Infallibility

Inference III

III. That the denial of such continuous infallible voice leads to Agnosticism.

At the outset of the era of reform, the Reformers raised the long loud cry that there had been no infallible teaching in what was called the Church from the sixth century downwards.

Those who hold that the world went on eight hundred years without the presence of an infallible teacher, do not seem to realise that such theory is suicidal. Yet the inference that it is so is inevitable. If they persist in maintaining it, they must be prepared to make the open confession without equivocation or mental reservation, that Christianity as it is known at present, whether in its fragmentary form or in its plenitude and completeness, is nothing but a bundle of opinions. On such a supposition it could not be anything more. And opinions may be right or they may be wrong. They can never rise to the elevation of definite knowledge, much less to the altitude or dignity of supernatural faith. Looked at from a religious point of view, they are nothing more than the outcome of the disintegrating principles of Agnosticism let loose upon the dogmas of revelation even the most fundamental. Let the alleged fact of the Church’s lapse—in the sense of the cessation of an infallible voice—be conceded, and at once we are confronted with the doubt, the rational doubt, whether the world has ever seen her face since the day of her supposed downfall. For, as has been shown, to prove that she does exist somewhere among the populations of the earth, the Scriptures, without a concurrent infallible voice, are not sufficient.

But lest the argument should seem weakened, on account of the different opinions that may prevail as to the date at which she ceased to be infallible, it may be well before proceeding farther to premise the following: Perhaps in supposing that our opponents regard her as having been infallible until towards the beginning of the sixth century, we are supposing more than they are disposed to grant—at least more than some of them are willing to grant. There may be a number who hold that she was never strictly infallible except in the time of the Apostles. Such persons no doubt will explain their position by stating it to be their belief or opinion, that she received in the beginning a sacred impulse or a Divine impetus, at the hands of her Founder, which enabled her to keep pretty well on the right lines for the five hundred years following—without, however, being endowed with constitutional infallibility.

No matter how numerous these views may be, and no matter what their variety or difference, they do not interfere in any way with the state of the case. The difference is only a difference of date concerning the cessation or continuance of a disputed prerogative. And therefore it can in no wise diminish the force of the reasoning. For if there ever was from the day of Pentecost at any date, either immediately after the last member of the original Apostolic band, had passed away, or at any date since, a single break in her infallibility, then it would follow indisputably that everything which lay on this side of that date, in the sphere of religion, was enveloped in a cloud of doubt. In such case the chasm that separated the age of certainty from the age of conjecture would be “unbridgeable”. We mean the intervening space would be hopelessly impassable, so far as reaching anything in the line of certain or definite revealed truth was concerned. We should have nothing more than a fallible, and therefore necessarily doubtful, voice to tell us what she taught in those days when she was in the admitted possession of the endowment of infallibility. We are under the impression, however, that the great bulk of Anglicans allow that she continued to retain a faculty of infallible teaching, at least in the way of General Councils, till towards the end of the sixth century.

But now let it be granted, even in the widest sense in which our opponents wish to have the concession made, that she not merely lapsed about that period, but lapsed so lamentably that no unerring voice was heard for eight hundred years. What would be the state of the case?

We can more easily point to it by asking the further question: How were the Christians who lived in the early part of those ill-fated days, and who had been taught to look upon her as having been infallible, at all events as having been, by a special Divine assistance, free of error all along up to that date—how were they to find out for certain that any faculty of infallible teaching she had hitherto possessed was then suspended, or that any immunity from error she had till that time enjoyed, then ceased; and that things were to continue in that sad condition, not merely during their lives, but for a long succession of centuries after?

Some other unerring voice equal in unerringness to the one which she had lost would be required to make them aware of the fact.

Anything less than an infallible one would be useless. For if the voice was liable to err, it could only give an uncertain sound. On the other hand, the Church had been in possession up to that time; and it would surely be against all law, as well as against reason and common-sense, to pronounce her deprived of privileges which she had hitherto enjoyed, on the mere strength of testimony which was evidently and entirely doubtful.

