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

mises have NOT been accomplished in EVERY society that claims to itself the name of CHRISTIAN.

Whence it plainly must follow that, IF accomplished, the promises can ONLY have been accomplished in some PARTICULAR Church or Churches, to the EXCLUSION of all other societies which may make a profession of Christianity.

Such, therefore, being confessed on all hands, the simple question is: Whether the promises have been fulfilled in the particular Romish Church or in some other particular Church.

But, as I have just hinted, the whole conduct of the Romish Church, regarding both doctrine and practice, has, through all the Middle Ages, been uniformly such (except only as that dreary uniformity has been varied by regularly progressive deterioration down to the crowning Council of Trent The 16th-century ecumenical council that defined many Roman Catholic dogmas in response to the Reformation.), that the most profuse credulity must be exhausted in the attempt to believe that, with the Romish Church, through all the Middle Ages, and through the whole course of both her teachings and her doings, the holy and pure and merciful Redeemer never ceased to be spiritually, and therefore approvingly, present.

Consequently, the claim of the Romish Church being thus, of plain necessity, set aside, we are bound to produce some other Visible Church