pful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,
in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only
which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or
that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.
And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament
Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of
slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and
duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic
system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in
this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and
times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must
eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the
sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and
refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.

In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the
simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the
Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
which his Church has elaborated.

In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
us.

* * * * *

Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be it