then first experiences this great moral change, it is a new birth; but if the child of ten regains a regenerate state which he had lost, again enters the path of peace from which he had departed, then some other word must describe the change. The result in both cases may be life, spiritual life; but in the former case the change is initial, original, while in the latter it is a reinstatement.

IV. Our Lord's assigned reason for the new birth conflicts with the doctrine of Infant Regeneration. The response of Nicodemus, in the fourth verse, evidently contemplates a return to infancy, with all that pertains to that period of helplessness and innocence. Can a man return to that state? This is obviously impossible, and the assertion of our Lord seemed to throw discredit on his teaching. Now, according to this doctrine, the answer was not merely irrelevant, but untrue. What is that answer? Substantially this. "True, Nicodemus, this is impossible. But if it were otherwise it would be of no avail; for the birth of which I speak is from above, spiritual, while that of which you speak is natural, according to the flesh. Now that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and flesh only, and consequently a return to human infancy could produce no moral change, could bring no spiritual life." Nicodemus was silenced though not satisfied. But if he had been a reader of the Methodist Quarterly Review in the year of grace 1859, he need not have been silenced so soon. He might have rejoined: "But, Rabbi, while I admit that natural and spiritual life do not flow from the same fountain, yet is it not true that they do meet in our humanity at its very origin? When natural life is transmitted from father to son, is not the spirit of God there, in pursuance of the provisions of the atonement, to repair the injury done to our nature by the first transgression,' and infuse spiritual life into that nature, so that every one born of the flesh is born of the Spirit also? And is not this spiritual life perpetuated unconditionally and in full force during the period of infancy, and will it not infallibly lift our humanity to heaven, unless forfeited in maturer life? Why, then would not a return to infancy, if that were possible, secure the very object contemplated?" Indeed, if the doctrine in question be true, our Lord could not have assigned as a reason for the new birth any lack connected with natural birth; for

whatever nature might lack grace supplied. Of course that lack could furnish no possible reason why Nicodemus or any one else "must be born again." Backsliding, the loss of the grace of infancy, might furnish such reason, but nothing dating back into that infancy. And it would seem, that, while in the first instance Nicodemus was misled through his own inexcusable ignorance of spiritual things, in the second instance he was misled intentionally, and by language that must of necessity convey a false impression. And, what is, if possible, still more remarkable, while the mistake was promptly corrected, and Nicodemus was taught that not a natural but spiritual birth was intended, the falsehood was left to mislead him and all that should come after him, to induce the belief that natural generation is not uniformly accompanied by spiritual regeneration that to be "born of the flesh" does not necessarily involve being "born of the Spirit."

V. Our Lord's declarations substantially affirm, that some never are born again, and consequently never enter the kingdom of God. This point, if established, is of course fatal to the theory under examination. An attempt is made to avoid its force, by explaining the words of Christ as referring not so much to an event, in the new birth, as to a state, the regenerate state. The absurdity of this mode of explanation has been already exposed in part, but we wish to give it more special prominence. The natural and obvious meaning of the language, the meaning which it would convey to every one who has not a theory to care for, evidently is, that the new birth of which our Lord speaks is an event, an event dated and located as distinctly as natural birth, and forming as marked an epoch in one's history; that it is the initial change in which spiritual life originates, and that, to Nicodemus and others in like moral condition, it was an event yet future. It is true, language may sometimes be forced by its connections out of its natural and obvious meaning, but it so happens that this language is forced into that meaning. We are compelled to understand the Saviour as speaking of an' actual occurrence, a change, of which a regenerate state and holy life are consequents; for, if that regenerate state were congenital, then, as already seen, a return to that state would secure it. But there can be no necessity for forcing an unnatural meaning upon

these weighty words of our Lord, unless the necessities of an erroneous theory require it. No, he means just what he says. Nicodemus, and all others in the same moral condition, "must be born again," not because they have fallen and lost their infant regeneration, but because they were never born of the Spirit, but only of the flesh.

VI. Finally, admitting the doctrine in question, nothing could be more shockingly absurd than our Lord's solemn asseveration, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." For according to that doctrine, every man is born again long before this declaration can reach his understanding.

The question now comes back, What is the moral condition of infants? And so far as the objects of the present discussion are concerned, this question may be answered in very few words. It is precisely the same as that of adult sinners, with one single exception. In the infant, depravity is incipient, germinal; in the adult, it is in progress of development. In their legal condition, however, there is an immeasurable difference.

N. B.-It is due to the author of the above article to say that it was written previous to the appearance of Dr. Hibbard's late work on "The Religion of Childhood."-ED.

ART. III.—LEO THE GREAT AND THE PAPACY IN THE FIFTH AND SIXTH CENTURIES.*

THE Roman bishop, it is well known, claims to unite in his person the fourfold dignity of bishop in his own diocese, metropolitan or archbishop in his province, patriarch of the West

*I. SOURCES: ST. LEO MAGNUS: Opera omnia, (sermones et epistolæ,) ed. Paschas. Quesnel, Par., 1675, 2 vols. 4to., (Gallican, and defending Hilary against Leo, hence condemned by the Roman Index;) and ed. Petr. et Hieron., Ballerini, (two very learned brothers, and presbyters, who wrote at the request of Pope Benedict XIV.) Venet. 1753-1757, 3 vols. fol. (Vol. i, contains ninety-six sermons and one hundred and seventy-three epistles, the other two volumes doubtful writings and learned dissertations.) This edition is reprinted in Migne's Patrologia Cursus completus, vol. liv-lvii, Par., 1846.

