except in committee; and very few will have given special study beforehand to one half the subjects upon which they will be called to vote. A member burdened with egotism or enamored of his own eloquence will learn little of a subject during a discussion; and the man of average attainments who listens well to all discussions, both in committee and in open Conference, will be apt to make the best and safest legislator, especially if he be not in too great haste to get home. Let men be chosen who realize that the magnitude of the interests placed in their hands imposes weighty and solemn obligations upon them for their best service. Let the Committee on Entertainment see that a building with good acoustic properties and with comfortable seats be provided. Let all conscientious delegates sit through the four hours' sessions for a month and a day, if need be. And let us hear no more about making the General Conference a small body. This business should not be done in a corner.

J.D. Walsh

ART. IV.

SALVABILITY OF HERETICS.

WE should suppose, from the controversies among Protestants over Roman Catholic doctrine, that the Roman Catholic Church was an obscure, shy sect of esoteric teachings, instead of filling Western history back almost to apostolic times and having proclaimed her tenets in a thousand authentic and public documents. It was really amusing some years ago to observe a Presbyterian clergyman communicating, with an air of mysterious astonishment, the results of a private interview with Archbishop Corrigan's secretary, to the effect that his Church allows that a good many Protestants may be saved. We should suppose, from the air of pleased surprise and innocent importance with which he made the announcement, that this opinion had been buried under the pyramids and had just been excavated by him, along with the mummy of Rameses the Great, for the general enlightenment. He seems not to have been aware that no opinion can bind a Catholic conscience unless proclaimed urbi et orbi, or unless universally taught in the Church as something essential to the faith. There is, therefore, no room for excavations or mysterious disclosures in the field of Roman Catholic doctrine. Opinions may be entertained more or less widely and with more or less of reserve; but, unless universally published and universally received as of dogmatic obligation, they cannot be enforced upon any Roman Catholic who chooses to deny them. He may be enjoined against publicly contradicting a widely spread opinion which is not of faith, but he cannot be required to profess it. Nor can we be sure that a doctrine is held by Rome to-day because she held it a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago. It is remarked by Dr. Döllinger that Rome, six hundred years back, burned people for teaching papal infallibility, and to-day she excommunicates them for denying it. Even Roman Catholics now very commonly accept Cardinal Newman's theory of development, according to which the general type of doctrine has always been the same in the Catholic Church (as indeed it has), but that this has been very slowly evolved, and, meanwhile, many opinions incompatible with it have long prevailed and often been inconsiderately enforced, as if they were of the faith. Whatever we may say of this theory

in general, in its relations to the infallibility of the Church, it seems not to work amiss as to the salvability of heretics, especially as it would, I think, be difficult to cite any instance of discipline inflicted on a Catholic, ancient or modern, for entertaining a charitable presumption as to the future destiny of pious schismatics whose schisin has been inherited and has not originated with them.

As good a starting point as any in our consideration of this matter is Dr. Johann Anton Theiner's work, Das Seligkeitsdogma der römisch-katholischen Kirche ("The Roman Catholic Doctrine of Salvability"), published at Breslau in 1847. The names Theiner and Breslau suggest a Roman Catholic origin. However this may be, the work of over six hundred and fifty closely printed octavo pages, crowded with the most accurate learning, breathes from beginning to end the most unrelenting virulence against the Church of Rome. The author's aim is to prove that the Roman Catholic Church has always taught, and still teaches, that from the first Whitsuntide (or, at least, from the fall of the temple) till now no human being, baptized or unbaptized, infant or adult, dying out of visible communion with the see of Peter has ever been, or ever will be, saved. All pretenses to the contrary he declares to have been mere hypocritical appearances, assumed to beguile the unwary and lull them into an unsuspicious benevolence toward Rome, which shall make them easier victims of her proselytizing designs. Now, anyone who will attentively read Dr. Theiner's work will not fail to be persuaded of his ample competency to decide this matter. If he cannot establish his point no one can. Learning and ability being conceded, the only question is one of good faith.

