Canon XXIV:  “If any one says that righteousness, after having been received, is not conserved nor augmented before God by good works, but that these works are merely the fruits or signs of the justification which one has obtained, and that they are not a reason why justification is increased,—­let him be accursed.”

It is a well-known characteristic of the decrees of the Council of Trent that truth and error appear skilfully interwoven in them.  They are like a double motion that is offered in a deliberative body:  they contain things which one must affirm, and other things which one must negative.  They cannot be voted on—­many of them—­except after a division of the question.  They contain “riders” like those in a bill that comes before a legislative body:  in order to pass the bill at all, the “rider” must be passed along with the bill.  But enough crops out in these decrees to show that the Catholic Church is not willing to let the merits of Christ be regarded as the only thing that justifies the sinner.  He must cooperate with the Holy Spirit to the end of being justified.  He must prepare and dispose himself for receiving justifying grace, and this grace is infused into him, and manifests itself in holy movements of the heart and by good works, in acts of love.  The Roman Catholic Christian is taught to believe that he is justified partly by what Christ has done, partly by what he himself is doing.  He cannot subscribe to Paul’s statement:  “By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves:  it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2, 8. 9.) Nor is his justification ever complete, because his love is never perfect.  It must be increased even after his death.  The Roman purgatory contains sinners whom God had justified as far as He could, the sinners remaining in arrears with their, part of the contract.  Accordingly, the sinner can never have the assurance that he will enter heaven.  It would be presumptuous for him to think so.  He must live on and work on at his poor dying rate, and hope for the best.

This teaching of the Church of Rome subverts Christianity.  It strikes at the root of the faith that saves.  It is a relapse into paganism and an affront offered to the Savior.  It borrows the language of Scripture to express the most hideous error.  By this teaching Rome does not drive men into purgatory,—­which does not exist,—­but into hell.  It is only by a miracle of divine grace that sinners are saved where such teaching prevails:  they must forget what is told them about the necessity of their own works and cling only to the Redeemer, and must thus practically repudiate the teaching of their Church.  Some do this, and escape the pernicious consequences of the error of their Church.  All of them will rise up in the Judgment to accuse their teachers of a heresy the worst imaginable.