Fencing Bear at Prayer

"It is to be noted that the heretics, being unable to vindicate themselves against the truth of the faith by force, by arguments, or by authorities, in consequence immediately fall back upon verbal sophisms, ambiguities, and evasions in order to avoid being entrapped in their errors.  The use of ambiguous replies is one plain sign by which heretics can be recognized.  One kind of deception which they use is equivocation.  For instance, when asked if they believe in the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, penance, matrimony, ordination, and extreme unction, they reply that they do indeed believe, but what they mean by all this is either good will in the heart or an inner penance.  Likewise, they may take 'the true body of Christ' to mean His mystical body, the Church, or the body of any good man, which they say belongs to Christ, as do other bodies also.  So, when asked whether they believe in the body of Christ, they reply ambiguously or with a double meaning....

"It is not true at all that dogma is 'hopelessly irrelevant' to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that is is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God [take that, Dan Brown !--FB]; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is wholly irrelevant to chatter about 'Christian pirnciples.' "If the 'average man' is going to be interested in Christ at all, it ...