ance only. Men might carefully avoid speaking of Tertullian; they could not escape his influence. Cyprian, for example, never breathes his name; yet the works of Cyprian are filled with the silent witnesses of the diligence with which he studied his brilliant predecessor; and his secretary told Jerome he never passed a day without reading him, and was accustomed to ask for him in the significant formula, “Hand me the Master.” This is not far from a typical instance. “The man was too great a scholar, thinker, writer,” remarks Harnack,[1] “and he had done the Western Church too distinguished service during a long series of years for his memory to become effaced.”
In modern times the vigor of Tertullian's mind and the brilliancy of his literary gifts have perhaps generally been fully recognized. It is questionable, however, whether the greatness of his initiative in the development of Christian doctrine is even yet estimated at its true value. That many of the streams of doctrinal thought that have flowed down through the Western Church take their rise in him is indeed universally understood. But perhaps it comes to us with a little surprise when Harnack claims for him, for example, that it was he who broke out the road for the formulation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. “When the Nicene formulary is praised,” says Harnack,[2] “it is always of Athanasius that we think; when the Chalcedonian decree is cited, it is the name of Leo the Great that is magnified. But that Tertullian is in reality the father of the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ, and that in the whole patristic literature there is no treatise that can be compared in importance and influence with his tract Against Praxeas, it has necessarily been left to the investigations of our own day to exhibit.” If such a statement as this can be substantiated it is enough to mark Tertullian outnot merely as a man of exceptional gifts and worthy performance, but as one of the greatest forces which have wrought in history.
It is proposed to subject this statement to such testing as is involved in going to the tract Against Praxeas and seeking to form a judgment of its value and of the place in the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which it vindicates for its author.
The tract Against Praxeas, it must be borne in mind from the
