celebrated in consequence of the accusation preferred, in relation to it, against Dionysius of Alexandria, before his namesake and contemporary of Rome. It would be interesting, if space permitted, to trace the analogy. It will be enough to say that, in the conflict with the Egyptian Sabellianism, Dionysius of Alexandria appears to have used language similar to that employed by Hippolytus in the same contest at Rome; and he was charged before Dionysius of Rome as falling, through zeal against the Monarchian doctrine, into the opposite extreme of subordinatianism. And, among the many remarkable evidences of the fidelity with which Rome has ever guarded the deposit of faith, there is none more interesting to the theological student of history than the accuracy with which the Roman Dionysius drew the line between the monarchianism which he, as well as his Alexandrian brother, repudiated, and that lowering of the relation of the Son to the Father into which the Alexandrian Patriarch had been charged with falling. St. Athanasius, in his Defence of the Nicene Definition, has preserved this document, the exposition of Dionysius of Rome,-in which he remarks upon and refutes those errors against the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, which exaggerate the distinction of personality into a form inconsistent with the Unity of substance; or which, in effect, represent the nature of the Son as inferior to that of the Father, by using language in reference to His generation, or to His subordination to the Father, which necessarily leads to the inference that He is a work or a creature of the Father. "Next," says he, "I turn to those who divide and cut into pieces and destroy that most sacred doctrine of the Church of God, the Divine Monarchy, making it certain three powers and partitive subsistences and godheads three. I am told that some among you who are catechists and teachers of the Divine Word, take the lead in this tenet, who are diametrically opposed, so to speak, to Sabellius's opinions; for he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father, and the Father the Son; but they in some sort preach three Gods, as dividing the Holy Unity into three subsistences foreign to each other and utterly separate. For it must needs be that with the God of the Universe, the Divine Word is one; and the Holy Ghost must repose and habitate in God; thus in one as in a Summit, I mean the God of the Universe, must the Divine Trinity be gathered up and brough together. For it is the doctrine of the presumptuous Marcion, to sever and divide the Divine Monarchy into three origins, a devil's teaching, not that of Christ's true disciples and lovers of the Saviour's lessons. For they know well that a Trinity is preached by Divine Scripture, but that neither Old Testament nor New preaches three Gods. "Equally must one censure those who hold the Son to be a work, and consider that the Lord has come into being, as one of the things which really came to be; whereas the divine oracles witness to a generation suitable to Him and becoming, but not to any fashioning or making. A blasphemy then is it, not ordinary, but even the highest, to say that the Lord is in any sort a handiwork. For, if He came to be Son, once He was not; but He was always, if (that is) He be in the Father, as He says Himself, and if the Christ be Word and Wisdom and Power, (which, as ye know, Divine Scripture says,) and these attributes be powers of God. If then the Son, came into being once, these attributes were not; consequently there was a time when God was without them; which is most extravagant. وو He sums up his judgment on the whole question as follows: "Neither then may we divide into three Godheads the wonderful and Divine Unity; nor disparage with the name of 'work' the dignity and exceeding majesty of the Lord; but we must believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus His Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and hold that to the God of the Universe the Word is united. For I,' says He, and the Father are one;' and, ‘I in the Father and the Father in Me.' For thus, both the Divine Trinity, and the holy preaching of the Monarchy, will be preserved."* St. Athanasius, in speaking of the expressions of Dionysius of Alexandria, which led to his being accused at Rome of heterodoxy, explicitly attributes his using such language as led to these accusations to his being engaged in argument against the Sabellians. Dionysius, who was bishop of Alexandria," he says, "upon his writings against Sabellius, and expounding at large the Saviour's 66 * Oxford Translation. Part I. pp. 45-7. economy, according to the flesh, and therein proving against the Sabellians, that not the Father, but the Word was made Fesh, as John has said, was suspected of saying that the Word was a thing_made and generated, and not one in substance with the Father; on which he wrote to his namesake, Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, to explain that this was a slander upon him.* In like manner St. Basil, who admits the faultiness of the language of Dionysius, ascribes it to the same cause— a zeal against Sabellianism running into the opposite extreme.† It is a very remarkable confirmation of the view we have suggested, that we find precisely the same series of events that befel in the days of Pope Callistus, re-enacted in the same controversy when it arose half a century later, in a different part of the Church, but between the same classes of adversaries. We find at Alexandria, as at Rome, two different courses taken in the contest with Sabellianismthe one adopted by Dionysius, the other by those who charged Dionysius with heterodoxy. Now, their charges against Dionysius tally most strikingly with those which we learn from Hippolytus, were made against him by Callistus, and those who joined with him. The first part of the extract from Dionysius, of Rome, given above, reveals to us precisely the same imputation of "Ditheism," of which Hippolytus complained so bitterly; the second points with equal distinctness to the temporary generation of the Word, and the subordination of the Word to the Father, which are ascribed to Hippolytus. If Pope Callistus had been equally fortunate with his successor Dionysius; and if we possessed any writing of his own, explanatory of his own opinions, and of his objections to the teaching of Hippolytus against Sabellius, as well as of the grounds of those objections; there can be no possible doubt that that explanation would be identical in doctrine, in spirit, and in phraseology, with the Letter of Pope Dionysius, which, thanks to its having been used in argument by Athanasius, has escaped the fate of almost all the other literary remains of the early Papacy. It is time, however, to close this long and disjointed Oxford Translation, p. 44. † Ep. 41. Petavius. De Trinitate, ii. 27. controversy. What has been said already may satisfy even the most sensitive client of the papacy, that, like every similar attempt in the earlier history of the struggle, the effort to call forth Pope Callistus from the obscurity in which he had hitherto lain, for the purpose of representing him, not as a saint and a guardian of orthodoxy, but as a corrupt ruler of the Church and a heretical teacher, has proved a complete failure. It is only by a hasty and uncritical acceptance of the statement of one who was avowedly the adversary of the Pontiff, and whom the very slightest examination would have proved to be himself in the wrong, that the case against him could have obtained even a temporary currency. A more careful enquiry shows him forth in the true light in which all history represents his fellow successor of St. Peter-as the guardian of the faith of the Church; the steady defender of the letter of its theological language; and the uncompromising antagonist of every new form of words, however specious in itself, or estimable from the learning and zeal of its author. It shows him forth as clinging to that just mean between the opposite extremes into which error has so often run-the mean, which it has been the historical privilege of Rome to maintain-the mean which Innocent held between Fatalism and Pelagianism,-which Leo held between Nestorius and Eutyches; and by maintaining which, Rome, forfeiting for nearly half a century the favour of the emperor and the communion of his Patriarchs, in the end saved the East to the Church ;-the mean by which, in the controversy of the Three Chapters, the Popes once more preserved, almost in its own despite, the orthodoxy of the West ;-the mean again between Idolatry and Iconoclasm, which, while it protected the noblest conceptions of the Nature of the Divinity, secured for weak humanity one of the best and most precious supports of its weakness in the struggle towards the higher life;-the unfailing, unchanging mean, in fine, the adhesion to which is the secret at once of the greatness and the humility of That Crown august, which, like a star, O'er all things and through all things shone, Was friend to each, and slave to none. ART. VI.-1. Allocutio Sanctissimi Domini Nostri Pii PP. IX. Allocution of His Holiness Pius IX., in the Consistory of November 3, 1855.* 2. Lingard. Observations on the Laws and Ordinances of Foreign. States, published in 1817. (Now printed with his Tracts.) IN N our last number we had occasion to discuss the right of a nation to alter, upon the ground of internal change in its government and constitution, stipulations guaranteed by solemn treaties with the Holy See. Whilst the politicians of one kingdom were endeavouring to justify want of faith with the Church, the statesmen of Austria were anxious to repair the evil and undo the wrong, which a similar spirit of resistance to her authority had effected and had maintained for more than seventy years. Scarcely had the troubles of the first years of his reign subsided, when the youthful Emperor turned his attention to the restraints imposed upon the Church by his predecessors; and amidst the anxieties of his position during the war, which is engaging the Northern and Western States, he has never wavered in his wish to fulfil that duty of justice to the Church, without which, justice to his allies and to his subjects would never be secured. The task was a difficult one. Whilst Calvin gave the right of holding spiritual power to the body of the faithful, the courtly Luther claimed it for their rulers only, and Grotius allowed the Church to exercise it by delegation from them. The Emperor Joseph II. was willing to act upon views so favourable to his authority, and yet was unwilling to lose the honour of being a son of the Church. The same views found favour with our Tudor kings, and have been always welcome to the pride of sovereigns and to the ambition of parliaments. But others were content to assert them in measures of ecclesiastical government; Joseph claimed the supremacy of the Crown, and employed * At the time when this paper was sent to press, only the first of the lectures of His Eminence Cardinal Wiseman on the Concordat had been published. |