PROTESTANTISM IN A NUTSHELL.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1849.]

We have seen few works written with a more just appreciation of our age than the one before us, or so well adapted to the present state of the controversy which we are always obliged to carry on with the enemies of the church. Its author understands well the essential nature of Protestantism, and clearly and distinctly points out the proper method of meeting it under the various forms it at present assumes, and of imposing silence on its arrogant and noisy pretensions. He does not confine himself to the field of theological controversy, properly so called, but he meets Protestants on their own chosen ground, on the broad field of European civilization, and shows them that, under the point of view of civilization, of liberty, order, and social well-being, Protestantism has been a total failure, and that, even in reference to this world, Catholicity has found itself as superior to it as it claims to be in regard to the world to come. He does not merely vindicate Catholicity, in relation to civilization, from the charges preferred against it by the modern advocates of liberalism and progressism, but by a calm appeal to history and philosophy, he shows that the opposing system has interrupted the work of civilization which the church was prosecuting with vigor and success, and has operated solely in the interest of barbarism. In doing this, he has done a real service to the cause of truth, and we learn with pleasure that one of our friends in England has translated his work, and rendered it accessible to the great body of English and American readers.

Such a work as this was much needed in our language. We have, indeed, many able controversial works,-works admirable for the learning, ability, and skill of their authors; but we have comparatively few which are adapted to the present state of the controversy with Protestants. The greater part of those accessible to the mere English reader

*El Protestantismo comparado con el Catolicismo en sus relaciones con la civilizacion Europea. Por Don Jaime Balmes, Presbitero. Paris: 1849

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are well adapted only to the few individuals whose hearts the grace of God has already touched, and whose faces are already set towards the church. Truth is one and invariable, but error is variable and manifold. It is always the same truth that we must oppose to error, but it is seldom the same error for two successive moments to which we must oppose it. We must shoot error, as well as folly, "as it flies," and we must be able to shoot it under ever-varying and varied disguises. The works we have, excellent as they are in their way, and admirably fitted to guard the faithful against many of the devices of the enemy to detach them from the church, and to aid and instruct persons in heretical communions who are virtually prepared to return to the church, do not hit the reigning form of Protestantism; they do not reach the seat of the disease, and are apparently written on the supposition of soundness, where there is, in fact, only rottenness. The principles they assume as the basis of their refutation of Protestantism, though nominally professed or conceded by the majority of Protestants, are not held with sufficient firmness to be used as the foundation of an argument that is to have any practical efficacy in their conversion. They all appear to assume that Protestants as a body really mean to be Christians, and err only in regard to some of the dogmas of Christianity and the method of determining the faith; that Protestantism is a specific heresy, a distinct and positive form of error, like Arianism or Pelagianism; and that its adherents would regard themselves as bound to reject it, if proved to be repugnant to Christianity, or contrary to the Holy Scriptures. This is a natural and a charitable supposition; but we are sorry to say, that, if it was ever warrantable, it is not by any means warrantable in our times, except as to the small number of individuals in the several sects who are mere exceptions to the rule. Protestantism is no specific heresy, is no distinct or positive form of error, but error in general, indifferent to forms, and receptive of any form or of all forms, as suits the convenience or the exigency of its friends. It is a veritable Proteus, and takes any and every shape judged to be proper to deceive the eyes or to elude the blows of the champions of truth. It is Lutheran, Calvinistic, Arminian, Unitarian, Pantheistic, Atheistic, Pyrrhonistic, each by turns or all at once, as is necessary to its purpose. The Protestant as such has, in the ordinary sense, no principles to maintain, no character to support, no con

sistency to preserve; and we are aware of no authority, no law, no usage, by which he will consent to be bound. Convict him from tradition, and he appeals to the Bible; convict him from the Bible, and he appeals to reason; convict him from reason, and he appeals to private sentiment; convict him from private sentiment, and he appeals to scepticism, or flies back to reason, to Scripture, or tradition, and alternately from one to the other, never scrupling to affirm, one moment, what he denied the moment before, nor blushing to be found maintaining that of contradictories both may be true. He is indifferent as to what he asserts or denies, if able for the moment to obtain an apparent covert from his pursuers.

