dy of men on earth,
are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
that to impugn them is not error but crime.

With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be
left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
help us.'

Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they