“See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
sentences in which Froude asserts that Christianity is Catholic
or nothing:--
“‘... This was the body of death which philosophy detected but
could not explain, and from which _Catholicism_ now came
forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
“‘The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the
early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has
long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very
essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be
purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the
beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without
his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural
organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization
could begin again from a new original, no pure material
substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God had
first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in
the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it,
through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew
again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean
as the first body of the first man when it passed out under
His hand in the beginning of all things.’
“Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where
he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his
readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is
called a thing ‘worn and old’ even in Luther’s time, and he
definitely prophesies a period when ‘our posterity’ shall learn
to ‘despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together
out of its tatters.’”