With the fruitlessness of its endeavors to extinguish the Arian controversy we have nothing to do, but in its legislative capacity its labors had an influence upon our subject which merits a closer examination than would appear necessary from the seemingly unimportant nature of the proceedings themselves. With the full belief that the canons of a general council were the direct operation of the Holy Ghost, they were of course entitled to unquestioning reverence, and those of Nicæa have always been regarded as of special and peculiar authority, cutting off all debate on any question to which they might be applicable. The third of the series has been the main reliance of sacerdotal controversialists, and has been constantly appealed to as the unanswerable justification for enforcing the rule of discipline which enjoined celibacy on all admitted to holy orders. Its simple phraseology would hardly seem to warrant such conclusion. “The Great Synod has strictly forbidden to bishop, priest, and deacon, and to every ecclesiastic, to have a ‘subintroductam mulierem,’ unless perhaps a mother, a sister, an aunt, or such person only as may be above suspicion.”[83] This is the only allusion to the subject in the Nicene canons. As it does not include wives among those exempted from the prohibition of residence, we can hardly be surprised that those who believe celibacy to be of apostolic origin should assume that it was intended to pronounce an absolute separation between husband and wife. As the Council of Elvira, however, contains the only enunciation of such a rule previous to that of Nicæa, and as those of Ancyra and Neocæsarea and the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons, directly or indirectly, allow the conjugal relations of ecclesiastics to remain undisturbed, we are certainly justified in assuming the impossibility that an innovation of so much importance would be introduced in the discipline of the universal church without being specifically designated and commanded in terms which would admit of no misunderstanding. That the meaning of the canon is really and simply that alone which appears on the surface—to put an end to the disorders and scandals arising from the improper female companions of unmarried priests—is, moreover, I think, susceptible of easy demonstration.