I.

(Teaching of the Church, p. 240.)

It is noteworthy how frequently our author employs this expression in this immediate connection. Concerning the punishment of the wicked he asserts a "clearly defined teaching." He shows what the Church's teaching "has laid down" touching demons and angels. Touching the origin of the world, he again asserts the Church's teaching, and then concedes, that, over and above what he maintains, there is "no clear statement regarding it,"--i.e., the creation and its antecedents. Elsewhere he speaks of "the faith of the Church," and all this as something accepted by all Christians recognised as orthodox or Catholics.

Not to recur to the subject of the creeds ¹ known at this period in the East and West, this frequent recognition of a system of theology, or something like it, starts some interesting inquiries. We have space to state only some of them:--

1. Was Origen here speaking of the catechetical school of Alexandria, and assuming its teaching to be that of the whole Church?

2. If so, was not this recognition of the Alexandrian leadership the precursor of that terrible shock which was given to Christendom by the rise of Arianism out of such a stronghold of orthodoxy?

3. Does not the power of Athanasius to stand "against the world" assure us that he was strong in the position that "the teaching of the Church," in Alexandria and elsewhere, was against Arias, whom he was able to defeat by prescription as well as by Scripture?

4. Is it not clear that all this was asserted, held, and defined without help from the West, and that the West merely responded Amen to what Alexandria had taught from the beginning?

5. Is not the evidence overwhelming, that nothing but passive testimony was thus far heard of in connection with the see of Rome?

6. If the "teaching of the Church," then, was so far independent of that see that Christendom neither waited for its voice, nor recognised it as of any exceptional importance in the definition of the faith and the elimination of heresy, is it not evident that the entire fabric of the Middle-Age polity in the West has its origin in times and manners widely differing from the Apostolic Age and that of the Ante-Nicene Fathers?