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nomination, when not published by their own book society." The Reviewer says this is not true. We know from our own knowledge that it was true a few years since to some extent, and we know, and the Reviewer admits, that the Methodist elders do "urge their people to patronize their publishing establishments." p. 459. It seems, however, we were wrong in speaking of their "book society," for they have no book society, but a "book concern." We acknowledge our mistake. The simple fact is, the Methodist denomination is itself, properly speaking, a huge society, and this society carries on a large book concern, and seeks as far as possible to monopolize the whole publishing business of its members.

We denied that the Catholic Church has ever been hostile to the liberty of the press, and asserted that the Reviewer had not adduced a single fact in proof of his charge. In the article before us, he appears to think we were wrong in this; for he adduced some extracts from the encyclical letter of the Holy Father, bearing date August 16 (15), 1832, which goes far at least to prove it. We had, and now have, that letter before us, but it does not sustain the charge we denied. The Reviewer misquotes and perverts the sense of the passages he professes to give. The Holy Father does not declare, "Liberty of conscience is an absurd and erroneous opinion, or rather a mad conceit," as the Reviewer asserts; but that the opinion, that liberty is to be asserted and maintained for the conscience of each one, is absurd and erroneous, or rather a madness. Atque ex hoc putidissimo indifferentismi fonte absurda illa fluit ac erronea sententia, seu potius deliramentum, asserendam esse ac vindicandam cuilibet libertatem conscientiæ. What is condemned is not liberty of conscience, rightly understood, but that false view of the liberty of conscience which releases conscience from all obligation to conform to the truth, and which makes the conscience of each the sovereign arbiter in all cases whatsoever. Conscience is free, has all its rights, when subjected only to the will of God; but that its freedom demands that it must in no instance be restrained, the individual, under plea of conscience, must be free to conform or not conform to the law of God, -free to run into any and every excess of error and delusion, to subvert all religious, social, and domestic order, is indeed an absurd and erroneous opinion, a real delusion, which every right-minded man must condemn. That the Holy Catholic Church does not allow liberty of conscience in this sense, which is not liberty,

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but license, we have never denied, and trust we never shall. The Church leaves the conscience all the liberty, that is, all the rights, it has by the law of God. If the Reviewer is not satisfied with this, he must bring his complaint against his Maker, not against the Church.

In fact, this notion of the unbounded license of conscience no man in his sober senses can undertake to defend. We remember to have read some years ago, in one of the Protestant missionary journals, of a pious Protestant convert among the heathen, who, on her dying bed, having but a poor appetite, thought she might, perhaps, eat the little finger of a very young child, if nicely cooked! This her conscience permitted. Was the liberty of her conscience to be respected? The conscience of the Anabaptists required them to run naked through the streets, and that of the early Quakers required them, especially the women, to go naked into the religious assemblies and prophesy. Was their conscience to be respected at the expense of public decency? There is, or at least was two or three years ago, a new religious sect in Western New York, who reject marriage, allow promiscuous sexual intercourse, and practise various obscene and filthy rites which we dare not name. Is the liberty of their conscience to be respected? There was, too, Matthias, the famous New York prophet, whose queer conscience commanded him to claim his neighbour's property and his neighbour's wife as his own. Was the liberty of his conscience to be allowed? We have a friend who is conscientiously opposed to paying taxes to the government. Shall the government respect his conscience, and exempt him from the payment of taxes? We have another friend who believes it decidedly wrong to use money. So, when he steps on board the steamboat at New York for Boston, he insists on having a free passage, because his conscience will not let him pay for it. Shall he go scot-free through the world? One man is conscientiously opposed to the observance of Sunday; do you respect the liberty of his conscience? Another is opposed to the employment of chaplains by legislative assemblies; do you respect his liberty of conscience? Not at all.

It is evident from what we have advanced, that some bounds are, and must be, set to the license of conscience, that there must be somewhere a limit beyond which the plea of conscience is not to be entertained. But where is this limit? Where are these bounds? Who shall determine? The individual for himself? No; for that would be to leave con

science without any restraint whatever; because conscience is each man's own judgment of what the law of God commands or permits. If you leave the individual to determine for himself, you leave conscience without law. You must, too, respect the determination of one as much as that of another. Individuals as such are all equal, and you have no right to prefer the judgment of one to that of another. The judgment of the Libbeyite of Western New York, of Matthias, the prophet, of the anti-Sabbatarian, of the anti-chaplainite, must be held as respectable as your own. This, then, will not do. If any bounds are to be set to conscience, it must be by an authority above the individual, and which may command the individual, and enforce its commands on the individual.

