VII.] FEW LEARN RELIGION DIRECTLY FROM BIBLE. 113 were taught by the living voice of apostles and evangelists and preachers. Since their time thousands upon thousands of good men have gone to heaven in ignorance of the Bible; for, before printing was discovered, books were scarce and the power of reading them uncommon. Even in our own time the illiterate are numerous; yet who will venture to deny that many, ignorant of the knowledge of this world, may be possessed of the knowledge that maketh wise unto salvation? All these have learned their religion from the Church, not the Bible. When those who can read take up the Bible, they find it is not a book adapted for teaching our religion to those who do not know it already. The writers of the New Testament were all addressing men who had been previously instructed orally and an acquaintance with the doctrines of the Gospel on the part of the reader is therefore assumed. The Bible itself contains no systematic statement of doctrine, no examples of the catechetical instruction given to the early converts. Of many most important doctrines you do not find the proof on the very surface of the Bible: you have to study the Scripture attentively to find it out; and it may well be doubted whether, in some cases, you would have ever found it if the Church had not pointed it out to you.

All this (to which much more of the same kind might be added) would be very difficult to answer, if we imagined it was any part of Christ's scheme to make us independent of the good offices of our fellow-men in learning our religion; but it goes idly by us who cheerfully acknowledge that Christ foresaw our need of human instruction, and provided for it, not only by the ordinary dispensations of His Providence, but by the institution of His Church, whose special duty it is to preserve His truth and proclaim it to the world. I need scarcely say how well this duty has been performed; how fully the Church provided, in her formularies and by the labour of her ministers, for the instruction of those who might be either unwilling or unable to obtain it otherwise. The illiterate may, through her, learn those truths which make wise unto salvation; the careless may have them forced on their attention: even the most learned have, by her means, their

I

study of God's Word aided to a greater degree than they are, perhaps, themselves aware of. Ever since the Church was founded, the work she has done in upholding the truth has been such, that the words 'pillar and ground of the truth' are not too strong to express the services she has rendered. She has preserved the Scriptures, and borne witness to their authority; she has, by her public reading, forced her members to become acquainted with them; she has embodied some of their most important doctrines in creeds which she has taught to her members. Even in the times when her teaching was mixed with most error she preserved the means of its correction. There was no new revelation of Divine truth made at the Reformation: it was by means of the Bible, which the Church had never ceased to honour, and through the instrumentality of regular clergy of the Church, and by reviving the memory of lessons taught by some of its most eminent teachers in former days, that the Reformation was brought about.

Nor do I hesitate to acknowledge the services rendered by the Church in the interpretation of Scripture. We need not hesitate to grant, in the case of the Bible, what we should grant in the case of any profane author. Were the object of our study an ordinary classical writer, an interpreter who, devoid of all sobriety of judgment, should scorn to study the opinions of the wise and learned men who had preceded him would be likely to arrive at conclusions more startling for their novelty than valuable for their correctness. Again, if the subject of our study were the opinions of a heathen philosopher, we should not refuse to consider the question, what was supposed to be his doctrine by the school which he founded? not that we should suppose their tradition to be more trustworthy authority as to the doctrines of their master than his own written statements. We might think it more likely than not, that a succession of ingenious men would add something of their own to what had been originally committed to them; and yet we should not think it right to refuse to listen to the tradition of the school as to the doctrine of its founder-to listen with attention, though not with blind acquiescence.

VII.]

HOW THE CHURCH OUGHT TO TEACH.

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But, when every concession to the authority of the Church and to the services she has rendered has been made, we come very far short of teaching her infallibility. A town clock is of excellent use in publicly making known with authority the correct time-making it known to many who, perhaps, at no time, and certainly not at all times, would find it convenient or even possible to verify its correctness for themselves. And yet it is clear, that one who maintained the great desirability of having such a clock, and believed it to be of great use to the neighbourhood, would not be in the least inconsistent if he also maintained that it was possible for the clock to go astray, and if, on that account, he inculcated the necessity of frequently comparing it with, and regulating it by, the dial which receives its light from heaven. And if we desired to remove an error which had accumulated during a long season of neglect, it would be very unfair to represent us as wishing to silence the clock, or else as wishing to allow every townsman to get up and push the hands back or forward as he pleased.

