what their interpreters may have meant:  the decemvirs’ meaning, if it was their meaning, is no longer the law of Rome.”  But who can dare to say to a Christian, “You need not consider what was the meaning of our Lord and his apostles; the law for you now is the meaning of Cyprian, or Ambrose, or Chrysostom;—­that meaning has superseded the meaning of Christ.”  A Christian must find out Christ’s meaning, and believe that he has found it, or else he must still seek for it.  It is a matter, not of outward submission, but of inward faith; and if in our inward mind we are persuaded that the interpreter has mistaken our Lord’s meaning, how can we by possibility adopt that interpretation in faith?

Here we come to a grave consideration—­that this doctrine of an infallible rule of interpretation may suit ignorance or scepticism:  it is death to a sincere and reasonable and earnest faith.  It is not hard for a sceptical mind to deceive itself by saying, that it receives whatever the church declares to be true:  it may receive any number of doctrines, but it will not really believe them.  We may restrain our tongues from disputing them, we may watch every restless thought that would question them, and instantly, by main force, as it were, put it down; but all this time our minds do not assimilate to them; they do not take them up into their own nature, so as to make them a part of themselves, freshening and supplying the life-blood of their very being.  Truth must be believed by the mind’s own act; our souls must be drawn towards it with a reasonable love; some affinity there must be between it and them, or else they can never really comprehend it.  The sceptic may desperately become a fanatic also, but he is not become, therefore, a believer.

Authority cannot compel belief; the sceptic who knows not what it is to grasp anything with the firm grasp of faith, may mistake his acquiescence in a doctrine for belief in it; the ignorant and careless, who believe only what their senses tell them, may lay up the words of divine truth in their memory, may repeat them loudly, and be vehement against all who question them.  But minds to which faith is a necessity, which cannot be contented to stand by the side of truth, but must become altogether one with it,—­minds which know full well the difference between opinion and conviction, between not questioning and believing,—­they, when their own action is superseded by an authority foreign to themselves, are in a condition which they find intolerable.  Told to believe what they cannot believe; told that they ought not to believe what they feel most disposed to believe; they retire altogether from the region of divine truth, as from a spot tainted with moral death, and devote themselves to other subjects:  to physical science, it may be, or to political; where the inherent craving of their nature may yet be gratified, where, however insignificant the truth may be, they may yet find some truth to believe.  This has been the condition of too many great men in the church of Rome; and it accounts for that bitterness of feeling with which Machiavelli, and others like him, appear to have regarded the whole subject of Christianity.