First, let their attention be fixed on the history of Christianity as learnt from universal tradition, and the writers of each successive generation. Draw their minds to the fact of the progressive and still continuing fulfilment of the assurance of a few fishermen, that both their own religion, though of Divine origin, and the religion of their conquerors, which included or recognised all other religious of the known world, should be superseded by the faith in a man recently and ignominiously executed. Then induce them to meditate on the universals of Christian Faith—on Christianity taken as the sum of belief common to Greek and Latin, to Romanist and Protestant. Show them that this and only this is the _ordo traditionis_, _quam tradiderunt Apostoli iis quibus committebant ecclesias_, and which we should have been bound to follow, says Irenæus, _si neque Apostoli quidem Scripturas reliquissent_. This is that _regula fidei_, that _sacramentum symboli memoriæ mandatum_, of which St. Augustine says:—_noveritis hoc esse Fidei Catholicæ fundamentum super quod edificium surrexit Ecclesiæ_. This is the _norma Catholici et Ecclesiastici sensus_, determined and explicated, but not augmented, by the Nicene Fathers, as Waterland has irrefragably shown; a norm or model of Faith grounded on the solemn affirmations of the Bishops collected from all parts of the Roman Empire, that this was the essential and unalterable Gospel received by them from their predecessors in all the churches as the παράδοσις ἐκκλησιαστικὴ _cui_, says Irenæus, _assentiunt multæ gentes eorum qui in Christum credunt sine charta et atramento_, _scriptam habentes per Spiritum in cordibus suis salutem_, _et veterum traditionem diligenter custodientes_. Let the attention of such as have been shaken by the assaults of infidelity be thus directed, and then tell me wherein a spiritual physician would be blameworthy, if he carried on the cure by addressing his patient in this manner:—