II. The Causes of the Corruption of the Apostolic Religion. 8
says one, "which the church authentically uses, there are sometimes found errors, sometimes heresies, yet this is no sufficient cause to condemn either book or author. Let a reader of judgment peruse them, and he shall prove me no liar." Another: "The fathers while they labor with all their industry to subvert one error, have oftentimes either fallen, or at least seemed in some sort to fall into another, not unlike to husbandmen who, striving to make straight the crooked trunk of a younger tree, often do exceed the mean so far, that they make it bend as much the other way." Hear also a third of approved judgment: "The writings of great authors are not altogether perfect, for sometimes they slip and shrink, as one says, under their load, and other times they dally with the affluence of their own invention and affect popularity."
II. The Causes of the Corruption of the Apostolic Religion[1] The doctrine of religion is by many wrung and wrested unto the opinions of the heathen.
So Cassander testifies in the appendix of the defense of his book, De Officio pii viri. "We cannot," quotes he, "deny, but that the ancient
Christians (with a wonderful consent) have affirmed that of the laws of their religion, which both the Romans and other nations in elder times have affirmed of their laws, viz., that they were partly written and partly unwritten, ἔγγραφον καὶ ἄγραφον." The Greeks themselves do use these words, even Clem. Alexand., Basil, Epiphan., and Dionysius. And the Fathers (lest the doctrine of the Church should seem too harsh) do twine it towards natural reason and physical arguments, and in the questions of sin, free will, and faith, they argue more like philosophers than divines. As for example,
Athanasius in his book against idols and Clement in the 2nd of his Stromata.
The counsels of supererogation are nothing else but the philosophers' κατόρθωμα, or decorum. The doctrine of purgatory came into the Church out of the heathen writers, for the philosophers and the poets were the first that ever wrote of the pains of purgatory after death, as Plato, in his 10th book De Republica, Virgil, in his 6th of the Aeneid, and Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, lib. 15. "The Platonists," says Augustine, De civitate Dei, lib. 21, cap. 13, "although they will have no sin unpunished, yet all those punishments, they will have to tend unto reformation, whether they be inflicted by law divine, or human; in this life, or after death."
The rites and customs of the heathen (with some little change) have been brought into the form of God's worship, and that by Christians.
It was a custom with many to banquet upon martyrs' solemnities, and this was fetched from an old ethnic custom. Augustine's
Confessions, lib. 6, c. 2. Gregory Thaumaturgus changed the Gentiles' solemnities into the martyrs' feasts, as Gregory Nyssenus, in his life, says thus: "He permitted the celebrations of the martyrs' memories, lest the unskillful multitude should (through desire of vain delight) persist in the adoration of their gorgeous idolatry."
Theodoret, De Evangelicae veritatis cognitione, lib. 8, says, for the Pandia, Diasia, & Dionysia, that is, the feasts of Jupiter and Bacchus,
"the people do now make their banquets to solemnize the memories of Peter, Paul, Thomas, Sergius, Marcellus, Leontius, Antoninus,
Maurice, and other such holy martyrs."
Painting and imagery was a heathenish custom (Euseb., lib. 7, c. 17, Hist. Eccl.), as also to burn incense and light tapers unto the images
(Cicero, De Officiis, lib. 3). Yearly vigils were used by the Gentiles
before they came into the Church, as appears by Suetonius in Vespasian's life, c. 7, as also sprinkling of holy water (Juvenal, Satire
6), which Sozomen expressly calls a heathenish custom, lib. 6, c. 6.
Also lighting of candles by daylight (Seneca, lib. 4, epist. 15), and shaving of crowns: Apuleius, De asino aureo, lib. 11. "The priests of Isis," quotes he, "had their hairs shaven, and their crown very smooth." Rufinus, Hist., lib. 2, c. 29, says that, for Serapis, "his breastplate, everyone painted the cross upon the posts, entries, windows, walls, and pillars, and that Constantine used this sign of the cross in his ensign," Sozomen testifies, lib. 1, c. 5.
The Church has resumed the abolished customs and ceremonies of the Jews, as the making of their holy vestments according unto the priests of Moses's law. Alcuinus, De officiis divinis. Also Amalarius,
De officiis Ecclesiasticis, lib. 2, c. 22. Gratian, De consecratione, dist.
1, says, that "The consecrations and holy unctions are to be made and performed according unto the prescript of Moses, and the imitation of the Levites." The license and too free lib.ty which the Church used in these three things has been the cause of all these corrupted festers now predominant therein, and rankling the chief and choice parts thereof.