Imitation of ChristSpiritual CombatTreatise on Prayer.Boston: P. Donahoe. Pp. 816. 1868.
Decidedly opposed to small type in books of a religious or educational character, we can cheerfully overlook its use in this instance, giving us, as it does, complete in one volume and in bulk not exceeding the average size of prayer-books, three such admirable devotional works.
Irish Homes and Irish Hearts.By Fanny Taylor, author ofEastern Hospitals, Tyborne, Religious Orders,etc., etc.Boston: Patrick Donahoe. Pp. xi. 215.
The original work, of which this volume is a very neat reprint, was favorably mentioned inThe Catholic Worldfor September, 1867. Hence we need not enter into details. It is enough to say that the author, leaving the beaten track of ordinary tourists, devoted herself to the visitation and inspection of the various charitable and religious institutions of Ireland, the number and excellence of which amply vindicate "the warmth of Irish hearts and the depth of Irish faith." This volume gives the result of her examination. It unfolds not a new, but to many an unexpected, phase of Irish character, and will well repay a perusal, from which few can rise without being benefited thereby.
Choice of a State of Life.By Father C. G. Rossignoli, S. J.Translated from the French,1 vol. 16mo, pp. 252.Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1868.
This is a well-reasoned little treatise on vocations, or the choice of a state of life, an important matter too little thought of in our day, when material things have the upper hand, and spiritual things are made of so little account. Many, no doubt, fitted by their talents and called by an interior voice to the priesthood or the religious state, neglect the call; and others again, quite unfit, thrust themselves forward, allured by some prospect of worldly advancement. This little book clearly exposes the motives which should govern us in the choice of a state of life. If read in a calm and undisturbed state of mind, we do not doubt it will do a great deal of good, and induce many to embrace the better part which shall not be taken away from them.
Margaret: A Story of Life in a Prairie Home.By Lyndon.New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1868.
A pleasantly told story of everyday life. The interest in the narrative is well sustained throughout; the incidents natural, yet effectively introduced; and the characters strongly marked and sufficiently diversified. "Life in a prairie home," however, if here faithfully described, differs materially from what it is generally supposed to be. The incidents are such as to be equally possible in any village in any one of the original thirteen states.
Elinor Johnston: Founded on Facts;Maurice and Genevieve, or The Orphan Twins of Beauce.Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham. Pp. 136.
Two charming stories for children, tastefully got up, if we except an occasional inequality in the pages and carelessness in typography, which we hope to see avoided in future volumes. There is no reason why books intended for children should not be as creditable in appearance as those for adults. That this can be done is proved by the beautifully uniform series just issued by the Catholic Publication Society.
From John Murphy & Co., Baltimore:
The First-Class Book of History, designed for pupils commencing the study of history, with questions; adapted to the use of academies and schools.By M. J. Kerney, A.M., author of Compendium of Ancient and Modern History, Columbian Arithmetic, etc., etc., etc. Twenty-second revised edition. Enlarged by the addition of Lessons in Ancient History,1 vol. 16mo, pp. 335.
From P. O'Shea, New York:
O'Shea's Popular Juvenile Library.First series. 12 vols., illustrated.
A few months ago I described a visit which I had recently paid to a friend of mine in the country, and repeated a little of the conversation we then had together upon subjects especially interesting to Catholics. [Footnote 177]
[Footnote 177: SeeThe Catholic World, March, 1868; article, "Canada Thistles."]
