Some Account Of The Penitential Discipline Of The Early Church In The First Four Centuries PDF Download

Excerpt from Some Account of the Penitential Discipline of the Early Church, in the First Four Centuries In the following pages I have endeavoured to sketch briefly the institution and development of the penitentiary discipline of the Christian Church. The subject, so far as I have been able to discover, has not received treatment since Marshall wrote his work, "The Penitential Discipline of the Primitive Church" (1714), except in encyclopaedias. All the material was brought together and arranged in the sixteenth century by Morinus, whose work must always be the standard book of reference on the subject. But the arrangement is not chronological, and he deals with it under certain headings rather than as a historical growth. My object has been to trace it from the earliest times till the year 400, allowing the Fathers to tell their own story, so far as is possible. I have been obliged to deal more cursorily than they deserve with Tertullian and Cyprian, for fear of prolonging the work unduly. I have taken for granted the knowledge of the chief events in the period, which any Church History will give: if I have a preference it is for the work of Dr. Foakes-Jackson, though all the works that I have discovered are eminently readable, and each has some merit of its own. If I have made unduly prolix extracts from patristic sources it is because they are to me of such intense interest that I cannot bring myself to condense them. I have had in my mind not so much the professed theological student, who has Migne at his elbow, as the more amateur student, acquainted with the brief outline of the courts of early Church history, and glad to have one aspect of it brought before him so far as possible in the words of those who made the history. I have been glad to avail myself of Lightfoot's "Apostolic Fathers," and of the translations of patristic works edited by Pusey, Robertson and Donaldson, Wace and Schaff, though I have not always followed them verbatim. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."