Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
which his Church has elaborated.

In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
us.

* * * * *

Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one
and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"
in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which
all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it
is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed
Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and
of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any
rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no