oral powers.

In former days, if any moral question came before me, I was always
apt to turn it into the mere lawyerlike exercise of searching and
interpreting my written code. Thus, in reading how Henry the Eighth
treated his first queen, I thought over Scripture texts in order to
judge whether he was right, and if I could so get a solution, I left
my own moral powers unexercised. All Protestants see, how mischievous
it is to a Romanist lady to have a directing priest, whom she every
day consults about everything; so as to lay her own judgment to
sleep. We readily understand, that in the extreme case such women may
gradually lose all perception of right and wrong, and become a mere
machine in the hands of her director. But the Protestant principle of
accepting the Bible as the absolute law, acts towards the same end;
and only fails of doing the same amount of mischief, because a book
can never so completely answer all the questions asked of it, as a
living priest can. The Protestantism which pities those as "without
chart and compass" who acknowledge no infallible written code, can
mean nothing else, than that "the less occasion we have to trust our
moral powers, the better;" that is, it represents it as of all things
most desirable to be able to benumb conscience by disuse, under the
guidance of a mind from without. Those who teach this need not marvel
to see their pupils become Romanists.

But Bibliolatry not only paralyzes the moral sense; it also corrupts
the intellect, and introduces a crooked logic, by setting men to the
duty of extracting absolute harmony out of discordant materials. All
are familiar with the subtlety of lawyers, whose task it is to elicit
a single sense out of a heap of contradictory statutes. In their case
such subtlety may indeed excite in us impatience or contempt; but
we forbear to condemn them, when it is pleaded that practical
convenience, not truth, is their avowed end. In the case of
theological ingenuity, where truth is the professed and sacred
object, a graver judgment is called for. When the Biblical interpreter
struggles to reconcile contradictions, or to prove that wrong is
right, merely because he is bound to maintain the perfection of the
Bible; when to this end he condescends to sophistry and pettifogging
evasions; it is difficult to avoid feeling disgust as well as grief.
Some good people are secretly conscious that the Bible is not an
infallible book; but they dread the cons