d of Bishops, approaches very nearly indeed to it, and was the
effluence of the Spirit of God ruling and guiding the Church of the
Fathers, we must justify ourselves from the damning blot of schism. We
cannot, dare not, do this upon principles such as "the right of private
judgment"--"The Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,"--and the like,
which lead directly, and by most certain consequence, to dissent, heresy,
and anarchy. God forbid that they who profess to be members of the One holy
Catholic Church should, urged by any unhappiness of their provisional and
strange position, take up Satanic and Antichristian arms. No! if we may not
hope for that system under which Augustin and Chrysostom laboured and
witnessed, we will have nothing to do with those who destroy dogmatic faith
altogether, and break up the visible unity of the Church of Christ into a
multitude of atoms. _Quot homines, tot voluntates._ We cannot so relapse
into worse than a second heathenism, and with the unity of Pentecost
offered us, deliberately choose the confusion of Babel.

But over and above his natural eminence in the Church, which I have
attempted to describe, a concurrence of events in the fourth century tended
to give a still greater moral weight to the voice of the Bishop of Rome.
While the other great sees of the Church were vexed with heresy or schism,
his was providentially exempted from both. The same century witnessed
Coecilianus of Carthage, judged and supported by Pope Melchiades, while the
Donatist schism all that century long rent Africa in twain; and St.
Athanasius, of Alexandria, driven from his see, and persecuted by the whole
East, received and justified by Pope Julius; and St. John Chrysostom, too
good by far for a corrupt capital and a degenerate court, in life
protected, and in death restored, by Pope Innocent. We have seen St. Jerome
appeal to Pope Damasus, to know which of three competitors for the
Patriarchal throne of Antioch was the right Bishop. But it is impossible to
describe the confusion and violence which the Arian heresy, and the cognate
heresies concerning the Person of our Lord, wrought throughout the Church
and Empire. In all these the Roman Patriarch was beheld immovable,
supporting, with his whole authority, what turned out to be the orthodox
view. What Mr. Newman asserts is, moreover, entirely in accordance with the
Patriarchal system, as we have attempted to describe it, "that the writers
of the fourth