as being universally held. They are witnesses to the fact of those doctrines being received, not here or there, but every where. We receive those doctrines which they thus hold, not merely because they hold them, but because they bear witness that all Christians every where then held them. We take them as honest informants, but not as a sufficient authority in themselves, though they are an authority too. If they were to state these very same doctrines, but say, “These are our opinions : we deduced them from Scripture, and they are true,” we might well doubt about receiving them at their hands. We might fairly say, that we had as much right to deduce from Scripture as they had; that deductions of Scripture were mere opinions ; that if our deductions agreed with theirs, that would be a happy coincidence, and increase our confidence in them ; but if they did not, it could not be helped we must follow our own light. Doubtless no man has any right to impose his own deductions upon another, in matters of faith. There is an obvious obligation, indeed, upon the ignorant to submit to those who are better informed ; and there is a fitness in the young submitting implicitly for a time to the teaching of their elders ; but beyond this, one man’s opinion is not better than another’s. But this is not the state of the case as regards the primitive Fathers. They do not speak of their own private opinion ; they do not say, “This is true, because we see it in Scripture” about which there might be differences of judgments but, “this is true, because in matter of fact it is held, and has ever been held, by all the Churches, down to our times, without interruption, ever since the Apostles :” where the question is merely one of testimony, whether they had the means of knowing that it had been and was so held ; for if it was the belief of so many and independent Churches at once, and that as if from the Apostles, doubtless it cannot but be true and Apostolic.
This, I say, is the mode in which the Fathers speak as regards doctrine ; but it is otherwise when they interpret prophecy. In this matter there seems to have been no Catholic, no universal, no openly declared traditions ; and when they interpret, they are for the most part giving, and profess to be giving, either their own
