Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 28:111 (Jul 1871)
Article: Ways To Rome
Author: Francis Wharton

BSac 28:111 (July 1871) p. 417

Ways To Rome

Rev. Francis Wharton

In one respect the work before us1 is open to serious exception. Herr Nippold is a “liberal,” and as such revolts from anything that savors of a positive faith. He does not see that orthodoxy can be anything else than compulsory; he is unable to conceive of a mind that in perfect freedom, under the blessed influences of the Holy Spirit, accepts and obeys the revealed gospel of Christ. “Bondage,” and yet “liberty,” simple submission to a creed coalescing and becoming coincident with entire freedom both of belief and life,—these are among those mysterious harmonies which, verified as they are by the experience of every Christian heart, pass, like the co-existence of predestination with individual responsibility, beyond the range of the comprehension of the world. Hence it is that so often we hear the view incidentally taken by Herr Nippold in one of his closing sections — that whatever sets up an authoritative standard, in matters of faith at least, opens the way to Rome. Now, in one sense, this is nothing more than Luther’s well-known

BSac 28:111 (July 1871) p. 418

saying, that there is a pope in every man’s belly; and if it be limited to this, it is a position that all must admit. Every man, if he follow his natural instincts, will be a pope if he can. And this holds good in things ecclesiastical, as well as in things practical and domestic. The Methodist class-leader who patronizes no Christianity that is not Methodistic, and sees nothing Methodistic that is not Christian; the Presbyterian elder who makes his self his creed, and his creed an anathema; the Episcopal neophyte, who believes himself the holy catholic church that can never err, and who treats his bishop with the most abject professed veneration and the most insolent practical contempt — each of these assumes papal powers, so far as his little opportunities will allow. Nor can we stop here. If the pope is incarnate in any one, it is in those by whom “free-religionism,” as it is called, is most clamorously maintained. Some months since was published the life of a “liberal” Unitarian clergyman, who, having obtained a chaplaincy during our late war, used the powers it gave him to take military possession of a Southern pulpit, and there, as he exultingly tells us in his diary, to “force” the reluctant people to listen to the theories, political and social, which he was pleased to call the gospel. A regiment stood without; a prison or a gibbet rose in the perspective. It would be disloyal to fly from the loyal preacher who thus took possession; and thus he was able, as he felicitated himself, to ruthlessly assail the most cherished convictions of his hearers’ hearts. Now, this was ...