Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

In truth, the more recent Protestants, rejecting that pseudo-mystical inspiration, judge that one's own natural endowment fully suffices for the reason of any private individual, by conducting an inquiry into the biblical text, to arrive at the genuine understanding of revelation. In place of private inspiration, therefore, they introduce a merely subjective scientific inquiry. Now if these Protestants affirmed by their principle only that private inquiry, or the scientific study of the Bible, is lawful for all, they would say nothing but the truth. They err, however, insofar as they contend that everything, and only that, is to be believed which each individual draws out of the Bible by private inquiry. Private inquiry, understood in this sense, is refuted both by human reason and by Protestant history.

1. Human reason perceives without difficulty that private inquiry into Scripture is not a rule of faith suited and sufficient for all men. For the Protestants wrongly teach that Scripture explains itself to all, or at least can be explained and understood by all with certainty and ease.¹ In truth, nothing is more difficult to understand than the Bible, if it must be understood by private inquiry alone. The original codices of the Bible have perished; the Hebrew and Greek languages, in which the sacred books were first written, are unknown to most; the ancient and vernacular versions are imperfect; the canon of sacred Scripture is drawn out only by long study; many texts are obscure in themselves:² countless historical, archaeological, and philological questions must be solved if the sacred books are to be understood at all.

Hence the unlearned are unequal to the private inquiry into Scripture. Nor can the knowledge of the learned be commended to them, as the adversaries infer. For uncultivated men cannot grasp the critical-scientific demonstrations of the scholars. Moreover, the learned neither deserve faith nor are able to win it for themselves. For even they are found in that worst condition, that they agree on no truth of Scripture and believe none to be certainly revealed. Hence both unlearned and learned Protestants must recall that word of the Lord: „But if a blind man give guidance to a blind man, both fall into the pit."³ Certainly:

2. Protestant history leads the principle of private inquiry ad absurdum. For it shows that Protestants, swearing by this one principle, are forced either to have recourse again to the authority they spurned or to slide into bare unbelief.

Luther himself, the father of the principle of private inquiry (for we know that his pretended inspiration was nothing but private inquiry), soon attempted to rein in the much-vaunted „freedom of the spirit" by the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium. Indeed, when the necessity of curbing the rebellious peasants and teachers pressed upon him, he attributed to himself and to his church properly an authentic or divine magisterium.⁴ Nay, while the reformers were still living, Protestants began to compile the „Confessions" (the Augustan, the Belgic,⁵ the Helvetic, the Scottish, etc.) or „symbolic books", which they prescribed to their people as norms of believing and preaching. And even down to our own times the „orthodox" are driven to announce the gospel according to the rule of the symbolic books or of other ecclesiastical „Confessions".⁶ For without the authority of the Church, they confess, the whole faith and the Church itself would necessarily perish.⁷

And indeed those Protestants who have sincerely used the principle of private inquiry have fallen into bare unbelief, that is, into a rationalistic negation of the whole revelation. This needs no proof, since it is known to all that modern Protestantism is almost the same as rationalism. For whoever sets up the subjective inquiry of reason as the norm and judge of revealed truth, by that very fact contends that revelation contains nothing that does not belong to the sphere of pure reason. Behold crass rationalism! And moreover, with tradition and the authority of the Church denied, there perishes also the only source of revelation admitted by the Protestants, namely Scripture inspired by God. For the inspiration of Scripture is not sufficiently established except by Tradition and the authority of the Church, as will be shown.⁸ Hence the Protestant principle of faith leads by logical necessity to the total destruction of the Christian religion.⁹ The Christian religion cannot be preserved, unless the revelation once given by God is always proposed through the magisterium ordained by God.

The truth of the Catholic principle, therefore, is already discerned from the falsity of the Protestant principle, just as, conversely, the falsity of the Protestant principle clearly shines out from those things by which we shall presently prove the truth of the Catholic principle: