66 we later. As an antagonist he seems to have 66 66 of Christ, and dictated to them by the Holy Ghost, and passed from one to another,) doth, according to the example of the fathers, receive with equal reverence and pious affection, all the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the traditions belonging to faith and manners, as proceeding from the mouth of Christ, or dictated by the Holy Ghost, and pre-proof of his Roman devotion, by leaving served in the Catholic Church." Then, one half of his soul to the Virgin Mary, setting down a catalogue of the books, the and the other half to Jesus Christ. The decree concludes, "If any one will not sentiments of this author respecting the receive, as sacred and canonical, all the rule of faith, while they coincide exactly books, with all their parts, as in the with the decrees of the Council of Trent, Catholic Church they are accustomed to are accompanied with somewhat like be read, and are contained in the old argument. His words are, Apostolic Latin vulgate edition, and shall wittingly traditions unwritten, have the same force and purposely despise the acknowledged as written apostolic traditions;" and he traditions, let him be accursed." In regard assigns as a reason, The Word of God to the interpretation of Scripture, the is not alike, nor does it possess any authoCouncil, in its decree respecting the userity because written on pieces of parchof the sacred book, ordains, That for ment, but because it has proceeded from the purpose of bridling licentious wits, God, either immediately, or through the no person, confiding in his own skill in medium of the Apostles," a very sound matters of faith and morals pertaining observation, we admit, if the Apostles were to edification of Christian doctrine, and now living, so that we could take the twisting Sacred Scripture to his own tradition from their mouths, or if it were acceptations, shall dare to interpret the proved by satisfactory historical evidence Scripture against the sense which has been, that it had ever come from them; meanand is, held by the holy Mother Church, time, they being long since gone to God, (to whom it belongs to judge of the true we shall trust rather to the authentic sense and interpretation of the sacred writings they have left us, than to man's writings,) or against the unanimous consent treacherous memory, and his corruptible of the fathers. That if any should contra- love of the truth. The question regarding vene this decree, they should be declared the interptetation of Scripture, Bellarmine by the ordinaries, and punished according resolves into this, "Where does the Holy to the statutes." Spirit reside? For," he continues, think that his Spirit, although it be often granted to many private men, yet is assuredly to be found in the Church, that is, in a council of bishops confirmed by the Pope, or in the Pope in conjunction with a council of the other pastors;"which opinion of the learned Jesuit is directly at variance with the declaration of our Lord-"No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me, draw him. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God Every man, therefore, that hath heard and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me." A few lines farther on, Bellarmine has the following assertion, Here in general we affirm, that the church, that is, the Pope, with a council in which all Catholics convene, is judge of the true sense of Scripture, and of all controver Such are the decisions of the Tridentine Fathers. It may be interesting now to hear some of the learned Catholic doctors, and we subjoin the reasoning of Bellarmine. This man was an Italian Jesuit, who flourished in the sixteenth century, and was one of the ablest controversialiasts of his time. In 1599, he was honoured with a cardinal's hat, in reward, no doubt, of his valuable services to the Pope, whose cause no one ever defended to greater advantage; and yet he had the misfortune to incur the serious displeasure of Sextus V., by not insisting, in one of his works, that the power which Jesus Christ gave to his vicegerent was direct, but only indirect. The name of this writer is to be met with in almost all the works which appeared in defence of the principles of the Reformation during the first half of "we These dogmas, inculcated upon the people, render it easy to account for the popish dislike of the Sacred Scripture, and their superstitious value for traditions -for their being better skilled in the observances of lent and ember-week, in the worship of relics, images, and saints and in the doctrine of purgatory, than in the vital doctrines of man's misery and salvation. Indeed, some of their doctors have not feared to recommend frequent declamations against Scripture, and that, with rhetorical artifices, its darkness, lameness, and blemishes, should be complained of; while, on the other hand, the necessity, authority, and certainty of unwritten tradition, should be strenuously contended for, and mainly urged for the confutation of heretics. Others, again, in their violent hostility to the instruction of the common people, have characterized our English translations as damnable, and described the unlicensed and unlimited perusal of the Word of God as an inven tion of the devil. We proceed, however, to examine their standard of divine truth more at large, with the view of stating some leading considerations which may be borne in the memory. And we would call you, first of all, to observe how artfully the Roman system is contrived to retain the people in spiritual bondage, and with what perfect consistency its priesthood inculcates the necessity of implicit faith, that is, faith without evidence, or even in opposition to it. The disciples of one of the