of transubstantiation; the Council of Florence, which was itself the summary of the Councils of the East, spoke in all their names; all these received their expression in the decrees of Trent. … The profession of faith promulgated by Pius IV. recapitulates the doctrine of the whole Church, East and West, in one, and presents it to the world in ample array, bright and resplendent, over against the prolific errors of these later days restless with a perverse intellectual activity and fronts its advance, reaching from wing to wing.'[1]
We gladly recognise whatever zeal for doctrinal truth is to be found among Protestants of every denomination; among Anglicans, for many Catholic truths, and for approximations to Catholic doctrine; among Protestant Dissenters, for those primary and personal truths relating to our Divine Lord and His redemption, and to the soul and its union with Him. All these truths, in the main, and apart from imperfections of conception and statement, are Christian and Catholic; portions of our inheritance of faith, and of the deposit committed to the Church. The Reformation, which shattered so much of the order of Christian truth, preserved all these. But the tendencies called into activity by the Reformation have been continually destroying the belief of these truths in every Protestant country. Nevertheless, there remains in Germany, England, and Scotland a strong
- ↑ Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, pp. 153–4.
