members; and, deeply
mortified because the Asiatic Churches persisted in their own usages,
shut them out from his communion. But it was soon evident that the
Church was not prepared for such an exercise of authority, for the
Asiatics refused to yield; and as some of Victor's best friends
protested against the imprudence of his procedure, the ecclesiastical
thunderbolt proved an impotent demonstration.

The Paschal controversy was far from creditable to any of the parties
concerned. The eating of a lamb on a particular day was a fragment of an
antiquated ceremonial, and as the ordinance itself had been superseded,
the time of its observance was not a legitimate question for debate.
Each party is said to have endeavoured to fortify its own position by
quoting the names of Paul or Peter or Philip or John; but had any one of
these apostles risen from the dead and appeared in the ecclesiastical
arena, he would, no doubt, have rebuked all the disputants for their
trivial and unholy wrangling. We have here a notable proof of the
absurdity of appealing to tradition. Within a hundred years after the
death of the last survivor of the Twelve its testimony was most
discordant, for the tradition of the Western Churches, as propounded by
Victor, expressly contradicted the tradition of the Eastern Churches, as
attested by Polycrates. It is clear that in this case the apostles must
have been misrepresented. Peter and Paul certainly never taught the
members of the Church of Rome to eat the Paschal lamb, for the Jewish
temple continued standing until after both these eminent ministers had
finished their career, and meanwhile the eating of the Passover was
confined to those who went up to worship at Jerusalem. Philip and John
may have continued to keep the feast according to the ancient ritual
until shortly before the ruin of the holy city; and if, afterwards, they
permitted the converts from Judaism to kill a lamb and to have a social
repast at the same season of the year, they could have attached no
religious importance to such an observance. But now that both parties
were heated by the spirit of rivalry and contention, they extracted from
tradition a testimony which it did not supply. Vague reports and
equivocal statements, handed down from ages preceding, were compelled to
convey a meaning very different from that which they primarily
communicated; and thus the voice of one tradition could be readily
employed to neutralize the author