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| "The mind of Huss, at this stage of his career, would seem to have been the scene of a painful conflict. Although the church was seeking to overwhelm him by her thunderbolts, he had not renounced her authority. The Roman Church was still to him the spouse of Christ, and the pope was the representative and vicar of God. What Huss was warring against was the abuse of authority, not the principle itself. This brought on a terrible conflict between the convictions of his understanding and the claims of his conscience. If the authority was just and infallible, as he believed it to be, how came it that he felt compelled to disobey it? To obey, he saw, was to sin; but why should obedience to an infallible church lead to such an issue? This was the problem he could not solve; this was the doubt that tortured him hour by hour. The nearest approximation to a solution which he was able to make was that it had happened again, as once before in the days of the Saviour, that the priests of the church had become wicked persons and were using their lawful authority for unlawful ends. This led him to adopt for his own guidance, and to preach to others for theirs, the maxim that the precepts of Scripture, conveyed through the understanding, are torule the conscience; in other words, that God speaking in the Bible, and not the church speaking through the priesthood, is the one infallible guide." --Wylie, b. 3, ch. 2. Great Controversy, page 102.1 |
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| The grand principle maintained by Tyndale, Frith, Latimer, and the Ridleys, was the divine authority and sufficiency of the Sacred Scriptures. They rejected the assumed authority of popes, councils, Fathers, and kings to rule the conscience in matters of religious faith. The Bible was their standard, and to this they brought all doctrines and all claims. {SR 352.1} {4SP 173.2} |
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| God never forces the will or the conscience, but Satan's constant resort -- to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce -- is compulsion by cruelty. Through fear or force he endeavors to rule the conscience and to secure homage to himself.-- GC 591 (1888). {1MCP 325.1} |
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| God never forces the will or the conscience; but Satan's constant resort -- to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce--is compulsion by cruelty. Through fear or force he endeavors to rule the conscience and to secure homage to himself. To accomplish this he works through both religious and secular authorities, moving them to the enforcement of human laws in defiance of the law of God.-- GC 591 (1888). {2MCP 475.1} |
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Christ foresaw that the undue assumption of authority indulged by the scribes and Pharisees would not cease with the dispersion of the Jews. He had a prophetic view of the work of exalting human authority to rule the conscience which has been so terrible a curse to the church in all ages. And his fearful denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees, and his warnings to the people not to follow these blind leaders, were placed on record as an admonition to future generations. - {RH, June 7, 1906 par. 9} |
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