between what is to be followed and what is to be rejected. But this discrimination demands a rule of judgment. But what rule can the author allege? Private judgment? But that is no rule, for private judgment is by its very definition a judgment without any rule or standard of judgment, and, besides, those who differ from him have private judgment, and theirs is worth as much as his. Will the author answer again—The tradition or common consent of the true people of God? But who are they? Here, then, we are back in the old difficulty. Protestantism moves always in a vicious circle; proving its rule by its faith, and its faith by its rule. We see no way by which it can get out of this circle. It is not only as a Catholic we have felt this difficulty; we felt it as a Protestant, when we had the misfortune to be a Presbyterian, like our learned friend the Princeton professor.
We are sure the fault is not the professor’s, for he doubtless sees that he moves only in a vicious circle as clearly as we do, and no doubt would come out of it and move forward in a straight line, if he could. The fault is in Protestantism itself, which is essentially illogical, and does not conform to the divine order or the truth of things. The Reformers themselves started without seeing whither they were going, and without seeing that the Catholic system, parts of which they rejected, was a systematic whole, and that, if one part was retained, the whole must be retained, and, if one part was rejected, the whole must be rejected. This is what Moehler has so admirably shown in his Symbolik. But the Reformers did not wish to reject the whole; they wished to reject only a part, and in the beginning only a small part. They wished to remain
Catholics, minus one or two dogmas, and, after the condemnation of Luther by Leo X., minus the Pope and the Roman curia. But they were driven onward farther than they intended, and farther than they foresaw or were prepared for. They constructed no rule of faith beforehand, and adopted one only as the exigencies of the controversy with Catholics made one necessary; still, except on certain points, they continued using the old Catholic rule. Hence their Protestantism was patched up with shreds of the old religion, eked out by such new cloth as they were able to supply to meet the pressure of the occasion. It was formed not all at once, nor all of one piece. It was formed little by little in the struggle to maintain themselves against their Catholic adversaries, and to retain as much of what had always been the faith of Christendom as was possible in the position they assumed. In forming it, they were much more intent on demolishing what our professor calls “Romanism” than on laying a solid foundation for a Protestant superstructure.
The simple fact is, the Protestant movement could find no solid foundation except in pure rationalism, or, rather, in pure individualism, in which every man is his own church, his own rule of faith, his own law, and his own God—a conclusion from which Luther and Calvin would have recoiled with horror, as recoils Dr. Hodge to-day. The Reformers did not see, for they were, as all Protestants are, sad logicians in matters of religion, whither their movement tended, nor dream that one day they would be called on to show that their religion rests on a solid foundation, or a bottom of its own, irrespective of any relation to the Catholic Church, and when they must prove that it is something besides a mere
protest against the Church of Rome. They thought they could throw off Rome and a few dogmas, and still remain true Christian believers. In this they were deceived; for they were too little for Christianity and too much for its full denial. They retained certain positive Christian doctrines, but they had no authority for them except the Catholic authority which they madly rejected. Hence, when we press them for the authority on which they assert these doctrines, they fall into the vicious circle in which we find them for ever gyrating, and from which not even Dr. Hodge can relieve them.
The author says (p. 104), “Romanists agree with Protestants in teaching the plenary inspiration and consequent infallible authority of the sacred writings.” But this is a mistake. Catholics do not agree with Protestants, but some Protestants—by no means all Protestants—agree with the church in maintaining the Catholic doctrine of the “plenary inspiration and consequent infallible authority of the sacred writings.” It is simply a Catholic doctrine retained by the Reformers from the church, which taught it nearly fourteen hundred years before Protestantism was born. The able and learned professor, we are sorry to observe, forgets that the church is some centuries older than the oldest Protestant sect, that the founders of Protestantism had all been reared in her communion, and separated from her. Protestants have undeniably no historical connection with our Lord and his apostles, save through the Catholic Church, or the church in communion with the See of Rome. Whatever doctrines Protestants hold that the church always held and taught are hers, not theirs; and it is a grave mistake to pretend that they are Protestant doctrines. Protestantism consists
essentially and solely in those things which distinguish it from Catholicity, or in what is peculiar to it and constitutes its differentia—in what it denies that the church asserts, and it asserts that she denies. If they have stolen some of her doctrines, that does not make them any the less hers by right, nor give them the right to appropriate them as their own. There is not a single doctrine which Protestants profess to hold—which she teaches, and always has taught—to which they, as Protestants, have any title, or which they can prove to be revealed truth independently of her testimony and authority. It is disregarding this truth that gives to Protestantism the appearance of being a religion.
We return to the word of God as contained in the Old and New Testaments. Before the author can assert the Scriptures as the infallible rule of faith, he must settle, first, the canon; second, the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures; third, the completeness or sufficiency of the Scriptures; and, fourth, the true sense of the Scriptures. Now, not one of these points is it possible for a Protestant to settle independently of the witness and authority of the Catholic Church, and Dr. Hodge confirms our assertion by his manifest failure to settle any one of them on Protestant grounds. They are all questions of faith, and not one of them can be settled prior to or without the rule of faith; and yet on Protestant grounds they must all be settled before the rule of faith can be ascertained and applied.
Protestants exclude from the canon of the Old Testament several books called by some the Deutero-canonical books, which are included in it by the Catholic Church, and even the schismatic churches of the East, and they are far from being agreed among
themselves as to what books are or are not canonical. Some would exclude the Book of Ruth and the Canticle. As to the New Testament, Luther had doubts, if our reading or memory be not at fault, of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and that of St. Jude, and rejected the Epistle of St. James, which he called an epistle of straw, probably because it flatly contradicts his doctrine of justification by faith alone; others have doubted the canonicity of these, and, in addition, of the Apocalypse, the second Epistle of St. Peter, the second and third of St. John, and that of St. Paul to Philemon; others still reject the Gospel according to St. John, and indeed the whole New Testament, except the Synoptics—and these, while they admit them as authentic, they deny to be inspired. The Princeton professor may deny these to be Protestants, but they have as good a right to exclude from the canon such books as they judge proper as had Luther and Calvin; and there is no rule by which he can make out that he is a Protestant that will not equally serve to prove that they are Protestants. The only rule available is Catholic tradition, and that condemns him as well as them.