Our author seems struggling here, according to my view, with his own rule of prescription. He would free the doctrine from the charge of novelty by pointing it out in the Scripture of a hundred and sixty years before. But how instinctively the Church ruled against this sophistry, condemning in advance that whole system of “development” which a modern Tertullian defends on grounds quite as specious, under a Montanistic subjection that makes a Priscilla of the Roman pontiff. Let me commend the reader to the remarks upon Tertullian of the “judicious Hooker,” in book ii. capp. v. 5, 6; also book iv. cap. vii. 4, 5, and elsewhere.