Of any
other intercessor or advocate, angel, saint, or Virgin Mother; of any
other being to whom the invocations of the faithful should be offered,
Clement seems to have had no knowledge. Could this have been so, if
those who received the Gospel from the very fountain-head had been
accustomed to pray to those holy men who had finished their course on
earth, and were gone to their reward in heaven? Clement invites us to
contemplate Enoch, and Abraham, and David, and Elijah, and Job, with
many of their brethren in faith and holiness; he bids us look to them
with reverence and gratitude, but it is only to imitate their good
examples. He tells us to think of St. Paul and St. Peter and their
brethren in faith and holiness; but it is in order to listen to their
godly admonitions, and to follow them in all pious obedience to the will
of our heavenly Father, as they followed Christ. I must content myself
with a very few brief extracts from this Epistle[28]:
[Footnote 28: I am induced to mention here that two Epistles,
ascribed to St. Clement, written in Arabic, and now appended to
Wetstein's Greek Testament (Amsterdam, 1751), are believed by
many to be genuine, whilst others say they are spurious. At all
events they are productions of the earliest times. The
manuscript was procured at Constantinople. I have examined the
Latin translation carefully, and in some points submitted my
doubts to a very learned Syriac scholar.
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