diligent discharge of their numerous and painful duties, we deny it. The Professor, here as well as elsewhere, is liable to be deceived by concluding from Protestants to Catholics. We have no priests who introduce new doctrines, or gain notoriety by leaving old, well-beaten paths, attracting attention by their eccentricities. We have no Schleiermachers, De Wettes, or Strausses, and do not wish them. The Protestant minister lives in public, acts in public, and his qualities are displayed before the public, and noted. The Catholic priest does not act so much in public. His great duty is not to write books, nor his principal sphere the pulpit. His labors are chiefly by the side of the sick and the dying, in the hut of poverty, in succouring those who have no friend but God and the priest, and, above all, in the Confessional. No Protestant is qualified to judge of the ability, worth, or efficiency of a Catholic clergy. The Austrian clergy are not inferior to the Prussian, but they suffer, nevertheless, much in consequence of the reformations introduced by the half infidel, half Protestant Emperor Joseph the Second. To represent the present body of the French clergy, whether of the first or of the second order, as inferior to the English betrays an ignorance or a recklessness that we were not prepared for even in our Andover Professor. The present clergy of France, of both orders, are a pious, able, learned, and faithful body of men, and their superiors, if their equals, are nowhere to be found. We love and honor the present French bishops and clergy. They are Catholic, and nobly, zealously, and, with God's blessing, successfully, are they laboring for the regeneration of their beautiful France. To think of comparing these with the indolent English clergy, with their fat livings and famished flocks, is an outrage upon common propriety. The Professor must have been joking, or else he counted largely upon the ignorance and credulity of his countrymen.

The reason assigned by the Professor for the superiority of the Protestant is ingenious; but, unhappily, he undertook, like a certain philosopher, to account for the phenomenon, before taking the pains to verify the fact. His sneer, that "Romanism is so contrived as to save men the trouble of thinking for themselves," does not greatly disturb us. We would prefer to have our thinking done vicariously, as the Professor suggests, than to think to no better purpose than we have found our Protestant thinkers doing. We would rather look upward and outward for light, than into the depths of our own dark

ness; and we prefer to rely on the teachings of God's word, than on our own excogitations. If the Professor thinks differently, perhaps it is not our fault, nor his merit.

VI. We come now to the portion of this Lecture which is specially devoted to the discussion of the moral influence of Catholicity, and, notwithstanding the interest of the subject, we are compelled to treat it with the greatest possible brevity; for we have but a few more pages at our command. But we have already refuted, in principle, so far as they depend on any principle, the main charges which are urged. We must restrict ourselves to some brief observations on a few only of the Professor's assumptions, misrepresentations, and false assertions.

The charge now before us is, that the Catholic Church injures the heart of man by holding doctrines which have “a peculiar tendency to be perverted."— pp. 465-467. It is not pretended that the doctrines are untrue or unimportant, but they are objected to simply on the ground of the ease with which they may be perverted. But is the injury done by the doctrines themselves, or by their perversion? If by their perversion, who is in fault, the Church who teaches the truth, or they who pervert it? The blessed Apostle says, "We are unto God the good odor of Christ in them who are saved, and in them who perish. To some, indeed, the odor of death unto death, but in others the odor of life unto life."-2 Cor. ii. 15, 16. Were the Apostles guilty of injuring the heart of man, because they preached a doctrine which became to some, through their perversion of it, the odor of death unto death? And, in order to avoid such a result, was it their duty to withhold their doctrine, to modify it, or conceal some portions of it? The holy Apostle Paul did not think so; for he adds, in the following verse," We are not as many, adulterating the word of God; but with sincerity, but as from God we speak in Christ." St. Peter (2 St. Pet. iii. 16) tells us, that St. Paul, in his epistles, has said some things hard to be understood, which the unstable and the unlearned wrest to their own destruction. Will the Professor, therefore, charge St. Paul with injuring the heart of man? The wicked pervert, undoubtedly, the truth of the Gospel, the best gifts of God, for they pervert every thing; but the Church cannot confine herself to the merely expedient. The true question for the Christian is never merely, What is expedient? but, What is the

truth? and the truth he must speak, whether men hear or whether they forbear. To object to the Church because she proclaims doctrines which may be perverted, and which may, therefore, be thought to be inexpedient, is objecting to her for adopting too high a moral standard, and not conceding enough to human weakness and perversity.

Moreover, the Professor reasons on a false hypothesis. He assumes that the Church, like Protestant sects, has full control over her doctrines, and may herself determine arbitrarily what she shall hold and teach, and what not. But this is not the fact. She does not make her own creed; she receives it, and can hold and teach only what she has received and been commanded to hold and teach. It is her duty to teach the whole word of God, and she must do so. While she is faithful to her trust, the responsibility of effects belongs to Him by whose authority she acts, and the guilt of the perversion of what she teaches belongs to those who pervert it. She cannot withhold the truth, because men may abuse it; nor deny her children the food they need, because perverse minds and hearts may despise it, or derive strength from it for their wickedness. Should she do so, there would be no end to the cry of Protestants against her for her timidity, temporizing, and unfaithfulness.