But where was that new unerring voice to come from—either in the West, the East, the North or the South? Did the eternal Father speak in articulate tones such as those which were once heard on the banks of the Jordan? Or did His Divine Son speak audibly from heaven in words that were to resound through the nations, warning all that He was withdrawing the promises He had made to His Church at the beginning, that the Divine Spirit who, He had declared, was to dwell in her for ever, would cease to dwell in her for a time, and that He Himself during the same period would disown her teaching and repudiate her worship.

If such Divine declaration ever fell upon the ears of any generation of the world’s population since the Christian era began, there surely would be some record of it. Yet none is to be found.

But the inconveniences do not end here; they multiply as we analyse the question. In the dim light, rather we should say the mysterious gloom of this theory of defection, or supposed suspension of an infallible voice, consider what would have been the condition of the people whose lot was cast in the centuries that came within the alleged darkness. Take for example the Christian people of the ninth century—their plight would have been pitiable beyond description. They would have been placed in a position that rendered it impossible to make an act of faith. For they had no means of attaining any certainty about the object of faith, not even about those dogmas which are admitted by nearly all Christian sects to be fundamental. The voice of the infallible Church, it is alleged, had become silent some two hundred years before; and now there was no unerring authority forthcoming that could tell with certainty, with anything more than doubtful testimony, what the object of faith was. And faith and doubt are necessarily and everlastingly irreconcilable. Most likely it will be objected, “There was the Bible;” but they were not, could not be, certain of the inspiration of the Bible.

It avails nothing to say the doctrines were handed down by tradition. We respect tradition, that is, tradition in the true sense of the term. But under the circumstances in supposition such tradition could not possibly be of the right kind. It was divested of that authoritative force or sanction which alone could give it value. The doctrines would be handed down by individuals; those individuals, whether taken separately or collectively, were fallible; and their transmission of teachings, which looked like articles of belief, might be, whether accidentally or intentionally, gravely incorrect, and was undoubtedly liable to be full of mistakes.

This train of thought leads to a further most awkward inference, one which intimately affects us all.

Perhaps we ourselves are in a state which deserves compassion, quite as much as that of the people of those dark days, whose misfortunes excited so intensely the sympathy of the sixteenth-century Reformers. For if it is true the Church fell away so as to lose her prerogative of infallible teacher, there can be no evidence now that she has ever been raised up so as to regain it. And so perhaps we are all of us breathing an atmosphere of mitigated Agnosticism.

If we are pressed to concede the fact of her fall, we are surely free to ask:—

In what particular year did the period of her fallen condition come to an end? What is the exact date at which she recovered the Divine favour and became again a sufficiently trustworthy exponent of Divine revelation? Was it at the Reformation? If so, what infallible voice was at that time heard to say: The Church, which has been steeped in idolatry for a long series of centuries, and which has in consequence been forsaken by her Founder, has at last shaken off her idolatrous chains, has repented of her unrighteousness, has been received back into the Divine favour, and has now begun to teach and practise once more His Gospel in its completeness and purity.

It is true several of the Reformers spoke language something like this. But how many of them were infallible? or was any one of them infallible? Did any one amongst them ever pretend to possess the faculty of infallibility? No, not even those of them, who were loudest and most extravagant in their evangelical boasting, ever went so far as to arrogate to themselves the prerogative of inerrancy. They did many strange things; but to do this, in their circumstances, would have been such a transparent anomaly that not one of them ever ventured to put forward the claim. The consciousness of the peculiarity of their position precluded the inclination to assume such airs. Let it be remembered, we are not now discussing their moral characteristics, or their assumption of Apostolic privileges. We shall for the present confine ourselves to the absence of that spiritual endowment which they freely acknowledged they did not possess. That is, infallibility. They seemed to feel they could take their stand duly, as legitimate Reformers, without laying claim to immunity from doctrinal errors.

Yet these were the men who undertook to proclaim to the world that the Institution which in the early centuries was called, and was truly called, the Church of Christ, fell at a certain stage of her history from heaven’s favour, and fell so lamentably that she remained steeped in the deepest depths of idolatry for ages.

And this was not a casual assertion of theirs; they testified to it, and kept repeating it with a vigorous iteration which could hardly fail to affect the weak-kneed and unobservant.

