United States or Saint Kitts and Nevis ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The next important event in Methodist history during the Queen's reign is the rise and progress of the great Wesleyan Missions in the towns a vast beneficent movement, in which some at least of the aspirations cherished by the promoters of the first Oecumenical Conference appeared to have been realised.
The Catholic or OEcumenical Creeds make no affirmation whatever concerning the Bible. This theory is found alone, in formal official statement, in the creeds of minor authority, the utterances of councils of particular churches; as, for example, in the Tridentine Decrees and the Protestant Confessions of Faith. There is no unanimity of statement among these several Confessions.
It is a feature which nearly all historians neglect and yet one manifest upon the reading of any contemporary expression. That feature is this: No one in the Reformation dreamt a divided Christendom to be possible. This flood of heretical movement was oecumenical; it was not peculiar to one race or climate or culture or nation.
The Oecumenical Report gave the number of Methodist "adherents" as 24,899,421, intending, by the term adherents, those whose religious home is the Methodist chapel, though their visits to it be irregular. The statistics for Ireland and Canada were checked by the census returns. Probably in the case of missions the adherents would be more than four times the membership.
We hear now of questions being referred to the next OEcumenical Council better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing of words and creeds.
He would have supported the Synod if legally voted, but would have preferred the convocation, under the authority of all the provinces, of a general, not a national, synod, in which, besides clergy and laymen from the Netherlands, deputations from all Protestant states and churches should take part; a kind of Protestant oecumenical council.
I don't know whether to laugh or shudder. The thought of an oecumenical council having its leading feature dislocated by my trifling experiment! The thought, again, of the mighty revolution in human beliefs and affairs that might grow out of the same insignificant little phenomenon. A wine-glassful of clear liquid growing muddy.
In the occurrences that followed, both political and social, the Saracinesca bore a part, in that blaze of gaiety which for many reasons developed during the winter of the Oecumenical Council, in the fall of the temporal power, in the social confusion that succeeded that long-expected catastrophe, and which led by rapid degrees to the present state of things.
In 1869 the Oecumenical Council of the Vatican assembled, and after long debate sanctioned the doctrine of papal infallibility; that is, they promulgated the dogma that the Pope, when addressing the whole Church on a subject of morals or theology, is kept by the Spirit of God from enunciating error.
Already Leo had helped to trace with firm hand the deep lines of Christian orthodoxy which were accepted by the Church at the fourth great OEcumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 as her final utterance as to the true Godhead, the perfect Manhood, the invisible yet distinct union of both Godhead and Manhood, in the person of her Lord.
Word Of The Day