The Professor falls again into the predicament of the philosopher to whom we have just referred him, of assigning ingenious reasons for facts not verified, and which do not exist. His statement of the errors into which Catholics are liable to fall is rather amusing; though after all lamentable, for the degree of ignorance of Catholic doctrine it betrays. "When a man," he says, "is bowed down under a thought of his sinfulness, and is therefore simply commanded to eat no meat for a month, he will not understand the nature of faith, and will misunderstand the nature of Christian works.”—p. 466. We remember to have read somewhere of a young girl standing by a beautiful spring of water, bitterly crying and wringing her hands. Her mother came, and asked her why she cried. "I was thinking," said the poor girl, "if I should grow up and get married, and have a child, and the child should come to be able to run alone, and should be playing by this spring, and should fall in, and should be drowned, how very bad I should feel." Whereupon the mother burst out also a crying, and the father came, and heard the story, and he broke out a crying, and the grandmother came, and the grandfather, and

the whole family came, and heard the story, and they all set to a crying, and it was truly a crying family. Now, there is this difference between the Professor and the poor girl, — her apprehensions were of an evil which might possibly happen, but the Professor's are of what cannot happen. The case he imagines is not even supposable. Such a command could never be given, and no Catholic could ever be simpleton enough to believe that simply refraining from eating meat can atone for sin. Mortification of the body, as a cure for its disorders, is enjoined by the Scriptures; and he who does not, in some way, mortify the flesh, will make little progress in Christian perfection. But for works of mortification to be worth any thing, they must be preceded by faith and repentance, be done in a state of grace, in a spirit of contrition and humility, and accompanied by charity. A few visits to the Confessional would teach the Professor many things of which he appears to be now ignorant, and correct many of his false notions, as well as relieve him of certain imaginary fears which now affect his repose. It would do him no harm even to consult the instructions for penitents, which he may find in any of our ordinary manuals of piety.

The Professor admits that "there is some truth in the Catholic doctrine of Indulgences," but blames the Church for holding it, because "there is reason to fear that men who have made satisfaction for the temporal penalties of the law will consider themselves as having satisfied its eternal demands."-p. 466. The Professor little imagines the ignorance of Catholic doctrine this statement betrays to a Catholic. Every Catholic knows that the eternal demands of the law are satisfied only by the death and sufferings of our Lord upon the cross, and that he must be in a state of grace, have repented of his sins, and received pardon of them from Almighty God, before his works of satisfaction can be acceptable, or he receive an indulgence.

"If their sins are cancelled for this life, they will presume on the life to come." - Ib. Nonsense! for there is no cancelling of sins, either for this life or for that which is to come, but through the infinite satisfaction made by our blessed Redeemer; and no way of escaping the penalty temporal or eternal, but by faith, which is always presupposed, sincere repentance, and the free pardon of Almighty God. It is only he who believes, repents, humbles himself before God, and performs acts of contrition and charity, to whom indulgences

or works of satisfaction are available. Every Catholic knows this, and therefore the last blunder he could possibly commit would be the one the Professor so gratuitously imagines. The Professor is quite mistaken in his assertion of a difference between Catholicity "as cautiously and guardedly stated in the standards, and Catholicity as commonly taught and believed." He is equally at fault in his assertions as to what is Catholicity, as commonly taught and believed. He should be ashamed of his misrepresentations. No Catholic teaches, no Catholic believes, that the Blessed Virgin has divine attributes. In her own nature, by virtue of her own essential attributes, she is simply a human being, neither more nor less; and whatever the exalted rank above all creatures she is believed to hold, she holds it not in her own right, but by the appointment and free gift of God. Does it require rare sagacity, extraordinary powers, such as the Professor seldom finds among his own people, to distinguish between a being holding, by its own nature, an exalted rank, and one holding an exalted rank solely by virtue of the supernatural gifts and graces of Almighty God? If so, intellectual culture must be sadly neglected among Prot

estants.

That "indulgences are a legitimate article of traffic," or in any sense an article of traffic at all, is not taught, never was taught, is not believed, never was believed, and never can be believed, by any Catholic. No money can purchase an indulgence; for an indulgence can be obtained only by faith, repentance, confession, absolution, prayers, and alms-deeds. Why did not the Professor go a step further, and tell us indulgences are permits to commit sin? This is the general belief of Protestants, who know so little of what they speak as not to know that an indulgence cannot be granted till after the sin has been repented of, confessed, and its eternal guilt pardoned by Almighty God!

VII. "Romanism becomes injurious to the feelings by the mystical working of its machinery."- pp. 467-475. We have already answered this charge, in our remarks on the intellectual influence of Catholic worship. The mystical working here alluded to is the Professor's way of stating the fact, that Catholicity teaches that the sacraments are efficacious through the power of God who instituted them, and the Holy Ghost, who operates in and through them. His first objection, under this head, is, that the Church is held to be necessa