11.] BOSSUET AND JURIEU. 35 theirs, but certainly will contain much of which they were ignorant. And, in like manner, anyone who holds the theory of Development ought, in consistency, to put the writings of the Fathers on the shelf as antiquated and obsolete. Their teaching, judged by the standard of the present day, must certainly be defective, and might even be erroneous. In point of fact, there is scarcely one of the Fathers who does not occasionally come into collision with modern Roman teaching, and for whom it is not necessary to find apologies. A good deal of controversial triumph took place when, by the publication of certain expurgatorial indices, it was brought to light that the Roman authorities regarded certain genuine dicta of early Fathers as erroneous, and as needing correction. But if the Development theory be true, it is only proper that the inaccuracies of the time when Church teaching was immature should be corrected by the light of fuller knowledge. It follows that the traditional veneration of the Fathers in the Roman Church is a witness of the novelty of the theory of Development. But, more than a century before Dr. Newman's time, the theory of Development had played its part in the Roman Catholic controversy; only then it was the Protestant combatant who brought that theory forward, and the Roman Catholic who repudiated it. I shall have occasion in another lecture to speak of the controversial work published by Bossuet, who was accounted the most formidable champion of the Church of Rome towards the end of the seventeenth century. The thesis of his book called History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches was that the doctrine of the true Church is always the same, whereas Protestants are at variance with each other and with themselves. Bossuet was replied to by a Calvinist minister named Jurieu. The line Jurieu took was to dispute the assertion that the doctrine of the true Church is always the same. He maintained the doctrine of Development in its full extent, asserting that the truth of God was only known by instalments (par parcelles), that the theology of the Fathers was imperfect and fluctuating, and that Christian theology has been constantly going on towards perfection. He illustrated his theory by examples of important doctrines, concerning which he alleged the teaching of the early Church to have been defective or uncertain, of which it is enough here to quote that he declared that the mystery of the Trinity, though of the last importance, and essential to Christianity, remained, as everyone knows,' undeveloped (informe) down to the first Council of Nicæa, and even down to that of Constantinople. Bossuet, in replying, had the embarrassment, if he felt it as such, that a learned divine of his own Church and nationthe Jesuit Petau, whose name is better known under its Latinized form, Petavius-had, in his zeal to make Church authority the basis of all religious knowledge, made very similar assertions concerning the immaturity of the teaching of the early Fathers. Plainly, if Jurieu could establish his case, the whole foundation of Bossuet's great controversial work would be swept away. It would be impossible to taunt Protestants because their teaching had not been always the same, if it must be confessed that the same thing must be said of the Church in every age. But it would be unjust to imagine that Bossuet was actuated merely by controversial ardour in the indignant and passionate outcry which he raised against Jurieu's theory, or to doubt that that theory was deeply painful and shocking to him on account of its aspersion on the faith of the early Church. He declared the statement that the mystery of the Trinity remained undeveloped down to the Council of Nicea to be a horrible libel flétrissure) on Christianity, to be language which could only have been expected from the mouth of a Socinian. He appealed to the contemporary work of our own divine, Bishop Bull (Defensio Fidei Nicena), in which the doctrine. of Nicea was established by the testimony of ante-Nicene Fathers, a work for which Bossuet had communicated the thanks of himself and his clergy. He declared it to be the greatest of errors to imagine that the faith of the Church only developed itself as heresies arose, and as she made explicit decisions concerning them. And he reiterated his own thesis, that the faith of the Church, as being a Divine work, had its perfection from the first, and had never varied; and that the Church never pronounced any judgments, ex 11.] THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT. 37 cept by way of propounding the faith of the past.* The name of Bossuet is, for reasons of which I shall speak on another day, not popular with the Ultramontane party now dominant in the Roman Church; but there is no doubt that, in his day, he was not only the accredited champion of that Church, but the most successful in gaining converts from Protestantism. It seems, then, a very serious matter if the leading authorities in the Roman Church have now to own that, in the main point at issue between Bossuet and Jurieu, the Calvinist minister was in the right, and their own champion in the wrong. Now, in Newman's Essay on Development, everything that had been said by Jurieu or by Petavius as to the immaturity of the teaching of the early Fathers is said again, and said more strongly. He begins by owning the unserviceableness of St. Vincent's maxim: 'Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus'. He confesses that it is impossible by means of that maxim (unless, indeed, a very forced