That the Protestants who separated from the church should have been able to accept Scripture as binding upon them, is not strange; although to a philosophical mind at the present day, the Protestant theory must present insurmountable difficulties. When men break off from a system in which they were born and bred, they cannot, if they would, make of their minds a tabula rasa, freed from all prejudices and associations, ready to receive whatever can be proved purely a priori. To attempt this would be to attempt to move the world without a fulcrum. The question, What can be proved a priori? is one which requires the course of many generations only for its statement; as for its solution, that may be said to have proved itself impossible. Men are obliged, when they change their opinions in some respects, to allow their conduct to be influenced by those opinions which they do not change; and in some cases it happens that it is impossible, upon any a priori ground whatever, to draw the line between what they keep and what they reject. So it was at the foundation of Protestantism; and the effects of the modern "universal solvent" are due to what we have just stated, that, taking what a priori ground you will, there is none which will support the Protestant without landing him at last in contradiction or absurdity. Thus, men in the sixteenth century could easily accept theories of Scripture interpretation which are now found to be untenable; and the result is fatal to those who are so deeply committed to the untenable theories that the loss of them involves the loss of their whole intellectual groundwork.
For the Protestants cannot, as the Catholic can, point to the striking fact of a general agreement extending over many centuries. We know that the Protestant critics profess to pick holes in the Catholic claim to general agreement; but what a beggarly appearance these attempts present when they are contrasted with the whole extent of the subject! What is the value of the few specks they point out in the vast current of ecclesiastical history? They find so little to say, that what they say is proved to be the exception and not the rule. But if we turn to their own case, what a difference do we find! There we have no question of pointing out flaws here and there; it is all one mass of flaws. Protestants may attack the claim of the church; but they themselves are not able so much as to put forward a claim. Nor do they venture to claim unity; some even avow their preference for diversity. Yet in practice we find them all acting as though each thought himself infallible.
This is the result of a very common human weakness. Just as the founders of Protestantism could quietly acquiesce in many things which they had imbibed from the Catholic world in which they were educated, so their successors quietly acquiesce in what comes to them from their fathers; and in both cases there is much which cannot be systematically exhibited without contradiction. But very few men care to set about the systematic exhibition of all that they profess to believe or to act upon. If it were otherwise, the Protestant theories of Scripture would never have been set up; and they are now falling before the exertions of men who insist upon having a clear view of what they are called upon to believe. When the reformers made their appeal to Scripture, it was impossible for men of different tempers, habits, and associations to agree upon matters of interpretation, even if the appeal had been made in good faith. As it was, the appeal was made subject to certain foregone conclusions, none of which, perhaps, could have been deduced from the mere text by any scientific process of exegesis. Servetus could not find the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Bible; and though he was little if at all to blame, according to Protestant principles, Calvin thought this failure worthy of death. Luther found in the Epistle of St. James much more than he wanted, and therefore he ejected it from the canon. Thus the appearance of an appeal to a common standard is an appearance only. It has been found to cover the widest variations both of doctrine and ritual. The only result of professing to be bound by the Bible is, that the text is wrested to mean any thing. No single system of exegesis, strictly applied throughout and deprived of all external suggestion or comment, will elicit a consistent whole from the declarations of Scripture. All sects can produce some texts in their favor, and all find some texts which they are obliged to explain away. Inquirers are supposed to bring to the task of examination a previous reservation in favor of the doctrines of their peculiar sect. If they do not, they are denounced as traitors and unbelievers, in spite of the ostentatious demand for a free inquiry. When Mr. Jowett proposed to use for the elucidation of Scripture those aids and methods which scholars have applied with great success to the profane classics, he was met with something more than outcry; he was actually persecuted. Yet his persecutors, who kept his salary as professor of Greek down to forty pounds per annum when the other similar professorships were raised in value to four hundred pounds, had nothing to offer by way of reason against his proposal. They stooped to effect their object by using the blind prejudices of country clergymen.
