7 — \$ ■"■* / / UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. <&ej&***6t46> ^j^c- s&./f^ -.. s *>k PEEILS OF POPERY, ESPECIALLY CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY REV. JOHN BARTON. CINCINNATI: HENRY W. DERBY & CO M DCCC XLV. "Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by By John Barton and J. B. Peat. In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Ohio. v ADVERTISEMENT The Author owes an apology to the public for the numerous imperfections with which his work appears. But as an extended one would involve a detail which would be neither inter- esting to them nor agreeable to himself, he be- speaks their indulgence for it; only adding, that his unavoidable absence a great part of the time while it was issuing from the press, and the haste with which he was compelled to glance over most of what he did superintend, will, he hopes, be deemed a sufficient claim upon that indulgence. ERRATA. Page 38, read, " To exalt the Papacy was to exalt the Church, to ag- grandize religion," &c. Page 44, for "Romans," read conquered by the Normans. Page 98, after the semi-colon in the eleventh line, add the words, or to believe. Page 119, for "enorties" read enormities. Page 141, before the word "tawdry," insert the words mass of. Page 152, the poetic lines should conclude His "foe ;" and for "mental" read mutual. Page 164, for "all" read altogether " invulnerable." Page 166, instead of "so exist within a society like ours," read, co-exist with a government Uke ours. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PART FIRST. CHAPTER I. INFALLIBILITY CONSIDERED. - - 17 CHAPTER II. POPERY SUBVERSIVE OF RELIGION AND SOCIAL ORDER. 35 CHAPTER III. REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTI-REPUBLICAN AND ANTI- SOCIAL ASPECTS OF POPERY CONTINUED, AND AP- PLIED TO THE PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF REPUB- LICAN NORTH AMERICA. - - - - - 66 CHAPTER IV. POPERY NOT CHANGED FOR THE BETTER, - 99 PART SECOND. CHAPTER I. PROSPECTS OF POPERY IN ENGLAND, - 139 CHAPTER II. PROSPECTS OF POPERY IN THE UNITED STATES. Proselytation. — Emigration. — Political Associations.-— National Indifference. - 149 VI TABLE OP CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. GENERAL PROSPECTS OF POPERY. - 196 CHAPTER IV. CONCLUSION. The Remedy. — A variety of Reflections. - - - 207 APPENDIX. Latest (or Trentine) edition of Popery. — A Voice from the Basilic of St. Peter, or Pope Gregory Sixteenth's Bull against the American Christian League and Bible Society.— Who shall teach China? — Statistics, &c. • 223 PERILS OF POPERY PART FIRST. INTRODUCTION. We wrestle against spiritual wickedness in high places. Eph. vi. 12. "All that has been done hitherto," said the great Saxon reformer, in answer to the fears of a timo- rous friend, — u All that has been done hitherto is mere play. * * * * The tumult is continually growing more and more tumultuous; nor do I think that it will ever be appeased until the last day !" " Three centuries have passed away," adds a recent historian of the Reformation, " and the tumult is not appeased yet." The battle, re- newed from its temporary suspension, waxes hotter and hotter. The cessation from vigorous and general hostilities seems to have been only the dreadful pause of exhausted armies, during which they meditate new plans of attack, and ominous of a more fearful and deadly struggle. The silence for years past has been broken but by occasional rencounters ; but the crisis has arrived when the embattled hosts are taking the field. The world is in expectancy and commo- tion ; strange and mysterious events have already A VI INTRODUCTION. occurred; conjecture is at a loss to anticipate the scenes which are to follow these preliminary evolutions : nor is it improbable that the period is not far distant, when kings and potentates shall mingle in the gathering storm at the head of their battallions, the nations of the earth take sides, and the loud peal of universal uproar convulse the welkin and shake the solid globe. Say not, Christians, that we are already amid the millenial glory, — that the voice of prophecy assures us that the reign of error is at an end — that the universal triumph of Christ's kingdom has commenced — that no hard contested battle must be fought, and victory never again shall perch on the alien standard. It is folly to indulge vain and improbable presumptions without the shadow of just premises. I might add, many eminent divines and commentators have favored the opinion, as most agreeable to the prophetic record, that Popery is again to revive, and how- ever short its period, have another reign on earth, ere it is utterly consumed by the Spirit of His mouth and brightness of His coming, under whose feet all His enemies must ultimately be crushed. The Apocalyptic beast exhibits all the symp- toms of returning vitality, and energy, and effort, to regain his lost dominion. Popery, awaking INTRODUCTION. Vll from the slumber of centuries, recovering from the torpedo-touch of the Reformation, has sprung from her lethargy, and started from her couch of repose, with a seemingly freshened vigor, to re- trieve her waning fortunes in the earth, — to at- tempt the empire of the world to St. Peter's Chair, and in the use of his two-edged sword. To the efforts of the Jesuits is to be chiefly ascribed the confessed renovation of the decaying powers and dormant energies of Popery. Within the period of the re-existence of this order, the resuscitated zeal of Popery has followed in the wake of our Christian missionaries, to Syria, to Persia, to Hindostan, the coast of Africa, the Sandwich Islands, and other countries; where they are scattering the tares of death, to spring up amid the seed of life which these holy men have gone forth to sow, in those uncultivated regions of the earth. It has raised its humbled crest in Protestant Europe, to the discomfit and amaze- ment of its enemies, and thrown the thinking world into excited apprehension and alarm. And no cost nor toil is spared in this country for the purpose of securing to it a controlling influence in our great Western Valley, and thereby a political predominance in this country at large, and an ex- pansion of its power and influence, which will be V1U INTRODUCTION. felt throughout the civilized world; since no great civil or religious revolution can be effected in one hemisphere without a sympathetic action on the other. The Arch-fiend, according to the prince of modern poets, hurled from the heights of heaven with his rebel crew, into the abysses of the in- fernal deep, for rearing the standard of revolt in the neighbourhood of the Eternal Throne, which he aspired to usurp, so lately vanquished, scathed and confounded, maliciously meditated the ruin of this new-formed and ill-fated globe, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon. Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accurs'd and in a cursed hour, he hies. Ah, little did our first parents, adorned with spotless innocence, suspect the danger near! Little did they dream that "in- 'that serpent-form was couched a fallen Arch-angel — that from that tongue of guile flowed forth the honeyed accents of the father of lies — that from that audience to the tempter, that fatal audience, should spring diseases, and deaths, and woes, and curses upon their latest posterity. INTRODUCTION. IX" Like the first tempter of our race, and equally malign, Antichrist — cast down by the strong arm of Providence from his lofty orbit of assumption, where he aimed to supersede the Divine glory — recovering from the confusion of his fall, having fixed his eagle eye upon this land of liberty, tra- versed the deep, and has planted his dark stand- ard in this New World, As the prince of darkness sought, perchance, the recovery of Heaven by some circuitous route, so he meditates the reco- very of earth. And with the serpent's subtlety, and with his crooked course, and with his hum- bled mien, and with his poisonous fangs, and speckled and basking in the sun-beams of our glorious liberty — the Arch-Crusader is amongst us. From his own blasted, once glorious region, on another continent, he would come to wither up our fair country also. Thrown from his high sphere of usurped authority, he may hazard at least another effort, and spare no cost nor labor to plant his throne upon the demolished institutions of our Union, and consolidate the world into a universal empire. Ah, little are the American people aware of the deep design, the well-con- cocted scheme, and the busy hands which ply the shuttle, weaving the intended shroud of our country's glory. INTRODUCTION. This subject equally addresses itself to the patriot and to the Christian, as involving both our civil and religious rights and privileges ; both of whom should remember, that by watchfulness and vigor we may now maintain what in future our tears and blood may not avail us to recover. The day may come, and it may not be far dis- tant, and it may be too late, when this subject shall assume a weightier and all-absorbing inter- est with this nation ; when it shall be driven for self-protection to the adoption of measures for the exclusion of the aggressor from without, and for the subjugation of the foe within. Our contest is with a foreign potentate, and with his subjects in our midst, and with myriads on myriads ready to embark for our shores ; with hearts alien to us abroad as at home, in Protestant as in Papal countries, in America as in Italy or Spain. Our controversy is with a system, anti- American, anti- Republican, as well as anti-Protestant ; with prin- ciples carrying this character with them as es- sential to their identity, and invariably establish- ing that .character proportionably as they are restrained or unrestricted in their operation by extraneous influences. Anticipating the cry of intolerance! intolerance! from the truly tolerant partizans of that most INTRODUCTION. XI mtolerant Church, let this be our apology : As a Protestant and American citizen, I must present an inflexible and aggressive front to Popery, prompted by nature's first law and dictate, self- preservation, because it is exterminative of Pro- testantism and human rights. I am not intolerant in an evil sense, for I am an American citizen ; I am not intolerant, for I am a Protestant. I am struggling to secure the rights of conscience* liberty of speech, and the freedom of my country* I am but the enemy and opposer of the most cruel spirit of intolerance. If I am intolerant, (if you would have it so,) it is for toleration's sake; and neither the laws of God or man condemn me. As a Protestant, I blame Popery for having adul- terated and distorted Christianity, and buried her in a mass of errors. I believe it to be fundament- ally debased — & system of essential error. I hold it to be ruinous in its influence on the religious and eternal destinies of man ; and I am therefore bound to brand it as anti-Christian and flee all communion with it. As an American citizen I blame it, but not as a religion. I blame it as hazardous to the public safety and inconsistent with its present order and institutions; and for making religion the veil of its ambitious de- signs, the instrument of its power, and the throne Xll INTRODUCTION. of the worst political despotism the world ever saw. A glimpse into the future might startle, as- tonish, and confound us all. Could we realize with prophetic ken what may be the unhappy fate of our beloved country, or the destiny of the world — could we see the final issue of little sus- pected or latent causes now in operation — the scenes which some of this generation may live to behold, or those which posterity may witness, might fill us with indescribable horror and dis- may, and thrill our bosoms with agony. What shall be the issue in this contest, God only knows with certainty. In the absence of prescience, however, we are endowed with the inferior vision of wisdom and sagacity, which, with less certainty of future events, may, if duly employed, be adequate to the regulation of our conduct in adaption to all our interests, individual and associate ; with this advantage, that it checks our presumption, and leaves our conduct subject to the final destination of Him who rules over all. By the exercise of prudent circumspection, we may avoid many a surprise, and ordinarily escape those rocks against which the surges of time have dashed communities and individuals, through their own avoidable mismanagement and want of INTRODUCTION. Xlll prudent precaution. If ever their purposes are defeated, and their exertions diverted from the end they proposed, by the permission or interpo- sition of Divine Providence, mortals may rest assured their miscarriage is consistent with the ultimate success of right ; since a Justice too wise to err, too good to be unkind, is at the helm of the universe. Let not then a morbid and mis- placed charity or our national pride be ready to revolt at the abhorrent mention of our peril from Popery ; nor let us resign our chariot to Hercules, till we have put our own shoulder to the wheel. Divine Providence would have the hearty co-ope- ration of human providence ; and we are only au- thorized to expect the blessing of the former in the use of the latter. Heaven holds us respon- sible, in our private and public capacity, for the exercise of prudent circumspection in the ma- nagement of our affairs; which if we neglect, we may expect to incur the penalties of our folly. To the proper adjustment of our affairs we may be conducted, by attending to the established nature and tendencies of things, and by a process of reasoning and deduction from personal obser- vation and experience, and the recorded expe- rience of mankind. If, indeed, the elements of our country's disso- XIV INTRODUCTION. lutiori are at work, it is high time for the nation to be apprised of its danger, and to apply the remedies proper to arrest the disease threatening its destruction. Guided by the maxims of wis- dom and the lessons of experience, let us then turn our patient and anxious attention to the discovery of the causes, if indeed they exist, from the operation of which, if long unheeded and unresisted, the most horrible catastrophies are to be feared. It requires, we think, no extra- ordinary sagacity to detect elements in operation around us, which must, unchecked, effect such a revolution. Let us reconnoitre the enemy's forces and plans of attack, and afterwards deter- mine upon the countervailing movements neces- sary to his effectual resistance and defeat. If the imminency of our peril is not to be de- nied by any who have examined this subject, the means of our safety are perhaps equally clear. To be apprised of oar danger is half our pre- servation. The lurking foe will fear to bestir himself, and crouch in the recesses of his dark designs, whilst he knows the national eye to be riveted upon him ; and a nation of freemen, watchful of his movements, and almost forestall- ing the development of his purposes, will be ready at all times to adopt prompt measures of INTRODUCTION. XV resistance. Let every means be employed to enlighten the public mind upon this subject. Let the lecture-stand, the pulpit, and the press be appealed to as the engines of our generous but vigorous warfare. Let Protestant Associations be formed throughout the length and breadth of the land, to rebuke foreign associations, to stand as sentinels on the alert, and constitute a grand palladium thrown around our institutions and liberties. Clad in the invincible panoply of truth, let us go forward, and meet this system of error at every quarter. Let the principles of Popery stand unmasked and unadorned by it factitious trappings in their naked deformity and tendencies, — let history reflect its blaze of light upon its modus operandi; and let these, with every new development of facts, together furnish a clue to guide the whole people of this country to the dark recesses of the secret purposes and motives of the Papal Hierarchy. Should Popery succeed in this country, it will be for want of the universal diffusion of knowledge among the people. In this controversy the Christian minister occupies at once a responsible and delicate posi- tion. Nor should he be deterred from the at- tempt to diffuse light on this subject to the ut- XVI INTRODUCTION. most of his ability, through fear of being accused of springing out of his appropriate latitude, tar- nishing his ministerial character, or desecrating the holy sphere assigned him. This neglect cannot be regarded by us in any other light than as equivalent to the renunciation of an imperative and paramount duty. When religion and politics so intimately intermingle, it is alike the business of the ecclesiastic and the patriot to sustain their parts; and the Christian minister, in this case, should be the first champion of his country in the field. To the Church, in a pre-eminent sense, is confided the salvation of this nation. The Gospel of Christ, " the Spirit of his mouth," if it be saved at all, must be the principal in- strument in effecting its salvation, temporal as well as spiritual. With it is deposited the na- tural, and perhaps, most powerful antidote to Popery — that by which it is to be finally " destroyed." And in the present case, it is the Christian preacher's duty to reveal the Papal imposture — to throw off its religious garb — to hold it forth in its well- attested character of a usurpation, and disabuse mankind of its preten- sion to be in any true sense a Church or a re- ligion, both of which it has forfeited and would subvert. PERILS OF POPERY. CHAPTER I. INFALLIBILITY CONSIDERED. Though it does not belong to my plan to oc- cupy the wide field of discussion through which a particular examination of all the peculiar dog- mas of Popery would lead us, but rather to exhi- bit it in its more practical aspects, growing out of its essential genius and history, (embracing its modern manoeuvers to meet the present exigences, its general prospects, and natural antidote,) yet, as it might be expected in a work of this kind, I propose, referring my readers to the numerous and elaborate sources of information on these topics for further light, to dissipate the illusory basis of the whole system of Popish error, by a brief argument, which I would premise with a few general observations. By the designation, Popery, I understand that great apostacy from primitive Christianity, and corruption of Catholicism, which acknowledges the Roman Pontiff (either alone or conjointly with a General Council,) infallible head of the Church, or head of an infallible Church. 18 PERILS OF POPERY. At first the title of Pope, which in fact signi- fies the name of father, from papa, was enjoyed by all bishops, and sometimes even by the inferi- or clergy. Afterwards it was equally bestowed on the Bishop of Rome and those who possessed the other considerable sees. Cyprian had been complimented with the title of Pope of Carthage, by Cornelius, Bishop of Rome. About the se- venth century, the prelates of the Roman See began, however, to appropriate this title to them- selves. Soon afterwards, so insatiable are the demands of ambition and vanity, they connected with that title a claim to new privileges and pow- ers. Agatho was the first who laid claim to the attribute of infallibility for the Church at Rome, in virtue of the assumed primacy of Peter. Neither the claim to infallibility, nor the Pope's headship, though ultimately successful, was at once admitted. Many bishops and princes resist- ed it; and the Spanish monarchs, particularly, chose not to consider the Roman Pontiff even as head of the Church, but claimed nearly the same degree of supremacy over the churches in their dominions, which the kings of England, since the reign of Henry the Eighth, have exer- cised over theirs. PERILS OF POPERY. 19 The erection of the Papacy was indeed the work of time, and of the tedious encroachments of ages, and " Popery was only seen behind Catho- licism as a faint shadow." The simple primitive Church gradually gave way to a hierarchical self- styled Church. What was yielded as a privilege, began to be extorted as a right. Bishops claimed a superiority over their yielding equals ; and the Roman bishops shared in the influence and hon- ors of the ancient metropolis of the world — a privilege they neither disrelished to enjoy, nor failed to improve. The ambition of the Church trod in the steps of her success, her errors of her ambition; but not before the Papacy and Hierarchy arose in her midst, lording it over God's heritage, did she properly merit the ap- pellation of Popery. Thenceforward her claim to be considered either as Christian or Catholic ceased; intoxicated with pride she plunged deep- er and deeper into corruption, ever ripening into maturity : her religion became a name and a form, and her pretensions a snare. Popery is therefore not Catholicism : it is Hierarchism, — " the religion of the priest, devised by the priest, for the glory of the priest, and in which a priestly caste is dominant." If we would examine a building as to its 20 PERILS OF POPERY. solidity, we naturally begin at its foundation, pro- ceeding upwards if we find it right ; but if wrong, the examination is at an end. A house founded upon the sand, however imposing or beautiful its appearance, is of no value ; because it cannot be occupied with any degree of safety. We should proceed upon exactly the same plan in the investi- gation of systems purporting to be of truth. In the Church of Rome, her assumed infallibility is, indeed, the base principle. Take this away, and the temple falls into ruins — the arch, deprived of its key-stone, dissolves of itself, and the magic spell is gone, that binds her votaries to all her other errors. It is in virtue of this divine attri- bute that she asserts her right to oblige all Chris- tians to receive the books of Scripture adjudged canonical by her, and to reject all others — to in- vest the Word of God with authority, to fix its sense, to add prerequisites to salvation to those contained in Scripture at her pleasure — and to de- cide all controversies respecting matters of faith. In a word, as it is employed in this Church, it " stamps an entirely new character on the Chris- tian religion, substitutes a new object of faith and dependence, deifies what is human, hides and cancels what is divine, and transfers our allegiance from God to mortals." PERILS OF POPERY. 21 It might be deemed a sufficient refutation of this doctrine, merely to advert to the fact, that in its obvious absurdity and alarming issues, it car- ries with it its own condemnation, — that its very proposal is an insult offered to the common sense of the reasoning part of mankind. But since it assumes an importance quite beyond its own, from its constituting the only distinguishing principle of the Papist, (we use the term in no uncourteous sense,) the great inlet and conserva- tor of all the egregious errors and scandalous prac- tices of the Papal Chufch, — since, like the fatal fabled box of Pandora, out of it have issued all the ills which distinguish its history, it may merit in this place a more distended though tran- sient notice. Since the argument urged in its favor by its advocates, from reason and Scripture, involves an appeal to private judgment, it therefore neutralizes itself. The assumption that, independent of an infallible guide, we can not come to any conclu- sion in respect to points of faith on which the conscience can safely rely, precludes the possibili- ty of our ever ascertaining with certainty , even supposing it to be abstractly true, the existence of such a tribunal. It is a question that can only be decided by Scripture testimony; and since nothing 22 PERILS OF POPERY. short of infallibility is authorized to interpret z7, it must ever be impossible for any fallible being to arrive at a safe conclusion as to the existence and seat of this high attribute ; unless we gratuitously assume the whole in favor of the Church of Rome, and afterwards receive her infallible sanction of our implicit faith and piety, based upon our bare groundless assumption : in which case, the de- cision terminates where it commenced — in mere fallibility. But how immense the disproportion between the foundation, and the majestic fabric it is to sustain ! What a glaring absurdity ! And yet, on no other principle can the question be ceded in favor of Rome. Thus, by a most fla- grant inconsistency, the argument for infallibility betrays itself. There is but one way to obviate this difficulty. It may be said that reason is competent to decide on this point, but that its competency terminates, — it is discharged from office, — when this is settled. That is to say, when the most impor- tant^ and indeed the most obscure point of faith is determined by private judgment, we need a higher court to adjudicate the minor difficulties! The argument, like an inverted pyramid, cannot stand. It is the 'most important point of faith, as we PERILS OP POPERY. 23 have observed, in the whole compass of the Popish system. To abandon all our religious and eternal interests, the supreme faculty of conscience, and glorious attribute of reason with which Hea- ven has endowed us, to the mercy and guidance of a hierarchy, either human or angelic, is a weighty concern — one that certainly demands, at all events, great caution, and overwhelming evi- dence : and it may be soberly questioned whether irresistible conviction might be deemed a sufficient motive to compliance, without possessing the Roman boast to receive it. But this doctrine of infallibility, supposing it to be true, is at least among the most obscure of the doctrines contained in the Bible. The argument collected from it and reason is merely presump- tive, when it ought to be positive. The proof is from passages of doubtful import, when it ought to be absolute; inferential, when it should be direct; and equivocal, where it should be de- cisive. It begs the question it ought to settle. The investigation resolves itself into two ques- tions : — I. Is there in existence an infallible community styling itself the Church? And, II. What community so styling itself is en- titled to this pretension ? 24 PERILS OP POPERY. The Scriptures are to decide on both these questions ; or if an appeal to the principles of reason be admitted, "the possession of infallibility by an individual, or by a number of individuals, is a matter of fact, whose truth must be evinced in the same manner as other facts." Since, then, the general question is insusceptible of the latter kind of evidence, the pretensions to infallibility assumed by the Church of Rome, solely rest on scripture testimony. And how lucid the class of texts produced for that purpose ! Such, for in- stance, as the promise of Christ to be always with his Apostles, and the promise of the Spirit to lead them into all truth ! And then, to vindicate the claims of the Church of Rome — the assumed primacy of Peter — the saying of Christ to him, " Upon this rock," referring more obviously to a weighty sentiment just uttered by the Apostle, than to himself, — u Upon this rock will I build my church," and the exclusive assignment of "the keys of the kingdom of Heaven" to him, are adduced. Much of this language, it will be perceived, is highly figurative and metaphorical ; and the con- nection of the whole with the pretensions of the Church of Rome, if there is any, extremely indis- tinct ; it is palpably such that an unbiased reader of the New Testament, ignorant of her preten- PERILS OF POPERY. 25 sions. could never stumble upon her claims, or conclude that they even taught the existence of any such living oracle. There is so much room for variation in the interpretation of the passages on which the Papists lay such great stress, that it would not perhaps be easy to find two commenta- tors in any community whose expositions perfectly coincide. But were it admitted that these passages are properly interpreted and paraphrased by the Popish divines, it still remains to be proved, that the Roman Church is that Church, in preference to the Greek, the Armenian, or the Nestorian. In order to this, historical evidence — unequivocal his- torical evidence — of two facts, is essential. First. That Peter exercised his episcopal office at Rome. And, secondly, that he devolved his pecu- liar power and prerogatives on his successors in that sacred office. He might have been at Rome, and not have exercised those functions there, or he might have done so, and yet not have devolved his powers on his successors — he might have trans- mitted them to some other see. Here a necessity is created for the assumption of numerous facts to sustain the pretensions of the Church of Rome. "That Peter was ever at Rome, we have no evidence but vague and un- certain tradition ; that he exercised the episcopal 26 PERILS OF POPERY. functions there, is still more uncertain, or rather extremely improbable, as it is neither insinuated in Scripture nor very consistent with his higher character and functions. But supposing both these points were conceded, what evidence have we of that devolution of his power and preroga- tives on his successors, on which the authority assumed by the Bishop of Rome entirely rests? From the language of Scripture and the testimony of antiquity, there is much more reason for affirm- ing that James the Less was Bishop of the Church at Jerusalem, than that Peter sustained that office at Rome ; and by a parity of reason, his sucessors must be supposed to have inherited his powers and his infallibility; and the rather, since the Church at Jerusalem was the mother of all other churches, planted, not by one, but by all the Apostles, and often dignified by their united presence, — a Church on which the redundance of spiritual gifts was first poured, and consecrated by the blood of the first martyr. If, in opposition to this, we are reminded that the succeeding bishops of Jerusalem derived from St. James the rights attached to the episcopal function, but not his personal prerogatives and immunities as an Apos- tle, — this very distinction applies precisely to the* successors of St. Peter." PERILS OF POPERY. 27 Such is the doctrine, and such its proofs and difficulties, that alone is submitted to the popular apprehension for judgment. We must admit that, (supposing it to be true,) it, at least, and above all others, not excepting even transubstan- tiation, (supposing it also to be a doctrine of the Bible,) requires an infallible decision to sustain it — a new revelation to bring it to light. Will it be contended that the other points of faith essen- tial to salvation, exceed this in obscurity? that any other requires for its solution a more profound acquaintance with history and antiquity, com- bined with a more critical acquaintance with Scripture, and the means of its just interpretation? Will it be contended that any are equally obscure, or so justly merit the signet of infallibility ? But we tarry not here. The shades thicken as we advance: and at every step the difficulties if possible, grow more insuperable to the most distant hope of ever arriving at a divine faith. The disagreement of the Romish divines as to the seat of this fond assumption, affords proof, not only of its absurdity, since it precludes the possi- bility of ever deriving the advantages from the doctrine plead as the reasonable ground of its be- lief; but also of the point we are establishing — its extreme obscurity. By one, the mere bull of the 28 PERILS OP POPERY. Pope is deemed sufficient to decide his faith ; by another, the decree of a council ; by a third, their united authority is required ; and by the fourth, the decision of the universal church is demanded. Now, how, in such circumstances, is a divine faith to be attained to ? If, for instance, a pontiff's bull and the decree of a council be at issue, (a case which has more than once occurred,) neither, ac- cording to these divines, is of universal obligation ; and the infallible authority, wherever it be sup- posed resident, has not decided: each will have its party, and what is deemed obligatory by one, will be rejected or questioned by the other. But if both concur in a decision, though there is a large majority perhaps who will submit to their decree, yet the fourth class, who hold infallibility to be seated in the church universal or diffusive, are likely to question its force. We might add, that with the latter, the pretension is virtually given up, since it can never be exerciesd, suppos- ing it to have an abstract existence ; for when has the whole church met to make decrees, to choose representatives, or to deliver their sentiments touching any question started ; and less than all, could not constitute the church universal, and so could not claim the prerogatives of infallibility ? Hence, on this hypothesis, it may be deemed for PERILS OP POPERY. 29 ever impracticable, as it has been through the past ages unexercised. Besides, how are the unlearned, who constitute the great mass, to decide between these interfering claims — to determine what is in- fallible truth ? If he be sent to the divines, since every one in his judgment is but a fallible man, the ignus fatuus still eludes his grasp. Again, since it comes within the province of reason to determine upon the existence of an in- fallible human tribunal on earth, and where it is to be found, every true Papist is supposed, not only to have ascertained the certain existence and seat of infallibility, but also to be so familiar with the annals of his church as to be incapable of having imposed upon him for infallible, merely human decisions, which is preposterous. But neither is its seat settled, nor, if it were, the data within the reach of the vast multitude upon which they can form an accurate judg- ment. Then history itself is not an infallible vehicle ; hence even those whose heads are filled with learned lore are left in jeopardy — a truth of which we have prima facie evidence in their conflicting opinions. To reap the advantages of this doc- trine, its recipient, no less than the tribunal it erects, should be insusceptible to error; and to c 30 PERILS OF POPERY. sustain it, objective and subjective infallibility are confounded. But supposing all these insuperable difficulties removed, there arises still another no less formi- dable. When hard pressed with the consequences resulting from the pretended infallibity of general councils, the modern advocates of the Popish system take refuge in the subtle and slippery dis- tinction which they allege exists between the doc- trines which are, and those which are not points of faith. It is on this principle they would main- tain consistency in their renunciation of the rights of the popes to interfere in temporal matters, the slavery of conscience, the violability of oaths taken to heretics, and the persecuting maxims of former ages. Now it cannot be denied that these princi- ples are not only couched in the decrees of coun- cils, but that they were never by any one disa- vowed ; that they were for ages acted upon as the infallible principles of the Church. Hence, by modern Papists, (at least in Protestant countries,) the Church is acknowledged to be at once fallible and infallible: one hemisphere of their minds who compose it illumed with celestial light ; the other, dark as midnight, or the infernal shades. Hence the necessity of ascertaining, on scriptural grounds, the true extent of this infallibility ; be- PERILS OF POPERY. 31 cause the extent to which we are to subject our- selves to its arbitrary control, is a matter as much to be determined by Scripture, as the obligation in any sort or degree to acknowledge its authority and bow to its decisions. So that the doctrine of infallibility, even could we cede its abstract truth, rests on the obscurest passages of Scripture, which in no way distinguish the Church in which it is to be found, in what portion of that community so styling itself it resides, or to what extent its authority is to be admitted. Is it reasonable, is it credible, does it come within the range of possibilities, I ask, that the most important, and yet most obscure of points of faith — the all-comprehending point — the pivot upon which turns the very possibility of our sal- vation — the mighty centre around which is to re- volve all our hopes — the basis of all subsequent acts of faith— that that upon which is suspended our everlasting destinies; — is it possible, I ask, that that great principle should be permitted, by the Great Head of the Church, to be submitted to our unbiassed judgments, while things of second- ary importance are scrupulously reserved for the decisions of that august tribunal, whose dread bar is erected on the decisions of our mere fallibility ? In other words, that the sun, the centre of the 32 PERILS OF POPERY. mighty system of truth, by the reflection of whose refulgent beams all the secondaries shine and burn, is alone opaque and dark? A strange phenomenon this ! But is it possible ? No : the history of (he as- sumption is alone sufficient to expose the impos- ture. It is certain that in the first centuries of Christianity the claim to infallibility was not in any form preferred by the Church of Rome. When it was set up, it was in the form of a per- sonal appropriation by the Roman bishop, and for ages attributed to him by the Church in connexion with the Roman see ; and it was not till after the popes had grossly abused their arrogant preten- sion, till after the scandalous schism and conduct of rival popes had impaired the dignity of the office or the blind veneration it so long enjoyed, and the councils of Constance and Basil had challenged and exercised a supremacy over the bishops of Rome, that their pretensions to infalli- bility were called in question ; and the world at length discovered that for ages the Church had been mistaken as to the seat of her boasted in- fallibility. Are we still directed by the perplexed and astonished votary of this system, who professes to prostrate at once his reason and his faith before its PERILS OP POPERY. 