No doubt, the Scottish School has protested vehemently against the skepticism of Hume, but its refutation of that skepticism is a mere paralogism, a simple begging of the question, and therefore, scientifically considered, worthless.

But, after all, we cannot place our chief reliance on philosophy as an instrument in the conversion of Protestants. Philosophy is too indirect and too slow in its operations to meet their wants. They are too far gone, too restless, too impatient, too averse to calm reflection and continuous thought, to listen to us while we set the true philosophy before them, or to submit to the labor absolutely requisite to comprehend and appreciate profound philosophical science. An age of balloons, steamcars, and lightning telegraphs is not exactly the age for philosophers. Moreover, Protestant perversity would find in the necessity of the long and patient thought, and close and subtile reasoning, demanded by philosophy, an objection to our religion itself. Your religion, they would say, if true, is intended for all mankind, and therefore should be within the reach of every capacity. The thought and reasoning necessary to create or understand the philosophy you insist upon, transcend the capacity of all but the gifted few, and therefore, if necessary to establish your religion, prove that your religion is not true. We might, indeed, reply, that the thought and reasoning objected to are necessary to refute the errors of Protestants, not simply to establish our religion; but that would amount to nothing in practice. The nature of the Protestant is to devise the most subtile errors in his power, and to find an objection to our religion in the very labor he makes necessary for their refutation. When he objects, he may be as subtile and as abstruse as he pleases; but when we reply, he insists that we shall be popular, and never go beyond the depth of the most ordinary capacity,— that we shall answer the objection not only to the mind that raises it, but to the minds of all men. Only the candid among Protestants would acknowledge the justness of our reply, and these would fail to comprehend it; for if you find a candid Protestant, you may safely conclude that he lacks intelligence,

as when you find an intelligent Protestant you may be sure that he lacks candor. There must, then, be some briefer and more expeditious way of dealing with Protestants than that of philosophy, if we wish to affect them favorably.

We have defined Protestantism to be hostility to the Church, and virtually nihilism, because Protestants in general, sooner than return to the Church will push their hostility to its last consequence, which is the denial of God, therefore of all existence and existences. But this is not all that we have to say of the matter. No man loves error for its own sake, or wills what does not appear to him to be good. The natural heart of every man recoils instinctively from atheism; and it is seldom, if ever, that one without a fearful and even a protracted struggle abandons all faith and piety, resigns all hope of an hereafter, and consents to place himself in the category of the beasts that perish. Hatred, no doubt, will carry a man to great lengths; but even hatred must have its cause, real or imaginary. Hatred is love reversed, and intense hatred of one thing is the reverse action of intense love of something else. Protestants hate the Church. Wherefore? Because they love truth? Nonsense. Because they believe her false, and destructive to the souls of men? Nonsense again. We hope there is no Catholic so stupid as to believe it. Their hatred of the Church has nothing to do with concern for truth or for salvation. A large portion of them believe in no truth, in no salvation; a larger portion still are of opinion that all men will be saved, and that truth is whatever seems to a man to be true; and the remainder hold that the Church is substantially orthodox, and that salvation is attainable in her communion, as well as in their own. Whatever, then, the cause of their hatred of the Church, it is a cause unconnected with considerations of another world, or with truth as such.

We need not look far for this something which Protestants love and the Church condemns, and for condemning which they are full of wrath against her. It is nothing very recondite, or very difficult to seize. We make quite too much of Protestant

ism, which is, in reality, a very vulgar thing, and lies altogether on the surface of life. Protestantism is nothing more or less than that spirit of lawlessness which leads every one to wish to have his own way,-very common in women and children, and perhaps not less common in men, only they have, generally, a better faculty of concealing it. Objectively defined, it is expressed in the common saying, "Forbidden fruit is sweetest;" ." and subjectively, it is a craving for what is prohibited, because prohibited. It imagines that the sovereign good is in what the law forbids, and opposes the Church because she upholds the law, -hates the law because the law restrains it, duty because duty obliges it; and since, as long as it admits the existence of God, it must admit duty, it denies God; and since, as long as it admits the existence of anything, it must admit the existence of God, it denies everything, and lapses into nihilism. Here is the whole mystery of the matter,-Protestantism in a nutshell.

