Highly valuable is the Nicene Creed; but it has
its chief value as an historical document, proving that the same texts
in Scripture received the same interpretation, while the Greek was a
living language, as now.
Sect. III. p. 23.
If what he says is true: 'He that errs in a question of faith, after
having used reasonable diligence to be rightly informed, is in no
fault at all'; how comes an atheist, or an infidel, a Turk, or a Jew,
to be in any fault? Does our author think that no atheist or infidel,
no unbelieving Jew or heathen, ever used reasonable diligence to be
rightly informed? * * * If you say, he confines this to such points as
have always been controverted in the churches of God, I desire to know
a reason why he thus confines it? For does not his reason equally
extend to the Christian Faith itself, as to those points which have
been controverted in Christian Churches?
And the Notary might ask in his turn: "Do you believe that the
Christians either of the Greek or of the Western Church will be damned,
according as the truth may be respecting the procession of the Holy
Ghost? or that either the Sacramentary or the Lutheran? or again, the
Consubstantiationist, or the Transubstantiationist? If not, why do you
stop here? Whence this sudden palsy in the limbs of your charity? Again,
does this eternal damnation of the individual depend on the supposed
importance of the article denied? Or on the moral state of the
individual, on the inward source of this denial? And lastly, who
authorized either you, or the pseudo-Athanasius, to interpret Catholic
faith by belief, arising out of the apparent predominance of the grounds
for, over those against, the truth of the positions asserted; much more,
by belief as a mere passive acquiescence of the understanding? Were all
damned who died during the period when 'totus fere mundus factus est
Arianus', as one of the Fathers admits? Alas! alas! how long will it be
ere Christians take the plain middle road between intolerance and
indifference, by adopting the literal sense and Scriptural import of
heresy, that is, wilful error, or belief originating in some perversion
of the will; and of heretics, (for such there are, nay, even orthodox
heretics), that is, men wilfully unconscious of their own wilfulness, in
their limpet-like adhesion to a favourite tenet?"
Ib.
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