BX §85 3» » > > >> )> )3 %s >~^ > z z> : :> - z> ~z z> > > ; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. PRESENTED BY zzfom> z>zm> ZMX* m zm> >^> Zt>Z> ZJ>L> Zf£*> 5JZ>> - zw> Zvgl >"3F 3& > >• > u_ > > jjj^ > > ~3> ;> , > zzz^* > :> — % - > > to - j* ./> >> 3 * - z*> n» 3 ► J3> 2» j » - Jfi .) ^ * ^ m ~» .13 * "~3 ► T3»» » "j » >> . > "J » ..-;>:>» > 3 > 5> > ■^ * z> > :> ► > zz » ".:>">■•> » > ^ ► Z> ■>:• ■■> > ^> «? 3 ^ ~3 > z> "*5> »^ ^ > z> ^> .>^ T> z> o> ^> z> r> 3 "3 z> ^> "> .» > 3 z> ~^> >j > > z> "Z> • 33> > ■> z> r> 2)o Z> > ^» 33b ) > ^> ^ x»z> > z> z> > ^ > 3 z> Z> X>i > ■7> z> -_ z> z>z»z> j -> -Z > 3>> >^, '-P "^ Z>Z9 ZZ> > z> S3> ^>r» > O ^> _3^>> .> :> _> 4 3>3* > ._ r> > _ z> >^> > ; J> :> ^^5> ^> 3T zt> _ :>■ :>.3 3~: W — . > >^> ) s> 3> ► : ^> >^> > > T ^^^■> Z> > ^ ^= ^> :> " >/> -- ► " Z> z> z y> ^ -v > 3 ^ym ■1^^^ 3>3> -J* 3> 3 3 ."': 33 _ 3i~: 333> 3i> 33 ^ 33 :~ 33 33 S 3ft ;: 3P » 33 33 - o 3 ^ 33^: 3B>^ 33 33 i > ^^L"- - 33 : " *z^^ "33 3> 33 > *> 3*1 1 33 :"-^ 33: 3> 33 j : ~Z » ■>>..; ~~^j > T33 ^i> 33 > 3 ~> ~~T(I ' 3>3E> 33 3 > ' 33 _ -*^ 7333 33 33 ^ 73> 3 3> 33 .; 3 r^t | J33 ^3* 33 33 33 33 >3 > 3 "23 Kft ; 33 ^j^ 3^J ► ^£> > 3 "~ "> > "~^^ >_ ^>^ ► 33 > 3 JBO 3> ~~^^ > z £> > 3 3>3> >; "33^ 73 *£ > z 3> > 3 as > ^^p Z3 ^- > : 7> 3* . "3 : o> > ~ ^> -> 52 » "^ ^a ^ 3 O *^» V "l^ft> t3 : o ^ ^1 3 3 3 3 > 3 » > : >\_3 3J3, a: X: 5> 3 3J3 l -3> :>> > 3 3 >,r> ~Z3> i73> > > 3 ^ ► >> : ) 3> • TTJfc ■> i^ » > 3 T2 ft ^>>-j 3 ^3> >» 3> ~~3> 8? 3D r ^ ') ■>!> SO . 3> >^ 33 3D 33 >3 ^3 3D Z3^> 3 3 33 ~3>33« Z>31> Z>^3>3> 33 ~3^ 3 — 313 _33* 3 3 X3 T33 3 73 3 3 321ft 3 T> )3 to> t>-3 373' 733> 33 3 3 : 3> 3J3 : 3» J S> J>^> > >^> - _^ft 37>~3 ) 3 3: >~: 3-S> ':■ 33 33 > 3 33 >3 >il3> !?>>> > 3> ^£> 3 "33 >33 :3> >3 >3X> :■"::: >~J > I> :3 , >»• '3 > >3 >^3> - O - ' 3>373> '3 13>331> 3> 3>33T3> I3_ >3>3J3> » ^>n *73lO 3>^; 3> > 33 . : TlJft^ ^^ ' T» ^73ft 33 33TJ> 3 3 >1>~3*"3- J" i 33 >>173> 3 3 ~33> 33>3TZ^ 33 3^H3^ 33 33~Z^ft 33 33T3X 33 33 >3I3> • Jl> 33 J3> __ : 33 > ■> * 33 s> 33 T> _ 3> ).>> - ► 133 333 _ ^>^» >: » _ 3>> > 3 _ ^>_> ? ; £> ■_ 33 J 33 3£> 3 >33 <£f)e Appeal of ftomanistn to <£bumtea Protestants. A PAPEE HEAD BEFORE THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE, New Yokk, October 8, 1873. BY RICHARD S. STORRS, D.D., OF BROOKLYN, N. Y. ((? NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 18 74. s*< <\G <\ -P+dtf THE APPEAL OF EOMANISM TO EDUCATED PEOT- ESTANTS. By the Rev. R. S. STORRS, D.D., Brooklyn, N. Y. It is always easy, though always unsafe, to underestimate the attractive force of a system of belief adverse to our own. Stand- ing on the outside of it, we see only its ex- ternal proportions. The inner chambers, rilled with whatever precious and pleasant riches, are hidden from us ; and one must be of a remarkably sympathetic and compre- hensive mind to be able to enter into them, and to see the whole structure as its inhab- itants do. It is especially difficult for us as Prot- estants to understand the attractive power of Romanism. Jealousy of it, as of a stealthy and dangerous system, careless of virtue, eager for power, exquisitely adjusted to win mankind by condoning their vices and con- secrating their pride — this is an inheritance to which we are born. And such hereditary impressions ripen with most of us into per- sonal conviction. Not only does it seem to us hostile to liberty, and to rational progress, incompatible with a liberal and fruitful civ- ilization; it seems so distinctly to antago- nize the Gospel, so positively to contradict the fundamental ideas of the Divine Gov- ernment — dissociating religion from morali- ty, and destiny from character — its descrip- tion and its doom seem so luridly and in- delibly written in history, that we can not, without a distinct and strenuous effort, un- derstand how any should accept it. We have, therefore, been wont to regard the Roman Church as the Church of the ignorant and the superstitious alone ; to ex- pect that those born and trained within it will come out from it, with intelligent pro- test or with passionate revolt, when they shall have reached a higher level of educa- tion and moral force; and it has seemed well-nigh incredible that any one educated under Protestant influences should be al- lured into its fold. When such a one has gone to its commun- ion, we have been apt to feel that he must have been moved either by a desire for po- litical preferment, and the aid of the priest- hood in his personal schemes; or by the wish for terms of salvation which would leave his lusts free, and yet quiet his fears ; or by regard for particular teachers, as New- man or Faber in England, Brownson, Heck- er, or Hewit, in this country ; or that he was attracted by the tone of authority, and the 29 splendid pomp of the outward spectacle ; or that he was moved by a general uncer- tain eccentricity of mind, which might have made him a Shaker or a Mormon, but which, by chance, did make him a Papist ; or, final- ly, that it has been with him a blind leap after belief, in a desperate reaction from the lonely gloom of infidelity. In one or other of these ways we almost always account for the transfer to Roman- ism of one who has been educated outside its influences; while at last we are often constrained to leave it, as a strange phe- nomenon, not wholly explained by any thing which the man himself has said, or any thing which our thoughts can suggest. For some have gone who have certainly not been thus impelled ; of whose change no one of the motives which I have mentioned gives any more account than it does of the origin of the Paradise Lost. They are seri- ous, devout, conscientious persons, intent on learning, and then on doing, the will of the Almighty ; of no peculiar turn of mind, wit h no marked predominance of imagination or emotional sensibility ; many of them edu- cated in the best and most liberal Protestant schools ; some of them among the noblest of their time, whom it is a serious loss to us to lose. And it is to be distinctly observed that these men accept the system of Romanism with no languor or reserve, with no esoter- ic and half-Protestant interpretation of it, with no thought at all of modifying its dog- mas for their personal use by the exercise of a private judgment upon them. They take the system as it stands. They take it altogether. They look with pity, not un- mixed with contempt, on those who are ea- ger to adopt its phraseology and to mimic its ceremonies, while declining to submit their minds to its mandates ; and for them- selves they confess doctrines which seem to us incredible, and conform themselves to practices which look to us like idolatrous mummery, with gladness and pride. Now, what moves these men ? What is the attraction which the system presents to such as these, in Germany, England, this country? — an attraction which is strong enough to wholly detach them from their early associations, and to make them devo- tees of a spiritual power which from child- 450 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. hood they were taught to dread and to de- test ? I It is this question to which I am asked to give a partial and rapid answer. Of course it must he an imperfect answer, since I am not a Romanist, in any sense or any meas- ure. On the other hand, I am a Congrega- tionalist, in the broadest significance ; be- lieving for myself, without the wish to im- pose the belief on any body else, that each society of believers, permanently associated for the worship of God, and for the cele- bration of Christian ordinances, is a proper and complete church; competent to elect and ordain its officers, to administer the sacraments, and to fashion its rules and its ritual, under Christ, while bound to main- tain and teach his truth, to honor the law of Christian purity, and to live in unity of spir- it, and in fellowship of good works, with all similar societies. So far, therefore, as the Roman organization is concerned, I stand at almost the furthest remove from it ; with no- body beyond me, so far as I know, unless it be the Society of Friends. And concerning the whole immense sys- tem which that organization represents and subserves, I confess my sympathy with the most radical of the Reformers. I believe that the Fathers were thoroughly right in revolting against Rome ; that we are under the highest obligations to maintain that re- volt ; and that Christian civilization would perish from the earth, if the Papal suprema- cy should become universal. So it can not be that I should understand the system, or feel its attractions, as those do who live in it ; and if they were here to speak for themselves, they might well de- cline to have me represent them. But I can see some of the fascinating features which Romanism offers to its disciples, and can understand, in a measure at least — as it has been part of my business to understand — the appeal which it makes to educated Protestants. And from among its attract- ive forces, selecting them for their promi- nence and as easy to he exhibited, I will specify eight. 