Note 120 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 5)

A learned order must be supposed to consist of three classes. First, those who are employed in adding to the existing sum of power and knowledge. Second, and most numerous class, those whose office it is to diffuse through the community at large the practical Results of science, and that kind and degree of knowledge and cultivation, which for all is requisite or clearly useful. Third, the formers and instructors of the second—in schools, halls, and universities, or through the medium of the press. The second class includes not only the parochial clergy, and all others duly ordained to the ministerial office; but likewise all the members of the legal and medical professions, who have received a learned education under accredited and responsible teachers. [See 'The Church and State,' p. 45, &c., third edition—H. N. C.]

[121] The author of 'The Statesman's Manual' must be the most inconsistent of men, if he can be justly suspected of a leaning to the Romish Church; or if it be necessary for him to repeat his fervent Amen to the wish and prayer of our late good old King, that "every adult in the British Empire should be able to read his Bible, and have a Bible to read!" Nevertheless, it may not be superfluous to declare, that in thus protesting against the license of private interpretation, I do not mean to condemn the exercise or deny the right of individual judgment. I condemn only the pretended right of every individual, competent and incompetent, to interpret Scripture in a sense of his own, in opposition to the judgment of the Church, without knowledge of the originals or of the languages, the history, the customs, opinions, and controversies of the age and country in which they were written; and where the interpreter judges in ignorance or contempt of uninterrupted tradition, the unanimous consent of Fathers and Councils, and the universal Faith of the Church in all ages. It is not the attempt to form a judgment, which is here called in question; but the grounds, or rather the no-grounds on which the judgment is formed and relied on.

My fixed principle is: that a Christianity without a Church exercising Spiritual authority is Vanity and Dissolution. And my belief is, that when Popery is rushing in on us like an inundation, the nation will find it to be so. I say Popery; for this too I hold for a delusion, that Romanism or Roman Catholicism is separable from Popery. Almost as readily could I suppose a circle without a centre.