I was so well pleased with what I saw and heard on that occasion that I resolved to spend a few more days with him; and last month, as soon as the warm weather set in, I presented myself one evening at his hospitable door, valise in hand, and was soon comfortably installed as a guest. If I found his house an embodiment of domestic comfort during the winter, it was still more delightful, now that the lawn and meadows wore the brilliant green of early summer, and the prairie-roses, climbing over the great, roomy piazza, shook down perfume into the open windows, and drew around the place the ceaseless song of bees and the whir of the restless little humming-bird. The library which had charmed me so much when the blazing wood-fire shed a ruddy glow of comfort over the bookshelves and the big writing-table, and the tempting arm-chairs, was a thousand times more attractive, now that green branches and bunches of roses filled the old-fashioned fire-place, and windows, open to the floor, let in the breath of new-mown hay, while creepers and honeysuckles kept off the glare of the sun, and waved gently in and out with the south-west breeze. Here we used to sit and chat on warm afternoons, and our conversation generally turned upon the religious topics in which we were both so much interested. One day we were talking about the great improvement of late in the style of discussion on the Catholic question. "We don't hear so much of the old slanders," said my friend, "but there is rather an inquiry into the reasons of our success and the best methods to meet us. Whenever that inquiry is conducted honestly and thoroughly, it is found that the only way to meet us is, to come over boldly to our side and fight under our banner. As an illustration of what I have said," continued he, picking up a pamphlet from the table, "take this sermon on 'Christ and the Common People,' by the Rev. Mr. Hinsdale, a Protestant clergyman, of Detroit. He states the subject of his discourse boldly enough: 'We start,' he says, 'with theconfessed failure of Protestantismto control spiritually the lives, and to mould religiously the characters, of the millions.What are the reasons?' He declares that Protestantism has scarcely won a foot of ground from Romanism in more than two hundred years. 'Geographically, it is where it was at the close of the century in which Luther died. Neither is Protestantism stronger religiously or politically than it was in the seventeenth century; some deny that it is as strong' Nor can it be claimed that it is now making any material gains in any of these directions.' Again: 'In the Protestant countries, no ground has been wrested from false religion or irreligion within a hundred years;' and in the principal American cities the Protestant denominations are unquestionably losing ground. There is good authority for stating that in Cincinnati, for instance, the communicants in the Protestant churches are fewer by two thousand than they were twenty years ago; yet the population of the city has increased during the interval by something like a hundred thousand. Well, Mr. Hinsdale being, as I should judge, a gentleman of common sense and honesty, does not try to relieve his mind from the pressure of these disagreeable facts by cursing the Catholics, but sets himself to work to find out the reasons for the greater prosperity of our church. I need not read them to you; for of course the great reason of all—the assistance of Heaven—he does not perceive; but he makes some significant admissions. He tells his people that Catholicism is the especial religion of the poor, and that Protestantism is restricting itself daily more and more closely to the rich; and he quotes a saying of Theodore Parker's: 'If the poor forsake a church, it is because the church forsook God long before.' I am a Protestant of the Protestants,' Mr. Hinsdale adds, 'but have no hesitation in affirming that in some particulars we should stand rebuked before Romanists this hour; none in declaring that in some respects the Romish priest understands the methods of Christ better than the evangelical preacher.' Now, when the alarm of Protestants at the increase of our churches takes such a form as this, I believe that good results must flow from it."
"No doubt you are right," said I; "but I am afraid few of the anti-popery preachers are like this gentleman of Detroit. Here, for example, is an address, delivered at the last anniversary of the American and Foreign Christian Union, by the Rev. Dr. Talmadge, of Philadelphia. He begins with the admission that the cause of popery is still flourishing, 'although in the attempt to destroy it there has been expended enough ink, enough voice, enough genius, enough money, enough ecclesiastical thunder, to have torn off all the cassocks, and to have extinguished all the wax candles, and to have poured out all the holy water, and to have rent open all the convents, and to have turned the Vatican into a Reformed Dutch church, and the convocation of cardinals into an old-fashioned prayer-meeting, and to have immersed the pope, and sent him forth as a colporteur of the American and Foreign Christian Union. But somehow there has been a great waste of effort. The plain fact is,' he continues, 'that Romanism has to-day, in the United States, tenfold more power than when we first began to bombard it.'And the moral he draws from this survey of the situation is, that the Protestants had better 'change their style of warfare,' and introduce into the fight the principle of holy love, and the example of charity and devotion. Nothing could be more sensible than this remark of his: 'Bitter denunciation on the part of good but mistaken men never pulled down one Roman Catholic church, but has built five hundred. There is only one way to make a man give up his religion, and that is by showing him a better.' Brave words, you say, and so they are. Yet this very sermon is full of just the sort of bitter denunciation which the preacher denounces. The whole address is a condemnation of the speaker himself—one of the finest pieces of unconscious satire I ever read. I don't believeThe Observeritself could do the raw-head and bloody-bones business better than Dr. Talmadge does it."
"Never mind. Get these people to admit the principle of honest and gentlemanly dealing in religious controversy, and you may leave their practice to reform itself. For one man who was impressed by Dr. Talmadge's swelling invectives, I make little doubt that there were five who carried away in their hearts his advice to be charitable, courteous, and just. The English Nonconformist preacher, Newman Hall, who travelled through the United States recently, told his congregation on his return home that one of the greatest dangers of Protestantism nowadays was injustice toward Roman Catholics. I am afraid that his advice was not much relished in England, for you know injustice to Catholics is one of the pet foibles of Englishmen; but it is not so bad here. The American people are naturally fond of fair play. You have only to convince them that a certain course of conduct is unjust, and they will change it of their own accord."
"Do you mean to say, then, that you believe reason and logic are henceforth to supersede violence and slander in the discussion of the Catholic problem?"
