exercise your curiosity to better purpose in the business of salvation, run through the Apostolic Churches in which the chairs wherein the Apostles sat, are now filled; where their authentic epistles are read, which seem to convey the voices and figures of their authors. Achaia is at hand; so is Corinth. If you are not remote from Macedonia, you have before you Philippi and Thessalonica. Pass into Asia, there is Ephesus; in Italy, Rome: an authority to which we can readily appeal. Happy Church! which the great Apostles fully impregnated with all their doctrine and with their blood. Ibid. c. xxxvi. p. 338. “If the truth then be adjudged to us who embrace the rule which the Church received from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God; heretics, it is plain, cannot be allowed to appeal to the Scriptures, in which we prove they have no concern. They are not Christians; and therefore to them we may say, Who are you? When, and whence came ye? What business have you on my estate, you who are none of mine? Marcion, by what right do you cut down my wood? Or you, Valentinus, do you turn my streams? Or Apelles, do you move my boundaries? The possession is mine. What right have any others to sow and feed here as they may choose? The possession, I say, is mine; has been long mine; mine first: the title-deeds are in my hands, derived from them whose property it was. I am the heir of the Apostles. As they settled it by will, on the conditions they prescribed I hold it. You they disinherited as aliens and enemies. And why are you such, but by the diversity of the doctrine which each one of you, as he was disposed, produced or received against those Apostles? Where this diversity of doctrine is, there will the Scriptures, and the expounding of them be adulterated." Ibid. c. xxxvii. xxxviii. p. 338.
