Authority cannot compel belief; the sceptic who knows not what it is to grasp anything with the firm grasp of faith, may mistake his acquiescence in a doctrine for belief in it; the ignorant and careless, who believe only what their senses tell them, may lay up the words of divine truth in their memory, may repeat them loudly, and be vehement against all who question them. But minds to which faith is a necessity, which cannot be contented to stand by the side of truth, but must become altogether one with it,--minds which know full well the difference between opinion and conviction, between not questioning and believing,--they, when their own action is superseded by an authority foreign to themselves, are in a condition which they find intolerable. Told to believe what they cannot believe; told that they ought not to believe what they feel most disposed to believe; they retire altogether from the region of divine truth, as from a spot tainted with moral death, and devote themselves to other subjects: to physical science, it may be, or to political; where the inherent craving of their nature may yet be gratified, where, however insignificant the truth may be, they may yet find some truth to believe. This has been the condition of too many great men in the church of Rome; and it accounts for that bitterness of feeling with which Machiavelli, and others like him, appear to have regarded the whole subject of Christianity.
The system, then, of deferring to the authority of what is called the ancient church in the interpretation of Scripture, is impracticable, inasmuch as, with regard to the greatest part of the Scripture, the church, properly speaking, has said nothing at all; and if it were practicable, it would be untenable, because neither the old councils, nor individual writers, could give any sign that they had a divine gift of interpretation; and if such a gift had been given to them, it would have been equivalent to a new revelation, the sense of the comment being thus preferred to what we could not but believe to be the sense of the text. Above all, the system is destructive of faith, having a tendency to substitute passive acquiescence for real conviction; and therefore I should not say that the excess of it was popery, but that it had once and actually those characters of evil which we sometimes express by the term popery, but which may be better signified by the term idolatry; a reverence for that which ought not to be reverenced, leading to a want of faith in that which is really deserving of all adoration and love.
II. But it is said that the system of relying on private judgment is beset by no less evils: that it is itself inconsistent, and leads to Socinianism and Rationalism, and, in the end, to utter unbelief; so that, the choice being only between two evils, men may choose the system of church authority as being the less evil of the two. If this were so, I see not how faith could be attained at all, or what place would be left for Christian truth. But the system of the Church of England[16] is, I am persuaded, fully consistent, and has no tendency either to Socinianism or Rationalism. Let us see first what that system is.
[16] Much has been lately written to show that the Church of England allows the authority of the ancient councils and writers, and does not allow the right of private judgment. But it is perfectly clear, from the 21st Article, that it does not allow the authority of councils; that is to say, it holds that a council's exposition of doctrine may be false, and that such an exposition is of no force "unless it may be declared that it be taken out of Holy Scripture." Who, then, is to declare this? for to suppose that the declaration of the council itself is meant is absurd: the answer, I imagine, would be, according to the mind of the Reformers, "Every particular or national church," and especially the King as the head of the church. They would not have allowed private judgment, because they conceived that a private person had nothing to do but to obey the government; and it was for the government to determine what the truth of Scripture was. The Church of England, then, expressly disclaims the authority of councils, and, in its official instruments, it neither allows nor condemns private judgment; but the opinions of the Reformers, and the constitution of the church in the 16th century, were certainly against private judgment: their authority for the interpretation of Scripture was undoubtedly the supreme government of the church, i.e. not the bishops, but the King and parliament. But then this had respect not to the power of discerning truth, but to the right of publishing it, which is an wholly different question. That an individual was not bound in foro conscientiæ to admit the truth of any interpretation of Scripture which did not approve itself to his own mind, was no less the judgment of the Church of England than that if he publicly disputed the interpretation of the church, he might be punished as unruly and a despiser of government. But then it should ever be remembered that the church, with the Reformers, was not the clergy. And now that the right of publication is conceded by the church, it is quite just to say that the Church of England allows private judgment; and if that judgment differ from her own, she condemns not the act of judging at all, but the having come to a false conclusion.
It is urged that the act of I Elizabeth, c. 1, allows that to be heresy which the first four councils determined to be so. This is true; but it also adjudges to be heresy whatever shall be hereafter declared to be so by "the high court of parliament, with the assent of the clergy in their convocation." The Church of England undoubtedly allowed the decisions of the first four councils, in matters of doctrine, to be valid, as it allowed the three creeds, because it decided that they were agreeable to Scripture; but the binding authority was that of the English Parliament, not of the councils of Nicæa or Constantinople.
