How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before. Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning. It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak that an honest investigation would fail to find it.
Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects or our hearts.
It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion, Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth, are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and that to impugn them is not error but crime.