. . . In Which Dr. Salmon Sadly Reveals Himself to be a Hyper-Rationalistic Pelagian Heretic, and Engages in Yet More Misrepresentation of Development of Doctrine and Cardinal Newman’s Statements and Positions

This follows directly and immediately from the Infallibility of the Church; and the Catholic who accepts that doctrine, accepts all this as a matter of course. He knows that in believing what the Church teaches, he is believing what our Lord revealed to His Apostles, and what they committed to the Church from which he now accepts it. And he not only accepts the actual teaching of the Church, but he is prepared, and for the very same reason that he accepts what she now teaches, to accept also whatever she may in the future make known to him. Any increase of religious knowledge imparted to him by the Church is welcome to the Catholic, its truth and its antiquity are to him a foregone conclusion. He knows that it is part of that body of truth which he had already accepted unreservedly, and in its entirety — that it is a fuller meaning of some truth which he had already believed — that it now comes to him on the same authority on which all his faith rests; and by reason of that additional light and knowledge he accepts now explicitly what he had hitherto implicitly believed.

This is no more than saying that a Catholic is a Catholic, that he really believes what he professes to believe; and for such a person new doctrines in the sense imputed by Dr. Salmon are impossible. By new doctrines Dr. Salmon means doctrines that were not revealed at all — false doctrines — and he gives as instances the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility. But Catholics know that the Church defines nothing that was not in her keeping from the beginning — nothing new — and the very fact of their definition is to the Catholic a proof that these doctrines formed a part of the original revelation; and later on Dr. Salmon shall be supplied with evidence of the unmistakable traces of these doctrines in Catholic
tradition.

The mental attitude of Catholics Dr. Salmon does not realise at all, and hence it is that he makes such silly charges against us. He never loses an opportunity of saying hard things of the Oxford converts for their unpardonable sin of abandoning Protestantism in order to save their souls. He says of them : —

Perhaps those who then submitted to the Church of Rome scarcely realised all that was meant in their profession of faith in their new guide. They may have thought it meant no more than belief that everything the Church of Rome then taught was infallibly true. Events soon taught them that it meant besides that they must believe everything that that Church might afterwards teach, and her subsequent teaching put so great a strain on the faith of the new converts that in a few cases it was more than it could bear. (Page 19.)

And later on (page 62) he gives Mr. Capes as an instance of one who found the strain too great, though, according to Dr. Salmon’s own version of the case, Mr. Capes left the Catholic Church because he refused to accept a doctrine which the Church taught at the very time he joined her. Now, if any of the converts alluded to came into the Church in the state of mind described by Dr. Salmon, they really were not Catholics at all. They had not accepted that which is the foundation of the whole Catholic system — the authority of the teaching Church, which involves belief in anything the Church may teach in the future as well as acceptance of what she actually teaches. And converts coming into the Church are well aware of this, for it is fully explained to them. The Catholic Church does not blindfold those who come to join her, notwithstanding Dr. Salmon’s confident hypothesis. It is not to make up numbers that she receives converts. They must be instructed before they are received, and no priest could, without sin, knowingly receive into the Church one so ill-instructed as Dr. Salmon supposes some of the converts to have been.

Dr. Salmon says of Mr. Mallock that ‘he criticised other people’s beliefs and disbeliefs so freely, that it was hard to know what he believed or did not believe himself’ (page 60). These words are strictly applicable to Dr. Salmon himself. With the exception of a few vague references to what  ‘a prayer-full man,’ may find in the Bible, he gives no clue to his own creed. He boasts of ‘the strength of his conviction of the baselessness of the case made by the Romish advocates’ (page 14); he is quite sure that all distinctive Catholic doctrines form ‘no part of primitive Christianity.’ But this is all negative, and all through his Lectures his teaching is of the same sort. Thus he tells us what he does not believe; but as to what he does believe, we are left totally in the dark. But such is his idea of faith, that it really does not matter much, whether the articles of his creed be few or many, for his faith is purely human. It is not the argument of things unseen; not the testimony ‘greater than that of man;’ not an assent in nothing wavering; not therefore the root and foundation of justification, but a merely human faith, probable, hesitating, doubtful, with no higher certainty than mere unaided human reason can give it. Dr. Salmon believes in the truths of Christianity (if he believes them at all) on exactly the same grounds, and with exactly the same certainty, as he believes in the career of Julius Caesar. Tacitus and Suetonius give him the same certainty as St. Matthew and St. Luke. His own words are: —

That Jesus Christ lived more than eighteen centuries ago; that He died, rose again, and taught such and such doctrines, are things proved by the same kind of argument as that by which we know that Augustus was Emperor of Rome, and that there is such a country as China. Whether or not He founded a Church; whether He bestowed the gift of infallibility on it, and whether He fixed the seat of that infallibility at Rome, are things to be proved, if proved at all, by arguments which a logician would class as probable. (Page 63.) . . . We are certain, for instance, that there was such a man as Julius Caesar. We may call ourselves certain about the principal events of his life; but when you go into details, and inquire, for instance, what knowledge he had of Cataline’s conspiracy, you soon come to questions, to which you can only give probable, or doubtful answers, and it is just the same as to the facts of Christianity. (Page 74.)

And for all this he had prepared his bearers by telling them (page 48) that ‘it must be remembered that our belief must in the end rest on an act of our own judgment, and can never attain any higher certainty than whatever that may be able to give us ’ (page 48). These sentiments are again and again repeated in Dr. Salmon’s Lectures; and in them we have the key to the nature and value of his faith, as well as to the character of his declamation against the Catholic Church. He devotes a great part of his Third Lecture to the right of private judgment, or rather he insists on the necessity of private judgment (page 48). And here again he transcribes almost word for word, and without acknowledgment, Whately’s Cautions for the Times. All through the lecture be is confounding private judgment with the legitimate exercise of reason, and he so represents Catholics as if they condemned all exercise of reason with reference to the truths of faith.

Now, Dr. Salmon must be well aware that private judgment has a well-recognised meaning in theological controversy. It means the opinion of the individual as opposed to external authority; it means the right of the individual to determine for himself, and quite independently of all external control, what he is to believe or not to believe. But private judgment is not a synonym for reason, and in condemning it in its controversial sense, Catholics do not interfere in the slightest degree with the legitimate use of reason. Let us use our reason by all means. St. Paul reminds us of that duty. But in establishing His Church, and commissioning her to teach the nations, our Lord Himself condemned private judgment in its controversial sense, and the Catholic Church only repeats that condemnation. We must use our reason. A fool cannot make an act of faith. And this is really all that Dr. Salmon’s declamation comes to.

But in his zeal to make a case against us the Doctor shows that he has himself no divine supernatural faith at all. ‘Our belief,’ he says, ‘must in the end rest on an act of our own judgment, and can never attain any higher certainty than whatever that may be able to give us’ (page 48). This statement is completely subversive of faith; it is an enunciation of rationalism, pure and simple.  If Dr. Salmon’s belief is to rest ultimately on his own judgment, then his faith is human, and Huxley, whose judgment was at least as reliable as Dr. Salmon’s, had as good grounds for rejecting the Bible as Dr. Salmon has for accepting it. It is well that he has stated so clearly the fundamental principle of Protestantism — a principle which robs faith of its supernatural character, and which has given to Protestant countries as many creeds as there are individuals. If each one’s faith is to rest ultimately on each one’s judgment, we are not to be surprised at the harmony and unity that are a note of what Dr. Salmon calls his Church. Pope’s lines are strictly true of it: —

‘Tis with our judgments, as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

It must be presumed that Dr. Salmon is contemplating that faith without which ‘it is impossible to please God’ — supernatural, divine faith — but he is completely astray as to its motive and nature. Supernatural divine faith does not rest ultimately ‘on an act of our own judgment,’ but on the authority of God revealing the truth we are to believe. We believe the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, not because ‘an act of our own judgment’ shows them to be true, but because God has revealed them. Dr. Salmon confounds the motive of faith with the motives of credibility. For an act of faith we require a revelation and evidence of the fact of revelation. The motives of credibility are those reasons which satisfy us that the revelation is from God — that God has spoken. They are those which establish the divine origin of the Christian faith generally — miracles, prophecies, the wonderful propagation and preservation of the faith, its salutary effect on mankind, etc. All these supply us with a wide and legitimate field for the exercise of our reason, and within that field Catholics do exercise their reason, and according to their circumstances they are bound to do so.

These motives of credibility lead us to believe that a revelation has been made; they are a preliminary to faith, but they are not the motive of faith, or any part of that motive. They do not enter into the act of faith at all. Because of them we believe in the existence of the revelation, but the revelation itself we believe on the authority of God Whose word it is. And belief resting on any motive inferior to this would not be divine faith at all, and could not be the means of saving our souls. Dr. Salmon tells his students that faith is the outcome of their own judgment (and it is to be hoped that they are all profound thinkers), but St. Paul tells them: ‘By grace you are saved, through faith, and this not of ourselves, for it is the gift of God.’ [Eph 2:8] And the same saint said to the Thessalonians: ‘When you had received of us, the word of the hearing of God, you received it not as the word of men, but (as it is indeed) the word of God, Who worketh in you that have believed.’ [1 Thess 2:13] According to St. Paul there is in faith something which we do not owe to our own talents or judgments, but which is God’s gift directly. And in strict accordance with this doctrine of St. Paul, is the teaching of the Vatican Council. It says: —

But that faith which is the beginning of man’s salvation, the Catholic Church professes to be a supernatural virtue, whereby enlightened, and aided by God’s grace, we believe those things which He has revealed to be true, not because of the intrinsic truth of them, known from the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God revealing them.

And the Council pronounces an anathema against those who hold, as Dr. Salmon does, that for divine faith it is not necessary that the revelation should be believed on the authority of God revealing. With this supernatural divine faith illuminating and elevating the soul, what a sad contrast is presented by Dr. Salmon’s bald rationalism — ‘the act of his own judgment.’ And the saddest feature of the contrast is the spiritual blight and ruin which Dr. Salmon’s theory involves. Supernatural faith is necessary for salvation, and the Doctor’s faith is not supernatural. It is purely human, and can have no more influence in saving souls than the latest theory on electricity. And as Dr. Salmon’s faith is purely human, he is quite logical (though quite wrong), in saying that it can attain to no higher certainty than reason cam give it; and that his belief in our Lord’s life and teaching comes to him in the same way as his belief in the career of Augustus Caesar — that it is merely a hesitating, doubting, absent, at best only a probability.

