LITERATURE. SERIES II
LATIN TEXTS
THE TREATISE
OF NOVATIAN
ON THE TRINITY
By
HERBERT MOORE M. A.
SOCIETY FOR. PROMOTING
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. London
The Macmillan Company. New York.
1919
It is hard to believe that the author of the treatise On the Trinity was simply an ambitious schemer, who adopted a popular theory to secure his own advancement. We may give him credit for having acted from the same zeal for the good of the Church and the glory of God which had led him previously to use his great abilities as a writer to explain the Catholic faith, his devotion to which was perfectly sincere. Religious speculations, some wild and fanciful, others deeply philosophical, were abroad in abundance, springing mostly from Greek or Eastern thinkers. Without the Church, some of these teachers tried to incorporate Christian elements into their systems ; while within, men who professed the faith had allowed these speculations to draw them from the faith as the Church understood it, into forms of opinion which the Church called heresy. Tertullian, in Africa, had written various treatises to purge the faith from these erroneous ideas, and to explain what it really is ; Novatian decided to do the same at Rome. He is the first great Roman writer; great, not only in his powers of thought, but in the cultured style, based upon his study of the best Latin authors, which he was able to devote to the expression of it.