ages in possession of men's minds, and had built up one harmonious structure of doctrine and practice by the work of a uniform hierarchy in many lands, and when, besides, a new invention had multiplied with a great economy of manual labour copies of the Scriptures, so that they could be produced in thousands and sold as an ordinary book, a notion, until then unheard of, was set up. A man arose who maintained that the Church in her ministers was not the teacher to whom God had committed the propagation of His gospel, but that each Christian was to teach himself by personal study of the written Word. This notion rested upon the assertion that the Holy Spirit coalesces with the written Word in such a manner as to act immediately on the mind of the reader. To those who could embrace such a notion the written Word came to stand to the reader in exactly that relation to divine truth which up to that time the Church herself had occupied. There seems to have been a real confusion in the mind of the man who devised this notion, and in the minds of his followers, between the outward material Word, which they read and construed, and its true sense, or the inward Word. Thus they argued from the possession of the former to that of the latter, and supposed that unity of belief would follow from the individual's study of the same documents. They always refused to see the conclusion which all of the old belief set before them, that they were substituting their own private and subjective interpretation of the Bible for the Church's public and authorised one. They opposed instead what they called the Word of God, that is, the real sense of Holy Scripture, to the word of man, which they called the Church's interpretation of it. It is true that this notion contained in it something very flattering to the human mind and the natural feelings, for it supposed an immediate relation between Christ and the individual, and an illumination of the readers mind by the influence of the Holy Spirit, the sole instrument of which was the reading of the Scripture. Thus this notion got rid at one stroke of Church, sacraments, discipline, and all spiritual rule.