PREFACE.
The Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent are documents as valuable in a legal and historical, as in a religious point of view. Amid much that is purely Papal in its character, amid many avowed professions of unscriptuiral superstition, there is still much that is common to Reformed Churches, much that proves that "if there was a good deal of policy in the decisions of the Council of Trent, there was no want also of conscientious sincerity."[1] To know what Roman Catholicism really is, according to its own best accredited testimony, we must turn to the pages of this council; to try Rome fairly, we must hear her plead her own cause.
Recent circumstances, doubtless fresh in the minds of my readers, render the publication of these documents in an English form highly expedient. While one class of persons have sought to explain away essential differences, and to invalidate the common belief regarding the errors of Rome, too many have likewise degenerated into the opposite extreme—have mistaken unqualified abuse of Rome for orthodox Christianity. It is in the humble hope that a spirit of fair and temperate inquiry, a desire to separate the tares from the wheat, may be aroused in the professors of Protestantism, as well as that the firmness of their rational resistance to
- ↑ Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. i. p. 545.
