There are but two ways in which it is possible for Protestants to impeach the title of the Church. The first is to convict her of contradicting in her teaching some known principle of reason; the second is to convict her of having contradicted herself, or of having taught doctrines which mutually contradict one another. No church can be from God that teaches, as the word of God, any doctrine which contradicts a known principle of reason. But we say a known principle of reason. A doctrine may be repugnant to our feelings, it may run athwart our prejudices, fancies, or caprices, and therefore seem to us very unreasonable, and yet contradict no known principle of reason. It must also contradict reason. A doctrine may be above reason, belong to an order lying altogether out of the range of reason, and yet contradict no known principle of reason. To be above reason is not necessarily to be against reason. The Church unquestionably has taught, and continues to teach, doctrines which are above reason, and concerning the truth or falsity of which reason has nothing to say; but no doctrine that contradicts any known principle of reason. Even the holy mysteries of the adorable Trinity and the blessed Eucharist form no exception to this assertion. They are above reason, incomprehensible to reason, impenetrable mysteries, we admit; but there is nothing in them or connected with them, that the Church commands us to believe, which contradicts reason in any respect whatever. The Unitarian has never demonstrated, never can demonstrate, the falsity of the doctrine of the Trinity; nor has the Sacramentarian ever detected any contradiction of reason in the Real Presence. The most either can say is, that reason of her own light does not affirm them.

Again; the Church never contradicts herself, or teaches doctrines that contradict one another. She doubtless modifies her discipline, and changes her canons, repeals old ones and establishes new ones, according to the exigencies of time and place; but she never teaches at one time or place a doctrine as of divine revelation, which she does not teach as such in all times and places. The assertions of Protestants to the contrary are all founded on misapprehension or misrepresentation of her actual teaching. No real instance of contradiction of herself, or variation in doctrine, has ever been detected by even the most learned and subtle of her opponents, and never will be. Nor does she ever teach one doctrine which contradicts another doctrine she teaches. Even her enemies are struck with the sys

The in

tematic consistency and coherence of her teaching. fidel Saint-Simon declares that her catechism and prayers are the most profoundly systematic works ever written.

It is clear, then, that in neither of these ways can Protestants impeach the title of the Church. They can, then, sustain none of the allegations set forth in their declaration against her; because they can produce no authority in their support paramount to that which they must, on any hypothesis, concede to her. Her simple denial is always sufficient to render nugatory all they can adduce against her. Their objections thus removed, her title stands good, and they are bound to respect it. Every man has the right to be accounted innocent till he is proved guilty, and a primâ facie case must be made out against him before he can be put upon his defence. Now, as nothing the Protestants do or can bring forward is sufficient to deprive the Church of the presumption of innocence, or to turn it against her, they are obliged to respect her as the Church of Christ, and are therefore precluded from alleging that Christ founded no church with authority to teach. They cannot, then, in order to excuse their heresy and schism in not being Roman Catholics, fall back on No-churchism. They must either become Roman Catholics or fall back still further. They must deny the authority of Jesus Christ himself, and fall back on INFIDELITY. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH OR INFIDELITY, — these, in the last analysis, are, after all, the only possible alternatives, as we have shown, from a different point of view, on more occasions than one.

No doubt, this conclusion is offensive to our Protestant friends, and we would gladly say something more grateful to their feelings, if we could. It is no pleasure to us to displease others; we take no delight in giving pain to a single mortal. But charity, as distinguished from a sickly sentimentality, not unfrequently compels us to utter unpalatable truths. If we love our brethren, if we really desire their spiritual and eternal welfare, we must not, for fear of disturbing their equanimity, or of wounding their feelings, forbear to tell them the dangers which surround them, and the untenable ground on which they attempt to stand. Men may say what they will, seek to deceive themselves or others as they may; but it is still true that between Catholicity and infidelity there is no middle ground on which a man who can reason and is not afraid to reason can take his stand.

Protestantism, in the hands of the Reformers, as we have

seen, was not all of a piece, but a compound of heterogeneous elements. The Reformers brought with them from the Church several important elements of Catholic truth; but these elements had and could have no affinity for the new elements introduced. The new elements were in their nature repugnant to these, and must either expel them or be expelled by them. The latter would have been the death and annihilation of Protestantism; the former alone was compatible with the continued existence of Protestantism. The history of Protestantism, from its origin to our times, its internal history, we mean, is simply the history of the mutual struggle of these two classes of elements; and the great and astonishing progress, religious progress, of the Protestant world for these three centuries, and of which we now hear so much, consists exclusively in throwing off more and more of the Catholic truth,-Catholic error, as the Protestant would say, and reducing the whole Protestant system into harmony with the peculiarly Protestant elements, or new elements introduced by the Reformers themselves, and for the sake of which they broke away from the Church. The struggle of the new and the old, we have seen, so far as the new gains the victory, results in Liberal Christianity. But Liberal Christianity, if it be not absolute infidelity, is not, after all, the last result. There is a lower deep," or a further progress, inevitable, before the whole of Protestantism is harmonized with the peculiarly Protestant elements.

