CHAPTER XII
THE ORTHODOX FAITH
The faith of the Orthodox Church agrees in the enormous majority of points with that of Catholics. In order not to fill up this chapter with an exposition of what we learnt in our catechisms, we will notice only the differences. But a list of such differences is liable to falsify one's sense of proportion. In considering what they believe it would be absurd to think of the procession of the Holy Ghost, the questions of the Epiklesis, Purgatory, the Primacy, as the chief points. The foundations of the Orthodox faith are belief in one God in three Persons, in the Incarnation of God the Son, Redemption by the Sacrifice of his life, the Church founded by him with her Sacraments, the Resurrection of the body, and Life everlasting. Let it then be said at once that the pious Orthodox layman lives in the same religious atmosphere as we do. His Church stands in every way nearer to the Catholic Church than any other religious body. The Orthodox use the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, and understand every word of them (but for one fatal clause in the latter) just as we do. But these are only what we may call the œcumenical Christian ideas.[1] The same could be said of Trinitarian Protestants. It is in the points about which Protestants disagree that we see how near the Orthodox Church is to us. The Orthodox believe in a visible Church with authority to declare the true faith and to make laws. They have a hierarchy against which our only complaint is that it has
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