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He who reveals a body of awful truth to a candid and willing auditory is content with the grand simplicities of truth in the quality of his proofs. And truth, where it happens to be of a high order, is generally its own witness to all who approach it in the spirit of childlike docility. But far different is the position of that teacher who addresses an audience composed in various proportions of sceptical inquirers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers. Less than an apostle is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibilities. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn: malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the known cases of signal opposition to Christianity, could not but hurry many good men into a vindictive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is communicated polemically (this is, not as it exists in its own inner simplicity, but as it exists in external relation to error), the temptation is excessive to use those arguments which will tell at the moment upon the crowd of bystanders, by preference to those which will approve themselves ultimately to enlightened disciples. Hence it is, that, like the professional rhetoricians of Athens, not seldom the Christian fathers, when urgently pressed by an antagonist equally mendacious and ignorant, could not resist the human instinct for employing arguments such as would baffle and confound the unprincipled opponent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature Christian. If a man denied himself all specious arguments, and all artifices of dialectic subtlety, he must renounce the hopes of a present triumph; for the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual themes is too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those habituated to darkness. And hence we explain not only the many gross delusions of the fathers, their sophisms, their errors of fact and chronology, their attempts to build great truths upon fantastic etymologies, or upon popular conceits in science that have long since exploded, but also their occasional unchristian tempers. To contend with an unprincipled and malicious liar, such as Julian the Apostate, in its original sense the first deliberate miscreant, offered a dreadful snare to any man’s charity. And he must be a furious bigot who will justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory Nazianzen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian? So far as he was interested, not for a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every “raw” that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian’s duplicity is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the claims of the criminal, was not right as regarded the duties of his opponent. Even in this mischievous renegade, trampling with his orangoutang hoofs the holiest of truths, a Christian bishop ought still to have respected his sovereign, through the brief period that he was such, and to have commiserated his benighted brother, however wilfully astray, and however hatefully seeking to quench that light for other men, which, for his own misgiving heart, we could undertake to show that he never did succeed in quenching. We do not wish to enlarge upon a theme both copious and easy. But here, and everywhere, speaking of the fathers as a body, we charge them with anti-christian practices of a two-fold order: sometimes as supporting their great cause in a spirit alien to its own, retorting in a temper not less uncharitable than that of their opponents; sometimes, again, as adopting arguments that are unchristian in their ultimate grounds; resting upon errors the reputation of errors; upon superstitions the overthrow of superstitions; and drawing upon the armories of darkness for weapons that, to be durable, ought to have been of celestial temper. Alternately, in short, the fathers trespass against those affections which furnish to Christianity its moving powers, and against those truths which furnish to Christianity its guiding lights. Indeed, Milton’s memorable attempt to characterize the fathers as a body, contemptuous as it is, can hardly be challenged as overcharged.