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121 ["Thyestian feasts" (p. 130, supra); a charge which the Christian Fathers perpetually repel. Of course the sacrament of the Lord's Supper lent colour to this charge; but it could not have been repelled, had they believed the material body and blood of the "man Christ Jesus," present in this sacrament. See cap. iii., note.]
122 [1 Cor. xv. 44. A very clear representation of the apostle's doctrine. See Kaye, 199; and compare On the Resurrection, cap. xiii.]
124 Otto translates: "which has made us and our neighbours attain the highest degree of rectitude." The text is obscure, but the above seems the probably meaning; comp. Matt. xxii. 39, etc.
125 [Hermas, p. 47, note, and p. 57, this volume; Elucidation, ii.]
126 [The Logos never said, "it excludes us from eternal life:" that is sure; and the passage, though ambiguous, is not so interpreted in the Latin of Gesner. Jones remarks that Athenagoras never introduces a saying of our Lord in this way. Compare Clem. Alexandrin. (Paedagogue, b. iii. cap. v. p. 297, Edinburgh Series), where he quotes Matt. v. 28, with variation. Lardner (cap. xviii. sec. 20) gives a probable explanation. Jones on The Canon (vol. i. p. 436) is noteworthy. Kaye (p. 221) does not solve the puzzle.]
127 Probably from some apocryphal writing. [Come from what source it may, it suggests a caution of the utmost importance to Americans. In the newer parts of the country, the practice, here corrected, as cropped out among "brothers and sisters" of divers religious names, and consequent scandals have arisen. To all Christians comes, the apostolic appeal, "Let it not be once named among you."]
128 [This our Lord commends (Matt. xix. 12) as a voluntary act of private self-devotion.]
129 [There is perhaps a touch of the rising Phrygian influence in this passage; yet the language of St. Paul (1 Tim. v. 9) favoured this view, no doubt, in primitive opinion. See Speaker's Comm. on 1 Tim. iii. 2. Ed. Scribners, New York.]
131 [But Callistus, heretical Bishop of Rome (a.d. 218.), authorized even third marriages in the clergy. Hippolytus, vol. vi. p. 343, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Edinburgh Series.]
132 [An allusion to the fable of the Sargus; and see Burton's Anat. Mel., p. 445.]
133 [See Tatian, cap xxiii., supra, p. 75. But here the language of Gibbon is worthy to be quoted; though the icy-hearted infidel failed to understand that just such philosophers as he enjoyed these spectacles, till Christianity taught even such to profess a refined abhorrence of what the Gospel abolished, with no help from them. He says, "the first Christian emperor may claim the honour of the first edict which condemned the art and amusement of shedding human blood; but this benevolent law expressed the wishes of the prince, without reforming an inveterate abuse which degraded a civilized (?) nation below the condition of savage cannibals. Several hundred, perhaps several thousand, victims were annually slaughtered in the great cities of the empire." He tells the story of the heroic Teleachus, without eulogy; how his death, while struggling to separate the combatants abolished forever the inhuman sports and sacrifices of the amphitheatre. This happened under Honorius. Milman's Gibbon, iii. 210]
134 [Let Americans read this, and ask whether a relapse into heathenism is not threatening our civilization, in this respect. May I venture to refer to Moral Reforms (ed. 1869, Lippincotts, Philadelphia), a little book of my own, rebuking this inquity, and tracing the earliest violation of this law of Christian morals, and of nature itself, to an unhappy Bishop of Rome, rebuked by Hippolytus. See vol. vi. p. 345, Edinburgh Series of Ante-Nicene Fathers.]
135 [Comp. cap. xxxi., supra, p. 146. The science of their times lent itself to the notions of the Fathers necessarily; but neither Holy Scripture nor theology binds us to any theory of the how, in this great mystery; hence Plato and Pythagoras are only useful, as showing that even they saw nothing impossible in the resurrection of the dead. As to "the same elements," identity does not consist in the same particles of material, but in the continuity of material, by which every seed reproduces "its own body." 1 Cor. xv. 38.]
136 [It is a fair inference that The Discourse was written after the Embassy. "In it," says Kaye, "may be found nearly all the arguments which human reason has been able to advance in support of the resurrection." p. 200.]
137 [1 Tim. ii. 1, 2. Kaye, p. 154. They refused worship, however, to imperial images; and for this they suffered. "Bend your royal head" is an amusing reference to the nod of the Thunderer.]
70 1 [This argument was adapted to the times, and to those to whom it was addressed, with great rhetorical art and concealment of art. Its faults arise from the defective science of the age, and from the habits of thought and of public instruction then in fashion. He does not address himself to believers, but to sceptics, and meets them on their highest levels of speech and of reason.]
2 The common reading is "excessive."
3 [The calm sublimity of this paragraph excels all that ever came from an Athenian before. In the Phoedon we have conjectures: here is certain hope and patient submission as our resonable service.]
4 [Kaye, p. 199. Compare Embassy, cap. xxvii., supra, p. 143.]
5 [This chapter of itself establishes the fact that Christians have a right to demand the evidence for what they are required to believe. It refutes the idea that what any single bishop or saint has said or thought is doctrine, for that reason only; but it leaves the fact that concurrent testimony is evidence, on certain conditions, in all its force.]
6 [Not strong enough for the force of the original: oud' e0k tw=n tisi/ dokou0ntwn h= dedogme/nwn.]
7 [From the natural common sense of the thing.]
8 [A beautiful and cogent argument for his proposition, and a precious testimony to the innocence of babes falling asleep in Christ. See Kaye, 190.]