If we take up Protestantism as we received it from the Reformers, analyze it, and subtract the Catholic elements retained, the remainder will unquestionably be what is peculiarly or distinctively Protestant, and all that Protestantism has a right to call her own; for we unquestionably have a right to claim as ours, and deny to be hers, all she has stolen from the Church, or which is part and parcel of the teachings of the Church. The Catholic truth abstracted, there will be found to remain for Protestantism, in its essential elements, only a revolt against God, the denial of his authority in his Church, and the attempt to set up man in the place of God, and to make him worshipped as God. In a word, it was, undeniably, simply the assertion of the superiority of the human over the divine; for the Bible, for which it contends, is, when humanly interpreted, only a human authority. Subject the matter to the most rigid analysis possible, and you shall never make more or less of Protestantism than this. This is it, and the whole of it, when reduced to itself, and compelled to operate with its

own essential elements. Now it needs no argument to prove that this is in reality, if not in fact formally, modern infidelity; for modern infidelity, in its essential elements, is simply the substitution of man for God, the assertion of the superiority of the human over the divine.. Protestantism, in so far as it is Protestant and distinct from Catholicity, is essentially the same thing, then, as infidelity. It is in vain you deny it. There is

not a dogma insisted on by Protestants, that, when divested of every Catholic element, is not infidel, or that any avowed infidel is not ready to admit. The infidel finds occasion to dissent from the Protestant only when and where the Protestant agrees with the Catholic. This is a fact of no mean importance, and proves that Protestantism, in so far as Protestant, is only another name for infidelity. Where, then, is the middle ground between Catholicity and infidelity, on which one can stand?

If we turn to the historical developments of Protestantism, we shall find this conclusion confirmed. We exclude, as of no account in the argument, the large mass of Protestants who receive what is given them, and merely follow, if they move at all, the beck of their leaders; because in these there are no developments; but if we confine ourselves to the leaders, to those who haye labored for and effected some development of Protestantism, we shall find that every new development has cast off an additional portion of Catholicity,- Popery, as it is called, and brought the Protestant system a step nearer to this result. Liberal Christianity, in which, to say the least, the Protestant sects have for the most part resulted, is much nearer open, avowed infidelity than the teachings of Luther and Calvin. New England Calvinism is resulting or has resulted in Unitarianism; but Unitarianism, as taught by Worcester, Ware, and Norton, has still too much of Popery to satisfy the younger members of the sect; further developments are attempted, and we find reproduced the Naturalism of Parker, the Pantheistic Idealism of Emerson, or the rank Humanitarianism of our old friend Ripley and his Fourierite associates. Survey the Protestant world calmly, and you shall find very little firm belief in Christianity as a supernatural and authoritative religion left. The mass of intelligent men among Protestants, who profess to believe it at all, profess to believe it as a philosophy rather than as a religion. But Christianity is not believable as a philosophy, till divested of all that distinguishes it, or is peculiar to it as Christianity. Men believe it as a philosophy only in pro

portion as they infidelize it, reduce it to mere Naturalism, which is to deny it as a divine revelation altogether. Here is the grand fact of the Protestant world as it now is. The most it does, as a Protestant world, is to take refuge in Liberal Christianity. Liberal Christianity indeed! For it liberates man from all restraint but the restraints of his own nature, and freely gives away all that is peculiarly or distinctively Chris

tian.

There is no mistaking the inevitable tendencies of the historical developments of Protestantism. They are humanizing and materializing every department of life. Man becomes the central figure of every group. All begins and ends with him. Human sentiments of kindness and liberality are raised above the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity; and it is conceived to be the greatest service we can render our age, to assert everywhere the supremacy of man, and to enable him to stand alone in his glory," or his shame. The love of man, philanthropy, usurps the place of love of God, and the authority of human instincts and passions that of the Creator and Lord of the universe. We see this everywhere. whole modern popular literature of the anti-Catholic world, that literature which is the exponent and the intellectual nourishment of the masses, is unblushingly infidel, immoral, and indecent. So far, then, as logical conclusions confirmed by historical facts afford any ground of reliance, we may repeat that the. alternatives are infidelity or the Roman Catholic Church. It is the just judgment of God, that, if you will not have his religion, you shall have none.

The

Is it not time for the serious-minded still in the Protestant ranks, who are startled by the developments of Strauss and Parker, and who would not willingly" deny the Lord that bought them," divest themselves entirely of the robe of Christ's justice, and stand before God and before man in utter nakedness, to ask if it be not better, after all, to return to the Church of our forefathers, than to plunge headlong into the bottomless hell of modern infidelity? We grant, their prejudices against the Church are strong and deep-rooted, and that nothing but the grace of Almighty God can overcome them ; but is not the alternative of rejecting the Church terribly appalling? In the heyday of our youth, with ardent passions and buoyant hopes, unsubdued by the world's cares and vicissitudes, feeling ourselves sufficient for to-day and thoughtless for to-morrow, we may turn a deaf ear to the invitations and warnings of re