THE CARDINAL IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION OF INFALLIBILITY.

You will easily understand that it would be absolutely

impossible for me, in the course of these lectures, to go through all the details of the Roman Catholic controversy. You have in your hands text-books which will give you information on all the most important points. But the truth is, that the issues of the controversy mainly turn on one great question, which is the only one that I expect to be able to discuss with you-I mean the question of the Infalli- • bility of the Church. If that be decided against us, our whole case is gone, and victories on the details of the controversy would profit us as little as, to use a favourite illustration of Archbishop Whately's, it profits a chess-player to win some pieces and pawns if he gets his king checkmated. In fact, suppose we make what seems to ourselves a quite convincing proof that some doctrine of the Roman Church is not contained in Scripture, what does that avail if we are forced to own that that Church has access to other sources of information besides Scripture as to the doctrine taught by our Lord and His Apostles? Suppose we even consider that we have proved a Roman doctrine to be contrary to Scripture, what does that avail if we are compelled to acknowledge that we are quite incompetent to decide what is Scripture or what is the meaning of it, and if it belongs to the Church of Rome alone to give us the book and to teach us its true interpretation ? In like manner, if our study of history should lead us to the conclusion that the teaching of the present Church is at variance

with the teaching of the Church of former days, we are forced to surrender this ill-grounded suspicion of ours if we are made to believe that the Church cannot err, and, as a necessary consequence, that her teaching must be at all times the same.

One can scarcely open any book that attempts to deal with controversy by such a Roman Catholic as, for instance, Cardinal Manning, without being forced to observe how his faith in the infallibility of the present Church makes him impenetrable to all arguments. Suppose, for example, the question in dispute is the Pope's personal infallibility, and that you object to him the case of Honorius: he replies, At most you could make out that it is doubtful whether Honorius was orthodox; but it is certain that a Pope could not be a heretic. Well, you reply, at least the case of Honorius shows that the Church of the time supposed that a Pope could be a heretic. Not so, he answers, for the Church now holds that a Pope speaking ex cathedra cannot err, and the Church could not have taught differently at any other time.

Thus, as long as anyone really believes in the infallibility of his Church, he is proof against any argument you can ply him with. Conversely, when faith in this principle is shaken, belief in some other Roman Catholic doctrine is sure also to be disturbed; for there are some of these doctrines in respect of which nothing but a very strong belief that the Roman Church cannot decide wrongly will prevent a candid inquirer from coming to the conclusion that she has decided wrongly. This simplification, then, of the controversy realizes for us the wish of the Roman tyrant that all his enemies had but one neck. If we can but strike one blow, the whole battle is won.

If the vital importance of this question of Infallibility had not been sufficiently evident from a priori considerations, I should have been convinced of it from the history of the Roman Catholic controversy as it has been conducted in my own lifetime. When I first came to an age to take lively interest in the subject Dr. Newman and his coadjutors were publishing, in the Tracts for the Times, excellent refutations of the Roman doctrine on Purgatory and on some other important points. A very few years afterwards, without making the smallest attempt to answer their own arguments, these

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men went over to Rome, and bound themselves to believe and teach as true things which they had themselves proved to be false. The accounts which those who went over in that movement gave of their reasons for the change show surprising indifference to the ordinary topics of the controversy, and in some cases leave us only obscurely to discern why they went at all. It was natural that many who witnessed the sudden collapse of the resistance which had been offered to Roman Catholic teaching should conclude that it had been a sham fight all along; but this was unjust. It rather resembled what not unfrequently occurs in the annals of warfare when, after entrenchments have been long and obstinately assaulted without success, some great general has taken up a position which has caused them to be evacuated without a struggle.

While the writers of the Tracts were assailing with success different points of Roman teaching, they allowed themselves to be persuaded that Christ must have provided His people with some infallible guide to truth; and they accepted the Church of Rome as that guide, with scarcely an attempt to make a careful scrutiny of the grounds of her pretensions, and merely because, if she were not that guide, they knew not where else to find it. Thus, when they were beaten on the one question of Infallibility, their victories on other points availed them nothing.

