assment to
the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private
judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
its purpose.

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
as agai