renouncing the Gospel. Christians of all ranks, including even bishops, crowded around the altars to offer sacrifice or burn incense to the Gods. These were stigmatized by the faithful as Sacrificati or Thurificati. There was another class, however, who would not openly deny Christ, and yet distrusted their power to endure the severity of torture. These purchased from the magistrate a Libellus, or certificate, that they had complied with the requirements of the Emperor. The temptation might, very likely, come in many cases, as Mosheim suggests, from the magistrates themselves. Poorer disciples would have the mere alternative of sacrifice or torture. But when the magistrates knew of a wealthy Christian, they might often give him to understand, that for a certain consideration he could have a certificate that he had given satisfaction to the government. This is represented by Cyprian as having sometimes been the case: "As there are various degrees of criminality (he says), among those who have actually offered sacrifice, so it would be most unreasonable to deny that there is also wide difference between those who have sacrificed, and such as have merely purchased a Libellus. The latter may say, I had read, and learned from my bishop, that a servant of God must not sacrifice to idols, and I would not do it; but when, without my seeking such a thing, a Libellus was offered me, I thought myself warranted in embracing that mode of escape. I did not deny my Savior; I said distinctly to the magistrate, I am a Christian; I cannot sacrifice to idols, nor offer incense on your altars, and I am willing to pay what you demand as the price of exemption from torture. This was the class of subjects for Church discipline known as Libellatici." It was in connexion with the discipline growing out of these offices, that the great schisms (as they are called), at Carthage and at Rome, in and after the middle of the third century, occurred. The Decian persecution raged with great severity both in Italy and in Africa, especially the former; and while many witnessed a good confession in the midst of torments, and many were crowned with martyrdom, the number also of the Sacrificati and Libellatici was large. These were regarded as apostates, and excluded from the communion of the Church. To the confessors and martyrs, on the other hand, were paid, from the earliest period of the Church, almost divine honors. They were attended by their fellow Christians to the place of trial and suffering. They were tended with unceasing care during their imprisonment. Christian ladies vied with each other for the honor of kissing their chains; and, with mistaken kindness, subjected them to a sorer temptation, through extravagant pampering and caresses, than that they had just encountered. Their last words and acts were carefully noted and treasured up; their bones were collected and kept with superstitious care, and the

anniversary of their martyrdom was made a solemn festival. The influence of the martyrs, of course, was unbounded, living and dead. Their word was law in the regulation of the Church. Regarded as raised, by their sufferings for Christ, to a height of dignity above that conferred by any human appointment, they might bind or loose at their pleasure the restorative discipline of the Church fell, in fact, almost wholly into their hands. They were universally conceded the right of re-admitting excluded members to the Church, by furnishing them with what was termed a Libellus pacis—a certificate of restoration. To these more faithful brethren, who had confessed Christ in the midst of torments, and were awaiting their execution, the Lapsi in Carthage, excommunicated as Sacrificati or Libellatici, made their application. The topics they would urge are easily conceived. Their ignorance of the nature of the sin they committed; the terrible strength of the temptation; their having designed to confess Christ, and yielding only when nature could bear no more; their profound grief and repentance, and their anxiety to be restored to communion with their brethren. They implored a testimonial that should entitle them to re-admission to the Church. The martyrs, flattered by the deference shown them, and disposed to magnify their office, issued their Libelli pacis to such applicants with fatal liberality. In the absence of Cyprian, who had fled from the persecution (A. D. 250), this practice grew into a dangerous abuse threatening the ruin of all Church discipline. He complains that they were granted by thousands; and not content with exercising the pardoning power thus freely in person, the martyrs sometimes exercised it by proxy. He mentions one instance as a specimen, in which Paul leaves authority with Lucian to restore the Lapsi in his name and after his martyrdom. This, of course, was offering the broadest encouragement to apostasy. The feeble or unsound Christian ran to the altar, while the persecution raged, and offered sacrifice; after the danger was over he applied to some confessor, and obtained with little difficulty a certificate of good standing. With this in his hands, he presents himself before the Church and demands restoration. The abuse was carried even further than this; for the libelli pacis were issued in general terms, so as to include the individual applicant with his family or friends.

