_But mark how sandy is your own pretence, Who, setting councils, pope, and church aside, Are every man his own presuming guide The sacred books, you say, are full and plain, And every needful point of truth contain; All who can read interpreters may be._--P. 165. This ultimate appeal to the scriptures against the authority of the church, as it is what the church of Rome has most to dread, is most combated by her followers. Dryden, like a good courtier, adopts here, as well as elsewhere, the arguments which converted his master, Charles II. "We declare," says the king in his first paper, "to believe one Catholic and apostolic church; and it is not left to every phantastical man's head to believe as he pleases, but to the church, to whom Christ left the power upon earth, to govern us in matters of faith, who made these creeds for our directions. It were a very irrational thing to make laws for a country, and leave it to the inhabitants to be interpreters and judges of those laws: For then every man will be his own judge; and, by consequence, no such thing as either right or wrong. Can we therefore suppose, that God Almighty would leave us at those uncertainties, as to give us a rule to go by, and leave every man to be his own judge? I do ask any ingenuous man, Whether it be not the same thing to follow our own phancy, or to interpret the scripture by it? I would have any man shew me, where the power of deciding matters of faith is given to every particular man. Christ left his power to his church, even to forgive sins in heaven; and left his Spirit with them, which they exercised after his resurrection; first by his apostles in their creed, and many years after by the council at Nice, where that creed was made that is called by that name; and by the power which they had received from Christ, they were the judges even of the scripture itself many years after the apostles, which books were canonical, and which were not." _Papers found in King Charles's strong box._ Note VI. _The good old bishops took a simpler way; Each asked but what he heard his father say, Or how he was instructed in his youth, And by tradition's force upheld the truth._--P. 167. Dryden had previously attacked the rule of faith, by private judgment of the Holy Scriptures. His assumption is, that the scriptures having been often misunderstood and abused by heretics of various descriptions, there must be some more infallible guide left us by God as the rule of faith. Instead of trusting, therefore, to individual judgment founded on the scripture, he urges, that the infallibility of faith depends upon oral tradition, handed down, as his communion pretends, by father to son, from the times of the primitive church till this very day. It is upon this foundation that the church of Rome rests her claim to infallibility, as the immediate representative of the apostles and primitive church. Note VII.