no censure; if I publish something against one or another of these I must submit to the penalty of having my publication placed on the Index and being excommunicated if I refuse to correct or retract the erroneous matter. The same rule obtains substantially amongst the so-called Evangelical sects. The Methodists would excommunicate from their communion the layman or "elder" who should publish any thing against the Methodist Book of Discipline and refuse to retract it. The Presbyterians would excommunicate the minister or layman who should do the same with regard to their Confession of Faith. The previous censorship is chiefly a protection to the author, for it enables him to throw the responsibility, in great measure, from himself on to his censors. Thus for years, for my own protection, I submitted all my theological articles to the revision of authority before their publication; I do not do it now, because I choose to bear the responsibility myself alone. The Patriarch of Venice, in his ecclesiastical capacity, could not prohibit the introduction of foreign books; all he could do was to forbid Catholics within his jurisdiction to read them. The introduction or non-introduction is a matter that falls exclusively within the jurisdiction of the civil power. What that power prohibits or does not prohibit in Venice or any other Catholic state, is nothing to me; for, as a Catholic, I am not bound to defend the legislation or administration of Catholic any more than of Protestant States. The principle involved in the Patriarch's circular is wise and just. The Church is bound to look after the faith and morals of her children, and if she allows her children to buy and sell and read without restraint, bad books, books prejudicial to religion and morals, our Protestant saints would set up a universal clamor against her for her alleged profligacy and disregard of religion and morals. There are classes of books, prints, and paintings, as the Reviewer well knows, which our laws forbid to be sold publicly or privately. Would the Reviewer think it wrong even for a Methodist Bishop to tell his people not to sell them, for he was determined to prosecute every man he found doing it? Protestants, when it concerns what a Protestant may do in the bosom of his sect, exercise as rigid a supervision over the reading of their members as the Church does. The Reviewer himself would not contend that all sorts of books, including irreligious, immoral, and infidel books, are proper even for Methodists. Would he recommend Methodists to read Tom Paine's Age of Reason, Volney's Ruins, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, Jacques et son Maître, and La Religieuse of Diderot, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, or Moore's Little's Poems, to say nothing of the vile publications circulated secretly for the very purpose of corrupting the heart and inflaming the senses of our youth? Nay, would he not at least admonish them not to read even Catholic books, and to be on their guard against the seductions of Rome? Then what has he to complain of in the Patriarch of Venice? One almost loses his patience with these Protestant declaimers against the Church. They cry out with all their force against the Church, accuse her of usurpation, of tyranny, of spiritual despotism, whenever she takes any step for the maintenance of the religion and morality of her children, or seeks to secure the peace and order of the state. Yet they know well enough that without discipline, without wholesome laws, restraining licentiousness and punishing vice and crime, society cannot exist. If the Church within her sphere, or a Catholic state within its sphere, attempts any thing of the sort, their love of liberty is outraged, and they call upon the whole Protestant world to come and put down these "Romanists." What is it they want? Of course, to prevent religion and morality from flourishing in Catholic states, to corrupt the morals of Catholics, to ripen the Catholic populations for sedition, rebellion, revolution, to render it impossible for Catholic governments to exercise their ordinary functions as governments, and to render the very existence of society in Catholic states impracticable. This is what English and American Protestantism is aiming at, and if it could only effect it, wouldn't it have a triumphant argument against the Church? The real significance of all these charges against the Church is that she pursues her own course without consulting the wishes or the interests of Protestantism, and has not the least disposition in the world to avoid doing her duty in order to give her enemies an advantage over her. "What this arm of the civil power means, the unhappy victims of priestly despotism in Austria understand full well." Is there any priestly despotism in calling upon the government to prevent the sale of books that strike at the foundation of religion and morals? Is it priestly despotism to call upon the civil power to punish gambling, adultery, theft, robbery, murder? Victims of priestly despotism in Austria! Who are they? Who are they? Name them. But you cannot. Austria is of all Catholic states precisely the one in which the clergy have had the least power, and even the late Concordat does not secure to the Church in the Austrian empire the freedom and independence she has in these United States. Civil despotism there has been in Austria, and it has had its victims, but priestly despotism there has not been. The censorship has existed and exists still in Austria; yet its practical effect has been not to prevent the circulation of Protestant, infidel, or immoral publications, but the publication of Catholic works, and to discourage Catholic authors. Anti-Catholic books were connived at; Catholic books were prohibited, lest they