Thus much for the primitive use of the word _implicit_. Now, with regard to the history of its transition into its present use, it is briefly this; and it will appear at once, that it has arisen through ignorance. When it was objected to a papist that his church exacted an assent to a great body of traditions and doctrines to which it was impossible that the great majority could be qualified, either as respected time--or knowledge--or culture of the understanding, to give any reasonable assent,--the answer was: 'Yes; but that sort of assent is not required of a poor uneducated man; all that he has to do--is to believe in the church: he is to have faith in _her_ faith: by that act he adopts for his own whatsoever the church believes, though he may never have hoard of it even: his faith is implicit, _i.e._ involved and wrapped up in the faith of the church, which faith he firmly believes to be the true faith upon the conviction he has that the church is preserved from all possibility of erring by the spirit of God.' [2] Now, as this sort of believing by proxy or implicit belief (in which the belief was not _immediate_ in the thing proposed to the belief, but in the authority of another person who believed in that thing and thus _mediately_ in the thing itself) was constantly attacked by the learned assailants of popery,--it naturally happened that many unlearned readers of these protestant polemics caught at a phrase which was so much bandied between the two parties: the spirit of the context sufficiently explained to them that it was used by protestants as a term of reproach, and indicated a faith that was an erroneous faith by being too easy--too submissive--and too passive: but the particular mode of this erroneousness they seldom came to understand, as learned writers naturally employed the term without explanation, presuming it to be known to those whom they addressed. Hence these ignorant readers caught at the last _result_ of the phrase 'implicit faith' rightly, truly supposing it to imply a resigned and unquestioning faith; but they missed the whole immediate cause of meaning by which only the word 'implicit' could ever have been entitled to express that result.