Grecian schools of philosophy, we are informed, were subjected to the purgatory discipline of five years of silence, a judicious expedient to repress impertinent curiosity, and prevent the inconvenience of contradiction. But in the Roman school of Christianity, the pupils are required not only to restrain speech, but to suspend the exercise of their reason, during the term of their natural lives; for of what use is Scripture evidence, or argument, to him who has come under an obligation to adhere to the doctrines and decisions of the Church, whatever they may be, and to forego his own opinions and judgment in all matters of religion? Her teachers even are not ashamed to admit the correctness of this inference. The language of Dr. Norris, principal of Stonyhurst, and of Dr. Doyle in Ireland, has been, that "Members of the Romish Church cannot The consistently enter into an examination of doctrinal points with members of a Protestant Church; because all doctrinal points between them and the Reformed were fully discussed and finally set at rest by the Council of Trent, the decisions of which are to be revered as the dictates of the Holy Ghost." Rome has spoken, and the controversy is at an end. The same powerful voice which thus suddenly terminates all argument, compels every Catholic to decline all farther investigation into the grounds of his belief; since no conclusion can be more evident than this, that if we allow the claim of any Church to be the infallible interpreter of the sacred writings, the sacred writings must inevitably lose their value in our eyes, and cease to be deemed worthy of examination; for why search the Scripture, in compliance with our Saviour's command, if after our search we must at last receive, as the articles of our creed, the decrees of him who has usurped the authority of supreme judge of the mind of the Spirit ? tenets of the Romanists in regard to tradition, tend in like manner to sacrifice christian liberty to the intrigues of a corrupt faction; and at once to degrade human reason, and lessen the estimation in which the sacred record ought to be held. For who are the keepers of the divine and apostolic traditions? The Church. On whose authority are they delivered as such? On the authority of the Church; which, as we have seen, some understand to centre in an menical council, some in the Pope and a council together, and others in the Pope alone, who is thus made an epitome epitomized. The obvious consequence is to lead to a right of usurpation on the part of his Holiness, his cardinals, and bishops, over the consciences of Christians, to betray the Church into their hands, and render it subservient to their own private ends and interests. This tendency may be made obvious by the following simple and familiar illustration:-Suppose that after king John, at the instant solicitations and demands of his barons, had granted the Great Charter to his subjects, he had constituted a court, claiming on its behalf to be the infallible interpreter of the terms of the charter, and asserting the charter to be incomplete without the addition of such traditions as the court might think fit to append to it as of equal authority. ecu is it not manifest that, such claims being admitted, the charter would cease to be a rule to private individuals, that its authority would be superseded by that of the court, its pretended interpreter, and that it would be vain for any one to appeal to it, when he thought the privileges it conferred infringed; since, however simple its language, he might be told, that the supreme court, in accordance with the unanimous consent of the fathers, explained it differently from him, or had preserved some unwritten tradition, to be received with the same reverence and pious affection, with which the import of the charter must be made to coincide. Now, the conduct we have supposed in this hypothetical case, has been exactly the conduct of the Court of Rome; and thus it is, that the great charter of Christian freedom is rendered null and void to the members of the Latin Church, not by any solemn repeal or abrogation, but by a usurped power on the part of their teachers to add to it what they please, and to interpret it as they please. power to enslave our own understanding reaches no farther than to a hypocritical pretence of opinions which we do not in truth hold. When Henry VIII., for example, having denied obedience to Rome, and assumed in his own person, the anthority of Pope over England, issued his celebrated edict, commanding the real presence of the true and natural body and blood of Christ, under the kinds of bread and wine, to be believed throughout all England, it was manifestly impossible for any man to yield such belief who found the evidence of reason and sense to be opposed to the doctrine commanded. In such circumstances, the only alternative left was to dissemble and equivocate, or to submit to the punishment of heretics; or, to quote another instance, when Tetzel and Eckius found that by arguing on rational grounds they were not likely to convince the judgment and resolve the doubts of Martin Luther, as to the scriptural nature of the doctrine of indulgences, did they advance a single step toward the proof of their position to any intelligent inquirer after truth, by having recourse to the Pope's authority, and insisting, that he not being able to err in matters of religion, and having published indulgences to all the faithful, it was, therefore, necessary to believe them as an article of faith? We cannot avoid remarking how much these absurdities, this entire reliance on human authority, and total disregard of reason and evidence, have tended to give a show of justice to the accusations advanced by infidels against our holy religion, and