In sum, then, I maintain that it is the office of the Church to teach but that it is her duty to do so, not by making assertion merely, but by offering proofs; and, again, that while it is the duty of the individual Christian to receive with deference the teaching of the Church, it is his duty also not listlessly to acquiesce in her statements but to satisfy himself of the validity of her proofs.

I said, in a former Lecture, that the true analogy to the relation between a Christian teacher and his pupils is not that between a physician and his patients, but rather that between a physician and the class of students whom he is teaching medical science. A simple test will show that this was the view practically taken by the early Fathers. We never hear the captain of a ship going among the passengers and imploring them to study the charts, and not take his word that they are in the right course, but convince themselves of their true position. A physician does not exhort his patients to study their own case out of medical books; on the contrary, he would be sorry to see them perplexing themselves with a

study which could do them no good, but, on the contrary, might stand in the way of their obediently following his directions. But exhortation to study, of this kind, you will hear from a medical lecturer to the students whom he is teaching the profession. He will frankly tell them the reasons for the course of treatment which he advises; he will not ask them to receive anything merely on his authority; he will give them references to the best authors who have written on the same subject. He talks in this way to his class-never to the patients on whom he practises; so, in like manner, it would be the duty of the rulers of an infallible Church to exhort the people to receive their doctrines without question; but not to exhort them to examine the grounds on which the doctrine was established.

If, in fact, the Church be infallible, it is impossible to understand why the Bible was given. It cannot be of much use in making men wise unto salvation, for that the Church is supposed to do already. But it may be used by the ignorant and unstable to pervert it to their own destruction. If a Christian, reading the Bible for himself, puts upon it the interpretation which the Church puts upon it, he is still no better off than if he had never looked at it, and had contented himself with the same lessons as taught by the Church; but if he puts upon it a different interpretation from that of the Church (and if the Church be infallible, her interpretation is right and every other wrong), then he is deeply injured by having been allowed to examine for himself. Thus, if the Church be infallible, Bible reading is all risk and no gain. And so, in modern times the Church of Rome has always discouraged the reading of the Scriptures by her people; and if her theory be right, she has done so consistently and wisely. And therefore I say it is a proof that this theory was not held in ancient times, when we find that the early Fathers had no such scruples, but incessantly urged on their congregations the duty of searching the Scriptures for themselves.

I will take one Father as an example-St. Chrysostom; and there is no unfairness in my choosing him, for I do so only on account of his eloquence and vigour. You will find

VII.]

THE EARLY FATHERS AND THE BIBLE.

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the same sentiments, though perhaps less forcibly expressed, in every early Father. My quotations from him will serve a double purpose: both to prove the point on which I am immediately engaged-that at that time Christian teachers, instead of asking their people to receive their statements on the authority of an infallible Church, urged them to consult for themselves the sources of proof-and also to prepare the way for the next point in the controversy, namely, that the sources of proof used were exclusively the Holy Scrip

tures.

Now, on the first inspection of Chrysostom's works, you see that they were composed for people who had the Bible in their hands. The great bulk of his works consists of reports of his sermons; and, as a general rule, these sermons are not of the kind of which we have so many excellent examples at the present day: expositions of doctrine, or exhortations to holy living, with a Scripture text prefixed as a motto; but they are systematic expositions of Scripture itself. The preacher takes a book of the Bible and goes regularly through it, lecturing on it, verse by verse. Preaching of this kind would evidently have no interest except for men who had the Bible in their hands, and wished for a guide to enable them to understand it better. We have expositions of this kind in the works of several of the most eminent Fathers, both Greek and Latin. But indeed, in the case of the Latin Fathers, we require no elaborate proof that the Church then, so far from desiring to check the study of the Scriptures, placed them in the hands of the people, and encouraged them to read them. The existence of the Latin translation, dating from an early part of the second century, is evidence enough of this fact. For whose benefit can we suppose that that translation was made? The knowledge of Greek was then the accomplishment of every educated Roman. It would have been far harder then to find a Roman gentleman who did not understand Greek than it would be now to find an English gentleman who does not know either Latin or French. The Bible was translated into Latin, because the Latin Church, in those days, wished that not merely the wealthy, and the highly educated, but