Fathers as a group. It is true that it has marked affinities, e.g. in its natural theology, with the earliest Apologists, Aristides and Justin, even as it is itself in substance an apology addressed not to the State, but to thoughtful public opinion. But this only means that we cannot draw a hard and fast line between groups of early Christian writings at a time when practical religious interests overshadowed all others.

If thus related to the Apologists of the middle of the 2nd century, the Epistle to Diognetus has also points of contact with one of the most practical and least literary writings found among our Apostolic Fathers, viz. the homily originally known as the Second Epistle of Clement (for this ascription, as for other details, see [Clementine Literature]). The recovery of its concluding sections in the same MS. which brought the Didachē to light, proves beyond question that we have here the earliest extant sermon preached before a Christian congregation, about A.D. 120-140 (so J.B. Lightfoot). Its opening section, recalling to its hearers the passing of the mists of idolatry before the revelation in Jesus Christ, is markedly similar in tone and tenor to passages in the Epistle to Diognetus. Far closer, however, are the affinities between the homily and the Shepherd of Hermas, “the first Christian allegory,” which as a literary whole dates from about A.D. 140, but probably represents a more or less prolonged prophetic activity on the part of its author, the brother of Pius, the Roman bishop of his day (c. 139-154). In both the primary theme is repentance, as called for by serious sins, after baptism has placed the Christian on his new and higher level of responsibility. Thus both are hortatory writings, the one argumentative in form, the other prophetic, after the manner of later Old Testament prophets whose messages came in visions and similitudes. This prophetic and apocalyptic note, which characterizes Hermas among the Apostolic Fathers (though there are traces of it also in the Didachē and in Ignatius, ad Eph. xx.), is a genuinely primitive trait and goes far to explain the vogue which the Shepherd enjoyed in the generations immediately succeeding, as also the influence of its disciplinary policy, which is its prophetic “burden” (see [Hermas, Shepherd of]).

We come finally to the anonymous Teaching of the Twelve Apostles and Papias’s Exposition of Oracles of the Lord, so far as this is known to us. The former, besides embodying catechetical instruction in Christian conduct (the “Two Ways”), which goes back in substance to the early apostolic age and is embodied also in “Barnabas,” depicts in outline the fundamental usages of church life as practised in some conservative region (probably within Syria) about the last quarter of the 1st century and perhaps even later. The whole is put forth as substantially the apostolic teaching (Didachē) on the subjects in question. This is probably a bona fide claim. It expresses the feeling common to the Apostolic Fathers and general in the sub-apostolic age, at any rate in regions where apostles had once laboured, that local tradition, as held by the recognized church leaders, did but continue apostolic doctrine and practice. Into later developments of this feeling an increasing element of illusion entered, and all other written embodiments of it known to us take the form of literary fictions, more or less bold. It is in contrast to these that the Didachē is justly felt to be genuinely primitive and of a piece with the Apostolic Fathers. Thus while its form would by analogy tend per se to awaken suspicion, its contents remove this feeling; and we may even infer from this surviving early formulation of local ecclesiastical tradition, that others of somewhat similar character came into being in the sub-apostolic age, but failed to survive save as embodied in later local teaching, oral or written, very much as if the Didachē had perished and its literary offspring alone remained (see [Didachē]).

As regards Papias’s Exposition, which Lightfoot describes as “among the earliest forerunners of commentaries, partly explanatory, partly illustrative, on portions of the New Testament,” we need here only remark that, whatever its exact form may have been—as to which the extant fragments still leave room for doubt—it was in conception expository of the historic meaning of Christ’s more ambiguous Sayings, viewed in the light of definitely ascertained apostolic traditions bearing on the subject. The like is true also of the fragments of the Elders preserved in Irenaeus (so far as these do not really come from Papias). Both bodies of exposition represent the traditional principle at work in the sub-apostolic age, making for the preservation in relative purity, over against merely subjective interpretations—those of the Gnostics in particular—of the historic or original sense of Christ’s teaching, just as Ignatius stood for the historicity of the facts of His earthly career in their plain, natural sense.

(B) Here the question of external form passes readily over into that of the internal character and spirit. Indeed much has already been said or suggested bearing on these. The relation of these writers to the apostolic teaching generally has become pretty evident. It is one of absolute loyalty and deference, as to the teaching of inspiration. They are conscious, as are we in reading them, that they are not moving on the same level of insight as the Apostles; they are sub-apostolic in that sense also. Hence there appear constant traces of study of the Apostolic writings, so far as these were accessible in the locality of each writer at his date of writing (for the details of this subject, and its bearing on the history of the Canonical Scriptures of the New Testament, see The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, Oxford, 1905). As Lightfoot points out (Apostolic Fathers, pt. i. vol. i. p. 7), however, personality, with its variety of temperament and emphasis, largely colours the Apostolic Fathers, especially the primary group. Clement has all the Roman feeling for duly constituted order and discipline; Ignatius has the Syrian or semi-oriental passion of devotion, showing itself at once in his mystic love for his Lord and his over-strained yearning to become His very “disciple” by drinking the like cup of martyrdom; Polycarp is, above all things, steady in his allegiance to what had first won his conscience and heart, and his “passive and receptive character” comes out in the contents of his epistle. Of the rest, whose personalities are less known to us, Papias shares Polycarp’s qualities and their limitations, the anonymous homilist and Hermas are marked by intense moral earnestness, while the writer to Diognetus joins to this a profound religious insight. These personal traits determine by selective affinity, working under conditions given by the special local type of tradition and piety, the elements in the Apostolic writings which each was able to assimilate and express—though we must allow also for variety in the occasions of writing. Thus one New Testament type is echoed in one and another in another; or it may be several in turn. The latter is the case in Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp; perhaps also in “Barnabas.” In Hermas there is special affinity to the language and thought of the epistle of James, and in the homilist to those of Paul. Yet their very use of the same terms or ideas makes us the more aware of “a marked contrast to the depth and clearness of conception with which the several Apostolic writers place before us different aspects of the Gospel” (Lightfoot). While Apostolic phrases are used, the sense behind them is often different and less evangelic. They have not caught the Apostolic meaning, because they have not penetrated to the full religious experience which gave to the words, often words with long and varied history both in the Septuagint and in ordinary Greek usage, their specific meaning to each apostle and especially to Paul. This phenomenon was noted particularly by E. Reuss, in his Histoire de la théologie chrétienne an siècle apostolique (3rd ed., 1864). Take for instance Clement. Lightfoot, indeed, dwells on the all-round “comprehensiveness” with which Clement, as the mouthpiece of the early Roman Church, utters in succession phrases or ideas borrowed impartially from Peter and Paul and James and the Epistle to Hebrews. He admits, however, that such mere co-ordination of the language of Paul and James, for instance, as appears in his twice bracketing “faith and hospitality” as grounds of acceptance with God (the cases are those of Abraham and Rahab, in chs. x. and xii.), is “from a strictly dogmatic point of view” his weakness. But the weakness is more than a dogmatic one; it is one of religious experience, as the source of spiritual insight. It is not merely that “there is no dogmatic system in Clement” or in any other of the Apostolic Fathers; that may favour, not hinder, religious insight. There is a want of depth in Christian experience, in the power of realizing relative spiritual values in the light of the master principle involved in the distinctively Christian consciousness, such as could raise Clement above a verbal eclecticism, rather than comprehensiveness, in the use of Apostolic language. As R.W. Dale remarks, in a note on Reuss’s too severe words (Eng. trans. ii. 295): “The vital force of the Apostolic convictions gave to Apostolic thought a certain organic and consistent form.” It is lack of this organic quality in the thought, not only of Clement but also of the Apostolic Fathers generally—with the possible exception of Ignatius, who seems to share the Apostolic experience more fully than any other, to which Reuss rightly directs attention. In virtue of this defect, due largely to the failure to enter into the Apostolic experience of mystic union with Christ, he can rightly speak of “an immense retrogression” in theology visible “at the end of the century, and in circles where it might have been least expected” (ii. p. 294, cf. 541).

In fact the perspective of the Gospel was seriously changed and its most distinctive features obscured. This was specially the case with the experimental doctrines of grace. Here the central glory of the Cross as “the power of God unto salvation” suffered some eclipse, although the passion of Christ was felt to be a transcendent act of Divine Grace in one way or another. But even more serious was the loss of an adequate sense of the contrast between “grace” and “works” as conditions of salvation. There was little or no sense of the danger of the legal principle, as related to human egoism and the instinct to seek salvation as a reward for merit. The passages in which these things are laid bare by Paul’s remorseless analysis of his own experience “under Law” seem to have made practically no impression on the Apostolic Fathers as a whole. Gentile Christians had not felt the fang of the Law as the ex-Pharisee had occasion to feel it. Even if first trained in the Hellenistic synagogues of the Dispersion, as was often the case, they apprehended the Law on its more helpful and less exacting side, and had not been brought “by the Law to die unto the Law,” that they might “live unto God.” The result was too great a continuity between their religious conceptions before and after embracing the Gospel. Thus the latter seemed to them simply to bring forgiveness of past sins for Christ’s sake, and then an enhanced moral responsibility to the New Law revealed in Him. Hence a new sort of legalism, known to recent writers as Moralism, underlies much of the piety of the Apostolic Fathers, though Ignatius is quite free from it, while Polycarp and “Barnabas” are less under its influence than are the Didachē, Clement, the Homilist and Hermas. It conceives salvation as a “wages” (μισθός) to be earned or forfeited; and regards certain good works, such as prayer, fasting, alms—especially the last—as efficacious to cancel sins. The reality of this tendency, particularly at Rome, betrays itself in Hermas, who teaches the supererogatory merit of alms gained by the self-denial of fasting (Sim. v. 3. 3 ff.). Marcion’s reaction, too, against the Judaic temper in the Church as a whole, in the interests of an extravagant Paulinism, while it suggests that Paul’s doctrines of grace generally were inadequately realized in the sub-apostolic age, points also to the prevalence of such moralism in particular.