The Doctor professes a profound knowledge of, and an intimate acquaintance with, Scripture; and yet nothing can be more clear and explicit than the Scriptural condemnation of his theory of faith. In texts almost innumerable faith is spoken of, not as the doubting, hesitating, probable opinion that he describes it, but as an assent to God’s word full, firm, and unhesitating. ‘If you shall have faith, and doubt not,’ said our Lord to His disciples, [Mt 21:21] where He clearly describes doubt as incompatible with faith. ‘Therefore, let all the house of Israel know most certainly that God hath made both Lord and Christ, this same Jesus whom you have crucified.’ [Acts 2:36] ‘For I am certain that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come . . . shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ [Rom 8:38-39] ‘For I know whom I have believed, and I am certain that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.’ [2 Tim 1:12] ‘Ask in faith, nothing wavering,’ says St. James [Jas 1:6].

Nothing can be clearer then, than that faith , according to Scripture, is a firm, unhesitating, unwavering, assent to God’s word. Those who hesitate are described as having ‘little faith’ or no faith. Faith and doubt are regarded as incompatible. And this is precisely the teaching of the Catholic Church. The Vatican Council, in the 3rd chapter De Fide, tells us that we are bound to give to God’s revelation ‘the full obedience of our intellects and of our wills.’ And it further asserts that ‘our faith rests on the most firm of all foundations ’ — the authority of God brought home to us by His Church. When, therefore, Dr. Salmon told his students that ‘our belief must in the end rest on an act of our own judgment,’ and can have no higher authority, he is con tradicting the express language of Scripture as well as the express teaching of the Catholic Church; and he is leading his students astray on the most vitally important of all subjects — the nature of saving faith. It is clear that he has no real conception of any supernatural element in faith; and hence it is that he seeks to ridicule the idea that there is any such, or that Catholics can have any certainty in matters of faith above what unaided reason can give.

I mean [he says] to say something about the theory of the supernatural gift of faith as laid down at the Vatican Council, merely remarking now that the theory of a supernatural endowment superseding in matters of religion the ordinary laws of reasoning, an endowment to question which involves deadly peril, deters Roman Catholics from all straightforward seeking for truth. (Pages 62, 63.)

And what he has to say is this: — ‘They are not naturally infallible, but God has made them so. It is by a supernatural gift of faith that they accept the Church’s teaching, and have a divinely inspired certainty that they are in the right’ (page 81). And he quotes the Vatican Council in proof of his statement, though there is nothing whatever in the Council that would give him the slightest countenance. We do not claim any gift, supernatural or otherwise, ‘superseding in matters of religion the ordinary laws of reasoning.’ These laws we respect and adhere to with far more consistency and persistency than Dr. Salmon shows in his own conduct. If misquotation and misrepresentation be in accordance with ‘the ordinary laws of reasoning,’ then Dr. Salmon is a profound logician! We do not claim to be infallible, either naturally, or supernaturally; we do not claim ‘a divinely inspired certainty that we are in the right,’ and the Vatican Council give no grounds whatever for those ridiculous statements. We have in the Church an infallible guide, and as long as we follow her guidance we are certain of the truth of our faith. But we are not infallible, for through our own fault we may cease to follow the Church’s guidance, and thus may fall away, and lose the faith. As long as we are loyal children of the Church we are certain of the truth of our faith, but that certainty does not come to us by inspiration.

We do not then make the claims attributed to us by Dr. Salmon. But we do claim with the Vatican Council, and hold as of faith, that we cannot make a salutary act of faith without actual grace enlightening our intellects to see the truth and inclining our wills to embrace it. And this claim of ours is not new, as Dr. Salmon ought to know. Our Lord Himself says: — ‘No man can come to Me, except the Father, who hath sent Me, draw him.’ [Jn 6:44] ‘By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is a gift of God.’ [Eph 2:8] Actual grace is necessary for all those acts that prepare us for justification, and especially necessary for the more arduous and difficult acts which are opposed to our own passions and prejudices, and Dr. Salmon must be very oblivious of early Church history if he venture to doubt this. To say nothing of other fathers the writings of St. Augustine against Semi-Pelagianism would supply him with abundant proofs of the necessity of illuminating and helping grace, and would show him also that only heretics questioned that necessity. The Second Council of Orange (A.D. 529) in its seventh canon says: —

If anyone asserts that by our natural powers we shall determine or embrace any good thing that pertains to eternal life, or that we shall assent, as we ought, to the salutary preaching of the Gospel without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Ghost, who gives to all sweetness in assenting and in believing the truth, that person is deceived by the heretical spirit, and does not understand the voice of God saying in the Gospel ‘without Me you can do nothing’ (John xv. 5), or that of the Apostle, ‘not that wo are able to think anything of ourselves, as from ourselves, but all our sufficiency is from God’ (2 Cor. iii. 5).

The sentiment reprobated in such forcible language in this canon is exactly Dr. Salmon’s, and it did not occur to him when he ridiculed the statement of the Vatican Council as false and new, that that statement was taken word for word from the canon of the Council of Orange just mentioned. If the Doctor had given some time and thought to the study of the important and difficult subject on which he lectured so glibly, he would not have made such an exhibition of his levity and of his ignorance by ridiculing as false and new a doctrine which our Blessed Lord Himself revealed most explicitly, and which His Church has held and taught ever since her foundation. Cardinal Newman, so frequently misquoted by Dr. Salmon, puts this matter, with his wonted force and clearness, as follows: —

Faith is the gift of God, and not a mere act of our own, which we are free to exert when we will. It is quite distinct from an exercise of reason though it follows upon it. I may feel the force of the argument for the Divine origin of the Church I may see that I ought to believe, and yet I may be unable to believe. . . Faith is not a mere conviction in reason; it is a firm assent; it is a clear certainty, greater than any other certainty, and this is wrought in the mind by the grace of God, and by it alone. As then men may be convinced, and not act according to their conviction, so they may be convinced, and not believe according to their conviction. . . . In a word, the arguments for religion do not compel anyone to believe, just as arguments for good conduct do not compel anyone to obey. Obedience is the consequence of willing to obey, and faith is the consequence of willing to believe. We may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is right without the grace of God. [Discourses to Mixed Congregations, Dis. XI. pp.  260, 261. Ed. 1862]

Instead of reading such extracts for his students, Dr. Salmon falls back on ‘an act of his own judgment,’ and with very unsatisfactory results. After his dissertation on private judgment he proceeds as follows, feeling apparently that the Catholic Church must go down before his assault:—

We have the choice whether we shall exercise our private judgment in one act or in a great many; but exercise it in one way or another we must. We may apply our private judgment separately to the different questions in controversy — purgatory, transubstantiation, invocation of saints, and so forth — and come to our own conclusions on each, or we may apply our private judgment to the question whether the Church of Rome is infallible, etc. (Page 48.) . . . It is certain enough that what God revealed is true; but, if it is not certain that He has revealed the infallibility of the Roman Church, then we cannot have certain assurance of the truth of that doctrine, or of anything that is founded on it. (Pages 63, 64.)

Here again the Doctor is illogical and misleading. He will have to determine whether the Church of Christ is infallible and indefectible also; and since this is certain and has been proved, he will then have to exercise his judgment in determining which of the existing bodies is that Church of Christ. It must, at all events, profess the doctrine of infallibility, for that doctrine is revealed and true; but since only one of the competitors holds that doctrine, it follows that, if the Church of Christ be existing on earth at all, it must be that one which Dr. Salmon calls the Church of Rome. This is the logical way for Dr. Salmon to use his reason, and it will lead to conclusions very different from those of his lectures. It is a wide field, and a legitimate one, for the exercise of his judgment. But to apply it ‘separately to purgatory, transubstantiation, and the invocation of saints’ is to abuse it. Only the Church can speak with authority on such questions.

These are doctrines that cannot be proved as it is proved that Augustus was Emperor of Rome or that there is such a country as China and faith founded on such arguments will avail very little for Dr. Salmon in the day of his need. It was not faith founded on such arguments that gave St. Paul the certainty of which he speaks in his Epistle to the Romans [8:38]; it was not such faith that enabled St. Stephen to ‘see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’ [Acts 7:55]; it was not such faith that sustained St. Laurence on the gridiron, or that ever enabled anyone to ‘take up his cross and follow’ our Divine Lord. Such faith as Dr. Salmon contemplates can bring no real consolation in this life, and can inspire no hope for the life to come. Resting on an act of his own judgment, like his belief in the exploits of Caesar or Napoleon Buonaparte, it does not go outside the sphere of mere reason; and hence it is that he seems to know nothing of the elevating, assuring, sustaining character of divine faith, and nothing of the effect of grace on the soul.

Grace and the supernatural are to Dr. Salmon unintelligible terms. He cannot enter into the views of Catholics regarding them; he cannot understand the certainty, the peace of soul, the ‘sweetness in believing,’ which the gift of faith brings to Catholics. All this he caricatures, though he cannot comprehend it. By pandering to the prejudices of young men not overburthened with knowledge, he may secure an audience in his class-room and the character of champion of Protestantism, but he should not forget that these young men have souls to save, and that it is only divine faith can save them. His references to ‘the prayerful man’ and to the Bible as a safeguard against Romanism are vague platitudes. The private judgment which he extols used to be the Protestant substitute for Pope and Church; but 1 modern criticism’ has killed it, and all Dr. Salmon’s art cannot bring it back to life. For the advocates of the Bible, interpreted by private judgment, the vital question now is: How much of the Bible is left for private judgment to interpret? And if Dr. Salmon had given his attention to this question, his time would have been more usefully as well as more charitably spent than it is in bearing false witness against us.

Dr. Salmon was able to give his students the welcome assurance that Catholics were so shattered by the logic of controversialists of his own class and calibre that new methods of defence had been recently resorted to, but, of course, with no prospect of success. The new defences are Newman’s Theory of Development, and the theory contained in his Grammar of Assent. These were, he told them, specially designed to meet the exigencies of controversy, but have failed to do so. In his First Lecture Dr. Salmon warned his students not to identify the statements of particular divines with the official teaching of the Catholic Church, and yet he is doing just that himself all through his Lectures. The works named are represented by him as if they were the very foundation of the Catholic system, essential to its existence. That he should have introduced them into his argument at all, shows how confidently he relied on the intellectual character of his audience. For surely Cardinal Newman is not the Catholic Church, and the Church has not adopted the works named, nor given any official sanction to either of them; and therefore she is in no sense whatever responsible for them, and whether the theories and arguments of the works named be sound or unsound, the Church is in no way concerned.

