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.
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