The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

against a part of the faith or deny it publicly whom it shuts out. Ignorance
and mental imbecility may prevent many from comprehending certain
parts of a system, but no particular church, however rigid, designs to
exclude such from its Communion.
The theory ignores the fact that the Church should make the standard
of faith, and morals, the highest possible, not the. lowest. She should lead
men, not to the least faith, the least holiness which makes salvation
possible, but to the very highest--she should not encourage the religion
whose root is a selfish fear of hell, a selfish craving of heaven, but she
should plant that religion to which pure truth is dear for its own sake,
which longs for the fullest illumination, which desires not the easy road,
but the sure one.
Force and extent of excommunication.
This theory, too, in asserting that there is a false assumption of
catholicity in such exclusions as it condemns, forgets that the only
discipline in the Church Universal is that now exercised by the particular
Churches. A pure particular Church is not a sect, but is of the Church-
Catholic. The particular Church must meet its own responsibility--it
claims no more than the right to exclude from its own communion--and
does not pretend to force any other particular Church to respect its
discipline. If we exclude a man for what we believe to be heresy, that does
not prevent his union with another part of the Church which regards his
view as orthodox. The worship of what we believe to be a wafer, may
exclude a man from our Communion, but it will prepare for him a
welcome to the Church of Rome, which believes that wafer to be incarnate
God. There such a man belongs. His exclusion does not deny that a man
may believe in Transubstantiation and yet be saved. Nor let it be forgotten
that no excommunication is valid unless it be authorized of God. All the
fulminations of all the particular Churches on earth combined cannot drive
out of God's kingdom the man he is pleased to keep in it. If the
excommunication be righteous, no man dare object to it; if it be
unrighteous, the man has not been excluded by it from the Church militant.
No man can be really kept or forced out of the Church militant except by
God's act or his own.