Before considering this, however, let us admit, what everyone knows, that the Catholic Church from the time of her full development, as early as the year 200, has always taught unwaveringly that out of the Church there is no salvation. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is a formula that no Catholic, ancient or modern, Eastern or Western, has ever ventured to contradict, unless he stood prepared to forfeit his Catholic name. The only question has been one of interpretation. We need not concern ourselves much about the Eastern Church. Her ancient writers have been of a milder, and her modern of a narrower,

temper than the Western. Orthodoxy has been her great note, while catholicity has been emphatically embodied in the Church of Rome. With the latter, doctrinal error has been of less account than disobedience. False doctrine, however erroneous, even though it should confound the persons of the Trinity, to use Bellarmine's illustration, is not heresy, so long as the man stands prepared to accept whatever he learns that the Church has authentically defined. The true question, therefore, is with Rome, Can schismatics be saved? It is indifferent whether their schism declares itself in the rejection of an authentic doctrine or in disobedience to a legitimate command of the Church. However, as inward separation from the Church is most unequivocally exhibited in the rejection of defined doctrine, we need not change our title, provided we interpret it as including schismatics even though doctrinally sound, as the Greeks are admitted to be and as some Roman Catholics maintain that a large share of the Anglicans are.

Theiner, who must not be confused with his brother, an eminent Catholic divine, is right in taking Augustine as the decisive authority as to the ancient Catholic doctrine of salvábility. However, he raises a strong presumption against the honesty of his attitude toward Augustine by hurling at him the hateful term Frömmler, "a pretender to piety," and holding up against him the excesses of his earlier life as a proof that the devout sobriety of his later years was put on for sinister ends. Now, I need not defend the noble sincerity of Augustine's conversion against Theiner or against any other ignoble adversary. Nor need I vindicate his right to that symbol of the flaming heart which the Roman Church, with the marvelous justice of her appreciations of her great saints, has assigned to him. But I mention Theiner's scoffing disparagement as the keynote to the tone of his whole book. It is thoroughly scientific in form and utterly unscientific in fact, having no more moral title to respect than any one of our coarsest and most blundering polemical tracts. This shows that scientific temperance would not establish his contention, and that he resorts to unworthy virulence for this reason. However, he surveys the whole field of the controversy with so ample a sweep of view that we cannot do better than in this respect to follow his lead.

Augustine and the whole Catholic Church of his day doubtless held that outside the pale of baptism justifying grace is not given. A virtuous heathen might not be condemned to torment; although the fathers are by no means so indulgent in this as the schoolmen and the modern Catholic divines. But at all events he would never be admitted into the kingdom of heaven. Yet even here we must make a profoundly important exception. Augustine declares that most of the Christians of his day denied the eternity of future punishment. Nor will he allow them to be called heretics. He commends their compassionateness and is willing to concede that eternal punishments may be from time to time remitted, or even altogether intermitted-an opinion very commonly prevalent throughout the later ages, and one to which the Church seems never to have raised any opposition. However, he insists that Scripture makes it plain that we cannot go farther than this. He and the Church of his day, of course, held that whoever is baptized in the Catholic Church, not being in mortal sin, is forgiven and justified, and, dying in this state, is saved. He also holds that whoever is, with due matter, form, and intent, baptized out of the Catholic Church receives the sacrament, indeed, but not the grace of the sacrament. If, now, he comes into the Church, then, having already the baptismal character, he first receives the baptismal grace. But who are baptized in the Catholic Church? Only those that are baptized by Catholic Christians? Theiner answers for him, "Yes." Augustine answers for himself as follows: "Those who defend their own opinion, however false and perverse, with no pertinacious animosity, especially when they have not engendered it by the audacity of their own presumption, but have received it from lapsed parents led away into error, and seek the truth with cautious solicitude, being prepared to be set right when they have discovered it, are in no way to be reckoned among heretics"-nequaquam sunt inter hæreticos deputandi. It follows, then, that all such persons, even though not baptized by Catholics, have been baptized in the Catholic Church and have been made partakers of justifying grace.

To this Theiner, who adduces the passage at length, replies that Augustine wrote it before he was firmly fixed in orthodoxy; that he addresses it to Donatist bishops, whose good