Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. Roman Doctrine. Roman doctrine must bo accounted for. It is not like the doctrine concerning our Lord’s nature. The first words that the Church uttered were that Jesus was the Christ, the Redeemer of the world. It was on the nature of this Being that the human mind began to speculate and to draw inference; and it was the work of the First Four General Councils to determine what had been delivered to her. But now we come to a system of doctrine which was not received in the beginning, which did not appear in the creeds, which was not the subject of the decrees of councils, and which was not mentioned or referred to in the sermons and letters of the great doctors of the first three centuries. When Cardinal Newman left the English Church and gave in his adherence to the Roman Church, he indicated that the first thing that he had to do to show his consistency and his appreciation of the Christian faith was to account for those doctrines which the Church of England had rejected and which she had ceased to teach and to believe. The worldwas startled by his change, and no less so by the reason that he gave for that change. When Renan left the French Church, he said, in his
Recollections of My Youth, that he was influenced by what we call the history of Christian doctrine. He was a diligent student of history, but he found no mention made of those doctrines which characterized the French Church of his day. He had not been able to discover that the great writers of the first centuries taught those doctrines and exhibited them as part of the Christian faith. (xote ]4.) It is very easy for us to ascertain what those doctrines are. We have only to compare the Service Book of the Anglican Church of to-day with the Service Books which were in use before the Reforma…