(C) In attempting a final estimate of the value of the Apostolic Fathers for the historian to-day, we may sum up under these heads: ecclesiastical, theological, religious. (a) As a mine of materials for reconstructing the history of Church institutions, they are invaluable, and that largely in virtue of their spontaneous and “esoteric” character, with no view to the public generally or to posterity. (b) Theologically, as a stage in the history of Christian doctrine, their value is as great negatively as positively. Impressive as is their witness to the persistence of the Apostolic teaching in its essential features, amidst all personal and local variations, perhaps the most striking thing about these writings is the degree in which they fail to appreciate certain elements of the Apostolic teaching as embodied in the New Testament, and those its higher and more distinctively Christian elements.[3] This negative aspect has a twofold bearing. Firstly, it suggests the supernormal level to which the Apostolic consciousness was raised at a bound by the direct influence of the Founder of Christianity, and justifies the marking-off of the Apostolic writings as a Canon, or body of Christian classics of unique religious authority. To this principle Marcion’s Pauline Canon is a witness, though in too one-sided a spirit. Secondly, it means that the actual development of ecclesiastical doctrine began, not from the Apostolic consciousness itself, but from a far lower level, that of the inadequate consciousness of the sub-apostolic Church, even when face to face with their written words. This theological “retrogression” is of much significance for the history of dogma, (c) On the other hand, there is great religious and moral continuity, beneath even theological discontinuity, in the life working below all conscious apprehension of the deeper ideas involved (E. von Dobschutz, Christian Life in the Primitive Church, 1905). There is continuity in character; the Apostolic Fathers strike us as truly good men, with a goodness raised to a new type and power. This is what the Gospel of Christ aims chiefly at producing as its proper fruit; and the Apostolic Fathers would have desired no better record than that they were themselves genuine “epistles of Christ.”

Literature.—This is too large to indicate even in outline, but is given fully in the chief modern editions, viz. of Gebhardt, Harnack and Zahn jointly (1875-1877), J.B. Lightfoot (1885-1890) and F.X. Funk (1901); also in O. Bardenhewer, Gesch. der altkirchlichen Litteratur (1902), Band i., and in Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, with Handbuch thereto, edited by E. Hennecke (Tübingen, 1904). The fullest discussion in English of the teaching of Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp is by J. Donaldson, The Apostolical Fathers (1874), which, however, suffers from the imperfect state of the texts when he wrote. The most useful edition for ready reference, containing critical texts (up to date) and good translations, is Lightfoot’s one-volume edition, The Apostolic Fathers (London, 1891).

(J. V. B.)

[1] Cotelier included the Acts of Martyrdom of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp; and those of Ignatius and Polycarp are still often printed by editors.

[2] See G.A. Deissmann, Bible Studies, pp. 1-60, for this distinction between the genuine “letter” and the literary “epistle,” as applied to the New Testament in particular.

[3] One result is their inability to form a true theory of Judaism and of the Old Testament in relation to the Gospel, a matter of great moment for them and for their successors.

APOSTOLICI, Apostolic Brethren, or Apostles, the names given to various Christian heretics, whose common doctrinal feature was an ascetic rigidity of morals, which made them reject property and marriage. The earliest Apostolici appeared in Phrygia, Cilicia, Pisidia and Pamphylia towards the end of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd. According to the information given by Epiphanius (Haer. 61) about the doctrines of these heretics, it is evident that they were connected with the Encratites and the Tatianians. They condemned individual property, hence the name sometimes given to them of Apotactites or Renuntiatores. They preserved an absolute chastity and abstained from wine and meat. They refused to admit into their sect those Christians whom the fear of martyrdom had once restored to paganism. As late as the 4th century St Basil (Can. 1 and 47) knew some Apostolici. After that period they disappeared, either becoming completely extinct, or being confounded with other sects (see St Augustine, Haer. 40; John of Damascus, Haer. 61).

Failing a more exact designation, the name of Apostolici has been given to certain groups of Latin heretics of the 12th century. It is the second of the two sects of Cologne (the first being composed very probably of Cathari) that is referred to in the letter addressed in 1146 by Everwin, provost of Steinfeld, to St Bernard (Mabillon, Vet. Anal. iii. 452). They condemned marriage (save, perhaps, first marriages), the eating of meat, baptism of children, veneration of saints, fasting, prayers for the dead and belief in purgatory, denied transubstantiation, declared the Catholic priesthood worthless, and considered the whole church of their time corrupted by the “negotia saecularia” which absorbed all its zeal (of. St Bernard, Serm. 65 and 66 in Cantic.). They do not seem to have been known as Apostles or Apostolici: St Bernard, in fact, asks his hearers: “Quo nomine istos titulove censebis?” (Serm. 66 in Cantic.). Under this designation, too, are included the heretics of Perigueux in France, alluded to in the letter of a certain monk Heribert (Mabillon, Vet. Anal. iii. 467). Heribert says merely: “Se dicunt apostolicam vitam ducere.” It is possible that they were Henricians (see [Henry of Lausanne]). During his mission in the south-east of France in 1146-1147 St Bernard still met disciples of Henry of Lausanne in the environs of Périgueux. The heretics of whom Heribert speaks condemned riches, denied the value of the sacraments and of good works, ate no meat, drank no wine and rejected the veneration of images. Their leader, named Pons, gathered round him nobles, priests, monks and nuns.

In the second half of the 13th century appeared in Italy the Order of the Apostles or Apostle Brethren (see especially the Chron. of Fra Salimbene). This was a product of the mystic fermentation which proceeded from exalted Franciscanism and from Joachimism (see [Fraticelli] and [Joachim]). It presents great analogies with groups of the same character, e.g. Sachets, Bizocchi, Flagellants, &c. The order of the Apostles was founded about 1260 by a young workman from the environs of Parma, Gerard Segarelli, who had sought admission unsuccessfully to the Franciscan order. To make his life conform to that of Christ, his contemporaries say that he had himself circumcised, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a cradle, and that he then, clad in a white robe and bare-footed, walked through the streets of Parma crying “Penitenz agite!” (“Poenitentiam agite!”). He was soon followed by a throng of men and women, peasants and mechanics. All had to live in absolute poverty, chastity and idleness. They begged, and preached penitence. Opizo, bishop of Parma, protected them until they caused trouble in his diocese. Their diffusion into several countries of Christendom disturbed Pope Honorius IV., who in 1286 ordered them to adhere to an already recognized rule. On their refusal, the pope condemned them to banishment and Opizo imprisoned Segarelli. The councils of Würzburg (1287) and Chichester (1289) took measures against the Apostles of Germany and England. But in 1291 the sect reappeared, sensibly increased, and Pope Nicholas IV. published anew the bull of Honorius IV. From that day the Apostles, regarded as rebels, were persecuted pitilessly. Four were burned in 1294, and Segarelli, as a relapsed heretic, went to the stake at Parma in 1300.

They had had close relations with the dissident Franciscans, but the Spirituals often disavowed them, especially when the sect, which in Segarelli’s time had had no very precise doctrinal character, became with Dolcino frankly heterodox. Dolcino of Novara was brought up at Vercelli, and had been an Apostle since 1291. Thrice he fell into the hands of the Inquisition, and thrice recanted. But immediately after Segarelli’s death he wrote an epistle, soon followed by a second, in which he declared that the third Joachimite age began with Segarelli and that Frederick of Sicily was the expected conqueror (Hist. Dulcini and Addit. ad Hist. Dulcini in Muratori, Scriptores, vol. ix.). He gave himself out as an angel sent from God to elucidate the prophecies. Soon he founded an Apostolic congregation at whose head he placed himself. Under him were his four lieutenants, his “mystic sister,” Margherita di Franck, and 4000 disciples. He taught almost the same principles of devotion as Segarelli, but the Messianic character which he attributed to himself, the announcement of a communistic millennial kingdom, and, besides, an aggressive anti-sacerdotalism, gave to Dolcino’s sect a clearly marked character, analogous only to the theocratic community of the Anabaptists of Münster in the 16th century. On the 5th of June 1305 Pope Clement V., recognizing the impotence of the ordinary methods of repression, issued bulls for preaching a crusade against the Dolcinists. But four crusades, directed by the bishop of Vercelli, were required to reduce the little army of the heresiarch, entrenched in the mountains in the neighbourhood of Vercelli. Not till the 23rd of March 1307 were the sectaries definitively overcome. The Catholic crusaders seized Dolcino in his entrenchments on Mount Rubello, and the pope at once announced the happy event to King Philip the Fair. At Vercelli Dolcino suffered a horrible punishment. He was torn in pieces with red-hot pincers—the torture lasting an entire day—while Margherita was burned at a slow fire. Dante mentions Dolcino’s name (Inferno, c. xxviii.), and his memory is not yet completely effaced in the province of Novara. The Apostles continued their propaganda in Italy, Languedoc, Spain and Germany. In turn they were condemned by the councils of Cologne (1306), Treves (1310) and Spoleto (1311). The inquisitor of Languedoc, Bernard Gui, persecuted them unremittingly (see Gui’s Practica Inquisitionis). From 1316 to 1323 the condemnations of Apostles increased at Avignon and Toulouse. They disappeared, however, at a comparatively late date from those regions (council of Lavaur, 1368; council of Narbonne, 1374). In Germany two Apostles were burned at Lübeck and Wismar at the beginning of the 15th century (1402-1403) by the inquisitor Eylard.

Several controversialists, including Gotti, Krohn and Stockmann, have mentioned among the innumerable sects that have sprung from Anabaptism a group of individuals whose open-air preaching and rigorous practice of poverty gained them the name of Apostolici. These must be carefully distinguished from the Apostoolians, Mennonites of Frisia, who followed the teachings of the pastor Samuel Apostool (1638-beginning of 18th century). In the Mennonite church they represent the rigid, conservative party, as opposed to the Galenists, who inclined towards the Arminian latitudinarianism and admitted into their community all those who led a virtuous life, whatever their doctrinal tendencies.

(P. A.)

APOSTOLIC MAJESTY, a title borne by the kings of Hungary. About A.D. 1000 it was conferred by Pope Silvester II. upon St Stephen (975-1038), the first Christian king of Hungary, in return for his zeal in seeking the conversion of the heathen. It was renewed by Pope Clement XIII. in 1758 in favour of the empress Maria Theresa and her descendants. The emperor of Austria bears the title of apostolic king of Hungary.

