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: CHAPTER II. Infallibility. In the foregoing pages it has been shown that unity is an indispensable prerogative of the Church, not only from the Scriptures and the writings of the first professors of the faith; but also from its agreement with reason. The Infallibility of the Church, is of like importance; without which it would be impossible to preserve the true faith, owing to the vacillating tendencies of the human mind, as exemplified in the changes continually going on among the sects who discard this doctrine. Infallibility is the guidance of the Holy Ghost promised in the Gospel to keep the Church in "all truth," and is claimed as a dogma, by the Catholic Church alone. Should a sect be so forgetful of its rightful position among sects as to advance a claim to all truth, it would mean the breaking of that existing bond, which requires that the sum total of truth possessed by all should be so divided that each may have a share, but none a monopoly; otherwise, Infallibility—to them the saddest of accidents—would result to the one, and with that result necessarily accomplish the destruction of the others. As a means of self-preservation then, protestants are obliged to oppose Infallibility, and endeavor to maintain that a number of instructors each differing in manyrespects as to the doctrine taught, so that no one of them being entirely right, yet no one of them entirely wrong, are superior to one voice teaching always and in all places, one doctrine and one faith. Our opponents aver that it is the acme of priestly arrogance, for a Church composed of fallen humanity, to lay claim to one of the attributes of Deity. J "As well," say they, "might a man claim to be immortal in his body as infallible in his mind." It should be remembered however that while Infallibility...