This proposal not to proceed was inadmissible. The courageous Farel opposed it. ‘It is nowhere asserted in the Scripture,’ said he, ‘that any particular Church is liable to error and that the universal Church is exempt from it. On the contrary, it is to a particular Church that Jesus Christ addresses the words, _Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them_. This promise cannot fail. The Canons refrained from accusing by their protest all the early doctors and the holy fathers, for whom they make pretence of so much reverence. We find in fact, in the writings of those ancients, only particular disputations, held for the purpose of examining articles at that time controverted. There are ten such articles in Cyprian, and twenty or thereabouts, in Augustine. If they accuse us, who are now assembled here, how shall they defend their own provincial councils, their monks’ chapters, all their schools and Sorbonnes, in which they hold conferences for the research of truth? Most of those whom they have condemned as heretics were not condemned in a general council, but in some particular assembly. Paul, speaking with reference to churches as they were, scattered in towns or villages, said, _Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge_. (1 Cor. xiv. 29.) ‘And how do these reverend gentlemen prove that the Church general cannot err? This is their pretty assertion, invented too by them, according to their excellent custom. They say that our Lord prayed for St. Peter that his faith might not fail. Who then has revealed to them the fact, either asleep or awake, that Peter is the Church universal? If it were indeed represented by St. Peter, then it would follow that the Church universal may, in one single day, three times deny Jesus Christ, as Peter did so after that word had been spoken to him. If an assembly of the Church universal were the only body capable of resolving doubts, then all the martyrs of Jesus Christ, who in the first three centuries set the seal with their blood to the truth of the Gospel, would have suffered death for things doubtful, for the Church universal had not yet been assembled in general council. [Sidenote: THE DISPUTATION.]