use of the magistracy and other civil offices, without which
no state is successfully administered.


To Article XVII.

The confession of the seventeenth article is received, since
from the Apostles' Creed and the Holy Scripture the entire
Catholic Church knows that Christ will come at the last day
to judge the quick and the dead. Therefore they justly
condemn here the Anabaptists, who think there will be an end
of punishments to condemned men and devils, and imagine
certain Jewish kingdoms of the godly, before the resurrection
of the dead, in this present world, the wicked being
everywhere suppressed.


To Article XVIII.

In the eighteenth article they confess the power of the Free
Will - viz. that it has the power to work a civil
righteousness, but that it has not, without the Holy Ghost,
the virtue to work the righteousness of God. This confession
is received and approved. For it thus becomes Catholics to
pursue the middle way, so as not, with the Pelagians, to
ascribe too much to the free will, nor, with the godless
Manichaeans, to deny it all liberty; for both are not without
fault. Thus Augustine says: "With sure faith we believe, and
without doubt we preach, that a free will exists in men. For
it is an inhuman error to deny the free will in man, which