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Updated: May 22, 2025
During his earlier and more agile years the Rabbi used to reach the higher levels of his study by wonderful gymnastic feats, but after two falls one with three Ante-Nicene fathers in close pursuit he determined to call in assistance. This he did after an impressive fashion.
Moreover she is certainly wrong in imagining that the ante-Nicene fathers did not as a body teach regeneration by baptism even Gregory Nazianzen, the most spiritual of many, did, and in the fourth century.
When, then, a Collection presents itself professing to consist of the Ante-Nicene Canons, there is nothing at all to startle us; it only professes to set before us that which we know anyhow must have existed. We may conjecture, if we please, that the fact that there were Canons may have suggested and encouraged a counterfeit.
And when the Church finally turned towards the Gentile world, it was still the popular religion, the religion of the poets, rather than the philosophy of the schools, with which its apologists first came into contact, and it is very evident from such writings as the recently recovered Apology of Aristides, "philosopher of Athens," and many other works extending over the whole Ante-Nicene period, that much of the energy of the early exponents of Christianity was directed towards the conversion of the populace who still adhered, at least formally, to the religion of their own poets.
Such were the Gnostics; and to external and prejudiced spectators, whether philosophers, as Celsus and Porphyry, or the multitude, they wore an appearance sufficiently like the Church to be mistaken for her in the latter part of the ante-Nicene period, as she was confused with the pagan mysteries in the earlier.
The object of this society, partly religious and partly literary, was to infuse a new spirit into the thinning ranks of Episcopalianism, by searching for, and bringing to light, in the popular form of lectures and dissertations, the evidences in favor of Protestantism, which, they supposed, were to be found in the writings of the primitive or ante-Nicene sages of the church.
They claim, then, to be, first, the recorded judgment of great portions of the Ante-Nicene Church, chiefly in the eastern provinces, upon certain matters in dispute, and to be of authority so far as that Church may be considered a representative of the mind of the Apostles; next, they profess to embody in themselves positive decisions and injunctions of the Apostles, though without clearly discriminating how much is thus directly Apostolical, and how much not.
It was launching myself on an ocean with currents innumerable; and I was drifted back first to the ante-Nicene history, and then to the Church of Alexandria.
The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior.
Allowing for such trifling modifications as the difference of time and change of circumstances absolutely necessitated, the Anglican was in their estimation the Ante-Nicene Church revived.
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