II. WORKS: ACTA SANCTORUM, sub Apr. 11, (Apr., tome ii, pp. 14-30, brief and unsatisfactory.) TILLEMONT: Mem., tome xv, pp. 414-832, (very full.) BUTLER:

or of the Latin Church, and pope of the universal Church, East and West, Greek and Latin. He claims to be the successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles, and the visible representative of Christ, who is the invisible head of the Christian world. This is the strict and exclusive sense of the title Pope.*

Properly speaking, this claim has never been fully realized, and remains to this day an apple of discord in the history of the Church. Greek Christendom has never acknowledged it, and Latin only under manifold protests, which at last conquered in the Reformation, and deprived the papacy forever of the best part of its domain. The fundamental fallacy of the Roman system is, that it identifies papacy and Church, and therefore, to be consistent, must unchurch not only Protestantism, but also the entire Oriental Church from its origin down. By the "una sancta catholica apostolica ecclesia of the Nicæno-Constantinopolitan creed is to be understood the whole body of Catholic Christians, of which the ecclesia Romana, like the Churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, is only one of the most prominent branches. The idea of the papacy, and its claims to the universal dominion of the Church, were distinctly put forward, it is true, so early as the fifth century, but could not make themselves Lives of the Saints, sub Apr. 11. W. A. ARENDT (R. C. :) Leo der Grosse u. seine Zeit, Mainz, 1835, (Catholic Apologetic.) EDW. PERTHEL: P. Leo's I. Leben u. Lehren, Jena, 1843, (Protestant.) FR. BōHRINGER: Die Kirche Christi u. ihre Zeugen, Zurich, 1846, vol. i, div. 4, pp. 170-309. PH. JAFFE: Regesta Pontif. Rom., Berol., 1851, p. 34 sqq. Comp. also GREENWOOD: Cathedra Petri, Lond. 1859, vol. i, book ii, chap. iv-vi. (The Leonine Period;) and H. H. MILMAN: History of Latin Christianity, London and New York, 1860, vol. i, book ii, chap. iv.

*The name papa-according to some an abbreviation of pater patrum, but more probably, like the kindred abbas, πúññas, or ñúñas; pa-pa, simply an imitation of the first prattling of children, thus equivalent to father-was in the West for a long time the honorary title of every bishop, as a spiritual father; but after the fifth century it became the special distinction of the patriarchs, and still later was assigned exclusively to the Roman bishop, and to him, in an eminent sense, as father of the whole Church. Comp. Du Cange, Glossar. s. verb. papa and pater patrum; and Hoffmann, Lexic. univers. iv, p. 561. In the same exclusive sense the Italian and Spanish papa, the French pape, the English pope, and the German Papst or Pabst, are used. In the Greek and Russian Churches, on the contrary, all priests are called popes-(from τáñas, papa.) The titles apostolicus, vicarius Christi, summus pontifex, sedes apostolica, were for a considerable time given to various bishops and their sees, but subsequently claimed exclusively by the bishops of Rome.

good beyond the limits of the West. Consequently the papacy, as a historical fact, or so far as it has been acknowledged, is properly nothing more than the Latin patriarchate run to absolute monarchy.

By its advocates the papacy is based not merely upon Church usage, like the metropolitan and patriarchal power, but upon divine right; upon the peculiar position which Christ assigned to Peter in the well-known words, "Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my Church.”* This passage was at all times taken as an immovable exegetical rock for the papacy. The popes themselves appealed to it, times without number, as the great proof of the divine institution of a visible and infallible central authority in the Church. According to this view the primacy is before the apostolate, the head before the body, instead of the reverse.

But, in the first place, this pre-eminence of Peter did not in the least affect the independence of the other apostles. Paul especially, according to the clear testimony of his epistles and the book of Acts, stood entirely upon his own authority, and even on one occasion, at Antioch, took strong ground against Peter. Then, again, the personal position of Peter by no means yields the primacy to the Roman bishop without the twofold evidence, first that Peter was actually in Rome, and then that he transferred his prerogatives to the bishop of that city. The former fact rests upon a universal tradition of the early Church, which at that time no one doubted, but is in part weakened and neutralized by the absence of any clear Scripture evidence, and by the much more certain fact, given in the New Testament itself, that Paul labored in Rome, and that in no position of inferiority or subordination to any higher authority than that of Christ himself. The second assumption of the transfer of the primacy to the Roman bishops is susceptible of neither historical nor. exegetical demonstration, and is merely an inference from the principle that the successor

* Matthew xvi, 18: Σὺ εἶ Πέτρος, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρα [mark the change of the gender from the masculine to the feminine, from the person to the thing or the truth confessed-a change which disappears in the English and German versions] οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, καὶ πύλαι ᾅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς. Comp. the commentators, especially Meyer, Lange, Alford, Wordsworth, ad loc., and Schaff's History of the Apostolic Church, §§ 90, 94, (New York edition, p. 350 sqq., and 374 sqq.)