4.  I am sensible how heavy a clog on the exercise of my judgment has been taken off from me, since I unlearned that Bibliolatry, which I am disposed to call the greatest religious evil of England.

Authority has a place in religious teaching, as in education, but it is provisional and transitory.  Its chief use is to guide action, and assist the formation of habits, before the judgment is ripe.  As applied to mere opinion, its sole function is to guide inquiry.  So long as an opinion is received on authority only, it works no inward process upon us:  yet the promulgation of it by authority, is not therefore always useless, since the prominence thus given to it may be a most important stimulus to thought.  While the mind is inactive or weak, it will not wish to throw off the yoke of authority:  but as soon as it begins to discern error in the standard proposed to it, we have the mark of incipient original thought, which is the thing so valuable and so difficult to elicit; and which authority is apt to crush.  An intelligent pupil seldom or never gives too little weight to the opinion of his teacher:  a wise teacher will never repress the free action of his pupils’ minds, even when they begin to question his results.  “Forbidding to think” is a still more fatal tyranny than “forbidding to marry:”  it paralyzes all the moral powers.

In former days, if any moral question came before me, I was always apt to turn it into the mere lawyerlike exercise of searching and interpreting my written code.  Thus, in reading how Henry the Eighth treated his first queen, I thought over Scripture texts in order to judge whether he was right, and if I could so get a solution, I left my own moral powers unexercised.  All Protestants see, how mischievous it is to a Romanist lady to have a directing priest, whom she every day consults about everything; so as to lay her own judgment to sleep.  We readily understand, that in the extreme case such women may gradually lose all perception of right and wrong, and become a mere machine in the hands of her director.  But the Protestant principle of accepting the Bible as the absolute law, acts towards the same end; and only fails of doing the same amount of mischief, because a book can never so completely answer all the questions asked of it, as a living priest can.  The Protestantism which pities those as “without chart and compass” who acknowledge no infallible written code, can mean nothing else, than that “the less occasion we have to trust our moral powers, the better;” that is, it represents it as of all things most desirable to be able to benumb conscience by disuse, under the guidance of a mind from without.  Those who teach this need not marvel to see their pupils become Romanists.