1. The prime secret of its attractiveness for such minds is, I think, that it claims to offer them in the Roman Church a present, living, authoritative Teacher; which has the mind of God immanent in it ; which is the witness and the interpreter of Revela- tion, and is itself the living medium of such Revelation; which has thus authority to decide on all questions of religious doctrine and duty, and whose decisions, when an- nounced, are infallibly correct, and unspeak- ably important. This is its first claim ; im- perative in tone, stupendous in substance, unique in its kind, and very effective. According to it, as you are aware, the bishops iu communion with the See of Pe- ter are the Ecclesia docens; the divinely con- stituted, perpetual, inerrant corporation, in which Christ, by the Holy Ghost, is always present ; which is filled, in its totality, with his inspiration, and which thus utters, in its decrees, his voice to the world. It does not merely articulate the general Christian con- sciousness of truth or of duty ; it speaks Christ's mind, as the apostles did in their day, with a superior fitness to modern needs, and with an equivalent, an identical author- ity. Debate is, therefore, always in order till the Church has spoken. But after that, doubt is a deadly sin. For it is not a mere perilous dissent from the majority. It is, in its essence, infidelity to Christ. And, on the other hand, the belief of the faithful in a dogma properly formulated and declared needs no argument, allows no hesitation, and asks for no support of reason. It is imme- diate and final ; since it rests solidly on the utterance of the Church, which is to it the testimony of God. This may seem to us immensely absurd, looked at in the light of 'history. It may seem prodigiously to transcend all the pre- rogatives promised by the Lord to the Church to which his truth was given. We may hold ourselves able to count the rings by which the successive increments of influence gathering to that Church hardened at last into the tough and oaken fibre of this un- yielding and gigantic claim. It may seem to us to put dishonor on the Bible. And we may feel that it reproduces, with strange ex- actness, with an almost fearful fidelity, the prediction of Paul concerning that Son of Perdition of whom he forewarned the Thes- salonian disciples, " that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." But the claim thus outlined has certainly a subtle and grand attraction for many minds. They do not feel limited, harassed, or forcibly overborne by this Di- vine authority iu the Church. On the con- trary, they feel invigorated and elevated by it, because holding themselves assured of the truth, by the very voice of God, speaking now as at the beginning, only speaking now, in tenderness to them, not through trumpet or tempest, in articulate thunders or earthquake throes, but through the consenting votes and voices of consecrated men. It seems to them the grand privilege of their minds to have such a Church ; the con- temporary of the apostles ; full now, as at Pentecost, of the Holy Ghost ; a majestic, abiding, undeceivable power, the very body of Christ, through which the present benig- nant Lord, always in the world, declares with perfect clearness and certainty what is to be believed and what to be done. All their expectations of progress and success in the attainment of divine knowledge rest on this ; and their minds are profoundly animated by it. A present revelation, not one in the past STORES: THE APPEAL OF ROMANISM TO EDUCATED PROTESTANTS. 451 — a revelation through men, not through a j book — is that which, according to their con- j ception, now brings to them the thoughts of \ the Eternal. Especially in times like ours, when relig- | ious doubt is passionate and ubiquitous, j when a whirling and vehement skepticism darkens and hurtles in all the air, they greet j with peculiar desire and welcome such a ba- ; sis of certainty, such a guaranty of the truth, j such a centre of enlightening and unifying authority. Amidst the many divisions of Christendom they long for this the more. And the Bible, interpreted by each for him- self, seems in no degree to meet their want ; while neither of the most cultured Protest- ant churches offers it satisfaction. Most of all, if they have themselves been assailed by the skeptical spirit, and have wavered and wandered in restless inquiry on the great themes of the soul's well-being, they feel attracted to such a Church, claim- ing such a prerogative, and offering such relief and assurance ; as Dollinger says of Christina of Sweden, that she " took refuge in the ship of ecclesiastical authority from the ocean of philosophical doubt." And every mind must admit, I think, that j there is a certain inspiring grandeur, august yet winning, in such a conception of God's enduring and holy Church ; that however far the ambitious corporation whose heart j is Jesuitism, and whose head is the Pope, j may fail of Tealizing it, the ideal itself is ! lofty and seductive; and that our timid i and limited human nature, surrounded by so many puzzles, and faced by such tremen- dous problems, may well at times admit the wish that such a conception had been per- mitted of God to be realized, and had not been left, as we assuredly hold it to have been, a delusive dream. This is the first of the attractions of Ro- manism, to an educated mind. Another is — 2. That it claims to offer to such a mind a body of doctrine, mysterious, no doubt, in some of its parts, but on the whole solid, con- sistent, consecutive, complete ; containing what they accept as a sufficient and satisfy- I ing answer to the questions of the soul, the antithesis to infidelity in all its forms, and | the consummation of what is true in other j systems. It boasts that in this not only the Scripture is fulfilled, but philosophy is illu- j mined, man's history is interpreted, God's ways to man are clearly vindicated ; and the ' appeal which it makes, through this doctri- nal scheme, is of immense persuasive force, i The scheme, of course, starts, as every or- I ganized theology must, with the doctrine of Original Sin. Socinianism affirms that man's nature and spirit are right at birth ; that they involve, j at any rate, no innate and governing pro- ' pensities to sin, and only need education, ' with favorable circumstances, to develop all forms of goodness and virtue. So it holds Jesus a created teacher, the Holy Ghost an impersonal influence, and regeneration a monkish myth. The Evangelical doctrine affirms that man, as originally created, was like God in nature, and like him also in moral perfection ; hav- ing the true knowledge of him, and standing in intimate communion with him through the sympathy of supreme and holy love; that no one of his constitutional powers was lost in the fall, though their activity was per- verted, and their development hindered; but that the change which then took place was in the essential temper of his heart — selfish idolatry and sinful passion supplant- ing the Divine love which had preceded, and the inmost dispositions and tendencies of the soul being thereafter averted from God, and directed to selfish pleasure and gain. The change now needed, therefore, is in this dominant spirit of the heart ; to alter the dispositions, to fix the supreme affection upon God, and to restore the spiritual dis- cernment which was possessed, but has been lost. And this is effected by the Divine Spir- it, through the truth as his instrument, and especially through the revelation of God's love, as declared, with transcendent fullness and tenderness, in his Son. When this is accomplished, no direct addition is implied to the inherent properties of the soul, but a change is realized in its temper, tastes, and spiritual activities, in its relations to God, and its personal destiny; a change so rad- ical, vital, complete, and so enduring in con- sequences, as to constitute a true regenera- tion. Conversion, to the loving obedience of Christ, is its sign and fruit. The beauty of holiness flows from it into life. It is com- pleted in sanctification. And, on the ground of Christ's atonement, he who has not yet reached that sanctity, but in whom its prin- ciple has been implanted, is reconciled to God, and is treated as if he had been right- eous ; is, in other words, justified. Preaching the Gospel is therefore here the means of regeneration. To lead men to af- fectionate faith in God, as made manifest in his Son, is the office of the ministry. He who has most of this faith in his heart, oth- er things being equal, is best adapted to ex- cite it in others. The Church and its sacra- ments are the instruments of God for propa- gating in the world the truth concerning him, as revealed in his Word, and for main- taining in renovated men the faith and love which by his Spirit have been inspired. His wisdom and grace are illustriously ex- hibited in this plan of redemption ; the an- gels take new conceptions of him from it ; and man is brought back to a holy love which commemorates Paradise, and which prophesies heaven ; which, being made com- plete and immortal, must make a heaven, though every gate of pearl should vanish. 