47
however, yet farther trespass upon the reader's patience to observe, that cunning men without a conscience are never secure. Into what a dilemma has the attempt to exculpate the Church of Rome in this affair driven her apologists! That Church does not condemn the philosophic doctrine, but on the contrary believes it to be true; by asserting, however, or barely admitting, that, although true, it is repugnant to Scripture, is it not a fair — a necessary inference, that in the view of the Church of Rome Scripture is false? This, I fear, is not an inference very alarming to some Romanists — they have still tradition, and then, without a rival. I may be allowed to remark yet farther, into what a forest of embarrassment the present ominous erasure has cast the unfortunate Church. For, if the doctrine, which by one of her principal courts of judicature in matters of faith she has condemned as heresy, so that the person vehemently suspected of that doctrine is therefore vehemently suspected of heresy, will it not follow, either that what was heresy in the seventeenth century is not heresy in the nineteenth; or, that the Church has been at one time or the other in error on a matter of faith; or, that an inerrable and unchangeable
