Frauds and Follies of the Fathers: A Review of the Worth of Their Testimony to the Four GospelsWheeler, J. M. (Joseph Mazzini)
Religion
Frauds and Follies of the Fathers: A Review of the Worth of Their Testimony to the Four Gospels
Wheeler, J. M. (Joseph Mazzini)
Christianity -- Controversial literature; Fathers of the church
Our space will not permit us to further enlarge on the vast appeals to
faith made by Irenæus. Nor can we pause to deal with Tertullian,
who, with more impetuosity and no less acerbity, championed the same
orthodoxy, shrinking not from the "credo quia absurdum est," and who
ended by turning heretic. Nor with the learned Clement of Alexandria,
whose high speculations led also into contempt of the world and its
ways of science, art, and civilisation. Nor with the ascetic and
self-emasculated Origen, at once profound and prolific, who, in his
attempt to reconcile Christianity with reason, fell into such errors as
believing in the pre-existence and pretemporal fall of souls, and the
redemption of the inhabitants of the stars and even of Satan himself.
We must reserve a brief space for the great ecclesiastical historian.
EUSEBIUS.
It is to this eminent Father that we are indebted for almost all we know
of the lost Christian literature of the time preceding the establishment
of Christianity by Constantine. He was born about 264 or 270, and was a
priest in the time of Diocletian.
During the persecution in that reign he retired to Egypt, where,
however, he was imprisoned, but speedily released. This gave rise to a
suggestion that he had apostatised. "Who art thou, Eusebius?" exclaimed
Potamon, Bishop of Heraclea, at the Council of Tyre, where Eusebius
violently conducted the "persecution of Athanasius," "to judge the
innocent Athanasius. Did'st thou not sit with me in prison in the time
of the tyrant? They plucked out my eye for the confession of the truth.
Thou comest forth unharmed. How didst thou escape?"
In 315 he became Bishop of Cæsarea. His friendships were among the Arian
party in the Church, and his views, to say the least, inclined that way,
and Dr. Newman, in his "History of the Arians in the Fourth Century,"
speaks of him as "openly siding with the Arians, and sanctioning and
sharing their deeds of violence." This, however, did not stand in the
way of his sitting beside the Emperor Constantine, at the Council of
Nice, to anathematise and put down the Arians. He subscribed the
Nicene Creed, apparently with some reservations, as to the word
_consubstantial._ It is noticeable that his history breaks off abruptly
before the Council of Nice. Perhaps it was one of those matters he
thought best to suppress as little to the credit of the Church or
himself. Athanasius, Petavius, Baronius, Montfaucon, and Moller consider
him an Arian. Bull, Cave, and Hely, defend his orthodoxy.
On account of his Arianism he has been violently attacked by Cardinal
Baronius, who impugns the faith of the bishop, the character of the man,
and the sincerity of the historian. He makes out Eusebius to have been
simply an ambitious and cruel courtier; calls him a calumniator, a
panegyrist rather than an historian, and accuses him of falsifying the
edicts of Constantine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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