452 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. This is the Evangelical doctrine. The Romanist system differs from it in essentia] particulars. It also holds that man is fall- en, and inwardly depraved, but in this dis- tinct sense: — By the image of God, in which he was created, it understands his rational and voluntary nature alone, by no exercise of which conld he attain true inward right- eousness, the knowledge of God, or the bea- tific vision. This nature being left to itself, the flesh must fight against the spirit, con- cupiscence gaiu the mastery, disorder and corruption follow. To prevent this result were therefore superadded in Adam, by the grace of God, the supernatural gifts of Di- vine knowledge and righteousness, through which the spirit, re-enforced from its Mak- er, was enabled to rule and restrain the flesh "as with a golden curb," and to rise to communion with the Almighty. It was these Divine supernatural gifts which Adam forfeited in the fall, sacri- ficing them for his posterity as well as for himself, so that all men now are born with- out them ; are horn in the state in which Adam was before he possessed them. And through this loss comes again the victory of concupiscence, the flesh everywhere con- quering and debasing the undefended spirit. There is, therefore, nothing to be effectually done for the soul of man, for its holiness and its peace, until these gifts have been restored to it. Without them, whatever teaching it may have, and whatever high influence through that teaching, it is naturally in- capable of aspiring to share the wisdom, the holiness, and the blessedness of God, as the flower is of flight, or the bird of solving a question in morals; and, without them, its course is continually downward, toward darker depths of ignorance and of sin. It is to supply this need of men, then, that the incarnation of God in Jesus is divine- ly ordained and divinely accomplished ; to make up to the soul, which has suffered a loss so essential and extreme, for this tremen- dous transmitted deprivation. By that in- carnation the supernatural gift which Adam forfeited is introduced anew into the world ; and it thenceforth is distributed, by the Holy Ghost, through the priesthood of the Church, and on its sacraments. It is properly given at the beginning of life, before activity has commenced, at the outset of consciousness. It is communicated in Baptism ; in which is effected an instant, essential, complete re- generation — the infusion of a supernatural life, the removal of all corruption of sin, the immediate and full introduction of the soul into the spiritual household of God. All the saving benefits of Christ's redemption are thus and there conveyed to the soul, as it enters upou life, and begins the career which can never close. The grace thus imparted is afterward con- firmed in Confirmation. It is nourished and renewed in the sacra- ment of the Eucharist. It is restored, if lost, in the sacrament of Penance. It is replenished and re-enforced in the sac- rament of Marriage, by which human love is exalted and transformed into holy affection. It is renewed, for those who receive this, in the sacrament of Orders. It is finally sealed, aud divinely com- pleted, in the Extreme Unction ; after which the soul, pursued and attended with gifts of grace from birth to death, goes forth to meet the grand assize. Regeneration aud Sanctification are, of course, synonymous with Justification, ou this system. The sacraments are efficacious means of grace ; having power to convey grace, by the Divine appointment, as material food has to nourish the body, or cold to congeal, or fire to burn. Transubstantiation is a necessity to the system, the means of realizing continually on earth the gift which came with Incarna- tion. The succession of the priesthood is an in- evitable part of it ; as much so as is the suc- cession of generations to a continued human history. The lines of transmission must be uninterrupted ; but personal purity in the priest is nowise essential to the virtue of his sacraments. True spiritual life is a thing impossible outside the Church, and miracles are still to be expected within it. For it is the super- natural Saviour, constantly present in the supernatural Church, who gives authority to every priest, and gives its efficacy to ev- ery sacrament ; aud, if he shall will it, the lame may now leap, the canvas become di- vinely luminous, the solid marble tremble into speech. The visible Church is the permanent Di- vine kingdom in the world, whose numeric- al limits are exactly defined ; and the state of each soul after death is absolutely deter- mined by the relation it has held to that Church and its sacraments. This is, in brief, the substance of the doc- trine. Of course it seems to us in sharp contrast with the Sermon on the Mount ; with the teachings and the letters of Paul and his associates ; with the very frame aud aim of the Gospel ; with consciousness itself, and the self-revealing facts of Christian ex- perience. The vices which have risen, and rankly flourished, in the Roman communion — its own historians being the witnesses — are testimony against it. The spiritual at- tainments of persons and of peoples under Protestant influences become inexplicable, if it be true ; they explicitly contradict it. The answer is immediate, and is to us overwhelming. But the system is logical, consistent, very commanding, and to many STORES : THE APPEAL OF ROMANISM TO EDUCATED PROTESTANTS. 453 thoughtful and questioning minds very at- tractive. Whatever there is of mystery, height, in- spiring power, in our doctrine of the Incar- nation or of the Trinity, is here as well ; whatever of solemn motive and warning in the doctrine of the Fall, and of Human Depravity, and of the Judgment for which we wait. And the advocates of this system hold it complete, while ours is partial ; theirs finished, and ours fragmentary. They do not in the least regard this sys- tem as tending to suhvert a sound morality, sincere and spiritual piety, belief in Christ as the author of grace and. justification, hut as simply essential to all these. And while they recognize Evangelical Protestantism as containiug still some elements of the truth, they look upon these as scattered timbers, not built into a house, and not sufficient to make one; as plates of iron, worthless sep- arately, and not capable of being framed together, except upon the Roman plan, into the vast and symmetrical fabric which is to bear up, over whelming waves, the heart and hope and faith of the world. By its claim of authority, and by this ar- ticulated body of doctrine, Romanism has a continual attractiveness for many fine minds. 