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If, in a theological point of view, to its account of the sin in the garden of Eden, and the transgression and punishment of Adam, so much weight had been attached, it also in a philosophical point of view became the grand authority of Patristic science. Astronomy, geology, geography, anthropology, chronology, and indeed all the various departments of human knowledge, were made to conform to it.
Let me present, as well as I can, his history, his services, and his personal character, all of which form no small part of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the giants of the fourth and fifth centuries, that which we call the Patristic literature, the only literature worthy of preservation in the declining days of the old Roman world.
Whether this theory is strictly in accordance with Apocalyptic prophecy and patristic theology may be doubted, but it fully satisfied those who had already arrived at the conclusion by a different road, and who sought merely a means of justifying their position.
As much as ten years ago, an eminently Christian writer observed: "The creationist theory does not necessitate the perpetual search after manifestations of miraculous powers and perpetual 'catastrophes. Creation is not a miraculous interference with the laws of nature, but the very institution of those laws. Law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, was the patristic ideal of creation.
No such command would have been given to the earth, had it not first received its baptism of life from God in other words, derived the animating principle of life from the source of all Life. And this seems to have been the patristic idea, namely, that law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, nor any specific act of creation, were what governed in the case of both vegetal and animal life.
Both revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our broken life were restored, philosophical development would be continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy.
Indeed it is wonderful that, under these conditions, he accomplished so much as he did that he wrote his North British articles, maintained a reputation which won for him so many offers of academic posts, and at the same time laid the foundation of a vast and spacious learning in Patristic and Reformation theology.
We have here the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever. Patristic, mediæval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no less, would go down before it.
Here we have the quasi-philosophical theory, from which the patristic conception is derived.
Students of theology and church history, on the other hand, have had a more difficult task set them in comparing and arranging the materials they have at their disposal, as found in the patristic writings and legendary records; and various theories have been put forward, not the least astonishing being the supposition that Simon was an alias for Paul, and that the Simon and Peter in the accounts of the fathers and in the narrative of the legends were simply concrete symbols to represent the two sides of the Pauline and Petrine controversies.
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