The doctrine of the sovereign authority of Scripture in matters of faith might seem at first sight to set up an external authority. And it is very true that certain Protestants have often understood it in the Catholic sense, and have employed it to exercise some violence on their own conscience or on the conscience of their brethren. But they never succeed for long; they soon fall into a too flagrant contradiction. The authority of the Bible is never separated in Protestantism from the right of the individual to interpret it freely, and from the personal duty of assimilating the truths he discovers in it. What therefore are those Protestants doing who attempt to set up a confession of faith as absolute and obligatory truth but imposing on their brethren their own subjective interpretation, and, consequently, denying to others the right which they exercise themselves? Nor let it be forgotten, on the other hand, that the obligation laid on each Christian to read the Bible and draw from it his faith is a perpetual and fruitful appeal to the energy of thought and to the autonomy of the inner life. The authority of Scripture, so far from being a menace to Christian liberty, is its invincible rampart. Not only has the Protestant Christian in the name of the Bible triumphed over eighteen centuries of tradition, but it is the Bible, an appeal to the Bible ever better understood, which has saved Protestant theology from scholasticism, which has prevented it from congealing in a confession of faith, and which, leaving the principle of the Gospel in an ideal transcendence in relation to all its historical expressions or realisations, has maintained, and still maintains, the spirit of reform in the Churches of the Reformation.