B. p. 22.
“It is plain that the meaning of a mute document, if it be tied to follow the utterance of a living voice, which shall claim the supreme right of interpretation, must vary with its living expositor.”—Manning’s Rule of Faith, (1838). App. p. 85.
“But neither can it be admitted that if the justification of the reformers is to rest on such grounds as the foregoing, their reputation can owe thanks to those who would now persuade the Church to acquiesce in a disgraceful servitude, and to surrender to the organs of the secular power the solemn charge which she has received from Christ, to feed his sheep and his lambs: for the real feeder of those sheep, and those lambs, is the power that determines the doctrine with which they shall be fed. Whether that determination shall profess to be drawn straight from the depths of the mine of revealed truth, or whether it shall assume the more dangerous and seductive title of construction only; of a license of construction which disclaims the creation, the declaration, or the decision of doctrine, but which simultaneously with that disclaimer has marked out for itself a range of discretion which has already enabled it to cancel all binding power in one of the articles of the faith, and will hereafter as certainly enable it to cancel the binding power of all those which the first fell swoop has failed to touch.”—Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. p. 60.
See also Archdeacon Manning’s recent letter to the Bishop of Chichester, where the same subject is again treated in the most convincing manner, pp. 35, 37.