This good man's charity jarring with his love and tender recollections
of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a
far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry. Not what the Pope
has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and
his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true
worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in
Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c.--this must determine the point.
What they are themselves,--not what they would persuade Protestants is
their essentials or Faith,--this is the main thing.


P. 164.

I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry
of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination,
being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:--'whose sins ye
remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained'.

Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have
any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian! Even to the
immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have
reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this,--Whenever
you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you,
repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins
shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of
exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled? Did Christ say, that true
repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest's
verbal remission was superadded?