entrusting herself to a good agent. Do we not in every department of conduct submit our own judgment to that of skilled persons? If we are sick, or if a member of our family is so, we do not try to study the case out of medical books; we call in a physician of repute, and submit implicitly to his directions. If we go to sea, we leave the navigation of the vessel in the hands of the captain. If we have a difficult lawsuit, we do not try to conduct it ourselves; we take legal advice, and permit our adviser to determine our course of action. Why should we think that the problems of religion are so simple, that skilled and unskilled persons are on a par, and that this is the only subject in the world in which a man is to be ashamed to submit his judgment to that of those who are wiser than himself?

This is by no means an uncommon line of argument for a Roman Catholic advocate to use; but if he does, it shows that he does not at all understand the nature of the claim to infallibility made on behalf of his Church, of which claim this argument is, in real truth, entirely subversive. would be absurd misrepresentation to suggest that any of us who insists on the necessity of private judgment thinks it a matter of indifference whether a man uses his judgment rightly. On the contrary, we think it every man's duty, who has to make a decision, to use every means in his power to guide his judgment rightly. Not the least of these means is the instruction and advice of people better informed than ourselves. I do not suppose that any different rule in this respect prevails in matters of religion and in other matters; or that theology is the only science in the world that can be known by the light of nature, and in which a man, who has given no thought to the subject, stands on a level with one who has. The illustrations we have used, then, justify a clergyman in claiming deference for his opinion on theological subjects from a layman, just so far, and no more, as he has given more and more prayerful study to those subjects than the layman has. It is just so in other cases. Why do we defer to the opinion of a barrister in matters of law, and to that of a physician in questions of medicine? Not because of their official position, but because of their

111.] WHAT KIND OF DEFERENCE DUE TO AUTHORITY.

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superior acquaintance with the subject. We do not imagine that an idle young man, who has eaten his dinners, and got called to the Bar, becomes, by reason of his new dignity, qualified to conduct an important lawsuit, or that we may not, without breach of modesty, prefer our own interpretation of an Act of Parliament to his. And so if you give no heed

to theological study, the mere fact of your ordination will not entitle you to claim deference for your opinion from members of your congregation, among whom you may easily find some better informed than yourself.

On what grounds, then, do those who insist on the infallibility of the Church of Rome claim deference for the authority of the Pope? Is it on the ground on which the illustrations we have used show that deference may rightly be claimed, namely, that superior knowledge which is the natural result of greater learning and deeper study? Clearly no such thing. The deference claimed is alleged to be due to the Pope's official position solely, and is demanded from the most learned and the most ignorant of his subjects equally. Now, on the principle that a man is likely to know more of a subject the more he has studied it, which of the two had a right to claim that his judgment deserved to be received with respect-von Döllinger, when he said that the doctrine of the Pope's personal infallibility was a mere novelty, unknown to the Church of former times; or Pius IX., when he declared that the Church had always held it? The one might be considered as entitled to speak on Church history with the authority of an expert; the other was an Italian ecclesiastic, of no reputation for learning, to whose opinion, on a question of Church history, if it were not for his official position, no one would dream of paying the slightest attention. You see, then, that the illustrations which have been appealed to are utterly destructive of the Papal claims. In truth, the ultra-Protestants and the ultraPapists are in complete agreement in their contempt for theological and ecclesiastical learning, and in their resistance to that claim to deference for the opinion of the clergy, which is made precisely so far, and no more, as by diligent and prayerful study the clergy have learned to know

more than those who are asked to defer to them. In the Roman Catholic Church, as much as in the wildest Protestant sect, learning must give way to ignorance and prejudice. Let a theological opinion commend itself to the superstitious and ignorant of the people; let the practices founded on it become prevalent; then let the Pope, who may be quite as superstitious and ignorant himself, give formal expression to it, and the learned have only the humiliating choice whether they will be turned out like von Döllinger, or give an amazed and reluctant assent like Cardinal Newman.

