ghtest
foundation for the inference that, at the time when it was written,
these ecclesiastical convocations were unknown in Africa and Italy. We
have direct proof that before this period they not only met in Rome, but
that the bishop of the great city had been in the habit of requesting
his brother pastors in other countries to hold such assemblies. [614:1]
There is, too, satisfactory evidence that they were now not unknown at
Carthage, [614:2] and Tertullian himself elsewhere apparently refers to
the proceedings of African synods. [614:3] He must have been well aware
that they had recently assembled in various parts of the West to
pronounce judgment in the Paschal controversy; for the decisions of the
Gallic and Roman synods mentioned by Eusebius seem to have been
published all over the Church; and the reason why he refers to the
convocations of the Greeks was, not because such meetings were not held
in other lands, but because these, from their peculiar method of
procedure in the way of fasting, [614:4] supplied, as he conceived, a
very apposite argument in support of the discipline which he was so
desirous to recommend.

If historians have erred in stating that synods commenced in Greece,
they have been still more egregiously mistaken in asserting that the
once famous Amphictyonic Council suggested their establishment, and
furnished the model for their construction. In the second century of the
Christian era the Council of the Amphictyons was shorn of its glory, and
though it then continued to meet, [615:1] it had long ceased to be
either an exponent of the national mind, or a free and independent
assembly. It is not to be imagined that the Christian community, in the
full vigour of its early growth, would all at once have abandoned its
apostolic constitution, and adopted a form of government borrowed from
an effete institute. Synods, which now formed so prominent a part of the
ecclesiastical polity, could claim a higher and holier original. They
were obviously nothing more than the legitimate development of the
primitive structure of the Church, for they could be traced up to that
meeting of the apostles and elders at Jerusalem which relieved the
Gentile converts from the observance of the rite of circumcision.

The most plausible argument in support of the theory that the
Amphictyonic Council suggested the establishment of synodical
conventions is based upon the alleged fact that these ecclesiastical
meetings we