Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/126

 it necessarily assumed this position in a system of Christianity of which Paul was the author. But by this means the way was already prepared for the ruin of Christianity. ‘You have challenged me to reason;—I, with your good leave, will reason for myself. You have indeed tacitly taken it for granted that my reasoning cannot issue in any result different from your own; but should it fall out otherwise, and I should arrive at some wholly opposite conclusion,—as will unquestionably happen should I proceed upon some other prevalent philosophy,—then must I prefer my own conclusions to yours, and that too with your own approval, if you are consistent with your own teaching.’ Such liberty was very assiduously cultivated in the first centuries of the Christian Church, and arguments without end were carried on respecting dogmas which owed their origin wholly to the Paulinean scheme of Mediation; and there arose in the One Church the greatest possible variety of opinions and disputes;—all proceeding upon the maxim that the Understanding is the Supreme Authority:—and this scheme of Christianity, I may once for all term Gnosticism. But in this way it was impossible to preserve the unity of the Church; and since all parties were equally far from discovering the true source of the evil in the original departure from the simplicity of Christianity for the purpose of gaining the good graces of Judaism, there was nothing left but a very heroic expedient; this, namely, to forbid all farther thought, and to maintain that, by a special providence of God, the Truth was deposited in the Written Word and the existing Oral Traditions, and must be believed whether it was understood or not;—and as any farther interpretation of those infallible sources of Truth which might be necessary rested with the Church at large, or with a majority of the voices of the Church, it followed that the statutes in which this interpretation was contained demanded a faith as unconditional as the