Canada Thistles.
The accident of a heavy snowstorm detained me, a little while ago, at the house of a friend in the country. It was certainly a pleasant place to be cast away in. My friend was a gentleman-farmer, who united a strong taste for rustic pursuits with an equally strong as well as an intelligent fondness for literature and art. In the matter of books and pictures, philosophy and religion, we were in sympathy with each other; but when he came to milch cows and turnips, my city education got the better of me. I could neither understand his conversation nor appreciate his enthusiasm. It was agreed, therefore, that as soon as he put on his long boots and set out for the barnyard, I should retire into his cheerful library, where a blazing fire of hickory-logs, shelves well stored with all that is best in literature, and a great green-covered table, on which papers, reviews, and magazines were piled in pleasant confusion, kept me in excellent spirits while he was attending to the daily duties of the farm. How I enjoyed those idle hours! Throwing myself back in a wide arm-chair, I passed the winter mornings skimming over the pages of my favorite authors, half reading them and half dreaming; and when my friend returned from his rounds, and stretched himself in another chair on the opposite side of the fire-place, we used to chat over the various subjects that had occupied my mind since breakfast. After dinner, we usually went back to the library with our cigars. The evening we always spent with the rest of the family in the parlor.
My friend read a great deal, and was also something of an author. He contributed essays on agricultural subjects to one or two magazines. He had even published a book or so in the course of his life; and he still amused himself by penning literary criticisms, for a periodical printed in New York. I was not surprised, therefore, to find his table burdened with a good many volumes, newspapers, and pamphlets, which I knew he would never have been at the trouble of ordering.
"Yes," said he, when I made a remark about the worthless character of some of these publications; "there is trash enough here to make a man melancholy. People send me these things for their own purposes, and I read them sometimes for mine. I should be tempted to be sorry for the invention of printing, only if we lost the bane, we should lose the antidote with it. Besides, I have little faith in the negative sort of virtue which is founded on ignorance. We ought to grow wiser, day by day, with the number of our teachers; but what I see here often makes me doubt it. You will find that mankind have the same propensity to use calumny instead of argument that they had two or three hundred years ago. In matters of religion and history, I believe that lies are very much like Canada thistles: let them once take root, and it is next to impossible to get the field clear of them. You may cut them all down to-day, and to-morrow their ugly heads will be as high as ever. Now, here," he continued, picking up a handful of pamphlets and newspapers, "is a crop of Canada thistles. These are all philippics against the Catholic Church. I suppose their authors call them polemical publications; but there is not an argument in one of them. They are nothing whatever but slanders which have been demolished a hundred times; and yet here they are, as bold as ever. It is consoling to be told, as we often are, that 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again;' but if a lie crushed to earth has not an incorrigible habit of rising again, then I am no reader of current literature. You and I may go out into the field of theological controversy, and, being well armed and on the right side, we may cut down every one of the calumnies which are marshalled against the church; but we know that they will jump right up again as soon as our backs are turned, and swear that they never went down. It is rather discouraging to fight against a man who doesn't know when he is dead. To answer these things now, that I hold in my hand, would be like running around the battle-field in chase of a rabble of lively corpses."
