Graces, we fear that an attempt to claim a more than synodical authority, and to interfere with the just exercise and expression of opinion on the part of the Clergy, is not inconsistent. But that the Archbishop of Armagh should have permitted himself to be made use of in this matter, is a subjeet of sincere regret to all who have valued his Grace's liberality. In the correspondence with Mr. Williams, there is the exhibition of a temper and tone which is painful to have to characterize. We therefore decline the task. Amidst this distress, the extreme folly of one Mr. Green furnishes a ludicrous element, in a transaction in which, apart from Mr. Williams's share in it, it would be hard to discover any redeeming feature. Meanwhile, let us not forget what is the original point in dispute; whether a pledge and bargain made in the name of England shall, or shall not, be kept. We are thankful to Lord Shaftesbury for some manful sincerity in this matter. He said distinctly at Islington, that if the bargain and promise was made, it ought to be broken for Gospel purposes.

We cannot permit the present Number of the Christian Remembrancer to reach our subscribers without recording our sympathies with that grief which we are certain must possess them, in common with the whole Church, at the intelligence of the removal of Dr. Mill, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge. Living long enough for fame, Dr. Mill has been taken away when his faithfulness and services could be least spared. He carries with him more, and more enduring, than literary honours. Severe to himself, and of a simplicity of manners which well recalled the scholars of other days, Dr. Mill possessed to a singular degree the art of winning confidence. He was, if any, a guileless man: of strong and ardent affections, and, possessed with burning sympathies, in what seemed reserve of manner, he was only checking a natural activity or éven vehemence of character. Though far advanced in acquirements above our sciolism, he was most free and courteous in communicating, even to strangers, from the exuberance of his learning. He could afford to disdain compromise, whose whole life exhibited a perfect consistency in teaching. He was one of whose steadfast loyalty to the Church none ever ventured to entertain a suspicion: and that Church which he defended with his learning, advanced by his practical works, and illustrated by his life, loses one who' will, however, take his permanent station in her list of great theologians. Dr. Mill's mind was eminently scholarly and theological: his very diction, under which ran a deep current of rich but subdued eloquence, showed a systematic and disciplined intellect; and his great, though fragmentary, works on the Pantheistic theory, will be alone a sufficient vindication of his fame. For ourselves, some tribute to the memory of the deceased will not be out of place, for, often as we consulted him, we never asked for information in vain. It is some melancholy satisaction to ourselves to recall, that, full as he was of works, he was always ready and willing to assist others; and to the readers of the Christian Remembrancer it is right to say this, recalling the circumstance, that our very last Number was enriched by a contribution from Dr. Mill's learning and kindness.

THE

CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER.

APRIL, 1854.

ART. I.-1. The Ethiopic Didascalia; or, the Ethiopic Version of the Apostolical Constitutions, received in the Church of Abyssinia. With an English Translation. Edited and translated by THOMAS PELL PLATT, Esq., F.A.S. London, printed for the Oriental Translation Fund, 1834.

2. The Apostolical Constitutions; or, the Canons of the Apostles, in Coptic, with an English Translation by HENRY TATTAM, LL.D., D.D., F.R.S., &c. Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund, 1848.

3. Geschichte des Kirchenrechts. Von JOHANN WILHELM BICKELL. Giessen, 1843.

In these volumes are first printed some of those documents for want of which the investigations of theologians into the history of the Apostolical Constitutions' were brought to a stand, about one hundred and fifty years ago. The divines of that day had pushed their inquiries in the right direction; but they wanted materials for further progress; and the illness and death of Grabe, the chief labourer in that field, brought it to a close. His last tract on this question was curtailed, owing to repeated attacks of acute disease; he had not the strength to print parts of the Arabic Constitutions which he had prepared, and he was waiting for a copy of a Syriac version from Rome. A Greek Vienna MS., of which he had had a copy made, from which he and others cited largely, and which he designed to publish, has now been printed by Bickell; another of his transcripts, from an Oxford MS., was published by Fabricius, amongst the works of Hippolytus; of the Ethiopic Version, of which a portion has been printed by Mr. Platt, he had only the table of contents; of the Syriac, only some extracts in Ecchellensis; of the Coptic, which has been printed by Dr. Tattam, he knew nothing. Opportunities are now, therefore, given for resuming the investigation of the subject, with the aid of these new materials, to which it is to be hoped that others may be added by the

publication of Syriac and Arabic Versions. We are in a condition to inquire what light is thereby thrown upon the composition, the authority, or historical value of this curious. collection.

The Apostolical Constitutions, in eight books, as we have them, occupying a very large space in the opening volumes of collections of Councils, of the Apostolical Fathers, and Pandects of Canons, claim for themselves a very high authority, as also a very high antiquity; they profess to be the composition of the Apostles themselves, their appointments addressed to the Bishops of the Churches, written by the hand of S. Clement of Rome, and laying down rules for the conduct and regulation of the Church in a great variety of points.

