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Cyprian
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Introductory Notice to Cyprian.
[3093] See illustrations in Faber’s Difficulties of Romanism, cap. iii. pp. 46–88, London, 1830. This work is a succinct reply to Berington and Kirk lately reprinted in New York. It refutes itself. Compare vol. i. pp. ix. and x., with the new dogmas, vol. iii. pp. 443–460.
[3094] See Eusebius, H. E., vi. cap. lxiii.
[3095] Tertullian, vol. iii. p. 661.
XXI. (Senators and men of importance and Roman knights, p. 408.)
[3096] Vol. iii. p. 45, this series.
Treatise I. On the Unity of the Church.
[3097] [Written a.d. 251. Although, in order of time, this treatise would be the third, I have placed it here because of its dignity, and because of its importance as a key to the entire writings of Cyprian; for this theory is everywhere the underlying principle of his conduct and of his correspondence. It illustrates the epistles of Ignatius as well as his own, and gives the sense in which the primitive Christians understood these words of the Creed, “the Holy Catholic Church.” This treatise has been subjected to falsifying interpolations, long since exposed and detected, to make it less subversive of the countertheory of Rome as developed by the school doctors. Elucidation I.]
[3098] Describing in few words the ambition and dissimulation of Novatian in invading the episcopate of Rome, he argues at length, that neither on the one hand is the passage in Matthew xviii. of any avail to compensate for their fewness as against the Church: “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name,” etc.; nor, on the other, could martyrdom be of any benefit to them outside the Church. Then he tells them that they need not marvel that heresies flourished, since they had been foretold by Christ; nor that certain Roman confessors acquiesced in the schism, because before one’s death no one is blessed, and the traitor Judas was found in the very company of the apostles. Yet he charges them to shun the association of schismatics and heretics, and finally exhorts them by the Scriptures to peace and unanimity.
[3100] The creeping, stealing thing.
[3101] Or, “living.”
[3105] [Here note that our author’s entire ignorance of any Centre of Unity, of any one See as the test of communion; in short, of any one bishop as having more of Peter’s authority than others,—is a sufficient disproof of the existence of any such things. Otherwise, how could they have been overlooked in a treatise devoted to the subject of unity, its nature and its criteria? The effort to foist into the text something of the kind, by corruption, demonstrates how entirely unsatisfactory to the Middle-Age theorists and dogmatists is the unadulterated work, which they could not let alone.]
[3106] [On the falsifying of the text by Romish editors, see Elucidation II.]
[3108] John xxi. 15. [Here is interpolated]: “Upon him, being one, He builds His Church, and commits His sheep to be fed.”
[3110] [Here is interpolated]: “And the primacy is given to Peter, that there might be shown one Church of Christ and one See; and they are all shepherds, and the Rock is one, which is fed by all the apostles with unanimous consent.” This passage, as well as the one a few lines before, is beyond all question spurious.
[3112] [Here is interpolated]: “Who deserts the chair of Peter, upon whom the Church is founded.” This passage also is undoubtedly spurious.
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