APOSTOLIUS, MICHAEL (d. c. 1480), a Greek theologian and rhetorician of the 15th century. When, in 1453, the Turks conquered Constantinople, his native city, he fled to Italy, and there obtained the protection of Cardinal Bessarion. But engaging in the great dispute that then raged between the upholders of Aristotle and Plato, his zeal for the latter led him to speak so contemptuously of the more popular philosopher and of his defender, Theodorus Gaza, that he fell under the severe displeasure of his patron. He afterwards retired to Crete, where he earned a scanty living by teaching and by copying manuscripts. Many of his copies are still to be found in the libraries of Europe. One of them, the Icones of Philostratus at Bologna, bears the inscription: “The king of the poor of this world has written this book for his living.” Apostolius died about 1480, leaving two sons, Aristobulus Apostolius and Arsenius. The latter became bishop of Malvasia (Monemvasia) in the Morea.

Of his numerous works a few have been printed: Παροιμίαι (Basel, 1538), now exceedingly rare; a collection of proverbs in Greek, of which a fuller edition appeared at Leiden, “Curante Heinsio,” in 1619; “Oratio Panegyrica ad Fredericum III.” in Freher’s Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, vol. ii. (Frankfort, 1624); Georgii Gemisthi Plethonis et Mich. Apostolii Orationes funebres duae in quibus de Immortalitate Animae exponitur (Leipzig, 1793); and a work against the Latin Church and the council of Florence in Le Moine’s Varia Sacra.

APOSTROPHE (Gr. ἀποστροφή, turning away; the final e being sounded), the name given to an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and addresses some one directly in the vocative. The same word (representing, through the French, the Greek ἀπόστροφος προσῳδία, the accent of elision) means also the sign (’) for the omission of a letter or letters, e.g. in “don’t.” In physiology, “apostrophe” is used more precisely in connexion with its literal meaning of “turning away,” e.g. for movement away from the light, in the case of the accumulation of chlorophyll-corpuscles on the cells of leaves.

APOTACTITES, or Apotactici (from Gr. ἀποτακτός, set apart), a sect of early Christians, who renounced all their worldly possessions. (See [Apostolici] ad init.)

APOTHECARY (from the Lat. apothecarius, a keeper of an apotheca, Gr. ἀποθήκη, a store), a word used by Galen to denote the repository where his medicines were kept, now obsolete in its original sense. An apothecary was one who prepared, sold and prescribed drugs, but the preparing and selling of drugs prescribed by others has now passed into the hands of duly qualified and authorized persons termed “chemists and druggists,” while the apothecary, by modern legislation, has become a general medical practitioner, and the word itself, when used at all, is applied, more particularly in the United States and in Scotland, to those who in England are called “pharmaceutical chemists.” The Apothecaries’ Society of London is one of the corporations of that city, and both by royal charters and acts of parliament exercises the power of granting licences to practise medicine. The members of this society do not possess and never have possessed any exclusive power to deal in or sell drugs; and until 1868 any person whatever might open what is called a chemist’s shop, and deal in drugs and poisons. In that year, however, the Pharmacy Act was passed, which prohibits any person from engaging in this business without being registered.

From early records we learn that the different branches of the medical profession were not regularly distinguished till the reign of Henry VIII., when separate duties were assigned to them, and peculiar privileges were granted to each. In 1518 the physicians of London were incorporated, and the barber-surgeons in 1540. But, independently of the physicians and the surgeons, there were a great number of irregular practitioners, who were more or less molested by their legitimate rivals, and it became necessary to pass an act in 1543 for their protection and toleration. As many of these practitioners kept shops for the sale of medicines, the term “apothecary” was used to designate their calling.

In April 1606 James I. incorporated the apothecaries as one of the city companies, uniting them with the grocers. On their charter being renewed in 1617 they were formed into a separate corporation, under the title of the “Apothecaries of the City of London.” These apothecaries appear to have prescribed medicines in addition to dispensing them, and to have claimed an ancient right of acting in this double capacity; and it may be mentioned that Henry VIII., after the grant of the charter to the College of Physicians, appointed an apothecary to the Princess Mary, who was delicate and unhealthy, at a salary of 40 marks a year, “pro meliore cura, et consideratione sanitatis suae.” During the 17th century, however, there arose a warm contest between the physicians and the apothecaries,—the former accusing the latter of usurping their province, and the latter continuing and justifying the usurpation until the dispute was finally set at rest by a judgment of the House of Lords in 1703 (Rose v. College of Physicians, 5 Bro. P. C. 553), when it was decided that the duty of the apothecary consisted not only in compounding and dispensing, but also in directing and ordering the remedies employed in the treatment of disease. In 1722 an act was obtained empowering the Apothecaries’ Company to visit the shops of all apothecaries practising in London, and to destroy such drugs as they found unfit for use. In 1748 great additional powers were given to the company by an act authorizing them to appoint a board of ten examiners, without whose licence no person should be allowed to dispense medicines in London, or within a circuit of 7 m. round it. In 1815, however, an act of parliament was passed which gave the Apothecaries’ Society a new position, empowering a board, consisting of twelve of their members, to examine and license all apothecaries throughout England and Wales. It also enacted that, from the 1st of August of that year, no persons except those who were so licensed should have the right to act as apothecaries, and it gave the society the power of prosecuting those who practised without such licence. But the act expressly exempted from prosecution all persons who were then in actual practice, and it distinctly excluded from its operation all persons pursuing the calling of chemists and druggists. It was also provided that the act should in no way interfere with the rights or privileges of the English universities, or of the English College of Surgeons or the College of Physicians; and indeed a clause imposed severe penalties on any apothecaries who should refuse to compound and dispense medicines on the order of a physician, legally qualified to act as such. It is therefore clear that the act contemplated the creation of a class of practitioners who, while having the right to practise medicine, should assist and co-operate with the physicians and surgeons.

Before this act came into operation the education of the medical practitioners of England and Wales was entirely optional on their own part, and although many of them possessed degrees or licences from the universities or colleges, the greater number possessed no such qualification, and many of them were wholly illiterate and uneducated. The court of examiners of the Apothecaries’ Society, being empowered to enforce the acquisition of a sufficient medical education upon its future licentiates, specified from time to time the courses of lectures or terms of hospital practice to be attended by medical students before their examination, and in the progress of years regular schools of medicine were organized throughout England.

As it was found that, notwithstanding the stringent regulations as to medical acquirements, the candidates were in many instances deficient in preliminary education, the court of examiners instituted, about the year 1850, a preliminary examination in arts as a necessary and indispensable prerequisite to the medical curriculum, and this provision has been so expanded that, at the present day, all medical students in the United Kingdom are compelled to pass a preliminary examination in arts, unless they hold a university degree. An act of parliament, passed in 1858, and known as the Medical Act, made very little alteration in the powers exercised by the Apothecaries’ Society, and indeed it confirmed and in some degree amplified them, for whereas by the act of 1815, the licentiates of the society were authorized to practise as such only in England and Wales, the new measure gave them the same right in Scotland and Ireland. The Medical Act 1886 extended the qualifications necessary for registration under the medical acts, by making it necessary to pass a qualifying examination in medicine, surgery and midwifery. (See [Medical Education].)

An act, passed in 1874, related exclusively to the Apothecaries’ Society, and is termed the Apothecaries’ Act Amendment Act. By this measure some provisions of the act of 1815, which had become obsolete or unsuitable, were repealed, and powers were given to the society to unite or co-operate with other medical licensing bodies in granting licences to practise. The act of 1815 had made it compulsory on all candidates for a licence to have served an apprenticeship of five years to an apothecary, and although by the interpretation of the court of examiners of the society this term really included the whole period of medical study, yet the regulation was felt as a grievance by many members of the medical profession. It was accordingly repealed, and no apprenticeship is now necessary. The restriction of the choice of examiners to the members of the society was also repealed, and the society was given the power (which it did not before possess) to strike off from the list of its licentiates the names of disreputable persons. The act of 1874 also specified that the society was not deprived of any right or obligation they may have to admit women to examination, and to enter their names on the list of licentiates if they acquit themselves satisfactorily.

The Apothecaries’ Society is governed by a master, two wardens and twenty-two assistants. The members are divided into Three grades, yeomanry or freemen, the livery, and the court. Women are not, however, admitted to the freedom. The hall of the society, situated in Water Lane, London, and covering about three-quarters of an acre, was acquired in 1633. It was destroyed by the great fire, but was rebuilt about ten years later and enlarged in 1786. This is the only property possessed by the society. In 1673, the society established a botanic and physic garden at Chelsea, and in 1722 Sir Hans Sloane, who had become the ground owner, gave it to the society on the condition of presenting annually to the Royal Society fifty dried specimens of plants till the number should reach 2000. This condition was fulfilled in 1774. Owing to the heavy cost of maintenance and other reasons, the “physic garden” was handed over in 1902, with the consent of the Charity Commissioners, to a committee of management, to be maintained in the interests of botanical study and research.

See C.R.B. Barrett, The History of the Society of Apothecaries of London (1905).

APOTHEOSIS (Gr. ἀποθεοῦν, to make a god, to deify), literally deification. The term properly implies a clear polytheistic conception of gods in contrast with men, while it recognizes that some men cross the dividing line. It is characteristic of polytheism to blur that line in several ways. Thus the ancient Greek religion was especially disposed to belief in heroes and demigods. Founders of cities, and even of colonies, received worship; the former are, generally speaking, mythical personages and, in strictness, heroes. But the worship after death of historical persons, such as Lycurgus, or worship of the living as true deities, e.g. Lysander and Philip II. of Macedon, occurred sporadically even before Alexander’s conquests brought Greek life into contact with oriental traditions. It was inevitable, too, that ancient monarchies should enlist polytheistic conceptions of divine or half-divine men in support of the dynasties; “Seu deos regesve canit deorum Sanguinem,” Horace (Odes, iv. 2, II. 12, 13) writes of Pindar; though the reference is to myths, yet the phrase is significant. In the East all such traits are exaggerated, a result perhaps rather of the statecraft than of the religions of Egypt and Persia. Whatever part vanity or the flattery of courtiers may have played with others, or with Alexander, it is significant that the dynasties of Alexander’s various successors all claim divine honours of some sort (see [Ptolemies], [Seleucid Dynasty], &c.). Theocritus (Idyll 17) hails Ptolemy Philadelphus as a demigod, and speaks of his father as seated among the gods along with Alexander. Ancestor worship, or reverence for the dead, was a third factor. It may work even in Cicero’s determination that his daughter should enjoy “ἀποθέωσις”— as he writes to Atticus—or receive the “honour” of consecratia (fragment of his De Consolatione). Lastly, we need not speak of mere sycophancy. Yet it was common; Verres was worshipped before he was impeached!

