unambiguous voice of those who cannot be silenced or corrupted, the Fathers of the Church. In the Fathers of the undivided Church, the East and the North and the West, so long severed, meet: we are not alone, who have with us, on the very point which divides us from our Mother Church, the still unbroken line of successors from St. Athanasius and St. Chrysostom. There is no break in the descent or in the doctrine of the Eastern Churches. There is the same dogmatic, the same hierarchical fabric, subsisting now as when St. Gregory addressed Anastasius of Antioch, and Eulogius of Alexandria. It may suit the purposes of unfair Roman controversialists to brand them as schismatics, and overcome, by calling them a name, their own most formidable opponents: but history cannot be so overcome. They have _never_ admitted the Papal sway, any more than the Fathers who passed the 28th Canon of Chalcedon: they have, indeed, admitted the Roman _Primacy_, as those same Fathers admitted it; for the very system, for which they are witnesses, is not complete without the Bishop of Rome stands at the head of it: the _due_ honour of Rome is involved in the due honour of Constantinople; and, we may add, the due honour of Canterbury: the same temper, the same persons, who reject the one, hate the other. What we say they never have admitted is, that which has really worked the disunion of the Universal Church, as St. Gregory foretold it would, the doctrine which is the centre of the present Papal system, which alone makes all its parts cohere, and justifies all its acts, and triumphs over all appeal to argument, and all testimonies of antiquity, viz., that, "the Pope is set over the whole Christian world, and possesses in its completeness and plenitude that power which Christ left on earth for the good of the Church."[168] They have never for a moment admitted that the Bishops of the Universal Church were the Pope's delegates, and received their jurisdiction from him. _We_ fight, it must be admitted, at some disadvantage with our opponents. The long subjection which our Church yielded to Rome, the manifold obligations under which we lie to her, the complete unsettling of the ecclesiastical and doctrinal system in the sixteenth century, the horrible vices of those who effected the change, the connection with those whose doctrine has now worked itself out into Socinianism, infidelity, and anarchy, the inability we have ever since been under of shaking ourselves completely clear of them, the thoroughly unsatisfactory position of the state towards us, as a Church, at present,--all these things are against us,--all these things tell on the mind which really lives and dwells on antiquity, and looks to the pure Apostolic Church. Still, though they weaken, they do not overcome our cause. But from all these objections the witness of the Eastern Churches is free. They were never subject to Rome, but to their own Patriarchs; they derived not their Christianity from her: