The Catholic World, Vol. 13, April to September, 1871

by Various

There might be some plausibility in the pretended appeal from the church to the Bible, if the church had not the Bible, or if she avowedly rejected its divine authority; but as the case stands, such an appeal is irregular, illegal, and absurd. The church has and always has had the Bible ever since it was written. It was, as we have seen, originally deposited with her, and it is only from her that those outside of her communion have obtained it or their knowledge of it. She has always held and taught it to be the divinely inspired and authoritative written word of God, which none of her children are allowed to deny or question. There is no opposition possible between her teaching and the Bible, for the Bible is included in her teaching, and consequently no appeal from her teaching to the Bible. It would be only an appeal from herself to herself. The only appeal conceivable in the case is from her understanding of the sacred Scriptures or the revealed word of God to—your own; but as you at best have confessedly no authority to expound, interpret, or declare the law, your understanding of the written word can in no case override or set aside hers.

The Reformers, when they pretended to appeal from the church to the Bible, mistook the question and proceeded on a false assumption. There never was any question between the church and the Bible; the only question there was or could be was between her understanding of the Bible and theirs, or, as we have said, between the Bible as expounded by the church and the Bible as expounded by private individuals. This the Reformers did not or would not see, and this their followers do not or will not see to this day. Now, count the authority of the church for as little as possible, her understanding cannot be below that of private individuals, and the understanding of private individuals can never override it, or be a sufficient reason for setting it aside. The Reformers had recognized the church as the supreme authority in matters of faith, and the question was not on admitting her authority as something hitherto unrecognized, but on rejecting an authority they had hitherto acknowledged as divine. They could not legally reject it except on a higher authority, or by the judgment of a superior court. But there was no superior court, no higher authority, and they could oppose to her not the authority of the Bible, as they pretended, but at best only their private opinion or views of what it teaches, which in no case could count for more than her judgment, and therefore could not overrule it or authorize its rejection.

It is all very well to deny the divine commission and authority of the church to expound the word and declare the law of God; but a denial, to serve any purpose, or to be worth anything, must have a reason, and a higher reason than has the affirmation denied. One can deny only by an authority sufficient to warrant an affirmation. It needs as much reason to deny as to affirm. The authority of the church can really be denied only by opposing to her a truth that disproves it. A simple negation is nothing, and proves or disproves nothing. Yet the Reformers opposed to the church only a simple negation. They opposed to her no authority, no affirmative truth, and consequently gave no reason for denying or unchurching her. Indeed, no individual or sect ever opposes either to the church or to her teaching anything but simple negation, and no one ever makes an affirmation or affirms any truth or positive doctrine which she does not herself affirm or hold and teach. Every known heresy, from that of the Docetæ down to the latest development of Protestantism, simply denies what the church teaches, and affirms nothing which she does not herself affirm, as Catholics have shown over and over again. These denials, based as they are on no principle or affirmative truth, are gratuitous, and count for nothing against the church or her teaching. Who would count the denial by a madman that the sun shines in a clear sky at noonday?

The simple fact is that whoever denies the church or her judgments does it without any authority or reason but his own private opinion or caprice, and that is simply no authority or reason at all. It is not possible to allege any authority against her or her teaching. Men may cavil at the truth, may by their sophistries and subtleties obscure the truth or involve themselves in a dense mental fog, so that they are unable to see anything distinctly, or to tell where they are or in what direction they are moving. They may thus imagine that they have some reason for their denials, and even persuade others that such is the fact; but whenever the fog is cleared away, and they have easted themselves, they cannot, if they have ordinary intelligence, fail to discover that the truth which in their own minds they opposed to her or her teaching is a truth which she herself holds and teaches as an integral part of her doctrine, or as included in the depositum of faith she has received. Do you say there is truth outside of the church; truth in all religions; in all superstitions, even? Be it so; but there is no truth outside of her in any religion or superstition that she denies or does not recognize and hold, and hold in its unity and catholicity. There may be facts in natural history, in physics, chemistry, in all the special sciences, as in the several handicrafts, that she does not teach; but there is no principle of science of any sort that she does not hold and apply whenever an occasion for its application occurs. None of the special sciences have their principles in themselves, or do or can demonstrate the principles on which they depend, and from which they derive their scientific character. They all depend for their scientific character on a higher science, the science of sciences, which the church and the church alone teaches. The principles of ethics, and therefore of politics as a branch of ethics, all lie in the theological order, and without theology there is and can be no science of ethics or politics; and hence we see that both, with those who reject theology, are purely empirical, without any scientific basis. An atheist may be moral in his conduct, but if there were no God there could be no morality; so may an atheist be a geometrician, but if there were no God there could be no geometry. Deny God, and what becomes of lines that may be infinitely projected, or of space shading off into immensity, on which so much in the science of geometry depends? Nay, deny God, and what would become even of finite space? Yet without the conception of space, which is in truth only the power of God to externize his acts, geometry would be impossible. All the special sciences are secondary, and are really science only when carried up to their first principles and explained by them. What more absurd, then, than the attempt of scientists to prove by science there is no God, or to oppose science to the theology of the church, without which no science is possible?

