SCRIPTISQUE EIDEM SUPPOSITIS.

and Pearson himself, to whom Arnoldus appeals, agree with Bellarmine, who contends that he flourished in the year 500. By the suffrage of this Father, therefore, Arnoldus does not strike the anti-Areopagiticists at all, since they too—as is evident from what was brought forward above—easily concede that the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius became known at the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th century.

XVI.

Having thought that he had reconciled the Fathers of the two centuries, namely the 4th and 5th, to the Pseudo-Dionysius and his writings and rendered them propitious, Arnoldus judged that there were still the three previous centuries to be overcome. These, however, he jumped over in a single bound by appealing to the Hidden Theology of the Old Church and the custom received within it of hiding sacred things from the profane and the not yet initiated, by which it could easily happen that the writings of Dionysius, as they taught profound mysteries, lay hidden for several centuries, until finally, when the Church began to enjoy greater freedom, they were brought into the open. An opinion certainly convenient and easy for dissolving whatever objections, provided it were equally true and stood on firm ground: for it rests upon a most false hypothesis concerning the Discipline which they call of the Arcane, which they contend prevailed in the Church from the time of the Apostles; when, however, only after the times of Tertullian—that is, in the 3rd century or, according to others, the 4th and 5th—did this custom of hiding arcana or mysteries from Gentiles and the uninitiated, which made up a part of the ecclesiastical discipline, and whence it is called the Discipline of the Arcane, prevail among the ancients. Concerning this, the following have dealt most prolixly and in separate writings: Theodorus Meier in On the Hidden Theology of the Old Church and the Solemn Concealment of Sacred Things from the Profane and Uninitiated (Helmstedt, 1679); Wilh. Ern. Tenzelius in his dissertation On the Discipline of the Arcane (Wittenberg, 1683); and the observations to the Apologetic Dissertation of Eman. à Schelstrate on the same argument, which complete the second part of his Select Exercises (Leipzig, 1692).