position necessary must rest the responsibility. In this world, it often happens that right cannot be peacefully asserted and maintained, and tyranny proves a curse, not only while it is unresisted, but even when resisted, and successfully resisted. We cannot permit a band of depredators to go unresisted, because we must disturb them by resisting them. Injustice, iniquity, can never be redressed, the tyrant can never be deposed and the legitimate sovereign restored, without a combat, and often a long and bloody one. Even our Lord himself told us to think not that he had come to send peace on the earth, but a sword rather. But shall we, therefore, make no efforts to right the wronged, to save justice and humanity from utter shipwreck ? Let no man who glories in the revolutionary principle, who boasts of being a lover of freedom and the progress of mankind, pretend it. We are no revolutionists; we hold ourselves bound in conscience to obey the legal authority; but we acknowledge no obligation to obey the oppressor, and let the competent authority but declare him an oppressor and summon us to the battlefield, and we are ready to obey, to bind on our armor, rush in where blows fall thickest and fall heaviest, let the disturbance be what it may. We are, thank God, Roman Catholics, and therefore love freedom and justice, and dare not, when called upon, to shrink from defending them against any and every enemy, at any and every sacrifice.

The Professor contends that the Church is hostile to civil government; we would respectfully ask him if he has reflected, that, without her, civil government becomes impracticable. How, without her as umpire between government and government, and between prince and subject, and without her as a spiritual authority to command the obedience of the subject and the justice of the prince, will he be able to secure the independence of nations, and wise and just government? Will he learn from experience? Let him, then, read modern history. The age in politics discards the Church. Protestantism for three hundred years has been the religion of nearly a third, and, in politics, of the whole of Europe. Three hundred years is a fair time for an

experiment. Well, what is the result? DESPOTISM on the ore hand, and ANARCHY on the other. There is not, at this moment, a single well-organized civil government on the whole Eastern continent, and only our own on the Western. The government of Great Britain may seem to be an exception for the Old World, but it is a perfect oligarchy; it fails to secure the common weal; enriches the few and impoverishes the many; and its very existence is threatened by a mob which the everincreasing poverty of the industrial classes hourly augments, and grim want is rendering desperate. Our own government is sustained solely by the accidental advantages of the country, consisting chiefly in our vast quantities of unoccupied fertile lands, which absorb our rapidly increasing population, and form a sort of safety-valve for its superfluous energy. Strip us of these lands, or let them be filled up so that our expanding population should find its limit, and be compelled to recoil upon itself, our institutions would not stand a week.

Here in the present state of the world, hardly to be paralleled in universal history, when old governments are either all fallen or tottering ready to fall; when all authority is cast off, and law is despised; when the streets of the most civilized cities run with the blood of citizens shed by citizens, and the lurid light of burning cottage and castle gleams on the midnight sky; when saintly prelates bearing the olive-branch of peace are shot down by infuriated ruffians; when murder and rapine hardly seek eoncealment, and all civilization seems to be thrown back into the savagism of the forest,-here we may read the wisdom of those who discard the Church, and denounce her as hostile to civil government, the wisdom of the doctrine which a scoffing and unbelieving age opposes to the truth which Almighty God has revealed, and to the lessons of universal experience. Alas! how true it is, that God permits strong delusions to blind the impious and the licentious, that they may bring swift destruction upon themselves!

But it is time to bring our remarks to a close. We have examined the principal arguments which Mr. Thornwell ha

brought forward to prove the fallibility of the Church, and we leave our readers to judge for themselves whe her we have not proved, that, in every instance, they are either unsound in principle or irrelevant, proving nothing but the Professor's own malice or ignorance. The Professor has made numerous assumptions, numerous bold assertions, but in no instance has he done better than simply to assume the point he was to prove. He has declaimed loudly against the Church, he has said many hard things against her, but he has harmed only himself and his brethren. We now take our leave of him. We have done all we proposed. We have vindicated the Catholic argument for the disputed books drawn from the infallibility of the Church, which is enough, without the testimonies of the Fathers, although we have even these. We regret that the task of answering the Professor had not been assumed by Dr. Lynch himself, who would have accomplished it so much better than we have done. Yet it was hardly fitting that he should have assumed it. He could not, with a proper respect for himself and his profession, have replied to such a vituperative performance as Mr. Thornwell's book. We were brought up a Presbyterian, and have been accustomed from our youth to the sort of stuff we have had to deal with, and therefore have been able to reply without feeling the degradation we should have felt, had we all our lifetime been accustomed to the courtesy and candor of Catholic controversialists.