The Romans had, up to the end of the Republic, accepted only one official apotheosis; the god Quirinus, whatever his original meaning, having been identified with Romulus. But the emperor Augustus carried on the tradition of ancient statecraft by having Julius Caesar recognized as a god (divus Julius), the first of a new class of deities proper (divi). The tradition was steadily followed and was extended to some ladies of the imperial family and even to imperial favourites. Worship of an emperor during his lifetime, except as the worship of his genius, was, save in the cases of Caligula and Domitian, confined to the provinces. Apotheosis after his death, being in the hands of the senate, did not at once cease, even when Christianity was officially adopted. The Latin term is consecratio, which of course has a variety of senses, including simple burial. (Inscription in G. Boissier, La Religion romaine; Renier, Inscriptions d’Algiers, 2510.) The Greek term Apotheosis, probably a coinage of the Hellenistic epoch, becomes more nearly technical for the deification of dead emperors. But it is still used simply for the erection of tombs (clearly so in some Greek inscriptions, Corpus Inscript. Graec. 2831, 2832, quoted in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Apotheosis). Possibly there is a trace of ancestor worship even here; but the two usages have diverged. The squib of the philosopher Seneca on the memory of Claudius (d. A.D. 54), Apocolocyntosis (“pumpkinification”), is evidence that, as early as Seneca’s lifetime, apotheosis was in use for the recognition of a departed emperor as a god. It also indicates how much contempt might be associated with this pretended worship. The people, says Suetonius (Jul. Caes. c. 88), fully believed in the divinity of Julius Caesar, hinting at the same time that this was by no means the case with the majority of the apotheoses subsequently decreed by the senate. Yet we learn from Capitolinus that Marcus Aurelius was still worshipped as a household divinity in the time of Diocletian, and was believed to impart revelations in dreams (Vit. M. Ant. c. 18). Antinous, the favourite of Hadrian, was adored in Egypt a century after his death (Origen, Contra Celsum, iii. 36), though, according to Boissier, his worship never had official sanction. The ceremonies attendant on an imperial apotheosis are very fully described by Herodianus (bk. iv. c. 2) on occasion of the obsequies of Severus, which he appears to have witnessed. The most significant was the liberation, at the moment of kindling the funeral pyre, of an eagle which was supposed to bear the emperor’s soul to heaven. Sharp-sighted persons had actually beheld the ascension of Augustus (Suet. August, c. 100), and of Drusilla, sister of Caligula. Representations of apotheoses occur on several works of art; the most important are the apotheosis of Homer on a relief in the Townley collection of the British Museum, that of Titus on the arch of Titus, and that of Augustus on a magnificent cameo in the Louvre.

In China at the present day many Taoist gods are (or are given out as) men deified for service to the state. This again may be statecraft. In India, the (still unexplained) rise of the doctrine of transmigration hindered belief. Apotheosis can mean nothing to those who hold that a man may be reborn as a god, but still needs redemption, and that men on earth may win redemption, if they are brave enough. Curiously, Buddhism itself is ruled by the ghost or shadowy remainder of belief in transmigration—Karma.

Apotheosis may also be used in wider senses. (a) Some (e.g. Herbert Spencer) hold that most gods are deified men, and most myths historical traditions which have been grotesquely distorted. This theory is known as Euhemerism (see [Euhemerus]). It is needless to say that the attitude of those holding the Euhemerist theory is at the farthest pole from belief in apotheosis. According to the latter, some men may become gods. According to the former, all gods are but men; or, some men have been erroneously supposed to become gods. The Euhemerist theory mainly appeals to ancestor worship—a fact of undoubted importance in the history of religion, especially in China and in ancient Rome. In India, too, a dead person treated with funeral honours becomes a guardian spirit—if neglected, a tormenting demon. But whether the great gods of polytheism were really transfigured ancestors is very doubtful. (b) Again, there is a tendency to offer something like worship to the founders of religions. Thus more than human honour is paid to Zoroaster and Buddha and even to the founders of systems not strictly religious, e.g. to Confucius and Auguste Comte. It is noticeable that this kind of worship is not accorded in rigidly monotheistic systems, e.g. to Moses and Mahomet. Nor is it accurate to speak of apotheosis in cases where the founder is in his lifetime regarded as the incarnation of a god (cf. Ali among Shi’ite Mahommedans; the Băb in Babism; the Druse Hakim). Most Christians on this ground repudiate the application of the term to the worship of Jesus Christ. Curiously, Apotheosis is used by the Latin Christian poet, Prudentius (c. 400), as the title of a poem defending orthodox views on the person of Christ and other points of doctrine—the affectation of a decadent age. (c) The worship paid to Saints, in those Christian churches which admit it, is formally distinguished as dulia (δουλεία) from true worship or latria (λατρεία). Even the Virgin Mary, though she is styled Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, receives only dulia or at most hyperdulia.

(R. G.; R. Ma.)

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS, the general name given to a vast system of elevations in North America, partly in Canada, but mostly in the United States, extending as a zone, from 100 to 300 m. wide, from Newfoundland, Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick, 1500 m. south-westward to central Alabama. The whole system may be divided into three great sections: the Northern, from Newfoundland to the Hudson river; the Central, from the Hudson Valley to that of New river (Great Kanawha), in Virginia and West Virginia; and the Southern, from New river onwards. The northern section includes the Shickshock Mountains and Notre Dame Range in Quebec, scattered elevations in Maine, the White Mountains and the Green Mountains; the central comprises, besides various minor groups, the Valley Ridges between the Front of the Allegheny Plateau and the Great Appalachian Valley, the New York-New Jersey Highlands and a large portion of the Blue Ridge; and the southern consists of the prolongation of the Blue Ridge, the Unaka Range, and the Valley Ridges adjoining the Cumberland Plateau, with some lesser ranges.

The Chief Summits.—The Appalachian belt includes, with the ranges enumerated above, the plateaus sloping southward to the Atlantic Ocean in New England, and south-eastward to the border of the coastal plain through the central and southern Atlantic states; and on the north-west, the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus declining toward the Great Lakes and the interior plains. A remarkable feature of the belt is the longitudinal chain of broad valleys—the Great Appalachian Valley—which, in the southerly sections divides the mountain system into two subequal portions, but in the northernmost lies west of all the ranges possessing typical Appalachian features, and separates them from the Adirondack group. The mountain system has no axis of dominating altitudes, but in every portion the summits rise to rather uniform heights, and, especially in the central section, the various ridges and intermontane valleys have the same trend as the system itself. None of the summits reaches the region of perpetual snow. Mountains of the Long Range in Newfoundland reach heights of nearly 2000 ft. In the Shickshocks the higher summits rise to about 4000 ft. elevation. In Maine four peaks exceed 3000 ft., including Katahdin (5200 ft.), Mount Washington, in the White Mountains (6293 ft.), Adams (5805), Jefferson (5725), Clay (5554), Monroe (5390), Madison (5380), Lafayette (5269); and a number of summits rise above 4000 ft. In the Green Mountains the highest point, Mansfield, is 4364 ft.; Lincoln (4078), Killington (4241), Camel Hump (4088); and a number of other heights exceed 3000 ft. The Catskills are not properly included in the system. The Blue Ridge, rising in southern Pennsylvania and there known as South Mountain, attains in that state elevations of about 2000 ft.; southward to the Potomac its altitudes diminish, but 30 m. beyond again reach 2000 ft. In the Virginia Blue Ridge the following are the highest peaks east of New river: Mount Weather (about 1850 ft.), Mary’s Rock (3523), Peaks of Otter (4001 and 3875), Stony Man (4031), Hawks Bill (4066). In Pennsylvania the summits of the Valley Ridges rise generally to about 2000 ft., and in Maryland Eagle Rock and Dans Rock are conspicuous points reaching 3162 ft. and 2882 ft. above the sea. On the same side of the Great Valley, south of the Potomac, are the Pinnacle (3007 ft.) and Pidgeon Roost (3400 ft.). In the southern section of the Blue Ridge are Grandfather Mountain (5964 ft.), with three other summits above 5000, and a dozen more above 4000. The Unaka Ranges (including the Black and Smoky Mountains) have eighteen peaks higher than 5000 ft., and eight surpassing 6000 ft. In the Black Mountains, Mitchell (the culminating point of the whole system) attains an altitude of 6711 ft., Balsam Cone, 6645, Black Brothers, 6690, and 6620, and Hallback, 6403. In the Smoky Mountains we have Clingman’s Peak (6611), Guyot (6636), Alexander (6447), Leconte (6612), Curtis (6588), with several others above 6000 and many higher than 5000.

In spite of the existence of the Great Appalachian Valley, the master streams are transverse to the axis of the system. The main watershed follows a tortuous course which crosses the mountainous belt just north of New river in Virginia; south of this the rivers head in the Blue Ridge, cross the higher Unakas, receive important tributaries from the Great Valley, and traversing the Cumberland Plateau in spreading gorges, escape by way of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers to the Ohio and Mississippi, and thus to the Gulf of Mexico; in the central section the rivers, rising in or beyond the Valley Ridges, flow through great gorges (water gaps) to the Great Valley, and by south-easterly courses across the Blue Ridge to tidal estuaries penetrating the coastal plain; in the northern section the water-parting lies on the inland side of the mountainous belt, the main lines of drainage running from north to south.

