[British Critic, Jan. 1839]
The undertaking which we are proposing to ourselves in the following pages, is one of no small delicacy, but of proportionally great importance; and if we only succeed in making some suggestions for its satisfactory accomplishment, which others may pursue for themselves, we shall deem it worth while to have attempted it.
That a certain system, called Catholicism, was the religion of the whole of Christendom, not many centuries after the Christian era, and continued to be mainly identified with the Gospel, whether with or without certain additions, at least down to the Reformation, is confessed by all parties. The point debated between them has reference to the origin of this system,—when it began, and who began it. Those who maintain its Apostolic origin, are obliged to grant that it is not directly and explicitly inculcated in the Apostolic writings themselves. When they turn for aid to the generation next to the Apostles, they find but few Christian writers at all, and the information to be derived from them to be partial and meagre. This is their difficulty, and the difficulty which we purpose here to meet, by considering how the text of those writers who have come down to us—the Apostolic Fathers as they are called—is legitimately to be treated, and what light, thus treated, it throws upon the question which is in dispute between Catholics and their opponents.
The works of the Apostolical Fathers, we repeat, are short, and their doctrinal declarations, of whatever kind, brief and almost sententious. If, then, they bear witness to what in the following centuries is taught diffusely, they must witness, from the nature of the case, in words which, as being few, admit of a various interpretation more readily than if they were more numerous and explicit. Accordingly, the controversy between those who appeal to them for and against the Catholic system of doctrine, or any portions of it, turns upon this issue—whether the Catholic and later statements are due developments, or but ingenious perversions of those passages from St. Clement or St. Ignatius, which are brought forward as proofs of them. For instance, Clement uses the word [prosphora], sacrifice, and [leitourgia], or liturgy; and Ignatius [thusiasterion], altar; and [hairesis], heresy. Are the Greek words adequately represented by the English, which convey the more modern or Catholic ideas? Or are these English words but comments, and unfair, untrue comments,—glosses—upon the language of an era anterior to the system of which those words form part? This is the question now to be considered.
1.
It will be seen at once, then, that the state of the case is one in which every reader is likely to make up his mind according to his previous modes of thinking. Men have ever a tendency to explain phenomena of whatever sort on the principles familiar to their own minds, or by their own bias. Thus witnesses in a court of justice unconsciously colour, according to their party feelings, the particulars of a fray, and give very precise and very sincere contradictions to each other on the points of detail, whether of time, of language used, or of conduct, on which the rights of the transaction turn. In like manner, historians explain events their own way, and the followers of opposing religions interpret them on conflicting views of divine Providence. The case is the same as regards the reasons for and against some particular proposition; it is not that each party allows those of the other, and strikes a balance in order to arrive at a practical conclusion; but to the one or the other its own side of the question shines out in the light of unclouded demonstration, and the other appears absolutely weak and contemptible. Each side is unable to feel the force of the case opposed to it, and drops all considerations but those which make for itself. So are we constituted; and in the instance before us, in like manner, unless a document speaks out with extraordinary clearness, it will not impress its own sense, whatever it be, on a reader; but he will consider his own in particular to be the one natural sense, and every other to be strained and perverse. The one party will take it, for instance, as a self-evident truth that [thusiasterion] in Ignatius cannot but mean altar in the modern sense; and the other, that this is a refinement put upon the free inartificial language of a primitive document.
Now how this question is to be settled, what principle is to be adopted in order to assay these conflicting explanations of the state of the case, by what test we are to discriminate a sophistical from a genuine interpretation of a given text, shall be considered presently; here, in the first place, we would insist on this, that, whereas explanations look strange or not, according to our previous bias, therefore their looking strange to us is no reason that they are not true. Accordingly, when a modern controversialist speaks of taking Scripture in a “natural” way, he really means in his own way; when he exhorts us to take the words “keep the deposit,” or “we have an altar,” or “the husband of one wife,” “simply and plainly,” without reference to the “disputes” and “fancies” by which men have obscured the intelligible meaning of the sacred text, he is only begging us to take the truth of his previous view for granted, and to rule the question on his side; and when he censures the “wildness,” or “perverseness,” or “subtlety of mind,” or “illogical reasoning,” which would explain “illumination” of baptism, or “whosesoever sins ye remit,” etc., of sacerdotal power, or any other still more sacred text or phrase of the sacred truth with which the Church has ever identified it, he really does but express surprise that he never heard that interpretation before. Prepossession has imposed, and habit has fixed for him, a certain meaning on the words of Scripture; and, as we all know, a man’s will is the best of all possible reason; and habit is confessedly a second nature.