Note 995 — Chapter XI

A strange notion has been started of late years in England, that the council of Trent made important innovations in the previously established doctrines of the Western Church; an hypothesis so paradoxical in respect to public opinion, and, it must be added, so prodigiously at variance with the known facts of ecclesiastical history, that we cannot but admire the facility with which it has been taken up. It will appear, by reading the accounts of the sessions of the council either in Father Paul, or in any more favourable historian, that even in certain points, such as justification, which had not been clearly laid down before, the Tridentine decrees were mostly conformable with the sense of the majority of those doctors who had obtained the highest reputation; and that upon what are more usually reckoned the distinctive characteristics of the Church of Rome, namely, transubstantiation, purgatory, and invocation of the saints and the Virgin, they assert nothing but what had been so ingrafted into the faith of this part of Europe, as to have been rejected by no one without suspicion or imputation of heresy. Perhaps Erasmus would not have acquiesced with good-will in all the decrees of the council; but was Erasmus deemed orthodox? It is not impossible that the great hurry with which some controversies of considerable importance were dispatched in the last sessions, may have had as much to do with the short and vague phrases employed in respect to them, as the prudence I have attributed to the fathers; but the facts will remain the same on either supposition.