"Not entirely, of course. But I believe that falsehoods are rapidly losing their efficacy in polemics, and that Protestants recognize this fact and are preparing to adapt themselves to the altered conditions of the conflict. And I do not mean to insinuate that as a class they do this merely from policy. Most of them probably used to believe the old standard lies; at least, they did notdisbelieve them. They repeated them by rote, because they had been brought up to do so, and they never thought of stopping to inquire into their authority. Now that the slanders have ceased to serve a purpose, it is naturally easier to convince those who used to profit by them that theyareslanders. What I mean to say is, that the tendency of our time is toward fairness and good sense in religious disputes. You and I, for example, are quite young enough to remember when 'Romanism' was popularly regarded as an unknown horror, no more to be tolerated than the plague or the yellow fever. It was not thought to be a question open for debate. A Protestant would no more have dreamed of examining the merits of popery than the merits of hydrophobia. But now it is a very common thing for our adversaries to admit that we have done wonderful service to humanity in our day; that in some particulars we have done and are still doing more than any other denomination; only we belong to a past age and ought now to give way to fresher organizations.I remember a rather striking sermon which I read in a Detroit newspaper, the other day, on the 'irrepressible conflict' between Catholicism and Liberalism, by the Rev. Mr. Mumford, a Unitarian clergyman. The greater part of the discourse was as illiberal as anything could be. Mr. Mumford saw in the Catholic Church a tremendous engine of oppression, and thought it was scheming to get control of the negroes in the Southern States, and through them to direct the politics of the whole country—"
"He saw no danger in the great influence which Methodism has acquired over the colored people, did he?"
"No; and he forgot to mention that the Catholic Church is almost the only one in America which has never been tainted by the intrusion of politics. Well, I was going on to say that, with all Mr. Mumford's prejudices and absurdities, he had the honesty to acknowledge that the Catholic Church is really entitled to the gratitude of mankind, and declared that he was glad it had secured some foothold in America, 'to act as a restraint upon the intolerance of the Protestant churches.'"
"I am afraid that you rather exaggerate the importance of admissions like these. They are so often made merely for rhetorical effect! They are little patches of light artfully thrown into the picture to heighten the effect of the shadows."
"I know that I don't refer to them as proofs of a willingness to examine the nature and grounds of Catholic doctrine, though I believe that there is much more of such willingness than there used to be, but as an evidence that a spirit of fairness and good-breeding is beginning to prevail in religious controversy; and from that spirit I cannot but expect good results."
"So far I have no doubt you are right; and one of the good results, it seems to me, must be the gradual extinction (or possibly the reform) of denominational newspapers of the old bludgeon-school.The Observermust go out of fashion whenever reason comes in. There will be no room for the religious brawlers when those who differ in creed learn to talk over their differences in a common-sense way. Don't you think there is a change in the tone of the press already?"
"The secular press certainly has improved wonderfully in its treatment of Catholics. About the religious periodicals I am not so sure: some of them are tamer than they were formerly, but the old stand-bys lash their tails as furiously as ever, and the less they are heeded the louder they roar. But that is only natural. You see the same thing at the theatres. When a play ceases to draw very well, the single combats become doubly fierce and the red-fire is frequent. The violence of the denominational organs must not be taken as an evidence of the sentiment of society. If they really led the opinions of their readers, we should have an anti-Catholic crusade every year. I wonder if you have noticed, however, that some of the Protestant religious papers which have usually been mild in their tone have been roused of late to an unaccustomed bitterness against us?"
"Yes, and I hardly know how to account for it."
