Along with the above-mentioned consider the local historians, who
have searched with laborious curiosity into the transactions of
some one particular nation. These men, wishing by all means to
enrich and adorn the Sparta which they had gotten for their own,
and to that effect not passing over in silence even such things
as banquets of unusual splendour, or sleeved tunics, or hilts of
daggers, or gilt spurs, and other such minutiae having any smack
of revelry about them, surely, if they had heard of any change in
religion, or any falling off from the standard of early ages,
would have related it, many of them; or, if not many, at least
several; if not several, some one anyhow. Not one, well-disposed
or ill-disposed towards us, has related anything of the sort, or
even dropped the slightest hint of the same.
For example. Our adversaries grant us,--they cannot do
otherwise,--that the Roman Church was at one time holy,
Catholic, Apostolic, at the time when it deserved these
eulogiums from St. Paul: _Your faith is spoken of in the whole
world. Without ceasing I make a commemoration of you. I know
that when I come to you, I shall come in the abundance of the
blessing of Christ.
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