The usual formula was, Communicet (Lucius or Caius) cum suis. Let the bearer be restored to Church fellowship together with his friends. It is even supposed to be intimated in a passage of Cyprian, that the holders of the Libelli speculated in this spiritual scrip, selling out to other Lapsi the privilege of coming with them as a part of the "friends" embraced in the certificate. Cyprian, on his elevation to the Episcopate, only two years after his conversion, found the Church sunk, according to his

own description, in a dismal spiritual decline, the growth of a long season of tranquillity. He describes the generality of professors as worldly-minded and greedy of gain. Luxury and effeminacy abounded; profaneness was unrestrained; and the intermarriage of Christians and heathens by no means uncommon. Bitter disputes prevailed among brethren, and even pastors, not simply neglecting, but actually deserting their flocks, travelled through distant provinces in quest of pleasure or of gain.

Cyprian set himself, with vast energy and resolution, to the task of correcting the prevailing abuses. He preached, he wrote, he disciplined; he implored the confessors to respect the purity of the Church; he called to his aid the See of Rome, between which and that of Carthage the most intimate relations existed; he tried to enlist neighboring bishops in the same work; and even from his place of concealment during the Decian persecution, he maintained, by constant letters, this course of influence.

That the effect of Cyprian's exertions was salutary at the time, is easily admitted. Discipline assumed fresh vigor; the churches were to some extent purged of unworthy members; the abuse of the Libelli pacis was abated; and through the associated influence of the Decian persecution and the labors of Cyprian, the society of believers was left in a much higher state of purity and vigor than before. At the same time, looking beyond the then immediate influence, we are to offset against all this, the encroachments he so greatly promoted on the parity of the clergy; his extravagant claims in favor of Episcopal power; and the potent energy with which he, being dead, yet pleads for hierarchical domination. Cyprian was, like Wolsey," a man of an unbounded stomach," of a high encroaching spirit; but it is also true that the circumstances in which he was placed encouraged a decided centralization of Church power; so that he probably acted, as Neander suggests, not so much from a deliberate design to exalt his own order at the expense of the liberties of the Church, as in the spirit of the whole party to which he belonged, and in accordance with the demands of the age. At the time Cyprian was raised to the bishopric, five presbyters, or pastors, in and around Carthage, opposed his election. The grounds alleged for their opposition are not preserved. They may have been perfectly legitimate-perhaps they were founded in part, at least, on the direction of Paul that a bishop should not be a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the Devil; an apostolic canon the wisdom of which was to some extent illustrated in the subsequent history of Cyprian. The leading spirit among the presbyters was Novatus. Between him and Cyprian, whom Neander supposes to be the representatives on the one side, of the original Presbyterian independency,

and on the other of the growing Episcopal domination, a furious jealousy existed from this time.

Novatus, perhaps fearful of the arbitrary temper of Cyprian, opposed his election at first, and afterwards set himself resolutely to resist his invasions of the liberties of the Church.

Cyprian paid him off with an excommunication, and with heavy drafts on his exceedingly rich vocabulary of abuse. Resting on his own presbyterial rights, Novatus ordained to the office of Deacon in the Church of which he was pastor, a certain Felicissimus. This opened a second campaign in the Punic war. Cyprian claimed the exclusive right of creating all the African Deacons. His favorite maxim was, that the Deacon hangs as a mere appendage to the Bishop. The Bishop exists by Divine right. The Deacon exists by Episcopal right. It was a monstrous piece of Presbyterian insolence, that Novatus should have ordained a Deacon without even asking the consent of the Right Reverend Thascius C. Cyprian; "nec permittente me, nec sciente." Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

