the basis of all succeeding investigations, and which has received confirmation from every successive discovery of MSS. or versions; viz. that the eight books of the Constitutions are a consarcination-if such a word may be used-a sewing together, of a number of separate documents, which were extant among the Christians of the first four centuries, bearing the names of the Apostles and their immediate disciples; but that in the process of their being put together, as well as before and after, the documents had been interpolated, retrenched, and otherwise altered in various ways.

In the year 1711, William Whiston-learned, indeed, and able, but the most fanciful of theorists-put out the view that these eight books of Apostolical Constitutions, except a few gross interpolations of later ages,' are, what they themselves profess to be, the very works of the Apostles themselves, and, as such, 'of Divine origin and authority.' It is scarcely possible to believe that any man could have put together such a series of fancies, and have been perfectly convinced of their truth, if one did not actually read them in his works, and know how tempting it is to build a structure of imagination on the basis of a few, and those perhaps mistaken, facts. With the simplicity of entire conviction, and the vivid depicting of one who had seen what he describes; strangely mixing imagination and fact together; he says that our Saviour himself delivered these Constitutions to the Apostles during the forty days between His resurrection and ascension; that the Apostles met in the famous Council of Jerusalem, about the year 64,' (the precision with which he fixes the times and places at which these imaginary events occurred is most curious and ingenious,) when the former five books and a half of the Constitutions were written and sent to the Churches; and again, in a third council at Jerusalem, in the year 67 (that recorded in the Acts was the first), when St. Paul was with them, they agreed upon the Constitutions in the eighth book, added the seventh, which had been made before, confirmed the whole, and made an extract from them, which was to be published to all (for the eight books themselves were kept concealed in the profoundest mystery of the disciplina arcani), under the name of The Teaching of the Apostles,' of which (he says) we ' have still two Arabick copies in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.' The Apostles who survived, together with the remaining kinsmen of Christ, &c.,' held a fourth Council at Jerusalem, soon 'after its destruction, and made a remarkable addition or appendix, which is now the last part of the sixth book.' The few surviving Apostles, with their companions, held a fifth Council, between the years 84 and 88, whether at Jerusalem or elsewhere is uncertain; wherein the Apostolical Canons were

'drawn up, and some few additions were made to the former 'parts of the whole work.' Besides these Councils at Jerusalem there had been one at Cæsarea, about A.D. 64, when the Apostles 'met there to ordain Zacchæus as bishop of that place,' at which the seventh book was first made. It ought to be said that much of this is based on what is mentioned in the Constitutions themselves. But of all this Whiston had the deepest, the most undoubting conviction. To guard us against being misled by extensive learning, and a disposition to speculating and theorizing on such subjects, we will add an extract (and every page of his volume is in the same strain), by which the perversion of his power of estimating the value of evidence may be judged of. He says, with the utmost simplicity, of his Council held A.D. 64, which he calls the Second Council of the Apostles at Jerusalem

This Council not meeting till about the time of Luke's writing his Acts of the Apostles, if not rather before it, we cannot expect an account of these, as we have of the first. But the Constitutions give us a full and distinct, a certain and authentic account of the Acts, both of the first and of this second Council; and such an one of this second, as shows it to have been the most important Council that ever was held in the Christian Church. Since therein was set down in writing, or engraved in box tables' (all this is his own imagination), the Catholic doctrine, or main account of the laws, doctrines and rules of the Gospel, formerly delivered to the Apostles in Mount Sion after our Lord's Resurrection, and now written down or engraved by the hand of Clement himself, as is most probable, (who appears to have been the Apostles' scribe or amanuensis upon this great occasion,) at least, sent by him, principally to the Apostolical Churches, as the grand system of the Christian religion; the main rule both of faith and practice; to be preserved by the bishops in their archives, and transmitted as a sacred Depositum to all future generations.'-Essay on the Apostolical Constitutions, p. 113.

6

From our Lord's coming to the Eleven during the forty days after His resurrection, and staying with them so long as to reveal to them all the Laws and Constitutions of Christianity 'contained in the book before us,' he derives a new and most 'powerful argument for the certainty of the fundamental fact of Christianity, the resurrection of our blessed Saviour; since we see that He did not merely appear suddenly to a few, or to many for a few minutes only, but that besides those appearances 'known by all from the Gospel history.' He stayed so long and often with the Apostles as the giving these Constitutions implies. The chronology of S. Paul's life, and the order of time in which the Epistles were written, are determined by Whiston, from the same source; for the Apostolical Constitutions having been shown to be prior to any book of the New Testament, it essarily followed that all agreements of expression between two were citations out of, or allusions to, the Constitutions the writers of the Epistles; not derived into the Consti

tutions from the Epistles; and according to the number of such citations or allusions, the earlier or later date of each Epistle might, he thinks, be correctly inferred upon this reasonable 'hypothesis, that the longer any sacred book had been public, and the oftener it had therefore been read in the Churches, and ' at home, the more would it naturally be fixed in the memories of 'Christians, and the oftener quoted by them upon all occasions.' A tabular view of the dates of the Epistles as settled on this principle is given, and the agreements and differences between the arrangement thus resulting, and that of other chronologies is argued out. On the same principle, every correspondence of expression between the Constitutions and the Fathers is alleged as an evidence for their knowledge of this Apostolical book or a citation from it.