"I think the explanation is this. The calm discussion of Catholic questions, as we said before, must logically lead to the discovery of Catholic truth. There are Protestant writers who see this and do not want to see it. They perceive whither the current is bearing them, and they struggle against it. They rail at the church by way of protest against the growth of an unwelcome, dimly foreseen conviction, as an encouragement to their tottering unbelief, just as boys whistle to keep up their courage.Have you ever seen a dying sinner try to fight off death? It is in some such hopeless effort as his thatThe Liberal Christianand a few other journals are now engaged. I do not say that they understand this themselves. I do not charge them with absolutely resisting the progress of conviction, or, to speak more exactly, the resistance is instinctive rather than voluntary; but they feel or suspect, perhaps without fully comprehending, that, if they keep on as they are going, they must come pretty soon to the Catholic Church, and that provokes them.The Liberal Christian, you know, is edited by Dr. Bellows, an accomplished gentleman, who was thought some years ago to exhibit a decided leaning toward the church. I am not prepared to say whether this supposition was correct or not; but it is certain that he saw more clearly and exposed more boldly the inherent defects and logical tendencies of Protestantism than any other Protestant I can remember, and in one of his published sermons he declared that Unitarians (his own sect) had more sympathy with Catholicism than with any other form of religion. It might seem strange to find him among the foremost revilers of that very Catholicism; but my theory explains it. The hostility which glistens in his letters and runs mad, sometimes, in the miscellaneous columns of his paper, is the revolt of his Protestantism against the progress of unwelcome ideas—an effort of his unregenerate nature, so to speak, to throw off something which does not agree with it. Ah! how many men have trod in the same path he is now following, and have been led by it to the bitter waters of disappointment! He saw the fatal gulf into which the Protestant bodies were plunging. He felt that hunger of the spirit which nothing but the church of God ever satisfies. He raised a cry for help, and when he found that there was no help except from the Holy Catholic Church, he turned his back upon her, and bound himself down once more with the narrow bonds of what is called Unitarian 'liberalism.' And now, of course, he misses no opportunity of declaring his detestation of the succor which he has refused. He has failed in his aspirations after a mock church, and naturally he vents his disappointment on the real one. He fancies that he is moved by principle, when he is really instigated by pique. He imagines that he is an earnest, honest seeker after an answer to what he well terms 'the dumb wants of the religious times,' when he is—but I have no business to judge his motives. That is God's affair. We must presume that he is courageous and sincere, and that whenever he finds the right road he will boldly walk in it. Nine years ago, Dr. Bellows delivered an address before the alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, on 'The Suspense of Faith,' which was generally supposed to indicate his wish to engraft a ritual and a priesthood upon the Unitarian denomination, bringing it perhaps nearer to Episcopalianism than to any other system of worship. There was no such thought in his mind, I am sure; though his sentiments, had they been acted upon, might have led many men through Episcopalianism into the Catholic Church. I will not weary you with the whole of it; but let me read a few lines which have a special application to what we have been saying.He is trying to account for the fact that Unitarianism is in a posture of pause and self-distrust and he says: 'If, with logical desperation, we ultimate the tendencies of Protestantism, and allow even the malice of its enemies to flash light upon their direction, we may see thatthe sufficiency of the Scriptures turns out to be the self-sufficiency of man, and the right of private judgment an absolute independence of Bible or church. No creed but the Scriptures, practically abolishes all Scriptures but those on the human heart; nothing between a man's conscience and his God, vacates the church; and with the church, the Holy Ghost, whose function is usurped by private reason: the church lapses into what are called religious institutions, these into Congregationalism, and Congregationalism into individualism—and the logical end is the abandonment of the church as an independent institution,the denial of Christianity as a supernatural revelation,and the extinction of worship as a separate interest. There is no pretence that Protestantism, as a body, has reached this, or intends this, or would not honestly and earnestly repudiate it; but that its most logical product is at this point, it is not easy to deny. Nay, that these are thetendenciesof Protestantism is very apparent.' When he comes to speak of Unitarianism as the representative and most logical exponent of Protestantism, he expresses himself in a still more remarkable way. Religion, he thinks, like everything else in the world, has been constantly making progress, and Unitarianism has always been in the van. Now this progress seemed to have reached its limit; there is a pause, a partial recoil, in some cases a turning back to the formalism and ritual worship of Rome, in others a headlong rush into the abyss of pure rationalism. In fact, Dr. Bellows believes that to create an equilibrium in the relations between God and man, two opposing forces are in operation—a centrifugal force, which drives man away from submission to divine authority, that he may develop his own liberty and functions of the will, and a centripetal force, which leads him to worship and obedience. These are represented respectively by Protestantism and Catholicism, and he seems to think them destined to alternate—perhaps for all time, though about this his meaning is not very clear. 'Is it not plain,' he says, 'that, as Protestants of the Protestants, we are at the apogee of our orbit; that in us the centrifugal epoch of humanity has, for this swing of the pendulum at least, reached its bound? For one cycle we have come, I think, nearly to the end of our self-directing, self-asserting, self-developing, self-culturing faculties; to the end of our honest interest in this necessary alternate movement.'"
"That means, if it means anything that Protestantism has done its work, at least for the present age; that it has accomplished all it can; and there is nothing left for man but a return to the centripetal force, or to the Catholic Church."
