The Church is a condition and medium, not the last ground of believing

Those doctors therefore treat the Church's voice and testimony as a cause without which we would not believe, and, in their terms, a condition of faith's object: the Church is the medium through which God reveals and proposes what is to be believed. Yet they refuse to reduce our faith to the Church's testimony as the supreme and last reason of believing. They reduce it to God revealing and the Holy Spirit illuminating — as Bañez teaches carefully in the place already cited.

Stapleton's words in the article we keep marking are the same: faith that begins from the Church's testimony, so far as that testimony proposes and leads to faith, ends in God revealing within and teaching within what the Church preached without. The Church's preaching teaches from outside; it proposes, leads, and helps. But the One who teaches within has his chair in heaven, as Augustine says. Once that inward teaching has come, the Samaritan line has its place: "Now we do not believe because of your speech; for we ourselves have heard, and we know that this is the Savior of the world" (John 4).