The Grammar of Assent is, as the very name implies, an attempt to explain the mental process by which men arrive at their beliefs. The greater part of the book has just as much interest for Protestants as for Catholics. Only one section of the fifth chapter has any special interest for Catholics, and even that section is merely explanatory, showing how the philosophical principles laid down in the previous chapter may be applied to dogmatic truths. The late Cardinal Cullen said of the Grammar of Assent that it was ‘a hard nut to crack,’ and Dr. Salmon does not seem to have seriously attempted the operation. And after all his declamation he is forced to admit that Catholics are in no sense concerned with the book. He says: —

When Newman’s book first came out one could constantly see traces of its influences in Roman Catholic articles in magazines and reviews. Now it seems to have dropped very much out of sight, and the highest Roman Catholic authorities lay quite a different basis for their faith. (Page 78.)

The basis of Catholic faith has been laid down not by ‘Roman Catholic authorities’ but by our Blessed Lord Himself, and considered, as an attempt to use the Grammar of Assent, as a weapon against that faith, the net result of Dr. Salmon’s long lecture is — nothing . Let us see how he succeeds with the Essay on Development.

It is, he says, a theory devised to cover our retreat before the overwhelming force of Protestant logic. ‘The Romish champions, beaten out of the open field, have shut themselves up in the fortress of infallibility’ (page 46). But while retreating ‘the first strategic movement towards the rear was the doctrine of development, which has seriously modified the old theory of tradition’ (page 31). It must be owing to his propensity to misrepresent that he substitutes the absurd expression ‘doctrine of development’ for Newman’s own words ‘development of doctrine’; but he distinctly states that it was an invention to meet a difficulty.  ‘The starting of this theory,’ he says, ‘exhibits plainly the total rout which the champions of the Romish Church experienced in the battle they attempted to fight on the field of history . . .  it is, in short, an attempt to enable men beaten off the platform of history to hang on to it by the eyelids.’ Though this extract would lead one to infer that the theory was not previously heard of he says, lower down, that the theory was not new, for it was maintained by Mochler and Perrone, and even a century earlier than their time.

But Newman’s book had the effect of making it popular to an extent it had never been before, and of causing its general adoption by Romish advocates, who are now content to exchange tradition, which their predecessors had made the basis of their system, for this new foundation of development. (Page 31.) . . . When Newman’s book appeared I looked with much curiosity to see whether the heads of the Church to which he was joining himself would accept the defence made by their new convert, the book having been written before he had joined them . . .  it seemed a complete abandonment of the old traditional theory of the advocates of Rome. (Page 33.)

Later on he says: ‘This theory of development, so fashionable thirty years ago, has now dropped into the background’ (page 41). And later on still, in his Seventh Lecture, he says the theory ‘has now become fashionable’ (page 113). What are we to think of this extraordinary theory, or the data given by Dr. Salmon? It is a new theory, and an old one, accepted by us and discarded; vital to us, and useless to us, and all, at the same time, according to this inimitable logician! Leaving to his juvenile controversialists the task of assimilating this mass of contradictions, it is quite sufficient to remind the Regius Professor that the Catholic Church is in no sense whatever responsible for the Essay on Development. It was written, as Dr. Salmon himself states, before its author became a Catholic; and if the Doctor had looked at the preface of the Essay he would have seen the following: ‘His (the author’s) first act on his conversion was to offer his work for revision to the proper authorities; but the offer was declined, on the ground that it was written and partly printed before he was a Catholic’ (Pref. p. x).

This shows how little the Catholic Church is concerned with the theory or with the arguments of the Essay; and how grossly unfair, even to his own students, is the mass of misrepresentation piled up by Dr. Salmon, on the false assumption that the Church is concerned with it. The development of Christian doctrine is as old as Christianity itself. St. Peter’s first sermon on the first Pentecost is an instance of it, and so too are the proofs and explanations of doctrine to be found in the New Testament, and in the early councils and early fathers[.] St. Vincent of Lerins propounded it as a formal theory. So far from supplanting tradition and the fathers, as Dr. Salmon says it does, it is an explanation of both; and if there be anything peculiar in Newman’s theory, he is himself responsible as his own words testify. If Dr. Salmon had given as much of his time and talent to the earnest search for truth, as he devoted to the propagation of calumnies on the Catholic Church, it would have been all the better for himself, and for his students also.

Before passing from the subject of Development, it may be well to consider the value of any interesting discovery which Dr. Salmon has made in the history of the theory. He says: ‘But more than a century before Dr. Newman’s time the theory of Development had played its part in the Roman Catholic controversy, only then it was the Protestant combatant who brought that theory forward, and the Roman Catholic who repudiated it’ (page 35). The allusion is to the controversy between Bossuet and the Calvinist Jurieu, and Dr. Salmon goes on to say : —

The theses of his [Bossuet’s] book called the History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, was that the doctrine of the true Church is always the same, whereas Protestants are at variance with each other, and with themselves. Bousset [sic] was replied to by a Calvinist minister named Jurieu. The line Jurieu took was to dispute the assertion that the doctrine of the true is always the same. He maintained the doctrine of development in its full extent, asserting that the truth of God was only known by instalments (par parcelles), that the theology of the fathers was imperfect and fluctuating, and that Christian theology has been constantly going on towards perfection. He illustrated his theory by examples of important doctrines, concerning which he alleged the teaching of the early Church to have been defective or uncertain, of which it is enough here to quote that he declared that the mystery of the Trinity, though of the last importance, and essential to Christianity, remained as every one knows undeveloped (informe) down to the first Council of Nice [Nicaea], and even down to that of Constantinople. (Pages 35, 36.)

And Dr. Salmon adds that even ‘the Jesuit Petavius had . . . made very similar assertions concerning the immaturity of the teaching of the early fathers’ (page 86). And his conclusion is this: ‘It seems then a very serious matter if the leading authorities of the Roman Church have now to own that in the main point at issue between Bossuet and Jurieu, the Calvinist minister was in the right, and their own champion in the wrong’ (page 37). According to Dr. Salmon then Bossuet repudiated the development of doctrine in the sense in which Catholics now admit it, while Jurieu maintained in precisely the same sense as we now hold it; and moreover the learned Jesuit Petavius agreed with Jurieu.

Neither of these statements has the slightest foundation in fact. Dr. Salmon says he has taken from Bossuet’s Premier Avertissement aux Protestans. They are not taken from the Premier Avertissement for they are not contained in it; on the contrary it supplies conclusive evidence to contradict each of these statements. Bossuet addressing Protestants in the third section of the Avertissement says: ‘What your minister regards as intolerable is, that I should dare to state that the faith does not change in the true Church, and that the truth coming from God was perfect from the first.’ Now Bossuet immediately explains what he means by this statement, for he immediately quotes St. Vincent of Lerins in confirmation of it: —

The Church of Christ, the faithful guardian of the truths committed to her care, never changes anything in them; she takes nothing away; she adds nothing; she rejects nothing necessary; she takes up nothing superfluous. Her whole care is to explain those truths that were originally committed to her, to confirm those that have been sufficiently explained, to guard those that have been defined and confirmed, and to transmit to posterity in writings those things that she received from the fathers by tradition. (Sec. 4 )

And having thus defined his own teaching Bossuet lays down, in Sec. 5, that his proposition which the minister thought so strange is exactly that of St. Vincent of Lerins, and he adds: ‘But it is not sufficient for that father to establish the same truth which I have laid down as a foundation, but he even establishes it by the very same principle, namely, that the truth coming from God was perfect from the first’ (Sec. 5); and he then quotes St. Vincent as saying : —

I cannot sufficiently express my surprise, how men are so proud, so blind, so impious, so carried away by error, that not content with the rule of faith, once given to the faithful, and handed down from those who went before, they are every day looking for novelties, and are daily seeking to add, to change, or take away something from religion, as if it was not a heavenly truth, which once revealed is sufficient, but only a human institution, which can only come to perfection by continual changing, or more correctly, by every day finding out some defect (Sec. 5.)

And still quoting St. Vincent, Bossuet adds: —

But in order the better to understand the sentiments of St. Vincent we must look at his proof. And the proof of the unchangeable character of the doctrine is St. Paul’s exhortation to Timothy: ‘Oh, Timothy, guard the deposit’; that is, as he explains it, not what you have yourself discovered, but what has been entrusted to you, what you have received from others, and not at all what you might have invented yourself. (Sec. 5.)

From Bossuet’s own words, therefore, in the Avertissement relied on by Dr. Salmon, it is perfectly clear that his teaching as to the unchangeable character of Catholic faith, and the explanation of doctrines under the control and guidance of the teaching Church, is the same as Catholic theologians have always held and taught. It is the teaching given by St. Paul to his disciple Timothy, inculcated by St. Vincent in the beautiful language already quoted from him, and reiterated in St. Vincent’s own words in the acts of theVatican Council. Dr. Salmon professes to have read the Avertissement, and he gives in his own book the acts of the Vatican, and he does not see how they agree in this matter.

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

The character given of Jurieu by his co-religionist and contemporary Bayle, would not lead one to attach much importance to his views on theology, or indeed on any other subject. His views on Development Dr. Salmon professes to have taken from Bossuet’s Avertissement, and Dr. Salmon’s contention is, that our theory now was Jurieu’s theory then, and that it seems a very serious matter if ‘the leading authorities in the Boman Church have now to own …. that the Calvinist minister was in the right, and their own champion in the wrong ’ (page 37). Now, when we refer to the Avertissement, from which Dr. Salmon has taken his information, we find Jurieu’s theory of Development described by Bossuet as follows: ‘It may be alleged that the changes were only verbal in the terms, and that in reality the Church’s belief was always the same. But this is not true . . .  for the way in which we have seen that the ancients speak of the generation of the Son of God, and of His inequality with the Father, convey impressions very false and very different from ours.’ (Sec. 6.) Again from Sec. 8 we learn that according to Jurieu the early Christians did not believe that the Person of the Son of God was eternal, and consequently did not believe that the Trinity was from eternity.

Again in Sec. 9 we are told that according to Jurieu the early Christians did not believe that God was immutable. In Sec. 10 we are told that according to Jurieu the first Christians believed that the Divine Persons were not equal, and from Sec. 13 we learn that, according to Jurieu, the early Christians did not know the mystery of the Incarnation. It is needless to quote any further the blasphemies of this man. It is quite unnecessary to inquire whether Jurieu really held these blasphemies, though Bossuet convicts him out of his own mouth. Such at all events is the theory of Jurieu from the very text which Dr. Salmon professes to have quoted. According to Jurieu the early Christians were not only ignorant of true doctrines, but they held for at least three centuries doctrines that were blasphemous, and subversive of all true faith, and that from this mass of blasphemous error truth gradually (par parcelles) came forth. And with this text and proof before him Dr. Salmon does not hesitate to tell his students that Jurieu’s position then was the Catholic position now, and that ‘in Newman’s Essay on Development everything that had been said by Jurieu and by Petavius . . .  is said again, and said more strongly’ (page 37).

