1. The religious certainty of a large majority of Christian believers rests, nominally at least, upon the authority of the Church. Conceiving of religion as a gift to us from God in the sense of a sacred deposit handed down for man’s guidance perfect and complete in all of its appointments and arrangements, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that its explanation will be rigidly immutable. There will be great doctrines to be accepted with unquestioning faith and definite duties to be performed with undeviating loyalty. The infallible Church and the infallible Pope are a natural and logical necessity in this view of the situation. Indeed if an infallible authority, outside the individual soul, is absolutely necessary to the religious life for the development of certainty, the Roman Church has the only logical and rational doctrine of such infallibility.
This infallible claim is made for example by Cardinal Manning, who asserts: “That God has not only revealed His Truth, but has made a divine and imperishable provision for the custody,
perpetuity, and promulgation of His Truth to the world; that is to say, through the channel of His Church, divinely founded, divinely preserved from error, and divinely assisted in the declaration of Truth.” [Note: Contemporary Review, xxiv. 153.]
2. The conception of faith as a body of doctrine, supernaturally accredited and therefore to be accepted in its entirety, is primitive. The guiding idea of Catholicism began to establish itself as soon as there was a Church for it to grow in. “The Catholic theory of apostolic tradition,” says Sabatier, who writes from a Protestant standpoint, “is found clearly defined and established as an infallible and sovereign law in the times of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus.” The concentration of power in the hands of the Roman Church, as the authoritative interpreter of this tradition, advanced as if by an automatic process. To quote Sabatier again: “The future centre of the Catholic Church appeared from the commencement of the second century,” and in the year 194, “for the first time a bishop of Rome, Victor, speaks as master to the other bishops, presents himself as interpreter and arbiter of the universal Church, acts as universal bishop, and proclaims heretical the churches that would resist his authority.” In Cyprian’s time the bishops were all theoretically equal. Yet such is the interior logic of the system that Cyprian himself laid the foundation of a new evolution which was to produce from the body of bishops that episcopus episcoporum against whom he had tried to guard himself. The trend of the Catholic polity towards a centralized despotism went on irresistibly and inexorably.
When once the Roman primacy is recognized, all later developments of the papal prerogative, down to our own times, are only the logical conclusion of the Catholic conception of the Church. The infallibility which was the attribute of the universal Church was gradually concentrated in the Roman Church, and thence passed to the Roman bishop. When the Pope was held to be the head and voice of the Church, the infallibility of the Church could not express itself through another mouth.
Roman Catholicism is a religion of authority. When a man who has been a Protestant becomes a Roman Catholic, he must learn a kind of submission that we in England, or America, know nothing of in any other relation of life, unless we are soldiers on a campaign. Where the Church has spoken, the loyal Catholic must obey without question. Nor is this authority confined to religious matters. “That authority,” says Cardinal Newman, “has the prerogative of an indirect jurisdiction on subject-matters which lie beyond its own proper limits, and it most reasonably has such a jurisdiction. It could not properly defend religious truth without claiming for that truth what may be called its pomoeria, or, to take another illustration, without acting as we act, as a nation, in claiming as our own not only the land on which we live, but what are called British waters. The Catholic Church claims, not only to judge infallibly on religious questions, but to animadvert on opinions in secular matters which bear upon religion, on matters of philosophy, of science, of literature, of history, and it demands our submission to her claim. It claims to censure books, to silence authors, and to forbid discussions. It must, of course, be obeyed without a word, and perhaps, in process of time, it will tacitly recede from its own injunctions.” [Note: W. R. Inge, Faith, 92.]
The following words, written by Father Morris in his last retreat, and quoted in his Life by Father J. H. Pollen, S.J., will cast further light on his character, and confirm the impression left by the description in the Autobiography :
“In all my life as a Catholic, now fully forty-seven years, I cannot remember a single temptation against faith that seemed to me to have any force. The Church’s teaching is before me, as a glorious series of splendid certainties. My mind is absolutely satisfied. Faith is an unmixed pleasure to me, without any pain, any difficulty, any drawback. . . . I have no private judgment to overcome, and no desire to exercise my private judgment. It is a greater pleasure to receive and possess truth with certainty, than to go in search of it and to be in uncertainty whether it has been found. The teaching of the Church is perfectly worthy of God, and it makes me happy. A declaration or definition of the Holy See is a real joy to me. So much more of certain and safe possession of truth.” [Note: M. D. Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, i. 229.]
3. But the testimony of the Church is not to be set aside because the Roman Church claims infallibility. By the testimony of the Church ought to be understood the voice of believing men throughout all the ages. In Romanism the testimony of the Church has been limited to her authoritative teaching of doctrine, when she is really working in an intellectual sphere, and is demanding an intellectual faith. The testimony of the Church should be extended to include her witness to the salvation of the human soul, through the grace of Jesus Christ, and here she is speaking within a spiritual sphere, and is making her appeal to the heart. Her witness is of incalculable value, and comes short only of the testimony of Holy Scripture. Should any one hesitate to believe the gospel declared by the prophets and apostles in the Bible, because it is too good to be true, or should any one desire some human evidence from those who have made the great experiment of faith, then the Church comes in and supplements the contents of Holy Scripture.
