A. p. 15.
IT should be observed, that as to the point of encouragement to “patient
waiting,” I have in the text much understated the force of the argument
to be drawn from the ecclesiastical history of the fourth century,
inasmuch as even after the Council of Nicea, there were fresh troubles
and disturbances upon the same doctrine, which were not settled for more
than fifty years. To use Mr. Keble’s words (on July 23rd), “The Church
waited till the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381, under all sorts of
interruptions and anomalies, charges of heresy, and breaking of
communion.” My purpose, however, in referring to that period of history
being chiefly to point to the Nicene Creed as an instance of a
declaratory act, explanatory of the Apostles’, I did not think it
necessary to pursue the matter further than A.D. 325.
B. p. 22.
“IT is plain that the meaning of a mute document, if it be tied to
follow the utterance of a _living_ voice, which shall claim the
supreme right of interpretation, must vary with its living
expositor.”—MANNING’S _Rule of Faith_, (1838). App. p. 85.
“But neither can it be admitted that if the justification of the
reformers is to rest on such grounds as the foregoing, their
reputation can owe thanks to those who would now persuade the Church
to acquiesce in a disgraceful servitude, and to surrender to the
organs of the secular power the solemn charge which she has received
from Christ, to feed his sheep and his lambs: for the real feeder of
those sheep, and those lambs, is _the power that determines the
doctrine with which they shall be fed_. Whether that determination
shall profess to be drawn straight from the depths of the mine of
revealed truth, or whether it shall assume _the more dangerous and
seductive title of construction only_; _of a license of construction
which disclaims the creation_, _the declaration_, _or the decision of
doctrine_, _but which simultaneously with that disclaimer has marked
out for itself a range of discretion which has already enabled it to
cancel all binding power in one of the articles of the faith_, and
will hereafter as certainly enable it to cancel the binding power of
all those which the first fell swoop has failed to touch.”—_Letter to
the Lord Bishop of London_, _by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone_,
_M.P._ p. 60.
See also Archdeacon Manning’s recent letter to the Bishop of Chichester,
where the same subject is again treated in the most convincing manner,
pp. 35, 37.