“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” [22d]
“I will pray the Father; and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth.” [22e]
“For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.” [22f]
“These things write I unto thee; that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” [22g]
Our endeavours to extract out of these texts infallibility for the Romish Church are as much in vain as in the preceding inquiry for supporting the Papal claims. A general council seems to have as little warrant from Holy Scripture to assure us that it is infallible, as the Roman Pontiff himself. The first quotation refers to the perpetual continuance of the Christian society. Christ assures us that, to the end of time, the gates of hell shall not prevail against his Universal Church; or, in other words, that a community called by his name, and retaining the essentials of Christianity, will never cease to be. But this consolatory promise gives us no security that any one particular Church, or any meeting of Church officers, shall be infallible. On this subject we cannot forbear transcribing the judicious comment of a learned Romanist, Tostatus of Avila, who flourished in the fifteenth century: “The universal or Catholic Church never errs, because it never errs in all its branches. The Church of Rome (ecclesia latinorum) is not the Catholic Church, but only a certain branch of it; and, therefore, although the whole of that branch should have erred, the whole Church could not be said to err. Because the genuine Catholic Church remains in the unerring branches, whether they be more or fewer than the branches which err.” [23]
Again, the injunction of our Lord to “tell the Church,” if taken apart from, and not in connexion with the preceding context, might seem to have some distant bearing upon this question. But on examining the whole passage, we perceive that our Saviour makes allusion to secular, not to spiritual concerns; and is speaking only of private differences among his followers. “If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.” Three successive steps are next recommended for effecting an accommodation: first a private interview; then the influence of mutual friends; and lastly, the authority of the Church to which the parties belong. The contumacious wrong-doer who could not by these methods be brought to reason, was no longer to be regarded as a Christian brother, but as a heathen. He was liable to excommunication, or expulsion from the society; and reparation of the injury committed might now be sought for in a court of law. We do not find in these directions the remotest allusion to infallibility.
The encouraging promise; “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” is not a grant of infallibility, but a promise of assistance, protection, and consolation; and was indispensably required, when our Lord delegated to his Apostles the perilous labour of propagating the Gospel in opposition to all the rulers of this world, sending them forth “as sheep among wolves.” [24a]
His promise that the “Spirit of truth” should “guide them into all truth,” relates entirely to the extraordinary gifts with which they were endowed, and is immediately connected with another promise, confessedly peculiar to the Apostolic age. “He” (the Holy Ghost) “shall show you things to come.”
The words, “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us,” in the decree of the first council at Jerusalem, have left no precedent for other councils to use the same language; unless on separate evidence it can be shown that those councils have the same authority of inspiration.
The position therefore, that general councils, as representing the Church of Christ, are infallible, labours under a total want of Scripture Evidence. There is not a single precept given for assembling them; not one solitary rule for determining their proceedings. As the learned Albert Pighius, an advocate of pontifical infallibility, very justly argues: “There is not a word about general councils in the canonical books of Scripture; nor did the primitive Church of Christ receive by Apostolical institution any special direction respecting them.” [24b] This able writer represents the practice of summoning a general council in cases of ecclesiastical emergency, to be an expedient piously introduced by the Emperor Constantine for the purpose of composing the dissensions of the Church. But the same author insinuates a charge of great ignorance against the Emperor and his council, who in adopting this course, appeared not to know that the privilege of infallibility belonged to the Papal chair, and that Rome was the proper Delphos where he might receive the infallible oracles. This imperial ignorance is a remarkable admission by the advocate of the Papacy in his zeal against general councils. He succeeds in demolishing the latter; but acknowledges at the same time a fact which is fatal to the former. For if Constantine and the Bishops of his court were ignorant of the papal pretensions, it must be obvious that such pretensions either could not have been put forth at all, or could not at that time have been generally recognized.