the word “as God,” implying that they would offer a secondary worship to a saint.  Again, whereas Eusebius in contrasting the worship paid to Christ, with the feelings of the Christians towards a martyr, employs only the word “love,” Bellarmin, following Ruffinus, interpolates the word “veneramur” after “diligimus,” a word which may be innocently used with reference to the holy saints and servants of God, though it is often in ancient writers employed to mean the religious worship of man to God.  Still how lamentable is it to attempt by such tampering with ancient documents to maintain a cause, whatever be our feelings with regard to it!

With two more brief quotations we will close our report of Eusebius.  They occur in the third chapter of the third book of his Demonstratio Evangelica, and give the same view of the feelings and sentiments of the primitive Christians towards the holy angels, which we have found Origen and all the other fathers to have acknowledged.

“In the doctrine of his word we have learned that there exists, after the most high God, certain powers, {176} in their nature incorporeal and intellectual, rational and purely virtuous, who ([Greek:  choreuousas]) keep their station around the sovereign King,—­the greater part of whom, by certain dispensations of salvation, are sent at the will of the Father even as far as to men; whom, indeed, we have been taught to know and to honour, according to the measure of their dignity, rendering to God alone, the sovereign King, the honour of worship.” ([Greek:  gnorizein kai timain kata to metron taes axias edidachthaemen, mono toi pambasilei Theoi taen sebasmion timaen aponemontes]) Again:  “Knowing the divine, the serving and ministering powers of the sovereign God, and honouring them to the extent of propriety; but confessing God alone, and Him alone worshipping.” ([Greek:  theias men dynameis hypaeretikas tou pambasileos Theou kai leitourgikas eidotes, kai kata to prosaekon timontes monon de Theon homologountes, kai monon ekeinon sebontes]) [Demonst.  Evang.  Paris, 1628. p. 106.; Praepar.  Evang. lib. vii. c. 15. p. 237.]

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SECTION X.—­APOSTOLICAL CANONS AND CONSTITUTIONS.

The works known by the name of the Apostolical Constitutions and Apostolical Canons, though confessedly not the genuine productions of the Apostles, or of their age, have been always held in much veneration by the Church of Rome.  The most learned writers fix their date at a period not more remote than the beginning of the fourth century. (See Cotelerius; vol. i. p. 194 and 424.  Beveridge, in the same vol. p. 427.  Conc.  Gen. Florence, 1759, tom. i. p. 29 and 254.) I invite the reader {177} to examine both these documents, but especially the Constitutions, and to decide whether they do not contain strong and convincing evidence, that the invocation of saints was not practised or