This section is an instance of impolitic management of a cause, into which Jeremy Taylor was so often seduced by the fertility of his intellect and the opulence of his erudition. An antagonist by exposing the improbability of the tradition, (and most improbable it surely is), and the little credit due to Saint Gregory and Saint Jerome (not forgetting a Miltonic sneer at their saintship), might draw off the attention from the unanswerable parts of Taylor's reasoning and leave an impression of his having been confuted. Ib. s. lxxxix. p. 362. But besides this, when the Apostles had received great measures of the spirit, and by their gift of prayer composed more forms for the help and comfort of the Church, &c. Who would not suppose, that the first two lines were an admitted point of history, instead of a bare conjecture in the form of a bold assertion? O, dearest man! so excellent a cause did not need such Bellarminisms. Ib. p. 363. And the Fathers of the Council of Antioch complain against Paulus Samosatenus, 'quod Psalmos et cantus, qui ad Domini nostri Jesu Christi honorem decantari solent, tanquam recentiores, et a viris recentioris memoriœ editos, exploserit.' This Sam-in-satin-hose, or Paul, the same-as-Satan-is, might, I think, have found his confutation in Pliny's Letter to Trajan. 'Carmen Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem.' Ib. s. xc. p. 364. Which together with the [Greek: tà apomnaemoneúmata t_on propháeton], the 'lectionarium' of the Church, the books of the Apostles and Prophets spoken of by Justin Martyr, and said to be used in the Christian congregations, are the constituent parts of liturgy. An ingenious but not tenable solution of Justin Martyr's [Greek: apomnaemoneúmata t_on apostól_on] which were presumably a Gospel not the same, and yet so nearly the same, as our Matthew, that its history and character involve one of the hardest problems of Christian antiquity. By the by, one cause of the small impression--(small in proportion to their vast superiority in knowledge and genius)--which Jeremy Taylor and his compeers made on the religious part of the community by their controversial writings during the life of Charles I is to be found in their undue predilection for Patristic learning and authority. This originated in the wish to baffle the Papists at their own weapons; but it could not escape notice, that the latter, though regularly beaten, were yet not so beaten, but that they always kept the field: and when the same mode of warfare was employed against the Puritans, it was suspected as Papistical. Ib. s. xci. pp. 364-5.