light of the world: you the salt of the earth: you the vessels of gold and silver: but here the vessels of earth or wood await the iron rod and the eternal flame.' Therefore_, though your greatness terrifies me, yet your kindness invites me. From the Priest the sacrifice claims salvation; from the Shepherd the sheep claims protection. Let us speak without offence: I court not the Roman height: I speak with the successor of the Fisherman, and the disciple of the Cross. I, who follow none as my chief but Christ, am associated in communion with thy blessedness; that is, with the See of Peter. On that rock the Church is built I know. Whoso shall eat the Lamb outside that house is profane.... I know not Vitalis (the Apollinarian); Meletius I reject; I am ignorant of Paulinus. Whoso gathereth not with thee, scattereth; that is, he who is not of Christ is of Antichrist."[13] Considering all the circumstances of the case, no one can wonder at St. Jerome's application. When it is remembered that the Roman See, up to that time, had been free from all suspicion of heresy, and that the Arian controversy was the one in question, and that he himself, of full manhood, had been baptized, and had lived at Rome, the force of his language is hardly surprising. His words certainly prove, what, I suppose, no student of antiquity can doubt, the Primacy of the Roman See: but could there be a greater unfairness than to apply their bare letter to a state of things totally changed? or to consider expressions proving the _primacy_ of Rome, as claimed in the fourth century, to prove equally a _supremacy_ as claimed in the nineteenth, which is as different from the former as one thing can well be from another. This very St. Meletius, a man of pre-eminent sanctity of life, the ordainer of St. Chrysostom, dies, it would appear, out of communion with Rome, and has ever been accounted a saint in the Western as well as in the Eastern Church.