We need but look at the present state of men's minds to see how the world gets on without the church. Never were men more active or indefatigable in their researches: they send their piercing glances into all subjects, sacred and profane; they investigate the heavens and the earth, the present and the past, and leave no nook or corner of nature unexplored, and yet there is not a principle of ethics, politics, or science that is not denied or called in question. In the moral and political world nothing is fixed or settled, and moral and intellectual science, as well as statesmanship, disappears. Doubt and uncertainty hang over all questions, and the distinctions between right and wrong, just and unjust, as well as between good and evil, are obscured and well-nigh obliterated. The utmost confusion reigns in the whole world of thought, and "men," as a distinguished prelate said to us the other day, "are trying the experiment of governing the world without conscience." All this proves what we maintain, that they who deny the church, or reject her teaching, have no truth to oppose to her, no reason for their denial, and no principle on which they base their rejection of her authority. Their rejection of the church and her teaching is purely gratuitous, and therefore, if not sinful, is at least baseless.

This much is certain, that it is either the church or nothing. There is no other alternative. Nothing is more absurd than for those who reject the church and her teaching to pretend to be Christian teachers or believers. They cannot believe the revelation God has made on the veracity of God alone, for they have no witness, not even an unassisted human witness, of the fact of revelation, of what God has revealed, or that he has or has not revealed anything, since they have no witness who was the contemporary of our Lord and his apostles—they were none of them born then—and they have no institution that dates from apostolic times, and that has continued without break down to the present. In fact, what they profess to believe, in so far as they believe it at all, they believe on the authority of the church, or of that very tradition which they reject and deny to be authority. They agree among themselves in their doctrinal belief only when and where they agree with the church; whenever and wherever they break from Catholic tradition, preserved and handed down by her, they disagree and fight with one another, are all at sea, and have neither chart nor compass. Do they tell us that they agree in the essentials of the Christian faith? Yet it is only so far as they follow Catholic tradition that they know or can agree among themselves as to what are or are not essentials. There is a wide difference between what Dr. Pusey holds to be essential and what is held to be essential by Dr. Bellows. Nearly the only point in which the two agree is in rejecting the infallible authority of the successor of Peter; and, in rejecting that authority, neither has any authority for believing what he believes, or for denying what he denies. Deny the church, and you have no authority for asserting divine revelation at all, as your rationalists and radicals conclusively prove.

But, happily, the other alternative saves us from all these logical inconsistencies. The church meets every demand, removes every embarrassment, and affords us the precise authority we need for faith, for she is in every age and every land a living witness to the fact of revelation, and an ever-present judge competent to declare what God reveals, and to teach us what we have, and what we have not, the veracity of God for believing. She can assure us of the divine inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures, which without her tradition is not provable; for she has received them through the apostles from our Lord himself. She can enable us to read them aright, and can unfold to us by her teaching their real sense; for the Holy Ghost has deposited with her the whole revelation of God, whether written or unwritten. Outside of her, men, if they have the book called the Bible, can make little or nothing of it, can come to no agreement as to its sense, except so far as they inconsistently and surreptitiously avail themselves of her interpretation of it. They have no key to its sense. But she has the key to its meaning in her possession and knowledge of all that God reveals, or in the divine instruction she has received in the beginning. The whole word of God, and the word of God as a whole, is included in the depositum she has received, and therefore she is able at all times and in all places to give the true sense of the whole, and of the relation to the whole of each and every part. In her tradition the Bible is a book of divine instruction, of living truth, of inestimable value, and entitled to the profoundest reverence, which we know it is not in the hands of those who wrest it from her tradition, and have no clue to its meaning but grammar and lexicon.

