CAPRICIOUS TENETS.
Bishop Ireland, Mho has become so, famous in connection with the Catholic colonisation movement in America, has of late caused a great commotion among the Protestants of his diocese by preaching a sermon in which he denied the right of Protestants to appeal to the Bible in support of their religious tenets, since he affirmed, it was impossible for them to' prove the Bible's inspiration on Protestant grounds. Several ministers have written in answer to the Bishop, but none of them have attempted a reply to the true point at issue, nor, indeed, was it possible for them to do so with any chance of success. But the whole attitude of the Protestant world towards the Bible is one of contradiction and caprice ; it is not only that they force it to support whatever views they may happen to adopt and use it as a servaut rather than obey it as a master; their pretence of receiving it at all as an authority is inconsistent, and, by their own tacit confession, baseless. "There is another reason,' 1 says a writer in a recent number of the Dublin Review, " which should make a Protestant cautious, to say the least of it, in rejecting the early evidence for the Papacy. He may plead that lie wants more witnesses, that there is too loug au interval between the Fathers who attribute the origin of the Papacy to Christ and Christ himself. We |will not stop to discuss the reasonableness of these objections. We only remark that they sap the foundations of Christian belief, as even Protestants hold it. Irenssus is too late to convince them of Papal authority. Good and well—only let them forget that Irenseus is the first author who names the four Gospels, and the Gospel of Sfc John.; is cited by name for the first time by Theophilus, of Antioch, an author of about the same date. We prove the authority of the New Testament, mainly by taking the fuller and clearer utterances of writers at the close of the second centuryv to _..-■ interpret and complete the obscure notices and allusions found in the fathers who came immediately after the apostles. So do orthodox Protestants, and the proof is' beyond exception. But, on precisely the same method, argument may be adduced for the Papacy, and if the method is good in. the one case it is good also in the other-"—Tablet.
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Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3926, 29 July 1881, Page 2
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403CAPRICIOUS TENETS. Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3926, 29 July 1881, Page 2
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