33 majesty, to the Church for its solution? Would he still send us to this living oracle — this abomi- nation of desolation sitting in the temple of God? . Shall we, we inquire in return, ask the impostor to reveal himself, the robber to confess his dis- honesty, or the murderer his guilt ? Nay but, we continue, if we are sufficiently infallible to decide for ourselves the weightier matters of the law, we are not too fallible to adjudicate for ourselves the lighter ones. So trusting to the Bible and common sense, with the Divine blessing upon them, we leave you to take care of the infalli- bility of the Church, while ice try to secure our souls, our money, and our liberties. This lofty pretension was the fruit of a pride marked with the highest character of impiety. It naturally fostered and enhanced an ambition of which it was the offspring, and produced besides a high-toned persecuting intolerance and ensan- guined cruelty. Not merely were these the prac- tical manifestations of the pride of the Church under the benign auspices of this infallibility; but they were solemnly sanctioned and recorded as its established principles : nor have they to this hour been disowned by this authority. Nor need we wonder, that, having aspired to usurp this celestial attribute, and to dissolve his creatures 34 PERILS OF POPERY from their allegiance to the Most High, by effect- ing the disruption of their faith from His word to itself, it should next aspire to supremacy among the powers that are ordained of God, lay its hand upon the thrones of princes, and add to its bold impiety towards God a proportionate injustice and cruelty to man. From this absurd, preposterous, and arrogant pretension might be anticipated two consequences equally fatal to religion and to society, supposing it to be as successful as the assumption is bold and impious. These conseqences are, — the awful corruption of religion, if not the renunciation of all its distinguishing principles ; the superinduc- tion upon it of a system of delusion calculated to subserve the evil passions, whence the lofty pre- tension originated: and, secondly, a total in- susceptibility, an inherent and eternal hostility to melioration or improvement. And these propo- sitions we now proceed more fully to evince and apply. 35 CHAPTER II. POPERY SUBVERSIVE OF RELIGION AND SOCIAL ORDER. Adapted to subserve the purposes of avarice and ambition, Popery is manifestly the invention of spiritual wickedness in high places ; and con- sequently subversive of religion, disastrous in all its tendencies, and malignant in all its aspects upon society, as it has been ruinous throughout the whole sphere of time in exact proportion to the absoluteness of its control. Were any piece of mechanism submitted to our examination in order that we might ascertain its purpose, we would naturally compare the mutual relations of the parts, and the adaptation of the whole machinery to the proper end. This might be a difficult task if we were without the data requisite to ordinary minds to arrive at that end, though possible to minds of a more analytic and yet comprehensive order; if, for instance, one had never seen a similar contrivance, or never by observation or instruction had formed an idea of its operation by a comparison with 36 PERILS OF POPERY. which he may readily arrive at the discovery of the purpose it is fitted to answer. But it would be a material assistance in ascertaining the mo- dus operandi of such a system ; it would greatly relieve, if not entirely remove the difficulty, even to a dull man, of analyzing the mutual relations of the several parts, and the relation of the whole to the end to which it is adapted, not only to see the machinery in motion, but from the experience of ages to have evidence that their unimpeded motions and its unimpaired operation hold the ne- cessary relation to each other of cause and effect. In illustration of this point let us employ an ancient town clock. The oldest inhabitants of the town or village testify to its cffice from their earliest recollection ; their fathers testified it to them. The curious visitor unfamiliar with such mechanism, on examining the machinery as we have supposed, and finding its perfect adaptation to the end which he has been informed it has from time immemorial subserved, would not for an instant doubt the nature and use of the system of machinery. Or would an intelligent inquirer ? because it had been permitted to run down, was impaired by time, or prevented by the rust per- mitted to form, or the dust to accumulate upon its works, from keeping as good time as the sys~ PERILS OP POPERY. 37 tern is evidently adapted to attain under more favorable circumstances, and as it formerly did, deny its adaptation to that end, or be imposed upon by any one to believe, that its relation is and has always been to some other end, which it has never answered, and to which, judging from the result of its examination, it has as little relation as the Popish system is calculated to subserve the purposes of true religion? The genius of Popery ascertains its tendencies, its history, its actual results ; and both will illus- trate what we might anticipate, and would realize from its future free operation. From its history and genius Popery is chiefly to be distinguished as a usurpation. This is its inalienable, essential, identifying, and all-com- prising feature from the beginning. Power and opulence were the objects of its ambition, and of its steady pursuit. The spirit of the system, a spirit of usurpation and encroachment, assumed and formed that organization through which it operated, instead of the system moulding it; and gradually assi- milated the whole Catholic world to itself, and to its gloomy purposes. This became the great regulator ; the Pope became the great centre of a Catholicism and a unity, not in doctrine or in 38 PERILS OF POPERY. Christian experience, but in encroachr 0611 *? an " the whole Church conspired to establish her own greatness by confirming and augme xltm & tile authority of her acknowledged head. < * ° exa " the Church was to aggrandize religion, t0 ensure to the spirit the victory over the flesh, a n( * to Go( * the conquest of the world. Such were lts maxims" from the time of Hildebrtf 11 "! m these, ambition found its advantage, anci lana ~ ticism its excuse." They are doubtle, 3S stl11 lts maxims, since the whole hierarchy ha s common cause with the Pontiff. When Papal P**** was empress of the world, they were it? P rmces > nobles, and rulers in connection with ^ lm ' and the instruments of his power. He r bishops, cardinals and legates, dared to insulf and me ~ nace monarchs with impunity, and t° tram P le legitimate authority beneath their feet; Subor- dination to the Pontificial authority is? has ever been, the paramount principle of pPP el T lts bulwark — its constitution, on which are sus ~ pended all other laws and regulations, things ^ to be abrogated and modified to corresjf onci Wlt " the color of the Pontiff's whim, or suit the ever " veering rule of expediency. All m ust Y ieici to the exaltation of the Papacy; at its slirine every sentiment of truth and piety was sacri hced, PERILS OF POPERY. 39 and religion and Christianity immolated to its gloomy and ambitious genius. The rights of Heaven and of earth were usurped to exalt this aspiring hierarch. It was not meet that the Vicar of Christ, designated God by a Roman emperor ; invested by writers and commentators of the Church with a universal dominion, not content with this world, which bounds the am- bition of earth's mightiest heroes, but reaching into the invisible ; not only invested by them with Divine attributes and honors, but exalted above Deity in some respects ; subjecting to his control the eternal and immutable distinctions of right and wrong, virtue and vice, and thus dissolving his creatures from their allegiance to the Most High ; it was not meet, I say, that he should be subject to any temporal jurisdiction: he should rather be considered jaredivino, secular ruler of the universe. And it was natural to transfer the allegiance of the inferior orders of the clergy, who enjoyed a handsome participation in the Pope's plenitude of power, whose stupendous function it was to make God their Creator, and who constituted the body, the Church, of which his Holiness was the head, and ambition and the lust of dominion the divinity within, animating and actuating all its members, from princes to 40 PERILS OF POPERY. the Pope, and thus bind them to the pontifical throne. These principles to which the Papacy itself gave rise, were carried out in all their bear- ings. History reflects its light upon them in letters of inextinguishable infamy. Accordingly, kings and potentates were degraded into sub- jection ; were treated as vassals ; were held amenable to the pontificial authority, their laws interdicted and repealed, and their decrees coun- termanded: they were ^approved, condemned, re- buked, or anathematized, according to the will and humor of his Holiness ; were dethroned, and the allegiance of their subjects absolved ; and the rights of nations, of the Church, and the univer- sal rights of man, were trampled upon by this insolent usurper. A more particular survey of the rise and pro- gress of the Papacy will be important to the further elucidation of the subject. During the first three centuries, Christianity remained comparatively pure and unadulterated ; though even in the apostolic age the mystery of iniquity had begun to work, and the spirit of encroachment and compromise was stealthily ad- vancing. In the fourth, by the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, and his becoming head of the Church, and advancing it in wealth and PERILS OF POPERY. 41 influence, a state of things was brought about favorable to the development of that downward tendency. And early in the seventh, when by the grant of Phocas, the Roman patriarch was constituted universal bishop, the pontificiate was permanently established, which prepared the way for all that tragic history of the Church which follows. Amid the universal wreck of virtue and excellence in Europe — amidst the irruption and settlement of the Saracens in the South, the fierce and bloody conflicts of barbarous ari$ pagan nations in the North, the universal cor- ruption of religion and decay of learning, the Papal power attained in the eighth century to an unexpected height; and that alliance was formed between superstition and despotism, which for many succeeding ages proved the scourge of mankind. In this century the nomi- nal authority of the enfeebled imperial power was shaken off ; the Eastern and Western divi- sions of the empire dissolved their connection ; the infamous Pepin expiated his perfidy to his master by liberal donations to the Church, and repaid the assistance and proved his gratitude to the Pontiff for his crown, by raising him to the dignity of a secular prince. The alliance be- tween the king of the Franks and the Roman 42 PERILS OF POPERY. Pontiff was confirmed by mutual necessities, and strengthened by mutual obligations. Char- lemagne, Pepin's son and successor, a man of surprising genius, as he was of unbounded ambition, threw the iEgis of his protection over the Roman see ; and for his additional donations of several cities and provinces to the Pope, under the specious pretext of atoning for his sins by his munificence to the Church, but in fact rather prompted by policy than piety, he had conferred upon him by the latter, as the reward of his patronage and pious obedience to the Church, and amid the acclamations of the Roman people, the title of Emperor, to which he had ardently aspired. Thus, by two usurpations, and the mutual support of the usurpers, was the Papacy invested with a temporal dominion. Pepin usurped the Frankish throne, by the consent and confirmation of the pontiffs, Zachary and Stephen, who thereby usurpatively assumed the character of supreme arbiters of the nations, deposers and creators of kings and emperors. The enormous powers acquired over the successors of the bar- barian conquerors of the Western provinces by the Roman Pontiff, rendered it impolitic for the usurper to transact so important an affair without his concurrence: and Pepin and his successor PERILS OF POPERY. 43 secured a temporal principality to the successors of the poor and humble Peter, and strengthened the power of the Church, in hopes of retaining their usurped dominion through the means which had acquired it. The example of Zachary and Stephen was imitated by John XII., as unhappy in his fate, as scandalous in his promotion, who transferred the government of Rome from the King of Italy to the German monarch, and for his service in ridding the Roman Church and people of the oppressive yoke of Berenger II., proclaimed Otho, Emperor of the Romans. The Germanic emperors, actuated by a similar motive to the Frankish monarchs, yet maintaining the prerogatives of suzerein lords, strengthened the Papacy, but at the peril of their own authority, till the reptile their bosoms warmed, inflicted a deadly wound upon themselves. But it was reserved for the original and power- ful genius of Hildebrand, after reigning in several preceding Popes, to conceive and execute the bold and magnificent design of erecting a politico- ecclesiastical despotism upon the ruins of legi- timate government in the Papal world. Aided by a conjuncture of circumstances peculiarly favorable to his ambitious project ; the Germanic Empire weakened by intestine broils; a young 44 PERILS OP POPERY. and dissipated monarch on the throne of France ; a great part of Spain under the dominion of the Moors; the kingdoms of the North but newly converted ; Italy broken into a number of petty principalities ; and England recently conquered by the Romans, he proceeded to subject priests, princes and people to his unbounded control. By dissolving their connection with the kings and emperors and imposing upon them a universal celibacy, he rendered the priesthood subject to the despotic government and the arbitrary power of the Pontiff alone; changed the entire hierarchy into a monkish order ; made bishops and abbots as well as inferior clergy the myrmidons of his power; arid bound the universal Church in chains. Thence he proceeded to extend his jurisdiction to emperors, kings, and princes. France, Saxony, Spain, and England, he claimed as tributaries or fiefs of the Apostolic See, de- manding their tribute with an arrogance only equalled by its unblushing effrontery, and pro- posed to the King or Emperor of the Romans an oath of allegiance as the profession of his sub- jection to the pontificial throne. The crusades, and a concurrence of circumstances, in after ages confirmed his authority, and extended his prero- gatives and dominions. Every favorable junc- PERILS OF POPERY. 45 ture was seized with avidity as it was sought with vigilance by the aspiring pontiffs ; but here we behold that comprehensive system of spiritual despotism achieved, which formed the basis of all the future history of Popery up to the Reform- ation. Then and thenceforward, a voice from the Vatican struck terror to the hearts of men, and shook the pillars of once mighty thrones. He who resisted a bull of the Pope, was subjected to the perils of excommunication, which not only rendered the autfionty of the mightiest monarchs exceedingly precarious, but in fact, jeoparded their persons; for it was generally accompanied or followed by the absolution of their subjects from their allegiance, and subjected the proscribed prince or monarch to the perils of a world enslaved and inspired by a dangerous and cruel superstition. Kingdoms and empires were created, and potentates deposed or exalted, at his imperious will ; they received their crowns at his hands, or yielded them up at his pleasure. If they had the temerity to withstand his man- date, they were often seen at last trembling and prostrate at his feet; princes on foot led his palfrey by the reins, in token of their homage ; what arms had failed to accomplish, superstition did ; mighty nations who were invincible to the D 46 PERILS OF POPERY. arms and the policy of the mightiest generals of pagan Rome, brought their tribute, and others threw themselves into the embrace of the " crowned priest," and all the world cowered be- fore him, and stood in terror of his voice, as all the beasts of the earth when the lion roareth. The usurpations of Popery, primarily promoted by a spirit of compromise and imposture, were afterwards advanced and sustained by every spe- cies of corruption, intolerance, cruelty, and oppres- sion: while these wsre the fruit and offspring of usurpation, they also exerted a reflex influence on their common origin. Popery accommodated itself to every thing — to every condition of society and every principle of human nature — that was calculated to enhance its popularity, promote its as- cendency, and strengthen its usurpations. What a medley of contradictions, what a multitude of inconsistencies does it exhibit ! What vice, what crimes, has it not directly or indirectly sanctioned ! What error, that could minister to its greatness, has it not admitted and taught! Well has it been characterized as the deepest conception, and mightiest achievement of Satan — an ample net for catching men — a delusion and bondage made for the world — a stupendous deception and uni- versal counterfeit of truth, which hath a chamber PERILS OF POPERY. 47 for every natural faculty of the soul, and an occu- pation for every energy of the natural spirit. This was the necessary result of its genius. It compromised all that was distinctive and glorious in Christianity away, because it answered not the ends of its ambition, and as little suited its dispo- sition and perverted taste. It was, therefore, a barter for power and influence, for worldly wealth and grandeur. The perfect equality of believers teachers and people, in the sight of God, which was the scriptural and primitive order, was not calculated to promote the priesthood — to make them lords over God's heritage — to awe the people into profound reverence and submission to their spiritual guides — to deliver them over bound and gagged by superstition into their hands : and the simple doctrine of salvation by grace or justifica- tion by faith, was not likely to fill and replenish the overflowing coffers of the Church. With these, as they were the two grand governing prin- ciples of Christianity, the one to rule her polity, and the other her doctrine, were swept away the main fortresses of the Church, and she laid open to the inroad of every base error, and to the intru- sion of every idolatrous and impure rite. Neither could minister to the intoxicated ambition of a princely pontiff thirsting after fresh orgies. The 48 PERILS OF POPERY. power of the priestly caste, and the reign of super- stition and ignorance, were essential to the success of the aspirant. The former must sustain his throne, and the latter form its palladium. Hence it was his true policy to add to the meretricious magnificence of the Church by every fruitful ex- pedient — to incorporate into Christian worship a base compound of Jewish and Pagan rites and ceremonies, which had been insensibly stealing upon the Church from the beginning, with the rising hierarchy in its midst — to put these and the priesthood in the foreground — to strike the senses of the multitude, and awe and confound them into superstition and subjection — to turn their attention to the priest, armed with his awful and new-invented functions for salvation — to adopt new tenets apologetical of these rites — to erect his own pretensions in proportion to the ascent of their importance — to keep Christianity and her Bible in the back ground, — and yet to hang out the sign of Holy Roman Catholic Church ! Better had she inscribed it with the apocalyptic amendment, Ci Mystery, Babylon !" Her imposition in the name of Christianity was no less subsidiary to her usurpations than her compromises. She must make the people believe that the adopter of the mitre and vestments of the PERILS OF POPERY. 49 priest of Cybele, was the divinely constituted Vicar of Christ, and the sustainer of the tiara, the legitimate successor of the humble fisherman Apostle. She must insist upon being, and seek to palm herself upon the world for, old Calholo- cism or Christianity. Both anti-Catholic and anti- Christian, she yet insists, with an unblushing effrontery, upon these claims, and urges them with a hardened and practiced facility. Arrayed in the pomps and vanities of paganism and the world — combined with some constitutions of Juda- ism, and tinctured with pagan philosophy — she professes to be old Christianity, as primitive as the Apostles. With her Papacy, indebted in no small degree to the infamous Decretals, for many "ages the arsenal of Rome,"* for its exaltation, she still persists in her claims to be ancient * In this collection of alleged decrees of the Popes, the most ancient bishops, contemporaries, Tacitus and Quintilian, were made to speak the barbarous Latin of the ninth century. The customs and constitutions of the Franks were gravely attributed to the Romans in the time of the Emperors. Popes quoted the Bible in the Latin translation of St. Jerome, who lived one, two, or three centuries after them. And Victor, Bishop of Rome in the year 192, wrote to Theophilus, who was Archbishop of Alex- andria in 385. The impostor who had fabricated this collection, endeavored to prove that all bishops derived their authority from 50 PERILS OF POPERY. Catholocism. Its priesthood, alien to the Chris- tian dispensation, arrogating the name and attri- butes of the Church, to the exclusion of the great community of believers, thus wresting from them their common rights, interposing a veil which Christ himself had rent, which was attested by the rending veil of the Jewish temple, and deny- ing the right of believers to access ivithin the veil to a free throne of grace ; they have persisted in maintaining to be of primitive and divine institu- tion. Pretended successors of the humble Peter, her haughty pontiffs have been arrayed in the vestments, and loaded with the honors of royalty. The disciples of the meek and lowly Jesus, who has said, " My kingdom is not of this world," she is intolerant, ambitious, and covered with the blood of his saints. Accommodated to meet every variety, condition, and circumstance of hu- man nature, but in its regenerate state, she would palm herself on the world for the only true Church the Bishop of Rome, who held his own immediately from Christ. He not only recorded all the successive acquisitions of the Pon- tiffs, but carried them back to the earliest times. The Popes did not blush to avail themselves of this contemptible imposture. As early as 865, Nicholas I. selected weapons from this repository to attack princes and bishops. — D'Aubine's History of the Reforma- tion. New-York ed. 1843, pp. 25, 26. PERILS OF POPERY. 51 or religion. What hypocrisy was needed, what lying miracles, what a system of legerdemain ! To gain the ends of her ambition, it became necessary to renounce Christianity ; and yet they could not be secured but in her name. They forged it : her hand never subscribed it to a * Popish scroll ! Hence her prohibition of the people to read the Scriptures. She hates the light, and will not come to the light, lest her deeds should be re- proved. It is a course of policy dictated by its necessity to her very existence. This prohibition is evidence of her self-consciousnes of its condem- nation of her pretensions. She never would de- prive her subjects of the right or restrict their privilege to read the Scriptures could she hope any thing from the appeal, and did she not know that they would detect her enormities and unveil her impostures. Protestant Christianity, on the contrary, appeals to the Holy Scriptures, is wil- ling to rest its pretensions on their authority alone, and feels conscious of greatest security where they are best known. Confident that they vindicate and establish her claim to the great principles of primitive Christianity, she urges the people to read them ; and flings them forth without fear or hesitation, without note or com- 52 PERILS OF POPERY. ment, or even living teacher, to be wielded by the Eternal Spirit. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was preceded and accompanied by the revival of letters. The two revivals, literary and religious, went hand in hand, like twin- sisters, mutually sustaining each other. The age of Renchlin and Erasmus was that of Luther and Melancthon ; the former, at the head of the literati, the latter, of the theologians. The trans- lation of the Scriptures, and their mighty circu- lation, was the soul and energy in the Reforma- tion. The same impression was produced in the minds of the learned who read them in the origi- nals, and of the illiterate, who read them in the vulgar tongues. As soon as they began to read them, they also began to conclude that, if the Bible be the Word of God, Popery must be the invention of man ; and at every step as they ad- vanced the conviction strengthened. Ignorance in her subjects was essential to the success of the impostor; and hence, it became necessary to deprive them by every artful expe- dient of the only Book which could reveal her to their view. To secure this end, the doctrine of infallibility was a grand and successful stroke of policy, since it drew general attention from the Bible to the priesthood, saved the people the PERILS OP POPERY. 53 trouble of thinking for themselves, a privilege tor which they are often but too grateful; and in pro- portion to the advance of priestly power, the man- date of authority succeeded with the few who still preferred the right to think for themselves, to the privilege of being thought for by others. Since ignorance was essential to the progress and perpetuity of the errors of the Church, the more profound and universal the better for her; and hence that universal and universally prevalent ignorance and unquestioning submission which has ever overhung and pervaded Papal Christen- dom: — Silence how dead ! and darkness how profound ! A religious imposture, devised for the purposes of usurpation, could not fail to engender, or to be advanced by every species of corruption. Good fruit never grew on such an evil tree ; nor did a sweet stream ever flow from such a bitter and impure fountain. The deeper the priesthood steeped in crime, the better were they prepared to promote the sordid purposes of the hierarchy. Hence, the very head of the Catholic world was the very fountain of the licentiousness that over- spread it. ^Mi the clerical orders emulated the 54 PERILS OF POPERY. Pontiff in immorality, and every species of vice. The nearer the throne the more impure the stream — for Rome herself was proverbially and notoriously a sink of iniquity; and where her superstitions were most firmly riveted, the public mind and mariners were most degraded. It was the main axiom of their policy that no falsehood, no perfidy, no injustice, no cruelties, that could secure and promote the interests of the Church, the hierarchy, were inadmissible — that the means sanctifies the end. Every institution of the Church became, in the hands of the priests, pro- motive of vice. The various errors to which Popery gave rise, or which she ripened into maturity, weakened or destroyed the awful and salutary sanctions of re- ligion, as they set at sale the privilege of perpe- trating ^the grossest crimes in consistency with exemption from future punishment: for even out of purgatory the priest could release the most scandalous sinners for money. For what crimes would not confession atone ? and the Pope could grant even indulgence to sin to the end of life. It is vain to attempt to parry this blow ; for what- ever face Jesuitical sophistry would put on these doctrines to justify them in the eyes of the en- lightened of our age, it is notorious that they PERILS OF POPERY. 55 were taught the multitude, and held by them in their licentious forms ; and in the popular forms, they are most congenial with the genius and spirit of the system. Over all the moral relations and duties, his Holiness presumed to exercise un- bounded control — to enforce and confirm, or to annul them at his pleasure. What atrocity, what career of vice, even persevered in to the last, was inconsistent with salvation, when accompa- nied with subjection and liberality to the Church? And yet the most eminent virtue, and the most ardent piety, were incompatible with it, where that profound submission was withheld, or that unbounded authority questioned. These errors which corrupted the people, en- riched the hierarchy, and they advanced its pow- er by the popular reverence and fear they extorted in its favor. The very immorality of the people prepared them to be the dupes of the priests by the ignorance and superstition it created; and the more debased the priesthood, the better were they fitted to take advantage with impunity from conscience of the popular degradation. Thus the ministers of Rome became the ministers of crime ; and the Papal world worshipped at the altars of the Church, dedicated to vice in the name of Christianity, like the modern atheists, 56 PERILS OP POPERY. who did homage to impiety in the name of rea- son. So nearly are the systems related in their results. The minds of the more discerning vi- brated between infidelity and superstition. The former made them uneasy of the restraints of virtue, the latter cancelled them by divine autho- rity; so that in either case, they were relieved from the embarrassing fears of future consequen- ces. Perhaps Pagan Rome was never so atheis- tic as Papal Rome. We may well be ready to conclude that so deep corruption and folly, armed with such unlimited power, would be essentially intolerant and cruel in the administration of its principles throughout the entire range of their operation. It was even so. The tender mercies of this wicked hierarchy were cruel! — what then their cruelty itself? By the experience of ages, they acquired the art of torture to perfection ! That irreconcilable hatred to Protestants, which is utterly inseparable from (misnamed) Catholocism, pervaded the whole mass or body, from the vitals to the ex- tremes of the extremities ; and the whole Popish world breathed an atmosphere of threatening and slaughter against heretics. Merciful, just God ! what scenes of corruption and cruelty, of martyr- dom and blood, the historic page unfolds ! Much PERILS OP POPERY. 57 more minutely, and vividly, and awfully is it written by Thy hand of vengeance in the book of Thy Omniscience ! Cruelty, treachery, and crime of all descriptions, are the concomitants and offspring of usurpation. Usurped authority is unsettled, because it is ille- gitimate ; and therefore the usurper is suspicious of danger when there is not even its shadow. But shadows and phantoms are sufficient to make the stout heart tremble, when the hand of con- science points to guilt, and justice invokes ven- geance. Guilt, if not natural disposition, makes the usurper a tyrant also, and thus propagates itself. Conscience sometimes becomes seared to any impression of humanity or generosity: it may become nature by habit to be ungenerous and inhuman, and then ivanton cruelty may as- sume the place of what originally proceeded from a real or supposed necessity or peril. This is the secret of Popish cruelty; and it is partly wanton, though it was also necessary to self- preservation. Power, usurped by the tedious encroachments of ages, is too tenacious of its privileges and emoluments readily to be given up — it must be jealously watched over and guarded; and religion, justice, and future retribu- tion are but bugbears to its unprincipled posses- 58 PERILS OF POPERY. sors. Hence the intolerance and cruelties of Rome upon system ; always in proportion to her ability to manifest the one, and to inflict the other. Like the robber, who, to escape detection, adds murder to theft, or the assassin, who to con- ceal his crime repeats it ; Rome has extermina- ted heretics to prevent her own detection, or, to change the figure, imbrued her hands in the blood of its witnesses, least they should convict her be- fore mankind of her perfidy to the murdered truth. The vanity that prompted its aspirings, had alone been sufficient to produce this characteristic result of the Popish system. The claim to be the only true Church would of itself have produced intolerance; and resistance, by wounding the pride that created it, would insure vengeance in proportion to her ability to inflict it. Non-resist- ance or non-existence would have been the alter- native proposed to its enemies by inflated human nature, clothed with an exclusive fancied or pre- tended sanctity and divine authority. Intolerance and persecution have ever been found in intimate connexion with imposture and exclusive claims. To vanity then, added to imposture, and wan- tonness from habit, is to be ascribed the intolerant and persecuting spirit of Rome. PERILS OF POPERY. 59 Itself despotic, Popery is the friend and ally of despotism, the parent of atheism, and womb of anarchy. The despotisms political and religious are akin, and naturally coalesce. It cannot be otherwise; for while there is a germ of liberty in the human mind either is insecure : where the passion for civil freedom predominates in character, hierarchical oppresions are likely to excite resistance, and vice versa. To crush every feeling and aspiration of liberty, or to hold a brittle rein, every moment liable to be snapt, is the only alternative. If association is allowed to be a test of cha- racter, the character of Popery is indubious from its cherished and continuous association with despotism. Its earliest voluntary association was with usurpation, which it aided into birth, and faithfully, though not disinterestedly, nourished and sustained. It was the axiom of the ancient emperors from the time of Charlemagne, nor was it less the policy of Pepin, that to exalt the Church was to confirm and secure their own authority. It is exactly the same maxim that is embodied in the famous lectures of Schlegel, and doubtless recognised and reviving in the old despotisms of Europe — that Popery and des- potism are natural allies. The most perfect 60 PERILS OP POPERY. system of Church and State — the beau ideal of Popish statesmen — is to have a Pope at the head of the former, an emperor at the head of the latter : the object is, that the Pope should rivet the chains the emperor imposes. We cede the principle they assume, (it is just in point for our argument,) that they mutually support each other; but Popery is in the arrears to the secular despots for investing her with an ability to triumph over themselves, and reign empress of the world. She will conspire with them against the universal liber- ties of mankind, when herself cannot reign abso- lute, in hopes of attaining that end at last; but only waits opportunity to seize the reins herself, to make even kings the tributaries of her throne, at the disposal of her caprices. Nor is Popery in- consistent with herself, when she is thus time- serving. Unhappily for mankind and for the interests of religion, its counterfeits have been in every age found in this association. Hence, by many who have not had the sagacity or the disposition to distinguish true religion from superstition, they have been confounded together, and itself re- garded as an instrument of oppression. Where- ever the prelacy is invested with the peerage, and the state provides for the support of the PERILS OF POPERY. 61 ministers of religion ; where mitered infidels and a secular church are its acknowledged representa- tives ; the truth and purity of religion is consi- dered by the great as of very trivial consequence. Taught to regard the establishment as a creature of government, it is thought no sacrilege to employ it as an engine of oppression ; nor will its ministers, it is to be feared, be likely to scruple much to twist its creed to meet the exigences of the times, and to conform to the policy of the government. Thus deleterious is the influence of the unnatural and anti-Christian union of Church and State, in every case, on religion. The fatal appendages of pomp and power superadded by human invention, resulting from this connection, become the splendid tomb of its spirit, of all that is vital in Christianity, or rather the signal of its departure. But Popery is peculiarly fitted, has an adaption per se from its construction, throughout its entire system, to subserve the end of oppression, and from the spirit of usurpation that animates its operations. If princes have employed it as an instrument of oppression, the instrument has been no less fatal to themselves than their subjects ; and it is the hope of future empire, as well as present emolu- ment, that inspirits the partizans of Rome in 62 PERILS OF POPERY. favor of the despotisms of the earth. Primitive, and truly Protestant Christianity, have never stood in this connection. Their genius and his- tory are the opposite. They teach and main- tain all the great franchises of men. To these we owe the liberal spirit and institutions of our age, and are indebted for all that is peculiar, and excellent, and glorious in our republican institu- tions ; which continue to depend on Christianity for their support, as they owe to her their erection. The two great enemies whose prevalency is most to be dreaded by the nations of the earth, both anti-social, and therefore anti-republican, are atheistic anarchy and ecclesiastical despo- tism. The reign of both, emphatically the reign of terror, Providence has permitted, probably for a warning to all future generations of their re- spective characters. The tendencies of the prin- ciples of both, are awfully commented upon in their histories; and doubtless their practical re- sults would be invariable, supposing them to have " full swing," in future experiments. It is somewhat singular, that systems, appa- rently so opposite and so hostile to each other, should conduce and arrive at the same end — the subversion of good government ; the one leading PERILS OF POPERY. 