Justice, Prophecy, The Announcements, and Return: Road to God, Who Guards It

The first four volumes tried what is said about God. This one tries the road to Him. Forty-seven questions in five divisions. Do acts carry a goodness and a badness that reason perceives before revelation comes? Can a God who compels be called just? Is evil a thing made, or the absence of a thing? What must be true of one who conveys from God - and what may not be claimed for him? Which of the announcements said to point to a coming prophet survive a scale, and which fall - including four raised by the author's own people, and rejected here by the same measure. Then the Return, and what was built upon it: purgatory, the treasury of the Church, the certificate of indulgence, and the power of the keys. Each is tried on its own proofs and not by the fall of its neighbour - and all four fall, each in its turn. The volume closes with the hardest question a book of this kind can be asked: after the owner of a Book has departed, who guards it from difference? Three answers are set out in their strongest forms, and each falls by the scale of its own people. And then the scale is turned upon its own maker: does a law this wide demolish every religion, the author's own among them? The answer is written as an undertaking and not as a promise. Four laws are drawn out along the way and printed so they can be used against the book itself: the law of the setting over, the law of the subject, the law of disclosure, and the law of constancy - the last of which, in the author's words, is held by its blade. Every scriptural quotation is collated word for word against the Revised Standard Version; the councils from Tanner; the definitions from Denzinger-Hünermann; the Catechism in its official English; Aquinas in the Dominican translation. Where a place could not be collated, the note says so in those words. The author's own notes are printed entire, with his marks upon what he had verified and upon what he had not, and the translator's collation is added after them and never mixed into them. No name is mentioned in this book with ill, and upon no question of it is there built a cursing or a disowning. The judge is the reader. Book Five of The Pleadings: A Thousand Questions and One. Book One: Rules of Court - Book Two: The Trinity - Book Three: The Hypostatic Union and the Two Natures - Book Four: The Incarnation and the Redemption