"Exactly: that would be the logical complement of the position he assumed in the curious discourse from which I have been quoting; but the misery is that he had not the courage to be logical. Ah! how well I remember the impression produced at the time by that sad, sad cry of weariness and disappointment which went up from his pulpit when he perceived that the toil, and speculation, and uneasiness of years had brought him to no goal; that he had developed man's faculties without finding a use for them; that he had achieved an intellectual freedom without knowing what to do with it; that, as he well expressed it himself, 'there was no more roadin the direction he had been going.'Many, as we have seen, when they reached that point on their journey whence this whole dismal prospect was visible, turned back to the church which their fathers had forsaken, and there found peace; and Dr. Bellows had stated so boldly the miseries of his own situation that it was no wonder people thought he too would follow that course. But he set himself about finding a new road, imagining a new church which was to arise at no distant day, and combine the most conservative of liturgies with the most radical of creeds. It was to be constituted on strictly centripetal principles. Speculation having proved empty, worship was to be essayed as a change. Doubt being but sorry fare for a hungry soul, there was to be a good deal of faith, and preaching not being a gift of all men, place was to be made for prayer. What that church was to be, how it was to arise, and when it was to make its appearance, he did not pretend to say. But it must come soon, because 'the yearning for a settled and externalized faith' was too strong to be left unsatisfied. It was to be, I must suppose, a mingling of the revelations of our Saviour with the dreams of Luther, Calvin, Fox, and Swedenborg; because, as Dr. Bellows says in one of his lectures, 'the religious man who has no vacillations in his views, who is not sometimes inclined to Calvinism, sometimes to Rationalism, sometimes to Catholicism, sometimes to Quakerism, has an imperfect activity, a dull imagination, and a timid love of truth; for all these faiths have embodied great and interesting spiritual facts which the free and earnest explorer will encounter in his own experience, and find more vividly portrayed in the history of these sects than in himself.' It was to possess a fixed creed, but nobody was expected to believe in it, for 'inconsistencies of opinion' are to be expected of everybody, and doubt, fear, and scepticism are actually desirable, provided they are 'the work of one's own mental and spiritual activity, and not of mere passive acquiescence in the forces that one encounters from without.' It was to be atruechurch, of course, yet a false church also; because Dr. Bellows declares that 'truth is too large to be surrounded by any one man or any one party,' and there are always two great parties in religion as there are in politics, 'and each has part of the truth in its keeping;' so that, of course, neither can be wholly right. He wanted his church to be a historical church, for Christianity is a historical religion, and 'a faith stripped of historic reality, disunited from its original facts and persons, does not promise to live and work in the human heart and life.' He seemed to have forgotten that history is the growth of time, and cannot be conferred upon a new-born infant. The future church must have rites and ceremonies, for without them religion hardly 'touches our daily habits and ordinary career,' and is, like Unitarianism, 'an unhoused, unnatural, and disembodied faith.' It must be a visible church, yet without a priesthood; a divinely instituted church, yet without authority; receiving its doctrines by divine revelations, yet only true in part; eternal, yet changeable, I am not surprised that Dr. Bellows has not yet found it."
"Surely he never uttered any such extraordinary farrago as you have been putting into his mouth?"
"Not in those words, of course, nor with that collocation of thoughts; but all that I have said you will find either in hisSuspense of Faith, or in the volume of sermons published under the title ofRe-Statements of Christian Doctrine, (New York, 1860.) I have represented, as fairly as possible, the vagueness of his aspirations and the inconsistency of his principles. It is only clear that he wanted to be a Protestant and a Catholic at the same time. He was shocked at the results of his own centripetalism, and he longed for a visible church, with a tangible creed and a set form of worship; only he wanted to make the church himself; not to be the founder of a new sect—he disclaimed that, and was unwilling even to change the form of service in his own congregation—but to dream about it, to speculate upon what it ought to be, to mould and influence opinion, until, by a seemingly spontaneous movement, the new church should arise from the midst of the people. Poor man! He sees, by this time, that nobody feels the want of this new church, and nobody believes in it; and he hates the true church, partly because it is a continual reproach to him, bringing to mind a duty unfulfilled and a happiness unappreciated, and partly because it continually revives his disappointment."
"I have serious doubts, however, whether Dr. Bellows ever comprehended the beauty of the Catholic religion half so well as many people supposed that he did. Read his books with a little care, and you will see that he never took but the most superficial view of religion: he never got at the core of it. Religion to him—as to how many others!—was a thin philosophy which amused his intellect, a sentimental poetry which tickled his aesthetic instincts; it was not alife. Of that vital Christianity which comprehends the whole relationship between God and man, which is both a creed, a worship, and the very essence of devout life, his heart seems to have been void."
"Yes, he says something almost equivalent to this in his sermon on 'Spiritual Discernment.'[Footnote 178]
[Footnote 178:Re-Statements of Christian Doctrine.]
