Transcribed from the 1850 Francis & John Rivington edition,
LONDON:
GILBERT & RIVINGTON,PRINTERS,
ST. JOHN’S SQUARE.
AN
ESSAY
ON
PAPAL INFALLIBILITY.
BY THEVENERABLE
JOHN SINCLAIR M.A.
ARCHDEACON OF MIDDLESEX,
AND VICAR OF KENSINGTON.
LONDON:
FRANCIS & JOHN RIVINGTON,
ST. PAUL’S CHURCH YARD, AND WATERLOOPLACE.
1850.
p. 1ON PAPALINFALLIBILITY.
“Holy Scripture containeth all thingsnecessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein,nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, thatit should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thoughtrequisite or necessary to salvation.”—SixthArticle of Religion.
“As we deny not those things that are written, so werefuse those that are not written.”—Jerome. [1]
“The Spirit of God, therefore, is the only infalliblejudge here; and has declared as plainly as any successive judgescan, in those things that are necessary to life and salvation,what is to be believed and to be done; which if we believe andpractise in particular, and do also in general, and implicitlybelieve and stand in a readiness to obey the rest of theScripture, when the sense thereof appears to us, we are in a safecondition, and need not doubt but it will go well with us in theother state.”—Works of Henry More, pp. 453,454.
Every reflecting Christian, as soonalmost as he is capable of reflection, must have continualoccasion to observe with sorrow and anxiety the multipliedvarieties of opinion that divide the Church of Christ, on everypoint or article of Christian faith; the confidence with whichevery sect lays claim exclusively to the possession of savingknowledge, and the unqualified severity with which each partyreprobates the other, as being implicated in unpardonableheresy. On hearing (and who can escape hearing?) thefulmination of these mutual anathemas, we not only grieve for thestate of dreadful peril in which, if we admit such principles, alarge proportion of our neighbours, friends, and fellowChristians must be involved: but we grieve likewise on p. 2our ownaccount. We are visited with doubts, misgivings, andapprehensions, lest we ourselves, through ignorance or prejudice,should have adopted unawares into our creed some articlecontaining deadly error; or should have omitted somethingindispensable to salvation.
In this state of intellectual and spiritual perplexity, if wewant the Christian industry and moral courage to work out forourselves, by the help of God, this greatest of all problems, weare in a state of passive readiness to receive counsel from thefirst adviser. Among the multitude of counsellors whopresent themselves, none is more importunately obtrusive, or moredictatorially confident than the Romanist; and I propose, for thesubject of this essay, to examine successively the remedies andexpedients he suggests for calming our disquietude, and restoringour religious peace.
He informs us that our state of mind is the necessaryconsequence of adhering to a Protestant c