Romanists have in vain sought to use him as an authority. It is sufficient to read him to be assured that he has nowhere made the Apostle Peter the rock of the Church, as they pretend. "The house of the Lord," he says,[1] "built in the top of the mountains," is the Church — according to the Apostle who says that one should know how to conduct one's self in the House of God, which is the Church of the living God. Its foundations are in the holy mountains, for it is built upon the foundations of the Apostles and Prophets. One of these mountains was Peter, upon which rock the Lord promised to build his Church. It is just that sublime souls, lifted above terrestrial things, should be called mountains. Now, the soul of the blessed Peter was called a sublime rock, because he was firmly grounded in faith, and that it bore constantly and courageously the blows that were laid upon it in the day of trial. St. Basil concludes that by imitating that faith and courage we shall also become mountains upon which the house of God may be raised.
Some Western fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries seem, more than those of the East, to favour the papal authority. But it is not so in fact. We have already given the doctrine of Tertullian, of St. Cyprian, of St. Hilary of Poitiers, and of St. Leo. That of Ambrose, Augustine, Optatus, and Jerome is the same.
According to St. Augustine, St. Ambrose had made the word rock in his hymns relate to the person of St. Peter, and this had at first led him to adopt this construction. St. Ambrose, however, explains himself in other writings, as in the following:[2] "Faith is the foundation of the Church, for it was not of the person but of the faith of St. Peter that it was said that the gates of hell should not prevail against it; it is the confession of