3. There is, too, a vast and subtile power in the representations which it presents of the invisible and spiritual world, and the intimate relations which it declares as al- ways subsisting between that world and this. The human spirit, conscious of affections, and haunted by premonitions, that overpass death, is always reaching out, with eager desire or with forecasting fear, after knowl- edge of the world which lies beyond its sense or science; a knowledge more exact and complete than God in his wisdom has seen fit to bestow. So necromancy is never dead; and so Spiritism comes, in our own time, to tip its tables and rap its floors, in a juggling offer to disclose the Unseen. Its incitement is in the hunger of the soul for some apprehension of the realms whose bounds, of beauty or fire, it has not reached. And now Protestantism, which limits it- self to what has been clearly expressed iu the Bible, and w^hich deals timidly even with that, seems vague, undefined, and. essential- ly unsatisfying, in its treatment of all that mystic domain which lies before us, in com- parison with the exact descriptions which Romanism presents. This affirms that those who die after bap- tism — really regenerate, and having com- mitted no unforgiven and mortal sin, yet confessedly imperfect in action and in vir- tue — are to undergo, in the future state, certain temporal pains, by which they are to be purified, and satisfaction to be rendered to the Divine Justice ; that these pains may be abridged by the offering of prayers, pen- ances, and alms, and of the unbloody sacri- fice, on the part of those who tarry behind; and that the limiting or remitting of the pains is within the prerogative of the au- thorities of the Church. So friends who linger, Wth aching hearts, on this side of the grave, haA T e power still to bless their dead. Across the far untrodden spaces they can send reliefs, and tidings of joy, to those who have vanished from their sight. And, in return, they maj 7 receive real aids and blessings from the dead. Those now sainted aud beatified can intercede with God for us, and will do this if we in- voke them. They are living, conscious, in the presence of God„in enjoyment of the be- atific vision, yet informed of what Ave need and desire — perhaps by the mind of God himself — and are fraternally sympathetic with us. We may pay them homage : not the Latreia, due to God only, or the Uper- douleia, due to the Virgin Mother, but the Doulda, proper to saints. And Ave may im- plore with joyful freedom their ready as- sistance as intercessors for us Avith the Al- mighty. Angels, too, in their power and splendor, and their relative sovereignty over nature and life, are still the guardian spirits of men — of the least and humblest, to whom has come God's gift through Christ. Especially the Virgin Mother of Christ may be asked to aid us, with her tender sympathy, and her unbounded power with her Son. The growth of reverence for her in the Roman Church shows how dear and alluring the thought of her is to the miuds of mankind. The vision of her seems to flash a certain tender light OA'er realms that were otherwise so high as to be dreadful. First, her perpetual virginity is declared. Then, she is formally styled and proclaimed the Mother of God. Then temples are built, aud prayers are arranged to be offered to her, as Queen of HeaA r en. Then her immaculate conception, without stain of original sin, is declared to be a dogma of faith. Now, she is undoubtedly more frequently implored in the Roman Communion than God or Christ. Women and children are especially at- tracted — but not they only, the strongest and most philosophic are attracted — by the thought of a Woman, at once maiden and mother, the spotless and illustrious head of her sex, so near the eternal throne of the universe, while full of gentlest memories and lo\ T e.. And so the whole mysterious realm be- yond the graAX — from which no traveler returns to us, the gloom and glory of whose shadows and lights harre been reflected on thoughtful minds from the outset of histo- ry, but the vision of which only death re- veals — seems brought nearer the earth, and made palpable by Romanism; its inhabit- ants to be declared; their relations to us 434 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. to be revealed as mutual and sympathet- ic; our offices for them and tbeira for us to be shown surviving the dread separation, and still to be accomplished across the vast and dim abysses. And however we may dis- miss the whole, as unauthorized by the Lord and unwarranted by Scripture, the simple creation of mini's imagination, as wholly ideal as a fancy concerning the civil con- stitution of republics in Sirius, we must not forget that there is prodigious attraction in it for many longing and sensitive souls. It seems to them too beautiful in itself, and too congruous with their wishes, not to be true. 4. Then, further, Romanism claims to of- fer a greater security of salvation than oth- er systems afford ; and to those accustom- ed critically and conscientiously to examine their inward processes of feeling, their suc- cessive vanishing states of mind, and who thus come to suspect the reality of their own virtue, this is immediately and immensely attractive. For feeling seems to fly, as wo touch it with our analysis, almost as life flits and fleets beneath the destructive dissecting edge. Spiritual states inevitably disappear when we look away from that which in- spires them, and search, with an introverted scrutiny, after themselves. Many a person of a sincere piety questions, therefore, if he may not have been deceiving himself as to the realness of his faith and repentance ; if what seemed contrition may not have been an unloving fear of the consequences of sin ; if what had been taken for Christian faith may not have been an assent of the under- standing, with no affectionate devoutness of spirit to make it vital. He questions this all the more as his rev- erence for God becomes more supreme, and his personal humility becomes more com- plete. He questions it most of all when he fronts, face to face, the tremendous facts of Death, Judgment, and the long Hereafter. Because a mistake must have such conse- quences, he is tremulously ready to suspect its existence. The fact that he suspects it seems to furnish fresh evidence that he has made it ; and the passage is no long one from such a doubt to remorseful despond- ency. Now, in such a mood of apprehensive self- questioning, Romanism appeals to him with a prodigious force of invitation. For, what- ever the fact may prove to be when its of- fers are analyzed, it seems to propose certain definite and practicable conditions of salva- tion, which appear as unmistakable as the ladder against a burning house, or the life- boat at sea. Baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, con- fession, penance, obedience to the Church, absolution by the priest, in whom authority to pronounce it has been vested by God, and whose declaration is ratified in heaven, the final anointing, and then, if any thing stilt remain of unfulfilled obligation, a full and eternal satisfaction to God by temporary pains beyond this life — this is the plan which it proposes, and on which it offers the assurance of heaven. It will certainly turn out that all this presupposes certain spiritual states in him who adopts it, without which it becomes confessedly ineffectual, and that the same doubts which perplexed him before may, therefore, here as easily arise ; and it also will appear that an intention of the priest is needful to the efficacy of every sacra- ment, of which intention the man who re- ceives this can never have certain and in- fallible proof; while it seems to us as plain as the stars that the whole scheme is want- iug in Scriptural authority ; that it is not implied in the words of the Master, nor in any teaching of his apostles ; that it tends to give men a false security, and to substi- tute an exact ecclesiastical obedience for the faith and love which alone can spirit- ually unite men to God. But, after all, it is very alluring, especially, as I said, to a mind introspective, self - distrustful, conscious of sin, and feeling the doom of immortality upon it. When such a one draws near the point of final passage to realms unchanging and eter- nal ; when he thinks of the Eye which search- es every thought and wish, and traces the secret windings of desire ; when he feels on his prophetic soul the heat and splendor of the great White Throne — to hear God's voice, through human lips, giving him quittance and final absolution, as Jesus to the loving woman, it is a thing which any one might desire if he could persuade himself that God had committed an authority so awful, an of- fice so sovereign, to human hands ! 5. And still further, Romanism seems to many to offer them a higher sanctity of spir- it and life than Protestantism does; a sanc- tity, indeed, which is wholly peculiar to it, and for which Protestantism, under what- ever name or form, presents no equivalent. So it attracts some whom it is a grief to us to lose. They want a life set apart from earthly care and labor, from desire and pleasure, from all the fascinations and entanglements of the world; a life devoted to religious meditation, and to works of constant benef- icence and piety; a life in sympathy with that of ancient martyrs and confessors, of Agnes and Perpetua, of Basil and Benedict, and Francis of Assisi, and of princes who left their crowns for Christ ; a life that is hid with Christ in God. They long for this. Because the spiritual nature in them is tender and deep, and has been moved by a mighty impulse, it yearns with inexpressible desire for fellowship with the Lord, and for the utmost possible attain- STORES : THE APPEAL OF ROMANISM TO EDUCATED PROTESTANTS. 