Untitled - Electric Scotland

482 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [en. xvu.
must he able to say to him whom you would influence : I know
what these perplexities mean. I can point the way to solve them.
1 .et us talk of those things quietly and reverently together, in
voking the Divine blessing, and by the Divine guidance we shall
certainly emerge into the light. We believe with the Church of
all ages that the Bible is the Word of God ; that it through God
speaks to each separate soul, and through it also God s voice is
heard century after century proclaiming truth aloud to a world
in error. \Ve believe that the eternal Son of God
wandering
visited, in human guise, the earth He had created ;
that His
advent was heralded and His presence attested by many miracles,
and that when the men he came to save slew Him, His power
over death, as the Prince *of Life, was shown by His rising, the
greatest of all miracles. We believe that through
His death the
barrier was thrown down, which, as the effect of sin once entering
into our nature, kept God and man asunder that thus God was
reconciled to man once for all as, through the spectacle
of His
death and rising again set forth to human souls age after age,
they are one by
one reconciled to God. l
And similarly, in 1866:-
" The
Church of England," he says,
"
does allow amongst its
in non-essentials. This is a
people great diversity of opinion
necessary characteristic of a Protestant branch of the Church
Catholic. Sects of all kinds, whether Protestant or so-called
Catholic, are narrow and unwarrantably dogmatic venturing to
define where God s word has not defined ; eager to exclude from
their pale all who will not allow their minds to be forced into one
groove. Such the Church of England has never been through
any continuous period of its history, though at certain epochs
vigorous efforts have been made and, for a time, even success
fully to narrow it to the dimensions of a sect. . . . But then
it is urged, and truly, that there must be limits to this variety, or
the Church will lose all unity. It may be well that Arnold and
lived and
Keble and Daniel Wilson, trained in one university,
ministers of one
died, with all their many peculiar differences,
Church. But how far is this liberty to ? go The answer is plain.
It can go no further than is consistent with a common belief in
the essentials of the Church s faith, and these are plainly stated
1
Charge of 1862, pp. 6-11.