And what has Petavius done that he should be classed with such a person as Jurieu? Surely his character as one of the greatest scholars of his age, and one of the leading theologians of the great Jesuit Order, should have made even Dr. Salmon hesitate to link him with such an ignorant fanatic. But the most extraordinary feature of the charge against Petavius is that the very text on which the charge is grounded proves it to be utterly and entirely false — is simply a formal refutation of the charge. Again Dr. Salmon takes his information from the Avertissement, and the only refer ence to Petavius is in Sec. 28, in which Bossuet undertakes to prove ‘that the passage of Petavius quoted by Jurieu, states the direct contradiction of what that minister attributes to him.’ And Bossuet proves his assertion conclusively from the text of Petavius. There was question only of the doctrine of the Trinity, and Bossuet shows that according to Petavius all the fathers agree as to the mystery, though they sometimes differ as to the manner of explaining certain things connected with it.

In the less important matters some few, very few, have erred. Some have spoken inaccurately but the great multitude of the fathers have been as accurate in their language as they were orthodox in their faith. This, according to Bossuet, is the teaching of Petavius, and anyone who consults Petavius himself will find Bossuet’s statement quite correct. The text will be found in the preface to the second volume of Petavius’ works, c. 1, n. 10 and 12 of Zachary’s edition, Venice, 1757. Now, though Petavius directly contradicts Jurieu, Dr. Salmon declares that they agree, and by some clever mental process he finds that Newman agrees with both. In proof of this he says that ‘Newman begins by owning the unserviceableness of St. Vincent’s maxim “quod semper”’ (page 37).

Dr. Salmon himself has made the same admission at page 270. He adds that Newman ‘confesses that is impossible by means of this maxim (unless indeed a very forced interpretation be put on it) to establish the articles of Pope Pius’ creed . . . impossible to show that these articles are any part of the faith of the Early Church’ (page 37). Dr. Salmon is here fully availing himself of his ‘advantage in addressing an audience all one way of thinking,’ and thus he is led again to attribute to Newman a statement that has no foundation in his text. Newman says nothing of what is attributed to him here. In speaking of St. Vincent’s maxim, Newman says that an unfair interpretation is put on the maxim by Protestants in order to make a case against the Catholic Church, and that for this unfair interpretation Protestants themselves suffer.

It admits [Newman says] of being interpreted in one of two ways: if it be narrowed for the purpose of disproving the Catholicity of the creed of Pope Pius, it becomes also an objection to the Athanasian; and if it be relaxed to admit the doctrines retained by the English Church, it no longer excludes certain doctrines of Rome which that Church denies. It cannot at once condemn St. Thomas and St. Bernard, and defend St. Athanasius and St. Gregory Nazianzen. [Essay on Development, p. 9]

And Newman adds: —

Let it not be for a moment supposed that I impugn the orthodoxy of the early divines, or the cogency of their testimony among fair inquirers: but I am trying them by that unfair interpretation of Vincentius which is necessary in order to make him available against the Church of Rome. [Ibid., p. 15]

This is Cardinal Newman’s real view as to the rule of St. Vincent of Lerins, very different from the view attributed to him by Dr. Salmon in his anxiety to make a case against the Catholic Church. And it is for this same object that Bossuet and Jurieu and Petavius are quoted by Dr. Salmon, to make them available against the Catholic Church. The attempt, however, is a miserable failure. In fact, no one can read the Avertissement, and read Dr. Salmon’s paraphrase of it, without feeling— well, that the Doctor is a very imaginative person, that he has a rather clever way of manipulating his authorities, that he is a sort of mesmeriser who can make his media say precisely what he wants them to say. His aim is, he says, not victory, but truth: but it must be admitted that he has a somewhat peculiar way of telling the truth. His manner of carrying on the ‘Controversy with Rome’ is in strict accordance with the time honoured traditions of Trinity College; and the College is, indeed, fortunate in securing the services of a regius professor who has such a profound knowledge of theology, and such a scrupulous regard for truth.

. . . In Which Our Sophist-Critic Massively Misrepresents Cardinal Newman and Utterly Misunderstands the Distinction Between Implicit and Explicit Faith

The book, The Infallibility of the Church (1888) by Anglican anti-Catholic polemicist George Salmon (1819-1904), may be one of the most extensive and detailed — as well as influential — critiques of the Catholic Church ever written. But, as usual with these sorts of works, it’s abominably argued and relentlessly ignorant and/or dishonest, as the critique below will amply demonstrate and document.

Dr. Salmon says: ‘For thus holding that the list of truths, necessary to be known in order to salvation, is short and simple, we have the authority of the Roman Church herself’ (page 91). And behold the proof: —

What is it [he asks], that for their souls’ health they are bound to know? A popular little manual circulated by thousands, and called, ‘What every Christian must know,’ enables us to answer this question. It tells us that every Christian must know the four great truths of faith, namely: — ‘1. There is one God. 2. In that God there are three Persons. 3. Jesus became Man and died for us. 4. God will reward the good in heaven, and punish the wicked in hell.’ This list of necessary truths is not long, but some Roman Catholics have contended that it might be shortened, pointing out that, since men were undoubtedly saved before Christ’s coming, without any explicit faith in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of the Trinity, an explicit faith in these doctrines cannot be held to be necessary to salvation (page 95).

In a note Dr. Salmon attributes this view to Gary, on the authority of Dr. Littledale, and he then proceeds as follows: ‘Nor does such faith seem to be demanded in a certain Papal attempt, to define the minimum of necessary knowledge. Pope Innocent IV., in his Commentary on the Decretals, lays down that it is enough for the laity to attend to good works; and for the rest to believe implicitly what the Church believes’ (pages 95, 96). Now, when young men, not overburthened with knowledge, are listening day after day to teaching of this sort, it is no wonder that it takes hold of their minds; they come to believe it; they rest satisfied with it; they rely on their teacher; and they go out into the world with the conviction that Catholics are very illogical and absurd, and very wicked also. They have been listening all along to a one-sided story, and they never realise that there is another side, which may be very different.

Dr. Salmon warned his students against identifying the statements of particular divines with ‘the authorised teaching of the Roman Catholic Church’ (page 13). And yet this is precisely what he has himself been doing, in the extracts just given. They are his proof that ‘we have the authority of the Roman Church herself for holding that the list of truths, necessary to be known in order to salvation, is short and simple’ (page 91). Now, Father Furniss is not ‘the Roman Church herself,’ neither is Father Gury, nor Innocent IV. in the work quoted, or rather misquoted. Catholic theologians would smile at finding the Regius Professor of Divinity quoting — (misquoting) — a penny book, written by a hard-worked missionary priest, and intended for children, as if it had been a standard Catholic theological work, and ‘the authority of the Roman Church herself.’ No wonder that the Doctor’s pupils become such profound theologians, such formidable controversialists, such a terror to the Church of Borne! The Doctor, then, is inconsistent. But he is much more than inconsistent; he is grossly unfair to the writers quoted, for neither of them held the doctrine attributed to them by Dr. Salmon.

When a passage is taken out of its context and used in a sense different from that of the writer, that writer is as much misrepresented as if words had been attributed to him which he did not use at all. To falsify a writer’s meaning is just as bad as to falsify his words. The view attributed to Gury is a good illustration of this. He is represented as teaching that our obligatory profession of faith ‘might be shortened’; limited to belief in God, and in future rewards and punishments; and Catholics are represented as holding the necessity of an infallible guide for so short a creed. Now, if Dr. Salmon believes in St. Paul’s teaching, he must be satisfied that belief in the two articles mentioned was absolutely necessary before the Church was founded at all. And does he fancy that an astute Jesuit theologian is so simple as to maintain that an infallible church is necessary for the teaching of truths, that had been believed for several centuries before the Church came into existence[?] Is he, in his anxiety to make out a case against the Catholic Church, abandoning the old Protestant theory about the Jesuits? He quotes Gury from Dr. Littledale. It would have been much better if he had quoted from Gury himself; for then, he would have seen that the passage referred to, had no more reference to the doctrine of Infallibility than the Aurora Borealis has. What sort of necessity does Gury contemplate in the passage referred to ?

It becomes necessary again to remind Dr. Salmon of the distinction made by theologians between the necessity of means (necessita medii), and the necessity of precept (necessitas praecepti). In strict theological language a thing is said to be a means (medium) of salvation, when it contributes something positive towards the securing of salvation; and, it is a necessary means, when this positive influence contributed by it, cannot be otherwise supplied. A thing, then, that is necessary as a means (necessitate medii) of salvation, is so necessary, that in no circumstances can it be dispensed with; it does for us something for the saving of our souls, which nothing else (in the present dispensation) can do. The necessity, therefore, is strict and absolute and indispensable. On the other hand, when a thing is said to be necessary, by necessity of precept (necessitate praecepti), the necessity arises solely out of the precept; the thing commanded or prohibited has, of itself, no positive influence on our salvation; it does nothing positive for us; but if we violate the precept we sin, and thus put a bar to our salvation.

It is clear, then, that the necessity of precept can affect only adults in the possession of their reason, for such only are capable of fulfilling a precept; and it is clear, also, that circumstances may exempt one wholly, or partly, from the obligation of a precept. And since we are bound to labour to save our souls, it follows that whatever is necessary as a means of salvation comes under that obligation, and is, therefore, necessary by necessity of precept also. Now, according to Catholic theology, faith is necessary as a means of salvation, absolutely and indispensably, for all without exception. Habitual faith infused in baptism suffices for infants who die before they come to the use of reason. But for all adults who have come to the use of reason, actual faith, supernatural in its principle and in its motive— that is, explicit belief in certain divinely revealed truths — is necessary as a means of salvation (necessitate medii), and from this stern necessity, no circumstances whatever, no ignorance how- ever invincible, can excuse them. How may truths of faith come under this stern necessity of means, is not determined; but all adults in the enjoyment of reason are bound by necessity of precept (necessitate praecepti) to believe all that God has revealed, and that His Church teaches.