455 ment in the Divine virtue. This is, as it ought to be, the supreme and inspiring pas- sion of their souls, for which they are ready to sacrifice all. All the more they desire it as life around them is hurried and hot, full of ambition, lust, and greed. Amidst the rush and glare of pleasure, amidst the incessant roar of trade, this desire, in finer minds, becomes only the more iutense and imperative. It has the energy of a recoil from that which offends, as well as the strength of a personal aspiration. It operates at length like a law of their being ; no more to be resisted than that which quickens the mother's love, or makes self- accusation follow a conscious and deliberate sin. " My soul be with the saints," they say. The inmost, incessant thirst of their hearts is for a celestial life on earth. And Romanism seems to offer them sat- isfaction. The sacraments are declared to communicate, and continually afterward to renew in the heart, this inner sanctity. They invest the whole progress of life on earth, and meet and sanctify all its changes. Manuals of devotion, wonderfully rich, tender, and varied, are offered to the disci- ple, to assist him to gain, and then to main- tain, the white chastity and the radiant charity of this divine life. The confessional offers its ear, never shut, into which the story of every impulse of doubt or passion may be instantly breathed, and behind which is a mind declared to be instructed of God to clear the doubt and quench the passion. Calvaries are constructed in Roman Cath- olic countries, with successive stations rep- resenting the stages of the way to the cross, at each of which men may bow and pray, as with tender love and shuddering awe they climb toward the crucifix. And convents and monasteries open to men and women alike their hospitable doors, outside which all cares and possessions may be left, where homes for life are furnished to the devout, and within which the world's clamor and glitter are unheard and unseen. To the active and energetic, for whom rest would be weariness, the most arduous and dangerous missions are assigned; to pierce the forest and the jungle, and spend their years among savage tribes ; to face the bit- ing arctic cold, and the blazing fierceness of tropic heat ; to front the pestilence, shadow- ing at once the city and the sea with its dark wings. Now I need not tell you how fascinating is all this — to women of fine and sensitive natures, to whom the common life of society seems demoralized drudgery ; to men of the heroic mould, to whom a supreme self-sacri- fice is attractive, and who count a life-long service to God the only royal good on earth. Protestantism seems to them, in comparison with this, gross, secular, essentially earthly, in its spirit and aims. When it bids them consecrate their business to God, and doing it in his fear, to do it all to his glory, it seems to them illicitly trying to unite God and Mammon. When it insists on the household life as the purest and noblest for both men and women, it seems to them Epicurean in spirit, hazarding the attempt to find a flow- ery path to the paradise which can only be reached over thorny roughnesses, and entered through sorest wrestle and pain. Protestant missions are to them too luxu- rious ; our labors for the poor appear dainty and haughty. And when an order of Prot- estant devotees is anywhere established, they feel instinctively that that is play, while they are in earnest ; that only an absolute self-abnegation, guarded by irreversible vows, can match the height of their desire. So they welcome the severer tasks, the strict- er limitations, the more austere and exact- ing discipline which Romanism offers, and seek in its services the life of God. They may be disappointed, with a blast- ing surprise that shall blacken and wreck their whole subsequent life. One of the most impressive pictures which the recent traveler sees in Europe is by the fertile French Dore", exhibited last year in London, representing a young monk, who has just learned how greedy and gross his associates are, and on whose sad and sensi- tive face, as his missal drops in his languid hands, is breaking forth the passionate sense of disappointment, detestation, of inner re- pugnance, and an utter despair. The power of the picture is in its reflection of an ex- perience not unfamiliar. Blanco White, who knew intimately the convents of Spain, and whose veracity has never been questioned, speaks of those con- vents in one of his letters as " those Europe- an jungles, where lurks every thing that is hideous and venomous." And the key to his final entire skepticism, who began public life as a devout priest, is found by those who know most of his career in that fierce sentence. But whatever the final experience may be, the offer which Romanism makes to these men is great and shining ; and it need ex- cite no wonder in us that they should find it grandly attractive. 6. Then, with all these forces of attrac- tion, the Roman Catholic Church is a vast, venerable, historic organization, of une- qualed age, of immense extent, whose his- tory has, in some of its aspects, been a grand one; whose history appears to those whom it attracts the one sublimest thing on earth — inexplicable, except upon the hypothesis of its Divine origin. It is to them the Church of the Apostles ; which saw the splendor of the Ascension, which heard Peter and John at Jerusalem, 456 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. Paul afterward at Corinth and at Rome, and which directly conveys to us the deposi- tion of faith received from them. It is to them the Church of the Cata- combs ; where the new Christian kingdom was working underground, in garments of sackcloth, along galleries of rock, to over- throw and replace the armed empire above. It is the Church of the Fathers, and the canonized Doctors, to whose learning and eloquence, and spiritual insight, the world is debtor ; of Clement and Polycarp, of Jus- tin Martyr and Hippolytus, of Ambrose, Athanasius, and him of the flaming Numidi- au heart. It is the Church of the great Councils ; before which were lowered imperial stand- ards, to whose decisions faction bowed, and whose creeds and decrees have governed and assimilated the mind of Christendom. It is the Church of the Middle Ages ; of Anselm, Bernard, and Poter the Hermit ; the Church which civilized barbarians, liberated slaves, organized crusades, built cathedrals, established libraries, founded universities ; which preserved learning, laws, and arts, amidst the shock of terrific forces, iu what an ancient Gallicau sacramentary hardly exaggerated when it called it "the crash of a falling world ;" the Church which taught the emerging peoples subjectiou to authori- ty, while it set sharp bounds to the rapaci- ty of barons, and admonished and ruled the haughtiest kings ; the Church which has since sent forth its heroic and conquering teachers to the ends of the earth, "Ad majo- rem Dei gloriam." And, ancient as it is, this powerful Church appears to them to-day the only power which nothing in fact centrally disturbs ; the only one which can defy infidelity, rule the licen- tious wills of men, subdue and inspire the daring and refractory human intellect, en- noble and rectify human society; the ouly one which science can not shake, nor revo- lution dethrone, nor the fiercest antagonism of secular interests override and destroy. The supremacy of the spiritual order in the world appears to them guaranteed by it, and by it alone. Secure itself, from all as- sault, it judges the world. To us, who look on the same long records from a wholly different point of view, it seems as certain as any thing in experience that much of this is unhistorical, is purely fanciful; that it has been the Gospel, as a spiritual force, working apart from and oft- en directly against the Hierarchy, which has done the best part of this ; that whoso- ever now preaches that Gospel, with fervent faith, is the true successor of all the saints ; and that the history of the Roman corpora- tion, which only came to its full develop- ment under Leo and the Gregories, has been crowded with bigotry, pride, persecution ; with prelatical tyranny, priestly license, and popular degradation ; with carnivals of fol- ly, and carnivals of crime ; has been black- ened with the names of inquisitors like Tor- quemada; has been stained, so that hyssop can not purge it, by prelates and pontiff's like the Borgias and the Medicis. This is our conception of it. But to those minds whose different attitude toward it I am trying