Perhaps those who then submitted to the Church of Rome scarcely realized all that was meant in their profession of faith in their new guide. They may have thought it meant no more than belief that everything the Church of Rome then taught was infallibly true. Events soon taught them that it meant besides that they must believe everything that that Church might afterwards teach; and her subsequent teaching put so great a strain on the faith of the new converts, that in a few cases it was more than it could bear.

The idea that the doctrine of the Church of Rome is always the same is one which no one of the present day can hold without putting an enormous strain on his understanding. It used to be the boast of Romish advocates that the teaching of their Church was unchangeable. Heretics, they used to say,

show by their perpetual alterations that they never have had hold of the truth. They move the ancient landmarks without themselves foreseeing whither their new principles will lead them; and so after a while, discovering their position to be untenable, they vainly try by constant changes to reduce their system to some semblance of consistency. Our Church, on the contrary, they said, ever teaches the same doctrine which has been handed down from the Apostles, and has since been taught 'everywhere, always, and by all.' Divines of our Church used to expose the falsity of this boast by comparing the doctrine now taught in the Church of Rome with that taught in the Church of early times, and thus established by historical proof that a change had occurred. But now the matter has been much simplified; for no laborious proof is necessary to show that that is not unchangeable which has changed under our very eyes. The rate of change is not like that of the hour-hand of a watch, which you must note at some considerable intervals of time in order to see that there has been a movement, but rather like that of the second-hand, which you can actually see moving.

The first trial of the faith of the new converts was the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in 1854, when a doctrine was declared to be the universal ancient tradition of the Church, on which eminent divines had notoriously held different opinions, so much so, that this diversity had been accounted for by Bishop Milner and other controversialists by the assertion that neither Scripture nor tradition contained anything on the subject.

The manner of that decree, intended to bind the universal Church, was remarkable. It was not a vote of a council. Bishops, indeed, had been previously consulted, and bishops were assembled to hear the decision; but the decision rested on the authority of the Pope alone. It was correctly foreseen that what was then done was intended to establish a precedent. I remember then how the news came that the Pope proposed to assemble a council, and how those who had the best right to know predicted that this council was to terminate the long controversy as to the relative superiority of Popes and councils, by owning the personal infallibility of the Pope, and so making

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it unnecessary that any future council should be held. This announcement created the greatest ferment in the Roman Catholic Church; and those who passed for the men of highest learning in that communion, and who had been wont to be most relied on, when learned Protestants were to be combated, opposed with all their might the contemplated definition, as an entire innovation on the traditional teaching of the Church, and as absolutely contradicted by the facts of history. These views were shared by Dr. Newman. His own inclinations had not favoured any extravagant cult of the Virgin Mary, and he was too well acquainted with Church History not to know that the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception was a complete novelty, unknown to early times, and, when first put forward, condemned by some of the most esteemed teachers of the Church. But when the Pope formally promulgated that doctrine as part of the essential faith of the Church, he had submitted in silence. When, however, it was proposed to declare the Pope's personal infallibility, this was a doctrine so directly in the teeth of history, that Newman made no secret of his persuasion that the authoritative adoption of it would be attended with ruinous consequences to his Church, by placing what seemed an insuperable obstacle to any man of learning entering her fold. He wrote in passionate alarm to an English Roman Catholic bishop (Ullathorne): 'Why,' he said, ‘should an aggressive insolent faction be allowed "to make the heart of the just sad, whom the Lord hath not made sorrowful"? Why cannot we be let alone when we have pursued peace and thought no evil? I assure you, my Lord, some of the truest minds are driven one way and another, and do not know where to rest their feet-one day determining to give up all theology as a bad job, and recklessly to believe henceforth almost that the Pope is impeccable, at another tempted to believe all the worst which a book like Janus says: ... Then, again, think of the store of Pontifical scandals in the history of eighteen centuries, which have partly been poured forth and partly are still to come... And then, again, the blight which is falling upon the multitude of Anglican ritualists, &c., who themselves perhaps at least their leaders-may never become Catholics, but who are leavening the various English denomi