that it was scarcely entertained in those days by
Protestants, and not at all by Catholics; in a third he implies that its
celebrity in the nineteenth century is owing in the first place to
Lamennais. The passage, taken from Vinet, in which Bossuet speaks of the
development of religion is inaccurately rendered. His words are the same
which, on another page, are rightly translated "the course of
religion"--_la suite de la religion_. Indeed, Bossuet was the most
powerful adversary the theory ever encountered. It was not so alien to
Catholic theology as is here stated, and before the time of Jurieu is
more often found among Catholic than Protestant writers. When it was put
forward, in guarded, dubious, and evasive terms, by Petavius, the
indignation in England was as great as in 1846. The work which contained
it, the most learned that Christian theology had then produced, could
not be reprinted over here, lest it should supply the Socinians with
inconvenient texts. Nelson hints that the great Jesuit may have been a
secret Arian, and Bull stamped upon his theory amid the grateful
applause of Bossuet and his friends. Petavius was not an innovator, for
the idea had long found a home among the Franciscan masters: "Proficit
fides secundum statum communem, quia secundum profectum temporum
efficiebantur homines magis idonei ad percipienda et intelligenda
sacramenta fidei.--Sunt multae conclusiones necessario inclusae in
articulis creditis, sed antequam sunt per Ecclesiam declaratae et
explicatae non oportet quemcumque eas credere. Oportet tamen circa eas
sobrie opinari, ut scilicet homo sit paratus eas tenere pro tempore, pro
quo veritas fuerit declarata." Cardinal Duperron said nearly the same
thing as Petavius a generation before him: "L'Arien trouvera dans sainct
Irenee, Tertullien et autres qui nous sont restez en petit nombre de ces
siecles-la, que le Fils est l'instrument du Pere, que le Pere a commande
au Fils lors qu'il a este question de la creation des choses, que le
Pere et le Fils sont _aliud et aliud_; choses que qui tiendroit
aujourd'huy, que le langage de l'Eglise est plus examine, seroit estime
pour Arien luy-mesme." All this does not serve to supply the pedigree
which Newman found it so difficult to trace. Development, in those days,
was an expedient, an hypothesis, and not even the thing so dear to the
Oxford probabilitarians, a working hypothesis. It was not more
substantial than the gleam in Robinson's farewell