necessity; so easily and at so little loss might the web be cut or
brushed away.

First, let their attention be fixed on the history of Christianity as
learnt from universal tradition, and the writers of each successive
generation. Draw their minds to the fact of the progressive and
still continuing fulfilment of the assurance of a few fishermen, that
both their own religion, though of Divine origin, and the religion of
their conquerors, which included or recognised all other religious of
the known world, should be superseded by the faith in a man recently
and ignominiously executed. Then induce them to meditate on the
universals of Christian Faith--on Christianity taken as the sum of
belief common to Greek and Latin, to Romanist and Protestant. Show
them that this and only this is the ordo traditionis, quam
tradiderunt Apostoli iis quibus committebant ecclesias, and which we
should have been bound to follow, says Irenaeus, si neque Apostoli
quidem Scripturas reliquissent. This is that regula fidei, that
sacramentum symboli memoriae mandatum, of which St. Augustine says:-
noveritis hoc esse Fidei Catholicae fundamentum super quod edificium
surrexit Ecclesiae. This is the norma Catholici et Ecclesiastici
sensus, determined and explicated, but not augmented, by the Nicene
Fathers, as Waterland has irrefragably shown; a norm or model of
Faith grounded on the solemn affirmations of the Bishops collected
from all parts of the Roman Empire, that this was the essential and
unalterable Gospel received by them from their predecessors in all
the churches as the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] cui, says
Irenaeus, assentiunt multae gentes eorum qui in Christum credunt sine
charta et atramento, scriptam habentes per Spiritum in cordibus suis
salutem, et veterum traditionem diligenter custodientes. Let the
attention of such as have been shaken by the assaults of infidelity