As already stated, circumstances may, to a large extent, affect the obligation of a precept, or may, altogether, exempt one from its observance. One, for instance, to whom the precept was never made known, cannot be expected to observe it, and does not sin by not observing it. A street arab who has been neglected by his parents, who has been the sport of adverse fortune from his earliest days, cannot be expected to know his faith as well as a child, who has been trained carefully by religious parents. And a trained theologian — like Dr. Salmon — knows much more of revealed truth than an ordinary layman does, and is therefore bound to a greater measure of explicit faith in those truths that are necessary, by necessity of precept (necessitate praecepti). And the violation of the precept of faith, is a much greater sin, in the case of one who has a better knowledge of his obligation ; for such a person sins against greater light. Thus then, while the precept of faith is the same for all, its obligation, as regards explicit faith, does not affect individuals with equal stringency. All this, Dr. Salmon could have read in any of our dogmatic theologians; and he should have read it somewhere before he ventured to lecture on so important and difficult a subject.

But to misrepresent our theologians without reading them, appears to be Dr. Salmon’s forte. Instead of looking, himself, at the text of Gury, he takes it from the extra-fallible Littledale, and tells his students that we require an infallible guide to a profession of faith, that is limited by one of our own standard theologians to two articles: — the existence of God, and future rewards and punishments. Now again, what sort of necessity does Gury contemplate in the passage referred to? Nothing can be clearer than Gury’s own words. The passage occurs in his treatise, De Virtutibus , c. 1, art. 2, 8. 1, and the section is headed — ‘On the truths necessary to be known and believed by necessity of means’ (necessitate medii).

He is, therefore, discussing what truths of faith are absolutely and indispensably necessary (necessitate medii) to be explicitly believed by all, whether in the Church or outside of it, in order that they may be saved. He states as certain that the two articles of faith mentioned by Dr. Salmon are necessary as a means (necessitate medii) and he gives the proof; and having done so, he says: — ‘But it is disputed whether there are not many other articles also necessary to be explicitly believed by this same rigorous necessity of means (necessitate medii) for salvation.’ He states that some theologians hold that the Trinity and Incarnation come under the same rigorous necessity, but, he himself thinks the opposite opinion more probable; that is, that only faith in God, and in future rewards and punishments, is necessary by necessity of means (necessitate medii) for salvation.

This, then, according to Gury, is the minimum of explicit faith to qualify an adult for entering into Heaven; and no circumstances whatever — no amount of invincible ignorance — would excuse from the stern necessity of so much at least of explicit faith. It holds for all without exception, whether in the Church or out of it. It has been necessary since revelation began, and a majority of theologians regard it as more probable that the Christian revelation has not altered this minimum. Thus, then, the opinion of Gury contemplates a most exceptional case: — that of one who has explicit faith in God, and who believes that He will reward those who serve Him; but who, through no fault of his own, is ignorant of all other revealed truths. And all that the opinion concedes is, that the salvation of such a person is not impossible. According to Gury, therefore, the salvation of one who has explicit faith in God and in future rewards and punishments, is, in certain most exceptional circumstances, not impossible.

Therefore, says Dr. Salmon, Gury teaches that explicit faith in God and in future rewards and punishments is sufficient for all persons, at all times and in all circumstances. This is all ‘that for their souls’ health they are obliged to know’ (page 95); and in this teaching of Gury ‘we have the authority of the Roman Church herself’ (page 91). Dr. Salmon’s logic is worthy of his cause. In the chapter and article of Gury, already quoted, section 2 is headed: ‘On the truths necessary to be known and believed by necessity of precept ‘ (necessitate praecepti); and he gives in the list of such truths the Apostle’s Creed, the Commandments, the Precepts of the Church, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments, and he adds such an explanation of them as includes our full obligation, both as to faith and morals. All this we are bound by the Church to know and believe, and for the simple and sufficient reason that our Lord commissioned and commanded her to teach all this; and it is in teaching all this that the Church’s infallible authority comes to be exercised. This is a very different version of Gury’s teaching from that given to his students by Dr. Salmon; but it is Gury’s own.

And bad as Dr. Salmon’s treatment of Gury is, his treatment of Pope Innocent IV. is immeasurably worse; for he represents the Pope as teaching that ‘the laity’ require no explicit faith at all. After misquoting Gury the Doctor adds: —

Nor does such faith seem to be demanded in a certain Papal attempt to define the minimum of necessary knowledge. Pope Innocent IV., in his Commentary on the Decretals , lays down that it is enough for the laity to attend to good works, and for the rest to believe implicitly what the Church believes (pages 95, 96).

The quotation begins with one of those sinister insinuations with which Dr. Salmon’s book is literally teeming: ‘a certain Papal attempt to define.’ Now, when we speak of a Pope defining any doctrinal question, we understand that he is pronouncing a definite sentence, which Catholics are bound to accept as infallible; and the expression used by Dr. Salmon suggests to his students that ‘the minimum of necessary knowledge’ has been definitely fixed for us by an infallible decision, that minimum being no explicit faith at all, at least for lay Catholics. Now (1), no Catholic believes that a Pope, when he writes a book, is acting in his official capacity as Head of the Church and teaching infallibly. Benedict XIV. has written several very learned and valuable works, which are frequently quoted by Catholic theologians, but never as infallible utterances. It is so with the work of Innocent IV. He was a very learned man; but no one before Dr. Salmon represents him as defining, or attempting to define, the questions discussed in his book in the sense in which that word ‘define’ is used when there is question of the exercise of Infallibility.

When a Pope writes such a work Catholics regard him as a private theologian giving his opinion; and in such cases his opinion is weighed, like that of other theologians, on its merits. But (2) Innocent IV. did not give the opinion attributed to him by Dr. Salmon, but the exact contradictory of it; and Dr. Salmon’s manipulation of the text he professes to be quoting is one of the worst specimens of his controversial tactics. He suppresses what the Pope says, in order to represent him as saying what he did not say. ‘Pope Innocent IV. lays down that it is enough for the laity to attend to good works, and for the rest to believe implicitly what the Church believes.’ Now, if the Pope lays down that, this is enough ; therefore, he lays down that no explicit faith is necessary for the laity. This is Dr. Salmon’s version. But the opening words of the passage he professes to be quoting are as follows: —

There is a certain measure of faith to which everyone is bound, and which is sufficient for the simple, and, perhaps, even for all laics; that is, that each one coming to the faith must believe that there is a God, and that He rewards all the good. They must also believe other articles implicitly; that is, they must believe that whatever the Church teaches is true.

With his usual dexterity Dr. Salmon omits the passage in which the Pope insists on the necessity of explicit faith, and substitutes words which have no foundation in the text at all. The Pope says that explicit faith in God, and in future rewards, is necessary for all, even the most ignorant; but according to Dr. Salmon be lays down that the laity require no explicit faith at all. There is very little likelihood that Dr. Salmon’s students will take the trouble of consulting the very rare and obscure book which he professed to quote; and so, the false impression created by his teaching will remain; and if the students really believe their professor, they will go out into the world with the conviction, that their Catholic neighbours are not bound to have explicit faith even in the existence of God! What a liberal and enlightened generation of clerics that must be, which has had the advantage of Dr. Salmon’s special training.

The remainder of Dr. Salmon’s reference to Innocent IV. is quite irrelevant. It is clearly intended to fasten on Catholic priests in the past, the charge of ignorance. Well, it is much to be regretted that religious teachers in any Church should be wanting in knowledge; but the Catholic Church has not a monopoly of such teachers. A glance at the third chapter of Macaulay’s History of England, or at Dean Swift’s Directions to Servants, would show Dr. Salmon that he has some domestic difficulties to settle. And indeed, judging from his own lectures, those who have had the privilege of his own special training, are not likely to become prodigies of theological knowledge; — and certainly their time would have been better employed in learning to defend whatever revealed truths they still hold, than in learning to calumniate us. But even irrelevant as the quotation from Innocent IV. is, Dr. Salmon could not resist his habit of manipulating it.

The cleric described by Macaulay, after securing the cook or kitchen-maid as partner of his missionary toil, was allowed by his Church to propagate the Gospel after his own fashion. No inconvenient inquisition was set up as to his positive knowledge of the truths he was supposed to teach. But the ignorant cleric contemplated by Innocent IV. was not let off so easily, as Dr. Salmon could have seen from the text before him. By dispensation of the Pope, or of a religious superior, such a cleric may be allowed to retain his position, only in the extreme case when he had neither time for studying nor the means of acquiring knowledge; when he was so poor that he should support himself by the labour of his own hands. But if he had facilities for acquiring more explicit knowledge he was bound to acquire it.

And the religious superior, before imposing penance on such a cleric for culpable ignorance, was directed to ascertain whether the ignorance arose from weakness of intellect, or, as many of those alleged, from pressure of works of piety and charity. And in the case of one who had sufficient talent and the means of acquiring more explicit knowledge, Innocent IV. would not admit of such an excuse. No doubt the case contemplated by the Pope is an extreme one, and the standard is certainly low; but it is very far from being so low as Dr. Salmon represents it; and moreover, it was the result of the bad system of lay interference in ecclesiastical appointments — a system which the Popes always laboured to break down.

Amongst the myriad misquotations in Dr. Salmon’s book, perhaps the most extraordinary is his reference to Father Furniss. The little book quoted, What every Christian must know, is one of a series of ‘Books for Children.’ The Imprimatur of the present learned Archbishop of Dublin on its first page, is an absolutely certain warrant of its orthodoxy; but, being intended for children, and for very young children, too, its style is the plainest and simplest imaginable, and its teaching of the most elementary character. That this penny book should be looked up to as an authority by the theological faculty of Trinity College, is an indication of the profound knowledge of theology which the faculty imparts; but, that so plain and simple a little book should be misrepresented, must be the result of an invincible propensity. This little tract, he says,

Tells us that every Christian must know the four great truths of faith, namely: — 1. There is one God. 2. In that God there are three Persons. 3. Jesus became man and died for us. 4. God will reward the good in heaven and punish the wicked in hell (page 95).

And on the following page he adds that: —

Later editions add the doctrine of the Sacraments, namely: — Baptism takes away original sin; Confession takes away actual sin; and the Blessed Sacrament is the body and blood of Christ.

And he adds: —

But take this list of necessary truths at the longest, and it certainly has the merit of brevity But the main point is, that if the list of necessary truths is so short the necessity for an infallible guide disappears, the four great truths of faith named are held as strongly by Protestants who dispense with the guidance of the Church of Rome as by those who follow it (pages 96, 97).

All that we need believe then is the existence of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, future rewards and punishments, with Baptism, Confession, and the Blessed Sacrament, and for this concise creed we require an infallible guide. This is Dr. Salmon’s version of the teaching of Father Furniss. But when we consult Father Furniss himself, we find the Doctor playing his old game. The very first sentence in Father Furniss’ little book is a quotation from Benedict XIV. as follows: — ‘We affirm that the greatest part of the damned are in hell, because they were ignorant of those mysteries of faith which Christians must know and believe.’ This does not look like minimising in the matter of faith. And the very next sentence, which is the first of Father Furniss’ own text, is as follows: — ‘Every Christian, by the command of the Church, must know, at least: — 1. The four great truths of Faith. 2. The Sacraments; at least Baptism, Penance, and the Blessed Eucharist. 3. The Prayers, Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Creed, or, I believe. 4. The Commandments of God, and the Church.’