As to the canon of 1571, which allows preachers to teach nothing as religious truth but what is agreeable to the Scriptures, "and which the catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from that very doctrine of Scripture," it will be observed that it is merely negative, and does not sanction the teaching of the "catholic fathers and ancient bishops," generally, or say that men shall teach what they taught; but that they shall not teach as matter of religious faith, a new deduction from Scripture of their own making, but such truths as had been actually deduced from Scripture before, namely, the great articles of the Christian faith. Farther, the canons of 1571 are of no authority, not having received the royal assent.--See Strype's Life of Parker, p. 322, ed. 1711.
It is invidiously described as maintaining "the sufficiency of private judgment." Now we maintain the sufficiency of private judgment in interpreting the Scriptures in no other sense than that in which every sane man maintains its sufficiency, in interpreting Thucydides or Aristotle; we mean, that, instead of deferring always to some one interpreter, as an idle boy follows implicitly the Latin version of his Greek lesson, the true method is to consult all[17] accessible authorities, and to avail ourselves of the assistance of all. And we contend, that, by this process, as we discover, for the most part, the true meaning of Thucydides and Aristotle with undoubted certainty, so we may also discover, not, indeed, in every particular part or passage, but generally, the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures with no less certainty.
[17] Of course no reasonable man can doubt the importance of studying the early Christian writers, as illustrating not only the history of their own times, but the New Testament also. For the Old Testament, indeed, they do little or nothing, and for the New they are of much less assistance than might have been expected; but still there is no doubt that they are often useful.
But if another man maintains that a different meaning is the true one, how are we to silence him, and how are we justified in calling him a heretic? If by the term heretic we are to imply moral guilt, I am not justified in applying it to any Christian, unless his doctrines are positively sinful, or there is something wicked, either in the way of dishonesty or bitterness, in his manner of maintaining them. The guilt of any given religious error, in any particular case, belongs only to the judgment of Him who reads the heart. But if we mean by heresy "a grave error in matters of the Christian faith, overthrowing or corrupting some fundamental article of it," then we are as fully justified in calling a gross misinterpretation of Scripture "heresy," as we should be justified in calling a gross misinterpretation of a profane Greek or Latin author, ignorance, or want of scholarship. There is no infallible authority in points of grammar and criticism, yet men do speak confidently, notwithstanding, as to learning and ignorance; Porson and Herman are known to have understood their business, and a writer who were to set their decisions at defiance, and to indulge in mere extravagances of interpretation, would be set down as one who knew nothing about the matter. So we judge daily in all points of literature and science; nay, we in the same manner venture to call some persons mad, and on the strength of our conviction we deprive them of their property, and shut them up in a madhouse: yet if madmen wore to insist that they were sane, and that we were mad, I know not to what infallible authority we could appeal; and, after all, what are we to do with those who deny that authority to be infallible? we must then go to another infallible authority to guarantee the infallibility of the first, and this process will run on for ever.
But, in truth, there is more in the matter than the being justified or not justified in calling our neighbour a heretic. The real point of anxiety, I imagine, with many good and thinking men is this: whether a reasonable belief can be fairly carried through; whether the notion of the all-sufficiency of Scripture is not liable to objections no less than the system of church-authority; whether, in short, our Christian faith can be consistently maintained without a mortal leap at some part or other of the process; nay, whether, in fact, if it were otherwise, our faith would not seem to stand rather on the wisdom of man than on the power of God.
I use these words, because these and other such passages of the Scripture are often quoted as I have now quoted them, and produce a great effect on those who do not observe that they are quoted inapplicably; for the question is not between man's wisdom and God's power, but simply whether we have reason to believe that God's power has been here manifested; or, rather, to see whether we cannot give a reason for the faith which is in us, such faith resting upon God's power and wisdom as manifested in Christ Jesus; for if no reason can be rendered for our faith, then our minds, so far as they are concerned, are believing a lie; they are believing in spite of those laws by which God has determined their nature and condition.
Yet, however we believe, blindly or reasonably, (for some men, by God's mercy, are accidentally, as it were, in possession of the truth, the falsehood of their own minds in holding it not being, it is to be hoped, imputed to them as a sin;) however we believe, I never mean to say that our faith is not God's gift, to be sought for and retained by constant prayer and watchfulness, and to be forfeited by carelessness or sin. That is no true faith in which reason does not accord; yet neither can reason alone and without God ever become perfected into faith. For although intellectually, the grounds of belief may be made out satisfactorily, yet we are not able to follow our pure reason by ourselves; and no work on the evidences of Christianity can by itself give us faith; and much less can amid the manifold conflicts of life maintain it. That faith is thus the gift of God, and not our own work, I would desire to feel as keenly and continually, as with the fullest conviction I acknowledge it.