63 directly to despotism, the other to anarchy, thence terminating in despotism : but such is the fact. The atheists of France deemed the utter extinc- tion of ecclesiastical despotism, and with it of re- ligion and all its appendages, absolutely essential to the preservation of the liberty achieved in their revolution ; but, in the experiment, they plunged into the abysses of a wilder disorder — the chaos of anarchy. Both have evinced them- selves inconsistent alike with the civil and reli- gious rights of man. Were this or any other enlightened nation to pass through the fires of Popery, supposing its germ of liberty uncon- sumed in the flame, its next evolution would most naturally be into popular scepticism. The deformed caricature of Christianity which Po- pery exhibits, is calculated to drive men into deism, and thence into the avowal of down- right atheism : since men, indisposed to examine the truth of Christianity unembodied in its pro- fession, and failing to distinguish between true and false religion, or to penetrate beyond the mere name, will hastily conclude it better to have no religion at all, than to renounce their liberties, — when to tolerate religion is, in their estimation, to endure despotism. This most tri- umphantly establishes the importance of " pure 64 PERILS OP POPERY. religion" as the basis of government, especially its popular form. Since the obligations and sanctions of religion are so indispensible to the utility of all the forms of government and the stability of social order, that is most friendly which is neither calculated to tempt the renun- ciation of religious obligation on the one hand by its oppressions, nor into tame submission on the other by its superstitions. Truly Protestant Christianity, in all those great principles which constitute the rallying points of all her disciples, steers clear of both these difficulties. She does not propose to thinking men the awful alternative of renouncing their reason and their God, or their sacred liberties. It has been said, that Rome is but human nature exalted, and displaying some of its worst propensities ; and, we may add, armed with its most licentious principles. And of all the mani- festations of that fallen nature, Popery is the worst, since it sanctifies all its evils to the service of religion ; and has thus corrupted and rendered void the purest and holiest religion ever promul- gated on earth. It is the worst of despotisms, as it is pillared on religion's counterfeit — super- stition : the worst of usurpations, for it affects a divine right, and, clad in the habiliments of sane- PERILS OF POPERY. 65 tity, seizes in the name of Heaven: the worst species of intolerance and persecution, since it gratifies the basest and most malignant passions, under pretence of advancing the glory of God, and the salvation of his creatures. Nor is the bodily organization of that nature better adapted to its present mode of existence, perfect as is that adaptation, and unsuitable to any other mode, than is the Popish system to advance these unhallowed objects. 66 CHAPTER III. REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTI-REPUBLICAN AND ANTI-SOCIAL ASPECTS OF POPERY CONTINUED, AND APPLIED TO THE PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF REPUBLICAN NORTH AMER- ICA. It is a position capable of the clearest manifestation that a republican government is more susceptive to the control of Popery than any of the other forms, on the supposition that its people only equal in intelligence the subjects of the other governments, or that the majority are under its religious influence. In monarchies, whether limited or absolute, but especially in the latter, the power of the emperor or king seems to be a salutary counterpoise to the power of the priesthood; prevents its becoming absolute and universal, and represses the ambition of the Pope by intimidating encroachment; though history proves that conjunctures may occur in which even this formidable obstacle may be insufficient. In a republican government, on the contrary, where the majority rule, there is no check but what exists in the people themselves to the en- PERILS OF POPERY. 67 croachments of the priesthood ; no superior, civil power to contest with them the absolute subjec- tion of the people : hence, if they are only igno- rant and pious enough to submit to the arbitrary government of the Pope and his priests, to sur- render themselves, with all their present and eter- nal interests to their safe-keeping, the contest is at an end. In a republic, if they but eradicate the difficulties which lie in the way of their success with the populace, their work is effected. In the monarchical, after they have succeeded with the people, they have yet to combat the more for- midable influences of the ambition and power of the throne. So that, in the supposed circum- stances, monarchical government seems to be a necessary check to the encroachments of Papal ambition. But whence, it may be asked, whence the na- tural coalescence and continuous association of Popery with the despotisms of the earth, if the republican form of government is so suitable to her success? For the obvious reason, that, though presenting a more direct path to success, her sway would be more precarious : since, in a republic, where no military despot is supposed to exist ta protect his natural ally, the Church, the surprises of resistance to hierarchical oppressions are more 68 PERILS OF POPERY. to be dreaded, and might be anticipated, where a germ of liberty should survive the surrounding wreck. Hence Rome prefers a surer, though less direct pathway to power. She would divide the spoils rather than risk their being wrested from her hand by a populace liable to be enraged by her oppressions. Besides, if we be permitted to take her pride and ambition into the account, it would better sort with them to aspire to suprem- acy among kings, and amid the grandeur of thrones, and to hold despots as vassals in their turn. The institutions of our Republic are based on principles exclusively Protestant in contradistinc- tion to Popery. They not only imbue the spirit of the age we live in, but deeply impress all the institutions of this country. Admit this to be the fact — admit that principles exclusively Pro- testant enter into the very genius of our govern- ment, are indispensable to its preservation, and inseparable from its existence; and you have here prima facie evidence of the hostility of Popery to the popular form of government; that it is destructive of it in its nature and in all its tendencies ; that it is ready to pull down the col- umns that support it, to remove the key-stones which bind its arches together, and to banish the genius that presides within it. PERILS OP POPERY 69 That perfect liberty of thought and action, unrestricted only in so far as restriction is abso- lutely necessary to the maintenance of public order and tranquility and the sacredness of pri- yate character and security, which is at once the glory of Protestantism and of our Constitution, Popery has ever opposed and persecuted, and at present denounces. Liberty of opinion, of speech, of the press, in harmony with these objects, are exclusively Protestant. The Pope, within but a few years, has publicly denounced them as "national curses." And if the tyr- anny of Rome over nations recognizing Popery as their established religion is not as absolute as it has been heretofore, it is not to be as- cribed to the papal will, or to principles prop- erly Popish; it is to be attributed to their ex- tortion of the privilege of a milder administra- tion of the ruling despotism, and to the spirit of the age, infused by Protestantism. The intelligence and virtue of the people univer- sally who are invested with the sovereign prerog- ative of the elective franchise in our country, is confessed by all of first and vital importance. Their moral and religious, as well as intellective culture, involves in it the happy upshot of our ex- periment of popular self-government. Did Popery 70 PERILS OF POPERY. prevail, one grand source of popular intelligence — the only source of light and purity to the world, and the allowed basis of our institutions and laws, their expounder and their guardian genius — would be taken out of the hands of the multitude. The Holy Bible would be prohibited to the indes- criminate throng. They are openly aiming now at its banishment from the common school system of this country, of which it has been deemed a vital part, and have been actually succeeding in its ex- clusion. What would be the consequence of the success of this policy we are not left to imagine. The universal ignorance, and error, and vice, which prevailed among all orders of society in the ages of Popish sway, are what we might ex- pect to return upon us in process of time. The intellectual and moral condition of nations where this policy is pursued, and the state of neighbor- hoods among us where the Bible is neglected or little known, is standing proof of its unavoidable tendency. Deprived of this great teacher, to which we owe the refinement of public manners and sentiment, which is the glory and boast of our Republic, the lower orders of society would lose their only fount of refinements; and all the other sources in the hands of the higher orders would prove insufficient to repress the out-flow- PERILS OF POPERY. 71 ings of profligacy and licentiousness throughout their circles. The people, without the right or the possibility of appeal to the sacred oracles, would be left to the guidance of the priesthood ; to whom., if ignorant, or corrupt, or both, they would be abandoned, the victims of their du- plicity and of delusion, and of every wild excess of error : and as regardless as ignorant of their deplorable condition. Ignorance and corruption in the priesthood must, by a natural reaction, be the result of this policy : for popular stupidity, by a law of our mental constitution over which only master-minds would be likely to triumph, would beget indolence in the teacher; and the posses- sion of absolute power in every case tempts cor- ruption. Thus the teachers would be without check, and without incitement to the acquisition of knowledge, but especially of religious know- ledge, and the people abandoned to their delu- sion. Such would be the consequences of this usurpation, as, indeed, they have already been. Though they might not follow in a day, yet time would gradually and inevitably evolve them. Already have we seen that Christianity is the surest basis of good government, that her auspi- cious laws and awful sanctions are best adapted to promote its stability: certainly, then, any 72 PERILS OF POPERY. thing that vitiates its principles and corrupts those laws and sanctions, must seriously affect our government, as it must weaken or under- mine its foundation principles, and mar their op- eration. We have farther witnessed that Popery tends to despotism, and that to effect and main- tain this, her ministers have always erected and employed the machinery of popular ignorance. We might have expected that, unless in a nation of infidels, those who fear to put the Bible into the hands of the people and of their children, would be regarded with suspicion as enemies of all sound principle and good government. Both Popery and atheism conspire against the Scrip- tures, and both are ascertained to be subversive of civil order. The evocation of that religious ignorance which has always distinguished her sway would be but a leading step with the priests of Rome. Give them up the management of the common school system, and you will next find them directing their utmost power to the superinduction of po- litical ignorance upon it. And if the general knowledge of their laws and constitution was deemed by the ancient Romans so important to the preservation of their Republic, that the twelve tables were committed to memory by the rising PERILS OP POPERY. 73 generation, and constituted one of the first ele- ments of public instruction, is it not equally im- portant for the security of ours ? How much more careful ought we to be, with the accumu- lated experience of ages before us ; conversant with the subversive tendency of popular ignor- ance, always accompanied with popular vice, of popular institutions ! Let the people be shut up in the dungeon of universal ignorance and super- stition; they will neither be disposed to prize nor to guard our sacred institutions ; and despotism will stand without holding the keys secure. In such a state, it will require a moral earthquake to startle the prisoners from their slumber, and fling open the dungeon doors; and even then they will not be prepared to exercise their visual organs — they would rush forth in disorder, and tend to a state of lawless anarchy. Should Popery ever succeed in this country in bringing about this two-fold blindness, just in proportion to its success will be the incapacity of the people for self-government. This is its aim: its history attests it. Where has there ever been an in- stance of popular intelligence, of Biblical and po- litical training, associated with the influence of Popery. Compare England and Scotland in this respect with the degradation of the Irish Ca- 74 PERILS OF POPERY. tholic peasantry. Compare in those countries the comparative conditions of mind under the aus- pices of these antagonist influences. Compare the emigration of the Pope's subjects to this country, both from Protestant and Papal states, with our native-born citizens; and then judge of the pretensions of that Church, and of its claims to our confidence. From its whole history, and from the present condition of its deluded votaries in every country, the truth stands out in bold re- lief that it is unchangeably hostile to the educa- tion of the whole people. What is the prepa- ration of the great body of Popish emigrants, and of the people under Popish influence, to ex- ercise and discharge the high prerogatives and responsibilities of American citizens, he who runs may read. When men consent to give up the reading of the Scriptures for themselves, and to think and decide in religion by proxy, it will not be difficult to lead them into an analogous course in politics. Ignorance and superstition in turn support each other. Popular ignorance superinduces, as it advances, popular superstition, and superstition maintains the reign of ignorance. As Popery was evolved amid the deepening shades of error and the growing corruptions of the Church, till PERILS OF POPERY. 75 it ripened into a mature superstition, so it is its policy to recede and dwell amid these shades, to conceal that matured corruption and forbid in- quiry, well knowing that popular ignorance and priestly tyranny are its only safeguard. How hopeless, then, as well as deplorable, is the con- dition of that people who are fast-bound in her toils ! Again: Popery not only tacitly confesses by its prohibition of the people to read the Scrip- tures, its hostility to the great principles of our government, but it is based on the principle that the commonality are necessarily incompetent to self-government. This follows by just inference from the denial of the right of private judgment in religion. For if the priesthood only is in- vested with the right to exercise their judgment and reason, and to determine all religious ques- tions for the people, for the obvious reason that they are incapable of judging for themselves, it is the natural and unavoidable consequence that the same weakness of intellect which disqualifies them for religious decisions, proves them unequal to the great task of political self-determination. And hence it would follow that they should tamely submit to civil rulers also, whose office should be to think, and speak, and decide for 76 PERILS OP POPERY. them, with a sway altogether kindred to the ecclesiastical — if, indeed, all civil government be not swallowed up in the ecclesiastical rule. How simple, how natural, how unavoidable is the transition ! How consistently does his Holiness, in his late encyclical letter denounce all the great franchises of American freemen ! It is only the echo of Popery's past history, and the inference we have deduced but brings us to the source of his impudent denunciation. Hence civil and ecclesiastical despotism have ever been a wedded couple. They are of a piece. Civil freedom and ecclesiastical despotism cannot subsist to- gether. Upon religious liberty civil liberty must be superinduced in the order of things; and by the preservation of the former only can the latter be perpetuated. When the shackles of religious slavery are successfully imposed, in vain may we look for a single germ of civil liberty. The prevailing religion and the politics of a country such as ours, where no union of Church and State is recognized, are not so perfectly dis- tinct as is generally supposed. If the religion be spirit-crushing, it will assimilate the government, or its administration, which is the same thing, to its character, by disqualifying the people for the enjoyment of freedom, as well as for its protec- PERILS OF POPERY. 77 tion. For instance : bring the human mind into religious bondage ; enslave the senses to an ima- ginary transubstantiation ; compel it by terrors to unlock all its secrets to priestly scrutiny as essential to salvation; vest the hierarchy with the right to impose upon it self-invented condi- tions, to insist on every figment of their own cre- ation in order to that salvation ; convince it that the power of the priesthood on earth reaches into the invisible and eternal world, and that it is de- pendant on it for its rescue from purgatorial fire and torture ; that the Church, the hierarchy at the utmost, is infallible, and must think, and rea- son, and decide for it with an authority alto- gether absolute, in every thing appertaining to religion, and that the priests, their pastors, are the oracles of that Church: — get the human mind under this religious training, and teach it to look up through the inferior orders of the clergy to the universal Sire at Rome, whose ministers, or rather myrmidons they are — the deposer of kings, the vicar of God, the keeper of the keys of heaven and hell — and you create in it a super- stitious reverence for its spiritual rulers and guides, that at once degrades it into the basest compliance with their arbitrary wishes, an abso- lute subserviency to their despotic will. It is 78 PERILS OF POPERY. now an easy matter for them to extend their sway into the region of civil policy, to usurp a political influence. As in morals and religion, every departure from rectitude, and every step in apostacy, conducts, though it be even perhaps by insensible degrees, to utter corruption or to final apostacy from the faith, so every fresh in- road upon the liberty of the human mind plunges it deeper and deeper into degradation, till it is unfitted to entertain a single sentiment of free- dom, or a single aspiration after it. Its liberty, like virgin chastity, once yielded to the violator, may hardly ever be recalled; and the reception of a single bond may leave it impotent to resist a thousand shackles. When a man renounces his reason and his rights in religion, he is badly pre- pared to maintain them in politics: they who have ravished him of their exercise in the for- mer case, will find an easy prey in the latter. It is in vain alleged by the apologists of the Papacy in this country, that the Roman Pontiff is not the claimant of a temporal supremacy and jurisdiction. They do, indeed, disclaim allegi- ance to him in the capacity of a secular sove- reign, and complain of the imputation as a slan- derous aspersion of Protestants. Hence, they would have us entertain no apprehension of dan- PERILS OF POPERY. 79 ger from the advances of Popery. But for this, as we have before observed, we have barely their denial; not a word from the infallible tribunal of the Church. Pope after Pope has claimed it and exercised the high prerogative. And what Pope, ancient or modern, has ever disclaimed it ? Is not the Pope even now a secular prince, a Eu- ropean sovereign ? His usurped dominion — is it relinquished in the Papal States? The principle which they contend was a figment of the dark ages, and confined to them, is thus involved; and oppor- tunity only is wanting to seize again, and loudly to assert his ancient prerogative and sway a univer- sal scepter. But we may confidently assert, in the language of Bellarmine, a Romish authority, that, "by reason of the spiritual power, the Pope, at least, indirectly, hath a supreme power even in temporal matters." On which passage Dr. Barrow laconically observes, "If the Pope may strike princes, it matters not much whether it be by a downright blow or slantingly," Assuming, then, the denial by the Papal agents among us of the doctrine of the Pope's temporal supremacy to be unequivocal, (of which, by the way, we demand other and better evidence,) are we not still endangered from this indirect power? Who would willingly entice that foreign poten- 80 PERILS OF POPERY. tate, who would throw open our country to the rapid advances of his influence ? Who can be- hold the subjects of even the spiritual jurisdiction of his Holiness annually increasing and pouring in upon us, ready trained, without feelings of alarm? Who can contemplate without agitation the evidently advancing influence of a commu- nity whose foreign head is not, by the confession of all, simply recognized as first bishop in order and dignity, but is, at least, endued with the pre- rogative of power and jurisdiction over all Chris- tians, (all who bear the Christian name included,) iu order to preserve unity and purity of faith and moral doctrine, and to maintain order and regu- larity in all Churches; and who, according to Dens, is empowered by the Church to inflict cor- poreal punishments on heretics, apostates, and infidels, and even justly to punish heresy with death, unless the contrary course is dictated by policy, as in the present state of the world it is? The warfare of Popery and Protestantism is only to be appeased by the extermination of the one or the other ; and will not clergy and laity, will not the whole Popish world, willingly co- operate with his Holiness for the subversion of institutions based, as we have discovered, on Protestantism? institutions, the -r'me principles PERILS OF POPERY. 81 of which have so lately and so unqualifiedly been denounced from Rome itself as anti-Popish. We are here forcibly reminded of the pleasant story of the Grecian youth who, to support his propo- sition that he was ruler of Greece, affirmed that he governed mother, that mother governed father, and then father governed Greece. Admitting the premises to be true, the argument of the juvenile aspirant was logical and triumphant. Thus, the Pope rules the priests, the priests are the instru- ments of his sway over the people ; and should the Popish population ever become the majority y they will rule this country. It matters not whether despotism governs directly or indirectly, it is still the rule of despotism. The rule of ropery will be Papal still, though it be by the low whis- pers of his will through the ranks of his Ameri- can subjects. The still small voice will be as dire and as deadly to our universal liberties as though the Vatican were pealing its terrific thunders. The malign influence of this system, the scenes which would follow its ascendancy in this coun- try, its effects upon literature and laws, upon moral science and public sentiment, upon civil, social, and domestic life, and upon our eternal destinies, we might here leave the reader to derive 82 PERILS OP POPERY for himself from what has preceded. Take with you the genius and accredited history of Popery, and you cannot fail to anticipate correctly its future results through all these relations in our country, should it but be favored with oppor- tunity and time to operate its scheme. In this event I can imagine the Papal throne erected on the ruins of our subverted institutions, the Pontiff's court transferred from its ancient, and now rather unsettled seat, to the capital of this country, and his person surrounded by the obsequious minions of his power. But whether he reigns in propria persona, or by proxy, it matters not. His will is law, and his nod the nod of destiny. I see his innumerous agents scattered over the broad face of the land : cardi- nals, bishops, monks, friars, priests, inquisitors; all the orders of the Church servile to his decrees, and every officer of the state fulfilling his bid- dings. Splendid edifices, costly churches, dedi- cated to gloomy superstition, are erected; but erected with means wrung by fraud and violence from the sweat and toil of the poor and indus- trious. Grand fabrics are reared, devoted to education ; but they are for the benefit of the favored few. Popular education is not only neg- lected, but discountenanced; and from these halls PERILS OP POPERY. 83 are to go forth a ravenous priesthood, to feed and to fatten upon the vitals of our prosperity, and by their corrupt principles and practice to sow the seeds of profligacy and licentiousness through all orders of society. Here and there, nor far be- tween, behold those monasteries and nunneries, for the most part secret and impenetrable cover- ings of darkness and debauchery, the mere in- corporation of rites and ceremonies of prostitu- tion and dissoluteness, which brand the pagan worship with lasting infamy. Other Tetzels are going forth exposing indulgences for sale, differ- ing in cost with the varying magnitudes of crimes, licensing the highest enormities of guilt, and sell- ing heaven for dollars and cents to wretches who would make monsters of wickedness in hell. But, alas, where are the Luthers to confront them! One Luther was enough for Rome: another, amid her reign, would share the fate of Huss. Papal intolerance has grasped her rusty sceptre, and sways it over the faith and con- sciencs of her willing or reluctant subjects ; her- etics are prescribed, and doomed to racks and dungeons, and the all-conquering arguments of sword and fire resorted to for their salvation. The roll of martyrdom is filling up. Martyrs, as of old, who do honor to the Christian name and 84 PERILS OF POPERY. to the Protestant faith, after enduring the indig- nities and barbarities of this cruel spirit of intol- erance, are seizing their glorious wreaths, and joining the spirits beneath the altar who cry for vengeance. Ah, happy days, when it was the chartered privilege of every man to read at pleasure that sacred volume which is emphatically the light of the world, the riches of the poor, and the conso- lation of the afflicted; when every man sat under his own vine, and under his own fig tree, without fear of molestation — ah, happy, happy days, ye are departed ! That light is quenched in the dungeon of Popish darkness. That mine of in- appreciable treasure is seized by a monopolizing priesthood — misers, who, while they plunder the poor man of his richest earthly portion, enjoy it not themselves. That font of consolation is dried up to the afflicted and oppressed. The Bible is sealed up ; and he who dares to break that seal without a special licence from a bishop or inquis- itor, brings down upon himself the heavy chas- tisement due to his invasion of the holy interdict. That Word extinguished, a more than Egyptian darkness is settling upon us; that sable pall of ignorance which has long enwraped the Papal States, and once a Papal world, is fast folding PERILS OF POPERY. 85 around us ; the aspirings of rising genius are vig- orously watched to be crushed; the energies of mind are suppressed, and incarcerated and doom- ed to pine away in the solitudes of its own cham- bers, and its best offspring, if, indeed, it should bring forth under such circumstances, subjected to the inquisition of the Pontiff or his delegates, who, with the barbarity and the cruelty of a Herod murdering the children of Bethlehem to destroy the hope of the world, condemns it to the flames! Nothing can escape unless it proves a monster of absurdity and error. The Indexes Expurgatory and Prohibitory reigns over the whole region of letters. Piles on piles of the best works of English literature, collected from all our public and private libraries, are sacrificed to the evil genius of this gloomy superstition ; their incense comes up gratefully before the hier- archy; and with them is attempted to be con- sumed, and buried ia their ashes, the revered names of highest literary fame and immortal merit. The works of Algernon, Sidney, Addi- son, Bacon, Hale, Locke, and Milton, may suffice for a sample. These are all doomed to utter ex- tinction; and nothing is left us but such miser- able, vile, and infamous trash as are conformable to its intolerant, dark, and persecuting rules — the 86 PERILS OP POPERY. low offspring of intellect enslaved, and moral sense vitiated and depraved by the spirit of Po- pish error. All the atrocities of thy former reign, Popery! which thrill with horror, and wring with anguish our hearts for humanity bleeding at every pore, and alternately foams and freezes the life blood within us, are acting over again ! The Inquisi- tion and auto da fe, have triumphed over law and justice, and are trampling them beneath their feet. Yes, truly august court of the Holy Inqui- sition ! I see thee erected on the ruins of our courts of justice, and thy dungeons crowded with victims: the ghastly beings stand trembling be- fore thee: there heroic manhood, there palsied age, there female loveliness, there youthful ten- derness, await their doom at your consecrated bar. No age, no sex, no infirmities escape your vengeance; your ingenious tortures, numerous as hell could devise, or cruelty inflict, are all at work, to extort the secrets of their breasts, and inflict the sentence of your infernal malice. Upon the most unfounded pretence or shallow pretext this diabolical tribunal sends forth its em- issaries to apprehend whom she pleaseth — to bring before it the unresisting and helpless beings doomed to be the victims of its tortures and its PERILS OP POPERY. 87 deaths. Whoever is suspected of holding hereti- cal opinions, or has in any way become obnoxious to the vengeance of the judges, or whose posses- sions render him worthy of the special attention of the Holy Mother , may anticipate the honor of a visit from the familiars of these her faithful min- isters. For when there is no shadow of proof against the pretended criminal, when protracted and exasperated torture have failed to extort self- accusation, though he be discharged after suffer- ing their utmost torments, (if, indeed, he does not expire in the operation,) and enduring a tedious and dreadful imprisonment, he but obtains his life and liberty, with the loss of the greater part of his effects, which goes to swell the coffers of these saintly robbers, and to augment the spoils of this holy Church ! Sacred justice ! tender beneficence indeed ! to punish the victims of their Inquisition first, then charge them, after having nearly de- prived them of life itself, of almost all the rest they own, to repay the trouble of their unavailing inquest, and for pronouncing them innocent ! I see the muffled and ebon band, with dark lantern, go forth from the hall of this slaughter den of cruelty to execute its purpose by bringing in the victims selected for the slaughter. The sacred stillness of midnight and the hour of uni- 88 PERILS OF POPERY. versal repose, is usually disturbed to execute their fell design. They approach the domicil which contains their victim, resting his wearied frame in sleep ; they demand admittance of the startled in- mates ; the surprised and shivering host, recogni- zing in their ominous habillaments that they are the agents of priestly cruelty and licensed crime, dare not refuse them ; the dumb and breathless inhabitants await the summons of the selected one ; the leader speaks ; it is the word of destiny. Away he is hurried before the inquisitor — the ven- erable butcher. Compelled to stifle the voice of imploring nature within them, parents deliver up the child of their affection, the husband the wife from his bosom, the master his servant, the host his friend from the protection of his roof, or the mother her husband, and the children their father to its officers, not daring in the least to murmur, nor to solicit their pardon after imprisonment, least they should be arraigned as accomplices; but they are compelled to go into mourning, and speak of them as dead. Where is there protection for property or life, or, dearer than either, where security for human innocence or female chastity, under the auspices of this institution ? It triumphs over all law, all justice, all order: it is invasive of our hearths, our PERILS OF POPERY. 89 thoughts, and all the heaven-born prerogatives of man ; and no man could feel secure in the bosom of his family, or even in his nocturnal slumbers, under its infernal influence. Nor is it among the least of the attendant evils of this bloody court that before its systematic espionage, aided by its twin engine, the confessional, due confidence be- tween man and man, and even in the tenderest relationships of life, must give way, and universal distrust throw its dark shadow over society ca- extensively with its reign. Behold a scene of this bloody court, drawn by a master hand indeed, but which fails, where all description must ever fail, to make us realize the dread reality itself: — The blood-thirsty inquisitor, who has grown gray in the service of the mother of abominations, who has long made it his boast that none of her priests has brought so many victims to her horrid altars as himself— the venerable butcher sits on his bench — the helpless innocent is brought bound from his dungeon, where no voice of comfort is heard, no friendly eye glances compassion, where damp and stench, perpetual darkness and horrid silence reign, except when broken by the echo of his groans, where months and years have been languished out in want of all that nature requiries; 90 PERILS OP POPERY. an outcast from family, from friends, from ease and affluence, and a pleasant habitation, from the blessed light of the world. He kneels, he weeps, he begs for pity. He sues for mercy by the love of God, and by the bowels of humanity. Already cruelly exercised by torture, nature shudders at the dreadful thought of repeating the dreadful sufferings under which he had almost sunk be- fore. He protests his innocence. He calls heaven to witness for him, and implores Divine power to touch the flinty heart, which all his cries and tears cannot move. The unfeeling monster talks of heresy, and profanation of his cursed supersti- tion. His furious zeal for priestly power and a worldly Church stops his ear against the melting voice of a fellow-creature prostrate at his feet ; and the terror necessary to be kept up among the blinded votaries, renders cruelty a proper instru- ment of religious slavery. The dumb executioner strips him of his rags ; the rack is prepared ; the ropes are extended ; the wheels are driven round; the bloody whip and hissing pincers tear the quivering flesh from the bones ; the pulleys raise him to the roof; the sinews crack; the joints are torn asunder; the pavement swims with blood. The hardened minister of infernal cruelty sits unmoved. His heart has long been steeled PERILS OF POPERY. 91 against compassion. He listens to the groans, he views the strong, convulsive pangs, when nature shrinks and struggles, and agonizing pain rages in every pore. He counts the heart-rending shrieks of a fellow-creature in torment, and enjoys his an- guish with all the calmness of one who views a philosophical experiment ! The wretched victim expires before him. He feels no movement but of vexation at being deprived of his prey before he had sufficiently glutted his hellish fury.* And now comes the splendid spectacle of the auto da fe : or the last act of the inquisitorial tragedy — a sufficient number of victims for the flames being provided to grace the high occasion ! The sanctity of the Sabbath is selected. They take advantage of a great festive day to add to the awe and impressiveness of the scenes, and to swell the crowd of spectators by the leisure of the multitude. From the hall of the Inquisition, where they are clad in vestments which forestai their sentence and foretell their doom, the tortured and mangled beings (for the tale of cruelty is writ- ten in their haggard and anxious features, and emaciated and slow-moving forms,) come forth in procession, and move onward, amid the vast as- * Burgh's Dignity of Human Nature. 