'All the triumphs of Protestantism,' he declares, 'the universal improvement of private and public morality, of public education, respect for the individual, have grown out of the increasing care to keep the church and the world apart—religion and other interests distinct subjects of thought and attention.' And the word 'world' here he does not use in its bad sense, but merely as synonymous with secular affairs. Again he says, that 'the Catholic Church succeeded wonderfully in blending life and religion together, faith and daily usage, pleasure and worship, philosophy and the Gospel;' and this, he thinks, was its great fault, while the great merit of Protestantism was, that it carefully separated what the church had so carefully melted together. That gives you the real old Puritan idea of piety—a something to be put on at stated times, and then put off again, like the long faces which old-fashioned Protestants pull for Sunday wear; to have no intimate connection with daily life, but to be kept carefully apart, like the best coat which our ancestors used to lay by in lavender leaves, to be worn on days of ceremony. What is the good of a religion which does not blend with work-a-day life? of a faith which is not felt in daily usage? of a worship which must be kept apart from our pleasures, from our business, from any of our honest pursuits?Why, the very beauty of religion is, that it shall be in man's heart at all times and in all places. If it cannot accompany us everywhere, if it can only live in the artificial atmosphere of Sunday meetings, it is not worth having. The danger against which we have most to guard is not, Dr. Bellows thinks, that of forgetting our religion, but that of growing too familiar with it. His God is an awful rather than a loving God, and our sin against him is not that we go so far away from him, but that we bring him so near to us. In effect he tells us to fetch out our piety once a week or so, on stated occasions, but not to let it interfere with our daily walk and conversation, for that would be sacrilege."
"All this shows, as you say, that he has no comprehension as yet of the true nature of religion; and shall I tell you why he is so slow to acquire it? I believe that he is not really in sympathy with Christianity."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh! he is nominally a Christian, of course. He would be horrified if you told him he was not. But he has no sympathy with the religion of Christ. Our Saviour, in his opinion, was only the expounder of a system of ethics, and, to tell the truth, it is not clear to me wherein the Christ of Unitarianism is essentially superior to Socrates or Benjamin Franklin. The worship of our Lord Dr. Bellows emphatically denounces as rank 'idolatry.' We may only reverence him as a creature specially favored by the Almighty, and a teacher to whose word we owe the most profound respect. Take away from your religious system the idea of God in the person of his divine Son perpetually present with the faithful, and helping them to bear the burdens of humanity which he himself has borne, and it is but a cold, cheerless, fallacious belief which is left you. It is no longer religion; it is only a false philosophy. Devotion vanishes; faith, hope, and love are exchanged for a code of rules of behavior; and God withdraws from the world into the impenetrable mystery of the heavens, where the voice of prayer indeed may reach him, but his presence is never felt by man, and his love never fills the heart. He is no longer the dear Lord of the Christian saints, but the Allah of the Moslems."
"You have hit it exactly; and now let me tell you that ever since Dr. Bellows set out on the foreign tour in which he is still occupied, I have watched for the record of his impressions of Oriental life, feeling certain, from what I knew of him, that he would find an attraction in Mohammedanism which he never saw in Christianity. I was not mistaken. He is not a polygamist: he has no taste for a sensual heaven; I don't suppose he prefers the Koran to the Bible; and I never heard of his keeping the inordinate fasts of Ramadan; still, the creed of Islam seems, in its main features, to have caught his fancy, and he loads it with indirect praises, which he never thought of bestowing upon any form of Christianity. Let me read you an extract from one of his recent letters toThe Liberal Christian:
"'These people,' he says, referring to the Egyptians, 'know nothing of Christianity which ought to give it any superiority in their eyes over Mohammedanism. When the Arabian prophet commenced his marvellous work, there is little doubt that he was animated by the sincere enthusiasm of a religious reformer. Mohammed recognized both dispensations, the Mosaic and the Christian; and his intelligent followers to this day speak reverently of the Christ. They evade the authority and use of our Scriptures, by asserting that they have been thoroughly corrupted in their text. A learned Mohammedan in India, however, has just written the introduction to a new Commentary on our Bible, in which he ably refutes the Mussulman charge of general corruptness, and adduces all the passages quoted out of the Old and New Testaments in the Koran.But what have Mussulmans seen of Christianity to commend it greatly above their own faith? Is it alleged that Mohammedanism has owed its triumphs and progress to the sword? Is it the fault of Christians if the Cross has not advanced by the same weapon? What infidel rage of the Crescent has ever exceeded the fanatical soldiering of the Crusades, and what has Coeur de Lion to boast over Saladin in enlightenment or appreciation of the Christian spirit? And if we come to bowing, and fasting, and washing, and external forms,I confess that the degrading prostrations, and crossings, and mummeries of the Greek and Catholic churches, with the gaudy trappings of robes and jewels, the worship of saints and images, and the deification of a humble Jewish woman, appear to me to have nothing in the presence of which Mussulmans could feel the lesser reasonableness, purity, or dignity, or the lesser credibility of their own unadorned and simpler superstition.Compared with Catholic and Greek legends, the Koran is a model of purity and elegance of style, andits worst superstitions do not much exceed in grossness the popular interpretation given to monkish fables.As it respects ecclesiastical interference and tyranny, Mohammedanism is a whole world in advance of Romanism or the Greek Church. It is essentially without priest or ritual, in any Catholic sense. The Mussulman is his own priest. He finds Allah everywhere, and he has only to turn toward Mecca, and bow in prayer, and his field, his boat, the desert, is as good an altar as the mosque. It is truly affecting to see the fidelity of the common people to their faith, the apparent heedlessness of observation, the absorption in their prayers, the careful memory of their hours of devotion.'