"Well," said I, "you are partly right and partly wrong. We have got to cut away at the Canada thistles, as you call them, whether we root them out or not; if we don't, they will stifle the grain. Besides, your lively corpses cannot run for ever. You may galvanize a dead body into spasmodic activity, but you cannot bring it to life again; and I believe that, every time a lie is exposed, there is good done to somebody, though the exposure may have been made a hundred times before. Take the old fiction of a female pope; one of the most preposterous of anti-Catholic calumnies, and one of the easiest to demolish, because the admitted facts of history were so plain against it. That was an incredibly long time dying; but it is dead at last—so dead that even Mr. Murphy, of Birmingham, probably does not believe it. Well, that lie would never have been laid on the shelf if Catholics had not hammered away at it until they forced their enemies to listen to them. Take the St. Bartholomew massacre—"
"I don't know about that," interrupted my friend; "there is a good deal of vitality in that thistle yet. Two things have been proved, and are now admitted by the most candid Protestant historians—that the massacre was the crime of a political, not a religious, party, and that the number of the slain has been frightfully exaggerated. The old story used to be that 100,000 fell, and Lingard has shown that the number, in all probability, did not exceed 1500. Notwithstanding this, I have a volume here, called Willson's Outlines of History, which, I learn, is used as a text-book in the College of the City of New York, and which represents the massacre as a rising of the 'Catholics of Paris' against their Huguenot brethren, declares that it lasted in the capital 'eight days and eight nights without any apparent diminution of the fury of the murderers,' and estimates the number of the victims at 50,000. Then the writer goes on to say that the pope caused medals to be struck in commemoration of the auspicious event, and returned public thanks to heaven. A student would never suspect from this that the assassins were not the Catholic inhabitants, but the hirelings of the queen mother. Besides, the massacre lasted, not eight days and nights, but three days and two nights. This fact is of more importance than at first appears. If the slaughter had lasted so long, and so many persons had been killed, it could hardly have been the work of a band of cutthroats; but if we remember that, as all reputable historians admit, it was over on the third day, and that the number of victims, according to Froude, who is the latest Protestant authority, certainly did not exceed 2000 in Paris, and 10,000 in all France, or, according to Lingard, 1500 in the whole kingdom, it is evident that it could not have been shared in by the Catholic inhabitants."
"Froude, you say, puts the number at 10,000?"
"Yes, and admits that the French Catholics cried out with horror at the outrage. Yet Froude is a most unwilling witness in our favor. His bias, as you know, is all the other way. The Calvinistic author of the martyrology of the Huguenots, published only ten years after the massacre, made careful search, and was able to find the names of only 786 persons who perished. Froude's estimate is too high, and Willson's is altogether preposterous. Then about that medal and the Te Deum at Rome; everybody knows that, as soon as the horrible deed was over, the first care of the French king was to justify himself at the other European courts by false accounts of what had taken place. His ambassador informed the pope that his majesty had discovered a Huguenot conspiracy against his life and throne, and had overcome it by promptly executing the criminals. It was in the belief of this lie that the pope caused public thanks to be given for the king's victory. This is a fact as well established as any other of the 16th century. Yet Mr. Willson, and men like him, choose to go on quietly disregarding it. I think it simply a sin that anybody so grossly ignorant or so shamefully perverse should be allowed to deceive the young with what they presume to call 'history.'"
"How does Froude stand in this matter of the rejoicings at Rome?"
"Froude has too melodramatic a mind, if I may use the expression, to be a good historian. He has a dangerous gift of sarcasm and invective, and a fatal knack of putting things together so as to make an effective situation. If an inconvenient truth pops up to mar the scene, he quietly knocks it on the head, and arranges the stage to suit himself. For instance, he wants to paint the duplicity of Charles, so he mentions his lying bulletins to the pope and the other sovereigns; but he also wants to impress us with the heartless bigotry of the pontiff; so, after showing on one page that the pope could not know the truth, he coolly assumes on the next that he did know it."
"I think the best account of the massacre I ever read in a Protestant publication is that in The New American Cyclopaedia. Not a perfect book, of course, but upon the whole, very honest."
"Yes, if you want to get a plain statement of facts, without party coloring, you must go to some work in which many heads and hands have worked together. You know an ordinary refracting telescope of the old sort shows distant objects, not as they really are, but tinged with prismatic colors, because no one lens has the power of transmitting all rays with equal impartiality; but by a combination of lenses we get at the exact truth; one corrects another. So, if you want a thoroughly impartial, achromatic account of anything, let a number of men work at it together For this reason, a good cyclopaedia is better than a volume of history; it is perfectly cold-blooded."
"Our friend Willson," I said, turning over the leaves as I spoke, "is certainly a telescope of the old sort. His book is as gay with prismatic colors as a parlor candelabrum. See here: 'The doctrine of infallibility means the pope's entire exemption from liability to err;' 'Indulgences are billets of salvation, professing to remit the punishment due to sins even before the commission of the contemplated crime.' Mr. Willson knows that neither of these definitions is correct."