And then under the heading of Faith, Father Furniss says: — ‘Be very careful to learn these four great truths, because no one can go to heaven without knowing them,’ and he then gives the four great truths named by Dr. Salmon. It is clear, then, from Father Furniss himself, that the necessity for the four great truths is the necessity of means, whereas, in the previous sentence he contemplated the necessity of precept, and gave, under that heading, his substance of the Catholic profession of faith, which we are bound to take from the Church.

Father Furniss next gives the Sacraments: — Baptism, Penance, and the Blessed Eucharist, with a very short question and answer on each. And, strange to say, Dr. Salmon misrepresents only one of these answers; but what is lost in number is made up for by the character of the misrepresentation. ‘Confession takes away actual sin,’ he says, whilst professing to be quoting from Father Furniss. No, Confession does not take away actual sin, and Father Furniss does not say that it does. The Sacrament of Penance takes away actual sin, and Father Furniss says so; but of that Sacrament Confession is only one part, and that not the most essential or important. Such, then, are the authorities offered to his students by Dr. Salmon, to convince them, that we are required to believe very little, and, that for that little we require an infallible guide. For teaching of this sort it is no excuse that it is addressed to ‘an audience all of one way of thinking.’ This circumstance only renders such teaching more reprehensible, for it keeps young men from thinking aright on a question involving the salvation of their souls.

Now, when Dr. Salmon told his students that our obligatory profession of faith may, according to our own theologians, be cut down to two articles, and that we required an infallible guide even for these, did he make the slightest attempt to verify his statement ? Does he fancy that we are fools to risk our souls on such a creed  Does he fancy us ignorant of the fact that the articles named were just as necessary before the Church was founded as they are now? Did he really believe his own statement regarding us? Either he did not believe his own statement about us, or, if he did believe it, then his ignorance is not only culpable, but contemptible; for a moment’s glance at the authorities quoted by him would have convinced him of his error. There is no use in mincing matters with this Regius  Professor. His loud sounding titles give him no license to misrepresent. While teaching respectable young men he takes his authorities at second hand from tainted sources; and, from false premises thus acquired he draws false conclusions, and sets them before his students as truths admitted by Catholics themselves.

Instead of giving them reliable information, he crams them with error and with prejudices, and sends them on their mission, blind leaders of the blind, with, of course, the usual result. If our doctrines be false, surely they can be refuted without being misrepresented; and if they be true, Dr. Salmon and his young men have a very vital interest in knowing what they really are. ‘The main point is,’ he says, ‘that, if the list of necessary truths is so short, the necessity for an infallible guide disappears.’ The main point is just the reverse, for the list of necessary truths is not so short, and the necessity for an infallible guide does not, therefore, disappear. But Dr. Salmon must be again reminded that our argument for the infallible guide is grounded, not on its necessity at all, but on God’s express revelation of it.

It is our duty to take the truth from God, not to ask Him the reason why; though the conflicting opinions held by the leaders of Dr. Salmon’s Church on the most vital doctrines of Christianity afford a very strong presumptive proof of the necessity of an infallible guide for a much shorter creed than ours. A day will come for Dr. Salmon when he shall know a good deal more theology than he seems to know now; and as it is just possible that such knowledge may come too late, it may be more prudent for him to consider seriously in time whether in ‘dispensing with the guidance of the Church of Rome’ he may not be in reality casting in his lot with the heathen and the publican. He says his object is not victory but truth, and here is a matter in which truth and victory go hand in hand.

Not content with misrepresenting Father Furniss  as to the list of necessary truths, Dr. Salmon seeks to bring ridicule on him for attempting to determine such a list at all. He says: ‘And we may think it strange that a modem writer has succeeded in doing what the writers of the New Testament tried to do, and are said to have failed in’ (page 96). Here he tells his students that the writers of the New Testament tried to draw up a complete list of necessary truths, to be, of course, handed down in the New Testament; and he insinuates, that we hold they failed in the attempt. Now, we deny emphatically, that the writers of the New Testament had any such intention, and they could not be said to have failed in doing what they never attempted to do. The Doctor offers no proof of his statement, except his confident assertion.

It was certainly, [he says], the object of the New Testament writers to declare the truths necessary to salvation. St. John (xx. 31) tells us his object in writing: ‘These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name ’ (page 96).

Now this assertion, and the text offered to prove it, fall far short of the Doctor’s case. It is necessary for him to show that the object of the New Testament writers was to declare in their writings, all the truths necessary to salvation. The text of St. John refers to the Incarnation only, and it may be presumed that Dr. Salmon believes at least in the Trinity. As already stated, the New Testament writings were called forth by circumstances. In one place it was necessary to counteract the tendency to Judaising; in another place, the false principles of Pagan philosophy bad to be checked; in another piece professing Christians had to be censured for their wicked lives, or for the dissensions that were springing up amongst them. To meet such emergencies was the object of the writers of the New Testament, as Dr. Salmon is well aware. To this object their writings are mainly directed, and not in all these writings, taken together, have we stated the complete body of Christian faith. The Apostles, no doubt, declared to their followers all the truths necessary to salvation, but they did not insert all these truths in the inspired writings that have come down to us, and Dr. Salmon has not an atom of proof to the contrary.  And, though he has offered no proof whatever, he proceeds, as if his case had been indisputably established, to say: —

Yet we are required to believe that these Apostles and Evangelists, who wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, performed their task so badly, that one who should have recourse to their pages for guidance is more likely than not to go astray, and is likely to find nothing but perplexity and error. Strange indeed that inspired writers should fail in their task. Stranger still that writers who claim no miraculous assistance, should be able to accomplish it in a half-a-dozen lines (pages 96, 97).

No such extravagant demand is made on Dr. Salmon, at least by Catholics. We leave him in the full enjoyment of that liberty to believe, or not to believe, which his own Church gives. But if he make a ridiculous hypothesis, what follows from it must be his own affair. Catholics do not say that everything in Scripture is obscure and difficult; that no revealed truths are stated plainly in it; but they do say that the whole of God’s revelation is not contained in it; whilst the conflicting Creeds professedly deduced from it, by men as earnest and ‘prayerful’ as Dr. Salmon, afford conclusive proof, that there is a great deal in Scripture that is obscure, and that a great many have gone astray, and have found little but ‘perplexity and error ’ for making to find their faith from it alone. The following extract is recommended to Dr. Salmon’s consideration: —

Whence come the separation of antagonistic Churches and the multiplicity of dissentient sects? The Romanist reads the Bible, and he finds in it the primacy of Peter, the supremacy of the Church, and the direction to ‘do penance’ for the forgiveness of sins. The Protestant reads it, and he discovers that Rome is the ‘mystic Babylon,’ the ‘mother of harlots,’ the ‘abomination of desolation.’ The Sacerdotalist reads it, and he sees priestly supremacy, Eucharistic Sacrifice, and Sacramental Salvation. The Protestant cannot find in it the faintest trace of Sacerdotalism, nor any connexion whatever between offering an actual sacrifice and the holy memorial of the Supper of the Lord. The Congregationalist reads it, and regards Sacerdotalism as an enormous apostacy from the meaning and spirit of the Gospel, and comes away convinced that every believer is his own all-sufficient priest. The Baptist looks into it, and thinks that in Baptism true believers must go under the water as adults. Most other Christians think that infants should be baptised, and that sprinkling is sufficient. Cromwell and his Roundheads read it, and saw everywhere the Lord of Hosts leading on his followers to battle. The Quaker reads it, and finds only the Prince of Peace, and declares ‘He that takes the sword shall perish with the sword.’ The Anglican Churchman was long persuaded that it taught the doctrine of passive obedience— the right-divine of kings to govern wrong — the Puritan dwelt on ‘binding their kings in chains and their nobles with links of iron.’ The Calvinist sees the dreadful image of wrath flaming over all its pages, and says to his enemies, ‘Our God is a consuming fire.’ The Universalist sees only the loving Heavenly Father, and explains the most awful forebodings, as Oriental tropes and pictorial rhetoric. The Mormon picks out phrases  to bolster up his polygamy. The Monogamist cries out even  against divorce. The Shaker and his congeners in all ages forbid and disparage all wedded unions whatever. [Farrar, The Bible, its Meaning and Supremacy, 2nd ed. p. 113 (might be p. 143) ]

The writer of this extract is a Protestant quite as orthodox as Dr. Salmon, and like the Doctor an enthusiastic upholder of the all-sufficiency of Scripture. When Dr. Salmon and his ‘prayerful’ friends can find so many different religions in the same Bible, they are illustrating in the clearest possible way the result that comes of ‘dispensing with the guidance of the Church of Rome.’ While discussing the necessary articles of faith, Dr. Salmon introduces the distinction between explicit and implicit faith, and uses it, with his wonted cleverness, to blindfold his students while professing to enlighten them. ‘No one,’ he says truly, ‘is so unreasonable as to expect ordinary members of the Church to be acquainted with all the decisions of Popes and Councils’ (page 91); and he goes on to enumerate some decisions that are difficult and obscure; and he states that, though it would be unreasonable to expect Catholics to know them, ‘they are nevertheless obliged to believe them.’

And again he adds: ‘Of these and such like propositions which an unlearned Catholic is bound to believe he is not in the least expected to know even the meaning . . . He must believe that the Church teaches true doctrines but he need not know what these doctrines are’ (page 92). If Dr. Salmon, before making the above statements, had explained to his students, the distinction between explicit and implicit faith, and applied it, his remarks would have lost their sting; but he allowed his statement to produce a false impression on his students, and then, he introduced the distinction in order to produce another impression even more false and detrimental. He told them that ordinary Catholics were bound to believe what they could not be expected to know, and, without a word of explanation, he quotes Cardinal Newman as an authority for this statement.

Dr. Newman, [he says], has been so good as to furnish me with an example. ‘What sense,’ he asks, ‘can a child or a peasant, nay, or any ordinary Catholic, put upon the Tridentine Canons? . . . Yet the doctrinal enunciations,’ he adds, ‘are de fide.‘ Peasants are bound to believe them as well as controversialists, and to believe them as truly as they believe our Lord to be God (page 91).