"And, speaking of the absence of symbols and rites in the mosques, he adds: 'Surely there is something grand in this simplicity,and something vital in a faith which, aided by so little external appliance, has survived in full vigor twelve hundred years'"
"Why don't he admire the vitality of the devil? Satan has survived in full vigor a good deal more than twelve hundred years."
"That would be about as logical. But is it not melancholy to see how far a man whom we would like to respect can be carried by his uncontrolled vagaries! He demanded a 'historical church:' there is only one in Christendom, and that he will not have; and now it almost seems as if he felt an occasional temptation to search for oneoutsideof Christendom. Protestantism, he finds, has run its course. Catholicism he will have nothing to do with. What, then, is left him, if he will be a religious man at all? That seems to be the question which perplexes him and the small but intelligent school of thinkers of whom he is the representative. As the Jews are still waiting for the Christ they crucified eighteen hundred years ago, so the Bellows school are watching for the coming of that Christianity which they have already rejected. And both, it seems to me, are sick at heart with hope long deferred."
"Yes; we hear little now of the confident prophetic tone in which Dr. Bellows some years ago discoursed of the glories of the new religion of humanity, and predicted a resettlement of worn-out creeds and a revival of suspended faith. He writes now rather of the desolation of the present than of brightness which he discerns in the future. And this brings us back to the point from which we started. While Protestant theologians in general are discarding vituperation, there are certain of our opponents who show us a bitterness to which they were not formerly accustomed, because they have been disappointed in their own religious aspirations, and have a vague, half-conscious, and wholly unwelcome impression that the Catholic Church alone is capable of satisfying them. Dr. Bellows, for instance, travels through Europe and finds that Protestantism is everywhere lifeless. He is bold enough to say so; but he takes his revenge in the next breath by trying to show that the Catholic Church is no better.He is powerless to arrest the decay which is destroying his own organization, but he seems to find a melancholy compensation in attacking Catholicism. He reminds me of what the boy said when he was thrashed by a school-fellow: 'If I can't whip you, I can make faces at your sister.' He visits Paris, and confesses that 'Protestantism makes next to no headway' in France, and is torn by internal dissensions. He goes to the heart of Protestant Germany, and finds the general aspect 'one of painful decay in the faith and spirituality of the people.' All over the continent, he observes that where the Catholic faith has died out, 'nothing vigorous has shot up in its place,' and the masses of the population are 'without aspiration, devoutness, or faith in the invisible.' 'Protestantism, as it appears here, is a chilled, repulsive, ungrowing thing, entering very little into the national or the social and domestic life, and apparently not destined in any of its present forms to animate the passions or win and shape the hearts and lives of the middle classes. ...Out of the present elements of faith and worship in Germany I see no prospects of any healthy and contagious religious life arising.'Nay, what is worse than all, the peculiar form of Protestantism upon which, if upon any. Dr. Bellows would rely for the regeneration of Europe, is in no better way than the others. 'It does not appear,' he says, 'that the liberal element in the Protestantism of Germany, I mean that branch of its Protestantism which we should consider 'most in sympathy with Unitarianism, is very earnest or creative. It seems still rather a negation of orthodoxy than an affirmation of the positive truths of Christianity. ... Forced to take positive ground, I fear that a large part of this extensive bodywould be compelled to abandon Christian territory altogether.' From Berlin he writes that 'the whole life of the national church is sickly and discouraging;' from Strasburg, that Protestantism 'must learn some new ways before it will become the religion of the people of France, Italy, or even Germany;' from Vienna, that the Protestantism of Austria is 'essentially torpid and unprogressive, presenting nothing attractive or promising.' These passages, and many more of similar purport, we may take as equivalent to the little boy's confession that he could not whip his antagonist. When it comes to the other part, the making faces at his sister, I am bound to say that Dr. Bellows shows more temper than strength. In Vienna, he deplored the lukewarmness of the Catholic people all through Germany, yet, in several previous letters, he had contrasted their zeal in church-going with the indifference of the Protestants. He accuses the clergy of avarice, though in Rome he compliments the