Excerpt from Whose Are the Fathers?: Or the Teaching of Certain Anglo-Catholics, on the Church and Its Ministry, Contrary Alike to the Holy Scriptures, to the Fathers of the First Six Centuries, and to Those of the Reformed Church of England; With a Catena Patrum of the First Centuries and O The writer has always taken an interest in what relates to the maintenance and defence of Protestant and Evangelical religion, but did not, until two years ago, contemplate the authorship of such a volume as this. But that which a person may not at first design to do, he may, by a variety of circumstances, be induced to undertake. In these days of change and innovation in the Church, zealous partisans have made the best use they could of the daily press to promote ritualism and priestly power. It was in connection with an effort of this kind that the author contributed a series of letters in a local periodical; and a suggestion was made 'by the late Rev. Thomas Best and other clergymen that the general contents of those letters should be published in a more permanent form. The author readily attended to the suggestion, but in the first instance contemplated only a pamphlet or small volume. Finding, as he pursued the investigation of the Fathers with this object in view, how unsatisfactory it would be to give only a fraction of their testimony, he determined to include all the writers of the first six centuries, and quote them as fully as he might be able. 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.