to present, the opposite aspect is the one which it offers ; and often they are profoundly impressed by it. They seem to themselves ennobled by partaking in a his- tory which looks so sacred and august. They feel themselves confederate with the men, God's champions in the world, whose ma- jestic achievements amaze and delight them. They are strengthened for swifter and grand- er work by all the heroic wisdom and devo- tion to which the Church appears to them heir. A baptism of power falls on them from the past, which is animating and pre- cious beyond all words. And this is an ap- peal which we must not overlook, if we would master the secret of their zeal. 7. Still further, too, we must not forget that Romanism powerfully appeals to these men by its cordial relations with all the fine arts ; with music, painting, sculpture, architecture ; with whatever impresses and most delights the senses and the taste. Its cathedrals are the wonders of the world : mountains of rock- work set to mu- sic. Its elaborate, opulent, mighty masses make the common hymn-tunes of Protest- antism sound almost like the twitter of. sparrows, amidst the alternate triumph and wail of commingling winds. Its ritual is splendid, scenic, impressive, to the ultimate degree ; and all is exquisite- ly pervaded and modulated by the doctrine which underlies it, every gesture, every pos- ture, of the officiating priest, and every vest- ment which he wears, being full of signifi- cance. Its liturgical forms have not merely been arranged by studious men, with apt and practiced gifts for the office. They have some of them been born of those immense crises in personal or iu public experience when intensity of feeling, surpassing all po- etic impulse, infused spiritual fire into the sentences. Not ouly reminiscences are in them, therefore, of perils passed and victo- ries achieved; their present utterance is that of the faith which soared upward from the flame, or looked from the damp darkness of dungeons and beheld above the heavens opened. And architecture can not be too majestic to echo such voices. The tone- speech of music, in its most tender or jubi- lant strains, becomes their meek and glad handmaid. Nothing, therefore, is too ornate or mag- nificent to be incorporated in the superb ceremonial of this immense organism. It STORES : THE APPEAL OF ROMANISM TO EDUCATED PROTESTANTS. 457 marches, as it fights, au army with banners.. It would copy, if it could, the very ceremo- nial of the Temple above. The king's daugh- ter is all glorious within, and her raiment must be of wrought gold. To one who wants his whole aesthetic na- ture gratified and educated in his worship, while it shall be also and always subordi- nated to spiritual attainment — who accepts this nature as from God, and feels its thrill- ing and sweet impulsions demanding a law- ful aud large domain — there is here a con- stant and vast attraction. Other, more strict- ly intellectual services, appear to him barren and frigid in comparison. He seems to him- self to be honoring God with a worthier wor- ship, while gaining for himself a peculiar delight, by making the sanctuary a poem in stone, and then bringing into it the purple and the gold, the veils of silk, and fragrant incense, by hanging it with pictures, and paneling its walls with significant marbles. It is not the understanding alone, or the moral nature, which that worship is de- signed to enlist. The imagination is to be reached by it, and profoundly stimulated. The most secret sources of feeling are to be searched ; the most delicate aud retiring- sympathies. The whole soul is to be suf- fused with its subtile influence, as the atmos- phere of the church is struck through with golden or crimson lights, till holy memories arise within oue ; till he is wrapped in sweet ecstasy of reveries ; till he is conscious of undefined aud transporting expectations, and almost waits to hear around, upon the charm- ed aud perfumed air, the rustle of angelic plumes. The apostles worshiped well and truly, not at all in this way. The Saviour made no suggestion of this to the womau of Sa- maria, when he taught her how to offer her devotions. Our fathers found delight in praise, and were heard in their prayer, though offering it in rudest forms, under bleakest skies, because incense stifled them, and the gorgeous vestments seemed to them dipped in the blood of the saints. We do not maintain the passion of their reaction ; but we, too, are afraid of that sensuous pleas- ure which may be easily coufouuded with worship, while wholly dissimilar ; which may leave the soul intoxicate with joy, while utterly wanting in the devout love which links to God, and in the faith which conquers death. But the convert to Romanism delights himself in this service; so rich and tender, so various and so ancient, with a passionate fondness ; while the occasional attempts of ambitious High-churchmen to emulate that which the blending genius of many centu- ries aud lands has produced are to him sim- ply ludicrous ; like building another equal St. Peter's of scantling and boards, or repro- ducing Warwick Castle in cake and sujxar. 8. Aud, finally, let us not forget that Ro- manism offers to these men what they ac- cept as the Church of the Future ; through which, continuing to the end of time, and only growing mightier with age, the per- fect society shall be realized on earth. We have not reached the hiding of its power till we recognize this. It presents itself as ancient, but as still in the fullness of unworn strength ; as hav- ing the compactness, the hardihood, the con- fidence, which come with a long and vast ex- perience, but as combining with this the ar- dor of its most fervent aud hopeful youth. It seems conservative, beyond all other human societies; since its government is, aud must always continue, iu the hands of a trained and practiced class, shrewd, vig- ilant, closely combined, everywhere repre- sented. It seems communistic, beyond the dream of auy Socialist; since all baptized persons are made equally its members, and if continuing subject to the Church are one, eternally, in Christ Jesus. It claims to be eminently the Church for the rich; whose utmost treasures can not rival its revenues, whose titles and pedi- grees it immensely surpasses, and whose palaces dwindle before its cathedrals. It claims, more emphatically, to be the Church for the poor ; for whom its build- ings and many services are always open, on whose behalf it builds great hospitals, to whom it preaches in historic cathedrals, like Notre Dame in Paris or the Duomo at Milan, as well as in the humblest chapels, aud he- fore whom it displays the most exquisite splendors of its magnificent ritual. Compare its churches with ours, open only on Sunday, aud then occupied chiefly by the cultured and the prosperous, and ours look partial, exclusive, iu the contrast ; careless of those for whom the Lord died, aud in whom he now presents himself to us. It is limited to no nation, this ever-ex- panding, exploring Church; but is equally at home on every coast, and under every form of government. It grasps the most barbarous, while it trains the most civil- ized. It has an office for every power, and has a lure for every desire. Its plans ex- tend to all the lauds, and anticipate iu their reach the coming generations. And that perennial energy of it which is shown on the one hand in its doctrinal progress from dogma to dogma, till now it has concentrated such transcendent authority in the person of the Pops, on the other hand is shown in the missionary work which, radiating from Rome, is ever proceeding, with uncounted expenditure of money and of life, with un- wearied patience, and an unsurpassed skill, on every shore where life is found. If any institution seems likely to endure, then, by reason of its inherent strength, and in the absence of Divine interventions, this 458 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. Is the one. To those who see in it the king- dom of God, made visible in the world, and filled with his eternal force, nothing else which is future seems as certain as this. It saw the downfall of the empire of Rome. Unchanged itself, it has watched the change. and seen the end, of kingdoms and thrones from that day to this. They expect it to see the end of those which now look stately and strong on earth, and to have the per- petuity which, can belong to nothing else upon this whirling, inconstant planet. It is to them still in the beginning of its years. They anticipate the time when it shall have reconquered Germany and En- gland, shall have conquered this country, shall have reconciled to itself the severed and feebler