II.]

THE ROMISH CHURCH AND THE BIBLE.

27

feature, that there is another title-page which describes each as of the twenty-fourth thousand. But at page 112 the question and answer which I have quoted are to be found in the one book, and are absent from the other. It is, therefore, impossible now to maintain that the faith of the Church of Rome never changes, when it is notorious that there is something which is now part of her faith which those who had a good right to know declared was no part of her faith twenty years ago."

I will not delay to speak of many changes in Roman teaching consequent on the definition of Papal Infallibility; but you can easily understand that there are a great many statements officially made by several Popes which, inasmuch as they rested on papal authority alone, learned Roman Catholics had formerly thought themselves at liberty to reject, but which must now be accepted as articles of faith. But what I wish now to speak of is, that the forced confession of change, at least by way of addition, in Roman teach⚫ing has necessitated a surrender of the principles on which her system had formerly been defended; and this was what I had specially in mind when I spoke of the fortress of Infallibility as the last refuge of a beaten army, who, when driven from this, must fall into total rout.

The first revolt against Romanism took place when the Bible was made easily accessible. When, by means of trans

In reply to the above it has been said that it has been customary with heretics to accuse the Church of changing her doctrine whenever she finds it necessary, for the first time, to pass condemnation on some newly invented heresy; and that if the Church of Rome can fairly be accused of having changed her doctrine at the Vatican Council, the Church of the fourth century may, with equal fairness, be accused of having changed her doctrine at the Council of Nicæa. But in order to make the parallel a just one, it would be necessary to show that all through the first three centuries it had been a permissible opinion in the Christian Church to hold that our Blessed Lord was not truly and properly God: and further that, when heathen assailants had accused the Church of worshipping Christ as God, it had been customary with Christian apologists to answer, 'this is a heathen invention; the Christian Church has never regarded Christ as God in the highest sense of the word.' If such a defence had been made by the ablest of the Christian advocates, and if their apologies had been circulated with the approbation of all the leading bishops, then it would have been impossible to resist the Arian allegation that the Council of Nicæa had innovated on the ancient faith of the Church.

lations printed in the vulgar languages of Europe, a knowledge of the New Testament became general, men could not help taking notice that the Christianity then taught by the Church was a very different thing from that which was preached by the Apostles, and that a host of doctrines were taught as necessary to salvation by the modern Church, of which, as far as we could learn from the Bible, the early Church knew nothing. Whether the doctrines of Romanism can be proved from the Bible is a matter which you can judge for yourselves; but if there is any doubt about it, that doubt is removed by watching the next stage of the controversy. The Roman Catholic advocates ceased to insist that the doctrines of the Church could be deduced from Scripture; but the theory of some early heretics, refuted by Irenæus* was revived, namely, that the Bible does not contain the whole of God's revelation, and that a body of traditional doctrine existed in the Church equally deserving of veneration.

At this time, however, all parties were agreed that through our Lord and His Apostles a revelation unique in the history of the world had been made to mankind. All parties imagined that it was the truths then made known, neither more nor less, that the Church was to preserve and teach. All parties agreed that the Holy Scriptures might be implicitly depended on as an inspired record of these truths. The main difference was as to how far the Bible record of them could be regarded as complete. Things were taught and practised in the Roman Church for which the Bible furnished no adequate justification; and the Roman advocates

When they [the Valentinian heretics] are confuted from the Scriptures they turn round and accuse these same Scriptures as if they were not correct, nor of authority, for that they are ambiguously worded, and that the truth cannot be discovered from them by those who are ignorant of tradition. For they say that the truth was not delivered in writing but viva voce; wherefore Paul also declared "We speak wisdom among them that are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world" (Irenæus iii. c. 2.) And to make the analogy complete, Irenæus goes on to complain that when the Church met these heretics on their own ground of tradition, then they had recourse to a theory of development claiming to be then in possession of purer doctrine than that which the Apostles had been content to teach.

11.]

THE ROMISH CHURCH AND THE FATHERS.

29

insisted that, though the Bible contained truth, it did not contain the whole truth, and that the Church was able, by her traditions, to supplement the deficiencies of Scripture, having in those traditions a secure record of apostolic teaching on many points on which the Bible contained only obscure indications, or even gave no information at all.

