Excerpta Protestanti

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: III. A Thorough examination of the remains of primitive antiquity is not a desideratum unaccomplished. The whole of this enormous mass of evidence has been carefully sifted and weighed, by those giants of the reformed church of England, (our Cranmers, our Ridleys, our Jewels, and a host of other great and...
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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: III. A Thorough examination of the remains of primitive antiquity is not a desideratum unaccomplished. The whole of this enormous mass of evidence has been carefully sifted and weighed, by those giants of the reformed church of England, (our Cranmers, our Ridleys, our Jewels, and a host of other great and godly men, ) whom God raised up with capacity and resolution, as well as learning, equal to the task. Every canon, even of the old councils, has been vigorously analysed, and not a document overlooked which could throw a light upon the mind of catholic antiquity. The result of this laborious scrutiny is, that not only the practical teaching, but the specific doctrines, of the church of England, have the consentient testimony of all primitive antiquity. She is, however, emphatically a scriptural church. Upon her own declaration of her office, in regard to holy writ, she is its witness and its keeper; with authority in all matters of faith, which she can prove out of the Divine record. But she cannot go farther; she cannot so much as change one jot or tittle of what is written, nor interpret it by any other rules than the laws of reason and the analogy of faith. And holding Scripture to be the sole rule of faith, it thus comes to pass thatwhen, had she been disposed, she might at least have appealed, in confirmation of her doctrines, to universal tradition, she studiously avoids it, and appeals to Scripture only. To general councils she attributes not only fallibility, but actual sins and errors; and pronounces that things ordained by them have neither strength nor authority, unless they be declared to be taken out of the Holy Scripture. She well knows, from history, the secular passions which mingled from the first in those synods; what turbulent ambition, pers..