It must have been a source of great satisfaction to Dr. Salmon’s theologians, to find us convicted of such irreligious extravagance, and that too on the authority of Cardinal Newman. But their professor did not tell them that the quotation was taken from an objection which Newman proposed to himself; and still less did he think of telling them that Newman had answered the objection. It is difficult to suppress one’s feeling in dealing with such dishonest controversy as this. The Fifth chapter of the Grammar of Assent is the only one that is strictly speaking theological; and in its Third Section, Newman undertakes to deal with ‘a familiar charge against the Catholic Church in the mouths of her opponents, that she imposes on her children, as matters of faith, . . .   a great number of doctrines, which none but professed theologians can understand.’ [p. 138] The principle of the objection was urged long since by Jeremy Taylor, but Cardinal Newman expands it, and urges it with his wonted candour and ability.

That Dr. Salmon should have borrowed his objection from Newman, is quite intelligible; for Newman was sure to put it with more precision, and with greater force than the Doctor himself could command; but that he should have led his students to believe that he was quoting Newman’s teaching instead of Newman’s objection; that he should have altogether suppressed Newman’s answer; all this is, perhaps, one of the most glaring and discreditable specimens of even Dr. Salmon’s controversial tactics. The Doctor could not have acted in good faith in thus misrepresenting Newman, for Newman distinctly states that he is putting an objection, and he states with equal distinctness that he answers the objection. In the very first sentence of the paragraph from which Dr. Salmon quotes, Newman says: ‘I will suppose the objection urged thus.’ [p. 141] The last sentence but one of the same paragraph is the one quoted by Dr. Salmon, and to it Newman adds: ‘How then are the Catholic Credenda easy, and within reach of all?’ And in the opening sentence of the very next paragraph Newman says: ‘I begin my answer to this objection by recurring to what has been already said,’ etc. (page 142).

Dr. Salmon, therefore, could not have mistaken the matter. He must have seen that Newman was putting an objection, and had given an answer (for Newman says so clearly and unmistakably). And yet, he puts before his students the words of the objection as Newman’s teaching, which could only be got from the answer, to which he makes no reference whatever. Conduct of this sort needs no comment. No one has more reason to complain of the Doctor than his own students. He is indeed treating them badly. It is worth while to give Newman’s answer at some length, for besides vindicating the Cardinal, it completely disposes of Dr. Salmon’s second-hand sophistry. Dr. Newman makes some preliminary remarks on the relations between theological truths and the devotions that are grounded on them. Hi explain  how the intellect acts on the deposit of faith, examining it, and systematising it into the science of Theology. He shows how the condemnation of false doctrines, as well as the definitions of true doctrines, enter among the Catholic Credenda, and he says: —

But then the question recurs, why should the refutation of heresy be our objects of faith? if no mind, theological or not, can believe what it cannot understand, in what sense can the Canons of Councils and other ecclesiastical determinations, be included in those Credenda, which the Church presents to every Catholic, and to which every Catholic gives his firm interior assent?

This is a re-statement of the objection, and the answer is as follows: —

In solving this difficulty I wish it first observed, that if it is the duty of the Church to act as the pillar and ground of the truth, she is manifestly obliged from time to time and to the end of time, to denounce opinions incompatible with that truth, whenever able and subtle minds within her communion venture to publish such opinions. Suppose certain bishops and priests at this day began to teach that Islamism or Buddhism was a direct and immediate revelation from God, she would be bound to use the authority which God has given her to declare that such a proposition will not stand with Christianity, and that those who hold it are none of hers; and she would be bound to impose such a declaration on that very knot of persons, who had committed themselves to the novel proposition, in order that, if they would not recant, they might be separated from her communion as they were separate from her faith. In such a case, then, her masses of population would either not hear of the controversy, or they would at once take part  with her, and without effort take any test, which secured the exclusion of the innovators; and she, on the other hand, would feel that what is a rule for some Catholics must be a rule for all. Who is to draw the line, who is to acknowledge it, and who is not?

It is plain there cannot be two rules of faith in the same communion; or, rather, as the case really would be, an endless variety of rules coming into force according to the multiplication of heretical theories, and to the degrees of knowledge, and of sentiment in individual Catholics. There is but one rule of faith for all, and, it would be a greater difficulty, to allow of an uncertain  rule of faith than (if that was the alternative as it is not) to impose upon uneducated minds a profession which they cannot understand. But it is not the necessary result of unity of profession, nor is it the fact that, the Church imposes dogmatic statements on the interior assent of those who cannot apprehend them. The difficulty is removed by the dogma of the Church’s Infallibility, and of the consequent duty of implicit faith in her word. The ‘One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,’ is an article of the Creed, and an article which, inclusive of her Infallibility, all men, high and low, can easily master and accept with a real operative assent.

It stands in the place of all abstruse propositions in a Catholic mind; for to believe in her word is virtually  to believe m them all. Even what he cannot understand, at least, he can believe to be true; and he believes it to be true because he believes in the Church. The rationale for unlearned devotion is as follows: — It stands to reason that all of us, learned and unlearned, are bound to believe the whole revealed doctrine, in all its parts, and in all that it implies, according as portion after portion is brought home to our conscience as belonging to it; and it also stands to reason that a doctrine so deep and so various as the revealed depositum of faith, cannot be brought home to us and made our own all at once.

No mind, however large, however penetrating, can directly, and fully by one act, understand any one truth however simple. What can be more intelligible than that ‘Alexander conquered Asia,’ or that ‘Veracity is a duty,’ but what a multitude of propositions is included under either of these theses! Still if we profess either we profess all that it includes. Thus as regards the Catholic Creed, if we really believe that our Lord is God, we believe all that is meant by such a belief; or else we are not in earnest when we profess to believe the proposition. In the act of believing it at all, we forthwith commit ourselves by anticipation to believe truths which at present we do not believe, because they have never come before us. We limit, henceforth, the range of our private judgment in prospect by the conditions, whatever they are, of that dogma. Thus the Arians said that they believed in our Lord’s divinity, but when they were pressed to confess His eternity, they denied it; thereby showing, in fact, that they never bad believed in His divinity at all. In other words, a man who really believes in our Lord’s proper divinity, believes implicite in  His eternity.

And so in like manner of the whole depositum of faith or the revealed word; if we believe in the revelation we believe in what is revealed, in all that is revealed, however it may be brought home to us, by reasoning or in any other way. He who believes that Christ is the truth, and that the Evangelists are truthful, believes all that He has said through them, although he has only read St. Matthew and has not read St. John. He who believes in the depositum of revelation, believes in all the doctrines of the depositum; and since he cannot know them all at once, he knows some doctrines and does not know others; he may know only the Creed; nay, perhaps, only the chief portions of the Creed; but whether he knows little or much, he has the intention of believing all that there is to believe, whenever, and as soon as it is brought home to him, if he believes in revelation at all. All that he knows now as revealed, and all that he shall know, and all that there is to know, he embraces it all in his intention by one act of faith; otherwise, it is but an accident that he believes this or that, not because it is a revelation.

This virtual, interpretative, or prospective belief, is called to believe implicite, and it follows from this, that, granting that the canons of councils and other ecclesiastical documents and confessions, to which I have referred, are really involved in the depositum or revealed word, every Catholic in accepting the depositum, does implicite accept these dogmatic decisions. I say ‘granting these various propositions are virtually contained in the revealed word,’ for, this is the only question left, and that it is to be answered in the affirmative, is clear at once to the Catholic, from the fact that the Church declares them to belong to it. To her is committed the care and the interpretation of the revelation. The word of the Church is the word of revelation.

That the Church is the infallible oracle of truth is the fundamental dogma of the Catholic religion; and ‘I believe what the Church proposes to be believed’ is an act of real assent, including all particular assents, notional and real; and while it is possible for unlearned as well as learned, it is imperative on learned as well as unlearned. And thus it is that by believing the word of the Church implicite — that is, by believing all that that word does or shall declare itself to contain — every Catholic, according to his intellectual capacity, supplements the shortcomings of his knowledge, without blunting his real assent to what is elementary, and takes upon himself, from the first, the whole truth of revelation, progressing from one apprehension of it to another, according to his intellectual opportunities. [Grammar of Assent, pp. 144-149]

This is Newman’s answer to the ‘familiar charge against the Catholic Church,’ which Dr. Salmon told his students was Newman’s own teaching. If the Doctor had read this for his students, they would have seen at once that he was as unfair to Newman as he was to the Catholic Church. The Catholic, then, believes in truths which he does not know, but only with implicit faith, which is only another way of saying that he is really sincere and logical in his explicit faith. Explicit faith is the assent we give to truths that are actually present to our minds — known to us. These truths very often include, imply, much more than is actually before our minds; but if we be really sincere in our explicit belief of the main truth, we take in also all that logically follows from it. As Newman says: ‘We limit henceforth the range of our private judgment in reference to that truth, and are prepared to take in, by faith, the fuller meaning of it, when the knowledge of that fuller meaning is acquired.’

In that fuller meaning, not yet known to us, we are said to have implicit faith. It is, then, a virtual, interpretative assent, implied, contained, in our actual assent to the truth which we believe explicitly; and, if we were so disposed as to exclude this implicit belief, we should, by the very fact, be shown to be insincere in our profession of explicit faith, to have no real faith in the truth which we professed to hold explicitly. When, therefore, uneducated Catholics are said to believe the decrees of councils, obscure definitions of dogma, and condemnations of errors, the meaning is that Catholics, one and all, no matter how little educated, believe openly and explicitly in the authority and infallibility of the Church; and by this act of explicit faith they take in and believe implicitly all that the Church teaches, and they condemn and reject all that she rejects and condemns. All this Dr. Salmon could have seen — he must have seen it — in the section of the Grammar of Assent, from which he took his quotation. But be did not tell his students that he saw it — of course, in the interest of truth.

And in reality Dr. Salmon’s own students are doing daily, the very same thing which he taught them to consider so extravagant and so impious in us. They profess to believe in the Bible, and let us hope they are sincere; but it is surely not uncharitable to suppose that there are more truths in it than they are aware of. Are they prepared to believe these truths when they come to know them? If so, they are in a state of mind similar to that which their Regius  Professor condemns in us. If they are not prepared to believe  them, then they are in a much worse state of mind— prepared to reject God’s revelation, and, of course, to take the consequences.

Dr. Salmon proceeds to illustrate implicit faith by a ridiculous story of the Fides carbonarii, which his highly intelligent audience most have enjoyed very much, probably regarding it as a ‘new definition’ by ‘the Church of Rome. ‘Such faith as this,’ he adds, ‘is held to be sufficient for saltation’ (page 93). Such faith is not held to be sufficient by Catholics certainly, but probably even stranger things are held by those who are outside the Church, ‘carried away by every wind of doctrine.’ Again, according to Dr. Salmon, a Catholic ‘may hold two opposite doctrines, the one explicitly, the other implicitly. . . .  In this case it is held, his implicit true faith will save him, notwithstanding his explicit false faith’ (page 93). What does Dr. Salmon mean by ‘false faith’[?] Faith comes to us on the authority of God revealing, and surely He can reveal nothing false.

