Farther, there is this point to remember.  Catholic and Protestant alike declare the Bible to be inspired.  But the Catholics can attach to inspiration a far wider, and less assailable meaning:  for their Church claims for herself a perpetual living power, which can always concentrate the inspired element, be it never so diffused; whereas for the Protestants, unless that element be closely bound up with the letter, it at once becomes intangible and eludes them altogether.  And thus, whilst the latter have committed themselves to definite statements, now proved untenable, as to what inspiration is, the Catholic Church, strangely enough, has never done anything of the kind.  She has declared nothing on the subject that is to be held of faith.  The whole question is still, within limits, an open one.  As the Catholic Church, then, stands at present, it seems hard to say that, were we for other reasons inclined to trust her, she makes any claims, on behalf of her sacred books, which, in the face of impartial history, would prevent our doing so.

Let us now go farther, and consider those great Christian doctrines which, though it is claimed that they are all implied in the Bible, are confessedly not expressed in it, and were confessedly not consciously assented to by the Church, till long after the Christian Canon was closed.  And here let us grant the modern critics their most hostile and extreme position.  Let us grant that all the doctrines in question can be traced to external, and often to non-Christian sources.  And what is the result on Romanism?  Does this logically go any way whatever towards discrediting its claims?  Let us consider the matter fairly, and we shall see that it has not even a tendency to do so.  Here, as in the case of the Bible, the Church’s doctrine of her infallibility meets all objections.  For the real question here is, not in what storehouse of opinions the Church found her doctrines, but why she selected those she did, and why she rejected and condemned the rest.  History and scientific criticism cannot answer this.  History can show us only who baked the separate bricks; it cannot show us who made or designed the building.  No one believes that the devil made the plans of Cologne Cathedral; but were we inclined to think he did, the story would be disproved in no way by our discovering from what quarries every stone had been taken.  And the doctrines of the Church are but as the stones in a building, the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a language.  Many are offered and few chosen.  The supernatural action is to be detected in the choice.  The whole history of the Church, in fact, as she herself tells it, may be described as a history of supernatural selection.  It is quite possible that she may claim it to be more than that; but could she vindicate for herself but this one faculty of an infallible choice, she would vindicate to the full her claim to be under a superhuman guidance.