Geology.—The rocks of the Appalachian belt fall naturally into two divisions; ancient (pre-Cambrian) crystallines, including marbles, schists, gneisses, granites and other massive igneous rocks, and a great succession of Paleozoic sediments. The crystallines are confined to the portion of the belt east of the Great Valley where Paleozoic rocks are always highly metamorphosed and occur for the most part in limited patches, excepting in New England and Canada, where they assume greater areal importance, and are besides very generally intruded by granites. The Paleozoic sediments, ranging in age from Cambrian to Permian, occupy the Great Valley, the Valley Ridges and the plateaus still farther west. They are rarely metamorphosed to the point of recrystallization, though locally shales are altered to roofing slates, sandstones are indurated, limestones slightly marblized, and coals, originally bituminous, are changed to anthracite in northern Pennsylvania, and to graphite in Rhode Island. Igneous intrusions consist only of unimportant dikes of trap. The most striking and uniformly characteristic geologic feature of the mountains is their internal structure, consisting of innumerable parallel, long and narrow folds, always closely appressed in the eastern part of any cross-section (Piedmont Plateau to Great Valley), less so along a central zone (Great Valley and Valley Ridges), and increasingly open on the west (Allegheny and Cumberland Plateaus). Asymmetry of the folds is a marked characteristic in the zones of closer folding, the anticlines having long gently inclined easterly limbs, and short, steep and even overturned limbs upon the west. The effect of such folds is often exaggerated by thrusts, and faulting of this sort is prominent in the southern section, where the existence of over-thrusts measured by several miles has been established.

What may be termed the ancestral Appalachian system was formed during the post-carboniferous revolution, though certain of its elements had been previously outlined, and perhaps at different dates. Folding of the rocks resulted from the operation of great compressive forces acting tangentially to the figure of the earth. Extensive and deep-seated crumpling was necessarily accompanied by vertical uplift throughout the zone affected, but once at least since their birth the mountains have been worn down to a lowland, and the mountains of to-day are the combined product of subsequent uplift of a different sort, and dissection by erosion. Produced by long-continued subaerial decay and erosion, in later Cretaceous times this lowland extended from the Atlantic Ocean well toward the interior of North America; since then the whole continent has been generally elevated, and by successive steps the Appalachian belt has been raised to form a wide but relatively low arch. The crosswise courses of the greater rivers result from the rivers being older than the mountains, which indeed have been produced by circumdenudation. The master streams of the present have inherited their channels from the drainage systems of the Cretaceous lowland, and though raised athwart the courses of the lowland trunk streams the great arch was developed so slowly that these channels could be maintained through pari passu deepening. Former tributaries have given place to others developed with reference to the distribution of more or less easily eroded strata, the present longitudinal valleys being determined by the out-crop of soft shales or soluble limestones, and the parallel ridges upheld by hard sandstones or schists. Parallelism of mountain ridges and intervening valleys is thus attributable to the folding of the rocks, but the origin of the interior structure of the mountains is to be kept distinct from the origin of the mountains as features of topography.

Flora and Fauna.—Much of the region is covered with forest yielding quantities of valuable timber, especially in Canada and northern New England. The most valuable trees for lumber are spruce, white pine, hemlock, cedar, white birch, ash, maple and basswood; all excepting pine and hemlock and poplar in addition are ground into wood pulp for the manufacture of paper. In the central and southern parts of the belt oak and hickory constitute valuable hard woods, and certain varieties of the former furnish quantities of tan bark. The tulip tree produces a good clear lumber known as white wood or poplar, and is also a source of pulp. In the south both white and yellow pine abounds. Many flowering and fruit-bearing shrubs of the heath family add to the beauty of the mountainous districts, rhododendron and kalmia often forming impenetrable thickets. Bears, mountain lions (pumas), wild cats (lynx) and wolves haunt the more remote fastnesses of the mountains; foxes abound; deer are found in many districts and moose in the north.

Influence on History.—For a century the Appalachians were a barrier to the westward expansion of the English colonies; the continuity of the system, the bewildering multiplicity of its succeeding ridges, the tortuous courses and roughness of its transverse passes, a heavy forest and dense undergrowth all conspired to hold the settlers on the seaward-sloping plateaus and coastal plains. Only by way of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, and round about the southern termination of the system were there easy routes to the interior of the country, and these were long closed by hostile aborigines and jealous French or Spanish colonists. In eastern Pennsylvania the Great Valley was accessible by reason of a broad gateway between the end of South Mountain and the Highlands, and here in the Lebanon Valley settled German Moravians, whose descendants even now retain the peculiar patois known as “Pennsylvania Dutch.” These were late comers to the New World forced to the frontier to find unclaimed lands. With their followers of both German and Scotch-Irish origin, they worked their way southward and soon occupied all of the Virginia Valley and the upper reaches of the Great Valley tributaries of the Tennessee. By 1755 the obstacle to westward expansion had been thus reduced by half; outposts of the English colonists had penetrated the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus, threatening French monopoly in the transmontane region, and a conflict became inevitable. Making common cause against the French to determine the control of the Ohio valley, the unsuspected strength of the colonists was revealed, and the successful ending of the French and Indian War extended England’s territory to the Mississippi. To this strength the geographic isolation enforced by the Appalachian mountains had been a prime contributor. The confinement of the colonies between an ocean and a mountain wall led to the fullest occupation of the coastal border of the continent, which was possible under existing conditions of agriculture, conducing to a community of purpose, a political and commercial solidarity, which would not otherwise have been developed. As early as 1700 it was possible to ride from Portland, Maine, to southern Virginia, sleeping each night at some considerable village. In contrast to this complete industrial occupation, the French territory was held by a small and very scattered population, its extent and openness adding materially to the difficulties of a disputed tenure. Bearing the brunt of this contest as they did, the colonies were undergoing preparation for the subsequent struggle with the home government. Unsupported by shipping, the American armies fought toward the sea with the mountains at their back protecting them against Indians leagued with the British. The few settlements beyond the Great Valley were free for self-defence because debarred from general participation in the conflict by reason of their position.

See the separate articles on the states, and also the following references:—Topographic maps and Geologic Folios of the United States Geological Survey; Bailey Willis, “The Northern Appalachians,” and C.W. Hayes, “The Southern Appalachians,” both in National Geographic Monographs, vol. i.; and chaps, iii., iv. and v. of Miss E.C. Semple’s American History and its Geographic Conditions (Boston, 1903).

(A. C. Sp.)

APPANAGE, or Apanage (a French word from the late Lat. apanagium, formed from apanare, i.e. panem porrigere, to give bread, i.e. sustenance), in its original sense, the means of subsistence given by parents to their younger children as distinct from the rights secured to the eldest born by the custom of primogeniture. In its modern usage it is practically confined to the money endowment given to the younger children of reigning or mediatized houses in Germany and Austria, which reverts to the state or to the head of the family on the extinction of the line of the original grantee. In English history the system of appanages never played any great part, and the term is now properly applied only to the appanages of the crown: the duchy of Cornwall, assigned to the king’s eldest son at birth, or on his father’s accession to the crown, and the duchy of Lancaster. In the history of France, however, the appanage was a very important factor. The word denotes in very early French law the portion of lands or money given by fathers and mothers to their sons or daughters on marriage, and usually connotes a renunciation by the latter of any future inheritance; or it may denote the portion given by the eldest son to his brothers and sisters when he was sole inheritor. The word apanage is still employed in this sense in French official texts of some Customs; but it was in old public law that it received its definite meaning and importance. Under the kings of the third dynasty, the division of the kingdom among the sons of the dead monarch which had characterized the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, ceased. The eldest son alone succeeded to the crown; but at the same time a custom was established by which the king made territorial provision suitable to their rank for his other children or for his brothers and sisters; custom forbade their being left landless. Lands and lordships thus bestowed constituted the appanages, which interfered so greatly with the formation of ancient France. While the persevering policy of the Capets, which aimed at reuniting the great fiefs, duchies, countships, baronies, &c., to the domain of the crown, gradually reconstructed for their benefit a territorial sovereignty over France, the institution of the appanage periodically subtracted large portions from it. Louis XI., in particular, had to struggle against the appanaged nobles. The old law, however, never abolished this institution. The edict of Moulins (1566) maintained it, as one of the exceptions to the inalienability of the crown-lands; only it was then decided that daughters of France should be appanaged in money, or that if, in default of coin, lands were assigned to them, these lands should be redeemable by the crown in perpetuity. The efforts of the kings to minimize this evil, and of the old jurisprudence to deal with the matter, resulted in two expedients: (1) the reversion of the appanage to the crown was secured as far as possible, being declared inalienable and transmissible only to male descendants in the male line of the person appanaged; (2) originally the person appanaged had possessed all the rights of a duke or count—that is to say, in the middle ages nearly all the attributes of sovereignty; the more important of these attributes were now gradually reserved to the monarch, including public authority over the inhabitants of the appanage in all essential matters. However, it is evident from the letters of appanage, dated April 1771, in favour of the count of Provence, how many functions of public authority an appanaged person still held. The Constituent Assembly, by the law dated the 22nd of November 1790, decided that in future there should be no appanages in real estate, and that younger sons of monarchs, married and over twenty-five years of age, should be provided for by yearly grants (rentes apanagères) from the public funds. The laws of the 13th of August and the 21st of December 1790 revoked all the existing appanages, except those of the Luxembourg Palace and the Palais Royal. To each person hitherto appanaged an annual income of one million livres was assigned, and two millions for the brothers of the king. All this came to an end with the monarchy. Napoleon, by the sénatus-consulte of the 30th of January 1810, resolved to create appanages for the emperor’s princely descendants, such appanages to consist for the most part of lands on French soil. The fall of the empire again annulled this enactment. The last appanage known in France was that enjoyed by the house of Orleans. Having been re-established, or recognized as still existing, by the Restoration, it was formally confirmed by the law of the 15th of January 1825. On the accession of Louis Philippe it was united to the national property by the law of the 2nd of March 1832.

For appanages in ancient law see the Essai sur les apanages ou mémoires historiques de leur établissement, attributed to Du Vaucel, about 1780.

(J. P. E.)

APPAREL (from O. Fr. aparail, aparailler, mod. appareil, from Low Lat. adpariculare, to make fit or equal), equipment, outfit, things furnished for the proper performance of anything, now chiefly used of dress. The word is also applied to the “orphreys,” i.e. embroidered strips or borders, on ecclesiastical vestments.