I must not part with this illustration without pointing out that the kind of deference to his authority which the most learned divine may claim is of a different nature from that which the captain of a ship may demand from his passengers, or a physician from his patients. The passengers do not go into a ship to learn navigation, but to be carried to their journey's end the quickest way: a physician's patients want to be cured of their disease, and not to be taught medical science. If in the Christian, as in many heathen systems, the art of propitiating the divinities was a special craft known to the priesthood alone, then the analogy would subsist, and we ought to trouble ourselves no more about the secrets of the art by which the priesthood gain for us the Divine favour, than a passenger on shipboard troubles himself about lunar observations and the nautical almanac. But the promise to Christ's Church was, ‘All thy people shall be taught of God.' In the Christian system religious knowledge is not the secret of one profession, but the privilege and the duty of all the people; and the duty of the clergy is to teach those committed to their care. It follows at once that the relation between them and their flocks is not that between a physician and his patients, but rather that between the physician and the class of students to whom he is teaching medical science. From the members of such a class he is entitled to the deference to which his superior knowledge gives him a right. His students would make no progress if they were indocile to their instructor, if they were captious and conceited; full of the belief that they had already knowledge enough, and that the old woman's remedies which their

III.]

THE ARGUMENT IN A CIRCLE.

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grandmothers or aunts had taught them could not be improved on by the highest medical science. And yet the instructor must be a bad one, or his pupils of mean capacity, if they do not arrive at a point when their beliefs rest on a better foundation than their teacher's word; when they are able to verify for themselves the things which they at first accepted from him with meekness and docility; when they feel that they may, without breach of modesty, criticize what he has told them, and perhaps improve on it.

I have thought it important, when speaking about private judgment, to make it plain that we do not recommend rash judgment, or independence of the teaching of others, or exclude deference to the authority of persons better informed than ourselves, or the use of any of the means which prudent persons employ in order to guide their judgment rightly.

But I must bring you back to the point with which I commenced, namely, that it is absurd for Roman Catholics to disparage private judgment, or make light of the kind of certainty we can obtain by its means, since their belief, as well as ours, must ultimately rest on an act of their private judgment, and can have no higher certainty than whatever that is capable of yielding. If they use their private judgment on no other question, they must use it on the question, Are we bound to submit implicitly to the authority of the Church of Rome? The result is, that absolute certainty can only be had on the terms of being infallible one's self. A man may say, 'I am absolutely certain that I am right in my religious opinions, because I believe what the Pope believes, and he is absolutely certain not to believe wrong.' But then comes the question, 'How come you to be absolutely certain that the Pope is absolutely certain not to believe wrong?'

It is not possible to answer this question without being guilty of the logical fallacy of arguing in a circle. For example, a common way of answering is by producing texts of Scripture such as 'Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church,' and such like. Now before we can use these texts to prove the Church's infallibility, private judg

ment must decide that the books cited are the Word of God, and private judgment must interpret the texts brought forward; and if private judgment can be trusted to do this, it would seem that it might be trusted to decide other questions too. But there is no point on which Roman advocates are fonder of insisting than that it is from the Church that we receive the Bible; that without her guidance we could have no certainty about the canon of Scripture; and still more, that without the Church's guidance we are incompetent to find the true meaning of Scripture. Now, certainly, those texts which are alleged to prove the Church's infallibility are not so plain and clear that no rational man can doubt their meaning. On the contrary, there are no texts in the Sacred Volume about which controversy has raged more fiercely. I suppose there is no text on which the Fathers have given greater variety of interpretation than that which I just mentioned, 'Thou art Peter': and we have to go down far, indeed, before we find one who discovered the Bishop of Rome in it. As a matter of fact, it is certain that more than half of those who profess to acknowledge the authority of the Bible are unable to find in it any proof of Roman infallibility. It remains, then, for a Roman Catholic to say, 'I know that I understand these texts rightly, because the Church, which cannot err, has taught me that this is their true meaning,' and then they are clearly in a vicious circle. They say, 'The Church is infallible, because the Scriptures testify that she is so, and the Scriptures testify this because the Church infallibly declares that such is their meaning.'

We find ourselves in the same circle if we try to prove the Church's infallibility by antiquity, sayings of the Fathers, by reason, or in any other way. For the advocates of the Church of Rome have constantly maintained that, on religious questions, nothing but the Church's authority can give us certainty. Well, when we are trying to prove the Church's authority, we shall be guilty of a logical fallacy if we assume the thing to be proved. Unless, then, we are building a fabric in the air, our proof of the Church's infallibility must rest on something else; and if we arrive at a certain result, it follows that without the Church's help it is possible for us