An Inquiry into the History and Theology of the Ancient Vallenses and Albigenses

living God: but NONE of the writers of the first three centuries ever imagined or allowed that the Rock is complexly Peter and his fancied successors, the Bishops of Rome. This notion rests purely upon the unauthoritative speculation of a later age; and upon that unauthoritative speculation—like the tortoise resting on empty space—rests the proof that the Romish Church is the only Catholic Church, and thence (as the Bishop’s argument proceeds) that the Romish Church is infallible and therefore has invariably been sound both in doctrine and in practice.

2. Such being the true state of the case, if a Romanist A term used to describe a member of the Roman Catholic Church, often used by Protestants in this period to emphasize distinctiveness. wishes to convince a mind that is little influenced by the mere boldness of assumption that forms the true basis of Bossuet’s Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, a 17th-century French bishop and theologian known for his defense of Catholicism. inverted process, a Protestant will naturally invite him to demonstrate that the Latin Church, from its invariable soundness in both doctrine and practice, MUST be the Church to which Christ addressed his promises.

Meanwhile, until such demonstration is provided (which, even in pretense, the Protestant perceives to be impossible, save through the ridiculously inadmissible medium of infallibility, which itself rests ultimately upon a mere