I don’t bash protestants. But I do stand up for the Church that Christ started (the Catholic Church) each and every time some PROTESTant starts babbling on about how wicked the Catholic Church is. 2,000 years and counting, most Christians in the world are Catholic, but because a few thousand protestants say the Catholic Church is the work of the devil, well it must be.
“To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant” - John Henry Cardinal Newman
To be deep in Scripture is to cease being Catholic.
Schaffs more extensive work as to ECF's shows how needful the work he and others did was, and how wrong guys like Newman were.
To be deeper in history than Newman was, is to not come up with the excuses for Romish alterations and additions (to Christian theology) which Newman had to...
If one had been paying attention, reading carefully to see if their own assumptions, along with statements such as the Newman quote could be falsified (or need some modification), then it should have been obvious by now Newman was engaging in wishful thinking -- to justify his own conversion. But then again, Newman was operating under assumptions based in part upon limited work (from Oxford) in regards to ECF's that favored Romish perspective (a kind of cherry-picking of quotes and citation) which the more thorough work of Schaff and Co., revealed was not only lacking, but misleading -- and quite possibly deliberately so. And so the conversation continues to echo...much of the same old same old. But thank you, and other Romanists for providing the ample (and daily) opportunities for rebuttals of various aspects of Romanism.
Any theory -- including theology -- which is refuted by facts in evidence, stands to be reconsidered or adjusted, if only as to wording.
From there...it gets even more interesting, for various RCC wordings can mean different things to different people, being possibly true enough in one regard, but not so true if particular assumptions as to word definitions and in particular --- identification -- are not carefully enough weighed and considered.
Vatican II, anyone? How many times have [Roman] Catholics pointed at that RC magesterium product as being either a work of evil, or "misinterpreted" even by their own clerics?
It must be confusing to be a [Roman] Catholic. I feel sorry for 'em [sometimes].