VII.

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THE CHURCH'S OFFICE OF TEACHING.

N the last day I sufficiently showed that the foundation for their system, which Roman Catholics assume as self-evident, namely, that God has appointed someone on earth able to give infallible guidance to religious truth, admits of no proof, and is destitute of all probability. But when we say that God has not provided us with infallible guidance, we are very far from saying that He has provided for us no guidance at all. I do not think a Protestant can render a greater service to the cause of Romanism than by depreciating the value of the guidance towards the attainment of religious truth given us by the Church which Christ has founded. Hoc Ithacus velit.' This is the alternative they want to bring us to-either an infallible Church, whose teaching is to be subject to no criticism and no correction, or else no Church teaching at all, each individual taking the Bible, and getting from it, by his own arbitrary interpretation, any system of doctrine he can. Reducing us to this alternative, they have no difficulty in showing that the latter method inevitably leads to a variety of discordant error; and they conclude we are forced to fall back on the other.

But in what subject in the world is it dreamed that we have got to choose between having infallible teachers, or else having no teacher at all? God has made the world so that we cannot do without teachers. We come into the world as ignorant as we are helpless: not only dependent on the care of others for food and warmth, without which neglected infancy must perish, but dependent on the instruction of others for our most elementary knowledge. The most original dis

VII.]

NECESSITY OF HUMAN TEACHING.

109

coverer that ever lived owed the great bulk of his knowledge to the teaching of others, and the amount of knowledgewhich he has added to the common stock bears an infinitesimally small proportion to that which he inherited. To think of being independent of the teaching of others, is as idle as to think of being independent of the atmosphere which surrounds us. Roman Catholic advocates can show, with perfect truth, that anyone who imagines he is drawing his system of doctrine all by himself from the Bible alone, really does nothing of the kind. Of course, if a man reads the Bible in a translation, he cannot imagine that he is independent of help from others. In any case, the selection of books that make the volume was made for him by others; the reverence that he pays to its contents is due to instruction which he received in his boyhood; and, besides, it is undeniable that it is natural to us all to read the Bible in the light of the previous instruction we received in our youth. How else is it that the members of so many different sects each find in the Bible the doctrines they have been trained to expect to find there?

Human teaching, then, we cannot possibly do without in any subject whatever; but are our teachers infallible? I grant that, by children and ignorant persons, it is necessary that they should practically be regarded so. It is said that, when Dr. Busby showed Charles II. over Westminster School, he kept on his own hat, though the king was bareheaded, and explained to the monarch afterwards that he should lose all authority over his boys if they once found out that there was anyone in the kingdom greater than himself. Certain it is that boys will not respect a teacher if they find out that he is capable of making mistakes. And this frame of mind is the best for the pupil's progress. When our knowledge is scanty, it is more important that we should be receptive than critical; or rather, if we attempt to be critical, we cannot be properly receptive. In the earliest stages, then, of instruction, a student makes most progress if he gets a teacher in whom he can put faith, and accepts from him with docility all the information he is able to impart to him. But you know that

the teacher's infallibility is not real: it is only relative and temporary; and an advanced student, instead of respecting a man more, respects him less if he pretends that he is incapable of sometimes making a slip. It is a maxim with chess-players, if you meet a player who says he has never been beaten, to offer to give him the odds of the rook. And what is intended plainly is, that the delusion of invincibility can never grow up in the mind of anyone except one who has never met a strong antagonist. Just in the same way, the delusion of infallibility can never grow up except in the mind of one who only mixes with inferiors, and does not allow his opinions to be tested by independent criticism. And we may say the same of Churches as of individuals. An infallible Church does not mean a Church which makes no mistakes, but only one which will neither acknowledge its mistakes nor correct them.

