Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

354 THE THIRD AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.It is evident that the question of penance andthat of rebaptisation touched the whole Christiansociety, arid here accordingly we find the superiorPrincipate of the Roman Church exert itself. Infact, the right decision as to both these questionsinvolved the right conception of the Church herself,her \ constitution, power, and prerogatives.The rigorism30 with which some had endeavouredto exclude certain sinners from the * faculty of re-ceiving penance, and the view which led them toconfine the validity itself of baptism to its receptionwithin the one Church, led when fully developedin the following century to the obstinateschism and heresy of the Donatists. These dan-gerous tendencies were resisted, when they firstappeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to suchresistance the application by Tertullian to the Popeof the title of " Pontifex Maximus" and " Bishopof Bishops," about the year 202, as the expressionof the power which he then claimed and exercised.Another question likewise touching the wholeChristian society, which the Roman Pontiff hadalready decided against the practice of the influentialand ancient churches of Asia Minor, / wasthe time of holding Easter. Pope Victor insistedthat the practice of the Roman Church must befollowed, which kept the day of the Crucifixioninvariably on the Friday, and that of the Resurrectionon the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of30 Hagemann, p. 77.