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and Pope, for the very reason that it was a rival authority, not resisting merely, but supplanting it. In proportion, then, as we find, in matter of fact, that the inspired volume is not adapted or intended to subserve that purpose, are we forced to revert to that living and present Guide, which, at the era of her defection, had been so long recognised as the dispenser of Scripture, according to times and circumstances, and the arbiter of all true doctrine and holy practice to her children. We feel a need, and she alone of all things under heaven supplies it. We are told that God has spoken. Where? In a book? We have tried it, and it disappoints; it disappoints us, that most holy and blessed gift, not from any fault of its own, but because it is used for a purpose for which it was not given. The Ethiopian's reply, when S. Philip asked him if he understood what he was reading, is the voice of nature:-"How can I, unless some man shall guide me?" The Church undertakes that office; she does what none else can do, and this is the secret of her power. "The human mind," it

has been said, "wishes to be rid of doubt in religion; and a teacher who claims infallibility is readily believed on his simple word. We see this constantly exemplified in the case of individual pretenders amongst ourselves. In Romanism, the Church pretends it; she rids herself of competitors by forestalling them. And probably, in the eyes of her children, this is not the least persuasive argument for her infallibility, that she alone of all Churches dares claim it, as if a secret instinct and involuntary misgivings restrained those rival communions which go so far towards affecting it." These sentences, whatever may be the errors of their wording, surely express a great truth. The most obvious answer, then, to the question, "Why we yield to the authority of the Church in the questions and developments of faith," is, that some authority there must be if there is a revelation given, and other authority there is none but she. A revelation is not given if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.'-(P. 87.)

Now it must be observed that this argument is conducted by an illicit process in two directions. First, it confuses the function of the Church as a witness with a supposed function of evolving infallibly new articles of faith. Next, in other parts of the argument, the author finds himself constrained to allow the same infallibility as the Church' to the Pope (see chap. ii. sect. 2, p. 87 note). The interchange of these two notions is very like a case of 'undistributed middle.'

The Church is a witness of the Faith; and a trustworthy one. But the notions of trustworthiness and infallibility are distinct. A witness may be correct upon a particular matter of fact. It does not therefore follow that he is infallible upon all matters. So the Church of the second or of the third century is, it will be universally allowed, a competent witness as to the Tradition received from the Apostles in those ages. The Church of the tenth or of the nineteenth century is not less a competent witness upon that point. It

is made so by the continuity of its teaching, which has been put on record in a thousand ways, in every one of the intervening centuries, and is discoverable by the exercise of ordinary diligence and learning by such as are qualified for their work. Thus, then, the fact of a continuous existence and teaching renders the Church of any age a competent and trustworthy witness as to the question-What was the Gospel preached in the first ages of Christianity?—without thereby claiming any infallible authority at all.

In the second place, granting that an infallibility does, juxta modum, and in a certain very real sense, inhere in the Church, it does not apparently admit, in the nature of things of being transferred to the Pope, or even of being exercised by him, notwithstanding the decree of the Vatican Council. This will, we think, appear if we consider the nature of the Church's infallibility.

We need hardly say that there is no express record in the Scriptures of the bestowal of the specific gift of doctrinal infallibility upon the Church by its Founder. But a promise was given of immunity from complete and mortal error, and that promise seems to carry with it a guarantee of doctrinal guidance and protection from falling as a whole into heresy, which is all that the notion of infallibility appears necessarily to imply, though it is popularly taken to mean a good deal more. Thus, the two notions are exactly commensurate.

The Church is infallible in so much as it is indefectible. That is to say, the whole Church cannot entirely and finally fall from the faith: 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' It is thus secure from complete denial of the faith. But this indefectibility of the whole does not apply to the parts severally and separately considered; each of which may conceivably err. Thus we must explain the nineteenth and twenty-first Articles. Bishop Pearson, indeed, taking the converse order, from the parts to the whole, argues that 'if all particulars be defectible, the universal Church must also be subject of itself unto the same defectibility' (On the Creed. Art. The Holy Catholic Church,' chap. i. § 16). And logically enough as far as his premisses went; but he takes care to render the conclusion harmless, by the cautela that they shall not perish all at once! The Universal Church is therefore indefectible, and if so, in a sense infallible. But it appears from the premisses that this infallibility cannot be predicated with certainty of any particular branch of the Church, at any time. It would appear, in consequence, that no single branch of the Church can exercise or transfer it.

Thus it is not a power of speaking at all times correctly and accurately on theology, though this is the meaning popularly attached to it. In other words, it is not a privilege, which may be exercised by a person; but it is a property inhering in an institution:-the property, i.e. of essential inerrancy, which inheres in the whole institution, and must not be predicated of its parts. The whole Church cannot, even if it would, divest itself of its property of inerrancy any more than snow could transfer its property of whiteness.

