Puritanism Not Genuine Protestantism; Being a Review of the Puritans and Their Principles, by Edwin Hall (Paperback)

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: every step, will never be able to do them justice, as he can neither enter into, nor appreciate their feelings. In order to understand, therefore, the true nature of the all absorbing questions which now occupy the mind of the Christian world, we must inquire, briefly as possible, what is the Romish idea of the Church, and of our relation and duty to it, and what was the idea opposed to it by the Reformers, and the consequences resulting therefrom; and what is the sectarian idea of the same, which stands in the opposite extreme from Romanism itself; and how that view agrees with, and differs from the view of the Reformers. ROMISH VIEW OF THE CHURCH. The Romish system teaches that the visible Church of Christ is the Son of God himself everlastingly manifesting Himself among men in a human form, perpetually renovated and eternally young, the permanent Incarnation of the same. The Church, therefore, with the Romanist, is the body of the Lord, it is, in its universality, His visible form; His permanent, ever renovated humanity; His eternal revelation. f Consequently, the authority of the Church, to use the language of one of its ablest -modern defenders: ): is the medium of all which in the Christian reli- Moehler Symb. 333. t Moeh. 351. t Moeh. 340. gion resteth on authority, that is to say, the Christian religion itself so that Christ himself is only so far an authority, as the Church is an authority. Out of this Church it holds that there can be no salvation. ROMISH VIEW OF TRADITION. This view of the Church compelled Romanism to regard the Church as the primary source of all religious knowledge, the foundation upon which even the Scriptures themselves must rest for authority; and tradition, which it regards as the living consciousness of the Ch...