, and an equally
able defence of the Athanasian Creed. But he felt that there are
formularies which may be only the interpretations of doctrine and
inferences from Scripture of a particular time or set of men; and he
was desirous of putting into their proper place the authority of such
formularies. His object was to put an interval between them and the
Scriptures from which they professed to be derived, and to prevent them
from claiming the command over faith and conscience which was due only
to the authentic evidences of God's revelation. He wished to make room
for a deeper sense of the weight of Scripture. He proposed to himself
the same thing which was aimed at by the German divines, Arndt,
Calixtus, and Spener, when they rose up against the grinding oppression
which Lutheran dogmatism had raised on its _Symbolical Books_,[56] and
which had come to outdo the worst extravagances of scholasticism. This
seems to have been his object--a fair and legitimate one. But in arguing
against investing the Thirty-nine Articles with an authority which did
not belong to them, he unquestionably, without seeing what he was
doing, went much farther--where he never meant to go. In fact, he so
stated his argument that he took in with the Thirty-nine Articles every
expression of collective belief, every document, however venerable,
which the Church had sanctioned from the first. Strangely enough,
without observing it, he took in--what he meant to separate by a wide
interval from what he called dogma--the doctrine of the infallible
authority and sufficiency of Scripture. In denying the worth of the
_consensus_ and immemorial judgment of the Church, he cut from under
him the claim to that which he accepted as the source and witness of
"divine facts." He did not mean to do this, or to do many other things;
but from want of clearness of head, he certainly, in these writings
which were complained of, did it. He was, in temper and habit, too
desirous to be "orthodox," as Whately feared, to accept in its
consequences his own theory. The theory which he put forward in his
Bampton Lectures, and on which he founded his plan of comprehension in
his pamphlet on Dissent, left nothing standing but the authority of the
letter of Scripture. All else--right or wrong as it might be--was
"speculation," "human inference," "dogma." With perfect consistency, he
did not pretend to take even the Creeds out of this category. But the
truth was, he did not consciou