piety, the louder and
more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are
no embarrassment to the theologian. He finds no fault
with the method which is identical in them all. Whatever
the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under
illusions of Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High
Church party were more formidable than they are at
present--much about "the right of private judgment."
Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin
my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a
congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge
than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It
sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is
interfered with by a cause which, above all others,
would have been expected to further it; but this in
fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
grounds of theological belief beyond the province of
argument. No one talks of "a right of private judgment."
in anything but religion; no one but a fool
insists on his "right to his own opinion" with his
lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their
time to special subjects, are authorities upon it to be
listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority
at any given time is the collective general sense. Of the
wisest men living in the department to which they
belong. The utmost "right of private judgment" which
anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the
physician to whom he will trust his body, or of
counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his
cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies
a belief that in matters of religion, the criteria of truth
are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and
the efforts which have been made to bring the notion
into harmony with common sense and common subjects,
have not been very successful. The High Church
party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals,
that either "the right of private judgment" meant
nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the
wrong. "No," said a writer in the Edinburgh Review
"it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong,
no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the
policeman may not force a way into his house and
prevent him." The illustration fails of its purpose. In
the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a
wrong use of the thing; the