92 PERILS OP POPERY. semblage of the occasion, to the crowded theatre. Here are placed the ghastly beings, and over against them the inquisitors ; the seats on either hand rising in the form of an amphitheatre, where humanity deserted of sympathy looks on un- moved, and one by one they are called up to hear their sentence from the lips of one of the inquisi- tors. After an ostentatious eulogium of cruelty, mingled with bitter invectives against heresy, see you yon priest ascending that desk near the scaf- fold, who, having taken the abjuration of the peni- tents, declares publicly the conviction of those condemned to death, whose doom was already be- trayed by that red serge in resemblance of aspir- ing flames, sowed upon the santo benito of each, and of the heretics, who, in addition, have their own pictures painted on their breasts, and devils, dogs, and serpents, open-mouthed, about it. Now the hypocritical monsters, exposing to the awe- struck multitude the tender mercy of essential cruelty, deliver up these beings, the mere shadows of humanity through previous and protracted tor- tures, starvation, and incarceration, to the civil judge, no longer but the tool of Popish power, with much reluctance, earnestly beseeching the secular arm not to touch their blood, or put their lives in jeopardy. And yet somehow, not only PERILS OF POPERY. 93 now, but uniformly, it happens, at the same time, that the civic judge never revokes the sentence written upon their habits by these merciful eccle- siastics in characters of fire, except that all who die in the faith shall have the important advan- tage, the wretched privilege, of first being stran- gled to death, and then burnt to ashes. Away the agonized, the helpless, and uncompassionated victims are hurried to the Ribera, or place of ex- ecution. The negative and relapsed are first strangled and burnt. Now the professed, who persist in heresy, mount the stakes by ladders about four yards high, with a small board at the top of each to seat the sufferer. The Jesuits, after exhorting them in vain to be reconciled to the Church, depart ; but not before they have con- signed them over to the devil, who, they assure them is standing near, ready to receive their souls and bear them to the flames of hell. Hear that pandemonium shout. The infuriated multitude cry, " Let the dogs beards be made." This is the signal to thrust those flaming furzes, fastened to those long poles, against their faces, till they are burnt to cinder; and the work is accompanied with acclamations of frantic joy. Fire is at length set to the dry furze below, over which the victims are chained so high that the top of the flame sel- H 94 PERILS OF POPERY. dom reaches higher than the seat they sit on, so that they are rather literally roasted than burnt. In vain, during this process, do they cry out, as long as they are able, " Pity for the love of God !" The sympathies of that Popish rabble are frozen at the fountain. They have no sympathy but with their cruel superstition. All sexes and ages behold this scene with evident transports of joy and satisfaction. Merciful, mysterious God ! why sleep thy thunders? Why wake they not to avenge the cruelties inflicted on thy creatures — to vindicate the cause of injured innocence and of thy tortured saints? The time is hastening when thou wilt ! There was a time when these scenes might not be acted in this land, once free; when Popery measured the manifestations of her intolerance by her power, then weakness ; when such scenes as these, conjured up by fancy, told upon Ameri- can ears like idle tales that never could be real- ized. But the spirit of Popery evolving as grad- ually as its power increased, it was on the eve of triumph, had passed the Rubicon and mocked re- sistance before it was regarded as an enemy ; and now these times are no more. Those who still carry Protestant and human hearts in exterior conformity to Popish sway, may look on, but dare PERILS OF POPERY. 95 not intermeddle ; and should they revolt or mur- mur the same doom awaits themselves. Not even a sigh or murmur must be heard ; and as in Spain, in Italy, the Indies, and all Papal countries, the mere refusal of homage to the procession of the host, passing along our crowded thoroughfares, leaves one open to the vengeful sport of a mer- cenary and bigoted soldiery, to be struck to the earth, or run through with a bayonet. Ah, whither now are fled the freedom and hap- piness we once enjoyed? Where is the sacred instrument of the Constitution, charter of our uni- versal liberties, which we vainly hoped should never be violated, but should go down with the revolving ages of time, enlightening and cheer- ing the successive generations of our beloved land ? Where the right, or rather exercise of free suffrage it guarantied to all our citizens ? Where our righteous laws and seats of justice ? Where our administrators and legislators, chosen by the voice of a nation of freemen ? Where all our great franchises? Where? All gone! Our lib- erties, civil and religious, gone ! All our distin- guishing institutions gone ! Our schools for pub- lic instruction gone ! Our prosperity turned into adversity! our Bibles burned! our Protestant temples, the home and the guardians of liberty, 96 PERILS OF POPERY. consumed, or desecrated by Popish mummery ! Liberty is no more the pride, and the boast, and the song, through the length and breadth of the land ; and if it was, it were but an empty name. Liberty of opinion is no more ; liberty of speech no more ; liberty of the press no more. Our glo- rious eagle, mystic genius of our Republic, has plumed his wings and departed. No more the magnificent fabric of our government, reared by the iron-hands of the master-builders of the Rev- olution, lifts its lofty summit to the view of an ad- miring world ; that glorious edifice, which stood unrivalled amid the nations of the earth, or in his- toric fame ; whose splendors attracted the envy of them all, at once their terror and the world's hope ; which promised its emancipation from civil bon- dage, and made tyrannic thrones to totter to their base; ingloriously to its protectors, responsible to a world and to Heaven for its preservation, is fal- len, is fallen! — its collossal pillars, its mighty arches — all, all its splendors perished in these crumbling ruins, which scarcely tell that it ever existed. Shades of our Revolutionary heroes ! could ye have thought that the achievements which your valor won from the British foe was only obtained shortly to be merged in Papal despotism; that the PERILS OF POPERY. 97 glorious institutions of your wisdom ye hoped would be immortal, should so short a time survive yourselves, that ghastly thought, like a gloomy spectre chuckling at your foolish strife, had un- nerved your arms ere victory had crowned their struggle, and riveted more firmly the British chain upon them — a yoke infinitely more supportable than that which Rome proposes. Such, Popery, as I have depicted, thee thou wast, and such I see thee yet prospectively, shouldest thou ever be enthroned, alas! on our crushed liberties ! That the scenes depicted are not a caricature of practical Popery as it has existed under circum- stances more favorable to the full development of the system, will be questioned by none whose acquaintance with the light which history throws upon those subjects qualifies him to form an accu- rate judgment. I might add that intelligent Ro- manists themselves will not deny that these scenes are based in faithful ecclesiastical history, and con- tent themselves, in seeking to evade their force, by representing them as mere accidental excres- cences, not properly resulting from the essential 98 PERILS OF POPERY. spirit and genius of their system : a plea which the preceding pages abundantly confute. But even those who are indisposed to contend that they are not laid in the genuine history of Popery through the long night of its terrific reign, may feel disposed from a mis-placed charity, drawing unauthorized conclusions from its more superficial American and modern aspects, and from the char- acter of the American people, to question our country's being in danger of becoming the thea- tre of such a scene ; that modern Popery, though ascendant, would neither have the disposition nor the temerity to aim at the superinduction of such a state of things ; and that, allowing she had, it would be utterly impracticable. It will be seen, however, in the further prosecution of the sub- ject, that supposing such clemency and meliora- tion, we shall not be indebted for them to any change in the theoretic or practical system of Popery, but to extraneous and countervailing in- fluences; and that it may be reasonably fear- ed that, if sufficient time be given it ere its last downfall to combat these influences, the time is coming when the appalling scenes will be more than realized. 99 CHAPTER IV. POPERY NOT CHANGED FOR THE BETTER. It is now in place to consider the second general result of the assumed infallibility of the Church of Rome ; the position that it creates a total insusceptibility, an inherent and eternal hos- tility to melioration or improvement, which sheds its conservatory influence over the whole mass of corruption, and insures similar results in simi- lar circumstances (or circumstances equally fa- vorable,) in accordance with the law regulating the indissoluble connexions of causes and effects. This principle occupies a lofty and guardian eminence amid the system of Popery ; it mocks the idle hope of essential reform, and looks down with a repellant aspect upon the first preposter- ous motion towards innovation. "A religion which is founded on the assumption of a super- natural exemption from error on the part of its adherents, may be confuted by argument, sup- pressed by force, or relinquished from conviction ; 100 PERILS OF POPERY. but it is impossible to conceive of its susceptibi- lity of change. This consideration we oppose to the plea of that false and ill-timed charity which, admitting all the dark features as delineated to be true to the life of the ancient system, still literally " hop- eth all things and believeth ail things," nay, even " against hope believeth in hope," in favor of modern Popery. ¥ We persist," says one, whom we have quoted more than once,* "in maintaining that the adherents to Popery are materially changed, in contradiction to their express disavowal ; and while they make a boast of the infallibility of their creed, and unalterable nature of their reli- gion, we persist in the belief of its having expe- rienced we know not what melioration and im- provement. In most instances, when men are deceived, it is the effect of art and contrivance on the part of them who delude them: in this, the deception originates with ourselves ; and in- stead of having false witness against our neigh- bour, such is the excess of our candor, that we refuse to credit the unfavorable testimony which he bears of himself." * Robert Hall. PERILS OF POPERY. 101 We are aware that it has been alleged by Pro- testants, and successfully urged against the in- fallibility of the Church of Rome, that inconsist- ent doctrines have been taught by the same Church, that they once held doctrines which they now disavow, and they now hold doctrines which they once did not hold, and that many of the doctrines and axioms of the Church were once unsettled questions, This may be supposed to militate against our inference from her infalli- bility, — that it precludes melioration in the system, or in its results ; the pretension to infallibility by her votaries to the contrary notwithstanding : it may be said, that if she has changed, she may change again; that there is nothing to prevent the recurrence of like inconsistencies. To this, we reply, that we can conceive of much to pre- vent their recurrence. Experience, which teaches fools, will keep the Church of Rome on her guard against the repetition of an oversight which has already endangered the success of her distin- guished pretension, and given her sophists and apologists infinite trouble and uneasiness ; she will not be so impolitic as palpably to do what she denies she ever has done, and be guilty of any obvious incongruity similar to those which have taxed the utmost ingenuity and effrontery 102 PERILS OF POPERY. of her ablest artists to cover. The robber who has once betrayed himself by ill management, will provide against the recurrence of detection by similar means in his subsequent exploits. Besides, in the advances of the system towards maturity, it had a susceptibility to change which can no longer be supposed to exist. Ere it ar- rived at its maturity, its adjustments must have subjected it to those petty alterations which ac- cord with the progress of all human inventions ; but since it has reached a perfection that it never can surpass, since its particular arrangements and its general adaptation can never be exceeded, with the advantage of change the temptation ceases. These considerations will be deemed sufficient to clear up this point, though others might be adduced. That our language may escape a perversion to which it might otherwise be liable, we will antici- pate, by a cautionary suggestion, a paradox which will not escape the reader's notice — a pa- radox that has an actual subsistence in Popery. Popery is as time-serving in her policy, as she is unchangeable in the ends to which she is adapted, her distinguishing characteristics, and her essential and fundamental principles. Hence a perfect uniqueness and an infinite versatility of PERILS OF POPERY. 103 aspect may, with propriety, be affirmed of her in the same breath. The same crooked casuistry which prompted the emissaries of Rome to deny the cross and passion of Jesus Christ as a mali- cious aspersion of the enemies of Christianity, to conform it to the prejudices of the Chinese, and which distinguishes their unblushing denial of the odious features of their system in this country, is but in accordance with the essential and universal duplicity of the system. This we might have expected. Popery would be untrue to her well-established characters of compromise and imposture, if she did not seek to conform her policy to the exigences of the times. Whilst its inalienable spirit and essence, a spirit of en- croachment, usurpation and unbounded lust of dominion is deeply impressed in its system of error, and characterises all its living agencies and universal history; it matters not what trivial changes and modifications its policy may un- dergo. Its outer aspects are things to be as- sumed as expediency may dictate. This cir- cumstance renders her doubly dangerous ; for by it she can almost deceive the very elect, and therefore finds an easy prey in the credulous and unwary. Doubtless she would come forth in an entirely new armour, could such a change attain 104 PERILS OF POPERY. her ends, and insure a readier victory and as permanent a conquest; but that can never be the case, since there can never be a necessity — since her means are as apt as her ends are inglorious, or as human ingenuity can contrive to secure them. As it is she would suit her weapons to the period of her existence ; and they are inexhaustible, and in as great variety as abundance. In her arsenal all extremes meet, all paradoxes centre. When she cannot storm she will undermine. She is indeed unchanged for the better. If she is quite imposing and accommodating now, intolerance, cruelty, and universal bondage would follow her success to the utmost of her wishes, as they do now of her ability, as far as policy and expediency will admit. Be assured its present flattering aspects and pre- tended conformity to the genius of this govern- ment, and the demands of the age, are but super- ficial. Her present kindness is the arch-fiend's mock, the traitor's kiss — the sure harbinger of our ruin if we suffer the delusion ! What else can we expect of a system evinced in its principles and practical operation through successive centuries, to be presumptuous, usurpative, and despotic ; inva- sive alike of civil and religious freedom ; essen- tially licentious, and cruel, and unjust ; notorious PERILS OF POPERY. 105 for its lying wonders and gross impostures ; tor- tious in all its influences upon society ; and dis- tinguished by §very species of duplicity and treachery, by low cunning and intrigue, and for its perfidy to God as well as man. We have seen that philosophers have not been more at a loss to fix the local residence of the soul in the 'human body, than have the Romish rea- soners to ascertain the seat of infallibility in their (so styled) Church. We believe, however, it is in modern times pretty generally agreed that this glorious attribute presides in general councils, as representative of the Church either solely or con- jointly with the Pope. For a Papist, then, to condemn the proceedings or the decrees of this au- thority, or for this authority embodied in different councils headed by their several Popes to clash, would be a virtual renunciation of the doctrine of infallibility — at once " the chain which keeps its members fast bound to its communion: the charm which retains them within its magic circle ; the opiate which lays asleep all their doubts and difficulties ; the magnet which attracts the de- sultory and unstable in other persuasions within the sphere of Popery ; the foundation of its whole superstructure, the cement of all its parts, and its fence and fortress against all inroads and 106 PERILS OP POPERY. attacks." In a predicament how truly ridiculous, does this involve the votary of that system who dares to denounce the persecutions resorted to by his Church to maintain and extend her dominion for many ages ! No bulls of Popes, authorised by councils, no persecuting tenet ever propa- gated and sanctioned by them, can ever con- sistently be called in question by a votary'of that system, of which infallibility, is the centre ; whose Church, in virtue of her infallibility, cannot, at any time, cease to be orthodox in doctrine, or fall into any pernicious errors, constituted by Divine warrant judge of all controversies in religion, and in whose decisions all Christians are in conscience bound to acquiesce. Allow me here to record a sample of the prin- ciples of Popery, undisputably sanctioned at that tribunal which, if the pretension has any thing more than ideal existence, must be the seat of infallibity, amply sustained by the highest order of Popish authorities, and embodied in the history of Popery for ages, ratified by the action of the last great council, and for which the Church to this day stands justly responsible ; which must reduce its modern advocates to this alternative, — either they must admit them or deny them to be sound and characteristic of their religion. Now PERILS OF POPERY. 107 if they deny them to be the genuine principles of Popery, they give up the infallibility of the Church : if on the contrary they admit them to be the decrees of infallibility, they confess them to assert the principles of Popery in modem times, for it is not Popery but the age that is modern. The necessity of producing a multiplicity of proofs that the obnoxious principles of which we complain have emanated from the decrees of that tribunal admitted to be infallible by the majority of Papists at the present day, is obviated by the fact, that its modern advocates among us do not. cannot, dare not deny them to be genuine in the face of the highest historical evidence ; but, that to parry their force, they institute a subtle dis- tinction between the doctrines of their Church ; assuming that these principles, the open avowal of which they find would be so inimical to their success, are not to be regarded as points of faith, and therefore, though issuing from the fountain- head of infallibility, the offspring of mere falli- bility. They are then, it must be confessed, the admitted principles of the infallible councils ; which, if it were not admitted, it would be no difficult matter to prove. To be doubly sure, however, we may add to their own confession of 108 PERILS OF POPERY. guilty a single sample or two, which involves the three grand charges of interference in the business of the magistracy, the violability of faith with heretics, and that principle which authorizes persecution in all its horrid shapes. Under the immediate auspices of the great Council of Constance, composed of delegates from every kingdom and country of Europe; held in the presence of the Emperor Sigismund, and many other sovereign princes, called by the order of a Pope, and signalised by the absolute deposition of two pontiffs, a forced abdication of a third, and the creation of a fourth; which ex- tinguished a schism of forty years, and reunited the obedience of Christendom under one head, John Huss, the Bohemian reformer was arrested, cast into prison, and publicly burnt alive. This council decided that the "safe conduct" of the emperor, in reliance on which for protection he was induced to make his appearance before it, was no impediment to the exercise of its juris- diction, and that the ecclesiastical judge was perfectly competent, notwithstanding it to take cognizance of his errors, and to punish them agreeable to the dictates of justice; it was decided that no promise or faith was binding either by human or divine right, in prejudice of the Ca- PERILS OF POPERY. 109 tholic faith, and punishment threatened as a fa- vorer of heretical pravity, and guilty of the crime of high treason, to any, of whatever rank or sex, who should dare to impugn the justice of the holy council, or of his Majesty, in relation to their proceedings with Huss.* The Council of Trent formally recognised the decrees of Constance : hence by the decree of the last council all these principles are ratified ; and it necessarily follows that I and all who question the propriety of the decision are proper subjects for the flames, according to the decisions at the latest sessions of this infallible judge of all controversies in religion. Take another instance. The great Lateran Council, under Innocent III., ordained that " if a temporal lord, being required and admonished by the Church, should neglect to purge his territory from heretical filth, he should by the metropolitan and other comprovincial bishops, be noosed in the band of excommunication ; and that if he should slight to make satisfaction within a year, it should be signified to the Pope, that he might from that time denounce the subjects absolved from their * {Substantially as given in l'Enfant's History of the Council of Constance, vol.ii. p. 491, English edit., 1730. 110 PERILS OF POPERY. fealty to him, and expose the territory to be seized on by Catholics."* This council too was recog- nised by the Council of Trent as representing or constituting the Church.t Another instance in which these atrocious principles have been sanc- tioned at this tribunal would be a profusion on this topic, since if but one could be adduced it were sufficient to stamp with an indelible brand an infallible Church — a Church, which by reason of its infallibility, possesses no susceptibility to change no more than to error. Let us now see what influence this new aspect of infallibility might be expected to exert on the practical operation of Popery. Not to urge for the present that infallibility, being a negative idea, is insusceptible of degrees ; that this subtle distinction has not emanated from the highest authority, but that all its decrees are proposed fey it as equally sacred and binding ; and that it car- ries with it ample evidence of its being an expe- dient resorted to merely to answer present pur- poses, and cannot be received as the sense of the Church but as purely unofficial, without the * Cone. Later. Cap. 3, in Decret. Greg. lib. v. tit. 7. cap. 13. f Neque enim per Lateranense Concilium. Ecclesia. StatuiL &c, Syn, Trid. Sess. 14. cap. 5. PERILS OF POPERY. Ill sanction of a general council — not to urge these considerations, any one of which is sufficient to annihilate this distinction, how does it relieve the difficulty? Whether the decrees in question be considered as points of faith or in the light of principles of action, coeval with the system, associated with the most solemn acts of the coun- cils and identified in the popular apprehension with their most sacred decrees, constituting for ages the very spirit and temper of the body, and inwoven in the very texture of the moral feelings and principles of the sect ; for the carrying out of which two powerful agencies are kept on foot, the Jesuits and the Dominicans; the one the classic for treachery, the other for the most wanton and refined cruelty ; in which ever sense they be understood, what is the difference as to their results? Just nothing. Authorized by the infallible authority and all the precedents of the Church through ages, and being the prominent and distinguishing attributes of its character, they would still, if legalized by the " powers that be," produce precisely the same effects; would still be equally hos- tile to the existence of un trammeled secular govern- ment, and subversive of all the rights of man. But the Church and its infallibility stands, and must be held responsible for these principles; not 112 PERILS OF POPERY. having expressed its disapprobation of them, nor even instituted this subtile distinction, either of which would be equivalent to the renunciation of. its pretensions ; (since an infallible Church cannot change, and an infallibility that leaves its sub- jects to stumble upon the very threshold of mo- rality must be the subject of universal ridicule and abhorrence;) until it sanctions and ratifies this new-fangled distinction, (which would be a suicidal act,) these principles must be classed among the immutable decrees of infallibility. It follows of consequence, that these are changeless principles of the Church, at least till the infallible authority shall have otherwise decided; and that modern no less than ancient Popery, contains all these elements of mischief which once bound the nations in the chains of religious and civil bondage, and deluged the world with blood. But where or when has the self-styled Catholic Church authoritatively condemned these ob- noxious sentiments, at the charge of which modern Papists turn pale, and affect to shudder and shrink, and those outrageous practices which exalt her character to the summit of infamy? What council, what pontiff, since the dark ages, has disclaimed them as part and parcel of Popery, or interdicted the propagation of these principles, PERILS OF POPERY. 113 and the continuance of those practices? In de- ciding on a question so momentous in its bearing on the welfare of this country, and perhaps the very existence of her happy institutions, ought we to rely on the mere asseverations of particular individuals of that hierarchy, whose interest it is to deny the odious features of their system through policy, — a sin sanctified by the end of its commission, (to advance the popularity of the Church by the denial of unpopular inventions;) against the bulls of the popes, the decrees of councils, the standing authority of commentators, and the suffrage of so many ages ? Principles so absurd and practices so infernal, a system so threatening in its aspect upon the civil institutions of the age, which have proved so fatal to the universal rights of mankind, and to the happiness and tranquility of nations, certainly demand a positive and authoritative disavowal at the po- pular tribunal ? The world awaits an indubious response in the condemnatory voice of the Church, — a response from the highest jurisdiction, from in- fallibility itself; but in vain. The towering tribunal condescends not to gratify the reason- able demand. She concedes no principle, she condemns no practice ; but justifies them by her expressed or tacit consent. Common justice de- 114 PERILS OF POPERY. mands of her their unqualified disapproval, and even this were a small atonement for her bold impieties, her awful blasphemies, her foul im- purities, and the cruel enormities of her history, inked with blood, and pointed and embellished with the sighs and breaking hearts of her victims, — with martyr-groans and sufferings, pangs and blood. When these odious features are as pub- licly and authoritatively denounced as they have heretofore been advocated and established — when the enunciation of his Holiness, disclaiming the prerogatives so long cherished by his see, brands them with impiety and error, and commands his priesthood to relinquish the claim in his behalf; when the works which contain the poisonous principles and maintain the gross follies of Popery share the fate of our best English writings in the catalogue of the Indexes Expurgatory, and the latter which condemn its atrocities are expunged from the register of reprobation ; when the Popish clergy cease to extenuate the past crimes of their Church, and show symptoms of real regret and sorrow ; in a word, when the supreme authority of the Church conspires with Protestantism in protesting against them all as scandalous abuses of religious power, then, but not before, can we be prevailed upon to believe that they are mere PERILS OF POPERY. 115 figments of the dark ages, and that modern Popery is more innoxious in fact, than when mis- tress and tyrant of the world. Nothing less can successfully repel the charge. Not even this could fully shield that Church from the too well founded suspicion of intending to decoy us thereby to her cruel embrace — an embrace which, " like the embrace of that celebrated image of the Virgin in the Inquisition, which grasped the wretched victim in its arms, and folding him to its breast, transfixed him with a thousand knives at once," is the embrace of death ! The famous Council of Trent, convened by Paul III., in 1545, and continued by twenty-five sessions till the year 1563, under Julius III., and Pius IV., in order to correct, illustrate, and fix with perspicuity, the doctrine of the Church, to restore the reign of its ancient discipline, and to re- form the lives of its ministers, has, we believe in her decrees, not disclaimed one of these odious fea- tures of the Church, nor condemned the enormities of her history. But on the contrary, she ratifies and commends the dangerous and persecuting tenets of previous councils. It neither defined the li- mits, nor the character of the papal jurisdiction, awed by the interdiction of the pontiff from any interference with the question of his prerogatives. 116 PERILS OF POPERY. Hence the claims of the Pope are left undefined, may we not say purposely by this council, to his own arbitrary option, to be advanced in pro- portion to the capacity of every age to receive them in variable degrees. Surely amid the con- flicting opinions of the ecclesiastics of the Church as to the legitimate powers of the Pope, it behooved that infallible tribunal to determine and settle the question for ever. If Popes in former ages had usurped powers alien to them, if they had advanced claims and exercised prerogatives transcending the province of their ceded rights, and subversive of civil government, now was a fair opportunity for the Church assembled in her infallible organ to condemn, and check all future aggressions, to fix the standard of their subjection to the Pope, for the Popish world, and to meet this charge of the Protestant world, ever reiterat- ing in her ears. Did it condemn the cruelties of that infernal court — the Holy Inquisition — (in- appropriate name!) Did it indignantly unca- nonise from the register of saints, its first infernal minister, and wash its hands from the blood of its millions of tortured victims ? No, but by its continuance as an institution of the Church, they virtually said — " Their blood be upon us and upon our children." What was its condemnation of PERILS OP POPERY. 117 the universally cruel practice of that Church, in unison with its sacred theory, through ages past? It was a heightened cruelty, a hotter persecution under its own infallible auspices ! The sacred flame burned brighter upon the altars of per- secution. The Inquisition but clad itself in fiercer terrors and put forth freshened energies. Papal persecution in its hundred-handed cruelties stalked forth over the nations of Christendom, perpetra- ting wrongs and violences to the utmost of her ability. The persecutions carried on in different countries during the period of the long session of this council, and continued many years after- wards, is the only comment we offer on the character and acts of this pure infallible council. Its recollections are alive in traditional tale and in historic record, of the Germanic states, of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Holland, France, Spain, Por- tugal, England and Ireland. We waive the recital of the horrid and wanton tragedies of this period, if not through charity for the Church they array in bloody vestments, which deserves to be unveiled, yet to save our own feelings from tor- ture and check the risings of the spirit of mad- dened retaliation within us. We reiterate the ques- tion, What infallible tribunal of the Church has ever condemned the immolation of the many 118 PERILS OP POPERY millions, variously estimated by historians and martyrologists at from fifty to sixty-eight mil- lions of human beings through successive ages to appease the spirit of this gloomy superstition ! Be it remembered that the Council of Trent was the last council of that Church and probably the last that will ever be convoked to the end of time. To it we are to look for the genuine spirit and principles of Popery; not to individuals of that church in our country, bishops or what else who have no more authority to decide on these subjects in the name of the Church, than the writer of these pages. Nor be it forgot that the Council of Trent was in protracted session for so many years purposely to resist and destroy the Reformation. Then was the time for the Church of Rome to have spoken through it her unqualified censure of the lofty pretensions of her pontiffs, and the cruel barbarities, nay, the inhumanities of her persecutions. Then was the time for her to have exploded the edicts of past councils and the bulls of Popes, prejudicial to the interests of so- ciety, and transcending their legitimate powers. Then she would have anticipated the clamors and charges of Protestants of this day, by answer- ing those of her own day, of which ours is but the repetition, in a voice full of anathemas, not PERILS OF POPERY. 119 aginst heretics only, but against the absurdities of her ancient theory, and the enorties of the past practice of her Popes and councils. Then, should her own infallible lips have spoken their con- demnation as anti-Popish, and not the lips ol her erring sons, as now, e'er since fallible like other mortals. We might rest the whole controversy on the single question — Can this Church prove from the decrees of this Council or the creed of Pius IV., that these errors are anti-Popish. Say not her principles only are the same, her spirit is changed since they operate no longer in violence and persecution. Beware ! the sick lion only waits to gather strength to assert as afore, his reign of terror ! Aready, behold, he shakes his mane, and nerves his arm to strike, and is forging the thunders of his voice to shake and terrify the world. Has the tiger ceased to pant for blood? Unchain him not, though he plead like virgin innocence — he will pounce — his long fast has but prepared his insatiate maw for a fresh glut! Or can you tame the hyaena? you may when Popery is tamed. Under the intimidating influence of the light of science, the sun of the reformation, and the widely- diffused principles of civil liberty, the blood-thirsty beast may crouch in his den ; but let the dark cloud of anti-Christ- 120 PERILS OF POPERY. ian influence overspread the heavens and obscure these lights, and then he will come forth to his work of destruction, and roam as ever in pursuit of prey and carnage. Thank God, he is chained as yet by these influences ; but do we not hear the clanking of his chains and the gnashing of his teeth ? True, the rack, the gibbet, and the stake, are no longer the instruments of her ven- geance; but her crippled power has sent forth their harbingers. She shakes the rod with which she dares not yet, (as it would be prematurely,) to strike. True, Smithfield's victims are no more ; but its fires are unextinguished. See its vestal flames ever preserved on the altars of their hearts by a virgin priesthood, in the Bible-bonfires which betimes illuminate our land — sure presage of the anticipated fate of heretics, or Bible lovers. And for aught we know the machinery of inquisitorial vengeance may be providing in subterranean vaults, in anticipation of their speedy use. His Holiness, it is true, imposes on no humbled mo- narch the degradation of holding the stirrup of his august saddle, leading his noble steed, or kissing his puissant toe ; but it were not uncharitable to augur that the haughty occupant of St. Peter's throne would not at all disrelish the honors of his predecessors in office. Ah, could he, ye crowned .PERILS OF POPERY. 