[Footnote 15:  Cod.  Theodos. lib. i. tit. iv.  The edict is issued in the name of the emperors Theodosius (the younger) and Valentinian (the younger), in the year A.D. 426.]

In fact, it would greatly help to clear this question if we understand what we mean by allowing, or denying, the authority of the so-called fathers.  The term authority is ambiguous, and according to the sense in which I use it, I should either acknowledge it or deny it.—­The writers of the first four, or of the first seven centuries, have an authority, just as the scholiasts and ancient commentators have:  some of them, and in some points, are of weight singly; the agreement of many of thorn has much weight; the agreement of almost all of them would have great weight.  In this sense, I acknowledge their authority; and it would be against all sound principles of criticism to deny it.  But if, by authority, is meant a decisive authority, a judgment which may not be questioned, then the claim of authority in such a case, for any man, or set of men, is either a folly or a revelation.  Such an authority is not human, but divine:  if any man pretends to possess it, let him show God’s clear warrant for his pretension, or he must be regarded as a deceiver or a madman.

But it may be said, that an authority not to be questioned was conferred, by the Roman law, on the opinions of a certain number of great lawyers:  if a judge believed that their interpretation of the law was erroneous, he yet was not at liberty to follow his own private judgment in departing from it.  Why may not the same thing be allowed in the church? and why may not the interpretations of Cyprian, or Athanasius, or Augustine, or Chrysostom, be as decisive, with respect to the true sense of the Scripture, as those of Gaius, Paulus, Modestinus, Ulpian, and Papinian, were acknowledged to be with respect to the sense of the Roman law?

The answer is, that the emperor’s edict could absolve the judge from following his own convictions about the sense of the law, because it gave to the authorized interpretation the force of law.  The text, as the judge interpreted it, was a law repealed; the comment of the great lawyers was now the law in its room.  As a mere literary composition, he might interpret it rightly, and Gaius, or Papinian, might be wrong; but if his interpretation was ever so right grammatically or critically, yet, legally it was nothing to the purpose;—­Gaius’s interpretation had superseded it, and was not the law which he was bound to obey.  But, in the church, the only point to be aimed at is the discovery of the true meaning of the text of the divine law:  no human power can invest the comment with equal authority.  The emperor said, and might say to his judges, “You need not consider what was the meaning of the decemvirs, when they wrote the twelve tables, or, of Aquillius, when he drew up the Aquillian law.  The law for you is not what the decemvirs may have meant, but