Excerpt from The Dogmatic Faith: An Inquiry Into the Relation Subsisting Between Rebelation and Dogma These words sound like the battle-cry of the Church, the trumpet-note of the Spirit of God summoning her to the conflict. They appeal to the heroic virtues of constancy of purpose, forti tude, and courage. No childish uncertainty of conviction or womanly weakness of purpose must characterise the followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Many of the highest qualities of manhood are taxed by war, and by none should they be so illustriously displayed as by the saint who has attained unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Such was the appeal of St. Paul to his Corinthian converts: Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. The need for manly vigour is not diminished by the fact that the sphere of conflict is spiritual, not material. The shock of outward battle calls into play the excitement of the physical Spirits and the combativeness natural to man. It has about it a terrible pomp of its own, and an outward dis play singularly attractive to some minds, and only intensified into a sterner reality by its 'dreadful accompaniments of suffering and death. The spiri tual war taxes constancy and courage the more from the absence of these outward stimulants. To stand firm to principle amid reproach, steadily to separate abiding truth from its temporary counter feits, to resist ridicule and the strength of lan guage often substituted for strength of argument, to throw on one side accusations of narrowness and ignorance, irritating as they are to a just self respect, to rise superior to periodic fluctuations of opinion as ceaseless as the ebb and flow of the sea, and amid these various influences to maintain with singleness of heart and undistracted accuracy of eye the truth of God, is the most difficult of all conflicts and the most glorious of all victories. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.