Tracts for the Times No 90 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: § 5.—General Councils. Article XXI.—" General councils may not be gathered together without the commandment and will of princes. And when they be gathered tog... more »ether, forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God, they may err, and sometimes have erred, in things pertaining to God." That great bodies of men, of different countries, may not meet together without the sanction of their rulers is plain from the principles of civil obedience and from primitive practice. That, when met together, though Christians, they will not be all ruled by the Spirit or Word of God, is plain from our Lord's parable of the net, and from melancholy experience. That bodies of men, deficient in this respect, may err, is a self-evident truth, —unless, indeed, they be favored with some divine superintendence, which has to be proved before it can be admitted. General councils then may err, [as such ;—may err,] unless in any case it is promised, as a matter of express supernatural privilege, that they shall not err; a case which lies beyond the scope of this Article, or at any rate beside its determination. Such a promise, however, does exist, in cases when general councils are not only gathered together according to " the commandment and will of princes," but in the name of Christ, according to our Lord's promise. The Article merely contemplates the human prince, not the King of Saints. While councils are a thing of earth, their infallibility of course is not guaranteed; when they are a thing of heaven, their deliberations are overruled, and their decrees authoritative. In such cases they are Catholic councils ; and it would seem, from passages which will be quoted in Section 11, that the Homilies recognize four, or even six, as bearing this ...« less