For see, first, what is involved in the conclusion, when a person trained in Greece or in England gives in his name to the Church of Rome. It is deciding on his own authority what are the limits of the Kingdom of Christ, what the evangelical terms of salvation. He is pronouncing not only on the truth, but on the importance also, of the many and various propositions, which being in debate among those who call themselves Catholics, are settled under anathema by the Roman councils. He is consigning millions, who had no other thought than to live and die true subjects of the visible Catholic Church, to the comparatively forlorn hope of incurable ignorance and uncovenanted mercy. He is doing all this, I say, on his own authority: for although he may declare that he does but accept the Church's word for each doctrine, this will not make him the less responsible for taking on himself to determine, what is the Church,--whose word he will accept. If a child go out of his way to choose a physician for himself, is he not accountable for each separate direction, otherwise than he would have been, had he trusted his parents to choose for him.
Imagine how a person would feel, were he challenged solemnly to sign, on his own private judgment, such a document as the Creed of St. Athanasius, or the Nicene Creed with its Anathema, and to venture his salvation upon it. In the infinitely varying contingencies of human duty, of the pastoral care, especially,–such a step might possibly be needed, but who would not ask overwhelming proof of its necessity? Who would not shrink from it as an act of extreme daring? And yet people can bring themselves to think and speak lightly of adhering to the Tridentine Creed on their own private judgment: a far bolder step, by how much the doctrines enforced are farther removed from the foundations of Christianity, the evidence of their universal and original reception less obvious, and the number greater of those whom they exclude from Christ's pale.
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