that the charge of teaching, delivered to the Apostles, descended to all their successors, he adds: “By an hereditary right we are all engaged; we who, in their place, announce the Lord through the different regions of the earth. Observe that we received a general command, which we must all execute,-and, by a joint concurrence, uphold what was delivered, and maintained, by apostolical succession to our days." Ibid. p.614.
VINCENT OF LERINS, L. C. Having laid down the principle, which is the principle of the Proposition, that Councils frame no new articles of belief, but explain only and define what anciently was received, he proceeds to verify his doctrine by what was done at Ephesus, where the Synod had been assembled about three years before he compiled his Treatise,“Nor have I ceased to wonder, how great was the humility and piety of those Prelates, who, though so numerous, and by their learning qualified to discuss points of doctrine, and even confidently to advance opinions, yet presumed not; arrogated nothing to themselves: but, with the greatest caution, were careful to deliver nothing to their Successors that themselves had not received. Thus not only was the business before them well conducted, but to posterity was an example given, that the Faith of sacred antiquity must be reverenced, and the inventions of novelty be rejected.” Common. 11. c. 31. p. 367.
St. LEO, L. C. The Christian world had not reposed from this controversy, when Eutyches, the abbot of a numerous convent in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, in his zeal to oppose Nestorianism, fell into the opposite error; maintaining, that as in Christ there was one person, so was there but one nature. When a drop of water, he said, falls into the ocean, it is lost; so is the human absorbed in
