ll those to be deprived of civil rights,
and to be driven into exile, who did not accord with the belief of
Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, and Peter, the Bishop of Alexandria. Those
who presumed to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Jews he
condemned to death. "We will," says he, in his edict, "that all who
embrace this creed be called catholic Christians"--the rest are
heretics.

[Sidenote: Responsibility of the clergy in these events.]

[Sidenote: Massacre at Thessalonica.]

Impartial history is obliged to impute the origin of these tyrannical
and scandalous acts of the civil power to the influence of the clergy,
and to hold them responsible for the crimes. The guilt of impure,
unscrupulous women, eunuchs, parasites, violent soldiers in possession
of absolute power, lies at their door. Yet human nature can never, in
any condition of affairs, be altogether debased. Though the system under
which men were living pushed them forward to these iniquities, the
individual sense of right and wrong sometimes vindicated itself. In
these pages we shall again and again meet this personal revolt against
the indefensible consequences of system. It was thus that there were
bishops who openly intervened between the victim and his oppressor, who
took the treasures of the Church to redeem slaves from captivity. For
this a future age will perhaps excuse Ambrose the Archbishop of Milan,
the impostures he practised, remembering that, face to face, he held
Theodosius the Great to accountability for the massacre of seven
thousand persons, whom, in a fit of vengeance, he had murdered in the
circus of Thessalonica, A.D. 390, and inexorably compelled the imperial
culprit, to whom he and all his party were under such obligations, to
atone for his crime by such penance as may be exacted in this world,
teaching his sovereign "that though he was of the Church and in the
Church, he was not above the Church;" that brute force must give way to
intellect, and that even the meanest human being has rights in the sight
of God.

[Sidenote: Introduction of Patristicism.]

Political events had thus taken a course disastrous to human knowledge.
A necessity had arisen that they to whom circumstances had given the
control of public faith should also have the control of public
knowledge. The moral condition of the world had thus come into
antagonism with scientific progress. As had been the case many ages
before in India, the sacred writings were assert