Excerpt from An Essay on the Harmonious Relations Between Divine Faith and Natural Reason: To Which Are Added Two Chapters on the Divine Office of the Church It has been the accusation of ages against the Church, that she usurps the provinces of reason, common sense, and experience in teaching divine faith to her children; and millions upon millions 'of men have accepted the accusation as true, without ever having seen one of her catechisms or any standard Of her faith, written by one of her recoghized teachers. Indeed, her accusers doom her to their hate without even co'nsulting her theologians and historians, so that they are ignorant of both her faith and her theology. And I respectfully appeal to any who now condemn her, whether they do so because they have read and understood the teaching of her authorized doctors, or whether they do not do it hpon the historical assertions of her enemies and their denunciations Of her faith. It is, then, a purpose of this Essay to induce investigation'into the very truths the Church actually teaches, and also, to take those who have adopted the traditions of her accusers, into the sane tuary of reason, and at the foot of the altar of reason, to inquire of that unbiassed oracle whether the accusations against the Church be true Or' not; And whoever will carefully, in a candid Spirit of inquiry, read this little book, will find, as we devoutly trust, that the Church - as so far from chaining reason down to abasement - teaches' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.