"No, I don't believe he does. Remember what we said just now about thistles. To you and to me these statements seem—I don't know whether to say ludicrous or shocking. We know, as well as we know the alphabet, that while the church cannot err in defining dogmas, the pope, as a private individual, is as liable to err as Mr. Willson himself; that no sin can be forgiven before it is committed, and no past sin pardoned so long as the culprit purposes committing another; but I dare say Mr. Willson is ignorant of all this. There is a certain class of unfortunate Christians, now happily dying out, who are catechised in their youth into a hatred of the pope and all his works. They look upon his holiness as a superior sort of devil, rather more wicked and dangerous upon the whole than Satan, and not half so much of a gentleman. Willson was crammed full of these sentiments when he was a boy, and now he is trying to cram the coming generation. Here is a specimen of the moral nutriment which men of his stamp are brought up on. I cut it out of an old number of The Sunday-School Advocate, where it appeared as a comment on a picture of a Spanish flower-girl. There must be a funny twist in the mind of the writer who could get a lesson against popery out of that.
"'SELLING FLOWERS.
"'You never saw such a flower-seller, did you? You have not unless you have lived in Spain. The picture is meant to show you a Spanish lady, a Spanish flower-dealer, and a Spanish mule.
"'Spain is a beautiful land, but the people are not as happy as they are here. Why? Because they are Roman Catholics. Once they were a brave, powerful, rich, liberty-loving people; but a set of priests, called Jesuits, stole into the country, quenched their love of liberty, put out the lights of learning, trampled upon the true religion, and made the Spaniards boasters, bigots, and almost slaves to their kings and queens. Pity the Spaniards, my children, and pray to your heavenly Father to save this glorious land from ever being ruined by that great enemy to all that is good—the Roman Catholic Church.
x. x.'
"How can you wonder that a man who learns such nonsense in his childhood should say foolish things when he grows up? Still, Mr. Willson's ignorance does not excuse him. Any one who undertakes to write history is bound not to be ignorant. He cannot plead the prejudices of education in justification of his blunders. To teach calumny and religious error is as much a crime as to administer medicines without knowing the properties of drugs. We have little tenderness for an ignorant chemist's boy who poisons us by mistake, and I don't know why we should have any more for an ignorant historian who lies out of prejudice. Besides, even if Mr. Willson did not know the truth, he knew there were two sides to the story, and he was bound to study and weigh them both, which he evidently has not done. His ignorance was not invincible."
"I think, however, that the faculty of the College of New York are more to blame for adopting this work as a text-book than the author was for writing it. You know, I suppose, what that college is. It is a part of our common school system, designed for the youth of every faith, and supported by tax on all citizens alike. To allow a word taught there which could offend the religious feelings of either Catholics or Protestants is a gross outrage upon public right. It only shows, what wise men of our church have all along maintained, that Catholics need hope for no good from state education. We must be taxed for what we don't approve, and support our own schools and colleges besides.—But enough of this. Let us see the rest of your thistles."
