1st. Its extreme vagueness. What is primitive antiquity? and where is
its authority to be found? Does "primitive antiquity" mean the first
three centuries? or the first two? or the first five? or the first
seven? Does it include any of the general councils? or one of them? or
four? or six? Are Irenæus and Tertullian the latest writers of
"primitive antiquity?" or does it end with Augustine? or does it
comprehend the venerable Bede? One writer has lately told us, that our
Reformers wished the people to be taught, "that, for almost seven
hundred years, the church was most pure." Are we, then, to hold that
"primitive antiquity" embraces a period of nearly seven centuries? Seven
centuries are considerably more than a third part of the whole duration
of the church, from its foundation to this hour: can the third part of a
nation's history be called its primitive antiquity? Is a tenet, or a
practice taught when Christianity had been more than six hundred years
in the world, to be called primitive? We know not, then, in the first
place, what length of time is signified by "primitive antiquity."
But let it signify any length of time we choose, I ask, next, where is
its authority to be found? In the decisions of the general councils? But
if we call the first four centuries "primitive antiquity," we find in
this period only two general councils; if we include the fifth century,
we get four; if we take in the sixth and seventh centuries, we have
then, in all, six general councils. Will the decisions of any, or all,
of these six councils furnish us with an authoritative interpretation of
Scripture? They give us the Nicene and the Constantinopolitan creeds;
they condemn various notions with respect to the person of our Lord, and
to some other points of belief; and they contain a variety of
regulations for the discipline and order of the church; but, with the
exception of some particular passages, there is no authority in the
creeds, or canons, or anathemas of those councils, for the
interpretation of Scripture; they leave its difficulties just where they
were before. It is but little then, which the first six general
councils will do towards providing the student of Scripture with an
infallible standard of interpretation.
Where, however, except in the councils, can we find any thing claiming
to be the voice of the church? Neither individual writers, nor yet all
the writers of the first seven centuries together, can properly be
called the church. They form, even altogether, but a limited number of
individuals, who, in different countries, and at different periods,
expressed, in writing, their own sentiments, but without any public
authority. Origen, one of the ablest and most learned of them all, was
anathematized by the second council of Constantinople; Tertullian was
heretical during a part of his life; Lactantius was taxed with
heterodoxy. How are we to know who were sound? And if sound generally,
that is to say, if they stand charged with no heretical error, yet it
does not follow that a man is infallible because he is not heretical;
and none of these writers have been distinguished like the five great
Roman lawyers whom the edict of Theodosius[15] selected from the mass,
and gave to their decisions a legal authority. Or again, if it be said
that the agreement of the great majority of them is to be regarded as
decisive, we answer, that as no individual amongst them is in himself an
authority legally, so neither can any number of them be so; and if a
moral authority only be meant, such as we naturally ascribe to the
concurring judgment of many eminent men, then this is a totally
different question, and is open to inquiry in every separate case; for
as, on the one hand, no one denies that such a concurring judgment is
_an_ authority, yet, on the other hand, it may be outweighed, either by
the worth of the few who differ from the judgment, or by the reason of
the case itself; and the concurring judgment of the majority may show no
more than the force of a general prejudice, which only a very few
individuals were sensible enough to resist.
[Footnote 15: Cod. Theodos. lib. i. tit. iv. The edict is issued in the
name of the emperors Theodosius (the younger) and Valentinian (the
younger), in the year A.D. 426.]
In fact, it would greatly help to clear this question if we understand
what we mean by allowing, or denying, the authority of the so-called
fathers. The term _authority_ is ambiguous, and according to the sense
in which I use it, I should either acknowledge it or deny it.--The
writers of the first four, or of the first seven centuries, have _an_
authority, just as the scholiasts and ancient commentators have: some of
them, and in some points, are of weight singly; the agreement of many
of thorn has much weight; the agreement of almost all of them would have
great weight. In this sense, I acknowledge their authority; and it would
be against all sound principles of criticism to deny it. But if, by
authority, is meant a _decisive_ authority, a judgment which may not be
questioned, then the claim of authority in such a case, for any man, or
set of men, is either a folly or a revelation. Such an authority is not
human, but divine: if any man pretends to possess it, let him show God's
clear warrant for his pretension, or he must be regarded as a deceiver
or a madman.
But it may be said, that an authority not to be questioned was
conferred, by the Roman law, on the opinions of a certain number of
great lawyers: if a judge believed that their interpretation of the law
was erroneous, he yet was not at liberty to follow his own private
judgment in departing from it. Why may not the same thing be allowed in
the church? and why may not the interpretations of Cyprian, or
Athanasius, or Augustine, or Chrysostom, be as decisive, with respect to
the true sense of the Scripture, as those of Gaius, Paulus, Modestinus,
Ulpian, and Papinian, were acknowledged to be with respect to the sense
of the Roman law?