An innumerable company of saints of all ages and various intellectual creeds declare that they have heard the voice of God, and have gone forth like Abraham at His command, risking their whole spiritual position and an unknown future upon the Word of God and the Person of Jesus Christ. They have run this risk, and they have not been put to confusion; they have rather discovered, and are prepared to declare, that the half had not been told them of the goodly land into which they have already come, and whose fulness stretches before them into Eternity. It is as if a sinful man, penitent for his past and longing to see the salvation of God, should stand at the door of God’s Kingdom holding in his hand one of the great invitations of the Evangel, such as “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” (Joh_6:37) “Is this to be read,” he says, “in the fulness of its meaning? And is it possible that such a person as I am embraced in its intention? ” Unto this wistful soul comes one witness after another from the gates of the Kingdom, prophets, apostles, saints, martyrs. Each one comes now as an individual believer, and each one as he comes sets his seal upon the invitation, declaring that he has trusted, and that God has been true. And at the sound of this Amen the fearful soul plucks up heart to believe.
When we come to religious maturity our only authority must be faith’s object itself in some direct self-revelation of it. Our authority is what takes the initiative with our faith. Only so is the authority really religious, only as creative. Our only final religious authority is the creative object of our religion, to whom we owe ourselves. Every statement about God is challengeable till God states Himself, in His own way, by His own Son, His own Spirit, His own Word, His own Church, to our soul, which He remakes in the process. And the challenge, coming at the right place (alas, for the heartlessness of those who force it!), is God’s ordinance, to drive us onward and inward upon the soul’s centre and King there. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 22.]
4. Ruskin has written in his picturesque way: “There is therefore, in matter of doctrine, no such thing as the Authority of the Church. We might as well talk of the authority of a morning cloud. There may be light in it, but the light is not of it; and it diminishes the light that it gets; and lets less of it through than it receives, Christ being its sun. Or, we might as well talk of the authority of a flock of sheep—for the Church is a body to be taught and fed, not to teach and feed; and of all sheep that are fed on earth, Christ’s sheep are the most simple (the children of this generation are wiser), always losing themselves; doing little else in the world but lose themselves; never finding themselves; always found by Some One else; getting perpetually into sloughs, and snows, and bramble thickets; like to die there, but for their Shepherd, who is for ever finding them and bearing them back, with torn fleeces and eyes full of fear.” [Note: Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds.]
The half-truth thus eloquently expressed needs, no doubt, to be supplemented by another view of the Church’s mission. Ecclesia doom is still a reality. The Church, as part of its high calling, is set to teach. It is a pillar and support of the truth, although it is not, as both the Authorized and Revised Versions make it in 1Ti_3:15, “the pillar and foundation.”
There are few passages of the New Testament (writes Dr. Hort [The Christian Ecclesia, 174.]) in which the reckless disregard of the presence or absence of the Article has made wilder havoc of the sense than this. To speak of either an Ecclesia or the Ecclesia as being the pillar of the truth is to represent the truth as a building, standing in the air supported on a single column. Again, there is no clear evidence that the rare word “eklegomai” (ἑδραίωμα)ever means “ground” = “foundation.” It is rather, in accordance with the almost universal Latin rendering, firmamentum, a “stay” or “bulwark.” St. Paul’s idea, then, is that each living society of Christian men is a pillar or stay of “the Truth,” as an object of belief and a guide of life for mankind; each such Christian society bearing its part in sustaining and supporting the one truth common to all.
While, then, we reverently listen to the voice of the Christian Congregation, whether in the smaller societies of the faithful or in their aggregated numbers, so far as their collective utterance can be heard, we still claim the right to hear and to interpret for ourselves, as far as in us lies, the Oracles of God. For we are personally responsible.
It would be difficult to over-estimate the harm done by the claim of any organization to exclusive Authority in matters of faith. For when a claim to infallibility is coupled with the prohibition of all independent inquiry two results follow—bigotry and scepticism: bigotry in those who cannot think, and scepticism in those who can. [Note: S. P. Thompson, The Quest for Truth, 102.]
Let every man who is engaged in persecuting any opinion ponder it; these two things must follow: you make fanatics, and you make sceptics; believers you cannot make. [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1st series.]
Archbishop Temple says: “The study of Theology and Criticism imperatively demands freedom for its conditions. To tell a man to study and yet bid him, under heavy penalties, to come to the same conclusion with those who have not studied is to mock him. If the conclusions are prescribed, the study is precluded.”
Westcott, late Bishop of Durham, writes: “The life of man is the knowledge of God. But this knowledge lives and moves. It is not a dead thing embalmed once for all in phrases.”
Compare the above with a recent Roman Catholic episcopal utterance, part of a pastoral address: “If the Abbe Loisy has followers within the Church, as we are informed he has, it cannot be doubted that the danger for Catholics is by no means imaginary. . . . In his view our present knowledge of the Universe should suggest to the Church a new examination of the dogma of Creation. . . . But,” says the Bishop, “if the formulas of modern science contradict the science of Catholic dogma, it is the former that must be altered, not the latter” (Extract from “The Tablet,” 27 August 1904. Address by the Bishop of Newport). [Note: C. L. Drawbridge, Is Religion Undermined? 7.]
