Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

not for one who builds the tombs and garnishes the sepulchres of the canting, hypocritical, sour-visaged, greedy, arrogant, and cruel old Puritans, to accuse others of paying "tithes of anise, cummin, and mint, and of passing over justice and judgment, and the weightier matters of the law." The Professor should know that there are some who have even Puritan blood running in their veins who do not remember to forget what the Puritans were. We know their history, and would be silent; but we may yet be driven to write it. These men of yesterday, these theologians not yet in shorts, who want ancestors, and whom their own children disown, may yet be summoned to answer for their presumption and pride, their cant and hypocrisy, their falsehoods and calumnies, before the bar of a public that will not consent to be for ever duped. They have a terrible account to settle, and it will be no disadvantage to them to settle it now, before the books are opened for the last time.

"No faith to be kept with heretics.' Where did the Professor learn that this is a maxim of Catholicity? It is false. Catholicity knows no such maxim, and Catholic history authorizes no inference that she practically adopts or in the least conceivable manner countenances it. Individuals of bad faith may be found, no doubt, even among Catholics; but that Catholicity or Catholic doctors anywhere countenance any thing of the sort is a malignant falsehood. We are taught and required to keep our faith with all men, and faith plighted to a heretic can no more be broken without sin than faith plighted to a true believer. We would that Protestants would observe a tithe of the good faith towards Catholics that Catholics do towards Protestants; and when they shall do so, we give them free leave to abuse our morals to their full satisfaction.

"The end sanctifies the means." So the Apostles were slanderously reported to teach, "Let us do evil that good may come." "If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more they of his household!" No such doctrine is known among Catholics; we are not permitted to do evil that good may come. Both the means and the ends must be holy. But on what principle do Protestants themselves act, when they lie about and calumniate Catholics? On what principle would Professor Park attempt to justify the misrepresentations, distortions of the truth, and downright falsehoods of his own Lecture, if not on the principle, that "the end sanctifies the means"? On what principle can your Brownlows, Spar

rys, Breckenridges, Bemans, Kirks, Beechers, Dowlings, your famous anti-Catholic lecturers, pamphleteers, editors, and colporteurs, pretend to justify their flagitious falsehoods and calumnies, but on the principle that Catholicity is so great an evil, that any means are lawful which will tend to destroy it,—that is, "the end sanctifies the means"? When have Catholics lied about or calumniated Protestants? When or where have they even exaggerated their errors, vices, or crimes? When or where have they combined by systematic misrepresentation and slander to overthrow Protestantism or to build up their own Church? Facts, names, dates, Gentlemen, if you please, which we hold ourselves ready to give in return, if those already given do not satisfy you, or if you presume to contradict us. No, no, dear Protestant friends, remember that he that is without sin is the one who has permission to cast the first stone. Your own morals are quite too questionable to allow you to rail at Catholics. Be so good as to practise a morality half as pure as we teach, before you think of reading us moral lectures.

The

IX. The ninth charge, touching the austerity of Catholicity and its influence on the emotions, we must pass over. author converses on these matters as a Rationalist who forgets the grace of God may count for something might be expected to converse on a subject of which he knows nothing, and which, in his present state of mind, he is as ill able to appreciate as a blind man is colors, or a deaf man harmony. The Professor evidently has made no study of ascetic theology, or ever devoted much time to prayer, meditation, and mortification; and this may account, in no small degree, for his hostility to Gatholicity.

He might as well charge our blessed Lord with exerting a bad moral influence on the emotions and passions, in choosing his Apostles from fishermen, publicans, and tent-makers, as to charge the Church with a bad moral influence, because no small portion of her clergy are taken from the humbler classes of society. He thinks priests taken from the humbler classes, elevated suddenly to a higher condition of life, and invested with great power, must inevitably become proud, vain, servile towards those above them, and haughty and overbearing towards those below them. If they were to be Protestant ministers, this might perhaps be the case; for Protestants have not the grace of God to keep them humble. But we do not observe that the Apostles became proud in consequence of their eleva

tion and authority, nor as a fact is it often so with our Catholic clergy. The effects feared are guarded against by the religious training they receive, the influence of their religion on their consciences, and the grace of God imparted to aid them. not only as Christians, but as Christian teachers and pastors. May we request the Professor to remember that the grace of God is not regarded by Catholics as a fiction, and that Catholicity teaches us in all things to seek the glory of God, and to ascribe in all the glory to God?

X. The tenth charge, that Catholicity engenders an exclusive and persecuting spirit, we throw back on the Professor. The Catholic Church is exclusive in the sense that truth is exclusive, but in no other. She never persecutes, never has persecuted, never authorizes or approves persecution. Legitimate authority may punish, but it cannot persecute. But the Church herself inflicts only ecclesiastical punishments; and she has never authorized, or even tacitly approved, any civil punishment of heretics, when the heretic did not add to the sin of heresy, which St. Paul classes with murder and other deadly sins, the further sin of offences against the state, or of attacks on the very foundations of moral and social order, as in the case of the Albigenses, Wickliffites, Hussites, &c. The Catholic Church here, as well as elsewhere, is impervious to the shafts of her enemies.