The source of this impatience of restraint, and this desire to have one's own way, is the pride natural to the human heart, the root of every vice and of every sin. "Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil," said the serpent to Eve; and she reached forth her hand, plucked the forbidden fruit, ate, and sin and death were in the world. Pride is, on the one hand, a denial of our dependence, and, on the other, the assertion of our own sufficiency. Here you may see the origin and the essential characteristic of Protestantism, which is as old as the first motion of pride or of resistance to the will of God. Protestantism, after all, is more ancient than we commonly concede. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, would

have been as correct if he had said the Devil was the first Protestant, as he was in saying that he was the first Whig." It offends pride to be compelled to acknowledge our own insufficiency, to admit that we cannot be trusted to follow our own inclinations, that we must be subjected to metes and bounds, and placed under tutors and masters, who say, Do this, Do that; and we are galled, and we resolve we will not endure it; we will break the withes that bind us; we will stand up on our own

two feet, and assert our freedom in face of heaven, earth and hell. Hence we see Protestants, in every age, mounting the tallest pair of stilts they can find or construct, and with more or less vehemence, with more or less eclat, according to the circumstances of time and place, magniloquently asserting the "inborn" rights of man, proudly swearing to be free, to stand up in their native dignity, in the full and resplendent majesty of their own manhood, and making such appeals and forming such alliances as they fancy will best secure their independence, relieve them from all restraints, and give them the opportunity to live as they list.

Such is the general and essential characteristic of Protestantism; its particular character or form is determined by, and varies with, the circumstances of time and place. In itself, as Balmes well shows, it is a phenomenon peculiar to no period of history, but whatever it has that is peculiar it borrows from the character of the epoch in which it appears. It is always essentially the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, but the form under which the disobedience manifests itself depends on exterior and accidental causes. What it resists is what it finds offensive to human pride, to pure, unmitigated egotism, and what it asserts is always asserted as the means of securing free scope to its independent action. In the sixteenth century, pride found itself galled by submission to the Church, for the Church could not tolerate its wild speculations and its theological errors. It then denied the authority of the Church; and in order to make a show of justifying its denial, it asserted the supremacy of the Scriptures, interpreted by private reason, or by the private Spirit. Soon it found that the assertion of the supremacy of the Scriptures, so interpreted, limited its sovereignty, and that it was as galling to its sense of independence to submit to a dead book as to a living Church, and then it denied the Scriptures, and, to justify its denial, asserted the supremacy of reason. But reason, again, galled it, reminded it of its dependence, and would not suffer it to live as it listed. Then it cried out, Down with reason, and up with sentiment!a Transcendental element paramount to reason,- and thus

reached the jumping-off place. In order to resist effectually the Pope, it at one time, as in England, proclaims the divine right of kings; and then, in order to get rid of the divine right of kings, it proclaims the divine right of the people, or, to speak more accurately, of the mob; and finally, in order to get rid of the authority of the mob, it proclaims the divine right of each and every individual, and declares that each and every individual is God, the only God,-thus resolving God into men, and all men into one man, which implies the right of every man to take the entire universe to himself, and possess it as his own property. You laugh at its absurdity? Upon our conscience, we invent nothing, we exaggerate nothing, and say nothing more than is asserted, in sober earnest, by men whom the Protestant world delights to honor.

Turn Protestantism over as you will, analyze it to your heart's content, you can make nothing more or less of it than mere vulgar pride, and the various efforts pride makes from time to tine and place to place to secure its own gratification, to realize the assertion of the serpent, "Ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil," that is, ye shall know good and evil of yourselves. as God knows them of himself, and shall be independent, and act as seemeth to you good, even as God is independent and doth according to his will, not as subject to a power above himself, and in obedience to another will than his own. Just see the proof of this, in the sympathy now universally given to every revolt against established authority. All your modern literature is Satanic, and approves, and teaches us to approve, every rebel, whether against parental, popular, royal, or Divine authority. The Protestant readers of Paradise Lost sympathize with Lucifer, in his war against the Almighty, and if they had been in heaven, as one of our friends suggests, would have sided with him. Our friend, J. D. Nourse,* defending himself against our strictures on his book, boldly asserts that God is a despot, and his government a despotism,-nay, that all authority is despotic.

* See below. Authority and Liberty.