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The Fundamentals LIBLE BIBLE FOR AN INFALLIBLE CHURCH”, and the implication is that the one idea is just as baseless as the other. Sometimes the idea is taken up, quite commonly per haps, that the thought of an authority external to ourselves— to our own reason or conscience or spiritual nature—must be wholly given up ; that only that can be accepted which carries its authority within itself by the appeal it makes to reason or to our spiritual being, and therein lies the judge for us of what is true and what is false. That proposition has an element of truth in it; it may be true or may be false according as we interpret it. However, as it is frequently interpreted it leaves the Scriptures—but more than that, it leaves Jesus Christ Himself—without any authority for us save that with which our own minds see fit to clothe H int But in regard to the INFALLIBLE BIBLE AND THE INFALLIBLE CHURCH, it is proper to point out that there is a considerable difference between these two things between the idea of an authoritative Scripture and the idea of an infallible Church or an infallible Pope, in the Roman sense of that word. It may be a clever antithesis to say that Protestantism substituted the idea of an infallible Book for the older Romish dogma of an infallible Church; but the antithesis, the contrast, unfortunately has one fatal in accuracy about it. The idea of the authority of Scripture is not younger, but older than Romanism. It is not a late in vention of Protestantism. It is not something that Protestants invented and substituted for the Roman conception of the in fallible Church; but it is the original conception that lies in the Scriptures themselves. There is a great difference there. It is a belief this belief in the Holy Scripture—which was accepted and acted upon by the Church of Christ from the first. The Bible itself claims to be an authoritative Book, and an infallible guide to the true knowledge of God and of the way of salvation.. This view is implied in every reference
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