should disturb the Protestant minority. Wherever the state has established a censorship Catholic thought and intelligence alone have suffered from it. What this wise and learned Methodist Reviewer lays to the charge of the Church belongs to the state. He is an unreasonable man, and blames the Church for the very despotism of which she is the first victim, and pretends that the despotism which the state exercises over her, is a despotism which she exercises over the state. We wonder not that he should say, "Baal is God, and I will serve him." "It is not the sudden overthrow of the rights and immunities of Protestant liberty, we fear." To hear this man talk, one would suppose that he really imagines that Catholics are engaged in a dangerous conspiracy against the liberty of Protestants. Nero set Rome on fire, fiddled while it was burning, and charged the crime upon the Christians. "Ecoute: c'est Néro qui met le feu dans Rome, Luimême! Il nous fallait des coupables: c'est vous You are conspiring against the liberty of the country, and you would direct public vengeance against Catholics as Nero did. It is well; it shows who were your ancestors, and who were ours. The ages are hers. Like Zeuxis, she works 'for eternity." The first truth we have found in the article. The ages are hers, and she will live and bring forth children to her heavenly Spouse, long after the very name of Methodism shall be forgotten. She works for eternity, like her Master, not for time. Would our Methodist saint have her work for the temporal instead of the eternal ? Like Baalam, the poor man opened his mouth to curse, but was forced by a higher Power to utter a blessing. What he intended for a cutting reproach proves to be the highest eulogy he could pronounce. The Church does work for eternity, and thus obeys Him who commands us to "labor not for the meat that perisheth, but for that which endureth unto everlasting life." "If such a church were the true representative of Christ on earth, then would infidelity have whereon to stand. Infidelity to Christ would be duty to God. The infidelity of the eighteenth century was the insurrection of reason, not against truth; not against Christianity; but against that mockery of it, which had stolen its name, that huge hypocrisy which, in the livery of Heaven, blasphemed the Almighty, trampled on his servants, and practically nullified every virtue which the Almighty has taught. The jeers of Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclopædists were a tribute to truth. The infinite scorn which in such terrible measure was heaped upon the pope and the whole papal system was a tribute to the truth. It sprang from a just conception of the holiness, wisdom, and justice of that God whose character was slandered and caricatured by the character and principles of the pretended successor of the chief of the apostles."-p. 41. Another evidence that our Reviewer insists that Baal is God. The infidelity of the eighteenth century attacked the Bible as well as the Church; it made war avowedly on Christ himself, and its war-cry was Ecrasez l'Infame. It denied all divine revelation, denied the whole supernatural order, the immortality of the soul, and moral accountability, and under the name of reason deified passion, fitly represented by a prostitute. "The jeers of Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclopædists were a tribute to truth." Does the writer really know what he says? Is he aware that those jeers were directed against every thing which even he, if he calls himself a Christian, and believes that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Redeemer of mankind, holds sacred? If our Church be true, we grant infidelity has, as opposition to her, something to stand on; but if Protestantism, as this writer represents it, were true, it would have nothing to oppose and no motive to make war on Christianity, for in that case Christianity and infidelity would be one and the same thing. This converting Christianity to infidelity as the readiest way of converting infidels to Christianity, may do for a Methodist, but it will not do for a Catholic. The writer may persuade an intelligent unbeliever that Protestantism is infidelity, but he will never persuade him that it is Christianity. The common sense of the world has long since decided that Christianity and Catholicity are identical, and it is rare that a man who is really in earnest to be a Christian, if possessed of ordinary means of intelligence, finds a resting place outside of the Catholic Church. Protestantism under a purely religious point of view, has no hold on the world, and it is supported mainly as a political and social system, and under a religious name, perhaps as a compromise between heaven and earth, eternity and time, God and the devil. Many worthy people, no doubt, think it will answer the purposes of religion, and that by it they may provide for future contingencies without that renunciation of this world and of sensual gratifications demanded by Catholicity. But the man who has no religion, who has no Protestant connections, who is convinced of the necessity of religion for his soul's sake, not merely to whitewash a damaged reputation or to give him respectability in the eyes of the world, and knowing the difference between Protestantism and Catholicity, will never think of embracing Protestantism. He will regard it as too much or too little. Being in earnest he must have reality instead of a sham. Gentiles, Pagans, Jews, Mussulmans embrace Catholicity; very rarely Protestantism, and perhaps never except from a worldly motive. The notion of the writer that the unbeliever would be attracted by Protestantism rather than by Catholicity is true only on the supposition that the unbeliever wishes to gain the credit of being a |