English
We can no more say the Church is built upon the Bible than that a nation is built upon its literature or a speaker upon his speech ; for the Bible is itself the voice of the Church, or the collection of her voices in many ages. For the Church, or the assembly of men believing in God as He spoke to Abraham and Melchisedec and Jethro, and shewed Himself in Christ, is not a household of to-day, but fi*om of old, and for ever. " The Bible would not be inspired, if a Holy Spirit had not dwelt in the Church ; for it expresses thoughts which were in the minds of her members, either one by one, or together. If in one sense she is the witness of Holy Writ, as handing it down, and stamping it with the authority of genuineness, so in another sense she is its very speaker, and has embodied in it her own experiences. Those who look only at the record, and put it in- stead of the Truth which it expresses, or the living Family of which it is the speech, take the Jewish element in our faith, and are in danger of becoming slaves to the letter. Whereas those who use the Bible, as the Apostle Paul used it, only as an instrument of instruction or awakening, but cherish chiefly the Truth, and rejoice in the life of reason and conscience by which Christ, * being dead, yet speaketh ' in His Church, choose rather the Christian side of our faith, and have the freedom wherewith the Truth makes us fi-ee. Yet such a freedom is in its own nature a law of right, as it is of truth ; and it is balanced against self-will by fitness of counsel, and regard for others, and again by the witnesses to itself and to law, which are recorded in the inlierited volume. Moreover, since the human element in the Church is liable to err, and so her hold on the Truth may grow feeble, or her faith cold, so the rightful fi-eedom of the body may M. P. 32 498 HUMANITY IN CHURCH AND BIBLE. be abused through the sin or selfishness of dominant members. Then the record of better generations protests against falling firom their type, and serves to revive their spirit. Thus a zeal even for the letter, as against secular domination, though not as against the spirit of Truth, may in some stages of the Church become a symbol of spiritual freedom. We may then have two opposite tendencies, the one magnifying the inherited record, and the other the living society. Those who would make the Book the rule, lie open to the objection, that it contains no know- ledge requiring any other methods than such as the Eternal Spirit still upholds in His world. Again, those who magnify the indwelling witness of the Church, either in the interest of freedom or of discipline, are taunted with the fi*ailties by which her prominent members have often fallen short of sanctity. So that an argument from experience is said to lie against the claim of unnatural infallibility for the record, and against that of supernatural guidance for the society. But the advocates of the first may fairly answer, that if the records or the generations once quoted in the Bible, have so passed away as to be known to us only by quotation in its pages, the volume thus preserving them steps into their place, and becomes the precious tradition of a most remote antiquity. The very method of the Almighty in giving us historical knowledge through means, forbids us to neglect such means. But as to the life of sentiment, or religious breathing, with which it is true that God pervades both the Past and the Present, we can in no way better awaken it, or test our genuine participation in it, than by study and comparison of its utterances from the earliest time. So far the advocates of the Bible seem to prevail, as shewing its usefulness, and the fitness of our reading it intelligently. Nor need they trouble them- selves at every step to trace into its consequences, as regards the Bible, our old controversy between a Providence of general law, and one of special interferences. But the advocates of the Church have also their reply, that if men now arc frail, so have they always been ; and that the very fact of Christian redemp- THE PROMISE TO THE END OP THE WORLD. 499 tion, or deliverance, presupposes moral evil in which our souls are entangled ; yet the saints of later ages do not appear uni- formly worse than those of the Old and New Testaments, but rather in many cases better. There is no more proof then against a Divine working in human nature now, according to the elements of which we are composed, than for ages gone by. But if the God of truth has emphatically promised that He will be with us or dwell in us by His Spirit for ever, it seems faith- less to doubt that this promise is on His part performed. Espe- cially, if under the Old Testament His prophets* foretold it as a perpetual characteristic of the New, that a larger and more permanent measure of the Spirit should be universally diffused, no Christian can confine the gift of inspiration to any book or byegone age, without becoming an infidel. Nor can he do things, after the letter, and merely because they are written, rather than because they are holy and lovely and true, and therefore taught us by God, without falling from the life of Christ's freedom into a Jewish narrowness, which is almost bondage. If he thus made the Bible his highest law, it would, as a law of the Letterf, become to him, as it was to the Jews, the strength of sin. Nor again, is it reasonable, to feel a thank- less contempt for all the lessons which the living God teaches us daily by experience : nor is it even pious, to make worship of one thing a pretext for irreverence to all others ; or, to dese- crate His world, in order to idolise any book. With such answers, the defenders of Church authority prevail so far as to prove her inspiration a world-long gift, and one coextensive in idea with God and man, though not always}, or equally, brought to pass in act. Tliey leave also its mutual interlacing with the events of Divine Providence ; and as their theory does • Hosea, Joel, Jeremiah. f ''Not only the ceremonial law, but the moral, and even the moet holy deca* logue of God's eternal oommanda, is the letter, and the trudition of the letter, neither giving life nor righteousnesB^ as St Augustine abundantly proves, but killing, and causing sin to abound."— LuTHEB, In OalcU. i. 14. t "Where there is no vision, the people perisheth," Proyerbs zxix. 18. 32—2 500 INSPIRATION AND EXPERIENCE. RELIGIOUS TRUTH. not bind tliem to magnify anything beyond what it may be in the eye of the holiest truth, so they win by the grace of God, and with the mind of Christ, a great freedom for human reason, yet subject mere waywardness to authority. You can now ap- prehend, how the living Church is divinely free, and yet the record of experiences of her byegone members is historically precious to her, both on the side of providence and of grace. Can you not also see, that inspiration may somewhat change its character, according to the events or persons with a knowledge of which it is connected, and yet in another sense it may be the most permanent of all the Divine gifts? For God does not repeat again before our eyes the past history of the world ; nor does He send again His well-beloved Son, bearing the shame of the cross on Calvary ; but He ever awakens, in men not wilfully hardened, impulses for good ; and He varies these, so that they become clearer or deeper, or leave a calmer vision of truth, as we sit in spirit at the feet of the Son of Man, and are stirred by Divine words or deeds ; yet in all diversities of operations, now, or of old, it is one Spirit that worketh all in all. It would be well, in either extolling the record, or in vindicating for the Church her holy inheritance of freedom, if we remembered that each draws life from the Truth. The Truth hallows the books, but is not made holier by them ; and gives life to the Church, but cannot be changed by her. Nor does this saving Truth consist in earthly facts and speculations, or sciences, all of which we may inquire about, and cither believe or reject, as the worthiness of the record, or the external witness of the Church in handing it down, or the probability of things, and our range of knowledge from time to time, may persuade us. All those may be matters of inquiry and of belief, but not of religious faith.