thens, was the instability of their moral system, and the continual fluctuations of their doctrine. As the fulness of truth was not in vain philosophy, and as they drew not their lights, said Tertullian, from that sovereign reason which enlightens all minds, and which is the immutable teacher of the truth, but from the corruption of their heart and the vanity of their thoughts, they qualified good and evil according to their caprices, and, among them, vice and virtue were almost arbitrary names. Nevertheless, continues this father, the most inseparable character of truth is that of being always the same: good and evil take their immutability from that of God himself, whom they glorify or insult; his wisdom, his holiness, his righteousness, are the only eternal rules of our manners: and it belongs not to men, at their pleasure, to change what men have not established, and what is more ancient than men themselves.
Now, it was not surprising that morality had nothing determinate, in the heathen schools, delivered up to the pride and to the variations of the human mind: it was vanity, and not the truth, which made philosophers; the rules changed with the ages; new times brought new laws: in a word, the tenets did not change the manners; it was the change of manners which drew after it that of the tenets.
But what is astonishing is, that Christians, who have received from heaven the eternal and immutable law which regulates their manners, believe it to be equally changeable as the morality of philosophers: that they persuade themselves that the rigorous duties which the Gospel at first prescribed to the primitive ages of the church, are mollified with the relaxation of manners, and are no longer made for the weakness and the corruption of our ages.
In effect, the Gospel, the law of Jesus Christ, is immutable in its duration: seeing every thing change around it, it alone changes not; the duties which it prescribes to us, founded upon the wants and upon the nature of man, are, like it, of all times and of all places. Every thing changes upon the earth, because every thing partakes of the mutability of its origin: empires and states have their rise and their fall; arts and sciences fall or spring up with the ages; customs continually change with the taste of the people, and with climates; from on high, in his immutability, God seems to sport with human affairs, by leaving them in an eternal revolution; the ages to come will destroy what we, with so much anxiety rear up; we destroy what our fathers had thought worthy of an eternal duration: and, in order to teach us in what estimation we ought to hold things here below, God permitteth that they have nothing determinate or solid but that very inconstancy which incessantly agitates them.
But, amid all the changes of manners and ages, the law of God always remains the immutable rule of ages and of manners. Heaven and earth shall pass away; but the holy words of the law shall never pass away: such as the first believers received them at the birth of faith, such have we them at present; such shall our
