an instance of that careful weighing of individual cases which lays the basis of permanent enactments. An Actor, who had left the profligate and corrupting stage1 as a matter of course in obedience to Christian principles, felt no scruple in imparting his skill of voice and gesture to heathen youths or slaves. He had no power to enfranchise, or withdraw them from their profession, why hesitate to improve and elevate, perhaps chasten their performance? Similar casuistries every day impede practical morality, and the Africa of the third century was rife with them. With the touch of truth Cyprian exposes the man who was ready to form others to take the place from which he had escaped conscience-stricken; suggests his maintenance, if he really has no other means of living, by the church; and offers him, if Thenæ is too poor, food and clothing at Carthage.

The difficulty Eucratius had felt in dealing with the case lay in the absence of any rule excluding from the church elocutionists or others who only trained actors. A genuine fragment belonging to the second half of the third century' supplied the omission. 'If one has the mania of theatrical 'shows, or if he has been a declaimer in the theatres, let 'him cease or let him be cast out. If he teach the young "(in theatrical shows) it is good that he should cease. If 'he does not make a trade of it, let him be forgiven.' In A.D. 305 or 306 the Synod of Elvira enacts the rule requiring a converted performer to renounce his profession before

Epp. 29.) His successors appear in Councils up to A.D. 641. See Appendix on Cities.

1 Cf. Bingham (1855), vol. IV. p. 85. 2 Bunsen, Hippolytus (1852), vol. II. p. 314; it is later than Cyprian's letter, if not based upon it.

3 From the Alexandrian form of the Apostolic Constitutions which is still extant in the Abyssinian text and Arabic translation therefrom, as well as in the Coptic and Syriac; and which

forms the groundwork of that separate collection which now appears as the Eighth Book of our Greek text. Bunsen (op. cit.). Apost. Constt. viii. c. 32 TŵV ἐπὶ σκηνῆς ἐάν τις προσίῃ ἀνὴρ ἢ γυνή... ἢ παυσάσθωσαν ἢ ἀποβαλλέσθωσαν.

4 Conc. Eliberitan, can. 62. Pantomimus synonymous under the Emperors with histrio. L. C. Purser ap. Smith, Dict. of Greek and Rom. Antiquities, s.v. (ed. 1891).

reception into the church, and to be excluded upon any attempt to resume it.

In the 'fourth' letter he appears with Cæcilius, the senior bishop of the province, and other bishops and presbyters, taking strong measures for the suppression of a shocking fanaticism which allowed a supposed purely spiritual union between certain junior clerics and professed virgins'. In immediate connection with this subject appeared his treatise 'OF THE DRESS OF VIRGINS.'

In these letters the authority of the Bishop of Carthage is invoked or exercised beyond his own diocese, and wears already something of a metropolitic aspect.

One more exemplification of the system and appliances of discipline may be mentioned as belonging to this interval, in the investigation before the bishop and assessors of certain charges of cruelty to a father and a wife' which impended over an eminent presbyter, Novatus, the future schismatarch. To this we shall return hereafter.

When the persecution was past, Cyprian's calm judgment of his previous experiences was that 'long Peace had cor'rupted a divinely delivered discipline; that Faith had been 'taking her ease and half asleep".

Of Clerics not to be Tutores.

We are bound to take some of these subjects in detail, not only because of their intrinsic interest and importance, but because they afford us the first opportunity of weighing the objections which have been advanced by a clever writer against the genuineness of the Cyprianic letters. Mr Shepherd repudiates the authenticity of the First Letter and of the canon on which it is based.

Against these documents Mr Shepherd argues, that since the Carthaginian councils of A.D. 348 and A.D. 419, in forbidding the exercise of secular offices by the clergy, did not reënact this canon it must have been unknown to them. He states also that 'the office

1 The ovvelo aktoL, V. P. 54. Ep. 4.

Ep. 51. 2.

De Laps. 5.

'Letters on the genuineness of the

writings ascribed to Cyprian,' by the Rev. E. J. Shepherd.

Second letter, p. 25.

' of Tutor was one which a clerk, if he had no legal exemption, was 'compelled to serve.' That again the ministers of Cyprian's and still later times did engage in business (a practice allowed by the fourth council of A.D. 398), and 'were therefore very far from being 'always engaged in serving the altar and sacrifices, and employed in 'prayers and supplications.' That, although the evils which flowed from clerics taking the office of 'Tutor' were so many that Justinian prohibited it, yet they were 'at first' (in Mr S.'s opinion) proper persons to undertake such a charge, and actually did so (since the 17th canon of the 4th council of Carthage orders that, not the bishop himself but, his archpresbyter or archdeacon should take charge of widows and orphans). It is besides 'exceedingly pre'posterous' to imagine that the bishops of Cyprian's age, whom he censures for secularity, should have passed 'any law against secular pursuits,' when meantime even Cyprian himself was 'the victim of such an appointment from his own spiritual father Cæcilius,' 'to say 'nothing,' he adds in a note, 'of the wife who was also entrusted 'to him; and I suspect that a young African widow, probably not 'much out of her teens, would have been quite as serious a charge 'as the children.'

It is necessary to quote this passage, not because it is flippant, but because it evinces that the critic has not possessed himself of the most accessible information1. In the whole argument I do not detect one correct statement. It is well known that the power of a Tutor or Curator had 'respect to the property and pecuniary interests, not the persons of the pupilli' or wards. He was a trustee. His business was 'the preservation of property? during minority'; to guard against the minor's being defrauded: debts could not be recovered, nor were engagements valid, if incurred by a minor without his sanction. He was also bound to improve the property. The office of Tutor subsisted up to the ward's fourteenth year; that of Curator between the fourteenth and the twenty-fifth, at which he came of age.