What is this authority? The civil government? We deny it; for the civil government, except as the executive of the commands of a more ultimate authority than its own, has no right to meddle with conscience. Shall it be the authority of some one of the sects? Which one? Why one rather than another? Of all the sects combined? That is impossible; because one will insist that the law of God allows a latitude to conscience which another denies, and their agreement is out of the question. But waive this; we still say no; because the sects are all, taken singly or together, by their own confession, fallible, and may, therefore, misjudge, allow what the law of God prohibits, and forbid what the law of God permits. Moreover, conscience is accountable only to God, and to subject it to any fallible authority is intolerable tyranny. If, then, there be not on earth an authority through which Almighty God speaks, and interprets infallibly his own law, you have and can have no authority for restraining the licentiousness of conscience. But, if you have such authority, whatever restraints it imposes on conscience will be restraints imposed by the law of God, and therefore restraints perfectly compatible with the liberty of conscience. The authority of the Catholic Church is such authority, and therefore her control of conscience is not, and never can be, an attack on the liberty of conscience. It leaves it all the freedom Almighty God gives it, and that is all it has a right to demand.

The same or similar remarks may be made in reference to the freedom of opinion. The unrestricted freedom of opinion is no more permitted by the law of God than is the unrestricted freedom of conscience. The Holy Father condemns not the liberty of opinion, properly so called, but the immoderata

libertas opinionum, that is, the licentiousness of opinions. If there be any truth in Christianity, the mind is as accountable to God as the body, and licentiousness of mental action is as reprehensible as the licentiousness of bodily action. We are as accountable for our opinions as we are for our deeds. Else what means the confession we all make, that "we have sinned in thought, word, and deed"? If there is no law to which the mind is accountable, there can be no sin in thought, for sin is the transgression of the law; and where there is no law, there is, and can be, no transgression of the law. If there be a law to which the mind is accountable, then are we bound to conform to it, and are not free to do what it prohibits. Then the liberty of mind, of thought, of opinion, as well as the liberty of conscience, has its limits. And is it not so? Is there a Christian who dares assert that we are free to think and form opinions which are repugnant to the law of God? No; and we dare tell even this godless generation, let it declaim as grandiloquently as it pleases about the inalienable rights of the freeborn mind, that the mind has no rights but what Almighty God gives it, and we have no right to think what he forbids. We are bound to submit our very thoughts and imaginations to his divine law.

We say the same as to freedom of speech. We may sin in word as well as in deed. Speech, then, is subjected to the law of God; and the liberty of speech is only the liberty to say that which the law of God permits. We shall be called to account before God for our words, as well as for our thoughts and deeds. There is, then, a limit beyond which the liberty of speech does not and cannot extend. To prohibit beyond that limit is not to abridge the freedom of speech, nor to make war upon it; because, beyond that limit, Almighty God has given man no freedom of speech.

The principle here asserted is applicable to the press. The press is nothing but public speech, and its liberty must be subject to all the restrictions to which the law of God subjects thought and speech in general. The press has no liberty to publish what is contrary to the law of God, and when it is forbidden to publish what is contrary to the law of God, its license is indeed restrained, but its liberty is left untouched. We are not ignorant that this question of the press is a delicate question, and one on which it is impossible to speak as a Christian man should speak, without giving to the ill-natured and wicked an opportunity to pervert your meaning, and make the great

mass of the people believe you mean what you do not mean. But it is a question that presses home upon every parent, every citizen, not to say every Christian. The licentiousness of the press at home and abroad has become so great as to threaten all that is dear and sacred. Every thing venerable, every thing sacred in religion, in the state, in the family, is attacked with remorseless fury. Our youth grow pale over publications which pervert their understandings, extinguish every virtuous sentiment, and excite to terrible activity every evil propensity. Respectable booksellers keep, if not on their counters, at least on their back shelves, books which the Christian father or mother would be filled with horror to see in the hands of a son or a daughter. And those mischievous works are sent out at a price that places them within the reach of even the poorest. The infection becomes universal. No rank, no age, no sex, no condition, escapes it. Is this a time to talk of the blessings

of a free press? Books are companions, and bad books are bad companions, the very worst species of companions. They are made by the base and remorseless the vehicles of corrupting the innocent and unsuspecting. The licentious and designing have only to send a selection from the cheap publications of the day before them, and the way is prepared for them to follow. They have, too, books of all kinds, adapted to all dispositions. Our homes are no longer sacred. Corruption steals in by our very firesides, and we close our eyes and ears, lest we discover it in those nearest and dearest to our hearts. Will you tell us this is the inevitable consequence of a free press, and that, if you touch the freedom of the press, you take away the palladium of our liberty? Liberty! What is liberty, where the moral health of the people is gone, where virtue ceases to exist, and your community is nothing but a mass of rottenness?

Some restraint on the licentiousness of the press is unquestionably necessary. This the Methodist Reviewer admits, p. 464, in admitting that Protestant sects make the reading of books "of an irreligious tendency" a matter of discipline. What restraint is necessary, or by whom it shall be imposed, is another question. Religion is the only basis of morals, and it is idle to expect good morals where there is no religion. Every book which attacks religion, which tends to undermine faith in divine revelation, or which gives a false view of the dogmas of faith, is a bad book, an irreligious book, and repugnant to good morals, a book no man has the right to pro

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