While the name of Scripture has always commanded respect, and in this way a sort of pretended unity has seemed to bind together the sects of Protestantism, every generation has seen less and less ground for establishing any thing like real visible communion. Scripture is useless to this end, because every party insists that it has Scripture on its side. Since Luther and Melancthon conferred at Marburg with Œcolampadius and Zwingli, the futility of conferences has been growing more and more manifest. But so soon as men despair of establishing union by convincing their opponents, they are driven, if they desire union, to propose compromise as the basis upon which to found it; and in religious matters, compromise means the surrender of faith to expediency. Many attempts have been made to induce the sects to coalesce by declaring only that to be obligatory in dogma which is common to all, leaving every thing else in the region of pious opinion; but a very natural and even laudable party obstinacy has always brought these attempts to nothing. The only persons who can approach such compromises with a safe conscience are latitudinarians, whose fundamental principle is the denial that any dogma is of necessity to salvation; and to the latitudinarian this privilege is useless, because his overtures are superfluous if made to latitudinarians, while they are sure to be rejected by the dogmatists. Yet it is hard for the dogmatic Protestant to justify the religious scruple which makes him unwilling to treat with the latitudinarian; for he is cut off from the appeal to the "faith once delivered to the saints," and forced to take up his position on ground which can equally well be claimed by his opponents. The scruples of either side are called prejudices by the other; and neither can rebut the accusation upon solid grounds of reason. A position like this is unstable; and though habit will enable a given set of men to hold their ground firmly against mere argument, yet argument does tell in the long run, and an unreasonable position cannot with security be handed on to the next generation. For the next generation is not born under the same circumstances as the former; and so it often happens that the habit which swayed the fathers is not formed in the children. Bit by bit the ill-established creed rots away, as the "universal solvent" is brought to bear upon the whole; and thus successive generations of Protestants are apt to be pushed nearer and nearer to latitudinarianism, sometimes without any notice being taken of the change. At length, perhaps, we see matters culminate in some portentous vagary, like that society which now exists, or existed not long since in London, which proposes to unite upon the basis of assenting to nothing at all.
The connection between faith and reason, and the influence which intellectual processes may lawfully exercise upon religious belief, are questions of profound difficulty. But without attempting to draw the line exactly between what is right and what is wrong, it may be possible to assert with confidence of particular cases that they lie on this or that side of the line. We would not rashly encourage persons who have been brought up in any dogmatic system, however ill-grounded or erroneous we may think their belief, to set about mocking their hereditary faith upon the strength of a shallow scepticism; still less would we employ ridicule against errors which cannot be ridiculed without shocking deep convictions; because we think that the cause of truth, in the long run, loses more than it gains by such means. But the logical weakness of the Protestant position is made apparent by the fact that it always does give way before reason. England has passed through many phases, and one of these was a phase of rationalism, that is, of appealing to reason only as the ultimate ground of religious belief. During that period the popular religion sank into a vague deism, together with a practical code of moral decency. Yet, during that time—the eighteenth century—the Church of England was peculiarly rich in men whom she esteemed great divines; but theology is excluded from the pages of these theologians. We find little beyond exhortations to the practice of virtue, grounded upon appeals to good feeling and the hope of reward; and what ought to be the dogmatic side of their teaching is occupied with proofs of the reasonableness of Christianity, or with statements of the evidences of Christianity—a Christianity which, in the popular mind, had lost all hold upon the divinity of Christ. Here, then, the old Protestant dogmatic position had gone down before reason; and its fall is the more notable because reason was not polemically directed against it. The men who had renounced the dogmatic position were the champions of the church, nor had they the least suspicion that they had surrendered every thing to the other side except an empty title. Circumstances had forced them to take their stand upon reason; and dogma was quietly and instinctively dropped out of sight, simply because it could not be defended by them in their position upon that ground. We shall see presently how close, at this time, was the resemblance between the orthodox and the deist.
