“I will pray the Father; and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth.” {22e} “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.” {22f} “These things write I unto thee; that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” {22g} Our endeavours to extract out of these texts infallibility for the Romish Church are as much in vain as in the preceding inquiry for supporting the Papal claims. A general council seems to have as little warrant from Holy Scripture to assure us that it is infallible, as the Roman Pontiff himself. The first quotation refers to the perpetual _continuance_ of the Christian society. Christ assures us that, to the end of time, the gates of hell shall not prevail against his Universal Church; or, in other words, that a community called by his name, and retaining the essentials of Christianity, will never cease to be. But this consolatory promise gives us no security that any one particular Church, or any meeting of Church officers, shall be infallible. On this subject we cannot forbear transcribing the judicious comment of a learned Romanist, Tostatus of Avila, who flourished in the fifteenth century: “The universal or Catholic Church never errs, because it never errs in all its branches. The Church of Rome (_ecclesia latinorum_) is not the Catholic Church, but only a certain branch of it; and, therefore, although the whole of that branch should have erred, the whole Church could not be said to err. Because the genuine Catholic Church remains in the unerring branches, whether they be more or fewer than the branches which err.” {23} Again, the injunction of our Lord to “tell the Church,” if taken apart from, and not in connexion with the preceding context, might seem to have some distant bearing upon this question. But on examining the whole passage, we perceive that our Saviour makes allusion to secular, not to spiritual concerns; and is speaking only of private differences among his followers. “If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.” Three successive steps are next recommended for effecting an accommodation: first a private interview; then the influence of mutual friends; and lastly, the authority of the Church to which the parties belong. The contumacious wrong-doer who could not by these methods be brought to reason, was no longer to be regarded as a Christian brother, but as a heathen. He was liable to excommunication, or expulsion from the society; and reparation of the injury committed might now be sought for in a court of law. We do not find in these directions the remotest allusion to infallibility.