interpretation be put upon it) to establish the articles of Pope Pius's creed; in other words, impossible to show that these articles were any part of the faith of the early Church. But he urges that the same thing may be said of the Athanasian Creed, and he proceeds to try to pick holes in the proofs Bishop Bull had given of the orthodoxy of the ante-Nicene Fathers. So he declares that we need some new hypothesis for the defence of the Athanasian Creed, for which purpose he offers his theory of Development; and then he says that we must not complain if the same defence proves to be equally good for the creed of Pope Pius. I can remember my own astonishment at this line of defence, and my wonder how it would be accepted by Roman Catholic authorities. There appeared to be signs that it would be received with disfavour; for Brownson's Quarterly Review, the leading organ of American Romanism, published a series of articles severely criticizing the book, as abandoning the ground on which Roman doctrine had previously The statements in the text are taken from Bossuet's Prémier avertissement aux Protestants. been defended, giving up, as it did, the principles that the Church taught nothing but what had been revealed, and that the revelation committed to the Church had been perfect from the first. But when I was simple enough to expect that Roman Catholic divines generally would thus repudiate a work inconsistent with what their teachers had constantly maintained, I failed to notice what a temptation Newman offered by freeing the defenders of Romanism at once from a multitude of controversies in which they felt they were getting the worst. He evacuated all the difficult posts which they had been struggling to maintain, and promised that the captors should gain nothing by taking them, for that he had built inside them an impregnable wall of defence. Just imagine what a comfort it must have been to a poor Roman Catholic divine who had been making a despairing struggle to refute, let us say, the Protestant assertion that the Church of the first three centuries knew nothing of the Invocation of the Blessed Virgin, to be told that he need have no scruple in granting all that his opponents had asserted. Dr. Newman himself, disclaiming the doctrine that the Invocation of the Virgin is necessary to salvation, says (Letter to Pusey, p. 111): 'If it were so, there would be grave reasons for doubting of the salvation of St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius, or of the primitive martyrs. Nay, I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his voluminous writings invokes her once.' But he holds (p. 63) that, though we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special devotion to the Blessed Virgin', yet, by teaching the doctrine of our Lord's Incarnation, he laid the foundations on which that devotion was to rest'. Similarly, if perplexed by troublesome proofs that early Fathers were ignorant of the doctrine of purgatorial fire, or of the religious use of images, or of the supremacy of the Pope, what a comfort to be told, You may safely answer, 'Quite true: these doctrines had not been revealed to the consciousness of the Church of that age';-nay, to be told that he need not quarrel with Arian representations of the doctrine of the ante-Nicene Fathers, but might say, 'Quite true: the Church 11.] PROTESTANT AND ROMAN DEVELOPMENTS. 39 did not learn to speak accurately on this subject until after the Council of Nicæa.' The enlightened Roman Catholic of the new school may take the same view that a dispassionate infidel might have taken about the controversy which Anglicans and old-school Roman Catholics had been waging as to which of them held the doctrines originally revealed by Christ and taught by his Apostles. An infidel might say, 'Neither of you. The doctrines taught by Jesus of Nazareth have been since incorporated with a number of elements derived from different sources, and the Christianity of the first century is not like what is taught by anyone in the nineteenth.' Thus, you will see that the doctrine of Development concedes not only all that a Protestant, but even all that an infidel might ask. I purpose, in a subsequent lecture, to say something more in reference to this doctrine. At present my main object has been to show the primary importance of the question of Infallibility, which has really swallowed up all other controversies. It is inevitable, indeed, that other branches of the controversy should have a tendency to die out when a candid Roman Catholic is forced to concede what his opponents assert. An unlearned Protestant perIceives that the doctrine of Rome is not the doctrine of the Bible. A learned Protestant adds that neither is it the doctrine of the primitive Church. These assertions are no longer denied, as in former days. Putting the concessions made us at the lowest, it is at least owned that the doctrine of Rome is as unlike that of early times as an oak is unlike an acorn, or a butterfly unlike a caterpillar. The unlikeness is admitted and the only question remaining is whether that unlikeness is absolutely inconsistent with substantial identity. In other words, it is owned that there has been a change, and the question is whether we are to call it development or corruption. But you must carefully observe that the doctrine of Development would be fatal to the Roman Catholic cause if separated from the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Church. Without the latter doctrine the former, as I have already pointed out, leads to Protestantism or to infidelity rather than |