Wesley Corpus

The doctrine of the Church of Rome has a natural tendency to destroy truth from off the earth. What can more directly tend to this, what can more incite her own members to all manner of lying and falsehood, than that precious doctrine of the Church of Rome, that no faith is to be kept with heretics? Can I believe one word that a man says, who espouses this principle? I know it has been frequently affirmed, that the Church of Rome has renounced this doctrine. But I ask, When or where? By what public and authentic act, notified to all the world? This principle has been publicly and openly avowed by a whole Council, the ever-renowned Council of Constance: An assembly never to be paralleled, either among Turks or Pagans, for regard to justice, mercy, and truth ! But when and where was it as publicly disavowed? Till this is done in the face of the sun, this doctrine must stand before all mankind as an avowed principle of the Church of Rome. And will this operate only toward heretics? toward the supposed enemies of the Church? Nay, where men have once learned not to keep faith with heretics, they will not long keep it towards Catholics. When they have once over leaped the bounds of truth, and habituated themselves to lying and dissimulation, toward one kind of men, will they not easily learn to behave in the same manner toward all men? So that, instead of “putting away all lying,” they will put away all truth; and instead of having “no guile found in their mouth,” there will be found nothing else therein Thus naturally do the principles of the Romanists tend to banish truth from among themselves. And have they not an equal tendency to cause lying and dissimulation among those that are not of their communion, by that Romish principle, that force is to be used in matters of religion? that if men are not of our sentiments, of our Church, we should thus “compel them to come in ?” Must not this, in the very nature of things, induce all those over whom they have any power, to dissemble if not deny those opinions, who vary ever so little from what that Church has determined ?