Eastern Churches, shall have set the cross above the crescent, shall have bap- tized Buddhist and Brahmin in its faith, shall have come to the full inheritance of the earth. And then they expect the per- fect society, through the wisdom, justice, and spiritual sanctity, which it will everywhere propagate and maintain. They glory in being permitted to reach forward, through this expanding, enduring organization, to mould the distant future of the world; not limitiug themselves to a fugitive influence, which shall have passed when they are buried, but projecting their influence directly and sensibly into the fu- ture, and with the mightiest instrument of time working for the good of the latest gen- erations. In the ultimate triumph, of this Church of their devotion they expect the Millennium ; and in the peaceful glories of that they look, each one, to have some share. It is a great anticipation. We must not wonder if it grapples their hearts as with hooks of steel. So it is, then, Fathers and Brethren, as I conceive it, and so far as the time allows me to state it, that Romanism appeals to edu- cated Protestants ; as offering them an au- thoritative teacher, always present, in which it claims that the mind of God resides and is revealed ; as presenting what it affirms to be a solid, consistent, and satisfying theolo- gy ; as claiming to bring the spiritual world more clearly and closely to their minds, and to show their relations to it more intimate ; as professing to give them a security of sal- vation unattainable elsewhere ; as offering them what it declares the only true sancti- ty of spirit and life ; as showing a long and venerable history ; as welcoming and cher- ishing all the fine arts, and making these its constant helpers ; as promising to rebuild and purify society, and at last to possess and regenerate the earth. To those who are attracted by it, it seems to have all which other systems possess or claim, and to add vital elements which oth- ers lack, supplying their imperfections, sur- passing their power, and meeting wants which they can neither interpret nor an- swer. It influences men by its immense mass, without their conscious discrimination of its separate attractions. Its bulk is so gigantic, its energy so incessant, that it seems to them to verify its claims without other argument, and to make a private judgment against it the most rash and reckless of spiritual acts. So it draws them to it with a moral momen- tum which increases as they approach: with a force almost like that of the physical suc- tion of a current or a whirlpool. Once start- ed on their course to it, opposing argument becomes nearly powerless. The pull of this immense and consummate system is so stren- uous and enveloping that theological, philo- sophical, historical objections are evaded or overleaped by the yielding mind, as are rocks in a rapid by rushing timbers. Where it has once become firmly estab- lished it impregnates every thing with its mysterious and penetrant influence. It be- comes a pervading spiritual presence ; which has irs voices not only in the pulpit or iu books of devotion, but iu homes, and schools, and all places of concourse ; which touches life at every point where that is sensitive and responsive ; which is associated with ancestral memories and renown, and more vitally associated with the hopes of the fu- ture. It gives stability to rank, yet makes the hnmblest at home amidst its more than royal pageants. It invites the scholar to a happy seclusion, yet smites the most labori- ous life with a gleam from the supernatural. It paints the story of Christ on windows, and carves it in lordly and delicate marbles, for the eager and wondering eyes of child- hood, and for the fading sight of age. It occupies itself with imperial cares, yet con- nects itself intimately with the deepest as- pirations which move the soul, and with its longing love for the dead. It is like dis- placing the atmosphere to remove it. Re- bellion against it seems to dislocate the frame of society itself. Only a tremendous moral reaction, inspired and sustained by forces which are in their nature incompress- ible, and which have been gathering through successive generations, can break its hold on a nation which once it has firmly grasped. It is still too recent and too limited with us to have such a general sweep of power. But it is working, with unwearied resolu- tion, to make itself supreme among us. Its very strangeness gives it prominence in our American or English society ; as a palm-tree attracts more attention than an oak. It brings forces that have been disciplined for a thousand years to act on our plastic mod- ern life ; and converts to it may be expected from many quarters. Some have held its doctrine before, in the feebler, more fanciful, and more fragmentary STORRS : THE APPEAL OF ROMANISM TO EDUCATED PROTESTANTS. 459 form in which that is avowed by a section, for example, of the Augelican communion, in England and here. Their logical sense must carry them to its conclusions, if log- ical sense has been able to maintain itself through the enfeebling prettiness of their previous career. Some, holding the evangelical doctrine of the Divinity of our Lord, and the pres- ent operation of the Holy Ghost, find here what seems to them the necessary comple- ment, and the justifying reason, of these transcendent disclosures ; the only exact and final antithesis to Socinianism, or even to atheism. Some are drawn to it by the fervor of feeling, the energy of pathetic and admonishing eloquence, which mark the ser- mons of the Paulists, and of others who, like them, appear from their retreats to stir men's hearts as messengers from God. Some sim- ply and gladly react into it from a rest- less, sad, and weary skepticism. But all are greatly in earnest when they go. They are true devotees, and they rarely return. They are usually Ultramontanists afterward. There is nothing languid, moderate, tepid, in their conviction or their feeling. They are resolute, enthusiastic, with a fire of zeal which works alike in brain and heart. And they have a tone of assurance in their words, and of certainty of victory. Bellarmine is their favorite theologian. De Maistre is widely popular with them. Hyacinthe and Dollinger are " fallen angels." They had no trouble with the dogma of Papal Infallibility. It was desired and wel- comed by them, as articulating what had been latent for centuries in the unvoiced consciousness of the Church, and as bring- ing the whole system to its legitimate and prophesied climax. That Pope Honorius had been formally condemned by the Sixth Council, his dogmatic writings burned as heretical, and his name anathematized and stricken from the liturgy, was not even a hindrance to the eagerness of their faith. They make great sacrifices for their con- victions, and do it joyfully. Indeed, the sacrifice becomes to them a fresh motive, an argument for the system which demands it. For, according to the cross shall be the crown, and they who have come out of great tribulation shall find their robes of a more lustrous white. Before the intensity of their aspiration the ties of friendship, the strong- est bonds of earthly relationship, if tending to withhold them from the Church of their desire, yield and are severed as flaxen fibres in the flame. For they regard the system which they accept, not only as essential to the future of mankind, to the well-being of persons, to the safety and glory of peoples and states; they regard it as alone Divine in its nature, overwhelming in its authori- ty, whose touch should properly shatter and consume whatever opjwses it. Even the temporary toleration of a different faith is to them an unwelcome necessity. A system of popular education not pervaded by Ro- man Catholic influences, is ensnaring and dangerous. They have the courage of their convictions ; and they use without stint the instruments of Protestantism to further their system and to make it universal. Even present failure does not dishearten them. That they expect; and they can wait, for the Church lives on. The ages are hers; and to her supreme incorporeal life, which time does not waste nor change impair, the final victory always is sure ! If we are to resist the vast effort of these men, and to make the liberties which our fathers bequeathed to us, and the Gospel in which they surely trusted, supreme in the land, we must at least know more than we have known of the seductive and stimula- ting forces which operate against us, and which we are to encounter. To treat the cases of those who have gone from us to Rome as merely sporadic — the effect of acci- dental causes, or of personal