Priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people: That you may declare his virtues, who hath called you out of darkness into his admirable light.”
FATHERS.
So diffuse are all the early Fathers on this article of the Sanctity of the Church of Christ, in its doctrine, its moral precepts, and in the lives of many of the faithful, that to offer any extracts, on a point so generally established, must be thought a useless labour. And while here they are unanimous in praise, they are equally, at the same time, unanimous in condemning, not the opinions only, but the lives and conduct of those who departed from the Unity of belief. To many it may, perhaps, seem hardly credible, that the heretics of those days should have been so strangely perverse and wicked, as they are represented to have been. The horror, at all events, which their defection from the plain evidences of the Christian Establishment, excited, even in the minds of the warmest charities, is too faithfully described, not to have been real and universal. St. Irenæus relates, that Polycarp, the disciple of St. John, had been heard to repeat, that, on a certain occasion, when the Apostle, at Ephesus, had gone to the baths, and discovered Cerinthus, the heretic, there, he started back, and withdrew, saying: “Let us fly, for the enemy of truth is there, and the roof may fall upon us.” The same Polycarp, meeting Marcion, was accosted by him thus : “Dost thou know us?”—“ Know thee !" replied the Saint; “Yes, I know thee, the first-born of Satan.”“So careful,” adds Irenæus,“ were the Apostles