This Roman assertion might be met in two ways. Many, probably the majority, of the Protestants refused to listen at all to doctrines said to be binding on their faith, and not asserted to be taught in Scripture; and we shall afterwards see that they had the sanction of several of the most eminent Fathers for thinking that what was asserted without the authority of Holy Scripture might be 'despised as freely as approved." But there were champions of our Church who met the Roman case in another way. They declared that, as they had been convinced by historical proof that the books of the New Testament were written by Apostles or apostolical men, so they had no objection to examine whether similar historic proof could be given of the apostolic origin of any of the peculiar doctrines of Romanism.

*

Bellarmine, indeed, had given as one of his rules for knowing whether or not the proof of a Church doctrine rested on tradition,† that if a doctrine taught by the Church could not be proved by Scripture, it must be proved by tradition; for the Church could not teach wrong; and so the doctrine must be proved either in the one way or the other. But it would be too much to expect from us that we should admit a failure of Scripture proof to constitute in itself a proof by tradition. We have a right to ask, If the Church learned that doctrine by tradition, where has that tradition been recorded? Who are the ancient authors that mention it? If the thing has been handed down from the Apostles the Church of the first centuries must have believed or practised it let us inquire, as we should in the case of any other historical question, whether she did or not.

Bishop Jewel, in his celebrated challenge, enumerated

Hieron. in Matt. xxiii. + De verbo Dei, iv. 9.

twenty-seven points of the Roman Catholic teaching of his day, and declared that if any learned man of our adversaries or all the learned men that be alive, were able to bring any one sufficient sentence out of any old Catholic Doctor or Father, or General Council, or Holy Scripture, or any one example in the Primitive Church, whereby it might be clearly and plainly proved that any of them was taught for the first 600 years, then he would be content to yield and subscribe. Not, of course, that Jewel meant that a single instance of a doctrine being taught during the first six centuries was enough to establish its truth, but he meant to express his strong conviction that in the case of the twenty-seven doctrines he enumerated no such instance could be produced.

I do not wonder that many Protestants looked on this historic method as a very perilous way of meeting the claims of Romanism. In the first place, it deserted the ground of Scripture, on which they felt sure of victory, for that of history, on which success might be doubtful; and, in the second place, it needed no learned apparatus to embark on the Scripture controversy. Any intelligent layman might satisfy himself what amount of recognition was given to a doctrine in the Bible; but the battle on the field of history could only be fought by learned men, and would go on out of sight of ordinary members of the Church, who would be quite incompetent to tell which way the victory had gone.

When two opposing generals meet in battle, and both send home bulletins of victory, and Te Deums are sung in churches on both sides, we, who sit at home, may find it hard to understand which way the battle has gone. But if we look at the map, and see where the next battle is fought, and if we find that one general is making 'for strategic reasons' a constant succession of movements towards the rear, and that he ends by completely evacuating the country he at first undertook to defend, then we may suspect that his glorious victories were perhaps not quite so brilliant as he had represented them to be. And so, when the Church of England champions left the plain ground of Scripture, and proceeded to interchange quotations from the Fathers, plain men, out of whose sight the battle now went, might be excused for

II.]

THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT.

31

apprehension as to the result, themselves being scarcely competent to judge of the force of the passages quoted on each side. But when they find that the heads of the Roman Catholic Church now think it as great a heresy to appeal to antiquity, as to appeal to Scripture, they have cause for surmising which way the victory has gone.

The first strategic movement towards the rear was the doctrine of development, which has seriously modified the old theory of tradition. When Dr. Newman became a Roman Catholic, it was necessary for him in some way to reconcile this step with the proofs he had previously given that certain distinctive Romish doctrines were unknown to the early Church. The historical arguments he had advanced in his Anglican days were incapable of refutation even by himself. But it being hopeless to maintain that the present teaching of Roman Catholics is identical with the doctrine held in the primitive Church, he set himself to show that though not the same, it was a great deal better. This is the object of the celebrated Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which he published simultaneously with his submission to the Roman Church. The theory expounded in it in substance is, that Christ had but committed to His Church certain seeds and germs of truth, destined afterwards to expand to definite forms: consequently, that our Lord did not intend that the teaching of His Church should be always the same; but ordained that it should go on continually improving under the guidance of His Holy Spirit. This theory was not altogether new. Not to speak of earlier anticipations of it, it had been maintained, not many years previously, by the German divine, Möhler, in his work called Symbolik; and this mode of defending the Roman system had been adopted in the theological lectures of Perrone, Professor in the Jesuit College at Rome. But Newman's book had the effect of making the theory popular to an extent it had never been before, and of causing its general adoption by Romish advocates, who are now content to exchange tradition, which their predecessors had made the basis of their system, for this new foundation. of development. You will find them now making shameless confession of the novelty of articles of their creed, and even