121 heads, ye must yield him your willing or reluct- ant homage: all your crowns and diadems would reflect their lustre around his apostolic brow, on whose nod would hang suspended, not your crowns alone, but the heads that bear them ! If the Church of Rome is distinguished now by a milder and more insinuating policy than distin- guished her when she possessed ampler means of intimidation and greater capacity of inspiring fear, it is not that she is changed; her principles and spirit are still intolerant. In her former aspect we see the intolerance of power, in her present policy, the intolerance of weakness. It may be affirmed as an offset that Protestants have persecuted in their turn. It is admitted that professed ones have. But with equal justice do Papists charge these aberrations of her profes- sors on Protestantism, to infidels who charge the persecutions of the Church of Rome upon Chris- tianity. Nay, with infinitely less grace : for who taught Protestants to persecute — to whom are they indebted for this lesson ? Not to Protestantism but to Popery. And besides, it is to be pleaded in palliation of their offence, though not in vindica- tion of their conduct, that they were but follow- ing the law of (what they deemed just) reta- liation; a law which, though carried into vigor- 122 PERILS OF POPERY. ous execution, future ages would find still unap- peased, and holding the Church of Rome in ar- rears. But intolerance, adventitious to Protest- tantism, is essential to Popery. None of the principles of the former breathe its spirit, whilst it is inseparable from the latter. The one stands before us its very personification through all its history, the other its denouncer and mortal enemy. The general history of Protestantism is that of tolerance : the universal history of Popery is anti- tolerant; the history of a practice persecuting and ensanguined in exact proportion to her power of molestation, and her capacity of inspiring fear. When Protestants persecute they depart from the noble principles their name imports; for perse- cution is one of the things against which thev protest : if Papists should cease to persecute to the utmost of their ability and of good policy, they take a devious course. Protestants deny their principles when they persecute, no more than Papists when they act with clemency. It is one of the phenomena of human nature, that while good principles are frequently enter- tained with a practice that forms a satire upon them, we rarely find a virtuous life and vicious principles coexistent. The world has seldom be- held such an anomaly; and if they ever do exist. PERILS OF POPERY. 123 they form the very rare exceptions to the general rule. The reason of this is evidently man's fatal bias to evil, — a bias acknowledged and deplored in every age, and by mostly all poets, moralists, and sages. Though the passions and appetites may capti- vate, and sweep with their rush the enlightened judgment, feeble in its resistance while conscious of the infamy of its subjection, we do not regard it as a matter of astonishment. But when there is a coalescence, a natural affinity between the principles which possess the mind and the evil tendency of nature, we always do expect of con- sequence, the full manifestation of the evil princi- ples in the conduct of life. We expect the mind, in this case, not only to yield to and contribute, but to be the source of the stream of corruption. In short, we find in these principles an adequate cause for the conduct of the possessor. If evil, cherished in the united head and heart, be unproductive of a kindred practice, we are bound to impute the exterior virtue of the cherish- er to extraneous influences, to mere motives of policy and duplicity, sordid and dastardly. He aims, for instance, to attain his selfish ends by affecting an air of liberality — to serve vice in the livery of virtue. This is one of the workings of 124 PERILS OF POPERY. error and vice ; and thus their agents often worm their way into the graces of communities wher another course of conduct would at once repel them. Perhaps the external virtues of Hume made more converts to scepticism than all his own writings, together with those of his profli- gate fraternity. But all such apparent virtue, un- supported by principle, is indeed essentially vicious; its motives, its policy, and the ends it proposes, are only evil. Hence we conclude that the principles of i?o- man Catholicism constitute the proper criteria by which to anticipate her practice, independent even of historic evidence. And any suspension of that practice, whilst its principles and spirit remain the same, the right application of our knowledge of human nature justifies us in attributing to mere motives of policy, at the cessation of which the stream of practice will fall back into the accus- tomed channel the principles assign it. The mariner determines his port, unfurls his canvass to the breeze, and launches forth upon the deep. He knows not how many courses he must take upon the liquid element before he gains the des- tined port. Though now lagging in a profound calm, now by the resistance of adverse gales making devious paths, and beating about as if PERILS OF POPERY. 125 without any definite aim ; nevertheless, his aim is no less fixed when quietly reposing on the un- ruffled bosom of the ocean, nor his energies less vigorous when playfully tacking about to make the best of unpropitious winds, than when his prow is turned in full sail to the desired haven. Behold in this the figure of human policy. And what is Rome but human nature exalted to infa- my and armed with the most licentious principles? History, we believe, does not furnish a single in- stance of hierarchical reform. Individuals indeed have arisen to demand reform in several instances ; and possessing the quality of attracting around them the large proportion of the virtue and piety interspersed among the rubbish and corruption, have been compelled to come out from among it ; only leaving the great mass in worse circumstan- ces, and rendering the hope of reform more forlorn : but when or where has an instance occurred, or melioration originated with a hierarchy? On several occasions this demand was heard in the bosom of the Church of Rome, councils were assembled for this purpose, but all was abortive ; every attempt only proved its own futility, and brought derision on the project; all went to establish the principle, that the elements of its own regeneration are not to be found in the mass 126 PERILS OF POPERY. of corruption; that Heaven has ordained another process of cleansing, even the coming forth of the better portions of the mass : and, doubtless, had a reform been succeeded in, it would have been in- adequate in its nature and degree to the evils it was intended to correct. Obviously the reason of this is, that in proportion to the depth of the fall, is the hopelessness of recovery. When the pro- fessed ministers of Jesus Christ become the ser- vants of corruption ; when they conspire to turn a benign and holy religion into an instrument of oppression and self-aggrandizement; but especially, as in the case of the Church of Rome, when they have so far departed from the sacred vocation and progressed in impiety, as to vitiate and destroy all its essential features, so as to adapt it to their un- holy and impious purposes, and converted it into a scheme of popular ruin and degradation ; they become so far assimilated to the Author of all false religions, (as is universally the case with their priests,) as to preclude reasonable expecta- tion of improvement. Indeed, in such circum- stances, any reform not founded in the thorough regeneration of its advocates, would be inadequate to the case ; they would then abandon the horrid system with detestation, and a radical extinction would ensue of a system insusceptible of reform* PERILS OF POPERY. 127 Since Popery is a system in its operation, or com- ing pre-eminently after the working of Satan, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, (as St. Paul characterizes it;) since it mocks the idea of comparison in its unrelenting malignity, in the greatness of its fall and in its moral turpitude ; since it is without a parallel in its perfect adapta- tion to the purposes of civil and religious oppres- sion and ruin, unparalleled even in the annals of paganism, which was never so terrific or refined in cruelty, never possessed equal claims as a super- stition, never so prolific of expedients of oppres- sion or of such impious daring, and which might go to school, were it to revive and flourish, to take lessons in the first elements of barbarity and persecution of Papal Rome, her true successor ; we might as well talk of the reform of paganism in the conversion of the ancient world to Christi- anity, as of the Church of Rome. Like the car- nal mind, whose offspring diabolically generated it is, to subdue it it must be annihilated. Never, saith the voice of prophecy to be reformed, it is to be destroyed by the judgments of incensed Heaven. (2 Thess. 2, 8 ; and Rev. 18.) Besides, have we not good reason to fear that if Rome should ever be in the ascendant again, we should experience an exasperated vengeance, the 128 PERILS OF POPERY. heightened horrors, if possible, of a cruelty en- raged by defeat. This we might anticipate were she distinguished by a malignity less relentless, and a more unfeigned horror of blood. Who readier to retaliate injuries, real or fancied, than her pontiffs in all ages, and whose retaliation marked with a deeper malignity? Read their bulls, their history, their forms of excommunica- tion, their decrees universally ; examine the gen- ius and spirit of the whole system ; but especially the bull In coena Domini, sanctioned by at least a score of popes, which provides that from the Pope who begins it at Rome down to the lowest order of the priesthood, all orders of the clergy, under the shield of a dead language, are obligated by oath to pronounce it annually ; of which they are all commanded to keep a copy, and which they are diligently to read and study to understand; which curses the American government down through all its offices, curses and excommunicates every true-hearted American citizen, and consigns them, vindictively, to " eternal fire." Do we still console ourselves that Popery is changed, that it is not what it once was, what it was ages ago? Popery changed ! Its published, recorded, and acknowledged principles, as well as its essential genius and spirit, deny the charge. PERILS OP POPERY. 129 Popery changed ! As well might the leper change his spots, or the Ethiopian his color. Popery- changed ! Then it were no longer Popery — call it by some other name — all its distinguishing features must be evanished, and its principles, its policy, and even itself abandoned. Then has his Holiness indeed abdicated his throne, cast down his triple- crown, let go his lofty preten- sions, and flung away his keys. Popery changed! when the principles of Popery are notoriously the same now as in the days of Gregory the Seventh and up to the Reformation ; when the bishops are sworn now as well as through that period to ren- der fealty and homage to the Roman Pontiff, not merely as spiritual head of the Church, but as jure divino, supreme secular ruler of the universe, and to support the interests of his kingdom against tile world. Popery changed ! when the reigning incumbent of the pontificate in his recent ency- clical letter* sanctions and re-asserts the condem- nation of those great rights to which Romanism in principle and practice, wherever she has not wanted ability, has ever stood inexorably opposed! Has he not unceremoniously denounced liberty * Published in the Roman Catholic papers in this country, and dated August 15, 1832. 130 PERILS OF POPERY. of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, and the separation of Church and State, as four of the sorest evils with which a nation can be cursed? Popery changed in its intolerant, and persecuting, and blood-thirsty spirit — when it is irrefragably proved that Popery of the nine- teenth and of the sixteenth century is the same, by a standard authority in the Romish Church, in which it is unceremoniously affirmed that bap- tized infidels, such as heretics and apostates usu- ally are, also baptized schismatics, may be com- pelled, even by corporeal punishments, to return to the Catholic faith, and the unity of the Church;" that heretics are il rightly punished with death," and that "the rights of Pagans and heretics in them- selves considered, are not to be tolerated," unless the contrary course be dictated by policy !* Popery changed ! when the holy office of the Inquisition, established by Innocent III., and fully in operation in Italy, A. D. 1251, perfected in * See Synopsis of Dens' Moral Theology, Philadelphia edi- tion, 1842, pp. 107, 114, 117. And let it be borne in mind that this work is used in the Roman Catholic college at Maynooth, Ireland, the institution in which most of the Romish priests who come to this country are educated ; and that an edition of this work has been published at Mechlin, in the Netherlands, as re- cently as the year 1838. PERILS OF POPERY. 131 Spain and Portugal; and, by the way, henceforth in operation into the nineteenth century, has been from a temporary suppression, restored by Pius VII. so recently as the year 1826 ! Popery changed! Her principles, her spirit, her agencies for the most part — her object is the same in all time : only her power, thank God, is changed. Where or when, we ask, was it essen- tially remodeled, and put out in a new edition to the world. The ancient system is unimpaired, and, indeed, forbids in its first principles material alteration or improvement; and, though it may exhibit a more imposing exterior to meet the ex- igence of the times, this flattering aspect, these outward adornments, are but the whitewash of that horrid sepulchre which contains the elements of absurdity, abomination, and ruin. Was Po- pery less Popery under the reign of Charles the Ninth of France, when she caressed the Protes- tants of that country to their delusion, than on St. Bartholomew's festive night, when from sixty to a hundred thousand were treacherously mas- sacred at once ? Romanism the patron of popu- lar education, which has ever bound the human mind in ignorance ! Popery the friend and ally of civil and religious freedom, whose sway has ever been arbitrary and despotic, whose ambition 132 PERILS OP POPERY. insatiable; and whose subjects are to this day, even under Protestant governments and indepen- dent of racks and gibbets, the veriest, because voluntary slaves, for the most part debased by the spirit-crushing system to which they were born and at the bidding of an arrogant priest- hood ! What, then, under Popish governments — what in the Papal States? Answer Spain and Italy! where the machinery of oppression and terror is in more successful operation to enforce the Papal will ; though even there it is awe-struck by the surrounding light of the world and the re- quisitions of the age. We would add, on this topic, that Popery has one element of success in the present day, and of future security, should it ever succeed in regain- ing its ancient sway, that renders it peculiarly for- midable. Fortunately for the ages preceding the Reformation the order of Jesuits was not in exis- tence. Had it been when Papal Rome was at the summit of her power and pinnacle of human grandeur, bad as is its history, it would if pos- sible be worse. If it had not quenched the kind- ling Reformation, it would at least have retarded its progress, and vastly diminished its success. But doubtless God, who permitted Rome to tri- umph for ages, prevented such an organization in PERILS OF POPERY. 133 view of his gracious purposes, since manifested in the partial overthrow of this great usurpation. Should Rome ever again attain to the summit of her wishes, Jesuitism, raised up to prop her tot- tering fabric at the Reformation, will form a bul- wark of strength around her, will give her a new eye of vigilance, a new hand of power, a new heart of insensibility, which would increase the difficulty a hundred-fold of a revival of the Re- formation. The monastic orders were from the beginning the most zealous friends and promoters of the Pa- pacy. Hence, under the auspices of the most famous of the Popes, the whole clergy were in some sort remodeled and assimilated to that form. But all the other monks were separated from men, enclosed in the solitude and silence of the cloister from any immediate concern in civic affairs, and devoted to extraordinary acts of mortification and piety ; nor can it be said that any of the clerical orders was in an exclusive sense sworn and or- dained to a secular activity in the service of God, and of the Pope, his vicar on earth. These ele- ments were wanting, which Jesuitism supplies. As might be expected, they became celebrated by the friends and dreaded by the enemies of the Ro- mish faith, as the most powerful and enterprising 134 PERILS OF POPERY. champions of the Church. They were the most embittered foes, the most inveterate enemies of Protestantism ; incessantly stirring up against its votaries all the rage of ecclesiastical and civil per- secution, and vigorously opposing every measure of humanity and toleration in their favor. The sworn supporters of the Pope, they ex- ceeded in their devotion to the Papacy. What- ever diversity of sentiment has existed among the other orders respecting the prerogatives of the Pope, the Jesuits have always been a unit, as, in- deed, the very condition of its existence was their support, covert or openly, of his claims ; and they have always attributed to the Court of Rome a jurisdiction as extensive and absolute as was claimed by the most presumptuous pontiffs in the dark ages. By the very genius and constitution of this or- der a spirit of action and intrigue was infused into all its members. The discipline of the society in forming its members, and the fundamental and dangerous maxims of its constitution, (brought to light during their persecutions in Portugal and France,) prepared them, by a most corrupt and reckless casuistry, to merge every interest in that of their order ; an order to whose prosperity the preservation of the Papacy is vital as the trunk to PERILS OP POPERY. 135 the branches of the tree. In a word, formed to simulation and practiced in hypocrisy ; consum- mate in the arts of sophistry as they were in the tricks of deception ; owning no authority but that of the general of their order, no law but his arbi- trary will, no interest but that of their society, subservient to the Pope's, no rule of conscience, no restraining influence but expediency, they pass- ed through as many transformations as would sub- serve their policy ; compromising with paganism they beguiled the heathen, and flattering Judaism they beguiled the Jew : to be a Jew, a Protestant, a pagan, an atheist, equally suited the Jesuit ; it made no difference what his outer garb whilst it suited his present purpose. And hence, they will still be the most able and indefatigable promoters of those principles which have licensed the most atrocious crimes, and ruptured the connecting ties between subjects and their rulers ; which tend to the exaltation of ecclesiastical power on the ruins of civil government ; and which kept Europe agi- tated, convulsed, a theatre of blood, to the eternal disgrace of the Church of Rome, during the two centuries succeeding the Reformation. The pe- riod of the institution of this order and its speedy extinction are in themselves an ample comment on its character. Created for the purpose of check- 136 PERILS OF POPERY. ing and retrieving the breaches of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, early in the seventeenth the Emperor Charles the Fifth of Germany, found it expedient to check their progress in his domin- ions. They were expelled successively from Eng- land, Venice, Portugal, France, Spain, and Sicily; and the order finally abolished at the remonstrance of Popish governments, esteeming it dangerous to the tranquility of Europe, in the latter part of the last century. Since that time the order has been suppressed, till restored within the last twenty- eight years, obviously for making aggressive move- ments against Protestantism, and, if possible, of regaining the ancient domination of the Roman See. Is it a matter to be viewed with indiffer- ence, and regarded without surprise and apprehen- sion, when taken in connection with other circum- stances, that Jesuitism, banished, interdicted, sup- posed to be suppressed for ever, should in this century be revived, and in active and organized operation over the world ? Instead, therefore, of having experienced any melioration, or being any better entitled to the confidence of mankind, Po- pery is from any thing in or connected with the system itself, more to be detested and abhorred, and its future ascendancy more to be dreaded and PERILS OF POPERY. 137 resisted, than as it existed in the ages of Gothic darkness. And yet, singular to say, that insidious, capri- cious, and time-serving system, with a singl e eye, and that one eye immovably fixed on one object — that of universal dominion and arbitrary sway; the fundamental maxim of whose policy has always been that the end sanctifies the means, to the subver- sion of all moral distinction, receives countenance of our nineteenth century both in England and America. We seem to have consigned to oblivion all the lessons of the past, and to be insensible to the threatening indications of the present. We are courting delusion, and fostering, in the vital warmth of our bosom, that reptile whose mortal fang is ready to pierce that bosom and poison our national glory at its fountain. 139 PERILS OF POPERY. PART II. PROSPECTS OF POPERY. CHAPTER L ITS PROSPECTS IN ENGLAND, Every great revolution in time has been pre- ceded by a previous susceptibility in its age % and the signs of the times are ominous of a more than ordinary susceptibility in our age to the? success of Popery, as well as of a dark and well- concocted design of that system upon the world j which is evidently pregnant with springing re- volution. Now add to the inherent malignity of the Papal system, the susceptibilities of the age to its success, and how much reason there is for alarm. It is impossible, without taking them into view in connection, to form any thing like an adequate conception of the reality and magnitude 140 PERILS OF POPERY. of our peril. The former is the tinder, the latter the spark which is to ignite it. If we can clearly discover the fuel artfully arranged at the point of concentrated attack, nay strewed all over the world, and ten thousand torches in incendiary hands to enkindle the universal conflagration, will there be room to doubt any longer, — will it not startle us from our apathy and impel us forth instinctively to arrest the ruin. Upon our coun- try falls a weighty responsibility in this contest, as it is the selected quarter of attack, around which all the combustibles are bearing, and whence the ruin of a world, if the incendiaries shall succeed, is to issue. Let us now turn to its prospects in England and the United States, (those great and pro- fessedly Protestant nations,) but especially in the latter, and from thence it will be easy to draw conclusions of its probable destination in the world. Let us begin with England, and after- wards fix our principal attention on its prospects in our own country. Speaking of the advance and prospects of Puseyism, says a British writer, and Clergyman of the Established Church — " At home the con- tagion has spread through the length and breadth of the land, and by far the greater part of the PERILS OP POPERY. 141 clergy of the established Church are more or less contaminated with the plague ! — many of them beyond all reasonable hope of recovery, and many others to a degree that, at best, admits of only a trembling hope. Already do many of our churches in populous districts exhibit such a tawdry, foolish, Popish mummery, that a stranger entering them would immediately con- clude that he was in a Popish place of worship. In direct defiance of the laws of our Church, the communion table is by name and construction transformed into an altar, where you may be- hold large wax candles blazing at noon day, and crosses, and saints, and childish, Jewish, Popish toys in abundance, towards which the minister bows with all the superstitious reverence of a shaven monk or friar. But this is not the worst. Let the stranger who comes to worship God according to the rites and doctrines of Reformed Protestant Church of England tarry a little while, and he beholds the professed minister of the Gospel mount the steps to the altar, and there, according to his own declared belief, < he makes the body and blood of Jesus Christ f and in a real Popish belief of the doctrine of transubstan- tiation, which our Church utterly condemns, he pretends to feed the souls of the people with a 142 PERILS OP POPERY. portion of the Redeemer's person! From the communion table let the astonished stranger fol- low this Popish Puseyite to the sermon, or eve- ning lecture, and what will he hear ? Will it be the all-pervading and all-prevailing theme of the apostle Paul, c Christ Jesus and Him crucified V No ; for that glorious subject is to be purposely- kept in the back ground to be preached with re- serve ; and the sacraments, and the outward vis- ible signs, and the services of the Church, and the performances of the priest are to be substi- tuted for the Savior, and what he has done, and suffered, and merited for sinners ! So, again, in the sacrament of baptism, these men assume to themselves the most astonishing powers and priv- ileges; and by taking the most unfair advantage of two or three undecided expressions torn from the context, and construed without regard to the more explanatory and general declarations of our services, they teach the most absurd and unscrip- tural tenets of Puseyism and semi-Popery for the doctrines of the Church. All these * wandering stars ? do not, indeed, run into the same excess of folly and error ; but the leaven has extended so far and so widely, that its blighting, darkening, corrupting effects have quite extinguished the pure light of the Gospel in many of our parish PERILS OF POPERY. 143 Church ministrations, and so obscured the light, the truth and the way in hundreds and thousands of others, that those who go to learn what they must do to be saved are in the utmost danger of being led most fatally astray. Such things," con- tinues he, "have we already lived to see; and should this downward movement go on but a few years longer, as it has progressed through the last seven, then Ichabod will be written on our Church doors ; for she will not only fail to an- swer her intended purpose of enlightening and evangelizing the nation, but she will bring Po- pish abominations over it, and a darkness, a spir- itual darkness, that may be felt. O England, England ! already may it be said with truth, 'They which lead thee cause thee to err, and de- stroy the way of thy paths/ "*. The natural coalescence of both high-church- ism and Puseyism (which is only the former pressed out in its legitimate inferences) with Popery cannot be denied. With all their ab- * The above alarming paragraph is taken from a pamphlet lately published by a pious and devoted minister of the Estab- lishment of England, the Rev. Richard Marks, Vicar of Great Missenden, entitled, " Danger and Duty ; or, a few words on the Present State of the Times, and in behalf of Truth, Righteous- ness, and Peace." It may, therefore, be relied upon. 144 PERILS OP POPERY. horrence of Popery, high-churchmen have all along been fostering its very essence. And it must be admitted, that that unholy leaven, never thoroughly expurged, but tolerated from the be- ginning, and advocated by the more secular cler- gy of the Church of England and the Episcopal in this country, threatens now to heave the whole mass. That mystery of iniquity to which 1 refer, is the fable of Unbroken Apostolical Succession, down through the assumed continuous line of St* Peter's successors, Pope Joan not excepted, to the dignitaries of the Church of England, through whom the clergy of the Episcopal Church in these United States have derived their pure stream of clerical consecration ; and on which is superin- duced their high pretension to exclusive ordina- tion, and arrogant as uncharitable proscription from the honors of the clerical character and of- fice of the ministers of all other Protestant de- nominations. This high-church assumption is radically anti-Protestant, a fatal relic of the dark system whence their forefathers emerged, and the very spring-head of the impious innovations of Dr. Pusey and his associates. Perhaps, after all, it is not so much to be wondered at, that from such a seed, lodged in the bosom of that secular Church — the image of the former beast (Rev. 13 PERILS OP POPERY. 145 chap.) — should revive and flourish, the aspiring and wide-spreading tree of Popery, casting the shadowy gloom of its foliage over institutions, planted by the hands and watered with the sweat and tears, and nourished with the blood of vene- rable reformers and holy martyrs. Permit me to say, by the way, that by these great men this doctrine was never advocated; but on the con- trary, they regarded it as a figment of Popish superstition : and the writings of some of the prelates of the British establishment, who de- plored its existence among their high-minded brethren as of the very essence of Popery and pernicious in its tendency, are now standard au- thority against our modern vain-glorious boasters of succession. Such an ingredient would have completely neutralized all the anti-Popish tenets propagated by the reformers, rebuked their im- piety in resisting the apostolical throne, and stifled the reformation in the very bud of its being. Now, to return, high-churchism and Puseyism prepare the way for Popery wherever they are fully believed and thoroughly understood. They throw down, in effect, the partition wall between Protestantism and Popery. To be a consistent Puseyite, a man must return to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church ; for he acknowledges 146 PERILS OF POPERY. her authority and apostolicity, confesses her dog- mas and her doctrines, and, if true to his princi- ples, must stigmatize the reformers as schismatics for abandoning that Church which ceased not to be the true Church of Christ, merely because they departed from her communion. All high- churchmen, if true to their principles, would re- turn to her pale ; since they admit her to be in the true succession beyond all doubt ; and if so, have reason to fear that they are out of the suc- cession, and also out of the pales of the Church. For if their Church derived valid ordination and ordinances from the Papal see, the power which conferred them at first revoked them in dis- pleasure ; the same who ordained excommuni- cated and anathematized the ordained as heretics, and holds them so to this hour. If the succes- sion be essential, what rational mind will rest on such a sandy foundation when there is a sure rock at hand ? Their legitimate and only safe course is to retrace the steps of the reformers, whom they virtually brand as usurpers in daring resistance to their superiors in office, by returning within the pale of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and swearing allegiance to the Pope ! The conclusion is sufficiently obvious. Whether the body of high-churchmen in the United States PERILS OF POPERY. 147 as well as the other side the Atlantic, ultimately take part with Popery or not, their principles throw their weight of influence on Popery's side of the balance. Let the British nation be drilled into Puseyism and it will not, cannot rest there. It will retro- grade into downright Popery, as surely as waters seek their level. Let but the floodgates of Popery be once uplifted, and no mortal hand shall be able to let them down, and the angry flood shall sweep them away. If even the Pu- seyite teachers would stop short of a finished apostacy, the people will not. They will not, out in the gulf of religious excitement and revo- lution, cling to a plank, when there is a rock at hand. If succession be necessary to give validity to the ordinances, and they thus rendered valid ab- solutely essential to salvation, they will make sure of it as meet, at the fountain-head — in the bosom of the Church of Rome. And even the teachers themselves would be swept onward with the popular rush though despite their will. It is one thing to raise a storm, quite another to manage it. The Papal Jesuit school will finish what the Ox- ford began. The former would enter the breach which the latter opened up. Though it is doubt- ful whether the terms former and latter are 148 PERILS OF POPERY. not inapplicable in this case, since it may fairly be questioned whether there be any thing to dk * tinguish them except that the one are the dis- guised, the other the unmasked servants of the Pope. Nothing short of a mandate from the Vatican, or the intervention of a miraculous agency God is not often pleased to exert, would be able to drive back the tide or to chain the popular tempest ; and the former cannot be hoped as it would involve a miracle of miracles. The only conceivable issues to the British throne of such a revolution are obvious : its incumbent must either renounce the Protestant faith, or the throne, the very tenure of which is constitution- ally pendant on the condition of his maintain- ing that religion. In intimate association with these reflections is the fact, that a considerable proportion of the United Kingdom are bigoted Pa- pists with the grand Agitator (O'Connel) at their head, waiting to second the designs of the Pon- tiff. Should Puseyism succeed, what a train of ruins would follow ! Who can conceive what revolutions would ensue and where they would end ? Of this, however, we may rest assured : England once turned Puseyite, would speedily yield allegiance to the Pope ; the popular will at his nod would effect it. 149 CHAPTER II. PROSPECTS OF POPERY IN THE UNITED STATES. Add, again, to the evil aspects of the genius and tendencies of the Popish system upon our free institutions, (which we considered in the for- mer part of the work,) those internal and extrin- sic circumstances which render this nation peculiarly susceptive to its success, and how painful and overwhelming are the possibilities (to say the least) which their united evidence cannot fail to force upon our minds. These sus- ceptibilites may be classed under the following heads : Those which are friendly to proselyta- tion ; those which favor and encourage emigra- tion ; those which grow out of the political as- sociations of Popery, in prospect as well as in fact ; and, lastly, though not least, and most sur- prising of all, the extreme ignorance or indiffer- ence of our country in its imminent peril. PROSELYTATION. Accustomed to flatter ourselves that the intel- ligence and patriotism of our people, educated and formed under the genial light and influences M 150 PERILS OF POPERY. of Protestant institutions, is proof against Popish and Jesuitical proselytism, we are settled down into a profound indifference to the insidious, pros- elyting efforts of the Papal clergy, forgetting that the Jesuits are the legitimate successors of the Scribes and Pharisees, (and, like the servant of the prophet, inherit a double portion of their spirit,) who, our Lord declared, "would compass sea and land to make one proselyte ;" nor do they fail to exceed them in the sequel. No order of men can be better trained or qualified to impose upon mankind. " The glorious attribute of reason with which the Creator has endowed us, can, since the fall, be perverted to any service : there is no proposi- tion in ethics or religion too preposterous or too horrible to be embraced by it. And in the case under consideration the process by which convic- tion is wrought is not difficult of solution. Take the doctrine of tr an substantiation for example. You might carry it round the world, and stop at every human habitation, (beyond the pale of the Roman Catholic Church,) and you could not get a single man, woman or child, to believe it, if it were submitted to. them on its own proper evi- dence. You might as well attempt to convince them that the darkness of midnight was the efful- PERILS OF POPERY. 151 gence of noon-day as to make them believe that the consecrated wafer you exhibited to them was the 'body and blood, the soul and divinity of Jesus Christ/ But go even to men of vigorous minds and ripe scholarship, and convince them by the subtle sophistries of the Popish theolo- gians that God has instituted an infallible Church, and that the Church of Rome is that Church, and your contest with them is at an end. They will believe in transubstantiation or any thing else, provided the Church decrees it. The infallibility of the Church leaves no room for investigation, and makes doubt itself impiety. What right has reason to say, 'this is absurd?' What right have the senses to say, 'this belies every one of us? 5 The voice of the infallible Church is the voice of God; and the Church declares, 'this wafer is the body and blood, the soul and divinity, yea, the whole person of Jesus Christ/ Both must sub- mit, not only without examining, but without ques- tioning, to that power which cannot err, and from whose decisions there is no appeal/'* And with- out this, let it be recollected, there is no salvation ! Upon this bold and malignant assumption, too, together with the charitable concession of Pro- * Late Address of the American Protestant Association. 