The church interprets and explains herself; there are books, also, that carry their own explanation with them, and so need no interpretation or further explanation; but manifestly the Bible is not such a book. It is inspired; it is true; it is infallible; and is, as St. Paul says of all Scripture, divinely inspired, “profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice, that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good word and work” (2 Tim. iii. 16, 17); but it bears on its face the evidence that it was addressed to men who were already believers, and already instructed, partially at least, in the truths it teaches or enforces, and that it was not written to teach the faith to such as had no knowledge of it, but to correct errors, to present more fully the faith on certain points, to point out the duties it enjoins, to exhort to repentance and reform, and to hold up as motives on the one hand, the fearful judgment of God upon those who disregard his goodness, or despise his mercy, or abuse his long-suffering,
and, on the other, the exceeding riches of divine love, and the great reward prepared in heaven for those that believe, love, and obey him. No one can read it without perceiving that it neither is nor professes to be the original medium of the Christian revelation to man, but from first to last supposes a revelation previously made, the true religion to have been already taught, and instructions in it already received. This is true of the Old Testament, and more especially true of the New Testament; and we know historically, and nobody denies it, that the faith was preached and believed, and particular churches, congregations of believers, were gathered and organized, before a word of the New Testament was written.
The Protestant, reduced to the sacred text, even supposing he has the genuine and authentic text, and his private judgment, would be reduced to the condition of the lawyer who should undertake to explain the statutes of any one of our states, in total ignorance of the Common Law, or without the least reference to it or the decisions of the common-law courts. Now and then a statute, perhaps, would explain itself, but in most cases he would be wholly at a loss as to the real meaning of the legislature. Our wise law reformers in this state, a few years since, seeing and feeling the fact, attempted to codify the laws so as to supersede the demand for any knowledge of the Common Law to understand them, and the ablest jurists in the state find them a puzzle, or nearly inexplicable, and our best lawyers are uncertain how to bring an action under the new Code of Procedure. The Protestant needs, in order to interpret the sacred text, a knowledge of revelation which can neither be obtained from the text itself without interpretation nor supplied
by private judgment. Hence it is that we find Protestants unable to agree among themselves as to what is or is not the meaning of the sacred text, and varying in their views all the way down from the highest Puseyite who accepts all Catholic doctrine, “the damnatory clauses excepted,” to the lowest Unitarian, who holds that our Lord was simply a man, the son of Joseph and Mary, and rejects the church, the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, original sin, redemption, the expiatory sacrifice, regeneration, supernatural grace, the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, the everlasting punishment of the incorrigible in hell, and the reward of the just in any heaven above the Elysian Fields of the Greeks and Romans or the happy hunting-grounds of the poor Indian. Protestants are able to agree among themselves only so far as they follow Catholic tradition and agree with the church. The Protestant needs to know the Christian faith in order to interpret the sacred text and ascertain it from the Bible, and this he cannot know by his own private judgment or develop from his own “inner consciousness,” since it lies in the supernatural order, and is above the reach of his natural faculties. It is clear, then, that in the Bible interpreted by private judgment he has and can have only a fallible authority.
It is not because the Holy Scriptures do not contain, explicitly or implicitly, the whole faith, that, interpreted by private judgment, they give only a fallible rule of faith, but because, to find the faith in its unity and integrity in them, we must know it aliunde and beforehand. This difficulty is completely obviated by the Catholic rule. The church has in Catholic tradition, which she preserves intact by time or change, the
whole revelation, whether written or unwritten, and in this tradition she has the key to the real sense of the sacred Scriptures, and is able to interpret them infallibly. Tradition, authenticated by the church as the witness and depositary of it, supplies the knowledge necessary to the understanding of the sacred text. Read in the light of tradition, what is implicit in the text becomes explicit, what is merely referred to as wholly known becomes expressly and clearly stated, and we are able to understand the written word, because tradition interprets it for us, without any demand for a knowledge or judgment on our part that exceeds our natural powers. Our judgment is no longer private judgment, because we have in tradition a catholic rule by which to judge, and our judgment has not to pass on anything above the province of reason.
The objection we make to the Protestant rule, it must be obvious now to our friend, cannot be retorted. The Protestant must interpret the sacred Scriptures by his private judgment, which he cannot do without passing upon questions which transcend its reach. The Catholic exercises, of course, his judgment in accepting the infallible teachings of the church, but he is not required to pass upon any question above the reach of his understanding, or upon which, by his natural reason, he cannot judge infallibly, or with the certainty of actual and complete knowledge. He is not required to pass upon the truth of what the church teaches, for that follows from her divine institution and commission to teach the revelation God has made previously established. He has simply to pass upon the question, What is it she teaches, or presents clearly and distinctly to my understanding to be believed? and,
in passing upon that question, my judgment has not to judge of anything beyond or above reason, and, therefore, is not fallible any more than in any other act of knowledge.
There is another advantage the Catholic rule has over the Protestant rule. In this world of perpetual change, and with the restless and ever-busy activity of the human mind, new questions are constantly coming up and in need of being answered, and so answered as to save the unity and integrity of the faith. The Bible having once spoken is henceforth silent; it can say nothing more, and make no further explanations of the faith to meet these new questions, and tell us explicitly what the word requires or forbids us to believe with regard to them. Hence, Protestants never know how to meet them. Then new or further explanations and decisions are constantly needed, and will be needed to the end of time. Even the explanations and decisions of the church, amply sufficient when made, not seldom, through the subtlety and activity of error, and its unceasing efforts to evade or obscure the truth, become insufficient, and need themselves to be further explained, and applied so as to strike in the head the new forms of old error and deprive them of their last subterfuge. These explanations and decisions so necessary, and which can be infallibly made only by a living and ever-present infallible authority, can be only fallibly made, if at all, on the Protestant rule. Even the creed of the church, though unalterable, needs from time to time not development, but new and further explanations, to meet and condemn the new forms of error that spring up, and to preserve the faith unimpaired and inviolate. How is this to be done infallibly by a book written two thousand years ago and private judgment, or