eccentricity — one might as well treat thus the power which drives the Gulf Stream northward, or which hurls the monsoons of the In- dian Ocean back and forth across the equa- tor. The one tremendous fact against them is that they can not alter, and can not obliter- ate, the record of the past. Their system has been abundantly tried ; and, fascinating as it looks, its prodigal promises have been proved as unreal as the stately pleasure- dome of Kubla Khan seen by Coleridge in his dream. The scheme which looks so se- ductive and magnificent, when searched by the passionless logic of events, when tested in the slow and solemn ordeal of succeeding centuries, in Italy, Spain, Mexico, the West Indies, turns out as unreal in what it claims and in what it proposes, as the island of No- where in the famous romance of Sir Thomas More. Good men have lived under it, multitudes of them ; saintly women, as pure and devout as ever brightened the earth with their pres- ence; and such live in it now. But their goodness is wholly and constantly parallel- ed outside their communion, because it has come, not from what is peculiar to that, but from the quickening light of God's Word, and the transforming energy of his "Spirit, which we as freely and consciously partake. In that which is peculiar to it — its hie- rarchy, its ritual, its efficacious sacraments, its indulgences to the sinner, its vast and complex organization, the concentration of all authority in its " Vice-God" at Rome — wherever the system has had its way it has wrought such mischiefs that the pen hesi- tates to recount them. It has been powerful to depress peoples, 460 ROMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM. ineffectual to uplift them. It has, with sure instinct, discouraged and diminished secular enterprise. It lias linked itself most natu- rally with the harshest and most tyrannous civil institutions. It has made religion a matter of rites, and a matter of locality; till the same man became a devotee in the chap- el, and a bandit in the field. It has accepted a passionate zeal for the Church in place of the humility, the purity and charity, which Christ demanded ; till the fierce Dominic be- comes one of its saints ; till forged decretals were made for centuries to bulwark its pow- er; till its bottest anathemas have been launched at those who complained of its abuses; till all restraints of humanity or morality have been overleaped in many ex- cesses to whicb its adherents bave been prompted from the altar. Its most devoted and wide-spread order, the Society of Jesus, in spite of its invincible heroism and its un- equaled services to the popes, by tbe mon- strous maxims which Pascal exposed, and the practices wbicb expressed them, so kin- dled against it the indignation of Christen- dom that Clement XIV. was compelled' to suppress it in all Christian states. The rage of this system against whatever would hinder its march — against its own sub- jects when they have conscientiously paused in their submission — has had something transcendent in its pitiless malignity. The fierceness of its persecutions has been pre- cisely proportioned to its j>ower. The baud which looks so full of blessing has opened the deep of oubliettes, bas added tortures to the rack, has framed the frightful Iron Maid- en, has set the torch to martyr fires. The breath which should have filled the air with sweeter than Sabaean odors has blighted the bloom of many lives, and floated curses over the nations so frequent and so awful that life itself was withered before them, till their very extravagance made them harm- less. Instead of true wisdom, where this sys- tem has prevailed with an unquestioned supremacy, it has fostered and maintained wide popular ignorance. Instead of true sanctity, its fruit has been shown in peasant- ries debased, aristocracies corrupted, an ar- rogant and a profligate priesthood. It has honored the vilest who would serve it, and crushed the purest who would not. It sent gifts and applause, and sang its most exult- ing Te Deum, for Philip the Second ; while its poisoned bullet killed William of Orange. The medal which it struck in joyful com- memoration of the bloody diabolism of St. Bartholomew's is one of its records. Its highest officials have sometimes lived lives which its own annalists have hated to touch. Alexander VI., cruel, crafty, avaricious, li- centious, whom it were flattery to call a Ti- berius in pontificals — who bribed his way to the highest dignity, who burned Savona- rola, the traditional portrait of whose favor- ite mistress, profanely painted as the Moth- er of God, hangs yet in the Vatican, who probably died by the poisoned wine which he had had prepared for his cardinals, and whose evil renown is scarcely matched by that of Caesar Borgia his son — stands as one of its infallible popes, holding the keys of heaven for men. If any system is doomed by its history, this is the one. Protestantism has now so checked it, the advancing moral develop- ment of mankind has set such limits to its power, that these are largely facts of the past. The Vatican Court is now free from scandal. The Church at present seeks strength through beneficence, not through control of the secular arm ; by its helps to piety, not through appeals to physical fear. But its more spontaneous and self-revealing development has been in this more friendly Past. Therefore the nations whom once it has ruled, when they finally break from it, hate it with an intensity proportioned to the promises it has failed to fulfill, and the bit- ter degradations it has made them undergo. Atheism itself — that moral suicide — seems better to them than to be again subjected to Rome. This is the system as realized in history, and there forever adjudged and sentenced. Of course this gives immense advantage to those who now resist its progress. It can not fascinate the nations again till the long experience is forgotten. But such is not at all its appearance as presented to those whom it wins to its fold. And we must look at it, in a measure at least, as those who honor and love it look, if we would un- derstand its power, if we would know how it is that it hopes a second time to conquer the world. Travelers have often and glowingly de- scribed the silver and golden illuminations of St. Peter's, as seen from the Pincian Hill at Rome, on the great Easter festival. Won- derful, ethereal, almost celestial, appears the majestic Basilica, with its dome, when sud- denly over all its lines flashes that startling, unearthly radiance. It has never been noticed, so far as I have observed, that the illumination is wholly con- fined to that half of the dome which fronts the city. Tbe other remains frowning and stern, while this is glowing through the darkness like a golden temj)le let down by God from heaven to earth. We must not look only, as often we do, on the sombre and sterile side of Romanism, if we would comprehend its attraction. We must know, and feel, that there are aspects of it in which, to those who look with admir- ing eyes on its immense illuminated front, it appears more beautiful and serene than any vision of poets, while as solid and command- ing as the very, and only, Temple of God. &t)c Appeal of Romanism to (fbucateo fJrotestants. A PAPER READ BEFORE THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE, New York, October 8, 1873. By RICHARD S. STORRS. D.D. OF BROOKLYN, N. Y. EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE CONFERENCE, 1873. History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, held in New York, October 2-12, 1873. Edited by Rev. Philip S chaff, D.D., and Rev. S. Iren&us Prime, D.D. With Portraits of Rev. Messrs. Pronier, Carrasco, and Cook, recently deceased. 8vo, Cloth, nearly 800 pages, $6 00. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS. Franklin Square, New York. Sent l>v mail on receipt of $6 oo. / ^K> D ~> :» ) ^S> ■» j ZS> 9 1 > ; > :■ ■> ) v ?l > x ^> > 5 )~) jD -■>. ->:> Zl§> > >i> T> > > ~> > > > > y.> >^ >j> o"> >» V) "~> > » »Z> 8»?J >> I> > > >> " ► S>1> > > ^ ► >> 30 ~3 ► >> > > " ► >> >5 5 » >> >) 3 > i >-> > > > > >^ ^1 a > > ■>"»>.- 1* > "> ■> -> ^ V- ^ "> Z>> > >D I>^ > "> 2> "~>> > > > ' :»- > > > > Z>^ ~> > "> r> -> > > >> > ■>-^ ^ » > L > ^> >: ' >» .. >> > >.o > > > ~: >o:>:» , > ;> -> > :: ,> > i — > -& ^j* >^X>^> ; i^T5>>> & ^> »S353» ': '> ^ Z>^S> J0> ^^L. %^r^ *> > m ^J» r> MJ z> Z> Z> 1 3 J> K> ^> > ^ >> > ^» ) £ jjT> 2>>Z> f J>3 > r> i H -, 3>Z> Z2>3 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Jan. 2006 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111 33 •: 33\> :■■ ■..•■■> "> : • ^— 3 3> x3 : :: 3> 3 _ > 5- .3' > 2K>>3>> ^i macx> ■>■■.