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Updated: May 25, 2025
Whether there be any particular church government of divine right? 2. What that government is? 3. What church officers or members of elderships are of divine right? 4. Whether parochial or congregational elderships be of divine right? 5. Whether classical presbyteries be of divine right? 6. Whether provincial, national, and ecumenical assemblies be of divine right? 7.
The free thought of Origen is visible in the writings of the Western Doctors, Hilary and Ambrose; and the independent mind of Jerome has enriched his own vigorous commentaries on Scripture, from the stores of the scarcely orthodox Eusebius. Heretical questionings have been transmuted by the living power of the Church into salutary truths. The case is the same as regards the Ecumenical Councils.
Let those who are disposed to laugh at this notable "Ecumenical Council of the Hat" consider that ecclesiastical history has brought down to us the records of many larger and more imposing convocations, wherein grave bishops and learned fathers took each other by the beard upon matters of far less practical importance.
It was no easy task, in that troublous time, to hold an ecumenical council. There was mutual distrust between Catholics and Protestants. There was uncertainty as to the relative powers and prerogatives of council and pope. There were bitter national rivalries, especially between Italians and Germans.
How have the Greek traditions been respected and provided for in the later Ecumenical Councils, in spite of the countries that held them being in a state of schism! Then, again, such national influences have a providential effect in moderating the bias which the local influences of Italy may exert upon the See of St. Peter.
It is to the Pope in Ecumenical Council that we look, as to the normal seat of Infallibility: now there have been only eighteen such Councils since Christianity was, an average of one to a century, and of these Councils some passed no doctrinal decree at all, others were employed on only one, and many of them were concerned with only elementary points of the Creed.
However, in order to give the general reader some idea of the state of the case, I will make some copious extracts from the famous tract of Vincent of Lerins on Heresy, written in A.D. 434, immediately after the third Ecumenical Council, held against Nestorius. The author was originally a layman, and by profession a soldier. In after life he became a monk and took orders.
After this he always insisted on the authority of the early Ecumenical Councils and the Fathers of the Church an authority which his antagonists did not recognise. Altogether the mission was a complete failure, and all parties regretted that it had been undertaken. "It was a great mistake," remarked to me confidentially an Orthodox peasant; "a very great mistake.
In each cult, a distinct, formulated, official doctrine shall govern the teaching, preaching, and public or special instruction of every kind; this, for the Israelite cult, is" the doctrine expressed by the decisions of the grand Sanhedrin"; for the two Protestant cults, the doctrine of the Confession of Augsbourg, taught in the two seminaries of the East, and the doctrine of the Reformed Church taught in the Genevan seminary; for the Catholic cult, the maxims of the Gallican Church, the declaration, in 1682, of the assembly of the clergy and the four famous propositions depriving the Pope of any authority over sovereigns in temporal matters, subordinating the Pope to ecumenical councils in ecclesiastical and spiritual concerns, and which, in the government of the French Church, limit the authority of the Pope to ancient usages or canons inherited by that Church and accepted by the State.
It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at Ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual new world; the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to new thoughts.
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