PREFACE.

whose blasphemous opinions he has overthrown with his many and great volumes, as if with thunderbolts. And yet, after all this, this man—this Tertullian, I say—not holding the Catholic doctrine (that is, the universal and ancient faith), and being far more eloquent than faithful, changed his mind afterward. At last, he did what the blessed confessor Hilary writes of him in a certain place: "He discredited," he says, "his worthy writings with his later error," and he also became a great temptation in the Church. But I will say no more of this. I will only add that by defending—contrary to the command of Moses—the new madness of Montanus A leader of an ascetic, ecstatic movement in the 2nd century. springing up in the Church as true prophecy, and by supporting those mad dreams about the new doctrine of frantic women, he deserved that we should also say of him and his writings: "If a prophet shall rise up in the midst of thee," and shortly after, "thou shalt not hear the words of that prophet." Why so? "Because," he says, "your Lord God does tempt you, whether you love Him or no."

b de Jejun. c. 15. "How very slight among us is the prohibition of meats! Two weeks of dry food Refers to xerophagia, a restricted diet of bread, water, and fruit. do we offer unto God, and those too not entire, the Sabbaths and Lord's Days being excepted, abstaining also from things which we do not reject but only defer."

It is then the more strange, though the more solemn a warning, that such a person, so gifted and so honored, should not only have fallen into heresy, but into one that would seem to have so little temptation. It is strange that he, who had seen his way clearly amid so much error, should have fallen where there was so little apparently to attract and so much to repel. For it did not come during a state of relaxed discipline, as in these latter days, when one might readily suppose that a mind as ardent as Tertullian's might be led by the appearance of holiness amid the degeneracy of the Church. He did not have to advocate fasting when it was neglected or discouraged, or the restoration of discipline when the most grievous sins passed unnoticed. Tertullian himself even insists upon the slight difference between the Montanist fasts and those of the Church See note b in the margin.; he does not even complain that the