But if you want to find persecution, genuine, unmitigated persecution, you must go out of the Catholic Church, among the Reformers and their numerous bands of hostile sectaries; and especially among the Calvinists at Geneva, under Calvin's own reign of terror, where it was virtually a capital offence "to speak evil of M. Calvin," and where Calvin kept his grand inquissitor, Colladen, who applied the torture to the very point of death to whomsoever Calvin was pleased to designate; and where Calvin himself, in the coolest and most malignant manner conceivable, procured the judicial murder of the poor poet, Gruet, Michael Servetus, and others. Whoever would become familiar with bona fide persecutions must read the history of the Reformers and their children.

XI. That Catholicity accepts the sneer of Hume, that "Religion rests on faith, not on reason," we admit, if regard be had to the intrinsic reasonableness of the mysteries; yet we deny that faith is unreasonable, for nothing is more rea

The rule the Pro

sonable than to believe God on his word. fessor would introduce would be fatal to supernatural revelation. He contends for the principle, that we must judge the speaker by the word, and not the word by the speaker. This is a sound principle within the sphere of natural reason, in matters of which we have in ourselves a full knowledge, and therefore all the conditions of forming a correct judgment. But whoso adopts it in the sphere of religion is already an infidel or on the declivity to infidelity; for it cannot be adopted in the sphere of religion without first denying that in religion there is any thing to be believed which transcends natural reason; therefore it cannot be adopted without denying supernatural revelation; and to deny supernatural revelation is what is meant by infidelity.

We do not like to call a man an infidel, or to be continually telling him that his objections involve a denial of Christianity. We know how easy it is to say such things, and how very suspicious such charges usually are; but we confess, that, so far as we are competent to judge of the matter, the Professor has not urged a single objection against us, not false in fact, which, if analyzed, reduced to its ultimate principle, does not imply a total denial of all revelation of the supernatural order. We have found in no professedly religious writer in this country, unless it be in Mr. Parker, so complete a rejection, in principle, at least, of all supernatural revelation. The whole Lecture is written from the Humanitarian point of view, and proves that the author is far, very far, gone in German Rationalism; and unless the Puritans of New England are much changed from what they were when we knew them better than we now do, he will yet be called to an account for his doctrines.

In this Lecture, his tendencies are not fully developed, and they show themselves to the Puritan reader only in their opposition to Catholicity, and therefore are not likely to be at once suspected of their real character. He will be allowed, without rebuke, to pursue a line of argument towards us, which, if he should adopt it in regard to his own creed, would not be tolerated for a moment. But whoso sows error sows dragon's teeth, and they will one day spring up armed men. They who countenance arguments false in principle, when directed against their opponents, will one day find them rebound, and with as much force as they were urged. We do not like Puritanism; we regard it as a deadly enemy to truth and religion; but we should be sorry to see it overthrown by the introduction

Bad as

of another error still greater, still more destructive. it is, it is not so bad as German Rationalism, or even German Supernaturalism, as represented by Schleiermacher, Neander, and De Wette, which is only Rationalism sentimentalized.

We make these remarks with no ill-will towards Professor Park. We see his tendency, for it is a tendency we followed long before he was affected by it; we have followed it to its termination, and we know where it conducts. Would to God, that on this point the Professor would place some little confidence in our words. We were bred in the same school he was, and we embraced the faith in which he was educated, and made what we thought was our first communion in a Calvinistic church. We sought, like him, to rationalize our faith, with less learning, less knowledge, and less advantages to begin with, we own; for we were a poor boy cast upon the world alone, to struggle our way as best we could. We wished to have a faith the intrinsic reasonableness of which we could demonstrate. Of the twenty years which followed we need not speak. They are not such as we are proud of, nor such as we can recur to, except for a lesson of humility; yet this have we learned, had burnt and scarred into our very soul, — that there is no medium between a simple, meek, unquestioning faith in the sacred mysteries, as perfectly incomprehensible mysteries, on the sole authority of God revealing them, and absolute, downright infidelity; and that the first step taken for the purpose of rationalizing the Christian faith is a step downwards to the bottomless hell of unbelief.

The

The Professor charges us with being unwilling to accept, or unable to delight in, goodness not in our own Church. treasures of excellence that are spread out before us in Fénélon and Bossuet we, as Protestants, rejoice in; ..... but when the amiable sentiments of a Zinzendorf or of a Spangenberg are presented to a Romanist, are they welcomed by him?"_ p. 484. Yes, so far as truly amiable and good; and the Catholic is ready to acknowledge and does acknowledge and delight in excellence, let him find it where he may.

1. But and here is a point we beg the Professor to remember there is a difference between the amiable sentiments which are without grace, and the really amiable sentiments which are by grace. We admit amiable sentiments in men who are out of the Church; but not that men, who are not, to say the least, virtually in the Church, have or can have any

« AnkstesnisTęsti »