"Oh!" said he, laughing, "there are enough of them, I can assure you. Here, for example, is The Free-Will Baptist Quarterly for January, 1868. It contains an article on 'The Perversions of the Gospel a Proof of its Divinity,' and in the course of it occurs this sentence about the pope: 'He can remit sins or permit them, and his pardon and indulgences have been purchased with money.' Now, a quarterly is supposed to be edited with care and deliberation, and when such a periodical states that the holy Father has power 'to permit sins' it is guilty of a misstatement which I hardly know how to distinguish from a deliberate falsehood. The editor of The Baptist Quarterly is utterly inexcusable for not knowing that the doctrine which he attributes to the church is repudiated with horror by every theologian who ever wrote on our side. It has never been either maintained in theory or acted upon in practice. The statement of The Quarterly is one of the most atrocious calumnies ever uttered, and the editor was bound to know it. If he is so ignorant as not to know it, he is criminally presumptuous in undertaking the functions of a popular teacher. Then, again, he says that the pope's 'pardon and indulgences have been purchased with money.' This, too, is a positive falsehood, though we are willing to believe not an intentional one. In no case, and under no color, can pardon be obtained for money. The only price ever required, the only price which can ever suffice, is hearty repentance. After pardon has been granted, there remains, as we all know, a temporal penalty to be exacted by way of satisfaction, and for this the pope may decree the contribution of money for a charitable object or any other good deed. If the editor of The Baptist Quarterly does not know that this is the extent of an indulgence, then he has no business to be an editor. Ignorance does not excuse him. But let this pass. We were speaking just now of education here is an article quite à propos to that subject in The Churchman. It is called 'Rome and the Scriptures.' The writer begins by wondering at the insolence of 'Romanists' in denying that the church withholds the Bible from the laity; and how do you think he proceeds to prove that she does withhold it? Why, by showing that she lays some very necessary restrictions upon the indiscriminate circulation of translations of the Bible. But, it is objected, every English-speaking Catholic family has a copy of the Douay Bible in the house. Yes, says The Churchman, because the church lets you have it; she could forbid it if she chose. What do you think of that as a specimen of argument? The church forbids the Bible, because she might, if she pleased, only she doesn't. Besides, this writer continues, the English of the Douay version is so bad that it is practically not the vernacular; the book is as much sealed to the comprehension of the common reader as if it remained in the original Hebrew and Greek. Thus, he says, 'in Galatians v. 19-23, we have a list of the "works of the flesh," and the "fruits of the Spirit." In our version occur the words, "lasciviousness, drunkenness, revellings, long-suffering." But in the Douay version instead of such honest English, which any person of ordinary attainments can understand, we have the words, "impudicity, elrieties, [ebrieties?] comessations, and longanimity." In Hebrews ix. 23, our version reads, "the patterns of things in the heavens;" but the Douay has it, "the exemplars of the celestials." Again, in Hebrews xiii. 16, instead of "to do good, and to communicate, forget not; for with such sacrifices God is well pleased," as in our version, the Douay reads, "Beneficence and communication forget not, "for with such hosts God is promerited." Is this what the Romanists call the Bible in the vulgar tongue?' Now, in point of fact, not a single one of the preceding texts is given in the form he quotes in the Catholic Testaments now in use. The passage from Galatians reads, 'immodesty, drunkenness, revellings.' Instead of 'the exemplars of the celestials,' we have 'the patterns of heavenly things;' and the verse from Hebrews xiii. runs thus: 'And do not forget to do good and to impart; for by such sacrifices God's favor is obtained.' In the first edition of the Douay Bible there were many obscure expressions which have since been amended. If the translators knew English but imperfectly, whose fault was it? The English government would not allow Catholics to get an education in their native country—hanged them if they caught them at it. That we have corrected their shortcomings is proof enough that we are anxious to facilitate the study of the sacred books. What would The Churchman say if we accused the Anglican establishment of trying to conceal the Scriptures from the common people, because the translations of Wickliffe and Coverdale contain many antiquated expressions? That would be every whit as just as to found a similar charge against us upon the imperfections of the first editions of Douay and Rheims, (which are older, it should be remarked, than the Bible of King James.)"
"After all," said I, "I cannot regard the authorized English Protestant Bible as a model of what a popular translation ought to be."
