truth, which is the worst form in which scepticism of Providence can break out. It indicates an antisocial contempt for the human mind, a suspicion respecting the stability of the great principles of morals, a disbelief in the progressiveness of the higher civilization, which are the most fatal of all vices in those who rule mankind. The church or the nation that relies, for the maintenance of its faith or institutions, on principles of influence so ignoble, fosters within it the inevitable causes of decrepitude and decay.

LECTURE III.

PROTESTANT INFALLIBILITY.

ROMANS XIV. 4.

WHO ART THOU THAT JUDGEST ANOTHER MAN'S SERVANT?

THAT was a noble fight, which was fought by Luther and his printing press, when they rescued the Bible from the grasp of priests, and turned it from the charter of an incorporated tyranny into the patent of universal freedom. If the most

solemn æra of the world's history was that in which Christ himself walked its fields in Palestine, and refreshed its weary heart with the living spectacle of heavenly virtues, and entered death that he might illustrate life, and, as he ascended, bequeathed to all generations the dignity and responsibility of an immortal hope; the next in interest is the period when the true record of those things was brought again beneath the eye of men, and to the ear of thought the voice of Christ was made to speak once more, and the image of his mind was sent round the homes of the people, and went about, like himself, doing good. If that book is to fulfil its appointed. function, as the sinner's conscience, and the mourner's friend, and the oppressor's foe, it must be accessible to all men, in all stations of life and moods of mind; not dealt out only in the place of pulpits, and spoiled by the voice of preachers, and

selected by the will of priests; but abandoned, whole and entire, warning and promise, history, parable, miracle and prophecy, to the reason and the heart of all whom it may concern. The inquirer must have it, whenever the anxiety of doubt, or the spirit of speculation, urges him to its page; and he can borrow from it the solution of some perplexity, or shed on it the illumination of fresh thought. The sorrowing must have it, whenever the waywardness of grief may make it welcome, and to the touched heart there may be a gentleness in its voice of comfort, and a brilliancy in its scenery of hope, that may make them sacred to the memory for ever. The proud must have it, that, when no eye is on him but that of God, he may hear the withering words with which Christ could blight the Pharisee, and witness how mean is every distinction compared with that moral dignity which could raise the outcast from the dust, and seek the friendship of the publican, and praise the virtues of the Samaritan. The penitent must have it, that, at the happy moment, the eye of Christ may look into his heart, and bid it sin no more; and when the first effort is tempted to relax, his spirit of untiring duty may put weariness to flight; and when the self-gratulation of victory creeps in, the immense ambition of future progress may absorb the silly vanity of present attainment. The tyrant must have it, he that tramples on happiness and life for his own vile greatness, and hews a way of guilt and woe to an eminence of praise and hate,-that he may learn of a tribunal above, which frowns while it forbears, and waits only till the last drop of his brother's blood shall have cried to it from the ground. The slave, too, must have it, to tell him the incredible story of his origin and his end,—to whisper to him (if he can but believe so strange a thought to be a truth and not a mockery) the equal responsibility of all men; to persuade him that the end is not yet, nor this earth an image of the skies; that while here he is degraded, abandoned to an animal nature, sometimes pampered, and sometimes tortured, left without

duties because without rights, he goes in the great multitude of bond and free to that world where he will discover what he is worth in the creation of God, feel the mighty stirrings of a moral nature within him, and find, in verity, that of one blood, of one law, of one destiny, has God made all nations.

So far then as the Reformation effected the diffusion of the scriptures, the book of duty, the book of liberty, the book of life, it should be regarded with gratitude by all times. But there is room for much delusion, and there is much affectation, in the fashionable panegyrics on the Reformation. In order to produce its beneficent effects, the Bible must be left to its natural agency; must fairly come in contact with the open and unbiassed mind of men, and deliver its own reports unquestioned, and exercise its own influence unwatched. There must be no meddling with its genuine and simple impression. Without this the dissemination of the scriptures is a mere mockery; and yet of this we have enjoyed no experience to this day. The Reformers emancipated the Bible from Catholic theology; but it was only to enslave it to their own. They did not, indeed, adopt the suspicious-looking plan of partially withholding the book from the popular eye, and avowedly reserving in their own hands the administration of its contents; the Protestant churches have discovered other and more wily ways of giving currency and authority to their own interpretations. There is no need to print them in the scripture itself; it is as well to get the credit of circulating it without note or comment. What can seem fairer or more truth-loving than this compact and complete Bible, without a remark, without even a running title, with nothing but the old and venerable words from Genesis to Revelation (except, indeed, certain spurious passages, still thought to be convenient by those who know them to be forgeries)? But do you suppose this book will be trusted to go by itself among the people? It would be a great mistake. Preachers will go before it, and tell them what they are to find in it; creeds will go after it, and ask them if they

have found it. If not, intimations are given that they had better look again; and while the search is going on, a clamour, as of a multitude, is kept up; on the one side a chorus of sweet promises announces all tempting things in earth and heaven, to him that finds the pearl; on the other a discord of ill names, and insults, and horrors, and holy condolence, and assurances of absolute perdition, to him that misses it. All these oral notes are exceedingly effective; they are as powerful, without being quite so barefaced, as the ingenuous pretension to infallibility. They keep the Bible surrounded with a whole atmosphere of commentary, invisible itself, but colouring everything. They betray a rooted and irreverent distrust of the scriptures, a determination to haunt their steps, and privately overhear their teachings, and poison their pure and simple impression wherever they go. With all their boasting, not a book exists of which Protestants are so much afraid as the Bible.

I propose to illustrate this; and to show that wherever one particular interpretation of the scriptures is held to be essential, all the evils which arise from ascribing infallibility to a common human mind exist without abatement. With this view, let us take to pieces the theories of the Roman Catholic and Protestant religions; examine their fundamental principles; trace them so long as they agree, and point out precisely where they diverge, especially seeking to discover the supposed seat of certainty in each.

All men, except the atheist, will agree that there is infallibility somewhere; a mind, that is, all whose ideas are in the order of truth, and all whose emotions in the beauty of excellence. The supreme intelligence of God, within whose immensity the scheme of creation was projected as a magnificent picture, ere it was executed as a living reality, can mistake nothing within its circuit. Every leaf in the immense forest of events was present to his view ere the first seed was dropped on the bleak mountains of time. Those material