APPARITIONS. An apparition, strictly speaking, is merely an appearance (Lat. apparere, to appear), the result of perception exercised on any stimulus of any of the senses. But in ordinary usage the word apparition denotes a perception (generally through the sense of sight) which cannot, as a rule, be shown to be occasioned by an object in external nature. We say “as a rule” because many so-called apparitions are merely illusions, i.e. misconstructions of the perceptive processes, as when a person in a bad light sees a number of small children leading a horse, and finds, on nearer approach, that he sees two men carrying bee-hives suspended from a pole. Again, Sir Walter Scott’s vision of Byron, then lately dead, proved to be a misconstruction of certain plaids and cloaks hanging in the hall at Abbotsford, or so Sir Walter declared. Had he not discovered the physical basis of this illusion (which, while it lasted, was an apparition, technically speaking), he and others might have thought that it was an apparition in the popular sense of the word, a ghost. In popular phraseology a ghost is understood to be a phantasm produced in some way by the spirit of a dead person, the impression being usually visual, though the ghost, or apparition, may also affect the sense of hearing (by words, knocks, whistles, groans and so forth), or the sense of touch, or of weight, as in the case of the “incubus.” In ordinary speech an apparition of a person not known to the percipient to be dead is called a wraith, in the Highland phrase, a spirit of the living. The terms ghost and wraith involve the hypothesis that the false perceptions are caused by spirits, a survival of the archaic animistic hypothesis (see [Animism]), an hypothesis as difficult to prove as to disprove. Apparitions, of course, are not confined to anthropomorphic phantasms; we hear of phantom coaches (sometimes seen, but more frequently heard), of phantom dogs, cats, horses, cattle, deer, and even of phantom houses.

Whatever may be the causes of these and other false perceptions,—most curious when the impression is shared by several witnesses,—they may best be considered under the head of hallucination (q.v.). Hallucinations may be pathological, i.e. the result of morbid conditions of brain or nerve, of disease, of fever, of insanity, of alcoholism, of the abuse of drugs. Again, they may be the result of dissociation, or may occur in the borderland of sleep or waking, and in this case they partake of the hallucinatory nature of dreams (q.v.). Again, hallucinations may, once or twice in a lifetime, come into the experience of the sane, the healthy, and, as far as any tests can be applied, of the wide-awake. In such instances the apparition (whether it take the form of a visual phantasm, of a recognized voice, of a touch, or what not) may be coincidental or non-coincidental. The phantasm is called coincidental if it represents a known and distant person who is later found to have been dying or in some other crisis at the moment of the percipient’s experience. When the false perception coincides with nothing of the sort, it is styled non-coincidental. Coincidental apparitions have been explained by the theory of telepathy (q.v.), one mind or brain impressing another in some unknown way so as to beget an hallucinatory apparition or phantasm. On the evidence, so far as it has been collected and analysed, it seems that the mind which, on the hypothesis, begets the hallucinations, usually does so without conscious effort (see [Subliminal Self]). There are, however, a few cases in which the experiment of begetting, in another, an hallucination from a distance, is said to have been experimentally and consciously made, with success.

If the telepathic theory of coincidental hallucinations be accepted, we have still to account for the much more common non-coincidental apparitions of the living who do not happen to be in any particular crisis. In these instances it cannot be demonstrated that telepathy has not been at work, as when a person is seen at a place which he thought of visiting, but did not visit. F.W. Myers even upheld a theory of psychorhagy, holding that the spirits of some persons have a way of manifesting themselves at a distance by a psychic invasion. This involves, as he remarked, paleolithic psychology, and the old savage doctrine of animism, rather than telepathy (see Myers, Human Personality). Of belief in coincidental hallucinations or wraiths among savages, records are scanty; the belief, however, is found among Maoris and Fuegians (see Lang, Making of Religions). The perception of apparitions of distant but actual scenes and occurrences is usually called clairvoyance (q.v.). The belief is also familiar under the name of second sight (see [Second Sight]), a term of Scots usage, though the belief in it, and the facts if accepted, are of world-wide diffusion. The apparitions may either represent actual persons and places, or may be symbolical, taking the form of phantasmic lights, coffins, skeletons, shrouds and so forth. Again, the appearances may either represent things, persons and occurrences of the past (see [Retrocognition]), or of the present (clairvoyance), or of the future (see [Premonition]). When the apparitions produce themselves in given rooms, houses or localities, and are exhibited to various persons at various times, the locality is popularly said to be haunted by spirits, that is, of the dead, on the animistic hypothesis (see [Hauntings]). Like the other alleged facts, these are of world-wide diffusion, or the belief in them is world-wide, and peculiar to no race, age, or period of culture. A haunted place is a centre of permanent possibilities of hallucinations, or is believed to be so. A distinct species of hauntings are those in which unexplained sounds and movements of objects, apparently untouched, occur. The German term Poltergeist (q.v.) has been given to the supposed cause of these occurrences where the cause is not ascertained to be sportive imposture. In the performances of modern spiritualists the Poltergeist appears, as it were, to be domesticated, and to come at the call of the medium.

An intermittent kind of ominous haunting attached, not to places, but to families, is that of the banshee (Celtic) or family death omen, such as the white bird of the Oxenhams, the Airlie drummer, the spectral rider of Clan Gilzean, the rappings of the Woodde family. These apparitions, with fairies and djinns (the Arab form of fairy), haunt the borderland between folk-lore and psychical research.

So far we have been concerned with spontaneous apparitions, or with the belief in them. Among induced apparitions may be reckoned the materialized forms of spiritual séances, which have a material basis of veils, false moustaches, wigs and the corpus vile of the medium. It is also possible that mere expectancy and suggestion induce hallucinatory perceptions among the members of the circle. That apparitions of a sort can be induced by hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestion is certain enough (see [Hypnotism]). Savages produce apparitions in similar ways by suggestion, accompanied by dances, fumigations, darkness, fasting, drugs, and whatever can affect the imaginations of the onlookers (see [Magic]). Both in savage and civilized life, some persons can provoke themselves into beholding apparitions usually fantastic, but occasionally coincidental, by sedulously staring into any clear deep water, a fragment of rock crystal, a piece of polished basalt or obsidian, a mirror, a ring, a sword blade, or a glass of sherry (see [Crystal Gazing]). Indeed any object, a wall, the palm of the hand, the shoulder-blade-bone of a sheep, may be, and has been used to this end (see [Divination]).

Almost all known apparitions may accommodate themselves to one or other of the categories given, whether they be pathological, coincidental or spontaneous, induced, permanently localized, or sporadic.

See generally, [Spiritualism] and [Psychical Research].

(A. L.)

APPARITOR, or Apparator (Latin for a servant of a public official, from apparere, to attend in public), an attendant who executed the orders of a Roman magistrate; hence a beadle in a university, a pursuivant or herald; particularly, in English ecclesiastical courts, the official who serves the processes of the court and causes defendants to appear by summons.

APPEAL, in law. In the old English common law the term “appeal” was used to describe a process peculiar to English criminal procedure. It was a right of prosecution possessed as a personal privilege by a party individually aggrieved by a felony, a privilege of which the crown could not directly or indirectly deprive him, since he could use it alike when the prisoner was tried and acquitted, and when he was convicted and pardoned. It was chiefly known in practice as the privilege of the nearest relation of a murdered person. When in 1729 (after Colonel Oglethorpe’s inquiry and report on the London prisons) Banbridge and other gaolers were indicted for their treatment of prisoners, but were acquitted for deficiency of evidence, appeals for murder were freely brought by relatives of deceased prisoners. In the case of Slaughterford (1708) the accused was charged with murdering a woman whom he had seduced; the evidence was very imperfect, and he was acquitted on indictment. But public indignation being aroused by the atrocities alleged to have been perpetrated, an appeal was brought, and on conviction he was hanged, as his execution was a privilege belonging to the prosecutor, of which the crown could not deprive him by a pardon. In 1818 an appeal was ingeniously met by an offer of battle, since if the appellee were an able-bodied man he had the choice between combat or a jury (see [Wager]). This neutralizing of one obsolete and barbarous process by another called the attention of the legislature to the subject, and appeal in criminal cases, along with trial by battle, was abolished in 1819. The history of this appeal is fully dealt with in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 1898.

In its usual modern sense the term appeal is applied to the proceeding by which the decision of a court of justice is brought for review before another tribunal of higher authority. In Roman jurisprudence it was used in this and in other significations; it was sometimes equivalent to prosecution, or the calling up of an accused person before a tribunal where the accuser appealed to the protection of the magistrate against injustice or oppression. The derivation from appellare (“call”) suggests that its earliest meaning was an urgent outcry or prayer against injustice. During the republic the magistrate was generally supreme within his sphere, and those who felt themselves outraged by injustice threw themselves on popular protection by provocatio, instead of looking to redress from a higher official authority. Under the empire different grades of jurisdiction were established, and the ultimate remedy was an appeal to the emperor; thus Paul, when brought before Festus, appealed unto Caesar. Such appeals were, however, not heard by the emperor in person but by a supreme judge representing him. In the Corpus Juris the appeal to the emperor is called indiscriminately appellatio and provocatio. A considerable portion of the 49th book of the Pandects is devoted to appeals; but little of the practical operation of the system is to be deduced from the propositions there brought together.

During the middle ages full scope was afforded for appeals from the lower to the higher authorities in the church. In matters ecclesiastical, including those matrimonial, testamentary and other departments, which the church ever tried to bring within the operation of the canon law, there were various grades of appeal, ending with the pope. The claims of the church to engross appeals in matters trenching on the temporal rights of princes led to continual conflicts between church and state, terminated in England at the reformation by the suppression in 1534 of appeals to Rome, which had previously been discouraged by legislation of Edward III. and Richard II.

In temporal, as distinct from spiritual matters, it became customary for ambitious sovereigns to encourage appeals from the courts of the crown vassals to themselves as represented by the supreme judges, and Charlemagne usually enjoys the credit of having set the example of this system of centralization by establishing missi dominici. It is not improbable that his claim was suggested or justified by the practice of the Roman empire, to the sovereignty whereof he claimed to be successor.

