Search -
Lectures on the doctrine of justification
Lectures on the doctrine of justification Author:John Henry Newman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTUEE II. LOVE CONSIDERED AS THE FORMAL CAUSE OF JUSTIFICATION. T HAVE hitherto been employed upon a view of justi- -- fication which happens to be very... more » extensively professed in our Church at this day, either systematically or not; and has great influence, as a system, in consequence of the many religious men who hold it without system. I cannot for an instant believe that so many would adhere to it, if they understood what it really means when brought out as distinct from other views on the subject, and made consistent with itself. They profess it, because it is what is put into their hands, and they graft it upon a temper of mind in many cases far higher and holier than it. Now I come to consider the opposite scheme of doctrine, which is not unsound or dangerous in itself, but in a certain degree incomplete,—truth, but not the whole truth; viz., that justification consists in love, or sanctity, or obedience, or " renewal of the Holy Ghost."1 In describing it then, I am describing not a perversion,but what Saints and Martyrs have in substance held in every age, though not apart from other truths which serve to repress those tendencies to error, which it, in common with every other separate portion of the Scripture creed, contains, not in itself, but when exclusively cherished by the human mind. But in the Eoman schools, it has often been thus detached and isolated ;1 to use the technical language which even the Council of Trent has adopted, spiritual renewal is said to be the " unica formalis causa," the one and only true description of justification ; and this seems to be the critical difference between those schools and such divines, whether of the Ancient Church or our own, as seem most nearly to agree with them.—Now, however, to describe it in itself,that is, s...« less