PREFACE.

A painful analogy has, before our own eyes, been furnished by the change of temper, and, as one should fear, judicial blindness, which secession from our own Church has, in some saddening cases, brought over persons’ minds. Any way, it is a solemn warning that one who had possessed himself of a rule of faith against heresy, or, as we should say, of Catholic truth, should, probably the rather through no unnatural misapplication of that rule, be betrayed into heresy; that the most powerful mind perhaps of antiquity should be ensnared by a heresy, intellectually the least attractive; that a heresy, which soon showed the characteristic of heresy (as Tertullian himself had pointed outa) in dividing into lesser sectsb, and which at no time numbered any eminent persons within it, should have been reserved to ensnare one who was in other points on his guard, and but for this would have been a chief defender of the faith and Doctor in the Church; that, as far as it seems, one single uncorrected fault should have been the chief instrument of his fall. “The more,” says Tillemontc, “Tertullian seems to have been removed from the vices of men, the more reason had he to dread falling into those of devils” (pride and impatience). Of a truth, the “deceivableness” of Satan and his cunning in adapting his snares, in doctrine as in life, to each man’s peculiar temperament and failings, seem far greater than they probably suspect, who in these days fear it most. The fall of Tertullian was the one great triumph of Montanism. The warning seems to come the more providentially in an age, which on the one hand is so recklessly careless as to heresy on the highest doctrines, and on the other hand, patience seems to be the grace which God is especially forming in our Church.

a. On Prescription, ch. 42.
b. Against All Heresies, ch. 52. S. Epiphanius, Heresies 48, ch. 14; 49, ch. 1–2.
c. Tertullian, art. 8.