England.—When the royal authority in England grew strong as against that of the tenants in capite, the king’s courts in England were more effectively organized, and their net swept wider so as to draw within their cognizance matters previously adjudged in courts baron or courts leet or in the county court, and they acquired authority to supervise and review the decisions of the inferior and local courts, to control and limit their claims to exercise jurisdiction, and to transfer causes from the local to the royal courts. The machinery by which this process was usually effected, under the common law, was not by what is now known as appeal, but by the process of certiorari or writs of error or prohibition. Recourse was also had against the decisions of the royal courts by appeal to the great council of the king, or to parliament as a whole. The supremacy of the king’s courts over all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, has been completely established since the reign of Henry VIII., and they have effectually asserted the power to regulate and keep within their proper jurisdiction all other tribunals within the realm. Since that date the organization of judicial tribunals has gradually been changed and improved with the object (1) of creating a judicial hierarchy independent of executive control; (2) of ensuring that all decisions on questions of law shall be co-ordinated and rendered systematic by correction of the errors and vagaries of subordinate tribunals; and (3) of securing so far as possible uniformity in the judicial interpretation and administration of the law, by creating a supreme appellate tribunal to whose decisions all other tribunals are bound to conform. It would be undesirable to detail at length the history of appellate jurisdiction in England, involving as it would the discussion in great detail of the history and procedure of English law, and it may suffice to indicate the system of appeals as at present organized, beginning with the lowest courts.

Justices of the Peace.—The decisions of justices of the peace sitting as courts of summary jurisdiction are subject to review on questions of law only by the High Court of Justice. This review is in a sense consultative, because it is usually effected by means of a case voluntarily stated by the justices at the request of the aggrieved party, in which are set forth the facts as determined by the justices, the questions of law raised and their decision thereon, as to the correctness whereof the opinion of the High Court is invited. The procedure is equally open in criminal and civil matters brought before the justices. But when the justices decline to state a case for the opinion of the High Court, the latter, if review seems desirable, may order the justices to state a case. And the High Court has also power to control the action of justices by prohibiting them from acting in a case beyond their jurisdiction, ordering them to exercise jurisdiction where they have improperly declined (mandamus), or bringing up for review and quashing orders or convictions which they have made in excess of jurisdiction, or in cases in which interested or biassed justices have adjudicated (certiorari). None of these regulative processes exactly corresponds to what is popularly known as an appeal, but in effect if not in form an appeal is thus given.

There is also another form of appeal, in the fullest sense of the term, from the decision of justices sitting as a court of summary jurisdiction to the justices of the same county sitting in general or quarter sessions, or in the case of a borough to the recorder as judge of the borough court of quarter sessions. This form of appeal is in every case the creation of statute: and even in text-books it is hardly possible to find a really complete list of the matters in respect of which such appeal lies. But as regards criminal cases there is an approximately general rule, given by § 19 of the Summary Jurisdiction Act 1879, viz. that an appeal to quarter sessions lies from the conviction or order of a court of summary jurisdiction directing imprisonment without the option of a fine as a punishment for an offence, or for failing to do or to abstain from doing any act required to be done or left undone other than an order for the payment of money, or to find sureties or give security or to enter into a recognizance, or a conviction made on a plea of guilty or admission of the truth of the matter of complaint.

As a general rule, subject to particular statutory exceptions, appeals of this kind are by way of rehearing, i.e. the actor or prosecutor must before the appellate tribunal call his witnesses and prove his case just as if no previous hearing had taken place before the court appealed from (Pritchard, Quarter Sessions Practice, 2nd ed., 461). The only limit is that the appellant must confine himself to the grounds of appeal stated in the notice of appeal given by him.

Justices in Quarter Sessions.—This tribunal has under the commission of the peace and under statute power to refer questions of difficulty arising before it for decision to the High Court. The old mode of exercising this power was by sending on to assizes indictments raising difficult questions which had been presented at quarter sessions. The High Court has ex officio power to transfer such indictments where the nature of the case and the demands of justice call for such transfer. The quarter sessions had also power under statute on trying an indictment to refer to the court for crown cases reserved (Crown Cases Act 1848), abolished by the Criminal Appeal Act 1907, questions of law which had arisen at the trial, and in all civil cases the quarter sessions has power of its own volition and subject to no direct compulsion to consult the High Court on legal questions of difficulty which have arisen. Until 1894 this jurisdiction was regarded as consultative only. It was and is exercised by stating the facts, of which the court of quarter sessions is the sole judge, and indicating the questions of law arising on the facts, and the view of quarter sessions thereon, and inviting the opinion of the High Court. Under the Judicature Act 1894 cases stated in this way are now treated as “appeals” in the popular sense.

Inferior Courts of purely Civil Jurisdiction.—An appeal also lies as a general rule to the High Court from the judgment of a county court or of any inferior tribunal having civil jurisdiction.

(a) County Courts. Any party to an action or matter in a county court who is dissatisfied with the determination or direction of the judge in law or equity, or upon the admission or rejection of any evidence, may appeal against the decision in the following cases: (1) if the amount of claim or counter-claim in the proceeding exceeds £20; or (2) in all equity matters or cases in which an injunction has been given; or (3) in actions to recover possession of land where questions of title are involved (County Courts Act 1888, § 120). In the case of a claim below £20 no appeal lies except by the leave of the county court. The old practice of appeal by way of special case as in appeals from justices has been abolished, and the present procedure is by notice of motion (R.S.C. O. LIX. rr. 10-18).

These appeals are heard in the king’s bench division, except in the case of appeals from judgments of a county court sitting in the exercise of admiralty jurisdiction, which are heard by two or more judges sitting in the probate, divorce and admiralty division. The chancery division has never sat to hear “appeals” from a county court exercising equity jurisdiction; but at times, by prohibition or certiorari, has, in effect, reviewed or restrained excess of jurisdiction by county courts in equity matters.

The decision of the High Court on county court appeals is final unless an appeal to the court of appeal is brought by leave of that court or of the High Court (Judicature Act 1894, § 1, sub. sect. 5; Judicature Act 1873, § 45).

(b) Other inferior courts of civil jurisdiction. Appeals from the local courts of record which still survive in certain cities, towns and districts are in a somewhat anomalous position. The general rule is that, unless a statute regulates such appeal, it may be brought in the king’s bench division of the High Court on notice of motion in any case in which, before the Judicature Acts, the court of king’s bench could have reviewed the decision of the inferior court by writ of error. The history of this question is dealt with in Darlow v. Shuttleworth, 1902, 1 K.B. 721.

In the case of the mayor’s court of London, under the local and general statutes regulating that court, the appeal is usually to the king’s bench division, but where there is what is termed “error” on the face of the proceedings of the mayor’s court, the appeal lies direct to the court of appeal as successor of the court of exchequer chamber. Appeals from the Liverpool court of passage and from the chancery courts of the duchies of Lancaster and Durham lie by statute direct to the court of appeal.

High Court of Justice.—Until the Supreme Court of Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 came into operation, the superior courts in England were imperfectly co-ordinated both as to jurisdiction and appeals. The effect of these acts was to create a Supreme Court of Judicature divided into two main branches, the High Court of Justice, which is an appellate court with respect to the inferior courts already mentioned, and to certain other special courts and persons; and the court of appeal, which is mainly concerned with appeals from the High Court of Justice.

The High Court of Justice acts as an appellate court or court of consultation with reference to courts of summary jurisdiction or quarter sessions and to county courts and other inferior courts of civil jurisdiction in the cases already indicated. The three divisions of the court are somewhat differently placed with reference to appeals.

In the chancery division (made up, in 1908, of six single judge courts) no appeals are heard except from subordinate officials (masters) of the court, or an occasional interference by certiorari or prohibition with a county court.

In the probate, divorce and admiralty division, besides the supervision which may be exercised by a single judge over the subordinate officers of the court (registrars), divisional courts (of two judges) hear appeals from decisions of the county court in admiralty causes, and appeals from justices in cases between husband and wife under the Summary Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act 1895, as amended by the Licensing Act 1902. In the first of these cases the appeal is on law only as in the case of other county court appeals; in the second, the procedure is by rehearing, or reconsideration of the facts as minuted in the court appealed from, and of the law there applied to these facts.

The bulk of the appellate work of the High Court is conducted in the king’s bench division—which, as successor of the old court of king’s bench in the duties of custos morum of the realm, still retains supervisory power over all inferior courts in all cases in which that supervision has not been transferred to the other divisions of the High Court or to the court of appeal, or to the court of criminal appeal.

The king’s bench division exercises appellate jurisdiction in the following cases.

With respect to decisions of justices of the peace sitting at quarter sessions, or as a court of summary jurisdiction, except in the case above stated, the subject matter of appeal is for the most part of a criminal or quasi-criminal character, the civil jurisdiction of justices being comparatively limited. The appeal in such cases is as to matters of law only, the justices’ decision on facts not being subject to review.

In the case of the courts above named, the appeal is brought by writ of certiorari, where the jurisdiction of quarter sessions to give the judgment challenged is denied in toto, or in some cases by writ of habeas corpus, where the appellant is in custody under an order of the court appealed from (Judicature Act 1894, § 2). The best example of this is the right of a fugitive criminal committed for extradition to challenge the legality of the decision of the committing magistrate by writ of habeas corpus. Save in cases of want of jurisdiction or refusal to exercise it, no appeal lies from quarter sessions except by consent of the court appealed from, which states the facts as ascertained by the inferior court, and invites the review of the superior court upon the questions of law raised by the facts as found.

Decisions of justices sitting in the exercise of summary jurisdiction are subject to review by a special case in which the justices state the facts found by them and their decision on the points of law, and invite the review of the appellate court on these grounds. Such cases for appeal are usually stated by consent of the justices, but in the event of their refusal the appellate court may order that a case shall be stated.

Decisions of justices in the exercise of summary jurisdiction may also be challenged by writ of certiorari as having been wholly outside their jurisdiction; and in such proceeding the appellate tribunal may review the evidence taken below so far as to ascertain whether the justices have by an erroneous finding of fact enabled themselves to assume a jurisdiction which upon the true facts they did not possess.

Where the decision appealed from is in a criminal cause or matter the decision of the High Court is final. Where it is in a civil matter a further appeal also lies to the court of appeal by leave of the High Court or of the court of appeal (Judicature Act 1873, § 45).

Appeals in criminal cases tried on indictment, criminal information or coroner’s inquisition, stand on a different footing from other appeals.

