ter of all.'

'Heresy,' cried out one who had spoken before, 'always dates from the
oldest; it never has less age nor authority than that of Christ.'

'Christians! Christians!' Macer's stentorian voice was now heard
towering above the tumult, 'what is it ye would have? What are these
distinctions about which ye dispute? What have they to do with the
matter now in hand? How would one doctrine or the other in such matters
weigh with Aurelian more than straws or feathers? But if these are stark
naught, and less than naught, there are other questions pertinent to the
time, nay, which the time forces upon us, and about which we should be
well agreed. A new age of persecution has arisen, and the church is
about to be sifted, and the wheat separated from the chaff--the first to
be gathered into the garners of God, the last to be burnt up in fire
unquenchable. Now is it to be proved who are Christ's, and who are
not--who will follow him bearing their cross to some new Calvary, and
who, saving their lives, shall yet lose them. Who knows not the evil
that, in the time of Decius, yes, and before and since too, fell upon
the church from the so easy reception and restoration of those who, in
an hour of weakness and fear, denied their master and his faith, and
bowed the knee to the gods of Rome? Here is the danger against which we
are to guard; from this quarter--not from any other of vain jargon
concerning natures, essences, and modes of being--are we to look for
those fatal inroads to be made upon the purity of the gospel, that
cannot but draw along with them corruption and ruin. Of what stuff will
the church then be made, when they who are its ministers, deacons and
bishops, shall be such as, when danger showed itself, relapsed into
idolatry, and, soon as the clouds had drifted by, and the winds blew
soft, came forth again into the calm sunshine, renounced their idolatry,
and again professing Christ, were received to the arms of the church,
and even to the communion of the body and blood of our Lord?
Christians, the great Novatian is he to whom we owe what purity the
church yet retains, and it is in allegiance to him--'

'The great Novatian!' exclaimed a priest of the Roman church, 'great
only in his infamy! Himself an apostate once, he sought afterwards,
having been received himself back again to the church upon his
repentance, to bury his shame under a show of zeal against such as were
guilty of the same offence. His own weakn