h
us, even at the present day, that the beast, the man of sin, the
creature of Babylon, are the names which God has given in his Scriptures
to the pope and the papacy! Can it be imagined that Christ, who died for
our sins, and saved us by his blood, would have suffered that for ten or
twelve centuries his church should be guided by such an abominable
wretch? that he would have allowed millions of his creatures to walk in
the shadow of death? and that so many generations should have had no
other pastor but Antichrist?

Luther mistook the genius of Christianity in introducing a new principle
into the world--the immediate authority of the Bible as the sole
criterion of the truth. If tradition is to be rejected, it follows that
the Bible cannot be authoritatively explained by acquired knowledge; in
a word, human interpretation based upon its comprehensions of the Greek
and Hebrew languages. So, by this theory, the palladium of orthodoxy is
to be found in a knowledge of foreign tongues, and living authority is
replaced by a dead letter; a slavery a thousand times more oppressive
than the yoke of tradition. Has any dogmatist succeeded in drawing up a
confession of faith by means of the Bible which could not be attacked by
means of reason? This formula, that the Bible must be the "_unicum
principium theologiae_," is the source of contradictory doctrines in
Protestant theology; hence this question arises: "What Protestant
theology is there in which there are not errors more or less?" It was
the Bible that inspired all the neologists of the sixteenth century; the
Bible that they made use of to persecute and condemn themselves as
heretics. When Luther maintained that the Bible contains the enunciation
of all the truths of which a knowledge is necessary to salvation, and
that no doctrine which is not distinctly laid down in the Bible can be
regarded as an article of faith, he did not imagine that the time was at
hand when everybody, from this very volume, would form a confession for
himself, and reject all others which contradicted his individual creed.
This necessity for inquiry so occupies the minds of men at the present
day that the principal articles of the original creed are rejected by
those who call themselves the disciples of Jesus.

But what are we to understand by the Bible? The question was a difficult
one to solve even at the beginning of the Reformation, when Luther, in
his preface to the translation of the Bible, la