With respect to the teaching of secular knowledge, Universities have a function in some sort corresponding to that which the Church has been divinely appointed to fulfil in the communication of religious knowledge. If I said that University teaching of the mathematical and physical sciences was not infallible, you would not suspect me of being so ungrateful as to wish to disparage that teaching to which I owe all my own knowledge of these subjects. You would not suppose that I wished our students to receive with hesitation and suspicion the lessons of their instructors. You would not suppose that I was myself in the least sceptical as to the substantial truth of what is taught in these lessons. And yet I could not help owning that University teaching may possibly include errors, and must be willing to admit correction. Why, I could name one point of astronomical science in which it has altered within my own experience. When I was taught the planetary theory, I was given a demonstration, which I accepted as conclusive, that the changes in the orbits of the planets caused by their mutual action were all of a periodic character, and could not overthrow the stability of the system. At present the contrary opinion prevails, and it is held that the solar system is not

VII.] THE BEST HUMAN TEACHING NOT INFALLIBLE. III

constituted for eternal duration. In any case, no one can imagine that University teaching was infallible in those preReformation days, when what was taught was the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. And yet it would be equally false to say that University teaching was even then of small value; for I suppose the great reformer, Newton, could have made none of his discoveries if it had not been for the knowledge his University had taught him.

Now, we have no right to assume as self-evident that the laws which govern the communication of religious knowledge must be utterly unlike those which regulate our acquirement of every other kind of knowledge. In every other department of knowledge we must assert the necessity of human teaching; we must own that one who will not condescend to learn must be content to be ignorant; we must hold that the learner must receive the teaching he gets with deference and submission; and yet we do not imagine that the teachers are infallible, and we maintain that the learner ought ultimately to arrive at a point when he is no longer dependent on the mere testimony of his instructors, but becomes competent to pass an independent judgment on the truth of the statements made to him.

Improvements are made in metaphysics, political economy, and other sciences, not by persons who have thought out the whole subject for themselves, without help from others, but by those who, having been well instructed in what has been done already, then, by their own thought and study, correct the mistakes of their predecessors-even of the very teachers from whom they have themselves learned. In fact, the whole progress of the human race depends on the two things-human teaching, and teaching which will submit to correction. If there was no teaching there would be no progress, for each generation would start where its predecessor did, and there would be no reason why one should be more successful than another; and obviously there would be no progress if one generation was not permitted to improve on another. What actually happens is, that the new generation, rapidly learning from its predecessors, starts where they ended and is enabled

to advance further and to start the next generation on still more favourable terms.

There need be no difficulty now in coming to an agreement, that the divinely-appointed methods for man's acquirement of secular and of religious knowledge are not so very dissimilar. On the one hand, the finality and perfection of Church teaching-which was the doctrine of the older school of Roman Catholic advocates-is quite abandoned in the modern theory of development which has now become fashionable. That theory acknowledges that the teaching of the Church may be imperfect and incomplete; and though it is too polite to call it erroneous, the practical line of distinction between error and imperfection is a fine one and difficult to draw, as I could easily show by examples, if it were not that they would lead me too far from my subject. On the other hand we, for our part, are quite ready to admit that God did not intend us, in religious matters any more than in any other, to dispense with the instruction of others. We do not imagine that God meant each man to learn his religion from the Bible without getting help from anybody else. We freely confess that we need not only the Bible, but human instruction in it. And this need, we hold, was foreseen and provided for by the founder of our religion. He formed His followers into a community, each member of which was to be benefited by the good offices of the rest, and who, in particular, were to build up one another in their most holy Faith. More than this, He appointed a special order of men whose special duty it is to teach and to impress on the minds of the people the great doctrines of the Faith. In the institution of His Church, Christ has provided for the instruction of those who, either from youth or lack of time or of knowledge, might be unable or unlikely to study His Word for themselves.

Let me just remind you of the stock topics of declamation of Roman Catholics on the theme that Christ intended us to learn His religion, not from the Bible but from the Church. The first Christians, they tell us, did not learn their religion from books. There were flourishing Churches before any Book of the New Testament was written. The first Christians