pleted, the error of withholding assent is not a fatal one; but the belief which Christianity enforces, it enforces as the foundation of daily conduct, as the framework into which all acts, all thoughts, all hopes, affections, and desires, are to be cast, and by which they must be moulded. Whatever it teaches, for example, concerning the work and the person of our Lord, it teaches not in the abstract, but as holding forth Him whose steps we are to follow, in whom our whole trust is to be reposed, with whom we are to be vitally incorporated, and whom accordingly we must needs know even though "in a glass darkly"; for how can we imitate, or how love, without some kind of vision, and how can definite vision be transmitted from man to man without language; and what are the Creeds but the vision of God (in part) as He is, transferred into language? 39. So again, whatever the Catholic faith teaches concerning the Church, it teaches us concerning the organ by which these operations are to be effected in us; even as the schoolboy is taught the rules of the school in which he is to learn, and the workman those of the art which he is to practise. Now, singular as it is, considering that we have before us the case of a person of such a character and such a position, we find in Mr. Blanco White's system no recognition of the fact, we do not say that the Catholic faith is actually connected with Christian practice (which would be begging the question from him), but that the Catholic faith is taught by the Church as being so connected, as being the proper and exclusive foundation of Christian practice. So, then, her demand is by no means that of an assent to a scheme of abstract dogmas; it is the demand for our conforming to a new law of heart and life, which new law (as she says) can only take effect under the influence of the faith, and by the agency which it provides. It is the old charter of the Gospel "testifying repentance towards God, and " therewith, but only in indissoluble conjunction therewith, also "faith in the Lord Jesus Christ." In discussing therefore the reception or rejection of Christianity, according to its credibility or incredibility, we must remember that it purports to be a system of belief and action inseparably combined; and therefore that, if it be credible, it entails the obligation not of a speculation but of a practical question, of a question to be decided here and now, which cannot be relegated to the region of indifference, but which, even if our understanding refuse to act, our conduct must either recognise as true, or else repudiate as false. 40. Against this part, then, of Mr. White's doctrine, we contend, that Christianity does not require the highest degree of intellectual certainty in order to be honestly and obediently received; and that the very same principles which govern action in common life, cognisable by common sense, are those which, fortified (we should hold) through God's mercy with a singular accumulation and diversity of evidence, demand reception of the word and implicit obedience to it; and that we cannot refuse this demand upon the plea that the evidence is only probable and not demonstrative, without rebellion against the fundamental laws of our earthly state, as they are established, by a truly Catholic consent, in the perpetual and universal practice of mankind. 41. And it is well worthy of remark, that Mr. Blanco White did not deny that probability was in favour of the Christian Revelation. This is plain, from the passages on which we have been arguing. But even at a later time he allowed that the Christian revelation was proved up to "a certain-perhaps a slight-degree of proba 11 bility." Upon his own statement, therefore, it stands that he followed the improbable; and as the evidence was conclusive neither way, he chose that side upon which the lack was greatest; and his doctrine is overturned by the very argument, which he has taken for its foundation. 42. From this subject we pass on to observe that Mr. Blanco White entertained the notion, common with those in his unhappy condition, that the moral part of the Gospel could be separated from its dogmatical part. This we shall show from his own words; and we shall also endeavour to point out the steps by which he arrived at the position, and to glance at its consequences. He originally rejected Christianity in Spain, because he could not find the proof of a living infallible judge in questions of religion, again, because he found that the Roman Church, which claimed that character, had not sustained it in practice.† When he came to England, the theory of religion presented to him, on which his reviving affections fastened, was one, which is very different from that of the formularies, or of the theologians, of the English Church, but which has nevertheless, from time to time since the Reformation, obtained various degrees of currency in the popular mind. We cannot describe it more shortly than by saying, it is a theory which attaches no meaning to those words of the Twentieth Article: "the Church hath authority in controversies of faith;" and which, rightly asserting the supremacy of Scripture, wrongly subjoins to it a supremacy of the individual next to Scripture. 43. But he does not appear, either at that or at any subsequent time, to have examined that view of religion, according to which, without the prominent assertion, Ibid. I. p. 111. Life, III. p. 406; and II. p. 235. or even without the assertion at all, of an abstract infallibility, the Church, distributed in her regular organisation through the earth, is divinely charged with the functions of a moral guide, and instructs the individual believer with a weight of authority varying according to the solemnity of the subject matter, the particular organ from which the judgment proceeds, and its title to represent her universal and continual sense. He went therefore to the study of Holy Scripture, in the year 1814, with the expectation that he could find, firstly, a quasi-mathematical demonstration of the canon, and, secondly, the limits and definitions of faith so laid down upon its sacred pages as (if we may so speak) almost mechanically to preclude mistake in every case of pious and upright intention. He was naturally much disappointed to find that the authenticity and inspiration of the Bible were themselves questions, like that of the character of the Church, and as we have said, like most other questions, to be examined by the light of probable evidence. As in the case of the Church, when he failed to find that sort of infallible teaching which would go far to supersede faith and moral discipline, he lost, and never recovered, the very idea of her functions as a spiritual mother. So, then, he first imagined, apparently, that Scripture would be to him all that the Church had proposed to be; and when this expectation was falsified, he very speedily lost his hold upon Scripture, as an authoritative document, altogether. 44. Then doctrinal doubts began to assault him; his understanding wavered, and he had none of the extrinsic support which he would have derived from the Divines and the Reformers of the English Church, if it had been his lot to recommence his studies in their school, and if, like them, he had been content to receive, as the most effective witness to the sense of Holy Scripture, the voice of the universal Church. So that he very soon lost any portion of dogmatic faith that he had recovered. But having, as we see from his whole works, much more of affection than of conviction, he naturally clung to the moral teaching of Scripture, as long as any strength remained. He found the evidence on most controverted doctrines so equal, as he thought, that he conceived it best to have no opinion upon them (1818); he imagined the purpose of Scripture was to teach the spirit of Christian morality,† not to fix a code of opinions; he placed before himself God's will as a rule of life (1821); having doubts on the subject of particular and general providence, he put that question, as an abstract one! into the catalogue of non-essentials (1822);§ and in one year more (1823) he concluded that || Christianity had no letter, and that the Spirit, of which it testifies, could not be distinguished from conscientious reason. 45. Yet he does not appear, during that middle period of declension, to have been shaken as to the morality of the New Testament. Most true indeed it is, that as the Church is the bulwark of the canon of the Scripture and the doctrine it contains, so that doctrine is the bulwark of the whole of its moral law; and there is usually silence "for a little space" between the enemy's surmounting one of these inclosures, and the attempt to scale the next. But, in the period of his later and final lapse from the Christian faith, which followed the year 1830, and became rapid from 1833, it is quite evident that, following the natural order of things, he became * Life, I. p. 344. § Ibid. p. 398. + Ibid. p. 368. Ibid. p. 378, |