I PROLOGUE 9 



permission to themselves to make free with the 

 public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect 

 of the canon and of the meaning to be attached 

 to the words of the canonical books. Private 

 judgment that is to say, reason was (theoreti- 

 cally, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books 

 were and what were not to take the rank of 

 " Scripture " ; and to determine the sense of any 

 passage in such books. But this sense, once 

 ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to be 

 taken for pure truth for the very word of God. 

 The controversial efficiency of the principle of 

 biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the con- 

 servative adversaries of the Reformers were not in 

 a position to contravene it without entangling 

 themselves in serious difficulties ; while, since 

 both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking 

 efficient measures to stop the mouths of any more 

 radical critics, these did not count. 



The impotence of their adversaries, however, did 

 not remove the inherent weakness of the position 

 of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility 

 of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that 

 of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is 

 held by " faith," then the latter may be. If the 

 latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private 

 iudgment, why not the former ? Even if the 

 Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own 

 infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to 

 those who dispute the point is not obvious. On 



