I know there are a class of Protestant churchmen, who seek to satisfy themselves on this question of divine authority by claiming that it has come down to them on lines independent of the church of Rome. But, unfortunately for this contention the church of England herself and the other Protestants cut off not only the source of divine authority that might be claimed as coming from the church of Rome, but also every other source from which that authority could spring. In her great homily on the "Perils of Idolatry" the church of England says: "Laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages and sects and degrees have been drowned in abominable idolatry most detested by God and damnable to man, for eight hundred years and more" (Perils of Idolatry, page 3). By making this charge against all Christendom one is unable to see how the Church of England can make any claim whatsoever of divine authority; for, if all Christendom was plunged into this awful abyss of apostasy for eight hundred years and more, no divine authority survived that period. Nor is the Church of England the only Protestant authority which makes this charge of universal apostasy from primitive Christianity. John Wesley, in making an explanation of the cessation of scriptural gifts among Christians, says: "It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit [speaking of I Corinthians xii] were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the Emperor Constantine called himself a Christian; and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby heaped riches and power and honor upon Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they (the spiritual gifts) almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not (as has been supposed) because there was no more occasion for them, because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake, not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christians. The real cause of it was that the love of many, almost all, Christians so-called was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of man when he came to examine his church, could hardly find faith upon earth. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian church--_because the Christians were turned heathens again and only had a dead form left"_ (Wesley's Works, Vol. vii, sermon 89, pp. 26, 27).