Novatus was evidently one of those men not amiable in the eyes of the tribe of Cyprian, who go towards constituting a Church as well as a state;-high-minded men who know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain. He understood his position; he felt the importance of the principles he represented; and he had enough pugnacity and firmness to champion them à toute outrance. Novatus was plainly one of those characters who are "born to vex the State" ecclesiastical, when it verges, that is, towards abuse and oppression; who have a stubborn kind of prejudice in favor of Scripture order, and against usurpation in the Church. He has come down to us in the writings of Cyprian, blackened with all the epithets of reproach which the most vindictive odium prelaticum could invent. The African Bishop dis

'No moral association begins with the inertia of the mass of those associated; with the separation of the people and the government. It is certain, accordingly, that, at the outset of Christianity, the body of the faithful participated in the administration of the affairs of the society. The Presbyterian system, that is to say, the government of the Church by its spiritual chiefs, assisted by the leading members of the body, was the primitive system. There may be many questions raised as to the titles, functions, and mutual relations of these lay and ecclesiastical chiefs of the rising congregations; but as to the fact of their concurrence in the regulation of their common affairs there can be no doubt. GUIZOT, II., 61.

In it (the moral superiority conceded to the apostles and their immediate successors), we have the first germ, the religious germ of the Episcopal system. That system derives also from another source. The towns into which Christianity had made its way were very unequal in population, in wealth, in importance: and the inequality in intellectual development, in moral power, was as great as the natural inequality. There was consequently an inequality likewise in the distribution of influence among the spiritual heads of the congregations. The chiefs of the more important, of the more enlightened towns, naturally took the lead and exercised an authority at first moral, then institutional, over the minor congregations within a certain circle around them. This was the political germ of the Episcopal system. -Do., p. 63

missed all mercy from his lips, when Novatus was the theme. He represents him as of insatiable greediness and rapacity, haughty, arrogant, restless, always setting himself against the authority of the Church, treacherous and heretical in his temper, a perfect firebrand in God's house, an enemy of peace, and a lover of confusion. All this might pass for the mere vague raving of an unscrupulous adversary; but Cyprian proceeds further to charge him with specific crimes of the blackest character; that he had betrayed his trust as a guardian, had robbed the widows of the Church, and peculated from the poor-fund; that he had neglected to provide his aged father bread to save him from starving, or a grave to cover his remains; and finally, that he had caused the death of his wife (as Nero did the Empress Poppæa's), by kicking her while in a delicate state of health. Now when we consider that Novatus was the pastor of one of the churches in Carthage, filling a conspicuous and responsible post, and that a considerable body of Christians, including most of the confessors and martyrs, had made him their centre of union, we shall conclude all this is just as good as any other string of unlicensed vituperation-the unsifted gatherings of personal or party rancor.

Cyprian had been a rhetorician-a declaimer on themes for effect, and a pleader of causes; and he was too much of a neophyte to have been able to shake off his former professional habits. He evidently carried some of the worst parts, both of the lawyer and the rhetorician, into the Episcopate. In exhausting his eloquence upon the inflexible presbyter, he was gratifying both his personal hatred and his professional vanity. Robber, thief, adulterer, parricide! cries Cyprian. Nothing of all this am I, replies Novatus. Nor have you alleged a particle of proof to fasten these epithets upon me. Ah! monster! retorts the offended Prelate, what need we further testimony? Did you not ordain Deacon Felicissimus nec permittente me, nec sciente? Probatum est. The two branches of the equation in Cyprian's mind were evidently these: Voting against my elevation to the Episcopate, plus ordaining a Deacon on your own responsibility, equals robbery, plus murder, plus theft, plus parricide, plus an unknown quantity of other terms of similar significancy.

Towards Felicissimus, he indulges in the same complimentary strain. He charges the Deacon with theft; asserts that he had refused to restore money deposited with him, and was notorious for the profligacy of his habits. For this there is the same plentiful lack of testimony as in the former case. Cyprian says so; but as for the witness who was to prove it, latitat et discurrit. He has retired to parts unknown. In such a case we are not called on to present any rebutting testimony other than the immense improbability of the accusations. The evidence for the prosecution consists simply of the argumentum bilingue, famous among