TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.
the Welsh Dioceses are from the English, but for convenience-sake they were considered as two, according to their respective languages. Writers, from whose works extracts have as yet been made in these Records, all spoke Greek, or (as it is said) were of the Greek Church; Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, and the rest: as to the Christians of Lyons, &c. they were Greeks living in France, at that time a barbarous country. But Tertullian is a writer of the Latin Church; indeed he is the oldest of those whose works have come down to us, having been born about A.D. 160, only sixty years after St. John's death.
Tertullian's works, which have come down to us, are partly defences of Christianity and of the orthodox faith, and partly moral treatises. They are chiefly valuable, as witnesses of the state of the Church so short a time after the Apostles; as witnesses of what the Church then believed, taught, observed; as witnesses to the Creed as we hold it at this day, to Episcopacy, the Apostolical Succession, the Ceremonial of Religion, &c. His own authority indeed is small; for though very powerful as a writer, he was not a sound divine; was extravagant, nay even heterodox, in some of his opinions, and at length fell away into one of the heresies of his time. But all this, of course, does not interfere at all with the value of his writings as bearing testimony to facts, to the existing condition of the Church. And, moreover, as he writes ably, he is instructive on particular subjects, even though he is not a safe guide on the whole.
The work, from which an extract follows, was written when he was about forty years old, and may be called in English, "The Church's Plea (or Demur) against Dissenters." Tertullian's argument is this. "You who dissent from the Church," he says, "are confuted by the very novelty of your doctrine. The true doctrine must be old, and cannot be new; now the Church and its doctrines, which you despise, are much older than all your sects and their respective doctrines. Nay, the Church is as old as the Apostles; it was founded all over the world by the Apostles; and transmits down, from age to age, the doctrines which it received from them. But from whom did you receive your doctrine? Not from the Church, for you have gone out of it. Trace it up even for a few years, if you can; much less can