It would seem, therefore, to follow, that as, though there is a promise of indefectibility given to the whole Church, there is no such promise to any particular branch, so, though there is a general superintending Providence over the mind of the Church, guiding it eventually into the right channels and to an orthodox conclusion, yet that no particular Church is thereby guaranteed from error upon any point of doctrine during the process of its formation. There was a time during the Arian controversy, when well-nigh the whole Church found itself committed by its representatives to the heterodox formula of Rimini, and shuddered, as S. Jerome declared, to find itself Arian.1

Following out this line of thought, it may be laid down broadly as a working hypothesis, that the facts of sacred history being given in the historical Scriptures, and the great lines of inference sketched out unmistakably in the later treatises of the Canon, i.e. the Epistles of S. Paul; the human intellect, under the ordinary guidance of the Divine Spirit, becomes adequate to draw out the logical consequences and correlatives of those primary truths with practical correctness. It cannot, indeed, be called an infallible instrument; it makes mistakes. But the view we are endeavouring to expound is that, in the providence of God, these aberrations compensate each other; and that the travail of the mind of Christendom upon the great problems of the Christian Faith arrives at the truth in the end.

If one age or one set of thinkers develope the Christian scheme in a one-sided way, another age or another set of thinkers corrects that tendency. The pendulum swings for a time, too far first to one side and then too far on the other, but it reaches a state of rest at length. The same thing may be said of the human mind at all events in its employment upon theological subjects. Its stages may be defined as

1

'Ingemuit totus orbis et Arianum se esse miratus est.—(Dial. adv. Lucif.) See also Hefele : History of the Councils, ii. p. 271.

being usually three. It conceives a subject vaguely at first; expresses it in figurative, popular, and approximate forms of words. Then by time and reflection the matter becomes clarified to the eye of the mind, and is drawn to a single issue or group of issues, generally contrasted more or less sharply. Between these it oscillates for a time, and ends by coming to rest between the two, or, if it chooses one of the alternatives, it is taken generally with a negative veto upon certain of the inferences deduced from it. Thus the mind of the Church may seem to have oscillated for a moment between the teaching of Arius and that of Athanasius. Each claimed to be an explicit development from the previous implicit belief. The question was, which was the legitimate development? And this was soon seen to be a most momentous question; for though, at their starting-point, the two were so nearly alike that a single Greek letter covered the difference in the expression of them,' yet it was soon seen that their consequences diverged so widely, as to constitute not one religion, but two. In like manner the Christian consciousness has at one period gravitated towards holding the truth of the Divine predestination, as a complete statement of the cause of human action; at another it has leant towards an unqualified statement of the free will of man as similarly complete. The eventual conclusion into which it is settling is doubtless a tertium quid or combination of the two. Dr. Mozley says thoughtfully:

'Upon this abstract idea, then, of the Divine Power, as an unlimited power, rose up the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and grace; while upon the abstract idea of free will, as an unlimited faculty, rose up the Pelagian theory. Had men perceived, indeed, more clearly and really than they have done, their ignorance as human creatures, and the relation in which the human reason stands to the great truths involved in this question, they might have saved themselves the trouble of this whole controversy. They would have seen that this question cannot be determined absolutely one way or another; that it lies between two great contradictory truths, neither of which can be set aside or made to give way to the other-two opposing tendencies of thought inherent in the human mind, which go on side by side, and are able to be held and maintained together, although thus opposite to each other, because they are only incipient, and not final

The historian Gibbon says, according to his wont: 'The Greek word which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoeusians and the Homoiousians.'—(Decline and Fall, chap. xxi. p. 339.)

and complete truths-the great truths, I mean, of the Divine Power on the one side, and man's free will, or his originality as an agent, on the other. And this is, in fact, the mode in which the question is settled by the practical common sense of mankind.

They imply that the doctrine of predestination and the doctrine of free will are both true, and that one who would hold the truth must hold both.'Treatise on Predestination, chap. xi.

And we shall find hereafter how this law is constantly exemplified in the history of the successive controversies which have arisen in the Church respecting doctrine. But though controversy has been a constant incident of religious history, and thus in a certain sense the gradual modification of opinion was going on more or less rapidly at all times, yet it will be found that, as a matter of fact, any appreciable exercise of this evolving power is limited to particular times by latent but powerful causes, which work silently beneath the surface of opinion. In one age or century the efforts of thinkers are irresistibly directed to clear and systematise their conceptions; in another they rest content with the results already reached. The former, as we have said, will be the symbolising, creedmaking age; the latter will make few or no additions to its stock of formulised religious truths.

It seems to us, if we look across the centuries which separate us from the Christian era, that there are two periods in which this spirit of symbolising was decidedly in the ascendant; and that there were only two.

The former, and vastly more important, extended throughout the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D.; the latter embraced the great religious upheaval of the sixteenth and the earlier part of the seventeenth century.

We do not mean to say that activity about creeds is to be found at no time except during these two periods, or that the systematising faculty was entirely quiescent during the intervals. There were continual controversies on subordinate points of doctrine, even when the great questions of polemics had for the time been laid to rest. Some of the great theologians of later history-notably S. Jerome lived their whole lives enveloped in a whirlwind of controversies. One great dispute the Adoptionist-lies entirely outside both the periods we have named. A similar remark may be made upon the Iconoclast dispute, which, however, had but an indirect

1 It was, however, a survival from the controversies respecting the nature of the Divine Son, of which almost every point had been settled by the time of the Council of Chalcedon.

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