IX.

THE BIBLE, THE CHURCH, AND THE

RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT.

To discourse on the Right of Private Judgment in our time may seem to some people an unnecessary revival of an old controversy on which the dust of generations has been gradually settling. It may seem like an attempt to thrice slay the slain to try to prove in the nineteenth century that every man has a right to read the Bible for himself, and to bring its teachings to the test of his own spiritual insight and common sense. But we have been taught sometimes that it is not safe to be silent on great principles from the feeling that they are too firmly established ever to be disturbed. Questions we thought to have been settled once for all by the struggles of the past, have sometimes turned out not to be so settled as we supposed. Error is not immortal, but it goes through a great many shapes before it disappears, and we can never be quite sure that the old spirits of darkness are really dead. For after all human nature is very much the same in all generations. Minds with the same affinities for special forms of error are born in one century as well as another, and revive what was thought to have been obsolete. Then too, after a time, men who have had a long enjoyment of liberty get to undervalue it. The fathers won it after a baptism of fire and blood, but the children born in easier times know nothing of the struggle

by experience, and very soon forget what they have been told. And as sure as the watch slumbers evil steals into the city; spiritual ambition makes encroachments and spiritual indolence submits; the old fallacies are tricked out again in slightly different shape, and the old armour is refurbished, so that it becomes necessary to renew the old war-cries, and to fight the ancient battles once again.

It is so with the question of human authority in the matter of religion, of which I have to speak to-night. It is in our time as in all time before us, in our search for truth we have to guard against two foes of a totally opposite character-scepticism which will believe nothing, and superstition which is ready to believe anything. First, scepticism assails the faith of God and tries to bring in a wretched materialism which cuts all our spiritual aspirations down to nothing. Whereupon the priest seeing his opportunity steps forward and pointing to the dreary waste made by unbelief says " You see what it comes to if you begin to exercise human reason on religious questions. There is rest and safety only in the bosom of the Church. The Church is the authorised depository of truth, and the right thing to do is to accept such truth as she may give you. As soon as men begin to think for themselves see what endless variations and confusions they get into. Once you are outside the true Church and the lawfully constituted authority, see what innumerable sects rise up and what a Babel of voices; therefore cease your own striving and believe what the Church believes." To all which we feel disposed to reply:-These differences of which so much is made are not nearly so great as priests would wish us to believe. There is as much unity in vital things without the Church as there is within,-perhaps a little more. Moreover, variety of opinion is by no means necessarily an evil thing; important truths which might otherwise be overlooked are thus brought to the front. Truth is larger than any one

human system, and no one set of minds can compass it all round. Anything is better than stagnation and death. Moreover, the great object of God's training of our life here is to make men, not systems; and men are best made not by quiescence but by struggle and earnest search. All kinds of help are good but that which smothers self-help. There never was an ecclesiastical or civil government which undertook to think for men and tell them how to think, and to act for them and tell them how to act, that did not take from them the power of thinking and acting to any purpose. There was never a government of Church or State which took from men the necessity of individual responsibility, that made men that were worth having.

I. Now all these questions are quick and stirring in our own time—have had indeed quite a revival, and one can hardly lecture as I have been doing on the Bible and pass by the enquiry-Has this Book of God been given to the people at large or to the priest alone? The Church of Rome for many generations has given a very plain answer to the question. Of one thing we are quite certain: that if the Bible were made the sole, the authoritative source of religious truth, there would have to be a clearing out of a multitude of superstitions which are now part of her system, and which the faithful are expected to believe. With a very sagacious instinct she has always refused to let the common people have the Word of God for themselves. As far back as 1239 the Synod of Tarragona denounced as a heretic any one who, having a translation of the Bible, refused to surrender it to be burnt within ten days. Clement XI., about 1709, by a special Bull condemned the reading of the Bible by the laity. In another Bull, Pius VI. says—“It is an error to assert that, except in cases of inability, all should read the Scriptures. The Church prohibits the use of the Holy Scriptures in the vulgar tongue and permits only the use of those which are published with the approbation of the

Holy See, and with notes of the Fathers and other Catholic writers." After the formation of the Bible Society, Pius VII. wrote to the Bishop of Gnesna in Poland, declaring such societies "a most crafty, contagious invention which must be destroyed." Leo XII., in 1824, exhorted all the Bishops of the Catholic Church to watch against the two pernicious evils-indifferentism and Bible societies. Pius IX., writing from his retreat in Naples in 1849, charges the Bishops earnestly to remind the faithful under their charge "with special reference to the Holy Scriptures, that no person whatever is warranted to confide in human judgment as to their true meaning if opposed to the Holy Mother Church, who alone, and no other, has received the commission from Christ to watch over the faith committed to her trust, and to decide upon the true sense and interpretation of the sacred writings." And last, though not least in point of expressiveness, as late as 1850, the Archbishop of Milan and seven Bishops of the Province of Lombardy, reminded their clergy "how repeatedly the Church, by the mouth of the Roman Pontiffs, has forbidden her children to read the Bible in any vulgar tongue whatsoever, though free from all suspicion." All this is plain enough and has been practically carried out. In ancient times men have been burnt at the stake for no other crime than that of reading the Bible; and in our own day the reports of our Bible Society have been forced into a painful monotony in telling us year after year of the bitter and unyielding resistance of the priests on the continent to the introduction of the Word of God. Now I am not here to impugn the sincerity of these men any more than I should impugn the sincerity of Saul of Tarsus when he persecuted the church of God. But I am here to say of them what I should say of him, that they are grievously and perniciously wrong; that by setting aside the word of God in favour of that undefinable thing, church authority, they have inflicted irreparable mischief upon the intelligent piety of the christian community. Let me briefly

show why the private judgment of the Bible by every man for himself cannot be righteously set aside in favour of the so-called authority of the church.

(1) Before a man can accept that authority he must, of course, exercise his private judgment upon it in the same way as we ask him to exercise it on the Bible. Even Rome admits this by setting forth her credentials and supporting them by arguments, thus making her appeal to the very private judgment she repudiates. She makes her appeal to those very faculties which she forbids men to use, and calls upon them to exercise their private judgment in order that they may see it to be their duty not to exercise their private judgment. Before a man can fairly have satisfied himself that the authority of the church is what it represents itself to be, he must have thought out a great many questions of greater magnitude than those he is asked to accept without thought. Before he can accept the authority of the church, the word church must have a vital meaning for him. Its authority is supposed to be based on the fact that it is a society founded by the Son of God incarnate; therefore before a man can accept the authority of a society founded by Him, he must believe that the Son of God was really incarnate. A man must be a believer in God before he is a believer in Christ as the Son of God, and he must be a believer in Christ before he is a Roman Catholic. He must arrive at these momentous conclusions on their own evidence by virtue of the inherent claim they assert over our conscience and our reason, before he can touch the questions involved in the assertions that Peter was supreme among the Apostles, that he was Bishop of Rome, that as such he was made Christ's vicar on earth, and that he transmitted his supremacy down to the present Pope. A man who can settle questions like these may very fairly be trusted with the Bible for himself. To affirm that the sound judgment of men can conduct them so far but no farther, looks very like saying that the moment