But in the change of circumstances, which is the result of the course of time, there is something to compensate for this sinking and loosening of the dogmatic foundations of the Protestants. Something is gained in the greater ease with which later generations can shut their eyes to the presence of certain troublesome facts; and this is what Catholics mean when they speak of the children of schismatics as being less responsible than their fathers for the schism in which they find themselves. While the old Protestants were quite ready to take the Bible upon trust, they felt the force of certain texts which do not at all trouble their successors. No modern evangelical or Presbyterian feels any qualm of suspicion when he reads the words, "This is my body," nor does he trouble himself to seek out a plausible explanation. Macaulay said that "the absurdity of a literal interpretation was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now." But, at all events, there is this great difference between the two centuries: that in the sixteenth, men felt bound to give some meaning to the text, while now, in the nineteenth, they feel able to pass it over without giving to it any meaning at all. Œcolampadius and Zwingli were at the head of the two principal sections of the sacramentarian party, who denied all real presence, and reduced the eucharist to a mere commemorative rite. There stood the text, and they felt bound to explain it somehow, so that it might agree with their opinions. They assigned the same general meaning to the whole, but they could not agree on the question whether "is" or "body" must be interpreted by a kind of metonymy, that is, saying one thing and meaning another. The subject is not a fit one for laughter; but it is hard to read without laughing that Andrew Carlstadt thought our Lord pointed to his natural body, when he uttered the words of the text. Men must be sore pressed before they will execute such wrigglings as these; and there are many signs of the existence of similar pressures at that day, from which modern Protestants are more or less relieved. Thus, Calvin was obliged for the sake of consistency to declare that Scripture shines by its own light; while the moderns can act as if it did without being obliged to say so. Again, when Archbishop Heath and his fellow-sufferers protested against their deprivation by Queen Elizabeth, she felt bound to make some attempt to argue from the fathers against the supremacy of the pope, though she could have found no pleasure in the task, because she had so little to say for herself. Now, when a modern Protestant uses arguments of this sort, it is only to satisfy his own private whims or scruples; but Elizabeth was peremptorily called upon to defend herself against adverse public opinion.
Nothing seems simpler to a modern Protestant than that a man should take his stand on "the Bible, and the Bible only;" nothing seems more strange to any one who has considered the various ultimate grounds and hypotheses upon which religious belief may be supposed to rest. It is not necessary to be always obtruding the question of ultimate grounds upon men's notice, because it is not required that all who believe shall be able to produce an accurate statement of the true ultimate grounds of their belief. But such grounds must be supposed to exist, and to be capable of accurate statement; and the statement of them is, at any rate, fatal to the Protestant position. We have seen how dogmatic theology disappeared from the popular mind under the rationalism of the eighteenth century. And at the time of the French revolution, it was found that when men deserted the church, they did not take their stand upon the Bible, but on atheism; and that when they ceased to be atheists, they became Catholics again, not Protestants; nor has Protestantism ever made any large number of converts, except in the sixteenth century. This was a sore puzzle to Macaulay, as he himself declares; but it is easily explained on the principles we have laid down. In the sixteenth century, men had no thought of inquiring about ultimate grounds of belief; they were determined to believe something, and they looked about for any proximate ground which was near at hand and plausible in appearance. At the end of the eighteenth century, the question of ultimate grounds had occurred to many, and they had answered that there were ultimately no grounds for believing any religion at all. When they changed this opinion, and determined to have a religious belief, they did not take up the Protestant position, because it was exploded; and the proof that it was exploded lies in the fact that they did not take it up. They could no longer play the part of arbitrary eclectics, selecting what they chose and rejecting what they chose from the Catholic system. They could not follow the example of Calvin, who first stopped short where he did, and then helped to burn[166] Servetus for going a few steps further. The French revolutionists were without any of those convenient traditional drags which hamper movement, and enable men to stop short at arbitrary points. They ruthlessly carried out their principles into the wildest and most ferocious excesses, things for which no logical consistency will compensate; but they did carry them out. Therefore they were in some sense incapacitated for becoming Protestants, because they had once known what it was to carry out principles, and there is no set of principles whatever, which, if vigorously carried out, will land a man in Protestantism.