There is no reason to suppose that Cyprian was Tutor or Curator of the property of his friend's family. Pontius describes a deathbed scene (accersitione jam proxima) in which Cæcilius commended them (commendavit) personally to his convert's affection (pietatis). It was improbable that Cyprian should have been named Tutor in the will, for by blood he was not related to Cæcilius, and the usage was so invariable by which the nearest relations and next heirs were appointed Tutors, that it was a special slur if any of

1 E.g. Mr G. Long's article Dict. Gk. and Rom. Ant.

2 The res and the pecunia. He was

called upon 'negotia gerere' and 'auctoritatem interponere.'

them were passed over1. Incidentally, we observe that in this very letter Geminius Victor nominates a relative Geminius Faustinus.

Thus much for the legal criticism. Into the possibility of secular-minded men passing an anti-secular statute I need not enter; because the letter speaks of the rule having been made before the age of Cyprian, and being now enforced by him against a secularity which had grown up, as he says elsewhere2, during the long security.

We must now look into the argument from the canons. Granted that at this time the clergy could not live on their allowances, and long afterwards eked their living out by handicraft, by farming, or by literary occupation3. But the point of canon after canon is this:— That they were not to administer the property of other people. The distinction escaped Mr Shepherd. They are not to be agents or stewards, nor farm-bailiffs, nor accountants", nor contractors, factors, or managers, in short, not 'implicati obnoxii alienis negotiis' at all. The reason is not only obvious, but indicated. The opening for peculation, or at least for suspicion, caused the church to be ill spoken of, if they accepted such offices. The grounds for the prohibition of these agencies applied tenfold more to Tutorship of minors with property. The Tutor in Persius sighs for the decease of the ward. And while the church as a corporation undertook from the first not only the tutela, but the maintenance of destitute orphans and widows, and appointed her proper officers, Deacons (and after a time Archdeacons), to care for them, it became only the more important that her clergy should not enter into private relations of the kind.

Now the Council of A.D. 348, which Mr Shepherd alleges as the earliest forbidding secular employment to the clergy, supplies evidence worth attention that there did exist an earlier rule forbidding clergy to exercise tutela pupillorum. In that Council (c. 6) the bishops settle that the clergy are not to become agents or factors. They do not exclude them from the office of tutors. One bishop then enquires whether persons already engaged as agents, factors, or tutors, ought to be admitted to orders. The Council allows it (c. 8) 'if they have first wound up and exhibited their accounts, and had them approved.' These two canons are only intelligible

non

1 Te sororis filius...notavit, quum in magno numero tutorem liberis instituit. Cic. pro Sest. 52.

De laps. 5...disciplinam pax longa corruperat.'

IV. Conc. Carth. A. D. 398, cann. 51, 52, 53 'artificium, artificiolum, agricultura, literæ.'

41. Conc. Carth. A.D. 348, can. 8.

5 Ibid. can. 9.

6 III. Conc. Carth. A.D. 397? can. 15. 7 Pers. Sat. ii. 12 ...pupillumve utinam quem proximus hæres Impello expungam': the next of kin being tutor by the XII. Tables, unless the will had nominated someone else.

if we assume the reality of that earlier canon mentioned by Cyprian. Unless it existed previously, the Council would have left matters in this incomplete position, that tutors could only become clerics by resigning office, but that clerics might freely become tutors. Assume however that clerics were already forbidden to become tutors, and we see why they are not forbidden in canon 6. Again, clerics being already incapable of becoming tutors, and others being now also excluded, the question naturally arises, which is settled in canon 8, 'Is it impossible for a tutor, and persons holding such posts, to become clerics?' The omission in the Sixth and the inclusion in the Eighth canon are both simply explained.

Certain offices were how

Lastly, there is a mistake even in the assertion that a Tutor was obliged to serve unless he had a legal exemption. Those tutors (called legitimi) who were appointed by magistrates when people died intestate were so compelled. But a tutor appointed by a will could 'abdicate,' or renounce. ever considered by the law as exemptions, and the African bishops of the third century desired to make the clerical office such an exemption by internal regulations, since the government could not sanction it, until in the reign of Justinian, the canon was adopted into the imperial legislation. The sole penalty then lay at this time against the testator, and none was possible except the omission of his name from the intercessions for the departed. No steps could be taken against the cleric tutor, who might know nothing of his appointment until the will was read, and who certainly could not assign to his heathen neighbours, as a ground for renunciation, that he was a Christian presbyter.

Perhaps none of Mr Shepherd's 'criticisms' had more force in shaking confidence in Cyprian's letters than his attack on this one. Yet the objections are merely legal and historical misconceptions. The circumstances of the letter are, as we have shewn, perfectly consistent with the rather intricate conditions of the time; the early existence of the disputed canon is demonstrated by the wording of the later ones, and the authenticity of the story illustrated by the very names.

And here, lastly, we must add the consistency with which we find a member of the same family of Geminii speaking as bishop of the same town of Furni (Sentt. Epp. 59) several years later in the Council of A.D. 256. It is not impossible that it may have been Geminius Faustinus himself, and that he too may be the Bishop Geminius (Ep. 67) who signed the synodic letter in A.D. 254