152 PERILS OP POPERY. testants of the possibility of salvation within the pale of the Church of Rome, the Papists have not failed to levy ample contribution. From this assumption on their part, and concession on the part of their opponents, they unceremoniously in- fer that it alone ought to be deemed sufficient to decide the faith of a Protestant in their Church, since, on all hands, it is agreed that they may be saved within her pale, while there is no such mental agreement between Protestants and Pa- pists to the same effect in reference to those with- in the pale of the latter: as if there were nothing wanting to the decided superiority and success of a sect — nothing more required to prove its heav- enly descent, and its claims to universal accepta- tion, than vindictively to seize the thunderbolts of Omnipotence, " And deal damnation round the land On all they judge their foe !" The same charitable concession we make to the Jews, the heathen, and the Turks ; and the same reason precisely might be urged by them all, in common with Popery, as conclusive in favor of their respective religions, and are equally entitled to respect and consideration with such Protes- tants as are ready to be imposed upon by this PERILS OF POPERY. 153 shallow artifice of the partizans of Rome. Be- sides, this pretension, founded upon mutual agreement in religion, would be a still stronger reason to sweep us all (the - Church of Rome not excepted) back, by the abandonment of revealed religion altogether, into the faith of Lord Herbert and the natural religionists. But waiving further remark on this flimsy subterfuge for argument, and in support of a weak cause which it well represents, we are at a total loss to perceive why Papists lay such stress on the mere concession of a bare possibility by Protestants, (against a thou- sand probabilities, they also urge against the trembling hope of their salvation they charitably indulge, and their utter rejection of the idea where her votaries are in circumstances favorable to their better choice,) unless it be that it suits their pur- pose with inconsiderate or weak minded persons. One would be inclined to think, on the contrary, that instead of making such a fallible concession the ground of a divine faith, the partizans of an infallible Church would find in its source proof positive of its falsehood, draw from it just the opposite conclusions, and warn the world against placing any confidence in it: and the malignancy of the anathema involved in the exclusive claims of her community to salvation, might be deemed 154 PERILS OF POPERY. a sufficient antidote to its success with the least discerning minds, had not sad experience taught very differently. We are not left on this point to mere abstract argumentation. The times we live in one would think sufficient to dissipate the illusion that the Protestant community is invulnerable to Popery. What imposture is too gross, what fanaticism too wild in modern times, to draw away its thousands or myriad votaries ! What an aspect Christen- dom presents to the observant spectator ! How deeply, how painfully, how awfully interesting ! Error, hundred-handed, is stalking forth over the Christian world. Protean error, in its varied shapes, assuming new and reviving its old forms ^— now transformed into wild fanaticism, now in- to bare-faced imposture, and anon into new modi- fications of the great Papal apostacy — is aiming to assimilate the world to itself. It busies itself to suit all tastes and classes of society with its altars, regardless of the forms so the essence is preserved. Its most ridiculous forms attract their myriad wor- shippers, and human reason is caricatured in the person of humanity in our enlightened era. The Irving fanaticism in England is infinitely exceeded by the Mormon imposture in the United States : and how singular the success of the latter even to PERILS OF POPERY. 155 foreign shores ! The wild notions of a recent visionary, upon which have been more recently grafted old exploded dogmas of error, have shaken the whole country with excitement. And Popery, with seductive airs, aiming at the supremacy in this country, nor altogether fruitlessly, in a hardly protestantized exterior at the other side the At- lantic, has infected and proselyted a great part of the clergy of the Anglican establishment, and been tamely submitted to by large bodies of its members till the contempt of the intelligent and the good of that nation is turned into consterna- tion. We have seen that a British prelate to check its influence has had to deliver and publish a Charge against these errors. Thence it has ex- tended east and west, till the Bishop of Calcutta, and the Episcopalian Bishop of our own State, have found it necessary, even in these distant climes, to guard their clergy against them. If the revival of Popish tenets by aspiring founders of new sects are attended with such triumphs at home and abroad, what may not the great mother of abominations herself, aided as she is by the pseudo-Protestants, accomplish in the future ? And they are not a few among us who are be- guiled by the sophistry and shallow pretences of Popery, not only into the belief that she is per- 156 PERILS OF POPERY. fectly inoffensive, but actually into high admira- tion of her virtues. Surely they are well pre- pared to be deluded next into the belief of transub- stantiation, saint worship, purgatory, prayers for the dead, and other Popish rites and tenets, none of which, perhaps, is opposed by stronger evi- dence than disproves the position, that Popery is congenial to the institutions of civil and religious liberty. The great religious contest of our age is be- tween formalism and evangelism. Under these denominations air the sects are ranged; and in the van of the former Popery leads. We know that outward and adventitious things have more to do in deciding the religious preference of those who have no purely religious sentiments than the distinguishing principles of churches. Rome knows this too, and she acts upon it. Her clergy hope to strike the senses of the multitude with the pomp and splendor of her rites and ceremo- nies ; to attract to her altars, by the glare of the learning and refinement of her priests, the literary and vain ; and to win the affections of the fashion- able and the gay as she advances in popularity. Whatever, therefore, tends to strengthen and pro- mote the reign of formalism, is serviceable to the interests of Rome and favorable to her success ; PERILS OP POPERY. 157 since it is calculated to break down prejudices and create sympathy with her. The semi-Popish sects are indeed preparing the way for the success of Popery, and are likely to be ultimately swallowed up in her ; since the tendency of the human mind in error, like its ten- dency in truth, is from lesser to greater, and from partial to total. It would seem as if only the torch need to be applied to the combustible in them to blow them into atoms — to scatter all that distin- guishes them from Popery to the winds. Besides, there is in the human mind a tendency to supersti- tion, which has distinguished it in all ages, and to which the possession of vital religion is the only sure antidote. By superstition we mean all those notions of a spurious religion, in general, which attach to peculiar positive rites that efficacy which only belongs to moral conformity to the will of God, and supposes their observance to be equiva- lent to it. Of all the forms of superstition Popery is the worst ; since it has combined all that is most ruinous to the spiritual and temporal wel- fare of man with all that is calculated to captivate the senses and dazzle the imagination. The bulk of mankind will have some form of religion. This is, perhaps, the grand distinguishing charac- teristic of our race, man's great peculiar amid the 158 PERILS OF POPERY. varied forms of life and being by which he is surrounded. It is the instinct of his nature — an almost overwhelming power prompts him to de- votion and religious exercises. Hence the im- portance of possessing true religion, the pearl of great price : it fills the void, it occupies the space which superstition would usurp ; and not only arms us against it, but enlists and equips us for aggressive warfare, and makes it our indispensa- ble duty to oppose it. But the great multitude, who cling to the form of godliness whilst they deny its power, are vulnerable to superstition as these are proof against it ; and the same spirit and moral dispositions which contents them with the mere semblance and outward show of religion, creates a tendency to embrace that form which possesses the greatest exterior splendor, and is best adapted to strike the imagination and the senses. None delighted more to gaze upon the garnished and highly decorated tombs of the mar- tyred prophets and righteous men, as the Saviour informed the Jews, than those among them who inherited the murderous spirit of their fathers, who had imbrued their hands in their blood. The splendor of the tomb is in amends for the rottenness within ; and when men will bow at the shrine of a mere formalism, it is natural to PERILS OF POPERY. 159 expect them to surround that carcass whose sepulchre is most majestic and most imposing. These advantages incontestibly belong supremely to the Church of Rome. As on the one hand the transition from super- stition to Popery is natural and easy, so on the other scepticism and irreligion, as they may be its offspring, may in turn become a main source of its success. In proportion to the prevalence of irreligion is the danger from this source ; for if true religion be the only antidote to superstition, (which we have discovered,) then it necessarily follows that the more irreligious, according to the true rule of religious character, an individual or a nation is, the more exposed they are to the influ- ence of superstition, or that species of religion which would insure to the observance of mere outward rites and ceremonies the rewards of vir- tue and piety, which it proposes in lieu of them. As it is the purpose of superstition to blend the extremes of impiety and the most rigorous sanc- tity, to combine the rewards of virtue with the demerit of vice and profanity, (elements, by the way, essential to its success,) it must ever be most agreeable to the human mind in proportion to its enmity to moral purity or holiness. The ancient world was never more superstitious than when it 160 PERILS OF POPERY. was most impious ; and should a nation fly to the awful extreme of universal scepticism and profli- gacy, it would doubtless soon subside into the opposite extreme of profound superstition. Since the bulk of mankind at least will follow the pro- pensity of their nature to adopt some form of re- ligion, a spurious if not the genuine form, such must be the result. Had the modern revolution- ary atheists been permitted to protract and carry out their disastrous experiment, it would doubt- less have shed new light upon this propensity of our nature, and evinced that society could not long exist without some form of religious devo- tion. JNor are the leaders of political parties likely to be the last to fall in with, the growing or prevailing superstition. They will be prompted by good policy, if not by piety, to do homage to the superstition, by embracing its forms or paying court to its leaders. In proportion then to the ex- tent of practical and speculative impiety, and to the growing importance of the superstition for political purposes, is our danger from Popery. Two concurrent causes in operation create an awful possibility of an unimagined and unexam- pled success of Popery in our country : Extreme ignorance of the system and as to the character of its agents on the part of a large proportion of PERILS OF POPERY. 161 its citizens, and unwearied assiduity, with the utmost vigor of effort, on the part of the Papal clergy. A large proportion of the priests among us are undoubtedly Jesuits, and they have here already several institutions for the training of this order. Under these refined sophists and masters of policy, Popery is succeeding in fact in this country. They are aiming to engross, as they had done before the expiration of the sixteenth cen- tury in every Papal country in Europe, the edu- cational direction of the youth in this. Through- out the Mississippi .Valley their institutions of learning are sustained mainly by Protestant fami- lies, who are thus deriving their educational nour- ishment, and receiving a bias for life, at the viti- ating breasts of this hideous monster, disguised by exterior glare and show. This is a grand stroke of policy ! Many of their churches throughout the Middle and Western States are built, and others erecting in reliance on Protestants to fill them : nor are they slow in affording assistance for their erection. These proselyting movements are not to be in vain. They are tilling, and will yet tell loudly on our Protestant community. They have already removed the prejudices and conciliated the favor of multitudes of our respect- able and influential fellow-citizens; and, believe 162 PERILS OF POPERY. me,. this is the first step to the consummation they desire. In this Church, whose motto has always been that popular ignorance is the mother of popular devotion, they see nothing but the true friend and patron of learning ! In this leaven principle of the worst despotisms of Europe, they see only the friend, and ally, and admirer of republican institutions in America ! Time, whose keen tooth scarce aught earthly escapes, has been insensibly wearing away the asperity of Protestant prejudice and animosity against Popery ; the history of its enormities be- gins to fall upon Protestant ears like tales of ro- mance, too unearthly and inhuman ever to have been realized ; the horrid tragedies of its reign, which under almost any circumstances might ex- cuse incredulity, are rendered questionable by dis- tance, which diminishes evidence ; we at least are disposed to hope that the system has under- gone some radical melioration or improvement, an error into which even a mistaken spirit of Christian charity may lead us ; at all events we console ourselves the danger is distant; and a spirit of anlipathy and maddened retaliation has been displaced by compassion and sympathy for an humbled foe. Besides, it has usually been the error of txs&j PERILS OF POPERY. 163 or rather, to speak less paradoxically, of its vota- ries, that relying on its natural omnipotence and immortality, and confounding the weakness and susceptibility of the human mind with its mighti- ness and impassiveness, they have been wanting in vigilance and precaution against the assaults of sophistry and error. Error, on the contrary, is always suspicious of danger, and watchful as the spider at every breath to strengthen its flimsy web, and to retain its victims. And often in pro- portion to the magnitude of the error and the madness of its votaries, is the contempt and supineness of the friends of truth ; as if madmen and maniacs were not to be feared, a lawless banditti could effect no injury in society, or there was no susceptibility in mankind to errors of mon- strous shape and midnight hue. This proneness of the friends of truth, this confidence in its suc- cess and its maintainancy of its own ground, is highly dangerous to the cause. We leave it to secure itself till it is banished. It is a keen edged sword, but it needs to be wielded. Instead of following the ordinary rule by guarding the trea- sure in proportion to its value, we are liable here to reverse it. Into this dangerous errror Protest- ants, confident in the truth of their system, are fallen : and they are confirmed in their mistake by 164 PERILS OF POPERY. the modern aspects of Popery, failing to perceive that it is the times that are changed, not the sys- tem ; that it is ability that is wanting, and not the disposition of ancient Popery ; and that policy rather than piety is at the bottom of its friendly airs, as the assassin conceals the dagger he seeks opportunity to plunge into the vitals of his unsus- pecting victim. EMIGRATION. But the danger of this country is not chiefly from proselytation, though not all invulnerable at this point. It is from emigration, which gives it a peculiar adaptation to the Papal design, — emigration which, like the irruption of the North upon Italy, threatens to pour a flood of darkness over this mighty continent. The framers of our government did not take their observation from the critical point of time which we occupy ; the crisis had not arrived so threatening to our experiment of popular self- government ; they were not endowed with that scope of vision whereby they could anticipate the perilous times which have come upon us; per- haps none of them had analyzed the nature, or discovered the inherent malignity of the Papal system, and deceived by the quietude of Rome PERILS OF POPERY. 165 and its partizans, imagined that that spirit which had dyed its previous history in blood, and dis- tinguished its universal career by an indomitable ambition, was departed. And in their arrange- ments for its future government and its perpetuity they but provided against the evils they foresaw, and threw up no guards or fortifications for pro- tection against elements of evil they neither ima- gined or suspected. " The extension of our civil and social blessings to the oppressed of all nations who might seek an asylum on our shores, was a provision alike wise and generous; but it was not made with the expectation of millions, speaking other lan- guages, ignorant of the institutions and laws that gave them shelter, unqualified for the enjoyment of rights so easily secured and so little prized, would swarm forth from the crowded states of the old world, < when not needed for their armies and navies/ to endanger the liberties of the New World. Perfect freedom of conscience was another inalienable right, recognized in our char- ter of liberty, and by it secured to all who dwell in our land : but the prospect then seemed remote of such a provision being made the cover under which a system of spiritual despotism — in its in- herent nature and universal history opposed to N 166 PERILS OP POPERY. the very principle by which it is protected — now and always denying its subjects the right of pri- vate judgment in matters of faith — should seek, by the lavish expenditure of means drawn from the coffers of royalty and the skilful disposition of a Jesuit force schooled in the intriguing diplo- macy of Europe, to lay broad and deep such foundations of error as never did and never can so exist within a society like ours." The Crusades, protracted through successive ages, which superstition excited for the recovery of the land of Palestine from the infidel nations, when " all Europe, torn from its foundations, seemed ready to precipitate itself in one united body upon Asia," is. a fearful comment on the danger of America from the frantic zeal of Popish bigotry. The same spirit of enterprize, emana- ting from Popish zealotry, when excited from its apathy by the bold and magnificent design of the Papal court, may take its direction to our open shores, on which we have hitherto gene- rously stood, holding out the welcome hand t6 the alien, the foreigner, and the stranger, as it did once to the Holy Land. All the eyes of Papal Eu- rope will be turned, and concentred, and fastened upon America, if, indeed, their concentric gaze be not already fixed upon her. With the insti- PERILS OF POPERY. 167 tutions of this country, Protestant Europe has little or no sympathy, and who can tell that all Europe is not now, or ere long will not be con- spired against her. America stands alone in the political world, at once its terror and its hope, its reprover and its admiration ! So must she ever stand whilst the genius of her government and of theirs remain the same. Were our contest merely with Popery in our midst, then we might regard its effects with pity or with scorn rather than with apprehension and fear. It is not, however. It is with the great Papal empire — with the Pope, and his more than one hundred millions of subjects : an em- pire, the resources of which, from its peculiar structure, he can wield and concentrate with a marvelous dexterity. Popery among us is but the channel through which the wealth and influ- ence of papal Europe is to flow, ever widening by emigration, procreation, and proselytation, till the accumulating torrent|of Papal influence, dis- daining its narrow channel, whelms the whole country. Is not the grand crusade commenced already? May it share the defeat of the past crusades ! What mean those powerful associations in Eu- rope for the propagation of Popery here — in the 168 PERILS OF POPERY. city of Lyons — in Austria, headed by Prince JVletternich — and that gigantic scheme set on foot of late in Great Britain, speedily to distend the basis of the power and influence of Popery, by transporting whole colonies of Papists to our Western States. How far the enterprise of the Popish world is worked up it is impossible to say; and the time may be at hand when Europe once more unsettled from its basis, shall seem ready to bound, not upon Asia, but upon America. The floodgates of emigration are up- lifted, and who shall ever dare to whisper — let them down ? Judging from present appearances it is most probable that we shall continue to look on with a heightening, but unavailing surprise and anxiety, till we must behold with anguish an evil it is too late to correct; till the extin- guishment of the fire raging within attracts our attention and calls off our energies from the circle which involves us ; till the power of the internal enemy shall, maugre our alarmed flutter- ings, keep the gates wide open to the besieging hosts without, who haste to enter. No other country on the face of the globe is exposed at this quarter as ours. Its vast and uncultivated wildernesses invite the stranger and the foreigner to seek a settlement among us. If PERILS OF POPERY. 169 oppression reigns in European countries over any part of their citizens, the perfect tolerance of ours affords them an asylum. The superior enterprise of our people and peculiar resources of our country, hold out inducements to those in other lands who have no prospects there of com- petency or comfort, to mount with us the revolv- ing wheel of fortune in this. Here all the ele- ments of human prosperity are more rich and rife than in any other country. In this country they need not fear, as in England and Ireland, the want of bread, and may recover their ener- gies, paralyzed by poverty and the despair of bettering their conditions ; and, unlike the pea- santry of France, Austria, Prussia, Poland, Tur- key, and Italy, the dwellers in the cottages of our country, are themselves the lords of the soil, each under his own vine and fig tree. This is the field which invites their ever-increasing surplus popu- lations. As the subjects of the Pope are every- where in Europe the most miserable victims of poverty and oppression, an effect naturally re- sulting from the spirit-crushing genius of their religion, even where there are no extraneous causes, the greatest masses of emigration to this country are composed, as might be expected, of them. Hence America is the proper theatre to 170 PERILS OF POPERY. be selected by the Romish Church for the execu- tion of her bold design. Here the Pope may concentrate the energies and resources of his mighty empire, and a theatre on which to con- centrate his power is all he asks or needs. But besides, the late political attitude assumed by this organized body, under the enslaving in- fluence of a priesthood organized into a kind of individuality of interest, and feeling, and action, in the East ; their bold encroachment upon the educational system there, and advancing argu- ments which assume that there are fundamental and irreconcilable differences between their prin- ciples and those on which our social and political institutions repose ; and the unison with which they act in every city, village, and township where they have arisen, or are arising into im- portance, open to the observation 'of every man conversant with their proceedings, utters a por- tentous voice, one might suppose sufficient to startle from their lethargy this entire nation, and to convince all who believe, or effect to believe them an altered people, that the same spirit of ambition, innovation, and intolerance, pervades their community in our day as in olden time. If the evidence of the Papal design upon our liberties were less strikingly marked, it were not PERILS OF POPERY. 171 thence to be concluded that our institutions are not in jeopardy, and that the fatal train is not laid or laying, destined to effect the disastrous explosion contemplated. Like that submarine ephemera, feeble and contemptible though it ap- pears, which toils through its countless genera- tions unobserved, till often suddenly its coral creations emerge from their native deep, new continents and kingdoms ; — so the emissaries of the Roman See, perfectly organized, wedded to the holy mother, (inapposite name,) and self- sacrificing to her interests, patiently endure the continuous toil of ages, often unobserved and little suspected in their designs, till the last tragic scene of the grand drama is ready to be acted, when the curtain of secrecy is suddenly uplifted. Not to have formed such a design, and to be attempting it with a bold and vigorous execution under all the circumstances, would be a rare in- stance of apathy and stupidity in Rome. A de- sign upon our liberties, with even the least pro- bability of success, is what it would be natural to expect in such a sworn foe to the rights of con- science and of man — exactly what we would in- fer from its principles and anticipate from their past operation ; and one might suppose that such would be our horror and dread of its ascendancy 172 PERILS OF POPERY. that even dubious developements of the forma- tion of a design, beginning to be carried out/i^. systematic operation, with a bare possibility of success, would be sufficient to startle from their lethargy a nation of freemen, whose conduct should be a ceaseless exposition of the motto — u Eternal Vigilance." Can we linger a moment longer in doubt of the reality of this design ? To test this question let a demand be made upon the Pontiff of Rome to permit exertions on the part of Protestant Chris- tendom in his dominions equivalent to those which Papal Christendom is pressing among us — let us ask of him the reasonable return of our civility, and Christian charity and tolerance; and then, if we succeed in this just request; if the throne of infallibility does not frown down its own darkness upon us ; if an air of supercilious and haughty contempt does not accompany an indignant repulse, a stern refusal and severe rebuke, let us continue to question his evil inten- tions upon our country : but if, on the contrary, we fail, let the scales fall from our eyes, and let us bethink ourselves that he who is ready to take a liberty with others he is unwilling to grant in turn, is not to be trusted, — he is not merely guilty of meanness, but of knavery ; for he is al- PERILS OF POPERY. 173 ready found trespassing his own sense and stand- ard of propriety and of right. I fancy the reader is startled, at least smiles at the idea of the Pope's dominions being thrown open to the Protestant clergy of America, and the efforts, the wealth, the combined energies of Protestant Christen- dom ; turned by him into a war-theatre at their instance ; they permitted to erect churches and seminaries of learning, to scatter bibles all over the land — and of a universal toleration being proclaimed throughout the dominions of the sove- reign Pontiff. Well may the reader smile at so preposterous an idea. The experiment needs not to be tried : the whole world knows what recep- tion such a project would meet at Rome (See Appendxi.) political associations. The times are but too pregnant with intima- tions that this system of legerdemain is conspir- ing with the European despotisms to subvert the liberties of this nation, confessedly so perilous, and so evil in its aspects upon their authority. The Pope aspires to erect his Popedom in our midst, and they would employ him as the fit in- strument to effect a purpose fraught with such infinite advantage to themselves. Upon a spiri- o 174 PERILS OF POPERY. tu.al empire over more than one hundred millions of souls, why should he not, aided by the kings of the earth, aspire to establish a temporal supremacy over this mighty hemisphere. The signs are unequivocal of such an enterprise. The philo- sophy of Schlegel may be rife with ruin to the world. Think you that the motive which wrings the hard earnings of the European poor to erect splendid edifices of worship and institutions of learning in this country ; that stimulates them to the attainment of a high educational ascendancy at so much cost, with such energy and perseve- rance, is altogether pure; that it augurs nothing of the array of a Fopish world against our insti- tutions, confessedly so formidable and so perilous in their influence to the genius of its governments. Whence — we press the question — whence the in- terest manifested by the European kings and nobles in this republican country — their excited concern for its literary culture — their lavish dona- tions for the propagation and support of the Papal system amongst us ? Does all this proceed from pure disinterestedness and generosity ? If their real motive is not ulterior to their pretended de- signs, why not appropriate those squandered sums to the promotion of their home interests ? Has selfishness in these powers so soon been PERILS OF POPERY. 175 swallowed up in an unbounded philanthrophy ? Think so who can, with the evidence of univer- sal history before them. Or, we ask, have our institutions, most perfectly uncongenial and, in their influence, subversive of theirs, become all at once objects of such strong and devoted attach- ment, — that they should all conspire to pour their bountiful and munificent charities into the lap of a Protestant nation, to the neglect of their own needy and impoverished realms? They know the utility of keeping the motto, as well as we, that " charity begins at home ;" and were it not to advance some ulterior sinister interest of the family compact, their own present interests would not be abandoned in taking care of us. Be assured America in her present form of government is no more the universal favorite of the European powers now, than the Protestants of France were the pets of its government, which lavished its favors and elevations upon them so bountifully, previous to the disastrous night of the festivities to the honor of St. Bar- tholomew. It is to be feared that the sentiments of the famous Frederic Schlegel, under the auspices of Prince Metternich, (that*prime friend of despotism and of Popery ;) the author of his model of empire, 176 PERILS OF POPERY. a member of his cabinet, and his confidential counsellor and adviser, are operating like leaven in the ruling powers of Europe, and assimilating the whole mass to itself. This man, reputed great, but in error, and one of the most distin- guished literary men in Europe, about seventeen years ago (1828,) " delivered lectures at Vienna, on the Philosophy of History, a great object of which is to shew the mutual support which Po- pery and monarchy derived from each other. He commends the two systems in connection as deserving of universal reception. He attempts to prove that the arts and sciences, and all the pursuits of man, as an intellectual being, are pro- moted under the perfect system of Church and State : a Pope at the head of the former, an em- peror at the head of the latter. He contrasts with this the system of Protestantism ; represents Protestantism as the enemy of good government, as the ally of Republicanism, as the parent of the distresses of Europe, as the cause of all the dis- orders with which legitimate governments are afflicted. In the close of his lectures, he speaks thus of this country : < The true nursery of all these destructive principles, the revolutionary school for France and the rest of Europe, has been North America. Thence the evil has spread PERILS OP POPERY. over many other lands, either by natural c/rc- tagion, or by arbitrary communication? "* s/ich is the light in which our institutions are viewed in European countries ; and it is true jhat Popery and despotism, the forms of liberal go- vernment and Protestantism, are associated in history and coalesce in principle. These are the principles of the man, whose policy and opinions opened the way for Austrian efforts on the foundation of St. Leopold's to add America to the Pope's dominions: an institution erected for the express and exclusive purpose of advancing the propagation and influence of Popery here. Its source then is prifna facie evidence of the object of this institution. These patrons and friends of Popery hope, " so soon as it gains the fulcrum of popular opinion, and the lever of the majority" by its chamelion-like mu- tations, to build up the beau-ideal of the Aus- trian prince in America. Even England herself may be implicated in a measure in the plot; it is hard to conjecture how deeply. The late revo- lution in her national establishment, taken together with the insidious warfare of the government upon dissenters; and its bold but disastrous en- * Lecture 17, vol. ii, p. 286. The above extract is from Beecher. 178 PERILS OF POPERY. coachment upon the Church of Scotland (and fc long connivance as far as expediency would permit of the noon-day heresy by the dignitaries of Vie Church ought not to be forgotten;) are evi- defce of a more than merely religious movement The Puseyite movement, (which we have seen, is of relapse into the arms of Popery) may be a , plot intended to subvert the degree of civil and religious liberty the British people at present en- joy — an expedient to bolster up a falling secular Church, though at the sacrifice of its sacred prin- ciples; to raise up, by the avowal of Popish tenets; a distinction between the doctrines and rites of the Establishment and the dissenting bodies; to engraft upon the establishment the intolerance of Popery; and thus to quell the political agitations and excitements, and movements towards reform to which the empire is subjected from the diffu- sion of knowledge and liberal sentiments by Pro- testantism, and the influence of Ptepublican Ame- rica. If those in whose hands is the administra- tion of the British government, are not disposed to give a favorable response to the popular de- mand for reform of Church and State, the rulers of both judge rightly, if they deem a return to Popery absolutely necessary to secure the per- manency and peace of the government with its PERILS OF POPERY. 17! abuses. Could they but evoke the ignorance and superstitions of P.opery on the empire again, t|fe/ might perhaps succeed in maintaining the oppres- sive evils of their institutions. The true issue in this contest is, of Pcpish error and superstition — basis of monarchy ; and of Protestantism as the basis of popular and en- lightened government. The powers of Europe seem disposed to seize the former horn of the dilemma, uneasy of the restraints imposed upon them by an enlightened public opinion, and tl & demand for the reform of corruptions and abuses only sanctified by antiquity, they are unwilling to grant. T*hey think it preferable to risk the government of the people in the hands of a hired and venal priesthood, however dangerous the experiment, in hopes that they may be able to rule the priests, than that the people, assuming their natural sovereignty, should over-awe them, and they be held responsible at the tribunal of public opinion. The signs are unequivocal that this is the policy of consolidated Europe ; and that the Protestant with the Papal powers, if they do not conspire together to effect, would exult over the downfall of Republican North America. If we are not mistaken in these views (and 180 PERILS OF POPERY. God grant we may !) our conflict may be with a varring world. For this sublime contest — the st fylimest should it occur ever acted on the theatre °f time — let us prepare : and when that time ' a n^es let us act with a promptitude and vigor sorthg with the magnificent destinies, the des- tinies of a world, pending on our fortune. If irotestantism and liberty flee to this sacred tem- ple for refuge from their pursuers, intent on their banishment from earth — shall they, oh shall they ke dragged from the horns of its altar ! In the history of party collisions in this coun- try have already been witnessed the intoxication of political excitement and the recklessness of party zeal. It is easy to conceive that taking advantage of such violent paroxysms, as the Po- pish party advances in the scale of importance, it may enter into combination with powerful parties, and thus attain to an ascendancy at which there will be no power left sufficient to check its ambi- tious strides. The stone that on the mountain top, and even after its revolvings first begin, may easily be checked, after it has gained a quickened velocity defies the power of resistance, and goes on, rolling, and bounding, and leveling opposi- tion ; while they who might readily have checked it are left the single alternative, either to be crush- PERILS OP POPERY. 