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order of the Church. Prophets might rise without such official designation, but they exercised no power of government. Even our Lord Himself was not excused from that great law. We must then insist upon it. But we look for it and ask for it, in vain. If any one were to claim the Presidency of the nation, the office of Governor, the headship of a railroad, the Bishopric of a diocese or the pastorship of a parish upon evidence so vague and flimsy, he would be laughed at as a simpleton.

Rome thunders her anathemas loudly if we reject the claim; but reject it we must if we are true to Christ; and I am sure the anathemas will be as harmless to us as they were to SS. Cyprian and Firmilian and to St. Chrysostom and the other saints.

Sardica and Appeals to Rome.

LECTURE II.

THE REV. LUCIUS WATERMAN, D.D., Priest-in-charge of S. James's Church, Laconia, New Hampshire.

SARDICA AND APPEALS TO ROME.

I AM called upon to discuss before you some canons of a Church Council, that of Sardica, A.D. 343, touching appeals to Rome. If I had to put the story of those Sardican canons in the nutshell of a single paragraph, I should write it thus:

Desperate occasions demand desperate remedies. There arose in the Eastern churches in the fourth century an occasion so novel and so desperate that some good and wise men devised to meet it a remedy not only novel, but alien to the general mind of the Church as it had been previously expressed. This strange remedy was paralleled by a wiser proposal at the time and was emphatically disowned by the Church in a General Council shortly afterwards. From that time this rejected scheme never had any influence upon

the Church's legislation, unless it were by mistake. Through mistaking or misrepresentation, however, it probably did much harm.

I propose to deal with the subject by the expansion of this statement, taking up in order, (1) the desperate condition of the East in the fourth century, (2) the remedy proposed by Athanasius and Hosius at Sardica, (3) the proof that such a remedy was a new thing, (4) the rival proposal of the Council of Antioch and its thorough adoption by the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, and then (5) a view of some important steps in the progress of appeals to the Roman See in the next five hundred years, down to the appearance of the Forged Decretals, and the rise of what may be fairly called "The Papacy."

I.

FOURTH CENTURY CONDITIONS.

Who has not heard of "" Athanasius contra mundum"? But have you not wondered how Athanasius could have had to stand out SO "against the world," when the world had just become Christian ? Perhaps you have heard S. Jerome's phrase, "the world groaned to find itself Arian." If so, you must surely have asked yourself how the world could have been so deceived. Well, it was just this that did it all,Christianity became a fashion.

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