Men who found their belief upon the Bible alone, have first to determine the canon, then to settle the text, and lastly to interpret it. They have three questions to answer: 1. How is it known that the Bible is, as a whole, the word of God? 2. How is it known that the text is free from material corruption? 3. When men differ about its meaning, as they notoriously do, who is to decide between them? Until a reply is found to these questions, their position is open to attacks which cannot justly be stigmatized as the result of a shallow scepticism; and the best proof of this is the fact that it always goes down before reason. One or two men of learning and ability may be found to abide by the ancient ways; but they are deserted by the great majority of their fellows, and therefore they are the exception and not the rule. Who can pretend to doubt in what direction the whole of the learning and ability among the undergraduates of Oxford has been moving of late years? With hardly an exception, all the most promising among the young men have been moving away from those stand-points which Dr. Pusey finds necessary to his position as a Protestant; and if there be any exception to this general movement, he only marks the motion of the stream by standing still himself. This is because our three questions remain unanswered, while those who attempt to find such an answer as shall be acceptable to a rational mind, are denounced and persecuted. Yet these so-called liberals have a right to demand to be heard, and to be allowed to make out what they can by fair argument; nor has Dr. Pusey any right to be shocked when they find things in Scripture which he does not, except upon grounds which, if he would rigorously carry them out, would make him a Catholic. In his present position, we cannot guess how he would attempt to answer Charlotte Elizabeth, that great departed light of the extreme evangelicals. An acquaintance once suggested a doubt about the inspiration of the book of Revelation in these words: "You are a person of too much sense to believe that the binding up of certain leaves between the covers of the Bible makes them a part of it." This, in fact, raised the question how the canon is to be determined; and Charlotte Elizabeth was staggered for a moment, as she herself tells us. But the battle was turned by the following reply, which she piously believed to be dictated by God: "If you can persuade me that the book of Revelation is not inspired, another person may do the same with regard to the book of Genesis; and so of all that lie between them, till the whole Bible is taken from me. That will never do," etc. Having thus determined the canon, she promptly provides the interpreter. "Man can tell me no more than that God has clearly revealed" the Calvinistic doctrine of election and reprobation; "therefore, man cannot strengthen a belief founded on the sure word of God; or if he tells me it is not revealed, I know that it is; because I have found it so, and relinquish it I never can." (Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth, third edition, p. 134. The other passage quoted is at p. 130.) Charlotte Elizabeth, upon the strength of this, deals out the most uncompromising damnation to those who have found that it is not. And Dr. Pusey's estimable friend, Mr. Burgon, is equally ferocious toward those who doubt whether every syllable, point, jot, tittle, and full stop in the Bible is the express act of God. It would be impossible, we suppose, to convert the wood-and-leather man of Martinus Scriblerus, even though he "should reason as well as most of your country parsons."
Political circumstances have given such peculiar interest to the career of the Church of England that it deserves to be placed in a class by itself, apart from the other schismatical bodies which sprang up at the Reformation. Amid the storms of theological controversy she has always found a dubious sheet-anchor in the state, which secured to her a certain stability of political position, while it allowed her to drift through many widely different doctrinal phases. The tameness with which she veered about at the bidding of successive sovereigns, and the ease with which great changes were effected in her constitution, show that, in puritan phrase, her heart was not in the work. Historians are equally astonished at the power of the crown and the pusillanimity of the people. And there is ground for astonishment, though the facts are often described in terms of exaggeration. We are not to suppose that the passing of an act of parliament, or the "devising" of an ordinal by Cranmer, made a change in religion which was instantly felt through all corners of the kingdom. Multitudes had very vague notions of what was going on, and the only people who were thoroughly well informed, the courtiers, had their eyes fixed on church lands, not on theology. In some parts of the country, as in Lancashire, the change was little felt, and the Catholic religion remains there to this day a common heirloom. But in the mass of the people we quite miss that delicate spiritual sense, so keenly alive to the slightest variation from the faith, which gives such interest to the struggles of the church with the early heretics. When all has been said in their favor, it cannot be denied that the English have always shown themselves somewhat supine and spiritually sluggish. It is only the "right to tax themselves" which appeals to their energies with force enough to stir up a rebellion. The Scots took their religion into their own hands; but the English were contented to be led like sheep by Cecil and Parker.
The fundamental profession of faith of the Church of England, the Thirty-nine Articles, labors under this disadvantage, that it has never secured to the Established Church any closer union or more uniform dogmatic tradition than has been secured to Protestants in general by their common possession of the Bible. Very significant are those words in the King's Declaration prefixed to the articles, in which his majesty finds so much comfort from the fact that nobody refuses to sign the articles, in spite of "some differences which have been ill raised;" and that, when they differ, "men of all sorts take the articles of the Church of England to be for them." What is the value of a formula which has been found compatible with the primacy both of Whitgift and of Sancroft? Only once did the spirit of the nation question the right of "men of all sorts" to "take the articles to be for them;" and that was when Dr. Newman took them to contain the Catholic faith. But this was due to the national hatred of popery, not to the stringency of the articles. Their weak blast has never blown either hot or cold. They look like the offspring of a union between inconsiderate haste and the latitudinarian hankering after conversions made by compromise. They limit their confidence like the sagacious Bottom. "Masters, I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am no true Athenian."