well be doubted), dropped early out of sight. The notion of inspiration was taken over by the New Israel from the Old uncriticized and at its crudest, pretty much in the form which it had assumed in late Jewish speculation. Any utterance, of course, which is taken as inspired is as such in some sense the voice of God: the true prophet speaks with a certain measure of divine authority. Moreover, inasmuch as the ultimate truth of things is the truth as God sees it, the "authority" of God would be absolute, could it be adequately ascertained. Inspiration having been for the most part taken as plenary, and no degrees being recognized, it was all too readily assumed that the divine authority in this absolute sense belonged to the prophetic witness, whether as manifested by individuals or by the Church corporately in her prophetical office. Already in the Didache we find it laid down that when once the Christian prophet has successfully surmounted certain tests of his genuineness and been recognized as inspired not of Satan but of God, to question henceforward his lightest word amounts to that sin against the Holy Ghost which has never forgiveness: "A prophet that speaketh in the Spirit ye shall neither test nor discriminate all sin shall be forgiven, but this sin shall not be forgiven." Already, in other words, the intrinsic appeal of prophetic inspiration to the light that is in man, to the eye which, if it be not deliberately darkened, must recognize the truth, is in process of being externalized into the dogma of a mechanical infallibility which stands superior to reason and must be accepted without criticism at its own valuation. The process, however, which we here detect in its beginnings, received an early check in its development, arising from the practical difficulty of a conflict of authorities. Prophets with equal claim to the divine 1 πάντα προφήτην λαλοῦντα ἐν πνεύματι οὐ πειράσετε οὐδὲ διακρινεῖτε· πᾶσα γὰρ ἁμαρτία ἀφεθήσεται, αὕτη δὲ ἡ ἁμαρτία οὐκ ἀφεθήσεται (Didache xi.). The date of the Didache is disputed, but most critics assign it to about 100 A.D. The authorship is unknown. afflatus were discovered to be contradicting flatly each other's message. It was necessary in these circumstances to set up a criterion of inspiration in the shape of an appeal to tradition. The depositaries of tradition were inevitably the bishops, and more especially the bishops of those sees which claimed to be of apostolic foundation. It is probable that this, rather than the doctrine of order, was the original significance of the emphasis which so early as Irenaeus1 we find laid upon the apostolic succession of the bishops. As original prophecy declined and was discredited, men fell back more and more upon the authority of settled Church order and the norm of the common life in faith and practice. No doubt, as the canon of the New Testament gradually took shape side by side with that of the Old, the ultimate appeal in matters of doctrine tended to be to Scripture, or, more strictly, to Scripture as interpreted by apostolic tradition; but of this tradition the bishops continued to be the natural depositaries and custodians. The bishop, it came to be held, possessed as such a spiritual gift or "charism" of truth; if in spite of this his teaching was questioned, the appeal lay to the synod of his brotherbishops-ultimately, in later times, to an ecumenical council of the bishops. These questionings and developments in any case affected not so much the general conception of authority and inspiration in the Church as the problem of its rightful seat. That an inspired authority existed no one doubted; nor was it doubted but that inspired authority was tantamount to infallibility. The increasing concentration of the authority and witness of the Church in official-that is to say, in episcopal-hands must undoubtedly be regarded as due, at least in part, to the influence of the legalist temper, increasingly operative as the Church at once conquered, and was conquered by, the Empire. The tendency to claim for the hierarchy the exclusive custody of revealed 1 Irenaeus wrote probably about 180 A.D. truth, and a plenary inspiration for the determination of disputed points of doctrine and practice, grew with the growth of their administrative authority. Already by the time of Cyprian' the belief existed, if not in an infallible Pope, at least in something like a collectivelyinfallible episcopate. The right to speak with authority in spiritual things was conceived as vested no longer in the saints, or corporately in the Church considered as the school of saints, but in the Church's administrative organs acting in virtue of their apostolic commission; and hence the rise of an ecclesiastical authority more and more despotic in its form, conceived more and more not as representing and voicing, but as dictating, the convictions of the spirit-bearing community; as not merely speaking the truth in all things, but as mechanically infallible in its utterances, the truth of which was supposed to be externally guaranteed by the mere fact that they had been dogmatically imposed. The process finds its logical culmination in modern Romanism of the ultramontane