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DEFECTS OF PROTESTANTISM.

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the right to interpret Scripture, reject tradition, relics, saints, and have nothing between them and Christ or God. It was right in demanding freedom of conscience for all men, up to the point of accepting the Scriptures.^[1] This was no vulgar merit, but one we little appreciate. The men who fight the battle for all souls, rarely get justice from the world.

II. The Vice and Defect of Protestantism.

Its capital vice was to limit the power of private inspiration, and, since there must be somewhere a standard external or within us, to make the Bible Master of the Soul. Theoretically, it narrowed the sources of religious truth, and instead of three, as the Catholics, it gave us but one; though practically it did more than the Catholics, for it brought men directly to one fountain of truth.^[2] Now if the Catholic had an undue reverence for the organized Church, so had the Protestant for the Scriptures. Both sought in the world of concrete things an infallible source and standard of moral and religious truth. There is none such out of human consciousness; neither in the Church, nor the Bible. Both must be idealized to support this pretension. Accordingly as the one party idealized the Church; assumed its divine Origin, its Infallibility, and the exclusive Immanence of God therein; so the other assumed the divine origin of the Scriptures, their Infallibility, and the exclusive Immanence of God in them. Has either party proved its point? Neither is capable of proof. As the Catholic maintained, in the very teeth of notorious facts, that there was no contradiction in the doctrines of the

↑ It is not necessary to cite the proofs of the above statements from the Reformers, as they may be seen in the dogmatical writers so often referred to before. However, the most significant passages may be found collected in Harles, Theologische Encyclopädie und Methodologie, Leips. 1837, Chap. III. IV. The early Reformers differ in opinion as to the authority of the Bible. It is well known with what freedom and contempt Luther himself spoke of parts of the canon, and the stories of miracles in the Gospels and Pentateuch. But his own opinion fluctuated on this as on many other points. He cared little for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Indeed, it would not require a very perverse ingenuity to make out, from the Reformers, a Straussianismus ante Straussium.
↑ This is, logically speaking, the fundamental principle of the Reformers, though qualifications of it may be found in Luther, Melancthon, Zwingle, and Calvin, which detract much from its scientific rigour. But still the principle was laid down at the bottom of the Protestant fabric, and is yet a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to free men.

[1] It is not necessary to cite the proofs of the above statements from the Reformers, as they may be seen in the dogmatical writers so often referred to before. However, the most significant passages may be found collected in Harles, Theologische Encyclopädie und Methodologie, Leips. 1837, Chap. III. IV. The early Reformers differ in opinion as to the authority of the Bible. It is well known with what freedom and contempt Luther himself spoke of parts of the canon, and the stories of miracles in the Gospels and Pentateuch. But his own opinion fluctuated on this as on many other points. He cared little for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Indeed, it would not require a very perverse ingenuity to make out, from the Reformers, a Straussianismus ante Straussium.

[2] This is, logically speaking, the fundamental principle of the Reformers, though qualifications of it may be found in Luther, Melancthon, Zwingle, and Calvin, which detract much from its scientific rigour. But still the principle was laid down at the bottom of the Protestant fabric, and is yet a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to free men.

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