The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

176 SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION.this letter isaddressed to- us, and touches questions whichinvolve our eternal welfare, and contains not the slightesthint that it needs to be either interpreted or supplementedby the bearer, we will use the right and responsibility of interpretingit for ourselves.As regards the insufficiency of private interpretation, itishard to say whether Rome has conjured up more difficultieson the side of the Bible or on the side of man. Shehas made the most of the few difficult passages which theBible contains, overlooking its extraordinary plainness andclearness on the great matters of salvation, and has labouredto show that, however the Bible may be fitted for a higherorder of intelligences, it is really of no use at all to thosefor whom it was written. When a Romanist declaims onthis topic, we cannot help fancying that we are listening tothe pleadings of some acute, ingenious, and thoroughly inearnest infidel.And, as regards man, to believe Rome, onewould think that reason and right understanding is a giftwhich has been denied the human family, or, at most, isconfined to some scores of bishops and cardinals whom shedenominates the Church. The Bible is to be subjected tothe same rules of criticism and interpretation to which wedaily subject the statements of our fellow-men and theworks of human composition, and by which we searchoutthe hidden principles and fundamental laws of physical andmoral science. The faculties which can do the one can dothe other. The moral obliquity which prevents the heartfrom receiving: what the intellect can discover in the fieldof revelation, and which sheds darkness upon the understandingitself, is not to be overcome by papal infallibility,but by the promised assistance of the Divine Spirit. TheRoman Catholic Church has also found a specious argumentagainst the sufficiency of private judgment, in thedifferences of opinion on subordinate matters which existamong Protestants. These she has greatly magnified ; butwhatever they may be, she is not the party to reproach us,as we shall afterwards show. It is well known what a nest