to the taunts and reproaches they are in the practice of throwing out against its appointed guardians. Dr. Tindal, a man notorious for his hatred of Christianity, represents divines in all ages as, "for the most part, mortal enemies to the exercise of reason and even below brutes;" a sentiment to be expected from a man who had found christian divines too acute and learned to be discomposed by his sceptical subtilties, but to which, it is to be regretted, the absolute tyranny exercised by the Roman priesthood over the understanding and conscience of their flocks has given too much countenance. It is, then, with the consistency of system that the Roman Church requires implicit belief and obedience from those who belong to her communion; and since her rule of faith necessarily leads to so irrational a doctrine, a powerful objection may be urged against it from its consequences, on a similar principle to that which our Saviour instructs us to apply to false prophets, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." If Christianity be a scheme (as we hold it to be) capable of standing the strictest scrutiny of reason, that rule of faith cannot be scriptural, the reception of which involves, that we shall deem ourselves obligated to believe at command, to forego the use of our judgment in forming our creed, and to submit to a spiritual despotism more degrading than any which can be claimed merely over our persons. And as it cannot be scriptural, so neither can it be rational. In point of fact, implicit faith is an impossibility with men who have been once accustomed to the unfettered exercise of their faculties. The restlessness of thought, once awakened, cannot be lulled asleep. In consequence of those natural and un- Before passing from this branch of the alienable rights which belong to the human subject, it will be proper to take notice of mind, and which, although willing, it a defensive argument sometimes employed cannot resign, it is put beyond our ability by Catholics; and this is the more necesto dispose of our convictions as we can sary on account of the disrepute into which with certain parties, more unfriendly, it is to be suspected, to the doctrines which they contain than to the practice of methodizing our religious principles, since they can very well bear with compositions that agree with their own sentiments. The argument is, that although the reformed churches profess a supreme regard for the authority of Scripture, yet each of them, by claiming to decide what doctrines are scriptural, and requiring of her members an admission of the doctrines thus decided on her authority, virtually substitutes her authority for that of Scripture. Now, in order to detect the fallacy which lurks in this reasoning, let it be considered, that for the purposes of edification and administration of religious ordinances, it is indispensable that Christians should be united into a regular and orderly society. There can be no order among a multitude without confederation, still less the successful prosecution of a common object; and it is equally impossible that a community can hang together without confraternity and friendship. Division necessarily brings with it confusion and dissolution; and unity is the soul which gives life and vigour to every society. Hence the necessity that the members of a christian communion should be consociated by some common bond, by mutual consent to certain principles, forming the terms of communion. And hence, again, arises the necessity of some test or symbol of faith, by which a church may ascertain any one's fitness to be admitted within her pale. It is to supply this desideratum that every well-regulated church has drawn up an exposition of that form of sound words which it deems itself obliged to hold fast, and which it appeals to, not for the proof of doctrine, but to prove the agreement in respect to the doctrine of her members and ministers. The appeal still lies open to the Holy Scriptures, and the Church condemns no one as a heretic who differs from her in her view of divine truth; so that, whoever adheres to her communion, by the very act of adherence declares her confession of faith to be the confession of his faith; and her claim to authority resolves itself into nothing more than a public expression of the conviction of her individual fallible members in the soundness of their belief. Besides, while Scripture commands the preaching of the Word, it prescribes no particular method; and confessions and creeds, therefore, may be reckoned but al peculiar mode of instruction, possessing the advantage of presenting divine truths in a compendious form, and as they are mutually connected and subordinated. They are not put in the place of Scripture any more than catechisms or homilies, but for proof of the doctrines set forth in them, the reader is continually referred to Scripture; and he who does not think these of a scriptural character, is at liberty, with perfect impunity, possibly with profit, to leave the Church whose doctrines they are. With the observations now made on the subject of the Catholic rule of faith, viewed in both its branches, we must at present content ourselves. The remarks which follow shall be confined to the doctrine of traditions. The first and most obvious ground of objection to tradition as an historical medium, is its great uncertainty and liability to corruption, whereby it is rendered next to impossible, in most cases, to satisfy any intelligent inquirer that the narratives transmitted by it are authentic and genuine. We acknowledge our sense of this uncertainty and corruptibility in the ordinary transactions of life, and in matters of common history, by the prudent hesitation with which we receive details which rest merely