The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-04-19 00:00:00

hot one that would. even get. at the truth at all. Ido not
see how any man, unless he devoted the entire of a life, and
what can we who are so busy in the active pursuits of life do ?
—get at the nonillions interpretation of all the fathers. He
must go through and all over a multitude of volumes, digest
and collate them, then compare and condense the whole, and
then draw forth their responses thus collated, and thus con-
densed, and thus drawn out. If a man is not to find the
pearl of great price, or to know the way to happiness till he
has obtained it by going through all the fathers, it would be
melancholy indeed. Thank God, He may go not to the
fathers but to the grandfathers. (Applause.) Thank God
we can go not to Father Augustine, or Chrysostom, or
Jerome, but to Father Paul, and Peter, and John. (Cheers.)
Yes, my friends, we do not call them father, for we call no
man father spiritually but one, who is God ; he is our father
and our Lord, and we leave the Church of Rome to call any
man her father; therefore, papa the Pope, and the Popes,
and the brands of Anti-Christ upon earth. We do not, there-
fore, speak even of the apostles as fathers ; nor do we speak
of the early fathers in any other sense than simply as words
conventionally used, for we hold no one father but the ever.:
lasting father, the Lord upon high, who is the father of us
all. But with regard to the fathers themselves, I have read
to you already (having quoted it somewhat 'earlier than I in-
tended) the opinion of a Roman Catholic bishop with regard
to the testimony of the early fathers. He admits, that until
a very late period, in the church the doctrine of purgatory
was wholly unknown. I find it is clearly made out by seve-
ral of our distinguished controversialists, especially Mr.
Faber and the present Bishop of Exeter, that nearly at the
close of the third century there is not the slightest intimation
or whisper in any one of the fathers .3-
state of penalty and sufferin:'
rection for those who depart in the are upon
the contrary a multitude of passages in their writings that
most distinctly and flatly contradict any such notions. But
I shall hold myself excused, and I dare say you will, from at
all entering into the views of the fathers upon this subject,
because if all the fathers from Ignatius down to Origen, yea,
down to the last father tbrowrote were, with one unanimous
voice to give testimonspurgatory, it would not weigh
against one single part of si sentence of the word of God more
than a feather against the world. I know of no comparison
by which I could fairly shadow forth the extent of difference
between the testimony of poor fallible worms and the deci-
sive voice of the spirit of the living God; therefore I would
not allow, in my own mind, all the testimony of all the
fathers to weigh ought unless that testimony were endorsed
and authenticated by the word of God. As witnesses to
facts, as credible historians we respect and revere the fathers, but as propounders of doctrine, as adding ought to revela-
tion,
as sublimating as it were the records of God's word by
their own' MIR-'

ut an intermediate
.lath and the resur-
1. There

_
them, and we say—
nd the Apostles and