constituted the Church in a certain way; that He must have endowed it with certain prerogatives and certain authorities and certain safeguards and certain supremacies; because those prerogatives and so forth are, in the writer's ideal view, necessary to the Church's achievement of certain ends. Then with this ideal already in possession, controlling the imagination, and determining the mind what it is to discover, advance is made to the actual, to Scripture and to History; with the result that these are found to confirm anticipations—not it is true without difficulties, nor without feats of agility to the bystanders simply amazing, but yet to the complete satisfaction of the writer's mind. Nevertheless, the result is blindness to historical reality. No one has expressed this better than F. Ryder writing against an extremist in 1867, but in words which accurately describes a conviction widely prevalent in the Roman obedience.
"It is notorious that in some minds the craving for ideal completeness is so strong as to overpower from time to time their sense of truth, and under the influence of this craving, without any conscious dishonesty, they are unable to read either in the past or present world of experience anything but what, according to their preconceived notions, should be. Such minds, as we might expect, have a strong instinctive dislike for historical studies."[1]
If instead of theoretical inferences from an ideal, we take the critical and historic way, very different conclusions may be reached as to Infallibility. If the promises of Christ, "Lo, I am with you always," "He shall guide you into all truth," are interpreted in the absence of Roman preconceptions, it is evident that
- ↑ Ryder, Idealism in Theology, p. 5.
