FAITH, RULE OF, is that which determines what man is to believe concerning his origin, duty, and destiny. I. Many persons, denying either the possibility or the fact of a supernatural revelation, maintain that human reason alone, as possessed by all persons of sound mind, is both the source and ground of all religious knowledge and conviction of duty. II. Others, either denying or depreciating the authority of any external revelation, affirm that every man, in connection with his reason, yet as the enlightener of it, has an inward revelation—God with him—to which pertains the supreme authority in the belief of truth and knowledge of duty. III. The Roman Catholic church, admitting that truth supernaturally revealed is the rule of faith, teaches that the revelation actually given is partly written (as contained in the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha) and partly unwritten (as treasured up in divine and apostolic traditions); and that, consequently, the rule of faith includes both Scrip ture and tradition. And, as the people cannot surely and perfectly understand either of these, the only authorized interpreter of them both is the church, the infallibility of which is vested in the pope. Thus, ultimately, for every Roman Catholic, the rule of
faith is the of the infallible pope of Rome; and this, practically, for the mass of the people, resolves itself into the dictum of the parish priest, from whom they are bound to receive whatever he tells them as the judgment of the pope. IV. Protestants believe that all extant revealed truth is contained in the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; and therefore teach that these (received by every man, after due inquiry, as the word of God, and interpreted according to his own judgment, enlightened through the use of all accessible helps, human and divine) constitute for him the rule of faith. Among those holding this general principle of Protestantism there are recognized diversities, according as, on the one hand, the authority of the Bible —even in its letter—is intensified, or, on the other hand, the sphere of human reason in interpretation of its spirit is enlarged. Also to the consensus of the church are assigned differing degrees of authority in the interpretation of Scripture among different sections of Protestants