The notion that a man who knows nothing of the Christian faith, and is a stranger to the whole order of Christian thought and life, can take up the Bible, even when correctly translated into his mother-tongue, and from reading and studying it arrive at an adequate knowledge, or any real knowledge at all, of Christian truth or the revelation which God has made to man, is preposterous, and contradicted by every day's experience. Just in proportion as men depart from the tradition of faith preserved by the church, the Bible becomes an unintelligible book, ceases to be of any use to the mind, and, if reverenced at all, becomes, except in a few plain moral precepts, a source of error much more frequently than of truth. One of the most precious gifts of God to man becomes instead of a benefit a real injury to the individual and to society. Our school-boards may, then, easily understand why we Catholics object to the reading of the Bible in schools where the church cannot be present to enlighten the pupil's mind as to its real and true sense. It is the court that keeps the statute-books, and interprets and applies the law, whether the lex scripta or the lex non scripta.

The church, existing in all ages and in all nations as one identical body, is a living witness in all times and places, as we have said, of the fact that God has revealed what she believes and teaches, and is through his assistance a competent and sufficient authority for that fact, and to interpret and declare the revealed law, as much so, to say the least, as the supreme court of a nation is to declare what is the law of the state. The objection made by rationalists and others to believing on the authority of the church, or to recognizing her authority to declare the faith, is founded on the false assumption that the church makes the faith, and can make anything of faith she pleases, whether God has revealed it or not. We have already answered this objection. The church bears witness to the fact of revelation, and declares what is or is not the faith God has revealed, as the supreme court declares what is or is not the law of the state; but she can declare nothing to be of faith that is not of faith, or that God has not revealed and commanded all men to believe, for through the divine assistance she is infallible, and therefore cannot err in matters of faith, or in any matters pertaining in any respect to faith and morals. Since she cannot err in declaring what God has revealed and commanded, we are assured that what she declares to be revealed is revealed, or to be commanded is commanded, and therefore we know that whatever we are required to believe as of faith, or to do as commanded of God, we have the authority of God himself for believing and doing, the highest possible reason for faith, since God is truth itself, and can neither deceive nor be deceived; and the highest possible law, for God is the Supreme Lawgiver. It is they who reject the church or deny her authority that have only an arbitrary and capricious human authority, and who abdicate their reason and their freedom, and make themselves slaves, and slaves of human passion, arrogance, and ignorance. The Catholic is the only man who has true mental freedom, or a reason for his faith. His faith makes him free. It is the truth that liberates; and therefore our Lord says, "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." Who can be freer than he who is held to believe and obey only God? They whom the truth does not make free may fancy they are free, but they are not; they are in bondage, and abject slaves.

The church in affirming herself is not making herself the judge in her own cause, is not one of the litigants, as some pretend, for the cause in which she judges is not hers, but that of God himself. She is the court instituted by the Supreme Lawgiver to keep, interpret, and declare his law, and therefore to judge between him and the subjects his law binds. She, in determining a case of faith or morals, no more judges in her own cause than the supreme court of a nation does in defining its own jurisdiction, and in determining a case arising under the law of which it is constituted by the national authority the judge. She has, of course, the right, as has every civil court, to punish contempt, whether of her orders or her jurisdiction, for he who contemns her contemns him who has instituted her; but the questions to be decided are questions of law, which she does not make, and is therefore no more a party to the cause litigated, and no more interested or less impartial, than is a civil court in a civil action. Indeed, we see not, if it pleases Almighty God to make a revelation, and to set up his kingdom on earth with that revelation for its law, how he can provide for its due administration without such a body as the church affirms herself to be, nor how it would be possible to institute a higher or more satisfactory method of determining what the law of his kingdom is, than by the decision of a court instituted and assisted by him for that very purpose. In our judgment, no better way is practicable, and no other way of attaining the end desired is possible. We repeat, therefore, that the church meets every demand of the case, and removes every real difficulty in ascertaining what is the faith God has revealed, as well as what is opposed to it, or tends to obscure or impair it.