181 ed in its career or get out of its way, to look on at the destruction it is too late to remedy. We need not look forward for the period when the unnaturalized agents of the foreign despot shall boast of holding the balance of political power, and marshal their ignorant and subser- vient hosts, impelled by foreign sympathy, under a religious party flag, to subserve the interests of Rome. The time is arrived already. We have seen the favor of that party courted, or its retali- ation dreaded, by the secular press, in advancing their claims upon our Protestant community, and in its silence during their late aggression .on the school department in one. quarter of the land, not- withstanding their bold avowal therein of prin- ciples antagonist to those which form the basis of our institutions. It is the case with most party politicians, as well as the error of a majority of mankind, that they are disposed to merge all con- siderations of the future in the oblivion of the present interest; to look no farther into futurity than to the issue of the present emergency ; to sell a future kingdom for the gratification of a present triumph. Nor are ambitious demagogues likely to be wanting in the future history of this country, as they never have been wanting ill any country, 182 PERILS OF POPERY. who, desperado-like, for their subsidy in the elec- tive scale/ will be ready to sell their country, and become the willing tools of a foreigner combining political and ecclesiastical despotism, to gain their mercenary ends and gratify their lust for power. There are in influence in every government men of second-rate ambition and sordid principles, who would gladly wield a dependent influence ; men who would not start at the idea of ruining a world, so that self might be advanced to enthrone- ment upon its ruins; who, to chastise public neg- lect, or avenge private wrongs, would visit upon their country the maddened retaliation of their wounded vanity. There is, too, a species of am- bition which, unsupported by the associate attri- butes of greatness, and unable to aspire to the glory of a master-builder, would at least perpetu- ate its name, like the incendiary of ill-fame who destroyed the ancient temple by virtue of the torch of destruction. Where so many nations have fallen victims to slavery by the parricidal hands of their own children, it is not for us to re- pose implicit confidence in the universal and in- vulnerable patriotism of our countrymen. Be assured the time is at hand ! What Rome may not be able to effect by open violence she may by covert bribery and corruption. PERILS OP POPERY. 183 When reduced to the single alternative to be the despot or the slave, what man of wordly am- bition will not strive for the ascendency ? Re- duced to this alternative even patriots may so- phisticate despotism into virtue. Necessity, says the popular axiom, has no law; and self-preserva- tion is the first law of nature. Times there were in Roman history when her ruling spirits were involved in this dilemma. If ignorance and corrup- tion over-spread our nation, and factious dema- gogues gain the control of powerful and violent parties, even patriots may aspire to become tyrant-slaves, by base compliance with the ensla- ving conditions of Popish influence, to secure its patronage. They would doubtless exculpate their conduct by pleading that they only choose a les- ser for a greater evil ; when for them to have de- clined the despot's throne had only filled it with a worse tyrant. . We will barely allude, in this connection, (for to allude is sufficient,) to the proximity of Papal Canada and Mexico ; both ready, so soon as the Papal faction shall feel themselves justified to strike in this country, to back and follow up the blow. Any calculation, then, that leaves the in- fluence of these proximate countries out of the question, is an inadequate estimate of the real 184 PERILS OP POPERY. Papal power in this nation — variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to two millions. Already we find the venom of party politics instilled into the Church, and operating with a malignant influence among her members. In the late presidential election this element of discord has evinced a rapid growth; it begins to threaten more serious consequences than formerly, and will probably ere long, if not arrested by the good sense of our people, leaven the whole lump. These contests are beginning to produce a peri- odical declension of religious and fraternal feeling among the membership, but, alas, too universal ! Should this symptom of disease in the Church go on as it has been doing, it may well be feared that the time is not far distant when the line of the great political parties will also become a great dividing line of churches ; that the sects will stand ranged on the sides of Whig and Democrat ; that this will be effected by the drawing off of that polit- ical denomination in each church which is far in the minority, from differences of political opinion between a large proportion of the ministry of any given church and any portion of its membership, and from other causes. The same spirit which has transformed the great question growing out of the peculiar institutions of the South into an PERILS OP POPERY. 185 instrument of division, it is to be feared, will effect the evil we are deprecating; and perhaps, .twelve months ago, the idea that it would have assumed the fearful importance it now occupies in a numer- ous branch of our common Zion would have been started at as much as we fear will be the case with the sentiments we are here advancing ! In this event, (God forbid it should occur,) that party on whose side Popery shall range her hosts (and for aught we know it may prove the strongest) will open up new susceptibilities to its progress that may seal the destiny of our land and nation. A common sympathy, and common cause in the grand political contest, would in this case bury in oblivion all sense of religious difference, and create friendly dispositions and intercourse among the sects ranged on that hand; and Popery might ultimately devour them all up in her mighty vor- tex, and bring the embattled hosts to the general denominations of Popery and its friends on one hand, Protestantism and its friends on the other. The least that could be anticipated would be a division of Protestantism against herself; and the wisdom of the only infallible and unerring Teacher has long since decided that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." If it will not be thought too great a departure 186 PERILS OF POPERY. from the present stage of our subject, permit me to ask, Why may we not differ on questions affect- ing the internal policy of our country without turning it into a vehicle of prejudice and bitter- ness in our churches? and why may we not dis- tinguish between these questions and that in- volved in the invasive aspects of Popery and the Popish powers upon our country? The latter will, sooner or later, be the all-important, the vital question. Let neither party enter into close alli- ance with Popery; throw out no overtures to con- ciliate or secure its balance of power; let both con- spire to hold up to public view our danger from this prime invasion of (what equally concerns all parties) our country ; and let the popular mind be so well instructed in that conspiracy against our liberties that a close and uniform alliance of Popery with either of the great parties will be considered paramount to a renunciation of every just pretension to patriotism, and all the true friends of liberty oblivionize for a time the lesser in the greater interest; and should they even be compelled, in order to this, to abandon the party flag of local policy, fly to the support of the great standard of common defence. PERILS OF POPERY. 187 OUR INDIFFERENCE. The prevailing insensibility and lethargy of this nation in her imminent danger, is among the worst elements that augur the success of Rome. Would to God J were able to flatter myself that I am fighting phantoms! But I cannot. The visions of history crowd upon my memory. The revolutions and changes of fallen states and dy- nasties re-act before my imagination. The ele- ments of the wreck, as well as of the rise and greatness of states and governments, I see now insidiously operating, unfeared when they might have been checked and unsuspected, till beyond control, now developed in wide-wasting ruin and devastation. How often have the premonitions been disregarded, or slightly noticed, occasioned by the intestine commotions of the earth, when suddenly rent with the unexpected convulsive pang, the prostrative shock has stricken ruin through nations, and given birth to the all-en- tombing elements that agitated her inmost frame. If the faithful warnings of the trembling earth have been disregarded by her children, so may the prelusory intimations of the operating ele- ments of revolution by nations. From the past 188 PERILS OF POPERY. issues a warning voice — a blended peal from its nations from the lips of history fails upon our ears, telling us to beware! I might tarry on this topic to trace the sudden collapses and explosions of both ancient and mod- ern kingdoms; to shew that causes less suspicious and less likely to produce the concussions and lapses of dynasties and kingdoms than those which imperil us have succeeded to universal surprise. Ah, ye heroes, and statesmen, and sages of former times, how little did ye imagine that the petty evils of your day, almost unnoticed and undeplored by you ; that hostile influences too trivial to excite your suspicion that they should ever become formidable; or that latent principles operating in mystery while you lived, should, so soon after your departures, subvert the institutions your hands erected or adorned, spoli- ate posterity of the wonders your valor had achieved, and confound the lessons of prudence your wisdom had taught — that what you im- agined would endure as the sun, and ages flow harmlessly past, should so soon be known, not as the standing monuments to your honor, but as the melancholy tale of desolation ! It will be needless, however, to burden our subject with numerous illustrations. A few re- PERILS OF POPERY. 189 ferences will be sufficient, made to facts familiar to us all and to things transpiring around us. Perhaps it would not be a very difficult task to show, by an induction of particulars, that the mighty revolution which shook the Papal throne; that left it a shattered relic of what it once was, and brought about the Protestant Reformation, commenced with less probability and fewer obvi- ous contributory causes of success than those which seem to favor the designs of Rome. With what surprise did his Holiness behold the triumph of principles subversive of the established re- ligion -of Christendom through the instrumental- ity of an humble monk, aided as he advanced chiefly by a few undistinguished associates, whose operations in their first onset he regarded as too insignificant to attract his serious attention ! How perfectly confounded was the long unapprehen- sive Roman hierarchy at the glorious results of their at first unpromising efforts : when they saw nation after nation throw off the Papal yoke; and dissolve their connection with the Papal See, and Rome, hitherto supreme, humbled and degraded from her high and universal orbit of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction : Rome, supreme, the terror and the arbiter of kings and kingdoms crippled, her arm paralyzed, her mandates and p 190 PERILS OF POPERY. anathemas disregarded as less than the idle blast; and she too impotent to resent in the chastise- ments of her awful vengeance the insults of her revolted subjects ! Had Pope Leo at an earlier period, in answer to the clamorous importunities of Luther's adversaries, and by sagacious fore- sight of the final importance of the incipient re- formation, fulminated his sentence of excommu- nication against the reformer, or taken active measures against the Reformation, he might, per- haps, and to all human probability would have crushed it in its first stages. But fortunately for the reformation cause, Luther was an object of Leo's contempt rather than of any fearful appre- hension. At an earlier period the Reformation might have been quashed by prompt and vigor- ous management: but now neither the famous Council of Trent, in session for eighteen succes- sive years; nor the Vatican's thunder-pealing anathemas and excommunications; nor the innu- merous schemes suggested for the overthrow of the reform cause ; nor the bloody and extermin- ating wars intended to accomplish its eradica- tion; nor the invincible armada, as it was vainly called ; nor the seven-fold heated furnace of the Inquisition ; nor the myriads of myriads of Pro- testant hecatombs immolated for the space of PERILS OP POPERY. 191 thirty years without interruption, till the altars of persecution were almost submerged in the blood of saints — could avail to drive back the mighty tide of reformation which rolled onward and on- ward almost to the portals of the Vatican itself; engulfing the pride, and the pomp, and the power of mystic Babylon. If it be objected that we have been depicting the triumph of truth oyer error, and that, there- fore, the case is not in point; we turn to another sample in illustration, exhibiting the improbable triumph of error over truth— the modern success of Popery against Protestantism. This will be analogous. And, by the way, history is full of the variant fortunes of both truth and error, jus- tice and injustice. If truth thus succeeded, error may succeed. If Popery once triumphed over Christianity and obtained the mastery of the world, why should it be thought impossible that it should do so again ? And in a world where so many mighty nations have fallen we should not be confident, nor expect stability without pru- dence and exertion. Who- would have imagined, much less pre- dicted, when that pseudo-Protestant arch-Jesuit of Oxford began to broach his Popish heresies, that in the lapse of a few years such wouLd be 192 PERILS OF POPERY. the result of his system of innovation upon the doctrines and institutions of the national Church of England — that about seven years should effect so improbable a change? None surely. Yet this more than fiction is realized. Now if in Eng- land, once the theatre of Popish persecution, and well experienced in the intolerance of its spirit — if in England, the sworn foe of Popery and sworn defender of Protestantism, the crown and the throne of whose sovereigns are constitutionally suspended on this condition — if in England, where the absurdities and superstitions of Popery have been more detested, because more unmasked and better understood than by us — if in England, where Protestant infants may almost, be said to have been born enemies to Popery ; where they have drawn from the maternal breast the nourish- ment of that hatred ; where education may be said to strengthen a natural prejudice and ren- der it almost invincible ; where fathers have been accustomed to extort from their sons, like the sire of tie renowned Carthagenian, an eternal enmity to this hated foe to Protestantism and to the rights of man; where the voice of the martyr-blood of their forefathers and blended peals from a con- tiguous continent mingling with it, clamorous for vengeance, is deafening to their ears; where Pa- PERILS OP POPERY. 193 pist and rebel, priest and demon, Jesuit end vil- lian, Pope and devil, have been synonymous terms; and where all that is gloomy, and ail that is chilling, and all that is ghastly, and all that is sanguinary and base and hellish have been asso- ciated in the Protestant mind with the name of Popery — if, in a word, in Protestant England; in her splendid establishment, erected for the express purpose of preserving the nation for ever from Popish influence and errors, of disseminating the reformation principles, and protecting the religious and civil liberties of her people from Popish tyranny; if there and by that Church Popish principles are broached, Popish rites adopted, Popery in its naked -deformities caressed, Popish intolerance shaking her iron rod over every thing anti-Popish, what, I ask, is too wild next to con- jecture? Ought we to be composed and drink in the opiate of confident security? Is there not — we think it must appear to every candid mind that there is more probability now, that in a hun- dred years hence at least Popery will be ascend-, ant in this country, from all the elements con- ducing to that end, than there was eight years ago that by this time a large proportion of the British hierarchy should be essentially Papists,, 194 PERILS OF POPERY. and yet officiating in the name of Protestant min- isters and divines. When we reflect, then, upon the tendency in mankind, not only in the ignorant and uninfluen- tial, but of the politic and great, to undervalue small encroachments— when we call to mind- what little beginnings have given the first impulse to some of the mightiest revolutions which have ever astonished and confounded the world — when we consider the evident design of the Roman hierarchy upon our country — when we see a cloud of elements at work conducing with all the celerity of time to the end proposed ; Popery gradually advancing in power and influence ; the tide of emigration, chiefly Popish, annually pour- ing in upon our shores; the inexhaustible re- sources of the Papal empire in numbers and wealth, arrayed against us; the powerful com- binations, political and religious, into which Po- pery may enter in the future history of this coun- try ; the aspect of a world upon our free institu- tions, and upon this contest; the aspiring and in- sidious character of the enemy we have to con- tend with; and the national mind unapprised of our imminent peril — when we bring together these considerations, while they revolve in our minds, do we not feel that it were madness to be PERILS OF POPERY. 195 unalarmed, that it were folly to be silent any longer? I contrast the present numerical strength of Popery, her creations, her influence, and her attitudes with the mere name she was in this country but a very few years back; and then 1 contrast her future prospects with her present condition in an annually progressive ratio; and, I confess, her probable destination appals me. 196 CHAPTER III. GENERAL PROSPECTS OF POPERY. England and America, like Mercury and Ve- nus from their proximity to the natural sun, enjoy the greatest constancy and fervor of the Sun of Righteousness; And despite the petty grudges and vulgar prejudices of their inferior spirits, they are united by sacred ties and sympathies, are elevated to peculiar honors and privileges, and associated together by Divine Providence in the great work of the religious and political regenera- tion of the world. Perhaps the political institu- tions of England are as far in advance of the sur- rounding despotisms of Europe, as America is in advance of her. It is an idea that sorts with the general administration of Providence, that to their agency in the religious regeneration of the world they owe their political elevation and influence. Should the dark cloud of Popish error and power, though small as yet, still impending in angry and doubtful mood, overspread them, these nations, now distinguished as the dispensers of religious light and civilization to the world, might exert an PERILS OF POPERY. 197 influence as extensively malignant as it has been benign. Or perhaps God, who has elevated them above the nations of the earth to promote its civil- ization in connexion with its evangelization, they failing any longer to answer His purposes, would revoke the fiat to which they owe their greatness and transfer their glory to others. Their pros- perity blasted, their glory tarnished,^ and their power paralyzed, they would then sink down to a level, or perhaps beneath it, with their sister Popish nations, as the merited and exemplary punish- ment of the righteous Governor of the world; whose national retributions are evinced to be con- fined to time, as certainly as that individual re- wards and punishments ultimate in a future state of existence. What an accession to the power of the Roman Pontiff would be both or either of these nations ! How dangerous to the universal liberties of man- kind ! Thus the atheistic revolution in France not only threatened England with ruin, but was ominous of disasters to the world. Not more in- timate was the connection between these two countries than is that between the latter and America : and the improvements of the age have brought them into almost as near geographical proximity. The success of Popery in one quarter Q 198 PERILS OF POPERY. of the world will affect it in another, not only by the confidence with which distant success would be calculated to inspire its agents and the equal despondency and consternation of its opposers, but also by various other influences which might be mentioned. But this is sufficient to allude to at present: to the terror of the conqueror's arms is to be attributed half his renown. What a tre- mendous influence would be exerted by such a nation as the British ! Thus the intelligent and far-seeing in our country feel something more than a mere Protestant sympathy in this contest; they feel as if something were at stake for them- selves, their nation and posterity. Equally fatal to England and to the world would be the Papal conquest of this nation, perha'ps more so ; for its political glory is only equalled by its religious freedom and the evangelical fire which distin- guishes its orthodox denominations. Here stand- ing aloof from the state, and depending wholly upon the voluntary principle for support, the Church is not only preserved from that tendency to corruption and formality which such alliances generate, but steadily rebukes all such anti-Chris- tian and fatal organizations. Under the benign auspices of these two nations a new era has risen upon the world. Its nations PERILS OF POPERY. 199 are no longer like the scattered fragments of an exploded world. It is more like a body endued with living sympathies than a scene of disjointed or scattered parts or limbs. Nor do the seve- ral states, shut up within the narrow circles of their selfishness, and neither looking nor sympathizing boyond their own boundaries, pre- sent the aspects of so many worlds, sunless and centreless, unattractive and attractless. Protestant Christianity has called the chaos of worlds into a sort of order, and is marshalling like to the hosts of heaven. Like a sun she has arisen in their midst, drawing them towards herself and towards each other, yet so as not to produce collision, nor so as to encroach upon her own orbit or theirs. Her light is diffused abroad, and the rich fruits of universal science and the arts, and all the choice blessings of civilization, have been growing up luxuriantly under her genial influence, promoting peace and commerce among the nations of the earth. Her heat has thawed their frozen sympa- thies, and converted these icebergs into a mighty confluence. The world is at length assuming the appearance of a social compact — a grand system ; and its nations are at last beginning to resemble a family, acknowledging a common origin and fraternity, and adopting the great heaven-born 200 PERILS OP POPERY. fundamental principles of justice and equity for their government. Its benign influence is felt even beyond where it shines out in its glory. It gleams upon some by reflection, as the sun through the moon and stars, "rich in borrowed lustre from a higher sphere ;" it is felt by others like the first dawnings of the new rising day, shooting athwart the horizon, ere the day-star has reached its verge. It is felt still more as it glows in meridian strength and splendor and with greatest constancy and fer- vor, but the influence is felt and pervasive of all. Shall yon gathering and portentous cloud wrap that sun in midnight ; and the scathing fires of Popory darting in thunderbolts from the dark- ened heavens, consume all this rising structure of excellence and glory? Shall our international law and Gospel of peace be exchanged for a peace tha,t can only be enjoyed by compliance with the enslaving conditions of the Papal hierarchy, and for the all-governing bulls of the Pope ? To either paganism has as good a claim as Popery. In her way to success stand these two nations; and her dark cloud, and her lurid fires, cannot blacken and blaze over the world till she has extinguished this sun of Christianity in their midst. Hence it is her policy to concentrate her strength upon these. Her main hope doubtless is America ; and PERILS OP POPERY. 201 success in this might plant a lever under the Pro- testant world that would secure the overthrow of its institutions. Such, then, are the prospects of that system, now aspiring on the basis of a deep-laid and well- concocted plan, like the angel in the Apocalypse, to bestride land and sea, to set one foot upon the British throne and the other upon the Presiden- tial chair of these United States; and ready, over the ruins of these two nations which form the bulwark of the freedom and intelligence of the age in both hemispheres, to swear with his mouth of blasphemy that the principles and institutions of Protestantism shall exist no more on earth : a system whose imaginings and thoughts from its being the worst existing exhibition of fallen human nature are only evil and that continually; whose evils as developed in history are not merely extraneous or incidental, but whose spirit unquali- fiedly lusteth to cruelty and oppression. Should she succeed with them the world would find itself on the highway to certain ruin, mana- cled by superstition, and impelled forward to its awful destiny by her scorpion-scourge of terrors. The most sanguine may anticipate some con- juncture to arise (as conjunctures have arisen, for which Rome is always on the out-look,) in 202 PERILS OP POPERY. which she would successfully contest the mastery with the princes, and seat herself upon her ancient throne of supreme despotism. The experiment may prove as fatal to them as it hitherto has been. When princes play cards with the Pope, they are always sure to be beat at last ; when they tamper with him they tamper with a grizly lion's paw — with a stroke at an unsuspecting hour it will crush them. The sword is too sharp for the scab- bard — it will cut its way through. If the poten- tates of the earth propose through the confrater- nity to rule the people, they will find the time to come when they will rule the princes through the people; when their thrones will totter beneath them at a bull from Rome, armed with that band of excommunication to enforce it, and that threat of absolution to their subjects, which would expose them to the rage of a populace inspired with a dangerous superstition. And yet strange to tell, this is evidently their short-sighted policy, as ap- pears from the obviously prevailing disposition of the rulers of the old world to strengthen the un- holy (as to them fatal) alliance of church and state, and the evidently retrogressive motion of toleration principles in their administration. — France too, is implicated in this charge. The Prussian king would erect a hierarchy after the PERILS OP POPERY. 203 model of the British. And even her Brittannic majesty has become foster-mother to the bastard heresy of Oxford. They feel compelled no doubt to fly to this dernier resort to prop up their totter- ing systems of misrule. We have witnessed the impression already made upon the very bulwarks of Protestant Christen- dom — England and America — -a very considerable one indeed. In the former Puseyism, or more than semi-Popery, is rapidly on the advance and fostered in the bosom of the court, though vigorously resisted by the evangelical sects in that country ; and the regular Papal clergy are left to look on and chuckle at the zeal of these generous volunteers (though perhaps they have their pay !) in the service of their Church and of the Pope: in the latter that fearful apathy and indifference is witnessed which is the usual pre- curser of the doom of nations. But in neither, perhaps, are the efforts of the Protestant commu- nity at all ^commensurate with the greatness of the emergency and the imminency of the peril. Rome has then, added to all the rest, a resolution and zeal on her side that, supposing the parties in conflict stood on terms of perfect equality besides, would be vastly sufficient to turn the beam in her 204 PERILS OP POPERY. favor, and that might alone compensate for very inferior advantages. We have passed reflections in another part of the work on the relationship between all the forms of superstition and the adaptation in Popery, like Moses' rod, to swallow them all up. We may add that one or two consequences is likely to be evolved from the acknowledged revolutionary movements among the Jews throughout the realms of pagan- ism and of Mohammedan imposture — the acces- sion of their power and influence to Protestant Christianity or to the Papal apostacy. There is a fearful possibility that it may be to the latter, and a fearful responsibility devolving on the Protestant world to prevent it. The powerful proselyting ef- forts on the part of Rome, of Jesuitical Popery, (its worst and modern form,) combined, in our calculations, with the consanguinity, so to speak, of all the forms of superstition, fanaticism and impos- ture, incur a fearful apprehension of the result. In the Church of Rome the Jew will find in conjunc- tion with the name of Christianity the semblance of Judaism — of the theocracy, the priesthood ; and all that exterior magnificence which, calculated to dazzle and strike the imagination and the senses, accommodates it to the peculiar prejudices of his education, and to the sensual religion of his fathers. PERILS OF POPERY. 205 Nor is its adaptation to paganism and the reli- gion of the Mohammedans less perfect; since it excels them both in the sanguinary ambitions and sensual features of its character. Should the con- version of these grand divisions of the human family be in masses or nations, as is expected by many, is it not likely as not to stop short of the thorough regeneration of Protestant Christianity? and rest in a nominal conversion till another revo- lution effects a real change ? It is to be feared ; but may the effectual rallying of the Protestant world to enterprize and action, girt with the om- nipotence of truth and of the spirit of God, avert it! Venerable and heroic reformers, who arose in the name of an inspiring God amidst the surround- ing desolation of Zion and the fury of an apostate Church; who dared to be the champions of truth and piety, when the one was denounced and for- gotten, and the other extinguished in the super- stition of the age — was it for this ye Luthcrs and Calvins, ye Melancthons and Zwingles, that ye jeoparded your lives, your worldly all, drew down upon yourselves the fulminations and the curses of the Vatican, and confronted a Popish world? For this did the cloud of martyrs in the struggles of that period endure the utmost tortures of cruelty enraged by defeat, and pour out their blood like 206 PERILS OF POPERY. streams of water to satiate its vengeance ? Ah ! little did they think that the sacred rights and lib- erties for which they plead and fought, and which they succeeded to secure, would ever be forfeited by an unworthy and ungrateful posterity, for whom as well as for themselves they achieved the victory ; that the very bosom of Protestantism should betray its dearest rights, and embosom the very principles which they discarded; that their latest posterity should fail to appreciate, and cease to watch and to guard with a jealous circumspec- tion, the sacred deposit their banishments, and confiscations, and sweat, and tortures, and blood, and lives procured them ; that the nineteenth cen- century should witness Protestant Christendom asleep, Popery on the highway to an ascendency from which they hurled it in their might, the mid- dle w?ill of partition torn down by sacrilegious hands made strong in Protestant institutions of learning ; and Rome triumphing and insulting in confident anticipation of her ancient sway. No, no ! They never dreamt of such a calamity. Had they, it might have paralyzed their mighty energies. They thought that they were planting institutions on the demolition of Antichrist's king- dom, never to vanish or to be superseded till the wreck of matter and the end of time. 207 CHAPTER IV. CONCLUSION It is cause of unbounded gratitude that God, who made previous arrangements for the intro- duction of the Gospel, and also provided by his wonder-working providence for the success of the Reformation, has no less signally fortified our age with the means of safety against the resus- citated zeal of Popery. The revival of pure and evangelical religion which distinguishes the past century, having (like the ancient Ark the peo- ple of God) guided the Christian world through thick perils already, will not fail if sustained and borne forward to pilot it through the present dif- ficulties. How hopeless would be the case of the world at this juncture if reposing undisturbed in the arms of a mere formal Protestantism ! It has long been the boast of the established clergy, and the subject of their universal and un- tiring eulogium and highest panegyric, that the Church of England was the fortress and defence of the British nation against the recurrence of 208 PERILS OP POPERY. Popish sway. Take an instance among the most moderate and unadorned. " The value of our religious establishment," (says one of its learned prelates of no ordinary genius,*) " ought to be very much heightened in our esteem, by con- sidering what it is a security from; 1 mean that great corruption of Christianity, .Popery, which is ever hard at work to bring us again under its yoke.' Had he lived a century later, had he lived to the present day, methinks he would be tempted to reverse his language; and then it would read — the inutility of our religious esta- blishment ought to be clearly seen and confessed by considering what it is a stepping-stone to ; I mean that great corruption of Christianity, Po- pery, since it (the establishment) is hard at work to bring us again into bondage. This occurrence in the British establishment is an excellent com- ment on the general utility of such institutions. May the British people awake to the folly of any longer tolerating such an incumbrance ! May this treach:> y on its part hasten its long merited doom; and the aroused strength of the dissenting and Methodist bodies at last effect the downfall of * Bishop Butler, author of the Analogy, in Sermon xx, deli- vered before the House of Lords, June 11, 1747. PERILS OF POPERY. 209 this ever-active engine of oppression to the nation ! Such are our good wishes ! We may congratulate the British nation that she has other friends, and better fortresses and defences at this alarming crisis than her hierarchy affords her. In this conjucture to whom should England look but to the successors of the men who, in a state of things which a Tillotson and others de- plored and bewailed, but could not remedy — when their instructors for the most part were causing the people to err and leading them blind- folded to their common catastrophe of perdition — when a pagan morality had assumed the place of evangelical truth in the temples of Christianity — when those who had the sagacity or the judg- ment to discover the religious farce that was playing around them in the name of Christianity, for the most part, not distinguishing between the reality and the profession, were. concluding all religion delusion, and its professors either dupes or impostors on the world — when society was divided into formalists and sceptics, the por- tion whose prejudices in favor of religion were not so inveterate as to be proof against its cor- ruptions secretly or openly renouncing.it, popular infidelity threatening the world, and England on the highway to a similar revolution to that of 210 PERILS OP POPERY. France, — to whom should the British Empire look in this conjuctirre but to the successors of the men who in these critical times arose in the might of an inspiring God to her rescue ? Such was the age which gave birth to our Methodism and her Wesleys and her Whitefields. And such was the crisis at which the revival of religion so distinguished, kindled by a spark of grace, (in the University of Oxford too) broke forth; which has since rekindled the Reformation fires on numer- ous altars throughout Chiistendom, removed the chill of death which had seized the vitals of the Church; and which dissipated the fogs and rolled back the tide of infidelity which threatened to overflow the world, sweeping away not only the forms, the monuments, but the very name and every vestige of Christianity from the face of the earth. This conservatory influence of evangelism is equally if not more needed in this country than even in England. The sovereignty of the people creates a necessity of the highest general intelli- gence and virtue in order to its tranquility and the perpetuity of its institutions. Popular preaching is a main source of the refinement of public sen- timent and manners; and evangelism is all in motion, East, West, North and South, in the cities P^rtiLfc OF POPERY. 