Frauds
Frauds Pious, "artifices and falsehoods made use of in propagating what is believed to be useful to the cause of religion. They are the offspring of sincerity and insincerity; of religious zeal combined with a defective morality; of conscientiousness in respect of the end, and unscrupulous dishonesty as to the means: without the one of these ingredients, there could be. no fraud; without the other, it could in no sense be termed a pious fraud." These frands have been more particularly practiced in the Church of Rome. But Protestants, in their abhorrence of the frauds that have been so often employed in support of that corrupt system, are prone to forget, or at least not sufficiently to consider, that it isnotthe corruptness of the system that makes the frauds detestable, and that their separation from the Church of Rome does not place theuc in a situation which exasempts them from all danger of falling into corruptions; among the rest, into the justification of pious frauds, substantially similar to those with which that Church is so justly reproached. See Whately, Errors of Rommasmism. SEE CASUISTRY;SEE PROBABILISM.