PROTESTANTISM ENDS IN TRANSCENDENTALISM.*

JULY, 1846.

We have no intention of reviewing at length the book the title of which we have just quoted. Indeed, we have read it only by proxy. We have heard i spoken of in certain literary Margaret, a Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom, includ ing Sketches of a Piace not before described, called Mons Christi Boston: Jordan & Wiley. 1846. 12mo. pp. 460.

*

circles as a remarkable production, almost as one of the won ders of the age. The Protestant lady who read it for us tells us that it is a weak and silly book, unnatural in its scenes and characters, coarse and vulgar in its language and details, wild and visionary in its speculations; and, judging from the portions here and there which we actually have read, and from the source whence it emanates, we can hardly run any risk in indorsing our Protestant friend's criticism. The author is a man not deficient in natural gifts; he has respectable attainments; and makes, we believe, a tolerably successful minister of the latest form of Protestantism with which we chance to be acquainted; though, since we have not been introduced to any new form for several months, it must not be inferred from the fact that we are acquainted with no later form, that none later exists.

So far as we have ascertained the character of this book, it is intended to be the vehicle of certain crude speculations on religion, theology; philosophy, morals, society, education, and matters and things in general. The Mons Christi stands for the human heart, and Christ himself is our higher or instinctive nature, and if we but listen to our own natures, we shall at once learn, love, and obey all that our Blessed Redeemer teaches. Hence, Margaret, a poor, neglected child, who has received no instruction, who knows not even the name of her Maker, nor that of her Saviour, who, in fact, has grown up in the most bru tish ignorance, is represented as possessing in herself all the elements of the most perfect Christian character, and as knowing by heart all the essential principles of Christian faith and morals. The author seems also to have written his work, in part at least, for the purpose of instructing our instructors as to the true method of education. He appears to adopt a very simple and a very pleasant theory on the subject,-one which cannot fail to commend itself to our young folks. Love is the great teacher; and the true method of education is for the pupil to fall in love with the tutor, or the tutor with the pupil, and it is perfected when the falling in love is mutual. Whence it follows, that it is a great mistake to suppose it desirable or even proper that tutor and

This would be to reverse

pupil should both be of the same sex. the natural order, since the sexes were evidently intended for each other. This method, we suppose, should be called " LEARN ING MADE EASY, OR NATURE DISPLAYED," since it would enable us to dispense with school-rooms, prefects, text-books, study, and the birch, and to fall back on our natural instincts. These two points of doctrine indicate the genus, if not the species, of the book, and show that it must be classed under the general head of Transcendentalism. If we could allow ourselves to go deeper into the work and to dwell longer on its licentiousness and blasphemy, we probably might determine its species as well as its genus. But this must suffice; and when we add that the author seems to comprise in himself several species at once, besides the whole genus humbuggery, we may dismiss the book, with sincere pity for him who wrote it, and a real prayer for his speedy restoration to the simple genus humanity, and for his conversion, through grace, to that Christianity which was given to man from above, and not, spider-like, spun out of his own bowels.

SO.

Yet, bad and disgusting, false and blasphemous, as this book. really is, bating a few of its details, it is a book which no Protestant, as a Protestant, has a right to censure. Many Protestants affect great contempt of Transcendentalism, and horror at its extravagance and blasphemy; but they have no right to do Transcendentalism is a much inore serious affair than they would have us believe. It is not a simple "Yankee notion," confined to a few isolated individuals in a little corner of New England, as some of our Southern friends imagine, but is in fact the dominant error of our times, is as rife in one section of our common country as in another; and, in principle, at least, is to be met with in every popular Anti-Catholic writer of the day, whether German, French, English, or American. It is, and has been from the first, the fundamental heresy of the whole Protestant world; for, at bottom, it is nothing but the fundamental principle of the Protestant Reformation itself, and without assuming it, there is no conceivable principle on which it is possible to justify the Reformers in their separation from the Catholic