This and the preceding pages are scarcely honest. For Jeremy Taylor begins with admitting that the Creed might have been composed by others. He has no proof of that most absurd fable of the twelve Apostles clubbing to make it; yet here all he says assumes its inspiration as a certain fact.
Ib.
p. 454.
But for the present there is no insecurity in ending there where the Apostles ended, in building where they built, in resting where they left us, unless the same infallibility which they had had still continued, which I think I shall hereafter make evident it did not.
What a tangle of contradictions Taylor thrusts himself into by the attempt to support a true system, a full third of which he was afraid to mention, and another third was by the same fear induced to deny — at least to take for granted the contrary: for example, the absolute plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Apostles and Evangelists; and yet that their whole function, as far as the consciences of their followers were concerned, was to repeat the two or three sentences, that
Jesus was Christ
(so says one of the Evangelists),
the Christ of God
(so says another),
the Christ the Son of the living God