not to enforce anything to be believed for necessity of salvation.

These limitations follow naturally from the position claimed for Holy Scripture in Article VI., and would seem to require no further comment or illustration here.

(e) But there are difficult questions which it is possible to raise concerning the exercise of the authority thus limited, which it may be well briefly to consider. Who is to decide whether the Church has exceeded the powers thus conceded to her? And what is to be done if it should appear that as a matter of fact she has exceeded them? On these points the Article is silent. They raise the whole subject of the relation of Church authority to private judgment. Obviously there is no other body or society on earth with the right of reviewing the judgments of the Church and pronouncing upon them. But still the case may occur when it appears to some individuals, perhaps only to a very few, that the judgment of the Church is wrong. To say that it is an impossibility that God would allow His Church thus to err, is to be untrue to the whole teaching of history. There was a time when "the world groaned and found itself Arian," and when Athanasius stood contra mundum; and what has occurred once may occur again. With our eyes, then, open to the teaching of history, we cannot insist that a man must bow to the judgment of the Church. He is not called on to accept as truth that which his deliberate conviction tells him is false. While he will rightly and naturally give the greatest weight to the judgment thus expressed, feeling that it is far more probable that he should be mistaken than that the whole Church should be wrong, yet in the last resort he himself must be the judge. He must be true to his conscientious and candid convictions. The right of

private judgment is inalienable.

He cannot divest him

self of it.1 "To his own master he standeth or falleth." He will feel in his inmost heart with Liberius before his fall, when taunted with the fact that he was the sole Western champion of the Catholic faith, that "the cause of the faith is none the worse because he happens to be left alone," and " with a sorrowful heart" will "refer all to God." And, if the future may be prophesied from the past, it will always be found that the error is of no long duration, and that the truth which has been kept alive by the few faithful ones in a period of general falling away, will presently be accepted by the Church at large, and recognised as "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints."

III. The Office of the Church with regard to Holy

Scripture.

There is one clause of the Article on which nothing has yet been said, viz. that which states that the Church is a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ. A twofold office is here assigned to her. She is (a) a witness, as testifying to us what books are to be regarded as Scripture, for " in the name of Holy Scripture we do understand those Canonical books of the Old Testament of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church" (Article VI.), and also as declaring to us what is the meaning of Scripture; for, as we have already seen, she "hath authority in controversies of faith." Besides this, she is (b) a keeper of holy writ; for just as to the Jews of 1 Cf. Salmon's Infallibility of the Church, p. 46 seq.

2 Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, bk. II. c. xvi.

Cf. William of Occam, Dial. bk. V. par. i. c. 28. I owe this and the previous reference to The Church Historical Society Lectures, Series ii. p. 78, a valuable lecture on the "Teaching Power of the Church," by Professor W. E. Collins.

old "

were committed the oracles of God" (Rom. iii. 2), so now that there is a New Testament" as well as an Old," the completed Canon is to be regarded as a treasure committed to the custody of the Church, who is responsible for preserving it entire, and free from admixture with other books, as well as for transmitting it and proclaiming it to each generation in turn. It is in these ways that the Church fulfils her office as "a witness and a keeper of holy writ," and from what has now been said the respective offices of the Church and Holy Scripture may be clearly seen. The Church is the ordained teacher of truth; Holy Scripture is the criterion of truth by which the doctrines of the Church are proved and tested. To make Scripture, in the first instance, the teacher, is entirely to mistake its true office and function. The Gospels were written, not to convert unbelievers, but that those who had been already orally instructed (ie. who had received the teaching of the Church) might know the certainty of those things which they had been taught.1 So also the Epistles were addressed to regularly organised Churches, and were written to confirm those who had previously received apostolic teaching. Indeed, it is everywhere the case that "the Bible assumes the existence of a living instructor in the truth, who will indoctrinate us into the rudiments of it, and refer us to the Scriptures themselves for the proof of what he teaches. If the instructor is dispensed with, and the disciple thrown back merely on the Bible and his natural faculties, he will be very liable to stumble, and almost certain to do so as regards those more recondite definitions of doctrine which the Church's experience of heresies has shown her to be necessary, and has taught her to make." These offices of "the

1 See S. Luke i. 1-4.

• Goulburn's Holy Catholic Church, p. 294.

Church to teach, the Bible to prove," may be illustrated from the incident recorded in Acts viii. 26-40. The Ethiopian eunuch was "sitting in his chariot, and was reading the prophet Isaiah." He was, then, in possession of the Scriptures, and, according to the rather foolish saying, "the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants," these ought to have been sufficient for him. But plainly they were not; for in answer to Philip's question, "Understandest thou what thou readest?" the answer is returned, "How can I, except someone should guide me?" and this is followed by the further question, "Of whom speaketh the prophet this? Of himself, or of some other?" Something more was needed than the possession of the Scriptures, and that something was supplied by Philip, the representative of the ecclesia docens, who "opened his mouth, and beginning from this scripture preached unto him Jesus." Here we see the Church at work, and the right method to be followed, as it is seen throughout the Acts of the Apostles, where we everywhere find them stating the facts, and teaching with authority, while they prove their statements from the Scriptures, and refer their hearers to these as confirming them.1 And if this method was employed when only the Old Testament was in existence, it seems natural to suppose that much more should it be followed now, when the fuller revelation is also committed to writing.2

1 See Acts ii. 14-36, iii. 12-26, xiii. 16-42, xvii. 2, 3, 11, xviii. 28. 2 See on this subject Gore's Roman Catholic Claims, c. iii. and iv.

ARTICLE XXI

De autoritate Conciliorum

Generalium.

Generalia Concilia sine jussu et voluntate principum congregari non possunt, et ubi convenerint, quia ex hominibus constant, qui non omnes spiritu et verbo Dei reguntur, et errare possunt, et interdum errarunt, etiam in his quæ ad normam pietatis pertinent: ideo quæ ab illis constituuntur, ut ad salutem necessaria, neque robur habent, neque autoritatem, nisi ostendi possint e sacris literis esse desumpta.

Of the authority of General
Councils.

General Councils may not be gathered together without the commandment and will of princes. And when they be gathered together (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the spirit and word of God) they may err, and sometime have erred, even in things pertaining unto God. Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation, have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of Holy Scripture.

SINCE the Forty-two Articles were first published in 1553 this Article has remained practically unchanged.1 But before publication a clause had been wisely omitted from the close of it, which, as we find from the MS. signed by the six royal chaplains,2 had stood in the original draft: "Possunt reges et pii magistratus, non expectata conciliorum generalium sententia aut convocatione, in

1 In the English edition of 1553 "not only in worldly matters, but also " stood before "in things pertaining unto God." There was nothing corresponding to these words in the Latin, and they were accordingly omitted in 1563. In the Latin "verbis Dei" stood in 1553 and 1563, being altered to the singular "verbo" in 1571.

State Papers, "Domestic," Edward VI. vol. xv. No. 28. Cf. p. 14, and Hardwick, p. 283.