are often times careful to wrap up the snares of their captions propositions in the subtle covering of words, that the error lurking amid the difference of meaning may get more easy admission into the mind, and so that the truth of a proposition being upset by the slightest addition or change, the confession of it which was to effect salvation may, by a by sort of wily transition, incline to death. And this involved and deceptive mode of arguing is faulty in every kind of discourse, but in a synod is not at all to be tolerated, whose characteristic merit is this, to adhere to that lucid style of speaking in the instruction which it gives, such as may leave behind no danger of offence. If, on such occasions, anything wrong should present itself it cannot be defended by the artful excuse usually adduced, that any expressions of rather a harsh nature which may fall out anywhere, will be found in other passages more plainly explained, or even corrected, as though the pert flippancy of affirming and denying, and of contradicting themselves ad libitum, which has ever been the fraudulent resource of innovators to indirectly introduce error might not tend rather to expose error thin to palliate or excuse it; or as if illiterate persons more especially, who should fall in perchance with this or that part of the synod set forth to the public in the vernacular tongue, might always have at hand other scattered passages which might have to be inspected; or even after these were inspected, each person might have sufficient means to compare them one with the other, so that, as they idly pretend, they might be able to shun all risk of error. A most baneful trick no doubt for insinuating error, which was some time since wisely detected in the letter of Nestorius, a prelate of Constantinople, and most severely reproved by our predecessor, Celestinus;[1] in which letter, that artful individual was tracked, caught, and held fast, weakening his case by his own verbosity, whilst mixing up that which was true with what are obscure, and again confounding both, he either confessed what had been denied, or endeavoured to deny what had been confessed. To ward off which stratagems, too often resorted to in every age, no better method has been adopted, than that by which, by exposing those passages,
- ↑ S. Celestinus, ep. xiii. n. 2, ap. Const.
