Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/374



368 THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH.

then nothing whatever is beheved by divine faith: for what the Apostle St. jJaines judges to be the effect of a moral delinquency, the same is to be said of an erroneous opinion in the matter of faith. .Whosoever shall offend in one point, is become guilty of all} Nay, it apphes uith greater force to an erroneous opinion. For it can be said with less truth that every law is violated by one who commits a single sin, since it may be that he only virtually despises the majesty of God the Legislator. But he who dissents even in one point from divinely revealed truth absolutely rejects all faith, since he thereby refuses to honor God as the supreme truth and the formal motive of faith. "In many things they are with me, in a few things not with me; but in those few things in which they are not with me the many things in which they are will not profit them." And this indeed most deservedly; for they who take from Christian doctrine jwhat they "please Jean on their own judgments, not on faith; and hot bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ,'^ they more.^ truly obey them- selves than Go d. "You, who believe what you like of the gospels ahdT believe not what you like, believe your- selves rather than the gospel." *

For this reason the Fathers of the Vatican Council laid down nothing new, but followed divine revelation and the acknowledged and invariable teaching of the Church as to the very nature of faith, when they decreed as follows: "All those things are to be believed by divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the written or unwritten word of God, and which are proposed by the Church as divinely revealed, either by a solemn definition or in the exercise of its ordinary and universal Magisterium." ^ Hence^ as it


 * James ii. 10.

^ S. Augustinus in Psal. liv., n. 19. ^2 Cor. X. 5.


 * S. Augustinus, lib. xvii., Contra Faustum Manichaeum, cap. 3.


 * Sess. iii., cap. 3.