Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/141

Rh Submission to Church authority is the test whether or not we prefer unity, and the edification of body, to private fancies.

Thus, e. g. when the man of strong feelings, in old time, merely founded a college or monastery for devotion and study, he satisfied the test. When, in modern times, he opens a conventicle, and forms a sect, he is condemned by it, as Pharisaical.

When the Baptists go so far as to separate, because they think children ought not to be baptized, they fail under the application of it, since the Church, though earnestly enjoining infant baptism, does not exclude from communion those who scruple at it; therefore the Baptists are self-banished. When the Non-conformists separated on account of the surplice, the cross in baptism, &c. they too were detected and convicted of a rebellious spirit, by the same test.

The spirit of Schism, in addition to its other inherent characters of sin, implies the desire of establishing minor points as Catholic or essential points, or the spirit of exclusiveness.

The desire of novelty is restlessness; the maintenance of our own novelty is selfishness.

Zeal is the effort to maintain all the Truth; party spirit is a perverse maintenance of this or that tenet, even though true, yet to the suppression and exclusion of every thing else. "Forte hinc appellata Catholica," says Augustine, "quod totum veraciter teneat, cujus veritatis nonnullæ particulæ etiam in diversis inveniuntur hæresibus."

While Dissenters are exclusive on the one hand. Papists are so on the other. The Council of Trent converted certain theological opinions into (what they maintained to be) Catholic Verities. This was wrong, whoever did it; but it is some comfort to find, that the body that thus became uncatholic, was not the Church Catholic itself. It had been wretched, indeed, had the Church, in its Œcumenic or Universal capacity, surrendered its own essential character, and added to the Catholic faith private judgments. But the Tridentine Council was a meeting of but a part of Christendom. Though the Latin communion is given at 80,000,000 souls, yet the Greek Churches are said to