openly asserting that faith without good works is dead, these scriptural Christians, forsooth, maintain that we achieve forgiveness of our sins by faith alone, by apprehending Christ as the Saviour, and hiding ourselves and our iniquities beneath the broad mantle of His holiness. Belief in Christ, say they, is threefold; belief in the truth of all His works, belief in His power to do all things, and belief in the sufficiency of His merits to cancel all our sins, and this last alone is, they claim, the means of our justification. In refutation of such preposterous doctrine suffice it to say that though Christ on various occasions commended faith as a necessary condition for the restoration of bodily and spiritual health, still He often elsewhere assigns other dispositions — fear, sorrow, love, etc. — as the occasions of His indulgence. Of Magdalen, for example, He said that " much had been forgiven her because she had loved much." Besides, even where faith is mentioned by Him as His mercy's motive, it is evident that He speaks of belief, not in the efficacy of His merits, of which the parties concerned as yet knew nothing, but of belief in His unlimited miraculous power. Finally, the faith applauded by Christ in those instances was very often not at all that of those whom He healed or absolved, but of those who carried the afflicted before Him or besought Him on behalf of the dying or the dead. Thus, Protestants prove too little or too much, that is, they prove nothing.
Brethren, the Catholic Church holds, and has always held, that Baptism and Penance are the two
