that is to say, by authorized human teachers, whose adherence to it has been secured by a special Divine assistance, as that of the apostles was in the beginning.

Now this is, of course, an impossible plan for a merely human founder of a religion. A mere man, who has arrived by meditation and the practice of virtue at some great religious truths, or what he considers as such, even though he also believes that in this he has been assisted by Almighty God in some special way, cannot feel safe as to the propagation of these truths without loss or admixture by simply committing them to the charge of other men. The precise memory of what he, the founder, said will gradually be lost; the ideas of his representatives will after a time be confounded with his own. Of course he may be content that such should be the case; he may regard the religion which is taught in his name as intended by God to be the work of many co-operators; he lays the foundation, others continue the building; and perhaps even the foundation may be somewhat altered or improved as time goes on. But a religion like this is not such as those whom we are addressing regard the Christian religion to be.

For a human founder, then, who wishes the record of his ideas to be perpetual; who desires that none of them should be lost, and that noth

ing should be admitted outside of them in the religion which he establishes, except indeed. what the light of nature teaches all men, no course seems to be open except to commit his ideas or his religion to writing. In this way there can remain little doubt, except what may arise from the errors of copyists or printers, as to what he actually said; and generally these errors will be slight and easily detected.

But after all, though it is the best course he can adopt, it is open to serious difficulties. For no language can be made so plain that there will not be an opening for discussions as to its meaning. To take an example from another matter, the Constitution of the United States was drawn up with the utmost care; but for all that it is not possible, and never was expected by its authors to be possible, for every one to agree on its meaning without a court to interpret it.

Now, it is true that a human founder of religion can provide for such a court of interpretation for his ideas, and his provisions will probably be carried out; but he cannot possibly insure that the ideas of this court will always agree with his own. His own thoughts will then, in spite of all he can do, be gradually changed somewhat by the gloss put upon them by his interpreters.

But for a Divine founder these objections can

not, of course, exist. God is able to keep His truth in the world in many ways. He can, for instance, reveal it to each man individually; or He can by repeated public manifestations of it, accompanied by miraculous proofs such as those furnished by Christ and His apostles, prevent the world from forgetting it; or He can commit it to a book, as a human founder would, preventing false interpretations of that book by making it so clear that it could not be misunderstood, or by establishing a court of interpretation for it, the decisions of which He would Himself secure from error.

But on the Protestant theory, He has adopted neither of these plans. The only book which they admit as coming from Him is not so clear that it cannot be misunderstood, nor, according to them, has any court been established by Him for its correct interpretation. Some of them, indeed, claim that He does reveal it to every earnest inquirer without the aid of any visible teacher, but the actual discordance of those who claim to arrive at it in that way, or even with the help of the Bible, is enough to confute that claim. As for repeated miraculous manifestations of it, such are not recorded in history.

Other methods could no doubt be followed by the Divine Wisdom, beside these which I have mentioned; but we cannot, perhaps, see them very clearly, with the exception of one, the

simplest of all that we know of, and requiring the least special intervention on God's part. And that is the one which I have mentioned as that which Catholics believe He has adopted through the whole course of Christianity, and which Protestants themselves must admit He did at its beginning.

It is that of having for a fundamental authority in all ages, for a means of deciding all doubtful points, not a book alone, or a book with authorized interpreters, but simply the authorized interpreters of the faith such as the apostles were, with a book perhaps to help them, but still not absolutely needing that book for the discharge of their office any more than the apostles themselves did for theirs.

This simple plan it is the essential point of Protestantism to ignore or combat. As has been seen, they have nothing satisfactory or historically successful to offer in place of it, but it they will not admit.

Some Protestants, like those of the Church of England, go so far as to believe in an organized and Divinely constituted body of men, established to teach and preserve the faith of Christ; but they refuse to admit a Divine supervision of this teaching, at least of such a kind as will enable any one without hesitation to know just where to look for the truth. Their ground, as has been said, is similar to ours, but lacking in

this important respect. And history shows only too plainly that the Church, in their sense of the term, has varied.in its doctrine, taught dogmas at various times, and in various places at the same time, inconsistent with each other, and therefore to a considerable extent erroneous.

Protestants, then, and indeed all Christians separated from the Catholic Church, do not acknowledge the existence of this actual living and precisely determinable authority in the world, to which the preservation of the faith has been entrusted. It is, indeed, possible to withdraw from the government and discipline which Catholics believe to be also entrusted to this authority, without doubting its claim to be the Divinely constituted teacher of the faith; but this sort of rebellion against it, which we call schism, hardly exists pure and simple at present; the Greek Church furnishing, however, a near approximation to it.

The question now naturally arising, as we examine the Catholic theory, is where precisely this authority is located; who are the succes. sors of the apostles, not, be it observed, in their inspiration, or in their power of working miracles, but in this office so needed for the stability of religion, that of interpreting the true meaning of the Christian revelation, and of deciding doubts which might arise about it.

Whoever they are, they must be men dis