But their testimony, on their own admission, was fallible and consequently doubtful, and it being doubtful, they could not assure their followers that the statement they had made, about the loss of her original Divine privileges in the early times, was strictly correct. Hence, when they had poured out all the vials of their wrath upon what they designated the Church of the dark ages, and had abused her with every adjective of contempt and scorn which their dictionaries of vituperation furnished, they ended exactly where they had started, so far as producing anything in the way of certainty was concerned. They could show no charter of special inspiration or Divine delegation; and without it, they were only beating the air.

But allowing it to be true that she, the Church, once fell out of her Divinely destined orbit, and went wandering farther and farther away from it till the sixteenth century, their position is not improved. Similar difficulties stare them in the face. For the voices which tell us that she had got into that condition of aberration, in which she remained during the years of prolonged darkness, are the same voices which inform us that in their day, through their agency and apostolic exertions, she was purged of her many and “dominant errors,” was roused to a sense of her unfaithfulness, brought back from her prodigal wanderings, delivered from the Divine wrath which had hung over her so long, made again the realisation of the Divine ideal, and restored in the new garb with which they then clothed her to the bosom and friendship of Him who originally had established her.

All these voices, however, as has been already stated, both separately and in the aggregate, were confessedly of doubtful authority, and therefore could give only very uncertain witness.

Hence comes an inference which is appalling for all concerned. If the theory of her fall be true, she may be in her fallen state still, even now, up to the present moment, since the preachers of the Reformation, who proclaimed to the world her happy resurrection, were on their own acknowledgment liable to be mistaken. Are we not warranted in saying so?

To confess, as they did, that they were fallible, was to confess that their testimony was necessarily uncertain.

This inference, which, it must be admitted, is a legitimate one, enables us to look at the matter from another point of view. Since, as they held, eight hundred years had passed without an infallible voice sounding even once, and since they themselves did not pretend to have any such voice at their command, how could they tell the world with any degree of security what the early Church of Christ was like before her fall, what her structure was, what she taught and what she practised in the days of her righteousness,—in those days when she stood erect and blameless before the eye of her Founder?

There existed no source of knowledge that could give them absolutely reliable information on the matter. How then could they undertake to proclaim, that they had reproduced the form of the early primitive orthodox Church, when they were quite uncertain in what kind of form that early Church appeared. If they possessed no infallible means of knowing what the archetype was, why presume to say with bold assurance that the Institution they had produced was the realisation of that archetype. Here again we say an appeal to antiquity will not get them over the difficulty; such appeal bristles with objections similar to those we have already noticed. And all these difficulties—the fact cannot be repeated too often—spring from exactly the same cause, that is, from the denial of the existence of an unfailing infallible voice.

Few, if any, of the early Fathers give a complete picture of the Church of their day. That was not their scope; they spoke of certain elements in her and of certain things connected with her as occasion required.

Some of them alluded to what was called her hierarchy, others to what were called her Sacraments, others to laws or precepts she had made, others again to controversies in which she was engaged in their day or had been engaged before their day: but it would be difficult to gather from the works of any of them singly, or indeed of all of them collectively, what was the exact framework in which the Institution called the Church was embodied during the period in which they wrote. And even though, from their writings, together with the Epistles and Gospels, a structure could be formed which would seem to the thinking Christian to have the appearance and the characteristics of the Institution Christ must have meant originally to establish, there would still remain the same inexorable difficulty, that is, the want of an unerring definitive voice to declare that the passages of Scripture which referred to the building up of the Church had Divine authority; and to declare also that the Fathers had not been led astray by Scriptures that were merely human. And as that voice remained suspended still, at all events, as the Church founders of the Reformation did not claim to speak with it, they were necessarily unable to certify to their followers that the new edifice they had reared corresponded to the original of the first six centuries. Hence, when after years of toil they had framed the Church to which their heated imagination had given birth, they found themselves as far away from a satisfactory result as when they began. The fact was patent, and if they had allowed themselves to be influenced by reason and consistency, they would have been compelled by the force of their theory to confess, that they had only succeeded in piling up a mountain of conjecture.

The most they could undertake to say, with a shadow of reason, when they had raised their new fabric was: This may be like the Church of the early centuries, but we cannot positively declare that it is that Church in reality. Such the pass to which they were driven, by denying the doctrine that perpetual infallibility was an essential element in the Divine plan of the Church,—a pass which, were there a shred of revelation or of illuminated reason to give it solid foundation, would be enough to fill all of us with consternation. For the theory of a fallible Church, of which such inconvenience is the indisputable outcome, reduces the Christian religion, as it exists at the present moment, to a mere matter of doubt or speculation,—to what may be very justly termed diluted Agnosticism.

