other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." Church of Eng- land, art. vi (vth of the Methodist Episcopal Cliurch): " Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary- to salvation ; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor ma}' be proved tliereby, is not to be required of anj"- man that it should be believed as an article of faith." So the Creeds (art. viii) are commended to reception and belief only because they may be proved by cer- tain "warrants of holy Scripture;" works of super- erogation (xiv) are rejected as contradicted by the word of Cln-ist ; things ordained even by general coun- cils are affirmed (xxi) to have neither strength nor authority unless it be declared that they "be taken out of holy Scripture ;" purgatory, pardons, image worship, relics, saintly invocation (xxii), and tran- substantiation (xxviii) are rejected as grounded "upon no warrant of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God."
(II.) The Romanist Doctrine. — The Council of Trent (sess. iv, April 8, 1516, On the Canon) declares that the "Gospel pi'omised before by the prophets in the sacred Scriptures was first orally published liy our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who afterwards commanded it to be preached by his apostles to every creature, as the source of all saving truth and disci- pline ; and tliat this truth and discipline are contained both in written books and in unwritten traditions, which have come down to us, either received by the apostles from the lip of Christ himself, or transmitted by the hands of the same apostles, under the dictation of the Hoi}' Spirit;" and names as canonical all the books of the O. T. and the Apocrypha, according to the Vulgite cdijion ; declaring that the Council " doth re- ceive and reverence, with equal piety and veneration, all the hooks, as well of the Old as of the New Testa- ment, the same God being the author of both — and also the aforesaid traditions, pertaining both to faith and manners, whether received from Christ himself or dic- tated by t!ie Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Catliolic Church by continual succession." The Catechism of the Council nf Trent declares (Preface) that "all the doctrines of Christianity in which the faithful are to be instructed are derived from the Word of God, which includes Scriptures and tradition." These statements are not so decided as those of later Roman theologi- ans, but they were nevertheless received at the time as ordaining a new rule of faith in the Church. Ber- nard Gilpin (f 1583) had, it is said, been liesitating about accepting Protestantism, but the puljlicatinn of the decree of Trent decided him : " While he was dis- tracted with these things, tlie rule of faith changed by the Council of Trent astonished him. For he observed that not only the ancient divines, but even the modern ones, LomI)ard, Scotus, and Aquinas, all confessed that the rule of faith was solely to be drawn from Scrip- ture, whereas he found, according to the Council of Trent, that it might as well be drawn from human tra- ditions Tlie Cliurch of Rome kept the rule of
feith entire till it was changed by the Council of Trent. From that time he thought it a point of duty to forsake her communion, that the true Church, thus called out, might follow tlie AVord of God" (Life of Bernard Cil- pin, p. fi9, Glasgow, 1824, cited by Cramp, Text-hook of Poperij, ch. iii). Bellarmine (\ 1G21'), perhaiis the greatest of Roman theologians, sets forth the Roman theory more fullv in his treatise De Verbo Dti. He di- vides it into the written and the unwritten word. The written word includes the Scriptures of the O. and N. T. ; the unwritten is tradition, i. e. 1. dirine tradition, including doctrines communicated by Christ himself to the apostles, and taught by them, but not recorded ; 2. rpos'oUcal tradition, doctrines taught by the apostles, but not recordeil in their writings ; 3. ecclesiastical tradition, including ancient customs and usages hand- 1 cd down in the Church. The necessity for these tra-
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ditions he maintains on the express ground of the insufficiency of Scripture as a rule of faith and life (asserimus in Scripturis non contineri expresse totam doctrinam neeessariam sive de fide sive de nioribus, De Verba Del, iv, o). The substance of these passages is, that in the rule of faith tradition is an authoritj' indepsndent of Scripture, and in all respects equal to it in binding force. Mohler {^Symholism, § 38) attempts to refine the Roman doctrine, but, in fact, disguises it under an ideal theory of his own, intended to be adapt- ed to "the spirit of the age," or else inspired bj' it. But the substance of the Koman doctrine remains, in spite of his skill, in his statement that "it is the Church in which alone man arrives at the true under- standing of Holy Writ." One of the latest and most skilful advocates of the Roman view is archbishop Manning, who, in his Grounds of Faith (London, l.s52, 8vo), maintains that "universal tradition is the su- preme interpreter of Scripture," and that this tradition is maintained only in the Church of Rome, of which the pope is the head and exponent. Dr. SchafF sums up the vices of the Romanist theory of the rule of faith as follows: "The distinction between the divine and the human is unsettled by it. This pantheistic feat- ure runs through the wliole S3'stem, culminating in the respect shown towards the pope as lawfullj^ hold- ing and exercising the threefold office of Christ him- self. Too much is allowed, again, to human agency in the formation of the sacred Scriptures, by limiting the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to mere assistance and guidance {assistentia et direc/io). Still farther, the Lat- in translation of Jerome, a work of course proceeding from a particular Church position, and reflecting its image, is not only placed on a par with the original text, but in actual use preferred to it altogether (Bel- larmine,Z'e Verbo Dai, ii, 10). In the fourtli place, the charge of darkness and ambiguity is Ijrought against the Scriptures, wlience tradition is held to be necessary for their interpretation, and it is counselled that the laity should not read them except in cases of special qualification, of which the bishop is to be the judge. In short, the whole tendenc}' of the Roman Catholic Church has for its object to subordinate the Bible to tradition, and then to make itself the infiillible judge of truth, with power to determine at pleasure what is God's word and tiie doctrine of the Church, and to anathematize everything that may go beyond its past decisions, even though, as in tlie case of the Reforma- tion and Jansenism, it should be an actual deepening of the Christian consciousness itself" {Principle of Protestantism, p. 74).