priests for their personal merits, their 'seriousness, decorum, and fair intelligence.' He declares that 'the Catholic Church is an artful substitute for anything that a human soul ought to desire;' that she is 'the chief hinderance to progress;' that she has 'glorified the blessed Mother into the Almighty;' that she 'mutters spells and practises necromancy at her altars,' and all that kind of thing, which I need not repeat, because we have heard it in almost the very same words scores of times before. But the most curious of all his angry attacks was made—where, think you? Why, on a steamer in the Levant, where there was nothing whatever to provoke him: where the onslaught was so perfectly gratuitous that it burst upon the calm flow of his letter like a thunderbolt rending the summer sky. Here it is:
"'Roman Catholicism, weak in every member, is prodigious in its total effectiveness, because it is a unit. It is quietly seizing America, piece by piece, state by state, city by city. In a new state like Wisconsin, for instance, it has the oldest college, the largest theological school, the best hospitals and charities, the finest churches; and what is true of Wisconsin is equally true of many other Western states. Protestantism, with a hundred times the wealth, intelligence, public spirit, and administrative ability, by reason of its sectarian jealousies and divisions can have no parallel successes, and is losing rapidly its place in legislative grants and in public policy. The Irish Catholics spot the members of state legislatures who vote against the appropriations they call for, and are able in our close elections to defeat their return. Representatives become servile and pliable, and Romanism flourishes. A Quaker gentleman of wealth, in the West, (the story is exactly true,) married a Vermont girl who had become a Catholic in a nunnery where she was sent for her education. It was agreed that, if children were given them, the boys should be reared in the faith of their father, the girls in that of their mother.The Vermont mother gave her husband ten girls, but never a son!Eight of them grew up Catholics, married influential men, and brought up their children Catholics, and in some cases brought over their husbands, and so the Roman Church was recruited with Protestant wealth and Quaker blood to a vast extent. So much for sending Protestant girls to Roman Catholic seminaries, and then complaining that so many Protestants are lost to the superstitions of Romanism! There is an apathy about the Roman Catholic advances in the United States among American Protestants, which will finally receive a terrible shock. There is no influence at work in America so hostile to our future peace as the Roman Catholic Church. The next American war will, I fear, be a religious war—of all kinds the worst. If we wish to avert it,we must take immediate steps to organize Protestantism more efficiently, and on less sectarian ground.'
"Well, upon my word, the conduct of that Vermont girl was abominable. I suppose Dr. Bellows thinks she never would have been artful enough to swindle her husband out of all his expected boys if she had not been brought up in a convent. 'So much for sending Protestant girls to Roman Catholic seminaries!' I should think so, indeed!"
"The story is very ridiculous; but the moral Dr. Bellows draws from it is worse than ridiculous. If we wish to avert a religious war, he says, 'we must take immediate steps to organize Protestantism more efficiently, and on less sectarian ground.' That means that Protestantism must maintain an overwhelming preponderance in this country by fair means or foul. If it cannot convert the papists with the Bible, it ought to knock them on the head with a bludgeon. And the same atrocious sentiment is still more plainly expressed by an Irish writer inThe Liberal Christianof Feb. 29th, who says, 'Popery and Fenianism are Siamese curses, withering every noble and humane feeling wherever they exist. ...They deserve no toleration; they should receive no mercy.' There's a 'liberal' Christian for you, with a vengeance!"
"Well, we can afford to ridicule such fears and threats; but it is very sad. Here, where nearly all honest people seem to have made up their minds to reform their bad language, and be as polite in discussing sacred questions as in talking over secular affairs, a sect which professes toleration and fairness beyond all others goes back to the old style of polemical blackguardism. I can appreciate the unfortunate position of the liberal Christians, when, having pushed ahead so far, they find that there is 'no more road' in that direction, and can understand that only one of two courses may seem open to them, either to berate the Catholics or to join them; but the instruction which the barrister received from his attorney when the law and the facts were both against him, 'Abuse the other side,' does not apply so well to religion as to jury trials. We must have a different style of argument if anybody is to be converted or improved by the discussion.