become, therefore,
a believer.

Authority cannot compel belief; the sceptic who knows not what it is to
grasp anything with the firm grasp of faith, may mistake his
acquiescence in a doctrine for belief in it; the ignorant and careless,
who believe only what their senses tell them, may lay up the words of
divine truth in their memory, may repeat them loudly, and be vehement
against all who question them. But minds to which faith is a necessity,
which cannot be contented to stand by the side of truth, but must become
altogether one with it,--minds which know full well the difference
between opinion and conviction, between not questioning and
believing,--they, when their own action is superseded by an authority
foreign to themselves, are in a condition which they find intolerable.
Told to believe what they cannot believe; told that they ought not to
believe what they feel most disposed to believe; they retire altogether
from the region of divine truth, as from a spot tainted with moral
death, and devote themselves to other subjects: to physical science, it
may be, or to political; where the inherent craving of their nature may
yet be gratified, where, however insignificant the truth may be, they
may yet find some truth to believe. This has been the condition of too
many great men in the church of Rome; and it accounts for that
bitterness of feeling with which Machiavelli, and others like him,
appear to have regarded the whole subject of Christianity.

The system, then, of deferring to the authority of what is called the
ancient church in the interpretation of Scripture, is impracticable,
inasmuch as, with regard to the greatest part of the Scripture, the
church, properly speaking, has said nothing at all; and if it were
practicable, it would be untenable, because neither the old councils,
nor individual writers, could give any sign that they had a divine gift
of interpretation; and if such a gift had been given to them, it would
have been equivalent to a new revelation, the sense of the comment being
thus preferred to what we could not but believe to be the sense of the
text. Above all, the system is destructive of faith, having a tendency
to substitute passive acquiescence for real conviction; and therefore I
should not say that the excess of it was popery, but that it had once
and actually those characters of evil which we sometimes express by the
term popery, but which may be better signified by the term idolatry; a