type, and may be said to have reached its historical climax in 1870 with the decree of Papal infallibility. It is not extravagant to suggest that this represents a one-sided development of the idea of authority, which however explicable historically is none the less disastrous in its outcome. There Equally one-sided, however, and as we are constrained to think, equally disastrous, is the logical issue of that repudiation of the idea of authority in religion which is the characteristic aberration of Protestantism. is a sense, indeed, in which the so-called orthodox Protestantism, which for three hundred years dominated Northern Europe and in which our fathers for the most part believed, was not Protestantism at all, but only mutilated Catholicism. Its intellectual basis, that is to say, was equally authoritarian with that of Rome, from 1 Martyred A.D. 258. 2 It is perhaps fair to observe that in the numerous qualifying clauses inserted in this decree the influence must be traced of a moderate party within the Papal Curia itself which was opposed to the more extreme claims of Ultramontanism. which it differed merely in the substitution of the infallible Book for the infallible Church: a substitution which in itself was by no means an improvement. Such, it is only fair to say, had not been the position of the original Reformers. Luther, for instance, found the seat of authority not in the letter of the Bible, but in the self-authenticating witness of the Spirit of God speaking through its pages and discerned by the spiritual man; he proceeded upon this basis to exalt such of the Biblical books as particularly appealed to him and to depreciate others. Such a conception of religious authority, however, was too subtle for popular theology, and was, moreover, defenceless against the perils of an arbitrary subjectivism such as Luther's own. Historical Protestantism as a whole lost sight of it and fell back upon infallibility and verbal inspiration. In so doing it was, however, as above hinted, untrue to itself; and the shattering to pieces by the criticism of the last century of this particular mode of conceiving the ground of Christian faith is but the working out after three hundred years of that principle of religious individualism which was a large part of the inner significance of Protestantism from the first. Both infallibilities, we may say, are to-day discarded: the infallible Book has gone the way of the infallible Church. It is not surprising that under these circumstances there should be in some circles a reversion to the position of Luther. The claim to be in the true Lutheran succession and the only logical Protestants is made for themselves in Germany by that school deriving ultimately from Ritschl, of which the most notable living exponent is Professor Hermann of Marburg, whose book, The Communion of the Christian with God, is readily accessible in an English translation.1 Space forbids discussion of it in detail: it must suffice 1 Crown Theological Library, vol. xv. (Williams and Norgate, 1906). The late Auguste Sabatier, in his Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit sets forth a view which is substantially identical with that of Professor Hermann. to say, somewhat dogmatically, that while it contains positive teaching of very great value, the general view of religion which it is designed to expound appears to be lacking in objectivity, and is in any case too difficult a doctrine to be made intelligible to the plain man. Such, conceivably, might be the religion of university professors; such, assuredly, could never be the faith of the millions; and its patent inadequacy in the latter rôle might even suggest a doubt whether, in the last analysis, its spiritual atmosphere might not turn out to be too rarefied even for the soul of a professor. What is needed is rather a restatement of the principle of authority which shall avoid either confusing it with infallibility or legalizing it as despotism. Our suggestion in this essay is that such a restatement may profitably find its starting-point in a return to something nearer akin to the classical meaning of the word "auctoritas." When St. Augustine writes "evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas," is not his meaning much more nearly represented by some such rendering as " corporate witness, or even "inspired witness" of the Catholic Church, than by the paraphrase "infallible voice"? 1 Meanwhile not a little may be learnt from a consideration of the course of actual religious psychology in the normal individual life. Authority (in the sense of "auctoritas") is the form through which all truth, and a fortiori all religious truth, reaches us in childhood. We accept implicitly what we are told by parents, pastors, and masters, as being the teaching of "authorities" who would not willingly deceive us, and of whose competence to speak we have no doubt. Our teachers represent to us, however informally, the authority of the Church Catholic in her teaching office: we accept their utterances, as a general rule, in unquestioning faith and docility. In this, as a matter 1 Cf. the famous saying, "securus iudicat orbis terrarum” (AUG. Adv. Petilianum). |