church. She forgets more and more—at least in Rome—that symbols, dead works and ceremonies, are not the chief thing. She takes the shell for the kernel. She builds beautiful churches and permits humanity to decline.
The Protestant church, which, with infinite energy, broke the shell of forms and dead works, in order to come at life and truth, established for its church a principle of inexpressible depth: “faith, alone makes holy;” established the right of free inquiry. But whilst renewing the religious consciousness and striking deeper into the primal relationship of God with man, its view also became one-sided and its invisible church was not able to retain the conception of the kingdom of God.[1]
- ↑ How immeasurably superior, however, its logical conception
of the church is, in comparison with that of the Roman
Catholic church, may be seen from the passages which I here
transcribe from the catechisms of the two faiths:—
Question.—What is the only church by which you can be saved, according to the Roman Catholic doctrine?
Answer.—The church universal (Christian), is an assembly of all those faithful Christians, who are baptized and acknowledge their faith in Christ Our Lord, and acknowledge as His vicario, and as Christ on earth, the high Roman Pontiff (Il sommo Pontifice Romano).
“Dottrina breve Christiana, com. p. ordine di Papa Clementi VIII. dal R. P. Roberto Bellarmino della compagnia di Gesu-Roma, 1857.”
Question.—What, according to the acknowledgment of the Evangelical church, is the only true church of Christ, whose members can be saved?Answer.—It is to be met with wherever the word of God is proclaimed, and the means of grace partaken of; and every one who is really converted from sin to the living God, let him be-