The answer is, that the emperor's edict could absolve the judge from
following his own convictions about the sense of the law, because it
gave to the authorized interpretation the force of law. The text, as the
judge interpreted it, was a law repealed; the comment of the great
lawyers was now the law in its room. As a mere literary composition, he
might interpret it rightly, and Gaius, or Papinian, might be wrong; but
if his interpretation was ever so right grammatically or critically,
yet, legally it was nothing to the purpose;--Gaius's interpretation had
superseded it, and was not the law which he was bound to obey. But, in
the church, the only point to be aimed at is the discovery of the true
meaning of the text of the divine law: no human power can invest the
comment with equal authority. The emperor said, and might say to his
judges, "You need not consider what was the meaning of the decemvirs,
when they wrote the twelve tables, or, of Aquillius, when he drew up the
Aquillian law. The law for you is not what the decemvirs may have meant,
but what their interpreters may have meant: the decemvirs' meaning, if
it was their meaning, is no longer the law of Rome." But who can dare to
say to a Christian, "You need not consider what was the meaning of our
Lord and his apostles; the law for you now is the meaning of Cyprian, or
Ambrose, or Chrysostom;--that meaning has superseded the meaning of
Christ." A Christian must find out Christ's meaning, and believe that he
has found it, or else he must still seek for it. It is a matter, not of
outward submission, but of inward faith; and if in our inward mind we
are persuaded that the interpreter has mistaken our Lord's meaning, how
can we by possibility adopt that interpretation in faith?
Here we come to a grave consideration--that this doctrine of an
infallible rule of interpretation may suit ignorance or scepticism: it
is death to a sincere and reasonable and earnest faith. It is not hard
for a sceptical mind to deceive itself by saying, that it receives
whatever the church declares to be true: it may receive any number of
doctrines, but it will not really believe them. We may restrain our
tongues from disputing them, we may watch every restless thought that
would question them, and instantly, by main force, as it were, put it
down; but all this time our minds do not assimilate to them; they do not
take them up into their own nature, so as to make them a part of
themselves, freshening and supplying the life-blood of their very being.
Truth must be believed by the mind's own act; our souls must be drawn
towards it with a reasonable love; some affinity there must be between
it and them, or else they can never really comprehend it. The sceptic
may desperately become a fanatic also, but he is not become, therefore,
a believer.
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.
[Footnote 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.
[Footnote 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.
Now, to resume the consideration of that which, as I said, is the real
point of anxiety with many. They doubt whether the course of a
reasonable belief can be held to the end without interruptions: they say
that the received notions of the inspiration, and consequently of the
complete truth of the Scriptures cannot reasonably be maintained; that
he who does maintain them does so by a happy inconsistency;--he is to
be congratulated for not following up his own principles; but why should
he then find fault with others who do that avowedly and consistently to
which he is driven against his professions by the clear necessity of
the case?
This argument was pressed by Mr. Newman, some time since, in one of the
Tracts for the Times; and it was conducted, as may be supposed, with
great ingenuity, but with a recklessness of consequences, or an
ignorance of mankind, truly astonishing; for he brought forward all the
difficulties and differences which can be found in the Scripture
narratives, displayed them in their most glaring form, and merely
observed, that as those with whom he was arguing could not solve these
difficulties, but yet believed the Scriptures no less in spite of them,
so the apparent unreasonableness of his doctrine about the priesthood
was no ground why it should be rejected--a method of argument most
blameable in any Christian to adopt towards his brethren; for what if
their faith, being thus vehemently strained, were to give way under the
experiment? and if, being convinced that the Scriptures were not more
reasonable than Mr. Newman's system, they were to end with believing,
not both, but neither?
Therefore the question is one of no small anxiety and interest; and it
is not idly nor wantonly that we must speak the truth upon it, even if
that truth may to some seem startling; for by God's blessing, if we do
go boldly forward wherever truth shall lead us, our course needs not be
interrupted, neither shall a single hair of our faith perish.
The same laws of criticism which teach us to distinguish between various
degrees of testimony, authorize us to assign the very highest rank to
the evidences of the writings of St. John and St. Paul. If belief is to
be given to any human compositions, it is due to these; yet if we
believe these merely as human compositions, and without assuming
anything as to their divine inspiration, our Christian faith, as it
seems to me, is reasonable;--not merely the facts of our Lord's miracles
and resurrection; but Christian faith, in all its fulness--the whole
dispensation of the Spirit, the revelation of the redemption of man and
of the Divine Persons who are its authors--of all that Christian faith,
and hope, and love can need. And this is so true, that even without
reckoning the Epistle to the Hebrews amongst St. Paul's writings,--nay,
even if we choose to reject the three pastoral epistles[18]--yet taking
only what neither has been nor can be doubted--the epistles to the
Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and
Thessalonians, we have in these, together with St. John's Gospel and
First Epistle,--giving up, if we choose, the other two,--a ground on
which our faith may stand for ever, according to the strictest rules of
the understanding, according to the clearest intuitions of reason.