The History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (Paperback)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1829 Original Publisher: Richard Coyne Subjects: Protestantism Reformation Church history History / Europe / General Religion / Christianity / History Religion / Christianity / Protestant Religion / Christianity / Denominations Religion / Christian Church / History Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 16. -- The Protestants are ashamed of so many Confessions of Faith. -- The vain pretexts by which they endeavour to excuse them. This prodigious multitude of confessions of faith has alarmed those who made them: we shall see the weak reasons by which they endeavour to excuse them; but I cannot avoid mentioning those which have been set forth in the preface of the collection of Geneva, because they are general, and bear equally upon all the churches which call themselves reformed." The first reason assigned to establish the necessity of multiplying these confessions is, that as many articles of faith were attacked, it became necessary to oppose many confessions to this great number of errors. I agree to the justice of this reasoning, and at the same time, by a contrary reason, I demonstrate the absurdity of all these confessions of faith of the Protestants, since all, as it appears by reading the titles, only regard articles precisely the same; so that we can address them with St. Athanasiusf, " Why a new council -- new confessions -- a new creed ? What new question has been raised ? Another excuse alleged is, that the whole world ought (as the apostle says, ) to render an account of their faith, so that the churches spread in different places, have a right to declare their belief by a public testimony; as if all the churches in the wo...