Protestants do not study for the truth, and are never to be presumed willing to accept it, unless it chances to be where and what they wish it. They occasionally read our books and listen to our arguments, but rarely to ascertain our doctrines, or to learn what we are able to say against them or for ourselves. The thought, that we may possibly be right, seldom occurs to them; and when it does, it is instantly suppressed as an evil thought, as a temptation from the devil. They take it for granted, that, against us, they are right, and cannot be wrong. This is with them a "fixed fact," admitting no question. They condescend to consult our writings, or to listen to our arguments, only to ascertain what doctrines they can profess, or what modifications they can introduce into those which they have professed, that will best enable them to elude our attacks, or give them the appearance of escaping conviction by the authorities from tradition, Scripture, reason, and sentiment which we array against them. Candor or ingenuousness towards themselves even is a thing wholly foreign to their Protestant nature, and they are instinctively and habitually cavillers and sophisticators. They disdain to argue a question on its merits, and always, if they argue at all, argue it on some unimportant collateral. They never recognize-unless it is for their interest to do so-any distinction between a transeat and a concedo, and rarely fail to insist that the concession of an irrelevant point is a concession of the main issue. They have no sense of responsibleness, no loyalty to truth, no mental chastity, no intellectual sincerity. What is for them is authority which no body must question; what is against them is no authority at all. Their own word if not in their favor, they refuse to accept; and the authority

to which they professedly appeal they repudiate the moment it is seen not to sustain them. To reason with them as if they would stand by their own professions, or could or would acknowledge any authority but their own ever-varying opinions, is entirely to mistake them, and to betray our own simplicity.

Undoubtedly, many of our friends, who have not, like ourselves, been brought up Protestants, and have not to blush at the knowledge their Protestant experience has given them, may feel that in this judgment we are rash and uncharitable. Would that we were so. We take no pleasure in thinking ill of any portion of our fellow-men, and would always rather find ourselves wrong in our unfavorable judgments of them than right. But in this matter the evidence is too clear and conclusive to allow us even to hope that we are wrong. There is not a single Protestant doctrine opposed to Catholicity that even Protestants themselves have not over and over again completely refuted; there is not a single charge brought by Protestants against the church that some of them, as well as we, have not fully exploded; and no more conclusive vindication of the claims of Catholicity can be desired than may be-nay, than in fact has been-collected from distinguished Protestant writers themselves. This is a fact which no Protestant, certainly no Catholic, can deny. How happens it, then, that the Protestant world still subsists, and that, for the last hundred and fifty years, we have made comparatively little progress in regaining Protestants to the church? We may, it is true, be referred to the obstinacy in error characteristic of all heretics; but, in the present case,-unless what is meant is obstinacy in error in general, and not error in particular, this will not suffice as an answer; because, during this period, there has been no one particular form of error to which Protestants have uniformly adhered. No class of Protestants adheres to-day to the opinions it originally avowed. In this respect, there is a marked difference between the Protestant sects of modern times and the early Oriental sects. The Jacobite holds to-day the same specific heresy which he held a thousand years ago; and the Nestorian of the nineteenth is substantially the Nestorian of the fourth century. But nothing analogous is true of any of the modern Protestant sects. Protestants boast, indeed, their glorious reformation, but they no longer hold the views of its authors. Luther, were he to ascend

to the scenes of his earthly labors, would be utterly unable to recognize his teachings in the doctrines of the modern Lutherans; the Calvinist remains a Calvinist only in name; the Baptist disclaims his Anabaptist original; the Unitarian points out the errors he detects in his Socinian ancestors; and the Transcendentalist looks down with pity on his Unitarian parents, while he considers it a cruel persecution to be excluded from the Unitarian family. No sect retains, unmodified, unchanged, the precise form of error with which it set out. All the forms Protestants have from time to time assumed have been developed, modified, altered, almost as soon as assumed,-always as internal or external controversy made it necessary or expedient. Here is a fact nobody can deny, and it proves conclusively that the Protestant world does not subsist solely by virtue of its obstinate attachment to the views or opinions to which. it has once committed itself, or in consequence of its aversion to change the doctrines it has once professed. This fact proves even more than this. Bossuet very justly concludes from the variations of Protestantism its objective falsity, because the characteristic of truth is invariability; but we may go further, and from the same variations conclude the subjective falsity of Protestantism, or that Protestants have no real belief in, or attachment to, the particular doctrines they profess, not only that Protestants profess a false doctrine, but that they are insincere, and destitute, as a body, of real honesty in their professions. If they believed their doctrines, they could never tolerate the changes they undergo. New sects might, indeed, arise among them, but no sect would suffer its original doctrines to be in the least altered or modified. The members of every sect, if they believed its creed, would, so long as they adhered to it, be struck with horror at the bare idea of altering or modifying it; for it would seem to them to be altering or modifying the revealed word of God. This is a point of no slight importance in judging the Protestant world, and seems to us to deserve more attention than the great body of Catholics even are disposed to give it. These variations prove, at least, that Protestantism is something distinct from the formal teachings of Protestants, and something that can and does survive them.

That we are neither rash nor uncharitable in our judgment of Protestants, severe as it unquestionably is, may be collected from facts of daily occurrence. The great body of