Though his admirers go so far as to exculpate him from every error, we are not prepared to accompany them to that distance. We are willing to concede that Origen may have advanced some erroneous opinions, but error without contumacy does not entail the sin of heresy, which is a wilful rejection of any revealed truth authoritatively proposed. “I may fall into a mistake,” says the learned S. Augustine, “but I will not be a heretic.” The fathers of the church were only men, subject to human weakness, liable to err. The doubtful and obscure speculative hypotheses of the Alexandrian’s fertile imagination, then, should in no way darken the splendor of his genius or belittle his devotion to Catholic truth. F. Petau, his declared enemy, followed by Huet, who gave his learning to this controversy, refuses to believe Origen obstinate. Halloix, Charles Vincent de la Rue, Tillemont, Witasse, Ceillier, and other erudite scholars, who studied with care and impartiality this whole matter, unite in the emphatic declaration that Origen “died in the bosom of the Catholic Church.” This is the verdict of great men in modern times. It was also the verdict of the century in which he lived—the IIId—as may be seen in the apology of S. Pamphilus, composed in defence of Origen’s orthodoxy, and extant in the works of S. Gregory Nyssen; also in that beautiful monument of antiquity, the panegyric over Origen by S. Gregory Thaumaturgus, given in full in the works of Gerard Vossius. This verdict was confirmed in the IVth century by the catalogue of orthodox ecclesiastical writers, published by S. Gelasius, pope, among which is the name of Origen; and in the following century, in a profession of faith drawn up by Pope S. Hormisdas, and sent by Germanus, Bishop of Capua, to be signed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the heretics condemned by the church are enumerated, but in this enumeration we can discover no allusion to the great Scripturist.