The Catholic Church and history

[1] The Anglican authority and scholar, Dr. Lightfoot.

[2] For instance, he says there cannot have been a dragon under the Capitol because dragons are only found in Africa!

[3] For instance, the absurdity about the tides, and the argument from the phases of Venus.

[4] “Educated” Europe meant a far larger body in Catholic times than it does now. Universities were then popular institutions and their attendance was from every class.

[5] Taking the date of Pentecost as A. D. 29.

[6] Thus, a man who says, “While rejecting all dogmas and creed I revere the vaguer part of the traditional moral teaching of Jesus” is essentially a Protestant, not a sceptic, or Pagan: for such do not revere any part of our morals. Protestant also, not Pagan, is the man who confines himself to “the authentic teaching of Jesus” freed from all later stories of the marvellous and all the sophistries of Theology, which “authentic teaching” he picks out of the heap by his own infallibility. For the true sceptic or Pagan has no more use for the “authentic” fragments than for all the rest. He is equally indifferent to the whole.

[7] Heresy = Αιρεσις—“Picking and choosing.”

[8] Thus we say of a man of twenty-five that he “changes” into the man of forty. We also say of a man gone mad that he has “changed.” But the word “change” has two very different meanings in the two cases. In the one case it is change within the framework, of unity, of one character and personality. In the other it is the change against that unity, a rupture of it.