When brought in the stress of argument to its simplest expression, it cannot be forced into statement more definite than the following: The Church established by Christ may peradventure still exist on earth, but we must live and die in doubt as to whether she does or not.

Hence, we repeat, logically speaking, on such a supposition an act of faith is an impossibility; since faith and doubt are necessarily antagonistic; with doubt or conjecture, neither the act nor the habit of faith can possibly co-exist.⁴²42We say “logically speaking”. No doubt a Protestant in invincible ignorance may make an act of faith through ascribing infallibility to the dead letter of Scripture. Doubtless it is inferences such as these, flowing as they do naturally and necessarily from the system of the Reformers, that have driven so many of the intelligent and educated into that more pronounced and comprehensive Agnosticism, in which not only is the Church put aside, but even the very existence of God has become a matter of free discussion.

Who can wonder that it should be so? Should we not rather wonder if it were not so?

When principles, full of the seeds of disintegration, such as those we have been considering, lead to such impossibilities and make such wreck of the Gospel of Christ, why be astonished that many serious minds should turn away in despair from Christianity altogether, and plunge into the ocean of absolute unbelief?

We have seen then that the denial of constitutional infallibility renders the Scriptures valueless, renders the voice of antiquity valueless, wrecks the religion of those who make the sacred writings their rule of faith, reduces revelation to a mass of doubt, degrades it to the depths of that form of unbelief styled Agnosticism, or at least brings it down to the low level of things which rise no higher than probability.

If there is not on earth a voice distinctly and definitively infallible, which has spoken all through the centuries back to the day of Pentecost, and which is speaking still, religion is but a heap of conjecture, a pile of guesswork, a mere mountain of idle speculation.

Where Realised and Where Not

But now comes the all-important query regarding the realisation of the Divine ideal,—a query which can be easily and briefly disposed of.

Having proved the dogma of infallibility and drawn the inferences which flow from it, we are in a position to answer the questions: “Where is the Divine plan realised and where not?” Rather we are able to say that these two questions have been answered already. The same reply meets both; and that reply is embodied in the reasoning already put forward. The arguments, which prove where the Divine design is fulfilled, prove at the same time where it is not fulfilled.

We have shown that that design necessarily excludes private judgment in the sense the sectaries claim it as their right; necessarily contains an element of essential and perpetual unfailingness in the sense we have explained; necessarily contains an element of infallibility of the kind and within the limits already stated.

It is clear then that such design can be fulfilled only in a Church which peremptorily limits private judgment to its proper sphere, only in a Church which consistently and unchangingly teaches the necessity and claims the possession of indefectibility or permanent unfailingness, only in a Church which teaches the necessity and claims the possession of constitutional or essential infallibility.

Now where is the Church which prohibits, rejects and condemns, and which has ever prohibited, rejected and condemned private judgment; where is the Church which from the outset till now has ceaselessly and emphatically claimed to be indefectible and infallible? Our readers can have no difficulty in answering, since there is but one Church that claims these high characteristics and since all others distinctly disclaim them. In other words, it is vain to look for the realisation of Christ’s plan in any of the Churches which have sprung from the Reformation, because, whether they be established by law or not so established, they all assert the right of individual preference, and recognise in themselves the seeds both of failure and fallibility.

However, as the Anglican Church is the largest, the most imposing and influential of all the reformed communions, and as she is at the same time the most earnest in counting kindred or rather in claiming identity with the Church of pre-Reformation times, we now proceed to point out the groundlessness of her claim.

As we have already notified in the Preface, we should not think it either necessary or desirable to dwell at any length on this, were it not for her ceaseless aggressive attitude towards the Church of Rome. But when not merely members of her laity, but even some of her highest dignitaries have gone so far as to apply the epithet of “The Italian Mission” to the only Church which has a claim to be universal, it is well to help to make things appear in their proper light. In doing this, however, we shall not ignore the fact, (we readily admit it) that certain sections within her profess a larger portion of Catholic truth, than has been retained by any of the other Churches which sprang from the Reformation.