For many years the question of criminal appeal in general had been a matter of great controversy. As early as 1844 a bill had been unsuccessfully introduced for the purpose of establishing appeal in criminal cases, and from that time up to 1906 nearly thirty bills were brought forward with the same object, but none succeeded in passing. In 1892 the question was referred to the council of judges and favourably reported upon by them. It may be remarked that England was practically the only civilized country in which there was no appeal in criminal cases. It is true there was an appeal on questions of law arising at the trial. But the procedure was intricate and technical, being either (1) by writ of error, issued by the consent of the attorney-general (expressed by his fiat), to review errors of law appearing in the record of the trial, or (2) by special case, stated by the judge presiding at the trial, with respect to a question of law raised at the trial. These appeals were heard by the king’s bench division. Meanwhile there had been a considerable development of public opinion in favour of the establishment of criminal appeal, a development undoubtedly hastened by the report of a committee of inquiry in the case of Adolf Beck (1904), showing clearly that the home office was not a satisfactory tribunal of final appeal. In 1906 the lord chancellor (Lord Loreburn) introduced another criminal appeal bill, which passed the House of Lords, but was dropped in the House of Commons after a first reading. The next year the act (Criminal Appeal Act 1907), which was ultimately carried, was introduced into the House of Commons. By this act a court is established consisting of the lord chief justice and eight judges of the king’s bench division, the jurisdiction of the court for crown cases reserved being transferred to the new court. The court to be duly constituted must consist of not less than three judges and of an uneven number of judges. The court may sit in two or more divisions if the lord chief justice so directs. Its sittings are held in London unless special directions are given by the lord chief justice that it shall sit at some other place. The opinion of the majority of those hearing the case determines any question before the court, and judgment is pronounced by the president (who is the lord chief justice or senior member present), unless in questions of law, when, if it is convenient that separate judgments should be pronounced by the members of the court, they may be so pronounced. The judgment of the court of criminal appeal is final, except where the decision involves a point of law of exceptional public importance, and a certificate must be obtained from the attorney-general to that effect. The court of criminal appeal is a superior court of record. An appeal may be made either against conviction or against sentence. A person convicted on indictment may appeal either on a question of law alone or of fact alone, or on a question of mixed law and fact. On a point of law a prisoner has an unqualified right of appeal, on a question of fact or of mixed law and fact there is a right of appeal only if leave be obtained from the court of criminal appeal or a certificate be granted by the judge who tried the prisoner that it is a fit case for appeal. The court is given a wide discretion as to whether a conviction may be sustained or set aside. The court may allow the appeal if they think that the verdict of the jury should be set aside because it is unreasonable, or because it cannot be supported having regard to the evidence, or that the judgment should be set aside on the ground of a wrong decision on any point of law, or that on any ground there was a miscarriage of justice. Power is given to the court to dismiss the appeal if they consider that no substantial miscarriage of justice has occurred, even though they are of opinion that the point raised in the appeal might be decided in favour of the appellant. The sentence passed at the trial may be quashed by the appeal court and such other sentence (whether more or less severe) warranted in law by the verdict substituted. Notice of appeal or notice of application for leave to appeal must be given within ten days of the date of conviction; where a conviction involves sentence of death or corporal punishment the sentence must not be executed until after the expiration of ten days, and, if notice of appeal is given, not until after the determination of the appeal or the final dismissal of the application for leave to appeal. The act gives the court power to order any witnesses who would have been compellable witnesses at the trial to attend and be examined before the court, and to receive the evidence, if tendered, of any witness who is a competent but not compellable witness. If any question arises on the appeal involving prolonged examination of documents or accounts or any scientific or local investigation, which the court thinks cannot be conveniently conducted before it, the matter may be referred to a special commissioner appointed by the court, and the court may act on the report of that commissioner if it thinks fit. An appellant is given the right to be present on the hearing of his appeal, if he desires it, except where the appeal is on some ground involving a question of law alone, but rules of court may provide for his presence in such a case, or the court may give him leave. The act requires shorthand notes to be taken of the proceedings at the trial of any person, who, if convicted, would have a right to appeal under the act. Nothing in the act affects the prerogative of mercy, and the home secretary may, if he thinks fit, at any time refer a case to the court of criminal appeal.

The Court of Appeal.—The court of appeal, constituted under the Judicature Acts, is one of the two permanent divisions of the Supreme Court of Judicature. As now constituted the court consists of ex officio members and five ordinary members, styled lords justices of appeal. The ex officio members are the lord chancellor, every person who has held that office, the lord chief justice, the master of the rolls, and the president of the probate, &c., division.

The ordinary business of the court is carried on by the lords justices under the presidency of the master of the rolls, who in 1881 ceased to be a judge of the High Court (Judicature Act 1881, § 2). The court usually sits in two divisions of three judges, but on occasion a third court can be formed, with the assistance of the other ex officio judges, in the absence of the ordinary judges from illness or public engagements, or to deal with arrears of business. The quorum for final appeals is three, for interlocutory appeals two judges.

The court of appeal has succeeded to the appellate authority exercised (1) in the case of equity and bankruptcy matters by the lord chancellor and the lords justices of appeal in chancery (Judicature Act 1873, § 18); (2) in the case of common law matters, by the court of exchequer chamber, as a court of error, and the superior courts of common law sitting to review the decisions of single judges of these courts sitting with or without a jury at first instance in civil actions; (3) in the case of divorce or probate causes by the full court of divorce (Judicature Act 1881, § 9); (4) in the case of admiralty causes by the king in council or the judicial committee of the privy council; (5) in the case of applications for new trials in jury actions by the king’s bench division (Judicature Act 1890, § 1).

The court never had jurisdiction to hear an appeal in any criminal cause or matter, but was able to review by writ of error decisions of the king’s bench division in such cases, unless the court for crown cases reserved had dealt with the question under the Crown Cases Act 1848. This procedure has been abolished by the Criminal Appeal Act 1907. Instances of procedure by writ of error were rare. Those best worth notice are the cases of the Tichborne claimant on his conviction of perjury, and the case of C. Bradlaugh on the sufficiency of the indictment against him for publishing the Fruits of Philosophy.

The appellate jurisdiction of the court as now exercised entitles the court to hear and determine (1) appeals from every judgment or decree of every division of the High Court in all civil cases in which such judgment is not declared final by statute; (2) applications for a new trial in civil cases tried in the king’s bench division by judge and jury which, until 1890, were dealt with by two or more judges in that division; (3) appeals in matters of civil practice and procedure from decisions of a single judge in chambers, which, until 1894, were dealt with in a divisional court or by a judge in open court; (4) appeals from the chancery courts of Durham (Palatine Court of Durham Act 1889) and Lancaster (act of 1890, c. 23) and the Liverpool court of passage (Anderson v. Dean, 1894, 2 Q.B. 222), and on error in a record of the mayor’s court of London (Le Blanche v. Heaton Telegram Co., 1876, 1 Ex.D. 408); and from county courts under the Agricultural Holdings Acts and Workmen’s Compensation Acts; (5) appeals on questions of law from decisions of the railway commissioners in England (Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1888).

The court of appeal also exercises the lunacy jurisdiction of the lord chancellor, but in regard to this the jurisdiction of the court is for the most part original and not appellate.

The jurisdiction of the court of appeal is excluded or limited in the following cases:—(1) judgments of the High Court—(a) where its jurisdiction is consultative only; (b) where there is an appeal to the High Court from an inferior court of civil jurisdiction; (c) where there is an appeal to the High Court from any court of person, unless in cases (b) and (c) leave be obtained of the court by which the order is made, or of the court of appeal; (2) orders of the High Court in registration and election cases except with the like leave; (3) orders made by consent of parties, or as to costs only which by law are left to the discretion of the court; (4) certain interlocutory orders mentioned in § 1 of the Supreme Court of Judicature (Procedure) Act 1894, except by leave of the judge appealed from or of the court of appeal (5) orders of the admiralty division in cases of prize, the appeal from which lies to His Majesty in Council; (6) where the decision of any court whose jurisdiction was transferred to the High Court is declared by statute to be final; (7) matters which from their nature were not appealable to any court before the Judicature Acts, or in which the court of appeal has no means of enforcing or executing its judgment. For example, it was held in the House of Lords, in Cox v. Hakes, 1890, 15 A.C. 506, that no appeal lies from the order of a judge discharging a prisoner under a writ of habeas corpus. “If,” said Lord Herschell, “the contention of the respondent is to prevail, the statute has effected a grave constitutional change”; and later, “if” the High Court “has inherited the combined powers of the courts whose functions were transferred to it, but none of them had any jurisdiction or authority to review a discharge by a competent court under a writ of habeas corpus, or to enforce the arrest of one thus freed from custody ... it seems to me to follow, that however wrong the court of appeal might think a discharge to have been, it would have been powerless to order a rearrest, or at least to enforce such an order.”

The procedure of the court of appeal is regulated by the rules of the Supreme Court. A distinction is drawn between appeals from a final judgment or order (which, unless the parties consent to a smaller quorum, must be heard by three judges) and an appeal from an interlocutory order (which may be determined by two judges of the court of appeal).

In the case of appeals from a final or interlocutory “judgment,” or from an order, including applications for a new trial, the appeal must be brought within three months from the time when the judgment or order is signed, entered or otherwise perfected, or in the case of refusal of an application from the date of refusal. The appeal is by notice of motion, which except in cases of application for a new trial, need not state the grounds of appeal. Fourteen clear days’ notice of the motion must be given by the appellant to the other party, the respondent.

In the case of appeals from an interlocutory order, or from a final order, or from an order made in any matter which is not an action, or from an order made in chambers, the appeal must be brought within fourteen days by motion, of which four clear days’ notice must be given by the appellant to all parties directly affected by the appeal. Controversies have arisen as to the meaning of the term “interlocutory,” which (in the absence of any authoritative definition) the court of appeal settles as they arise. The test most generally accepted is that a judgment or order is final if, as made, it finally disposes of the rights of the parties in a manner equally conclusive between them. The court may by special leave allow appeals of either class to be brought after the time above limited. The respondent may by proper notice bring a cross appeal against any portion of the judgment or order made below with which he is dissatisfied. The court has power to order the appellant to find security for the costs of an appeal, if special circumstances, such as insolvency or poverty or foreign domicile or the like, make the giving of security desirable. The court of appeal “rehears” the case. Under ordinary circumstances it does not permit a new case to be set up inconsistent with the case as presented below; and it is content with the judges’ notes, or a transcript of the evidence given below, and with a note or transcript of the judgment appealed from, but has power on special grounds to receive fresh evidence either viva voce or on affidavit. The court may call in for its assistance assessors who are experts on the matters of fact or science involved in the appeal, and usually does so in cases arising out of collisions at sea.