211 and in the villages, in the back-woods as well as in the older and more populous regions, on her own grand, magnificent, apostolical and efficient scale. But how shall this government secure itself against the perils of Popery, strengthening by emigration and other causes ? Not tolerate it — proscribe it as an enemy to the country? No; its constitution guarantees an almost unbounded toleration — a toleration which reaches to that extreme where perhaps it ceases to be a virtue. Deny the stranger, the foreigner, the alien, an asylum within her shores ? Let down the flood- gates of emigration ? No — no. Methinks they never will. Proud of the distinguishing, princi- ples of equal rights and of universal toleration, inwoven throughout their whole political code, they will instinctively recoil at the thought of taking measures to prevent the ascendancy of errors even the most odious, however ominous of disaster to the nation. Here, where they have no practical knowledge of Church and State union, where there is no dominant and ruling sect, where the Constitution vetoes any interfer- ence of the secular authority in merely religious matters, they seem to take no cognizance of religious bodies whatever. Their motto is, Let the Church take care of itself and the Govern- 212 PERILS OF POPERY. ment will take care of itself. Religion and politics are so dissociated in their minds, and seem to them to be such very distinct things, that they will be slow to perceive how in any case the re- ligious views and principles of men can influence their political conduct. As to any legislation upon this subject, they will rather be unsuspect- ing to folly, and tolerant to madness. Where then is this nation to look for succour against its danger from this wide-spread religious sect, ga- thering annually numerical strength from foreign quarters; stepping out of their appropriate sphere and assuming a politico-ecclesiastical attitude; marshalled under a foreign absolute head; con- taining principles essentially antagonist to those upon which its institutions repose ; and display- ing even now a threatening aspect upon its esta- blished form of government. Where, I ask ? To the Church. The sun of this nation shall not go down amid the shades of Popish superstition and despotism, till a long poised victory has been won, a hard contested battle fought, and her brow encircled with the wreath of martyrdom. To the Church is confided the salvation of this nation in a more than merely religious sense. We know but two methods of effecting it — the prevention of foreign emigration, or the conver- PERILS OF POPERY. 213 lib!), the religious emancipation of the emigrants from foreign inQuence by the power of the Gospel. The first is at present impracticable, would per- haps be unwise, and is likely to be resorted to too late should it ever be deemed necessary. The latter is the true policy of this country. Will the Protestant Church prove traitor to her high trust, or the nation so reckless of its interest as not to sustain her ? It is the business of the Church, the Protestant Church, not only to secure her people against the proselyting movements of the Papal clergy, but, if possible, to force the bulwarks of her enemies, and press the battle within their gates. Though we propose, as Christians, no disfranchisement of our Romish fellow-citizens, no restriction what- ever of their privileges as citizens of our country, or as emigrants from foreign lands, nor even the letting down of the floodgates of emigration, yet, the enterprise of Protestantism should go forth winged with holy ardor and armed with the sword of etherial temper, in a warfare of love, for their emancipation from the bondage of ignorance and superstition. Upon that ignorance and super- stition, we are apt to imagine the etherial sword of truth must lose its edge, or glance without ex- ecution as upon the scaly hide of the leviathan. 214 PERILS OF POPERY. What! shall the impotency that has maked our hitherto puny efforts abash our hope, and dis- courage us from future enterprise ? No ! But with the spirit and the zeal, and the perseverance that inspired and characterized the instruments of the Reformation, let us on to the charge, and victory more or less will crown our energy. Is not the prevalent truth of the Reformation ours ? Are not the doctrines which once revolutionized the Papal empire ours? All but the spirit, the energy, the intrepidity of the Reformers are ours? Why then, not rally to the onset ? By this time, had the same spirit of intrepidity and zeal actuated their successors for the last three centuries, the Papal power instead of putting forth new energies and anticipating new triumphs, might be ex- tinct, and its throne not only upset but annihi- lated. Shall we confess it without a flush of shame burning on our cheeks — shall we be con tent, that divine truth, so potent in their hands, has become utterly powerless in ours: that the weapons which achieved so glorious a victory, which shook from half Christendom, pervaded with the universal ignorance, and error, and superstition of the fourteenth century, the Papal fetters, can effect no great and important triumphs amid, and aided by the tolerance and luminous- PERILS OF POPERY. 215 ness (for which, under God, thanks be to Protest- antism) of the nineteenth ? Perhaps these cir- cumstances more than countervail the fresh diffi- culty arising from the changed external aspect of the Papal Church. For it must be confessed we have this additional difficulty to encounter, that Popery, surrounded by Protestant influences; dragged into the light of truth at the Reformation till she was startled at the reflection of her own hideousness ; her power circumscribed and crip- pled, and too impotent to carry out her former enormities, has veiled herself to superficial eyes, put on the exterior of modesty, and attempts, that she may gain her selfish and ambitious ends, to impose herself upon mankind as reclaimed to tolerance and virtue, without the recantation of a single licentious principle. But if at the Re- formation she only needed to be exhibited to have her naked deformity detected ; if her impurities and abominations were too startling to fail of convic- tion ; if then she was seen clad in guilt, and red and reeling with blood ; in our day we have all the essential and unaltered features of the system, all its elements of absurdity and cruelty, all the principles which legitimately and demonstrably tend to the same issues, to expose to the view of her shrinking votaries. We can at the worst but 216 PERILS OF POPERY. gloriously fail in the trial. Let us then seek the emancipation of her deluded votaries settled among us, and greet with the light of salvation, with the rich boon of religious as well as civil freedom, her annual transportations as they land upon our shores. Both the other side the Atlantic and this we have evidence that the Gospel blade has neither lost- its edge nor its power to wound this pro- phetic beast. The success of the evangelical ministry against the noon-day heresy there, and that of our missionary operations here, are fraught with encouragement to commence the warfare on a sublimer scale. In the one case the effect has been to combine and inspire the dissenting churches, and is likely to tempt the long impend- ing fate of a seqularised religious system. In the other, though of a more threatening nature, simi- lar results may succeed to prompt and vigorous measures. Especially the German population in- vite our sanguine efforts; and presents a field, if not ripe for the harvest, at least ready for cul- tivation. Our victory as a nation, if we shall win the day in this country, may we not hope to be bloodless? We cannot, however, that it will be uncostly. A costly victory it must be ; in missionary toil and PERILS OF POPERY. 217 support, or in some other way. A few thinly scattered laborers will not be sufficient; there must be hosts on the field to meet the exigency of the case. Ample contributions and invincible perseverance will be required to succeed.. There is a tax upon our liberties : in. some way or other we must pay it. Far costlier may they prove if we neglect this grand enterprise on its most mag- nificent scale. Its magnitude demands grand arrangements, and its urgency expedition. Nay, await that future remedy ; let the present oppor- tunity pass unimproved, and you, or posterity may learn, that its improvement had been cheap at any cost. It must enter into our plan of operation, as an important and indispensable consideration, if we would successfully encounter this persevering sect, not only to equal them in our efforts to supply the nation with collegiate and academical opportuni- ties, but to hold out equal, if not superior, pecu- niary ad vantages, 1 and exalt the standard of our institutions to that pitch at which the insinuations artfully depositing by the Papal clergy, and gain- ing ground among the rising generation, will fall powerless at their bases. In this remark it is not meant to depreciate our Protestant institutions of learning: on the contrary, we are not in the least 218 PERILS OF POPERY. willing to cede the correctness of this Jesuitical artifice — a shallow one it is; but still it will be found increasingly necessary to attend to these objects ; and the imputation, so far as it has suc- ceeded, must be promptly met and eradicated. Cannot the Protestant Church, aided by the pa- triotism of the land, (and what patriot will not aid heart and soul,) both in a pecuniary and literary point of view, cope with the Papal clergy, though backed by the wealth and influence of Papal Eu- rope in these respects? To deny they can would be preposterous ; and since they ought to do so, we hope and believe they will. But this is not all we have to propose. No ; we would propose a dreadful retaliation upon the Pontiff and Papal hierarchy — a retaliation by moral means — to the utmost of the ability of Pro- testant Christendom, or of the Protestant commu- nity in the United Stales. Let us press the battle to the very basis of the Vatican itself— the spirit of apostles and reformers would effect it, and shake the ghastly tyrant from his ancient, but now unsettled throne. Is not Italy ripe for the Protest- ant sickle? Perhaps France is not less so; and she holds us in the arrears of gratitude. Let Pro- testant Christendom arise in her strength, let her buckle on her armor and go forth with the ma- PERILS OP POPERY. 219 jesty of the Lord of hosts in her front, and we still may hope that the recent revival of Popish seal shall have no other effect but to seal her doom and destiny; that it may but hasten her ever-im- pending and predicted overthrow, and be regarded as the prelude of her signal downfall— as the tran- sient bursts of an expiring flame precede its ex- tinguishment. It cannot be regarded in any other light than as an ill-faced omen of the times, that while the Protestantism of our country should be rallying and concentrating all its strength and energy up- on the common foe, she is deeply agitated by ele- ments of internal disorder and convulsion. The agents of the enemy, on the contrary, are united, and all together looking towards the grand re-> suit ; each in his allotted sphere is operating to- wards the common end, and feels his private or local interests involved in the success of the gen- eral cause. Let us take a lesson of our enemy ; let the distinctions of sect and party, and all minor considerations sink down to their proper level; and let Protestantism present for once a united, determinate, and disciplined array against the common enemy. Let us adopt for our universal motto the words of the officer to the flying sol- dier, who, seizing him, and wheeling his front to 220 PERILS OF POPERY. the foe, cried out, " Look that way for the enemy? What are we doing? what have we been con- templating to check the growing power and ex- panding influence of this arch-invader of our coun- try? Just nothing, nothing! Some, perhaps, wrapped up in the chrysalis of their own. genera- tion, whose selfishness and narrow-hearted sym- pathies will not allow their thoughts and energies to be excited into futurity, are content to let anti- christ aspire and advance without resistance, be- cause they regard his triumphant elevation, should it ever occur, as an event so distant in futurity that it has no concern with the present age. To men, (pardon the imputation,) to such reptile spirits it might be adjudged supererogatory to drop a word. That man, who seeing the most distant danger to his country from the genius and operation of this system, would be unexcited, un- alarmed, and unaroused to inquiry or activity to check it, imbosoms a heart alien to the principles and the love of his country ; and merely to depre- cate the feared event, in cool composure of our energies, is but to cherish a spirit of enthusiasm, and traitorous in the extreme. Protestants, children of Protestant sires, de- scendants of Protestant martyrs, and inheritors of PERILS OF POPERY. 221 the rich blessings of Protestant institutions; ye who can stand by and see the growing power and influence of that tyrannic hierarch they resisted, without alarm and painful anxiety; consent to forfeit for posterity your invaluable privileges, be- tray by indifference your sacred rights, and by conniving let the foe succeed : but the noble spirits whose energies are aroused and rallied at the bare mention of slavery, who awake and burn at the first intimation of the foe's design, will continue to mark his advance, to resist his progress, and to spurn the forging chains whose imposition your slumber tempts. Surely the combination of errorists, inspired with a fresh enthusiasm against the principles which distinguished the Protestant Reformation, indicates the desperate struggle it requires to re- trieve the waning fortunes of Satan's kingdom, and maintain his foothold on the earth. Although we cannot with some consider " our country safe from Romanism," or rather from its own indif- ferentism, what will be the final upshot is to us by no means dubious. Our faith fixes amid all the antagonist principles in operation around us, which would suspend the decision of the mere speculator, on the sure word of prophecy. There we find the grand destiny, the ultimate triumph of 8 222 PERILS OF POPERY. truth foretold, responsive to our anxious inquiries; and the prediction is at once satisfying to our faith and glorious to our hope. u He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh — the Lord shall have them in derision." Messiah's enemies, though earth with hell he leagued, shall be clothed with shame. But may we not expect trying conflict, perhaps bloody conflict, in the interim ? Present signs are omi- nous. But the principles of the Reformation must eventually make their, way, though dyed in blood, though stemming the torrent of its own blood, though through the agonies and shrieks of its own children, to universal ascendancy, transforming the wailings of our suffering Protestantism into the universal jubilant shout of millenial triumph. Methinks I see that luminous cross which inspired with courage and crowned with success the em- peror of old, hung out in the heavens to the view of the militant Church, with the inscription upon it — by this conquer ! Amen. As its past vic- tories justify our confidence, may they rally all our latent energies ! APPENDIX. LATEST (OR TRENTINE) EDITION OF POPERY. We submit the following twelve articles of the Romish faith to the consideration of our readers, offering them as we offer the holy Scriptures — without note or comment. They are the distinguishing tenets of Popery, from the famous Bull of Pope Pius IV. dated at Rome A. D. 1564, in the ides of November, and fifth year of his pontificate; and to be found at the end of the printed canons and de- crees of the Council of Trent. They are not to be re- garded as questionable opinions, but as necessary articles of faith, the words of the creed itself, which all Papists are obliged to believe and profess in order to salvation; and to which all who enter into religious orders in the Romish Church are solemnly sworn. 1. I do also (that is, together with the articles of the Apostles' Creed) most firmly admit and embrace the Apostolical and Ecclesiastical traditions, and all other observations and constitutions of the same (that is the Romish) Church. 2. I do admit the sacred Scriptures in the same sense that holy Mother Church doth ; whose business it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of them ; which I will receive and interpret according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers. 3. I do profess and believe that there are seven sacra- ments of the new law, truly and properly so called, insti- 224 APPENDIX. tuted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and necessary to the sal- vation of mankind, though not all of them to every per- son. These are Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Pen- nance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Marriage, which do all of them confer grace. And I do believe that of these, Baptism, Confirmation, and Orders, may not be re- peated without sacrilege. I do also receive and admit the received and approved rites of the Catholic (that is Roman) Church, in her solemn administration of the above-said sacraments. 4. I do receive all and every thing that hath been de- fined and declared by the holy Council of Trent concern- ing original sin and justification. 5. I do profess that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and the dead : and that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, there is truly, really, and substantially the body and blood, .together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus 'Christ ; and that there is a conversion made of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood ; which conversion the Catholic Church calls transubstan- tiation. 6. I confess that under one kind only, whole and en- tire Christ, and a true sacrament, is taken and received. 7. I do firmly believe that there is a purgatory, and that the souls kept prisoners there do receive help by the suffrages of the faithful. 8. 1 do likewise believe that the saints reigning with Christ are to be worshipped and prayed unto, and that they do offer prayers unto God for us, and that their relics are to be had in veneration. 9. I do most firmly assert, that the images of Christ, of the blessed Virgin, the mother of God, and of other saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration ought to be given to them. 10. I do affirm that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is very beneficial to Christian people. APPENDIX. 225 11. I do acknowledge the holy catholic and apostolic Roman Church to be the mother and mistress of all churches : and I do promise and swear true obedience to the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, and vicar of Jesus Christ. 12. I do undoubtedly receive and profess all other things which have been delivered, defined, and declared by the sacred canons and aecumenical councils, and especially by the holy synod of Trent ; and all things contrary thereunto, and all heresies condemned, rejected, and anathematized by the Church, I do likewise condemn, reject, and anathematize. A VOICE "FROM THE BASILIC OF ST. PETER." We cannot omit giving a few extracts from the Pope's Bull, dated May 8th, 1844, which has lately appeared in many of our religious papers (why not the secular press also]) and which we precede with the remarks of the London Times, which thus speaks of the cause of the Bull, as well as of the Bull itself: " Gregory the Sixteenth's lines are cast in any but pleasant places. His troubles rival those of the Grand Turk. The Jews of Ancona lately roused his ire and provoked their own prosecutions ; next the wretched mis- government of the Legations disturbed the tranquility of Monsignore Mori Cappellari ; and now his reverence, in full dress and crook in hand, has taken at a less mun- dane cause of alarm than industrious Jews or discon- tented subjects. What's that 7 The old cause— the cause that struck terror into the heart of Pius V., that made Leo XL < shake in his shoes,' and that provoked the bile of Pius VII. — the cause against which general councils have legislated, and the whole Romish priest- hood is confederated— simply the Bible. Nothing more* 226 APPENDIX. The most timid of his infallible predecessors were not more alarmed at the circulation of the Bible than is the infallible Gregory XVI., though some of them have, it is certain, been more rational and cautious in giving expres- sions to their fright. The Pope has denounced the circu- lation of the Bible in terms more absurd and wicked than those of Dr. Slop's curse. So at least we learn from a e Circular Letter from His Holiness the Pope to all Patri- archs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops,' — a docu- ment equally distinguished for inane verbosity of style and anti- Christianism in object ; which is as lengthy and illogical as it is iniquitous ; and is only more discredita- ble to his infallibility's theology than it is to his secular learning. The exertions of the American Christian League against Romanism in its stronghold, Italy, aim, we are told, at propagating ' insane indifference to all re- ligion.' It is, indeed, against those exertions that the paper pellets of the Vatican are now chiefly directed, and after a fashion worthy of Romanist learning." We exceedingly regret that our limits will not admit the whole Circular; but we offer the more important parts, italicising and capitalising those portions to which we would invite more particular attention. After a lengthy enumeration of the decrees and regulations of his predecessors in relation to the cir- culation of the Holy Scriptures, from the time of Inno- cent III. to that of Pius VIII, , his immediate pre- decessor ; substantially contained in the regulations pre- fixed to the list of prohibited books, viz. : "that the reading of the Holy Bible, translated into the vulgar tongue, should not be permitted, except to those whom it might be deemed necessarv to confirm in the faith and piety ;" and the provision superadded by BenedictXIV., " that no version whatever should be suffered to be read but those which should be approved of by the Holy See, APPENDIX. 227 accompanied by notes derived from the writings of the Holy Fathers, or other learned and Catholic authors." After this enumeration Pope Gregory XVI. adds : "We, in short, who succeed them, notwithstanding our great unworthiness, have not ceased to be solicitous on this subject, and have especially studied to bring to the recollection of the faithful the several rules which have been successively laid down with regard to the vul- gar versions of the Holy Books." The Christian League, a society lately formed in New-York, having for its object the circulation of the Bible in the common tongue, and Protestant books, in Italy and even in Rome itself, attracts a large share of Gregory's attention, and calls forth his holy ire and im- measured denunciation. After starting at the idea of a "Protestant League, composed of individuals of every na- tion," against Popery in its stronghold — after confound- ing the principles of Christian liberty with "an in- sane indifference to all religion"— and liberty of con- science with "liberty to err ;" and charging them with the awful intention of disseminating, by various expe- dients, but chiefly through disaffected Italians, the Bible, and "WORSE BOOKS STILL!" his Holiness pro- ceeds: " Scarcely were we made aware of these facts but we were profoundly grieved on reflecting upon the danger which threatened not only remote countries, but the very centre of unity itself; and we have been anxious to de- fend religion against the like manoeuvres. Although there be no reason to apprehend the destruction of St. Peter's See at any time, in which the Lord our God has placed the immovable foundations of his Church, yet we 228 APPENDIX. are bound to maintain its authority. The holy duties of our apostolic ministry remind us of the awful account which the Sovereign Prince of Shepherds will exact of us for the growing tares which an enemy's hand may have sown in the Lord's field during our sleep, and for the sheep which are entrusted to us, if any perish through our fault. Wherefore, having consulted some of the Cardinal Holy Romish Church, after having duly ex- amined with them every thing, and listened to their ad- vice, we have decided, venerable brothers, on addressing you this letter, by which we again condemn the Bible so- cieties, reproved long ago by our predecessors ; and by virtue of the supreme authority of our apostleship, we re- prove by name, and condemn the aforesaid society called the Christian League, formed last year at New-York : it, together with every other society associated with it, or which may become so. Let all know, then, the enor- mity of the sin against God and his church which they are guilty of who dare to associate themselves with any of these societies, or abet them in any way. 'Moreover, we confirm and renew the decrees recited above, delivered in former times by apostolic authority against the publi- cation, distribution, reading, and posession of books of the Holy Scriptures, translated into the vulgar tongue. With reference to the works of whatsoever writer, we call to mind the observances of the general rules and de- crees of our predecessors, to be found prefixed to the in- dex of prohibited books ; and we invite the faithful to be upon their guard, not only against the books named in the index, but also against those prescribed in the gen- eral prescriptions. "As for yourselves, my venerable brethren, called as you are to divide our solicitude, we recommend you earnestly in the Lord to announce and proclaim, in convenient time and place, to the people confided in your care, those Apostolic orders, and to labor carefully to separate the faithful sheep from the contagion of the Christian League — from those who have become its auxiliaries no less than those who belong to other Bible societies, — and from all APPENDIX. 229 who have any communication with them. You are, con- sequently, enjoined to remove from the hands of the FAITHFUL ALIKE THE BlBLES IN THE VULGAR TONGUE, which may have been printed contrary to the decrees above-mentioned of the Sovereign Pontiffs, and every book prescribed and condemned, and to see that they learn, through your admonition and authority, what pas- turages are salutary and what pernicious and mortal." WHO SHALL TEACH CHINA 1 Providence has now thrown back the doors of China, and has opened a path, if not into the interior of China, at least into a portion of the empire. The great wall is tottering. Where are the troops who are to march up and take possession of the land ! I will tell you ; at Rome! They are already in motion. Protestant Chris- tians of Europe and America — Protestant Christians of every section of the Christian Church, look at Rome! look at China ! Rome is looking at it. Hasten to China ! Rome is hastening thither ; and unless we are all on the alert, China will yet belong to Rome. With a sublime ambition she is aiming at the celestial empire ; and with a minute one, (for all policy is hers,) she is stooping down to the little spots of Polynesia. We must be upon the alert, or Rome will yet possess the world. Let us recollect that she states one of the evidences of her apos- tolicity to be her universality. She sees that Protestant- ism is rising up to dispute with her that evidence of apos- toiicity, and she is planting her missionaries all round the globe. We shall have to fight with the See of Rome for almost every mission which we have ; but with God on our side, we have no need to fear on whom will rest the victory. Rev, J. A. James, at London Miss* Soc. 230 APPENDIX. STATISTICS, ETC. The following is from Dr. Durbin's " Observations in Europe," recently published ; and which, we regret, has but at this late hour come into our hands : " The wealth of the Catholic world is at this hour at the service of the great enterprise she has set on foot, to recover all Christians again to her communion. The chief fields of her exertion are, the East, among the Greek, Armenian, and Nestorian Christians; and among the Protestants in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. She not only proposes to bring the Christian population again within her pale, but also to enter into every open door, and preocupy the ground among the heathen, and in all new countries. No sooner was the armistice concluded between England and China, than forty missionaries were dispatched thither ; as soon as the French established themselves in Algeria, it was erected into a bishopric, and missionaries sent to instruct the population. Before the bill for, the occupation of Oregon is introduced into Congress, the territory is erected into a bishopric, and an active, intelligent pre- late appointed to take possession. The missionary policy of the Roman Catholic Church has been developed of late to a degree unparalleled in her history. She may, indeed, with truth be called a Missionary Church, Her vast population of 160 millions, is, in reality, one enthu- siastic missionary society, directedby a central power at Rome. And while Protestants have been biting and de- vouring one another, and thus wasting their strength and treasure, this Catholic Missionary Society has completed the adaptation of its machinery to its great enterprise; has distributed it over all the earth, and the astounding results of its perfect and powerful action have at length startled the Protestant world, and inspired it with apprehension. "The following statistics will show the missionary cha- racter of this church and the extension of her machinery. It will be observed that England is regarded as a mis- sionary field, and that there are 624 missionaries at work amid a missionary population of one million. APPENDIX. 231 MISSIONS. * Consisting of Vicariates and Prefectures. EUROPE. States. Vic. Apost. Missionaries. Population. England . 8 624 1,000,000 Nassau } . . . . 00 00 180,000 Low Countries , 5 1,742 1,304,890 Gibraltar 1 10 13,000 Sweden and Norway . 1 2 2,000 Denmark ». 1 7 3,000 Scotland . 3 86 100,000 Saxony . 00 00 *28,000 Saxe-Weimar . 00 00 10,174 Wittemberg 00 00 512,333 Bukovina and Neoplanta . 1 00 14,000 Italo-Greeks 3 144 30,000 Constantinople . 1 46 10,000 Turkish Dalmatia 00 7 7,206 Moldavia and Wallachia . 2 30 64,000 Bosnia . 1 106 128,672 Bulgaria . 2 29 12 6,309 2,816 3,413,584 ASIA. States. < V ic. Apost. Prefect. Miss. Population. Turkey in Asia 3 1 00 12,000 India west of the Ganges . 7 00 00 758,000 India beyond the Ganges . 6 00 179 457,000 China . . . 10 26 00 1 160 339 360,000 1,577,000 &.FRICA. Abyssinia 00 1 5 Bourbon, Island . . 00 1 12 100,000 Cape of Good Hope . 1 00 4 2,000 Egypt . 2 00 50 10,000 Guinea , x 1 00 16 * Besides this, is the German Confederacy, in which are three Vicars Apostolic, and a Catholic population amounting to 2,068,968. 464 APPENDI: Vic, A post. Madagascar . .. .00 Morocco, Empire . . .00 Mauritius .... 1 Senegal . . . . 00 Tripoli . . . . 00 Tunis .... 00 Prefect 1 1 00 1 1 1 7 00 1 00 00 00 00 1 2 00 00 00 THEIR 00 00 7 2 00 . Miss. 6 1 6 2 4 6 112 00 00 5 00 00 00 00 5 00 00 00 POPULA 2,816 339 112 00 00 Population. 300 85,000 25,000 1,300 7,600 5 AMERICA. English Northern Possessions 2 French Possessions . . 00 Texas, Republic . . 1 Antilles . . . 3 Hayti . . . . 1 Guiana . 2 French Guiana . .00 231,200 73,000 1,300 10,000 256,000 1,000,000 24,000 16,000 9 OCEANICA. Batavia .... 1 Western Ocean . . 1 1,380,300 10,000 50,000 2 SUMMARY OF MISSIONS AND Europe . . . .29 Asia .... 26 Africa 5 America .... 9 Oceanica .... 2 60,000 TION. 3,413,584 1,577,000 231,200 1,380,300 60,000 Total ... 71 9 3,267 5,662,084 " The United States are also regarded as missionary ground, and the Roman Catholic Church is established in our midst, and is incorporating herself with our popu- lation, as a great element of power. The extent of her operations in the United States may be inferred from the following summary, derived from the same authentic source : Catholic Statistics in the United States. J)iocesses 21 Apostolic Vicariate ...... . 1 APPENDIX. 233 Bishops . . . . . . ' . . . .17 Bishops elect .... Number of Priests . " u Churches Other stations . . . Ecclesiastical Seminaries Clerical Students Literary Institutions for young men Female Academies Elementary schools everywhere throug diocesses Periodical publications hout most of the 8 634 611 461 19 261 16 48 15 " The preceding are the missionary statistics of the Church, and show nearly four thousand missionaries act- ing upon a population of about seven millions. The fol- lowing table will show the established population of the Church, which may be called her home interest, and which, thoroughly imbued with the missionary spirit, furnishes the men, women (religious sisterhoods) and money for the great enterprise of conquering the world. General Statistics of the Roman Catholic Church. EUROPE. States. Archb'cs. Bish'cs. Dioc's. Population. Albania and Epirus 2 4 6 88,788 Austria . 9 24 33 15,555,916 Baden 1 00 1 852,824 Bavaria . 2 6 8 2,977,675 Belgium 1 5 6 4,217,750 Cracovia . 00 1 1 142,202 France . 15 65 80 31,000,000 Greece ... . 1 3 4 22,900 Hanover . 00 2 2 216,758 Hesse, Grand-duchy . . 00 00 00 203,632 Hohenzollern, Hechingen 00 00 00 21,000 Hungary 3 25 28 7,578,122 Ireland . 4 23 27 7,500,000 Ionian Islands 1 1 2 2,630 Islands of Archipelago . 00 1 1 160 Lombardy, Ven. 2 17 19 4,645,594 Lucca, Duchy . 1 00 1 168,198 Malta and Gozo 1 00 1 109,000 Modena, Duchy . 2 2 4 378,000 234 APPENDIX. States. Monaco, Principality Papal States Parma, Duchy Poland, Russian Portugal Prussia Rhenish Provinces Archb ? cs. . 00 . 9 2 . 1 4 . 2 1 . 2 . 00 . 7 1 . 8 . 00 . 22 3 s . 1 Bish'cs. 00 59 4 8 17 6 4 5 00 34 00 51 4 80 18 00 Dioc's. 00 68 6 9 31 8 5 7 00 41 1 59 4 102 21 1 Population. 6,500 2,732,436 476,187 3,887,313 3,549,420 5,612,556 Russian Empire San Marino, Republic Sardinia Servia Spain Switzerland Two Sicilies Tuscany Prim. Archb. Armenian 5,590,000 7,600 , 4,650,350 10,000 12,286,941 882,854 8,156,310 1,436,785 27,560 Total in Europe . . 108 ASIA. 469 577 124,993,961 Oriental Rite. Armenians, Patriarchat Chaldeans, " Greeks, Melch. or Cath. Maronites, Patriarchate Syrians " . eof 1 2 5 5 " . 7 5 of 8 12 2 4 Latin Rite. 3 10 12 20 6 8,000 17,218 50,000 500,000 30,000 Asiatic Turkey India, Portuguese . Persia . . . 1 1 . 00 . 25. 4 1 1 34 5 2 1 59 11,400 538,000 1,000 Total in Asia . l,155,6fe Algiers . . Azores ... Canary Islands Cape Verde Islands Ceuta, Tangier, &c. Congo Madeira St. Thomas AFRICA . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 . 00 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 9 1 1 1 1 % 1 1 1 9 75,000 225,000 208,000 80,000 17,071 112,500 41,000 Total in Africa 758,571 APPENDIX. 235 NORTH AMERICA. States. Archb'cs. Bish'cs. Dioc's. Population. English Possessions . . 1 5 6 750,000 United States . * 1 15 16 1,300,000 Mexico .... 1 10 11 7,500,000 Central America . . 1 4 5 1,900,000 West Indies . . .1 2 3 1,020,862 SOUTH AMERICA. United States of the South 1 8 9 828,000 Venezuela . . . 1 2 3 945,348 Bolivia .... 1 2 3 1,300,000 Peru .... 1 4 5 1,700,000 Chili 1 4 5 1,400,000 Paraguay ... 00 1 1 250,000 Uruguay . . . .00 00 00 250,000 States of the Plata . 1 3 4 675,000 Brazil .... 1 7 8 5,000,000 Total in America . 12 67 79 25,819,210 OCEANICA. 1 3 4 3,000,000 Philippine Islands . Australia Total in Oceanica 1 2 2 50,000 3,050,000 Europe Asia Africa America Oceanica Total of Diocesses, with their Population, Diocesses. Population. 577 124,993,961 59 ], 155,618 9 758,751 79 25,819,210 7 • 3,050,000 Total ..... 731 To this add the missionary population I Population of the Catholic world 155,777,540 . 5,662,084 161,439,624 81 Here, then, we have a Roman Catholic population of one hundred and sixty millions. What is the force which Protestants can show in opposition ] Strictly speaking", not more than fifty millions. And if to the Protestant side we add the Greek, the Armenian, the Nestorian, 236 APPENDIX. and other Christian communions in the East which re- ject the supremacy of the Pope, we could scarcely make up one hundred and twenty millions. But in the contest with Romanism, the Protestants cannot derive any effec- tive aid from the Eastern Christians ; because, in the essential doctrines of faith which divide the Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Eastern churches are gene- rally on the side of the Catholics. The main and almost only point in which they agree with Protestants is in the rejection of the Pope as the head of the Church on earth. The contest must lie, therefore, between the fifty millions of Protestants, strictly so called, and the one hundred and sixty millions of Catholics. It is important, there- fore, that the Protestant churches should well understand the force and policy of the Roman Catholic Church, con- sidered as an external institution acting upon society. The force, amounting to 1742 missionaries, employed in the Low Countries, ought to attract attention," Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Jan. 2006 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township. PA 16066 (724)779-2111 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS