CHURCH OF ROME. – CAT HOLICISM AND PROTESTANTISM.
THE power of ancient Rome in the meridian of her glory was not so wonderful as her subsequent and her present dominion over the mind of man. Physical power we can understand. We see its growth. We see its cause along with its effect. We see armies in front, and civil authority in rear. But this moral power, this government over the mind extending through regions more vast and distant than ever the Roman arms conquered, is the most extraordinary phenomenon in human history. The Papist claims it as a proof of the Divine origin and truth of his doctrine. The Protestant and the philosopher inquire what principles of human origin give this power over the minds of men such wonderful extension and durability. To compare the machinery of each establishment, the Catholic and Protestant, the means by which each of these churches works upon the human mind — an inquiry altogether distinct from any investigation or comparison of the scriptural foundations of their different doctrines— would be a noble subject for the philosopher and historian, and one belonging strictly to metaphysical and political science, not to theology. It would bring out many of the most hidden springs of mental action, would elucidate many of those great moral influences which have agitated nations, and which are sometimes dormant but never extinct in society; and would explain some of the most important historical events and social arrangements of Europe. A few observations upon the present state and working of the machinery of each church, as they appear to the traveller in passing through Catholic and Protestant lands, may turn the attention perhaps of the philosophic inquirer to this vast and curious subject. Catholicism has certainly a much stronger hold over the human mind than Protestantism. The fact is visible and undeniable, and perhaps not unaccountable. The fervour of devotion among these Catholics, the absence of all worldly feelings in their religious acts, strikes every traveller who enters a Roman Catholic church abroad. They seem to have no reserve, no false shame, false pride, or whatever the feeling may be, which, among us Protestants, makes the individual exercise of devotion private, hidden — an affair of the closet. Here, and every where in Catholic countries, you see well-dressed people, persons of the higher as well as of the lower orders, on their knees upon the pavement of the church, totally regardless of and unregarded by the crowd of passengers in the aisles moving to and fro. I have Christian charity enough to believe, and I do not envy that man’s mind who does not believe, that this is quite sincere devotion, and not hypocrisy, affectation, or attempt at display. It is so common, that none of these motives could derive the slightest gratification from the act—not more than a man’s vanity could be gratified by his appearing in shoes, or a hat, where all wear the same. In no Protestant place of worship do we witness the same intense abstraction in prayer, the same unaffected devotion of mind. The beggar-woman comes in here and kneels down by the side of the princess, and evidently no feeling of intrusion suggests itself in the mind of either. To the praise of the Papists be it said, no worldly distinctions, or human rights of property, much less money payment for places in a place of worship, appear to enter into their imaginations. Their churches are God’s houses, open alike to all his rational creatures, without distinction of high or low, rich or poor. All who have a soul to be saved come freely to worship. They have no family pews, or seats for genteel souls, and seats for vulgar
souls. Their houses of worship are not let out, like theatres, or opera houses, or Edinburgh kirks, for money rents for the sittings. The public mind is evidently more religionised than in Protestant countries. Why should such strong devotional feeling be more widely diffused and more conspicuous among people holding erroneous doctrines, than among us Protestants holding right doctrines 2 This question can only be solved by comparing the machinery of each church. Although our doctrine be right, our church machinery, that is, our clerical establishment, is not so effective, and perhaps, from the very reason that our doctrine is right, cannot be so effective as that of the Catholics. In the Popish church the clergyman is more of a sacred character than it is possible to invest him with in our Protestant church, and more cut off from all worldly affairs. It is very up-hill work in the church of England, and still more so in the church of Scotland, for the clergyman to impress his flock with the persuasion that he is a better man, and more able to instruct them, than any other equally pious and equally well-educated man in the parish, whose worldly circumstances have given him equal opportunity and leisure to cultivate his mind; and in every parish, owing to the diffusion of knowledge, good education, and religious feeling among our upper and middle classes, there are now such men. The Scotch country clergyman in this generation does not, as in the last, stand in the position of being the only regularly educated, enlightened, religious man perhaps in his whole congregation. He has also the cares of a family, of a housekeeping, of a glebe in Scotland, of tithe in England, and, in short, the busisiness and toils, the motives of action, and objects of interest that other men have. It is difficult, or in truth impossible in our state of society, to impress on his flock that he is in any way removed from their condition, from their failings or feelings; and it would be but a delusion if he succeeded, for he is a human being in the same position with themselves, under the influences of the same motives and objects with themselves in his daily life. The machinery of the Roman Catholic church is altogether different, and produces a totally different result. The clergyman is entirely separated from individual interests, or worldly objects of ordinary life, by his celibacy. This separates him from all other men. Be their knowledge, their education, their piety, what it will, they belong to the rest of mankind in feelings, interests, and motives of action, — he to a peculiar class. His avarice, his ambition, or whatever evil passions may actuate him, lie all within his own class, and bring him into no comparison or collision with other men. The restriction of celibacy led, no doubt, to monstrous disorder and depravity in the age preceding the Reformation — an age, however, in which gross licentiousness of conduct and language seems to have pervaded all society — but it is a vulgar prejudice to suppose that the Catholic clergy of the present times are not as pure and chaste in their lives as the unmarried of the female sex among ourselves. Instances may occur of a different character, but quite as rarely as among an equal number of our unmarried females in Britain of the higher educated classes. The restriction itself of celibacy is unnatural, and in our church is properly done away with; because we receive the elements of the Lord’s Supper as symbolical only, not as being any thing else than bread and wine in virtue of the priestly consecration. The Papists, who receive the elements as transubstantiated by the consecration, require very naturally and properly that the priest should be of a sanctified class removed from human impurity, contamination, or sensual lusts, as well as from all worldly affairs, as far as human nature can by human means be. Both churches are right, and consequent in their usage and reasoning, according to their different doctrines. The Puseyites of the church of England alone are inconsequent ; for if they claim apostolic succession, and apostolic reverence and authority for the clerical body, they should lead the apostolic
life of celibacy, and repudiate their worldly spouses, interests, and objects. But our Scotch clergy placed by the Reformation in such a totally different religious position as to the nature of their function, are wrong in expecting a peculiar veneration, and in challenging a peculiar sanctity for their order. As a sacred order, or class, they ceased to exist, or to have influence founded upon any sound religious grounds, when the distinction which made them a peculiar class in the eyes and feelings of mankind, the distinction in their sacramental function, and consequent separation in all worldly affairs between their class and other men, ceased and was removed. The veneration and sanctity which each individual works out for himself by his personal character and conduct in his clerical functions alone remained. As a member of an order, he could take nothing, and de facto receives nothing. Superior education, and the prestige from Catholic times, kept up a lingering distinction in our Scotch country parishes in the last generation; but it seems a hopeless claim now in an educated age, for members of a profession not better educated than men of other professions, not separated by any peculiar exclusive religious function from the ordinary business, interests, motives, and modes of living of other well-conducted men, to obtain a separate status in society analogous to that of the popish clergy. They have an elevated, and, if they will so apply the word, a sacred duty to perform along with the ordinary duties of life; but they form no distinct, sacred class, or corporation, like the tribe of Levi among the Israelites, or like the Catholic clergy among the papists, having religious duties or functions which none can perform but its members, and to which they are essential. Some of our clergy in Scotland in the present day would insinuate that they are, by virtue of their ordination, or of their duties, a sacred order or class in the community; but this is a papistical pretension so entirely exploded by our Reformation, that those of the Scotch church who make it are afraid to speak out. F F
The genuine spirit of Calvinism, as adopted by the Scotch people, acknowledges no such order of priesthood, admits no such principle. A presbytery has no claim, like the Roman Catholic bishops, to sacred apostolic power of ordination. Their examinations and licences regard only the education, moral and religious character, and fitness of the individual to become a preacher in the established state-church, and to serve that particular charge to which he is called; but confer no spiritual gifts, no peculiar sacred powers; and for the good reason, that, in our presbyterian faith, no such gifts or powers are reserved for one class of men more than another, but scriptural knowledge, piety, sanctity, and all religious gifts, powers, advantages, and abilities, stand equally open to all men to be attained through faith, and their Bibles. As an influential machine in society, our clerical establishment cannot, therefore, from its nature, have such power over the mind as the Roman Catholic priesthood. The latter appears also to have taken up a new and more efficient position since the settlement of Europe after the revolutionary war. Catholicism has had its revival—and its priesthood has used it adroitly. By the French revolution many of the most glaring and revolting abuses of the Roman Catholic church were abolished. In no Catholic country, for instance, not even in Rome, is the interference of the church, or the clergy, in the private concerns, or civil affairs, opinions, or doings of individuals, at all tolerated. Its establishments, and powers discordant with the civil authority, have every where been abrogated. Monks and nuns are no longer very numerous, except in Rome and Naples, and are nowhere a scandal; and the vast estates of these establishments have, generally, over all the Continent been, in the course of the last war, confiscated and sold to pay the public debt of the state. In Tuscany, for instance, of 202 monastic establishments, viz. 133 of monks, and 69 of nuns, only 40 remain with means for their future support and continuance, and 162 receive aid from government, until the existing members who survive the confiscation of their former estates die out. The rich Neapolitan monasteries have, in the same way, been reduced in wealth and numbers. In France and Germany, the Catholic clergy, in general, are by no means in brilliant circumstances. The obnoxious and useless growth of the Catholic church establishment has, in almost every country, been closely pruned; and their clergy are, in reality, worse provided for than the Protestant. The effects of the Revolution have been to reverse the position of the clergy of the two churches; and to place the Catholic now on the vantage ground in the eye of the vulgar of the continental populations, of being poor and sincere, while the Protestant clergy are, at least, comfortable, and well paid for their sincerity. The sleek, fat, narrow-minded, wealthy drone is now to be sought for on the epispocal bench, or in the prebendal stall of the Lutheran or Anglican churches; the well-off, comfortable parish minister, yeomanlike in mind, intelligence, and, social position, in the manse and glebe of the Calvinistic church. The poverty-stricken, intellectual recluse, never seen abroad but on his way to or from his studies or church duties, living nobody knows how, but all know in the poorest manner, upon a wretched pittance in his obscure abode—and this is the popish priest of the 19th century—has all the advantage of position with the multitude for giving effect to his teaching. Our clergy, especially in Scotland, have a very erroneous impression of the state of the popish clergy. In our country churches we often hear them prayed for as men wallowing in luxury, and sunk in gross ignorance. This is somewhat injudicious, as well as uncharitable; for when the youth of their congregations, who, in this travelling age, must often come in contact abroad with the Catholic clergy so described, find them in learning, liberal views, and genuine piety according to their own doctrines, so very different from the description and the describers, there will unavoidably arise comparisons
in the minds especially of females and young susceptible persons, by no means edifying, or flattering to their clerical teachers at home. Catholic priests and monks, at the time of the Reformation, may have been all that our Scotch clergy fancy them still to be ; but three centuries, a French revolution, and an incessant advance of intelligence in society, make a difference for the better or worse in the spirit even of clerical corporations. Our churchmen should understand better the strength of a formidable adversary who is evidently gaining ground but too fast upon our Protestant church, and who, in this age, brings into the field, zeal and purity of life equal to their own, and learning, a training in theological scholarship, and a general knowledge superior, perhaps, to their own. The education of the regular clergy of the Catholic church is, perhaps, positively higher, and, beyond doubt, comparatively higher, than the education of the Scotch clergy. By positively higher, is meant that among a given number of popish and of Scotch clergy, a greater proportion of the former will be found who read with ease, and a perfect mastery, the ancient languages, Greek and Latin, and the Hebrew and the Eastern languages conmected with that of the Old Testament—a greater number of profound scholars, a greater number of high mathematicians, and a higher average amount of acquired knowledge. Is it asked of what use to the preacher of the gospel is such obsolete worldly scholarship 2 The ready answer is, that if the parish minister of the Scotch church can no more read the works of the Evangelists, Apostles, and early Fathers easily and masterly in the original Greek than any other man in the parish, knows them only from the translations and books in our mother tongue, to which every reading man in the parish has access as well as he, and if he has not had his mental faculties cultivated and improved by a long course of application to such studies as mathematics, the dead languages, scholastic learning, ancient doctrines in philosophy and morals, the ancient history of mind and men, and the laws of matter and intelligence as far as known to man, on what grounds does he challenge deference and respect for his opinions from us his parishioners? We are educated up to him. How can he instruct a congregation who know him to be as ignorant as themselves? Has the ordination of a presbytery conferred on the half-educated lad any miraculous gifts or knowledge? If he be as ignorant as his hearers of these higher branches of knowledge which few have his leisure to arrive at, what is it he does know 2 What is the education, what the acquirements on which a presbytery not better educated than himself have examined and licensed him He is like an apothecary ignorant of chemistry, compounding his medicines from a book of formulae left in his shop by his predecessor, and without any knowledge of the nature and properties of the substances he is handling. It may be said that the standard of clerical education in Scotland at the present day is as high as it ever was —as high as in any generation since the Reformation. It may be so; but if the public has become educated up to that standard, the clergy of the present day have lost the vantage ground of superior education and learning, and consequently of moral influence as teachers, as much as if the standard of clerical education had itself been lowered. In the nature, also, of our Presbyterian church service there is an element of decay of moral influence, produced by the general advance of society in education, intelligence, and religious knowledge. From the days of the Apostles to the Reformation, all instruction was oral, all knowledge was conveyed by word of mouth from the teacher to his pupils. But printing and the diffusion of books have reduced to insignificance this ancient mode of communicating knowledge, especially in abstract science. It is confined now to the branches of knowledge connected with natural substances, and the operations on them. Knowledge is imparted to the mind now, through the eye, not through the ear; and the book read, referred to, considered in the silence of the closet, has in all studies, sciences, public and private affairs, and intellectual acquirement, superseded, even in the universities, the duty and utility of the orator, lecturer, or speaker. Reading has reduced oral instruction to utter insignificance in pure science and in public affairs; and the ancient, but imperfect, mode of conveying information by word of mouth is banished to the nursery. The influence of the oral teacher naturally must decay along with the utility and importance of his occupation ; and this principle of decay of the moral influence of oral tuition reaches the Presbyterian pulpit.
It is unfortunate, also, for the influence of the Scotch Calvinistic church, that its service consists exclusively of extemporary effusions or temporary compositions. These, composed in haste by men of moderate education, and often of small abilities, have to undergo the comparison in the mind of an educated and reading congregation, with similar compositions, prayers, or sermons, prepared carefully for the press by the most able and learned divines. The moral influence resting solely on such a church service cannot be permanent. As a machinery, the English church is founded on a more lasting and influential basis; its established forms of prayer, unobjectionably good in themselves, not placing one minister or his compositions in competition with another, or with other similar compositions, in the public mind—the almost mechanical operation of reading the service well or ill being all the comparison that can be made between two clergymen in the essential part of the church duty. The competition, also, or comparison of any other compositions of the same kind, however excellent, with the old liturgy, can never occur in the public mind in England; because the liturgy has use and wont, antiquity, repetition from childhood to old age in its favour, and is interwoven with the habits of the people by these threads, in all their religious exerCISeS.
The comparative education of the Scotch clergy of the present generation, that is to say, their education compared to that of the Scotch people, is unquestionably lower than that of the popish clergy compared to the education of their people. This is usually ascribed to the popish clergy seeking to maintain their influence and superiority by keeping the people in gross ignorance. But this opinion of our churchmen seems more orthodox than charitable, or correct. The popish clergy have in reality less to lose by the progress of education than our own Scotch clergy; because their pastoral influence and their church services being founded on ceremonial ordinances, come into no competition or comparison whatsoever in the public mind with any thing similar that literature or education produces ; and are not connected with the imperfect mode of conveying instruction, which, as education advances, becomes obsolete, and falls into disuse, and almost into contempt, although essential in our Scotch church. In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain, the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals, is at least as generally diffused, and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body, as in Scotland. It is by their own advance, and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the popish priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age 2 Education is in reality not only not repressed, but is encouraged by the popish church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands, and ably used. In every street in Rome, for instance, there are, at short distances, public primary schools for the education of the children of the lower and middle classes in the neighbourhood. Rome, with a population of 158,678 souls, has 372 public primary schools with 482 teachers, and 14,099 children attending them. Has Edinburgh so many public schools for the instruction of those classes 2 I doubt it. Berlin, with a population about double that of Rome, has only 264 schools. Rome has also her university, with an average attendance of 660 students; and the Papal States, with a population of 2% millions, contain seven universities. Prussia, with a population of 14 millions, has but seven. These are amusing statistical facts — and instructive as well as amusing — when we remember the boasting and glorying carried on a few years back, and even to this day, about the Prussian educational system for the people, and the establishment of governmental schools, and enforcing by police regulation the school attendance of the children of the lower classes. France sent her philosophers on a pilgrimage to Berlin to study the manifold excellences of the Prussian school machinery, and to engraft them on her own “liberty of the people;” and not a few of the most enlightened, liberal, and benevolent of our own upper classes, sighing over the supposed ignorance and vice of the multitude, wish that our government, even at the expense of a little demoralising constraint and infringement of the natural rights of parents, would take up the trade of teaching, make a monopoly of it as in Prussia, with a stateminister of public instruction to manage it, and enforce by law and regulation the consumpt of a certain quantity in every family out of the government shops. Our statesmen were wiser than our philanthropists, or rather the common sense and sense of their civil and moral rights among the people were more powerful than both ; and society with us has been wisely left by our legislature to educate itself up to its wants—a point beyond which no school-mastering can drive it with any useful moral or religious result, and up to which, as in all free action for meeting human wants, the demand will produce the supply. The statistical fact, that Rome has above a hundred schools more than Berlin, for a population little more than half of that of Berlin, puts to flight a world of humbug about systems of
national education carried on by governments, and their moral effects on society. Is it asked, what is taught to the people of Rome by all these schools 2–precisely what is taught at Berlin, – reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, languages, religious doctrine of some sort, and, above all, the habit of passive submission in the one city to the clerical, in the other to the government authorities. The priesthood and the state functionaries well know that reading and writing are not thinking; that these acquirements and all the branches of useful knowledge besides, which can enter into the education of the common man in ordinary station, only increase his veneration for, and the social influence of that higher education which the mass of the community has no leisure to apply to, and which always must be confined to a few — to a professional class. The flocks will follow the more readily for being trained, if the leaders only keep ahead of the crowd. There is an evident reaction in the application of the old maxim, that superstition and despotism must be founded on ignorance. In Austria, in Prussia, in Italy, it is found that useful acquirements and knowledge do not necessarily involve thinking, and still less acting ; that, on the contrary, they furnish distraction and excitement to the public mind, and turn it from deeply considering, or deeply feeling, real errors in religion, or practical grievances in civil life. Education is become the art of teaching men not to think. When a government, a priesthood, a corporate body of any kind gets hold of the education of the people without competition, even in the most minute portion, as in a village school, this is invariably the result of their teaching. It is not difficult to account for the great number of schools — consequently the great diffusion of those acquirements which are called education—in Rome. The same cause acts in the same way in Edinburgh. There is a great demand for that sort of labour which may be called educated labour to distinguish it from mechanical labour, but which has as little influence on the moral or mental condition of the individual as shoemaking, or chipping stones on the highway, — and the demand produces the supply. Church servants of all kinds, from the cardinal down to the singing boy, must be able to read ; and the great amount of living to be found at Rome in the church, produces the demand for instruction in the qualifications. In Edinburgh, and generally in Scotland, the same demand for educated labour in the colonies, in mercantile, or legal, or me. dical professions, and in the Scotch church, produces a similar supply. Those who raise the supply are, in both cities, generally the young men intended for the priesthood; but in Rome the clergy occupy themselves more systematically, and more authoritatively, more in the Prussian style, with the education of the people, than they have legal power to do with us. They hold the reins, and are the superintendants, if not the actual teachers, in all these schools. It is very much owing to the zeal and assiduity of the priesthood in diffusing instruction in the useful branches of knowledge, that the revival and spread of Catholicism have been so considerable among the people of the Continent who were left by the Revolution, and the warfare attending it, in that state that if the Catholic religion had not connected itself with something visibly useful, with material interests, would have had nothing to do with it. The Catholic clergy adroitly seized on education, and not, as we suppose in Protestant countries, to keep the people in darkness and ignorance, and to inculcate error and superstition ; but to be at the head of the great social influence of useful knowledge, and with the conviction that this knowledge—reading, writing, arithmetic, and all such acquirements — is no more thinking, or an education leading to thinking, and to shaking off the trammels of popish superstition, than playing the fiddle, or painting, or any other acquirement to which mind is applied. Since the peace of Europe was established in 1815, very important events in church history have taken place, although scarcely noticed by our clergy occupied too exclusively in the petty politics of their own establishments. The revival of religious feeling in every country of Europe after the war-feeling, after the moral fever, and excitement of the revolutionary period were extinguished, and the embers of the flame trodden out at Waterloo, is one of the most striking characteristics of the times which have succeeded; and the different directions this universal revival of religion has taken in the different churches of Europe, one of the most eventful for future generations. The Continental people had a religion to choose at the end of the last war. How have the two churches of Europe availed themselves of this peculiar state of the European mind 2 The Protestant church is shaken to the foundation in her ancient seats, Germany and Switzerland, and, as a body politic, has lost, instead of gained, influence. The overthrow of the very name and form of Protestantism in Prussia by the late king, and the defection even of the clergy, from her doctrines in Switzerland, Germany, and other Protestant countries, have thrown great moral weight into the scale of the Roman Catholic church. The European people had a religion to choose, and found the Protestant church in its very centre, Germany, in a state of transition, and transformation into the new shaped thing — the Prussian church; and from the almost total silence of the abject Prussian population, both clergy and flocks, at the change, it was naturally believed that the change was undeniably necessary; and people naturally attached themselves to that church which acknowledges no want of change, and carries with it the moral weight of stability and time-hallowed forms. In the Continental Protestant church, the revived flame of religion has not taken a church direction, but has shown itself in schisms, discord of rites and opinions, the extinction in Prussia of the doctrines and forms of the two great branches of Protestantism, and the adoption, even by the clergy in Germany and Switzerland, of views which would have been considered formerly in their churches as deistical, unitarian, socinian. In Britain, also, the Protestant church has got into a false position. The clergy, both in the church of England and in the church of Scotland, have been attempting to unite the two opposite poles— power and popularity — and in their struggle for church power, and church influence, have lost the lead in the religious revival of the age. It is not the church in either country now that sustains, or directs, or even represents the religious sentiments of the people, but the offsets from the clerical body acting independently of the church, and forming an evangelical laity. The scholars have outgrown the teachers; and the teachers, instead of advancing with and leading the progress of the age, are in danger of becoming superannuated appendages on the religion of the people, sustained by it, not sustaining it; nor capable of directing it in the vast educational and missionary efforts which the religious sentiments of the people are making by their own agents, while their clergy are battling for church wealth, or church power. The Roman Catholic church, with its more effective machinery of a priesthood, has held the bridle, and guided the public mind in this great revival of religious feeling in Europe, more cleverly than the Protestant. It has evidently entered more fully into the spirit of the age, has seen more clearly what to give up, and what to retain, in the present intellectual state of the European mind, and has exerted its elasticity to cover with the mantle of Catholicism, opinions wide enough apart to have formed irreconcilable schisms and sects in former ages. Monkish institutions, onerous calls upon the time or purse of the common man, relic-veneration, vows, pilgrimages, auricular confessions, penances, and processional mummery, appear to be silently relaxed, or relinquished, wheresoever the public mind is too advanced for them. The old Catholic clergy and their kind of Catholicism appear to have died out, or to be
placed in an inactive state, and young men of new education and spirit to have been formed, and set to work: and these men have taken up their church as they found her, shorn of temporal and political power in almost every country, and of all social influence in a great part of Europe, and even with the means of living reduced to a very scanty pittance in France, and other Catholic lands, and have to set to work from this position, without looking back, with the zeal and fervency which perhaps only flourish in poverty. It is so far from being on the ignorance of the people this new school of the Catholic priesthood founds the Catholic church, that you hear sermons from them which might be preached to any Christian congregation. The general doctrines of Christianity are as ably inculcated as from our own pulpits, and the peculiar or disputable doctrines of the Popish church seem, by some tacit understanding, to be left out of the range of their subjects. They are not only free from the puerilities of doctrinal points, but also from the affectation, so common in the Protestant churches abroad, of preaching only the moral, and not the religious, doctrines of the gospel. Besides this greater efficiency of the machinery of the Romish church, the Catholic religion itself has the apparent unity of belief of all its adherents, in its favour. This unity is apparent only, not real ; but it has the same moral effect on the minds of the unreflecting, as if it were real. The Catholic religion adapts itself, in fact, to every degree of intelligence, and to every class of intellect. It is a net which adapts its meshes to the minnow, and the whale. The Lazarone on his knees before a child’s doll in a glass case, and praying fervently to the bellissima Madonna, is a Catholic, as well as Gibbon, Stolberg, or Schlegel: but his Catholicism is little, if at all, removed from an idolatrous faith in the image before him, which may in its time have represented a Diana of Ephesus, or a Venus. Their Catholicism was the result of the investigation of philosophic minds, and which, however erroneous, could
have had nothing in common with that of the ignorant Lazarone. I strolled one Sunday evening in Prussia into the Roman Catholic church at Bonn on the Rhine. The priest was catechising, examining, and instructing the children of the parish, in the same way, and upon the same plan, and with the same care to awaken the intellectual powers of each child by appropriate questions and explanations, as in our well conducted Sunday schools that are taught on the system of the Edinburgh Sessional School. And what of all subjects was the subject this Catholic priest was explaining and inculcating to Catholic children ; and by his familiar questions, and their answers, bringing most admirably home to their intelligence 2 — the total uselessness and inefficacy of mere forms of prayer, or verbal repetitions of prayers, if not understood and accompanied by mental occupation with the subject, and the preference of silent mental prayer to all forms — and this most beautifully brought out to suit the intelligence of the children. I looked around me, to be satisfied that I was really at the altar steps of a popish church, and not in the school room of Dr. Muir’s or any other well-taught presbyterian parish in Edinburgh. Yet beside me, on her knees before the altar, was an old crone mumbling her Pater Nosters, and keeping tale of them by her beads, and whose mind was evidently intent on accomplishing so many repetitions, without attaching any meaning to the words. Between her Catholicism, and that of the pastor and of the new generation he was teaching, there was certainly a mighty chasm, a distance that in the Protestant church, or in a former age, would have given ample room for half a dozen sects and shades of dissent — a difference as great as between the Puseyite branch of the church of England, and the Roman Catholic church itself. But the mantle of the Catholic faith is elastic, and covers all sorts of differences, and hides all sorts of disunion. Each understands the Catholic religion in his own way, and remains classed as Catholic, without dissent, although, in reality, as widely apart from the old Catholic church, as ever Luther was from the pope. Our Protestant faith sets before all men distinctly one and the same doctrine and belief, the same principles, the same christian knowledge, ideas, and objects. Thereis, consequently, distinct ground for sectarianism, and dissent, in the very nature of the Protestant church. These are also abstract ideas which are set before men, to which every mind must raise itself, and which, from the very nature of the human mind, cannot be comprehended so readily, or dwelt upon so long, and so fervently, especially by those untrained to mental exertion, as the material ideas of crucifixes, images, relics, paintings, and ceremonies, with which Catholicism mixes up the same abstract ideas. These material objects act like Leyden jars in electricity upon the devotion of Catholics: and every one seems to adjust to his own mental powers and intelligence, the use of this material machinery for quickening his devotion. With some, the invocation of the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, is considered but as a necessary, logical deduction from the great doctrine of mediation. If the mediation of the Son with the Father, be efficacious, the mediation of the Mother, who must have been the most perfect of created beings, as the chosen vessel for our Redeemer’s conception, with her Son, who in filial piety and affection as in all other virtue, was perfection, must, according to their not unspecious deduction, be efficacious also. The ora pro nobis, the invocations addressed to the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, Saints, and those who were either personal friends and companions of our Saviour when on earth, or are supposed to have been acceptable to him by their lives or sufferings, are founded on this deduction from the principle of mediation, and from the excellency of the virtue of our Saviour. The mediatory nature of these invocations is with others, again, almost entirely lost sight of and forgotten, and it becomes a direct idolatrous worship to those secondary mediators equal to what we pay to the great Mediator himself:
and as these are at best but human beings little removed from our own condition, the mind is able to dwell without exertion or fatigue upon them, their merits, and their works; and is excited to a fervency of devotion not attainable by the human mind from the contemplation of the sublime abstract truths of our religious belief. Our belief is the working of judgment, theirs of imagination; and this fervency of feeling is, in the construction of our mental system, more nearly allied to, and nourished and excited by imagination, than judgment. In this way we must account for the undeniably greater devotional fervour of Catholics than of Protestants. The elasticity of the Catholic church adapting itself to every mind, instead of raising every mind up to it, is the great cause of the advance of Catholicism in the present day, among the enlightened, as well as the ignorant classes; and the great cause of the small influence of Catholicism in raising the moral and intellectual condition of mankind, and advancing the civilisation of society. It is a cap that fits every head, for every head can stick it on in some fashion or other. Its most absurb doctrine, as that of the real presence in the elements of the Lord’s Supper, is plausibly enough deduced from the plain words of scripture — “This is my body” — not, this is the symbol of my body — and the natural objection of the evidence of our senses contradicting the supposed transubstantiation, is met by the argument of the unceasing divine power to operate a miracle even every day and hour upon every altar, the incompatibility with any rational idea of divine power, of the doctrine that the age of miracles is past, that what the divine power worked at one time it cannot or will not work at another, although the same necessity exists, and the insufficiency of our senses as a test of miracle, the disciples themselves having been blind to the miracle of the loaves and fishes, although seeing and assisting in it. This fits some heads. Others find the consubstantiation of the Lutheran, not at all more intelligible, than the transubstantiation of the Catholic, and acquiesce in the older faith of the two. The majority believe that which requires
no thinking. The French revolution left the minds of
men in a rude, uneducated state more adapted to re
ceive the material impressions of the Catholic faith, the ideas suited to a low, neglected, religious, and moral education, than to comprehend and embrace the higher and more abstract truths of Protestantism. The military spirit of a generation born and bred in wars and revolutions, and accustomed to see all distinction and honour resting not upon moral worth and good principle, but upon success, promotion, and outward decoration, could, when a reaction and revival arose in religious feeling among them, more easily go over into that church in which similar merits and similar emblems are admitted, and supersede mental exertion. The period of the French revolutionary war, undoubtedly, lowered the tone of moral and religious sentiment in Europe. In the events and present results of that vast movement, so many enterprises were successful in which all acknowledged moral and religious principles were set aside, and so many agents and participators in iniquitous events attained, and still to this day retain, all honour and social consideration, although gained in defiance of all moral principles of conduct, that wrong-doing has been kept in countenance, and success has been allowed to legalise, and cover from the judgment of posterity, the most flagitious acts of public historical personages. This is the deepest stain upon the literature of our times. Who in all wide Europe, which of the many historians of the French revolution — Scott, Alison, Thiers — who, who has raised his voice in the cause of moral right and integrity ? Who has applied to the test-stone of just moral principle the men and acts he is describing to posterity as great and brilliant examples of human conduct? Who has asked the French generals, marshals, and princes, the living individuals who now revel G G
in the eye of the world as the highest characters of the age, who has asked them, one by one, how did ye amass your immense wealth 2 Is it honestly come by ? Is it the savings of your daily pay and allowances in your professional stations 2 or is it money gained by secret participation with your own contractors and commissaries, or wrung by forced gifts, requisitions, unmilitary robbery, in a word, from towns, ancient institutions, and innocent suffering individuals 2 Where got ye your services of gold and silver plate? your collections of Flemish, Italian, and Spanish paintings 2 Were these not forced, plundered from their lawful owners, without even the show of purchase ? And who has asked the Buonaparte family, who are now vapouring about the world, attempting to set it on fire, how came ye to be great men P Your brother was a great soldier, but ye have neither inherited nor achieved greatness. Ye have no talents among you, either for civil or military affairs, that would be at all out of place in your original vocations upon three-legged stools, as country procurators, or behind the counter in the honest calling of grocers and drapers, in your native little town of Ajaccio 2 What, in the name of common sense, entitles you to be crowing upon the top of the world as princes and counts? And where got ye your immense wealth 2 Was it honestly earned in Ajaccio 2 Ye cannot even say it was military pillage and peculation. It was pilfered out of the taxes of those countries over which ye were sent to reign by your brother, like so many Sancho Panzas—the most impudent mockery of national rights and public principle ever attempted among European nations. It belongs, every dollar of it, to the people of those countries. Honest Sancho came penniless away from his government of Barataria, but ye left Holland, Westphalia, and Spain with full pockets. His moral feeling told him to leave his subjects without profiting by a farthing of their revenues. Ye offered to subscribe millions to the funeral of the emperor, and have expended millions in silly attempts to kindle a
flame in Europe for your ambitious projects, while the money you are wasting belongs really, and on just, correct, moral principle, to the people from whom it was squeezed, who earned it by their industry, paid it over most grudgingly to your own or your brother’s tax-gatherers for the public service, or civil list, or privy purse of their state, and to whom, individually, or collectively as a state, every shilling you have does in common honesty belong. When the great men of the earth arranged and restored at the congress of Vienna the political and territorial interests of kings and states, why did they not follow out the principle, and restore the moral interests of Europe also 2 Why did they not make the vultures who were gorged with the pillage of Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, of every city from Hamburgh to Bern, and from Bern to Cadiz, and to Naples, disgorge individually their unmilitary booty, and restore the property to the countries, towns, institutions, and private persons, from whom it had been extorted contrary to all principles of civilized warfare? They were not eagles,—these were but the foul birds of prey which follow the eagle to feed upon the carcass he strikes down in his flight. Political or military profligacy in high station and command is more ruinous to public morals than private vice, because it sets principle at defiance openly, and not in a corner, and showing the homage to virtue of attempting to hide itself; but braving, in high and conspicuous social positions, the control of morality and public opinion. The congress of Vienna, in restoring something like a balance of power, and a monarchical shape to the Continent, only skinned over the wound inflicted on society — made compensation only to kings, and some royal dynasties, not to the people; restored nothing of what is of more importance than forms of government, — nothing of the moral principle which had been pushed out of its proper place and influence in society, by the impunity, unmerited honours, and impudent assumption of dignity, permitted to the most shameless rapine that ever disgraced the history of civilised people. M. Thiers, the late minister of France, is now in Germany, writing history, fortunately for mankind, instead of making history on the banks of the Rhine. He is visiting all the cities and localities of Germany which were the theatres of important events and memorable exploits, to collect, it is said, materials for a great historical work from the commencement of the French revolution. Has M. Thiers the moral courage to write such a history as history in this age ought to be written ? Will he bring to the unerring test-stone of moral principle, every act, every character, every man he is dealing with as an historian * Will he unmask and denounce to posterity, the unprincipled adventurers, pillagers, and marauders, whom accident, good fortune, military success, and the bravery of their troops, threw up into high and conspicuous stations, and who are figuring to this day in the eye of the world, the first of men? Will he restore the moral tone to society which has been lost in France, by the unmerited success and splendour of such men? Or will he only give the world a classical work — a fine imitation of the ancient historians, brilliant descriptions of marches, battles, intrigues, causes and results of events, fine-spun, imaginary, eloquent, modelled upon the manner and style of Thucydides or Tacitus; a work of talent, but not of historical philosophic truth ; a work which every body will praise, few will read, and nobody believe, or be the better for ; a work, in short, of leading articles, in which every victory is unparalleled, every successful general a hero, and glory a cloak for the most infamous deeds and characters? The road is open to M. Thiers, and Germany is the country which contains much of the materials, to produce the most influential and truly philosophical history of an eventful period, which the moralist, or the historian teaching morality by example, ever had before him. Will M. Thiers have the moral courage to take this road 2 The results at some future period of the singular moral and religious state of the European mind which has followed the revolutionary paroxysm of the beginning of this century baffle conjecture. The Protestant religion, existing, it may almost be said, only in detached corners of the world, and there torn into a hundred sects and divisions, and the clergy of her two branches occupied in unseemly squabbles for power and property,’ and not leading, nor, in public estimation, capable of leading, the religious revival among Protestant Christians, nor of meeting and refuting the learning and theological scholarship of professed infidel writers— the popish church advancing stealthily, but steadily, step by step, with a well-organized, well-educated, zealous, and wily priesthood at the head of and guiding the religious revival in her domain of Christianity, and adapting herself to the state of the public mind, and the degree of social and intellectual development in every country, from the despotism of Naples, to the democracy of New York — the moral tone of society, the power of moral and religious principle over conduct, the weight and value of right or wrong in public estimation, deranged, the influence of public opinion on the moral conduct of public men lowered, by the countenance given by governments to individuals who should be branded in the history of this age as unprincipled depredators setting all moral and international law at defiance in their military and political acts — these are elements in the religious, moral, and political condition of European society, which, together with the change in its social economy by the new distribution of property, must make every thinking man feel that the French revolution, as a vast social movement, is but in its commencement. We are but living in a pause between its actS.
fynm 