disregard the God and Saviour who has a right to the highest place in our hearts. The brightest of our blessings are turned into causes of ungodliness, selfishness, and misery; there is not a gift which the Creator has bestowed, or a power with which He has entrusted us, from which our proud inclinations and ignorant judgments do not at times extract some poison.

Yet who would argue that for this reason these bounties are not designed by God for our use? Who would tear from his bosom every feeling of love and friendship, and laugh to scorn the dictates of his reason, and hide himself in the deserts far from all intercourse with his fellows, and feed on the berries of the forest, and drink of the water of the brook, and give up his faculties to sloth and stagnation, that he might avoid temptation, and be set free from the peril of abusing the gifts that his Lord had given him? And yet this would be but reasonable and pious, if we are bound to avoid the use of every blessing and power which may tempt us to do wrong. If it is our duty to shrink from the exercise of our free intellect and judgment in the study of God's word, lest in so studying we judge untruly and reason falsely, it is equally incumbent upon us to fly from friends and

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kindred, from comfort and enjoyment, from all use of our reason and all soarings of our imagination.

2. Secondly: the charge brought against the rights of the personal judgment, to the effect that experience has proved that uniformity of belief will never result from the private interpretation of the Bible, may be brought with equal force against the divine origin of Christianity itself. The two cases are exactly parallel. If we must believe that God has not given to every individual an authority to search the Scriptures on his own responsibility, because men have continually perverted them through folly or ignorance, we must necessarily reject the claims of the Gospel to a sanction from God, because it has never gained a complete ascendancy in the world, and has been perverted into a source of crime, bloodshed, and wretchedness. Every objection against the employment of the intellect in ascertaining the meaning of the Bible is an objection against the Bible itself. God gave the religion of Christ to be the religion of mankind, but it has never yet obtained a dominion in the hearts of more than a trifling fraction of the multitudes for whose benefit it was bestowed. The earth is still overspread with heathenism, superstition, folly,

and ungodliness; whole nations treat the holy Jesus as an impostor; and of those who profess to serve Him, a vast majority treat his commands with contempt or neglect. And yet we doubt not that Christ was truly sent by the great God of all things, and that He was sent for the very purpose that the religion He taught might spread through every people, nation, and language: we ascribe the hindrances to the progress of the Gospel to man's wickedness and foolishness, and not to any want of divine sanction. And thus, also, the divine right of every Christian to study the Bible for himself is not to be overthrown by the fact, that multitudes pervert that right to their own mischief. In each case God has put an unspeakable blessing into our hands; he has given us a charge, which we may neglect or abuse if we will; we should be no more justified in refusing to exercise our personal common sense in humbly endeavouring to ascertain the truth of Scripture, because the foolish and the wicked extract delusion from its pages, than in scorning the entire religion of Christ because men have made it an excuse and palliation for their crimes.

3. Again; experience has shown, that the reception of the doctrine of the infallibility of

the Church and the supreme authority of tradition, is no safeguard against misconceptions and misinterpretations of the truth. The Church of Rome includes within its members individuals and nations greatly differing from one another in their faith and practice, though they all agree in professing to obey the unerring guidance of some divinely commissioned teacher. In former days the world beheld the marvellous spectacle of a Church assuming an infallibility in all its doctrines, and changing its creed with the passing generations of men. The annals of Rome exhibit continual alterations in her articles of faith, long after she had claimed for herself a freedom from possibility of erring, and had enforced upon her members the universal acceptance of the claim. Men in communion with her in our own day receive religious opinions of most contradictory character; the faith and practice of one nation is dissimilar in many points from those of another; the belief of the Romanists of England bears little resemblance to that of their brethren in Ireland; these latter again differ from the followers of Rome in Belgium, in Spain, or in Italy. In every age Romish divines have published opinions which have been condemned by the Pope; one bishop

has sanctioned proceedings which have been opposed by another; the boasted uniformity has proved to be in many points a mere name, assumed as a cloke by those who in their hearts have treated the declarations of Rome as unscriptural or absurd. At one time the whole community was rent by the disputes of the Jesuits and the Jansenists; even till the present day the adherents of the unerring Church are divided into two parties, of which one supposes that the gift of infallibility is lodged in the Pope; while another receives no doctrine as necessarily true which is not sanctioned by some General Council; while a third thinks both Pope and Council necessary. The character of the wellknown theses of the famous Picus of Mirandola, which he published at Rome in the year 1486, shows plainly that a reception of the infallibility of the Church is no safeguard against the wilful fancies of the individual mind". Mirandola was among the most learned, the most able, and the most credulous of his age; he showed every disposition to render obedience to the authority of the Church; and yet he ventured to maintain opinions most obnoxious to the head of the

• Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. i. p. 284.