In truth, Mr. Newman and his friends are well aware that the Scripture will not support their doctrine, and therefore it is that they have proceeded to such, lengths in upholding the authority not of the creeds only, but of the opinions and practices of the ancient church generally; and that they try to explain away the clear language of our article, that nothing “which is neither read therein (i.e. in holy Scripture,) nor may be proved thereby, is to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”  It would be one of the most unaccountable phenomena of the human mind, were any man fairly to come to the conclusion that the Scriptures and the early church were of equal authority, and that the authority of both were truly divine.  If any men resolve to maintain doctrines and practices as of divine authority, for which the Scripture offers no countenance, they of course are driven to maintain the authority of the church in their own defence; and where they have an interest in holding any particular opinion, its falsehood, however palpable, is unhappily no bar to its reception.  Otherwise it would seem that the natural result of believing the early church to be of equal authority with the Scripture, would be to deny the inspiration of either.  For two things so different in several points as the Christianity of the Scriptures and that of the early church, may conceivably be both false, but it is hard to think that they can both be perfectly true.

I am here, however, allowing, what is by no means true, without many qualifications, that Mr. Newman’s system is that of the early church.  The historical inquiry as to the doctrines of the early church would lead me into far too wide a field; I may only notice, in passing, how many points require to be carefully defined in conducting such an inquiry; as, for instance, what we mean by the term “early church,” as to time; for that may be fully true of the church in the fourth century, which is only partially true of it in the third, and only in a very slight degree true of it in the second or first.  And again, what do we mean by the term “early church,” as to persons; for a few eminent writers are not even the whole clergy; neither is it by any means to be taken on their authority that their views were really those of all the bishops and presbyters of the Christian world; but if they were, the clergy are not the church, nor can their judgments be morally considered as the voice of the church, even if we were to admit that they could at any time constitute its voice legally.  But, for my present purpose, we may take for granted that Mr. Newman’s system as to the pre-eminence of the sacraments, and the necessity of apostolical succession to give them their efficacy, was the doctrine of the early church; then I say that this system is so different from that of the New Testament, that to invest the two with equal authority is not to make