Again, numbers are not as in original text found in same source as post below....
- And so faith in itself,
- even though it may not work through charity,
- is a gift of God,
- and its operation is a work belonging to the order of salvation,
- in that a person yields true obedience to God himself when he accepts and collaborates with his grace which he could have rejected.
- Wherefore, by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed
- which are contained in the word of God as found in scripture and tradition,
- and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed,
- whether by her solemn judgment
- or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.
- Since, then, without faith it is impossible to please God [21] and reach the fellowship of his sons and daughters, it follows that
- no one can ever achieve justification without it,
- neither can anyone attain eternal life unless he or she perseveres in it to the end.
- So that we could fulfil our duty of embracing the true faith and of persevering unwaveringly in it, God, through his only begotten Son,
- founded the church,
- and he endowed his institution with clear notes to the end that she might be recognised by all as the guardian and teacher of the revealed word.
- To the catholic church alone belong all those things, so many and so marvellous, which have been divinely ordained to make for the manifest credibility of the christian faith.
- What is more,
- the church herself
- by reason of
- her astonishing propagation,
- her outstanding holiness and
- her inexhaustible fertility in every kind of goodness, by
- her catholic unity and
- her unconquerable stability,
- is a kind of great and perpetual motive of credibility and an incontrovertible evidence of her own divine mission.
- the church herself
