subject them to episcopal censure, and to excommunicate them as heretics, and that it was a new and an unlawful attempt of the civil magistrate to take cognizance of an ecclesiastical cause. As long therefore as Martin stayed at Treves, the prosecution was suspended; and at his departure he obtained a pro. mise from Maximus, who held him in high esteem, that no capital punishment should be inflicted upon these men. But the emperor afterwards being corrupted by two bishops, Magnus and Rufus, and at their instigation departing from his milder designs, appointed the cause to be tried before the præfect Evodius, a stern and severe judge; and then, upon the report which was returned to him, he ordered Priscillian and his associates to be put to death.—But the death of Priscillian was so far from repressing the heresy of which he had been the author, that it conduced greatly to confirm and extend it; for his followers, who before had reverenced him as a pious man, began to worship him as a martyr. The bodies of those who had suffered death were carried back to Spain, and interred with great solemnity; and to swear by the name of Priscillian was practised as a religious act, &c."

Thus says Sulpitius Severus, who proceeds to be stow a bad character upon most of the prelates of his time, and to censure their scandalous contentions and their vile practices.

Upon the whole, I think it appears that the Priscillianists received the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. They likewise made use of apocryphal books: but what respect they had for them cannot now be clearly determined. Some ecclesiastics, who went under this denomination, are represented,

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from an ill-judged zeal, and without sufficient reason, to have deserted their stations in the church, to betake themselves to a retired and solitary course of life. They had errors concerning the soul, and some other matters. They seem to have had a disadvantageous opinion of marriage, and thereby sometimes made unhappy breaches in families, if their adversaries do not aggravate. They had also rules about diet, not founded in reason or Scripture. Some of these people are blamed for not consuming the eucharist at church; and they were irregular in fasting, when other Christians feasted. But as we have none of their writings remaining, we do not know their whole system with certainty. By some they have been charged with obscene doctrines and lewd practices. But so far as we are able to judge upon the evidence that has been produced, they appear rather to have made high pretentions to sanctity and purity, and to have practised uncommon mortifications *."

Martin, bishop of Tours, would never consent to the death of the Priscillianists; he interceded earnestly for them; he refused for some time to communicate with Ithacius and the persecuting bishops of his party; he at last consented to it, with the utmost reluctance, by the pressing intreaties of the emperor Maximus, and with a charitable and good-natured view to save the lives of some unhappy persons, at whom Maximus was offended because they had been faithful to Gratian, their lawful sovereign: but he never would sign a testimonial that he held communion with those cut-throats. He returned home, full of affliction for having made any condescension,

and

Lardner, ix. 348. See also L'Enfant, Hist. du Conc. de Basle ji. 369. and Du Pin, ii. 348.

and said to his friends, as it is reported, that for this frailty God had withdrawn from him the power of working miracles. He never more would communicate with the Ithacians, and for the last sixteen years of his life he never would meet at any council or synod, and carefully shunned those cabals. This behaviour doth honour to his memory; and whilst we reject the fabulous accounts of his miracles, we must applaud his humanity, his hatred of persecution, and, let us add, his dislike of councils.

Martin, who in point of miracles, as they say, was a perfect Thaumaturgus, like Gregory, seems to have failed as a prophet, when he declared that Nero and Antichrist were coming. Martin learned this perhaps from a Sybilline oracle, which is cited by the writer De Mortibus Persecutorum†.

Tillemont endeavours to clear Martin, or to excuse him, and says;

"He was persuaded, as almost all the saints were, that the end of the world was at hand. If he had some notions concerning Antichrist which were not wellgrounded, there is no man, who is not sometimes out in his conjectures relating to things which God hath not revealed to us."

Very good. But why did Martin dogmatize about such things, and venture to foretell events, in which he was as much mistaken in the fourth, as Jurieu and others have been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

"His body was at Tours, till our sins having rendered us unworthy of possessing this treasure, God gave it up into the hands of the Hugonots, who reduced

Sulpit, Severus, Dial. ii. 14,

tii, p. 44.

x. 349.

daced it to ashes. Yet it is thought that some of the bones are still preserved *."

From the recantations of some Priscillianists, it should seem that they held the Son to be unborn, innascibilis: Possibly they rejected the doctrine of eternal generation, and said that the Als was from all eternity underived and self-existing, and that the Father and the Son were Duo Principia †.

A. D. 379. Of all the fathers of the fourth century, there was not, in the opinion of Le Clerc, a more moderate and a worthier man than Gregory Nazianzen.

Gregory and his Consubstantialists were assaulted by the Arians of Constantinople. Ancient women, as he says, worse than Jezebels, young nuns, common beggars, and monks, like old goats [Haves], issuing out of their monasteries, armed with clubs and stones, attacked him and his flock, in his church, and did much mischief.

"St Jerom one day asked St Gregory to explain a difficult place in the New Testament, de Sabbato secundo-primo §. Gregory answered humorously, I will explain it to you by and by, in my sermon at church, where the applauses given to me by all the audience shall compel you, in spite of yourself, to understand what you understand not, or to pass for a blockhead if you are the only person there who joins not in admiring me.

"We see by this that Gregory, with all his gravity, was of a chearful temper, which also appears in his epistles; we see also how much authority he had over the people, and how little account he made of the acclamations

clamations which his eloquence excited. From this passage we might also perhaps infer that he was not always satisfied with the expositions which he gave to the people. The same may be observed of St Augustin; for in his sermons he delivers some things as certain, of which, as it appears from his letters, he was far from being assured *."

Go now, and establish articles of faith, or even interpretations of Scripture, from the homilies of the fathers!

A rational pastor, accustomed to think and to judge for himself, it he be a prudent man, will not perhaps tell his congregation every thing that he believes; but if he be an honest man, he will never teach them any thing that he believes not. Quandoquidem populus vult decipi, decipiatur, may be a good maxim for a quack, but not for a divine.

Gregory, in his old days, is said to have passed a whole lent without speaking. A grievous penance for a Greek father!

The Christian world is much obliged to him for the censures which he so freely and plentifully bestowed upon the second general council, held at Constantinople, A. D. 381.; which Cave † calls Venerandum Concilium Oecumenicum. It is a wonder that Gregory hath not been stigmatized, degraded, and stripped of his saintship, for having treated those venerable prelates and fathers with so little ceremony.

His favouring the persecution of some heretics is a blot in his amiable character. But alas, few of the men called orthodox were entirely free from that blemish.