"But the first would be of no avail, because she has taken care to explain the Scriptures in her own favor; and I cannot prove them to be the word of God in any other sense, unless I am at liberty to explain them by themselves." "That is, you cannot prove your point, unless you are at liberty to prove the same by the same! Prove that you are authorized to declare the sense of Scripture, and then you will have no difficulty."

"But I cannot prove that I am, save from the word itself."

"That is to say, unless you are at liberty to assume and exercise the authority to declare the sense of Scripture, as the condition of proving that you have such authority! That will not do, brother. It would be proving idem per idem, the same by the same, which is bad logic."

"How, then, am I to proceed?"

"That is your affair, not mine."

So

"The church spreads her claim over every thing, and leaves me, according to your principles of logic, no possible means of adopting any line of argument against her, which. does not, in some sense, assume the point to be proved. subtle and crafty in her tyranny, that it leaves absolutely nothing to those who would resist it. This to me is only another evidence of her wicked origin and pernicious influence."

"So you are of opinion, that, if Almighty God should establish a church, he would take good care to leave it open to attack, to give its enemies a fair and solid ground on which to carry on their operations against it! I am of a different opinion, and predisposed to believe the Almighty to be more than a match for the devil, and that, if he should establish a church, he would so constitute it that no attack could be made upon it which should not recoil upon those who made it, no argument be framed against it which should not serve to demonstrate the folly and absurdity of its framers. It is unquestionably a very difficult matter to make an action lie against the church, or to find a court in which an action can be legally commenced against her; but I have yet to learn that this is her fault. The church is in possession of universal and supreme authority under God, has a prescriptive right to that authority, and must be presumed to have a valid right to it till the contrary is shown. You cannot assume the contrary, but are bound to prove it. Now you must prove it without authority, or with

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authority. Without authority you cannot prove it; for proofs which are sustained by no authority prove nothing. You must, then, prove it with authority, or not prove it at all. That it is difficult to find any authority whose assertion does not assume the nullit, of the supreme authority which is to be presumed, is undoubtedly true. You wish to arraign the actual possessor of the supreme authority, but you cannot do so unless you have some court of competent jurisdiction. But any court which should claim authority to issue a precept against the possessor of supreme authority, and summon him to answer at its bar, would assume authority over him, and by so doing prejudge the case. This is in the nature of things, and cannot be avoided; but whose is the fault? The reformers, if they had been lawyers, would have seen that what they attempted was against law, and a prima facie crime on their part, for which they were liable to suffer the full vengeance of the law. If they had been even tolerable logicians, they would have seen that they could urge no argument which did not assume what was in question. But surely the church is not to be censured, because they were miserable pettifoggers and shallow sophists."

"But there is a court competent to institute proceedings against the church."

"What court?"

"The court of conscience."

"You must prove that conscience is supreme, before you can say that; for the church, as the vicegerent of the Almighty, claims and possesses jurisdiction over conscience, and is supreme judge in foro conscientiæ. This is an integral part of her possession to which she has a prescriptive right. You must dispossess her, before you can compel her to plead at the bar of conscience."

"But she is at least bound to answer at the bar of the Bible, interpreted by private reason."

"Not till you dispossess her, or place the Bible interpreted by private reason in possession; for she possesses jurisdiction over them."

"At the bar of reason, then."

"Reason has and can have no jurisdiction in the premises; for the question turns on a supernatural fact, lies within the supernatural order, and therefore out of the province of rea son."

"The general sense of mankind.”

"That is against you, and in favor of the church, as we have already seen, and is conceded in the fact that the church is allowed to plead prescription."

"Then to the written word, interpreted and its sense declared by the Holy Ghost."

"Establish the fact of such a court, and she will not refuse to appear and answer. But she claims to be that court herself, and is in possession as that court; you must dispossess her by direct impeachment of her claims, or by establishing, before a competent tribunal, the rights of an adverse claimant, before you can allege such a court."

"The reformers were aided by the private illumination of the Holy Ghost, and what they did, they did in obedience to his commands."

"That was for them to prove."

"They did prove it."

"How?"

"From the written word."

"But they could prove nothing from the written word, for they had no legal possession of it."

