- 11 - That God would entrust the great gifts of His order of Salvation to a servant of hell? Common sense should tell you that this is impossible. • God’s spirits bring their gifts only to the righteous, and remain with them only while they retain their righteousness. This is demonstrated by the story of Saul.. As long as that Divinely gifted monarch remained obedient to God, he was in daily communication with the Divine spirit world and could ‘inquire of God’ whenever he felt the need of enlightenment, invariably receiving his answer from the spirits of truth. • When, however, he broke faith with God, this communication with God's spirit world was instantly interrupted. The inquiries he addressed to God remained unanswered, and in the place of the Divine spirits, evil spirits took possession of him. At one stroke he was deprived of all his great gifts. No wicked man can ever be the holder of God’s sacred gifts, not even if he is the pope. It follows that among the popes, the wicked ones at least could never have been infallible, and since you have no means of knowing whether a pope, or indeed any human, is at heart friendly or hostile to God, you can never be sure whether a pope’s doctrines are true or erroneous. • God alone chooses those among men to whom He sends His spirits of truth. And no human choice can establish a mortal as the bearer of God’s truths. Not even Christ selected his Apostles according to his own judgment, for it is expressly stated in the Acts that he selected them ‘through a holy spirit’. (Acts 1:2) It follows that God cannot make the gift of infallibility contingent upon any office held by the grace of man, as is the case with the papacy. “Consequently, also, the interpretations given to many parts of the New Testament in support of papal infallibility are wholly erroneous. Among the passages so cited are the words addressed to Peter by Jesus: Matthew 16: 18-19: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys to the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ From these words you conclude that Peter, the man, was the foundation of the church of Christ; that as the leader of that church he could not err in his proclamation of the truth, and that, moreover, he had been invested with the power to bind and to lose the members of the church. Now that office has been passed on to his successors, the popes of the Church of Rome. Consequently, it is claimed, they have the same gifts and powers that once were Peter’s. These are all great fallacies. • It was not Peter the man but Peter’s faith to which Christ referred as the rock on which his church was to be built.
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