on hearsay, and for which we have not the authority of the original narrator and witness. So frequently are we imposed on with false reports in our intercourse with the world—and even truth, by passing through various hands is so apt to be blended with error, and embellished with fictitious circumstances, that there is little wonder we are thus cautious and sceptical in regard to rumours, however current, of which we have not investigated the origin and credibility. Suppose, for example, that, having been a witness to any extraordinary occurrence, I should feel desirous to convey an account of it to some friend at a distance, and that, instead of my account being transmitted in writing, it should be passed verbally through the medium of six or seven messengers, there is every chance that when it would reach my friend in his remote retirement, it would no longer be a narrative of what I had seen or heard, but a motely mixture, produced by a treacherous memory in one, by liveliness of imagination and love of exaggeration in another, or by the censoriousness of a third, fond of interweaving his own reflections with every tale. More especially would the truth be endangered if the narrative affected in any way the interests of the persons intrusted with the transmission of it. Some dishonest knave, perhaps, might not hesitate entirely to corrupt it, or two of them might combine to give it a sinister interpretation, in order to serve their own selfish ends. Thus it is manifest that every successive person to whom the tradition is committed increases its uncertainty, and the risk of its being vitiated; and hence the inestimable advantage of writing, which is capable of conveying our personal testimony to all ages and countries, and leaves to tradition nothing more than the genuineness of the inscribed record. But it is unnecessary to have recourse to any hypothetical case in order to illus trate the present objection. Romanists concur with Protestants in the belief, that when man was created, God communicated to him a revelation of his will, which, after the Flood, received, along with several additions, a remarkable confirmation, and was committed to tradition, to be by that means passed from generation to generation. The history of this revelation among the Gentiles, by whom it was not preserved in writing, is known to all; how, in the course of time, it became more and more corrupted by idolatrous admixtures, and was so metamorphosed by the mythologizing humour of poets, philosophers, and historiaus, as to be scarcely discoverable under the strange and mystic disguise with which they invested it. To turn to another instance-will any Romanist undertake to give a relation of any of those unrecorded acts to which the apostle John refers when he says, Many other things did Jesus, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books which should be written." Here was “ample room and verge enough" for trying the virtue of tradition; yet how sadly deficient is our information regarding any one of the innumerable circumstances alluded to by the evangelist? Is it not plain from this, that the Scriptures have been written for the very purpose of preventing the corruption and oblivion inevitably consequent on oral tradition? 66 For what purpose, otherwise, did Jehovah, in ordaining the law of the Old Testament, engrave the decalogue in stone with his own finger? For what purpose did he command Moses, and the prophets revelations which he vouchsafed them, if not to intimate the necessity that sacred truths should be transmitted by a less corruptible medium than verbal tradition? And can it be believed that things necessary to salvation would be left by an allwise being to be established by a species of proof so uncertain, and so liable to be vitiated, that it would not be admitted in evidence by any court of law in this country? The Evangelist Luke, indeed, assigns as the reason for committing to writing his account of our Lord's life that those he wrote to might know the certainty of what they had been instructed in. The Evangelist John also, in the conclusion of his gospel, tells us, that though Christ did many other things which were not written in that book, yet the facts recorded "are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, ye might have life through his name." Strange, therefore, would it be, if the evangelists and Apostles, having been divinely directed to commit to imperishable memorials the truths of the Christian doctrine, for the benefit of all succeeding generations, and writing with the assistance, and under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, should have happened to omit any particulars; stranger still, if they should have taught one system of doctrines to the Churches in writing, and whispered, at the same time, a contradictious appendix, to be conveyed by word-ofmouth to prosperity. In this, then, have Christians their security, that the Bible has come down to them with such proofs of genuineness and authenticity as no other book possesses; but this Romish value for private and improved tradition would rest our faith on a basis on which no historian of credit would undertake to certify the most trifling occurrence. The above reasonings and facts fully warrant the conclusion, that until the successors of the anathematizing doctors of Trent give us a perfect catalogue of the traditions which they hold to be divine and apostolical, and trace them up to apostolical origin through an unbroken line of narrators, of whom no one was deceived, nor wished to deceive, their pretended right to give authority to unwritten traditions cau be deemed nothing else than the assumption of a power to corrupt the truth by mingling with it their own fables and opinions, as |