John Henry Newman, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Yes. In the Arian crisis the deposit was preserved by the body of the faithful when the episcopate as a body failed, and the church's practice of consulting them is a witness to that.1234
It is not a little remarkable, that, though, historically speaking, the fourth century is the age of doctors, illustrated, as it was, by the saints Athanasius, Hilary, the two Gregories, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and all of these saints bishops also, except one, nevertheless in that very day the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the…On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, pp. 75–76
First, I will quote the passage which bore a meaning which I certainly did not intend, and then I will note the phrases which seem to have given this meaning to it. It will be seen how little, when those phrases are withdrawn, the sense of the passage, as I intended it, is affected by the withdrawal.On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, pp. 113–115
The words i^sia and hypostasis were, naturally and intelligibly, for three or four centuries, practically syno- nymous, and were used indiscriminately for two ideas, which were afterwards respectively denoted by the one and the other. Appendix. 445 NOTE V.i THE ORTHODOXY OF THE BODY OF THE FAITHFUL DURING THE SUPREMACY OF ARIANISM. (Vide supra, p.The Arians of the Fourth Century
Pope Liberius might sign a Eusebian formula at Sirmium, and the mass of Bishops at Ariminum or elsewhere, and yet they might, in spite of this error, be infallible in their ex cathedra decisions. Appendix.The Arians of the Fourth Century
Written for a magazine, delated for heresy, and vindicated a century later.