"They had legal possession of it. The Holy Ghost gave them legal possession of it."

"What and where was the evidence of that fact, if fact it was?"

"In the Scriptures."

"That is, they proved by the Holy Spirit that they had legal possession of the Holy Scriptures, and by the Holy Scriptures that they had the Holy Ghost! But this was to reason in a vicious circle.”

"The reformers set forth other and conclusive reasons for rejecting the church, which I will reproduce on another day; but you must excuse me now, for I have some parochial duties to which I must attend."

"So you give up the first reason, namely, our Lord founded no such church as the Catholic?"

"Not by any means. I may have erred in bringing that forward before the others. I ought not to have departed from the example of the reformers. They did not allege that reason first, and I see now that they were wise in not doing so. They first proved that the church had forfeited. her rights, by having abused her trusts. Having thus ejected her, they took possession of the word, and easily and clearly demonstrated that she had been null from the beginning, by showing that our Lord never contemplated such a church."

"That is, they dispossessed themselves by acquiring pos session. Very good Protestant law and logic.'

"You may spare your sneer, for perhaps it will soon be retorted with seven-fold vengeance."

"O, not so bad as that, I hope."

"We shall see. I will, God willing, prove that the reformers were rigid reasoners, and sound lawyers."

"An Herculean task. Clearing the Augean stables was easy compared with it."

The reformers were great and glorious men, rare men, the like of whom will not soon be seen again."

"Some consolation in that."

"To call such men miserable pettifoggers and shallow sophists is"

"To use soft words, which turn away wrath."

To outrage common sense and common decency."

Why, would you censure me for not calling them by harder names? I might have easily done so, but I wished to spare your prejudices as much as possible."

"I tell you, John, that, in becoming a miserable idolatrous Papist, and drunk with the cup of that sorceress of Babylon, the mother of every abomination, you seem to have lost all sense of dignity, all self-respect, and all regard for the proprieties of civilized life."

"Because I do not rave and rant, every time I have occasion to allude to the chiefs of the Protestant rebellion?" "No; you know that is not what I mean. You degrade yourself in speaking so contemptously of the glorious reformers."

"And what does my most excellent, amiable, polite, and sweet-spoken brother do, when he calls God's Holy Church the sorceress of Babylon, &c., and brands the members of her holy communion with the name of idolaters!"

CHAPTER VII.

ONLY a few days elapsed before John, finding his brother apparently at leisure, pressed him to redeem his promise. "You are prepared, brother, by this time, I presume, to undertake your vindication of the reformers, and to prove that they were sound lawyers and rigid reasoners."

"The church has so spread out her claims over every thing, that it is hard to construct an argument against her, which does not apparently take for granted some point

which she contends is the point to be proved; but the devil, though cunning, can be outwitted." "What! by heretics?"

"Protestants are not heretics."

"The church is in possession; and since Protestants break away from her and contend for what she declares to be contrary to the faith, they are at least presumptively heretics, and are to be treated as such, unless they prove the contrary."

"The church is in possession de facto, not de jure. She is a usurper."

"Possession de facto, we have agreed, is prima facie evidence of title. The reformers were, therefore, as we have seen, bound either to admit it, or show good and valid reasons for questioning it."

"True; but they showed such reasons.'

"So you have said, but you have not told me the reasons themselves."

"I gave you as one of those reasons, the fact that our Lord founded no such church as the Romish."

"But that was a reason you could not assign, because the simple fact of the existence of the church in possession was prima facie evidence to the contrary."

"I offered to prove my position from the word of God." "But could not, because the church was in possession as the keeper and interpreter of the word, and you could not adduce it in a sense contrary to hers without begging the question."

"I have the word as well as she, and it interprets itself." "That you have the word, or that it interprets itself, you were not able to prove. Moreover, the argument may be retorted. The church has the word as well as you, and the word interprets itself. She alleges that the word is against you, and her allegation, at the very lowest, is as good against your position as yours is against hers."

"I deny her infallibility."

"Do you claim infallibility for yourself?"

"I claim infallibility for the word of God."

"That is what logicians call ignorantia elenchi. But do you claim infallibility for your own private understanding of the word?"

"No."

"Then you are fallible, and may fall into error?"

"I do not deny it."