If they, as a whole, or if any portions of them, could be shown to have a claim to so supreme an authority, we need not say what deference they would require from the Christian world. It is true indeed that, even in this case, the rules contained in them would not necessarily be obligatory upon us, because the disciplinary injunctions even of Apostles themselves had reference to the special circumstances of their own age; but even considered in an historical point of view only, they would give us an insight into the very innermost life of the Christian Church in the first ages, and would reveal (what we should most desire to know) how Apostles lived, and prayed, and regulated the Church of Christ. And even if we give up this fond and extravagant dream, still, if we could regard these Constitutions, or any portions of them, or any extant documents cognate to them, as genuine and faithful monuments of the really authoritative rules of the first centuries of the Christian Church, they would acquire a great value as a picture of Christian life, and faith, and worship. What their genuine form is, and what their historical authority, it will be our present business to investigate. For it is manifest at once that these two questions are quite distinct. It is one thing to take the text of these documents, and to trace out its consarcinations, interpolations, retrenchments; to ascertain, if it may be, what it was in its earliest form, what the age and history of its several parts, and so to arrive at the very primary documents themselves, as they first existed, and as they were current in the early ages: it is another and a completely distinct matter to determine of what weight or value these documents are when thus brought into their primitive form. It is one thing to determine the text or age of a work; another, and quite a distinct thing to settle its authority. It by no means follows from the fact that a composition professing to contain Church rules was written in the second or third century, that it is an authentic document; that it is what it professes to be; that it really is

the body of rules by which the Church, or any part of the Church, was then governed. It may have been a private composition, or a work of fiction, or written by those who were not members of the Catholic Church at all. There were in the early ages numberless compositions of this kind - spurious Gospels, spurious Acts of Apostles, spurious letters and lives, which do not seem by any means to have been written with ill intention, nor in all cases, certainly, by those who were alien. from the Church. These works were often the inventions of men of lively imagination, who thought to promote piety by works of fiction, and made Apostles and Saints give good instructions and set good examples, which were in truth the fruit of the writers' own lively fancy. The second century had its works of fiction in religious literature in a form of its own, as well as the middle ages or the present day. But even thus, it is well to inquire whether incidentally and indirectly such productions may not have a considerable value, considered historically, as indications of what were then received practices of early ages, taken in connexion with what we learn from other

sources.

That we have in the eight books of the Apostolical Constitutions a genuine work of S. Clement and the Apostles, is, we repeat, too gross a conception to have had many advocates. It is true that the editors who first translated them into Latin, Bovius, in 1563, and afterwards Turrianus, with a very uncritical love for the subject of their labours, maintained that they were genuine; and controversialists at that time and afterwards, as they had occasion, have at times alleged them as apostolical; whilst the notion that, in substance and in part, at least, they might be so, was not unusually entertained. Still, great theologians decidedly repudiated them. Baronius, Bellarmine, Petavius, all saw, as it was very difficult not to see, that they were spurious, and interpolated, and even, it might be, heretical. Indeed, the fiction is so clumsily managed as to strike one at the very first. Apostles are brought together who never could have been together in this life; S. James the greater (after he was beheaded), is made to sit in council with S. Paul' (though elsewhere he is spoken of as dead). Thus assembled, they condemn heresies and heretics, by name, who did not arise till after their death; they appoint the observance of the days of their death;* nay, once they are even made to say, These are the names of the Bishops whom we ordained in our life-time." It is plain that these were sufficiently obvious reasons for the rejection of the Constitutions, at least as they were then extant.

3 Lib. vi. c. 8.

from the number of Apostolical compositions. For the purposes of controversy, indeed, they afforded little aid to the defenders of the Roman system, and supplied strong arguments against the primitive character of some, at least, of their chief doctrines. In the Constitutions the Church of Rome is nothing more than the Church of Rome. Not a shadow of indication is there of her Bishop, or of any other Bishop, even metropolitan or patriarch, possessing superiority over his fellowBishop. Rome is mentioned in the enumeration of the Bishops whom the Apostles ordained, but there it is placed after Jerusalem, Cæsarea, Antioch, and Alexandria: and we read, Linus was ordained by me, Paul, and after the death of Linus, Clement, by me, Peter;' there is no hint of S. Peter's special connexion with Rome. And on the whole, as the collection represents the practices of Eastern Churches, so far as it represents those of any Churches, the peculiar rules and practices of the Latin Church are contradicted by it.

However, we need not suppose the Roman controversialists to have been influenced by such motives in rejecting these books. There was sufficient to account for their doing so in the books themselves. It was in one who was opposed to the whole ancient discipline of the Church that the Constitutions found their most determined and systematic opponent-in Daillé, the most deeply read in patristic literature, and the most clear and vigorous of the reformed writers at the middle of the sixteenth century. In the work entitled, De Pseudepigraphis Apostolicis,' the author undertakes to show that the Constitutions, and also the Apostolical Canons, were not the work of the Apostles, nor of the Apostolic age, as it was easy to do: but he uses many bad arguments, as well as good, and he attempts to prove too much. His indiscriminate condemnation of Canons and Constitutions alike, and the late date to which he would bring down the collection of the former, laid him open to the correction of our more sober English divines Beveridge and Pearson. Bishop Beveridge undertook the vindication of the so-called Apostolical Canons, and established the position-which we consider to be still, in its main points, unshaken, as it has been generally accepted,that the so-called Apostolical Canons are a collection of Canons of Antenicene Councils, with a few interpolations of later date; that a part of the collection at least was made before the middle of the fourth century, and represents the rules of the Antenicene Church, whilst it is admitted that the collection is incomplete, undigested, and unmethodised.

As respects the Constitutions, which Daillé indiscriminately condemned, Bishop Pearson, with great sagacity, suggested the view which has since been generally accepted, and been made