One of the ‘opposite doctrines,’ therefore, is only an opinion and the explicit rejection of a doctrine by anyone, brings into grave doubt the reality of his belief in the doctrine in which the rejected one is supposed to be implicitly contained Cardinal Newman has put it clearly in the extract already quoted. ‘It is in this way,’ Dr. Salmon says (that is by holding opposite doctrines), ‘that the early Fathers are defended when their language is directly opposed to decisions since made by Rome’ (page 93). The Fathers named would have spurned the Doctor’s defence of them. He has prudently abstained from giving any reference to their words, hut neither of them has used anywhere any words that would warrant Dr. Salmon’s silly charge of ‘material heresy,’ against them. But [we]  shall hear more of his reference to them later on.

The real aim of all this wretched, wearying, sophistry is to make a show of disproving the Infallibility of the Church, or at least of bringing that doctrine into doubt. Dr. Salmon understood his young theologians of Trinity very well. With them it was an easy matter to discredit Catholic doctrine. The more grotesque the caricature of Catholic doctrine, the more likely it was to take with this ‘audience all one way of thinking,’ and that the Doctor’s own way. There was no fear of contradiction, no risk of inconvenient cross-examination. All through his lectures he is impressing on the students, on the one hand, that our argument for the Infallibility of the Church is its necessity, and on the other hand, that our profession of faith is so meagre, that there can  be no need of an infallible guide to arrive at it, and to retain it. Now, it has been proved already that Dr. Salmon misrepresents both our argument and our doctrine. We believe in the Infallibility of the Church, because God has expressly revealed that doctrine; and we believe in all the Church teaches, because God has commanded us to believe it. And this divine command to hear the Church binds Dr. Salmon and his theologians quite as stringently as it binds us.

Bearing this in mind, we can appreciate the following pretty specimen of his logic. ‘If our readiness to believe all that God has revealed, without knowing it, is enough for our salvation, there is an end to the pretence that it was necessary for the salvation of the world that God should provide means to make men infallibly know the truth.’ But now, ‘if our readiness to believe . . . without knowing ’ is not enough for our salvation, what provision is Dr. Salmon prepared to make for us? We are bound to know as well as believe all that the Church proposes to us — the principal mysteries, the Creed, the Sacraments, the Commandments, etc., and if, through our own fault, we are ignorant of these, ‘our readiness to believe without knowing ‘ can avail us nothing. And Dr. Salmon was not ignorant of our obligation in this matter when he so misrepresented it — ‘There is an end,’ he says, ‘of the pretence that it was necessary . . . that God should provide means to make men infallibly know the truth.’ The pretence is all his own. No Catholic ever maintained that ‘God should provide means to make men infallibly know the truth.’ He has provided means to enable men, certainly, to know the truth, but He has not deprived them of their liberty; their wills are free, and therefore, though they can know the truth, they are at liberty to reject it. And Dr. Salmon, not content with exercising this liberty himself, is labouring to get others to follow his example, and while doing so his logic is as unsound as his theology.

Here, [he says], is a specimen of what Roman Catholics call an act of faith: ‘O my God, because Thou art true, and hast revealed it, I believe that Thou art One God; I believe that in Thy Godhead there are three Persons; I believe that Thy Son Jesus, became man and died for us; I believe that Thou wilt reward the good in heaven and punish the wicked in hell; I believe all that the Catholic Church teaches; and in this belief I will live and die.’ In other words, this act of faith, is a profession of explicit belief in the four great truths of faith, ‘and of implicit belief in all the teaching of the Church’ (page 97).

Now, Dr. Salmon by extending his search somewhat could have found in Catholic prayer-books acts of faith much shorter than the one quoted. He could have found the following: — ‘O my God, I believe in Thee; I adore Thee; I hope in Thee; I love Thee; I am sorry for all my sins; I will never offend Thee any more.’ Now here is an act of faith, hope, and charity, with an act of adoration, an act of contrition, and a purpose of amendment; and all taken together are much shorter than the act of faith submitted to his theologians by Dr. Salmon. But Catholics in making such acts, have explicitly before their minds a great deal more than these words express. No Catholic regards such acts as a full and adequate profession of faith. Of this no one can be ignorant who has read even the most elementary Catholic catechism. Dr. Salmon must have known it, even from Father Furniss. His object in attributing to us so short a creed is, to show that there can be no need of an infallible teacher. But he has another object also here. ‘Now’ he says, ‘substitute the word “Bible” for the word “Church,” and a Protestant is ready to make the same profession. He will declare his belief in the four truths already enumerated, and in all that the Bible teaches’ (pages 97, 98).

This special pleading of Dr. Salmon breaks down at every point. The profession of faith given does not satisfy the obligation of either Catholic or Protestant. Each is bound to a great deal more of explicit faith. The Catholic is bound to know more, and he can learn it with the required certainty from the Church. The Protestant is bound to know more, and he cannot learn it with the required certainty from the Bible. There can be no faith explicit or implicit without a sufficient motive, — that is the authority of God brought home to the believer by a competent witness. The authority of God is brought home to the Catholic by the Church — the infallible interpreter of God’s revelation. Her teaching has never varied, she has never contradicted herself; she teaches all her children the same truths. The Catholic’s faith, both explicit and implicit, is fixed and definite, and for both he has the same adequate motive. But when Dr. Salmon’s substitution of ‘Bible’ for ‘Church’ is made, what does the altered profession mean in the mouth of a Protestant? It means that he professes to believe all that he thinks the Bible teaches.

Now, unless the real meaning of the Bible be, what the Protestant thinks it is, he does not really believe in God’s revelation at all. If you put on the words of anyone a sense different from that person’s own, they are no longer the person’s words but your own. And this is true of God’s word, as well as of man’s word. Unless, then, you put on God’s word, the true sense — His own sense — you are not really believing in God at all. You are believing yourself instead. God is not your authority; you are your own authority. Now how can a Protestant be certain that the real meaning of the Bible is what he thinks it is, when he finds ninety-nine per cent of his neighbours contradicting him, and contradicting one another, as to its meaning on the most vital and important truths supposed to be contained in it? In England alone there are nearly three hundred contradictory creeds, all supposed to be taken from the same Bible, by ‘prayerful men.’ They all profess to ‘believe all that the Bible teaches,’ but they do not ‘make the same profession of faith.’ This is the result of the substitution of ‘Bible’ for ‘Church,’ and it is a most instructive illustration of the wisdom of that substitution. Another important result of the substitution of ‘Bible’ for ‘Church’ is the following: —

In fact if it were even true that a belief in Roman Infallibility is necessary to salvation a Protestant would be safe. For, since he believes implicitly everything God has revealed, if God has revealed Roman Infallibility, he believe[s]  that too (page 98).

Dr. Salmon’s young men must have been startled by the announcement that they were in proximate danger of believing ‘Roman Infallibility’; but since in believing the Bible they really believe only in themselves, and as they are not individually infallible, nor prejudiced in favour of Roman doctrines, there are no good grounds for apprehending that awkward result of their professor’s wonder- working theory of implicit faith. The Doctor asks,

If a Roman Catholic may be saved who actually contradicts the teaching of his Church because he did not in intention oppose himself to her, why may not a Protestant be saved in like manner who is sincerely and earnestly desirous to believe all that God has revealed in the Scripture, and who has learned from the Scripture those four great truths of faith and many others which make wise unto salvation, even if there be some points on which he has wrongly interpreted the teaching of Scripture? (page 98).

The Doctor gives his Protestant friend credit for most acute spiritual intuition when he puts his shortcomings so lightly: — ‘Even if there be some points on which be has wrongly interpreted the teaching of Scripture.’ It would be much less difficult to count the ‘points,’ on which he would have rightly interpreted the teaching of Scripture. But the Doctor’s difficulty is a phantom. The Catholic may be saved if he believe with supernatural faith, in the truths named by Dr. Salmon, provided his ignorance of the other truths of faith be inculpable, and provided also that he he free from mortal sin. And a Protestant may be saved on exactly the same conditions. But then, the Doctor must see, that such a case is most exceptional, and that the doctrine of Infallibility is not affected by it [at] all.

The Protestant and the Catholic are bound to know and believe a great deal more than Dr. Salmon takes for gradated, and the real question, which he cleverly ignores, is whether the Catholic is not more likely to get the required knowledge from the Infallible Church, than the Protestant is to get it from the Bible, interpreted by his fallible self? The Catholic relies on God’s explicit repeated promise to guard His Church from error in her teaching. Dr. Salmon relies on the spiritual intuition of the ‘prayerful man,’ though Scripture, tradition, experience, and common sense, contradict him. Conflicting creeds, almost innumerable, are the direct result of the substitution of Bible for Church as recommended by Dr. Salmon, and his special pleading cannot obscure that notorious fact.

Dr. Salmon has a way of disposing of Church authority, which his students must have regarded as decisive. If the Catholic theory be correct, then Dr. Salmon maintains that the Church, so far from being a guide to salvation, is an obstruction, a source of ruin to souls. Every fresh definition narrows the way to heaven, and things would have been better ‘if the Church had but held her peace.’ ‘I cannot help remarking,’ he says, ‘in passing, how this theory represents the Church not as helping men on their heavenly way, but as making the way of salvation more difficult. Every fresh interposition of her authority closes up some way to heaven which had been open before’ (page 94).

And he illustrates this by the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility, which people were free to hold or reject before the definition, but which they are now bound to believe, ‘on peril of forfeiting their salvation.’ Now we shall invite the Doctor to go back some centuries in our history in order to test his argument. Let him test it at the time that our Blessed Lord Himself lived on earth. Dr. Salmon cannot deny that a greater measure of explicit faith has been necessary since our Lord’s coming than was required before. Therefore, according to the Doctor’s logic, the way of salvation has been only made more difficult. His coming ‘closed up’ a way to heaven which had been open before; and it would have been better that He had not come at all! The Regius Professor of Trinity is, no doubt, a great man, but he was not consulted as to the conditions on which souls are to be saved. He must take from God the terms of salvation, just as humbly as the college scavenger. The Church is just what her Divine Founder made her. She is executing the commission she received from Him. Her mission is to teach the truth, not to please Dr. Salmon; and the Doctor’s picture of her work and office is a caricature, a daub.

***