The publication of Whiston's book had one good effect; it elicited replies from Grabe' and others, which really did contribute to the elucidation of the history of the Constitutions, and materially advanced the true knowledge of the subject. Grabe showed that Whiston's imaginary book of the New Testament, the Teaching of the Apostles, of which we have two Arabick copies in the Bodleian Library,' was an Arabic translation of the first five and of part of the sixth book of the Constitutions, corresponding to the contents of the Ethiopic version. He brought out some of those parts which were peculiar to the Arabic; he used all that was then known of a Syriac version, to throw light on the history of the interpolations in the Constitutions, and, which was of most importance, he followed out Pearson's view, and had ready for publication two of the elements out of which, as that great divine and scholar had suggested, the Constitutions which we now have were made up. One of these, the so-called Hippolytean Constitutions, was published from his MS., as we have said, by Fabricius; the other, of which Grabe had a transcript, is now printed by Bickell from the original in the Library at Vienna.

After this, till of late years, almost nothing was done to illustrate the subject. Theologians acquiesced in the view that the Constitutions were an early compilation, in substance AnteNicene, but put together, altered, and interpolated to so great an extent, that they could only be cited as corroborative testimony on points of ancient practice.

At this time much interest has been awakened in the subject, and that among a wider circle than students of theology, by the views put out on the subject in the Age of Hippolytus; and

1 An Essay upon two Arabic Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and that ancient book, called the Doctrine of the Apostles, &c., by J. E. Grabe, 1711; and 2d Edition, 1712. Whiston replied in 1711. After Grabe's death Hickes published an account of Dr. Grabe, and of his MSS., 1712; which contains much curious information.

particularly by the beautiful and singularly interesting selection from the Coptic and other collections of Canons, under the names of the House Book and Law Book of the Ancient Church.' It is impossible for any one who loves simple Christian truth and holiness, not to be won by the beauty of these extracts; and the thought that by a process of critical discrimination we have here presented to us the very code of rules according to which Christians lived, and Church ordinances. were administered, almost in the Apostolic age, is so attractive, so seductive, that one is loth to dispel the imagination, or to suggest that it may be only a dream. As, however, it is most important that we should not be misled on such a subject, and as there is a danger both that exaggerated views of the value and authority of the documents now brought to light may be entertained, as well as, on the other hand, that their importance and real use may be overlooked by the students of ancient Church history, we will endeavour to give such a review of the whole subject as may place at least its main facts within the reach of our readers.

As our researches are independent of those of the author of the Age of Hippolytus,' and our line of thought different, we shall pursue the subject without referring further to that work, except very occasionally.

And here, on opening the subject, we must again observe, that there are two distinct questions before us: 1. What is the original form of the Apostolical Constitutions, as a whole or in part, in its text, and its constituent parts? 2. What was the authority of those parts, or the whole, when they were originally .written ?

It will be more convenient for us first to treat of the second question, so far at least as to see what historical evidence there is for the existence of any such professedly authoritative books of Church Rules; then to examine the history and component parts of the work, from which we shall derive further light as to their true character and value.

And, first, of the historical evidence; it will be observed, from the very nature of the work or works, being anyhow collections of Church Rules, that we might expect to find some notice of them in ecclesiastical writers, if they were received by them as of authority.

The following statement on this point was recently made by one whose name stands high in public estimation as an authority on such subjects:

6 There was a book in the Ante-Nicene Church, in that age which, as a whole, we may call the Apostolic, and of which Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian, represent the latter part,

'there was, among the Christians of those two hundred years, 'a book called Apostolic in an eminent sense, as the work of all the Apostles. It was a book more read than any one of the 'writings of the Fathers, and in Church matters of greater weight than any other; the book, before the authorities of 'which the bishops themselves bowed, and to which the Churches ' themselves looked up for advice in doubtful cases. And this 'book was not the Bible. It was not even a canonical book, but as to its form a work of fiction; and, pretending to have ' emanated from the Apostles, was excluded by most of the 'Fathers as spurious, from the books of the New Testament."

These statements, indeed, are the exaggerations of an excited imagination, which the author himself probably would, on reflection, very materially qualify. The words, however, express a definite view-they express it with great breadth and clearness -and we therefore select them; not having any controversial view, but because we wish to give to the view itself, so well expressed in them, the most direct contradiction. Let it be observed what the proposition in its simplest elements maintains -that a book containing Ecclesiastical Rules supposed to be derived from the Apostles was extant, was looked up to for advice in doubtful cases, was referred to as of greater weight than any other, and was held to be of supreme authority in the first two centuries of the Church. We affirm that there is no evidence whatever-not a shade of evidence of the existence of such a book so looked up and referred to.

We are free to admit that rules supposed to be derived, directly or indirectly, mediately or immediately from the Apostles, whether apostolical in their actual origin, or in that they were developments and applications of apostolic institutions, were held to be of absolute authority in the Primitive Church; and were continually referred to, and decided controversies; but they were not reduced to a code or comprised in a book. They were perserved in practice, written in the hearts and memories of Christians, and handed down by continuous tradition. On the other hand, there may have been, many actually were, books professing to contain apostolical appointments; but there is no evidence whatever that they were regarded as of authority, but much evidence the other way. Whatever these writings may have been, they were not authoritative.

We say this without any controversial view to bias our judgment. These supposed early collections of Church Rules, on the whole, tend to confirm our views of Church discipline, practice, worship, and faith. We do not refuse to admit that, whatever their authority may be, they may have a value in

1 Bunsen's Hippolytus and his Age, vol. ii. p. 220.