Four Years in France: or, Narrative of an English Family's Residence there during that Period; Preceded by some Account of the Conversion of the Author to the Catholic FaithBeste, Henry Digby
Religion
Four Years in France: or, Narrative of an English Family's Residence there during that Period; Preceded by some Account of the Conversion of the Author to the Catholic Faith
Beste, Henry Digby
France -- Description and travel
The other method of defending the reformation of the Church of England,
is by admitting, that the Church of Rome, as the Anglicans call it, has
been, and is, a true church, teaching with authority all doctrines
necessary to salvation; that the Church of England, having purified
itself from errors and abuses, is also a true church, an integral
portion of the catholic or universal church, with all the authority to
such a body ecclesiastical, of due right, appertaining.
This statement compels the Church of England to assert for itself
something like infallibility; for, as Voltaire expresses it, "L'église
catholique est infaillible, et l'église Anglicane n'a jamais tort." This
must be so; for the authority of a church which may be in the wrong,
must be always questioned.
This statement also deprives the Church of England of all advantage in
arms (theological arms I mean,) against the dissenters and other
reformers: they turn upon her, and ask how she is more infallible, or
even more in the right, than the Church of Rome. The Kirk of Scotland
will no more allow itself to be in the wrong than the Church of England.
Thus disputes are endless; appeals to remote antiquity, instead of
uninterrupted tradition, involve the matter in hopeless intricacy; and
the private judgment of nations has no more weight than the private
judgment of individuals.
Such are the two modes of defending England's reformation adopted by the
low and the high church parties, which once declaredly and still
insensibly divide its clergy. I have explained both methods, as they are
better understood by being contrasted: I have noted the vice of each,
that I may give in part my reasons for rejecting both in due time. Till
this due time arrived, I was induced to embrace, and, for the time,
conscientiously embraced, the opinions of a high churchman; and I was
induced to this by the arguments and example of my friend Richard Paget.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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