II. I pass, then, to the next point—the alleged absence of Subscription in the primitive age. Not content with the reference to the history of our own Church, Dr. STANLEY says:—“I will not confine myself to these isolated instances, but examine the history of Subscription from the first. For the first three centuries the Church was _entirely without it_.” “The first Subscription to a series of dogmatical propositions as such was that enforced by Constantine at the Council of Nicæa. It was the natural, but rude, expedient of a half-educated soldier to enforce unanimity in the Church as he had by the sword enforced it in the empire.” (p. 35). Again, I am painfully compelled to meet the statements of Dr. STANLEY with a direct negative. The case is _not_ as he states it. A “rude soldier,” in those days—(when comparatively few people _wrote_ at all)—would not, I think, have been likely to invent this “expedient:” but, in fact, he _did not_ invent it. Council against Paulus Samosatemus. I do not suppose for a moment that Dr. STANLEY could care to make a merely _technical_ statement as to the mode in which adhesion was signified to a dogmatic series of propositions. No merely formal position of that kind could serve the argument. The position which he lays down must be that, before the time of Constantine, there was that _freedom_ allowed which is demanded by those who object to Subscription now,—that people were not, in those days, called on to profess their belief in any set of “dogmatical” statements as tests of orthodoxy. If, then, he will look back sixty-six years before the Council of Nicæa, to the Council of Antioch (of which Constantine was quite innocent), against Paul of Samosata, there he will find the copy of a letter from certain orthodox bishops, Hymenæus, Theophilus, Theoctenus, Maximus, Proclus, and Bolanus, setting forth a series of dogmatical propositions, more minute and lengthened than those of Nicæa, and concluding with these words—Ταῦτα ἀπὸ πλείστων ὀλίγα σημειωσάμενοι, Βουλόμεθα μαθεῖν, εἰ τὰ αὐτὰ φρονεῖς ἡμῖν καὶ διδάσκεις, καὶ ὑποσημειώσασθαι σε, εἰ ἀρέσκη, τοῖς προγεγραμμένοις, ῆ οὐ. If he would not write, he must make his mark—give some sign, at all events—whether he “held and taught” as there set forth in writing (προγεγραμμένοις)—yes or no; or submit to lose his office in the Church—(καθαιρεθῆναι.)—_Routh’s Rel._ ii. p. 465, &c. Council against Noetus.