"Of course not. Don't you remember what Hallam says about it? Here is the passage: 'It is held to be the perfection of our English language. I shall not dispute this proposition; but one remark as to a matter of fact cannot reasonably be censured, that, in consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions, which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not the language of the reign of James I. It may, in the eyes of many, be a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned or retained only in provincial use.' (Literature of Europe, vol. ii. chap. 2.) The early Protestant versions are proof enough of the wisdom of our church in setting bounds to the license of careless or incompetent editors. You know there is one edition which is called by book-collectors 'the Breeches Bible,' on account of its rendering of a passage in the third chapter of Genesis, where Adam and Eve are said to have 'sewed together fig-leaves and made themselves breeches.' The king's printers, in 1632, were fined for publishing a Bible in which one of the commandments appeared in this form, 'Thou shalt commit adultery.' During the Commonwealth, a large impression of the Bible was confiscated on account of its corruptions, many of which were the result of design. One edition contained 6000 errors. Archbishop Usher, on his way to preach once, bought a London Bible in a bookseller's shop, and was dismayed to find that the text he had selected was omitted! In one of the English Bibles the first verse of the fourteenth (or in our Bible the thirteenth) Psalm is printed, 'The fool hath said in his heart, there is a God,' instead of 'no God.' Just see what that famous old Protestant divine, Thomas Fuller, says of this matter: 'Considering with myself the causes of the growth and increase of impiety and profaneness in our land, amongst others this seemeth to me not the least, viz., the late many false and erroneous impressions of the Bible. Now know, what is but carelessness in other books is impiety in setting forth of the Bible. As Noah, in all unclean creatures, preserved but two of a kind, so among some hundreds in several editions, we will insist only on two instances. In the Bible printed at London in 1653, we read, "I Corinthians vi. 9, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?" for "not inherit." Now, when a reverend doctor in divinity did mildly reprove some libertines for their licentious lives, they did produce this text from the authority of this corrupt edition in justification of their vicious and inordinate conversations. The next instance shall be in the Bible printed at London in quarto (forbearing the name of the printer, because not done wilfully by him) in the singing Psalms, Psalm lxvii. 2:
"That all the earth may know
The way to worldly wealth,"
for "godly wealth."' Such blunders too are by no means confined to early impressions. Why, there is an edition of the Anglican Liturgy printed at Oxford, of all places in the world, in 1813, in which occurs this dreadful blunder: 'Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the Lord.'"
"After this, it looks well, doesn't it, for The Churchman to blame us for repressing the indiscriminate circulation of wild versions of the Scriptures?"
"My dear friend, if all men were consistent, the whole world would be Catholic. Protestantism from beginning to end is nothing but a huge inconsistency. But come: have we any more weeds to look at?"
"Here is a copy of The Observer; if we don't find something startling in it, it will be strange. Yes; here is a letter from the well-known Irenaeus on 'the relics at Aix-la-Chapelle.' Read what he says:
"'I found that pictures of the relics were for sale in all the shops, and I bought a few as souvenirs of my accidental pilgrimage; particularly I sought for a good representation of that one which is first on the list, and first in the admiration of the people. As the Virgin Mother Mary is held in higher honor by all good Catholics than the Son of God himself, so they likewise venerate, with a deeper reverence, the linen garment that she wore, than the cloth which was around the loins of the Saviour on the cross.'
What do you say to that? For my part, I cannot believe that a man so well informed on most subjects as Irenaeus is really thinks that 'Catholics hold the Virgin Mary in higher honor than the Son of God himself.' If he knows anything at all about the Catholic Church, he must know that this is a downright slander."
"In point of fact, I suppose he does know it; but he belongs to a class of persons who seem to think it no harm to say anything evil of Catholics for the sake of producing a sensation. The church in their eyes is merely a convenient subject for turning an eloquent sentence; a sort of corpus vile, upon which it is allowable to try all manner of oratorical experiments. Besides, you know The Observer is nothing but a journalistic stuffed Guy Faux, brought out periodically for the purpose of reminding mankind of the wickedness of the bloody papists."
"Do you know I pity the editor of that paper? he must have such awful nightmares. Just think of perpetually dreaming that the pope sits scowling on your stomach ready to strangle you, and a grand inquisitor lurks under the bed! I suppose The Observer never goes up-stairs in the dark without dread of stumbling over a rack, or running his hand into a thumbscrew, and never falls asleep without apprehensions of a popish massacre before morning. Has he any special bugaboo to-day?"
"'The Confessional.' I will not read the whole article. Some of it is too nasty. But here is a specimen:
"'The confessional in the Roman Catholic Church, and in every church that becomes corrupt enough to introduce it, and slavish enough to submit to it, is an engine of tyranny over the social, domestic, and private life of the people, with an extent, power, and wickedness it is hardly possible to conceive.
"'It operates chiefly through the women. In most of the Roman Catholic countries men have substantially deserted the confessional. They go once a year, at Easter, if at all. Many of them, nominally Catholics, do not take the communion, and therefore do not come under the ecclesiastical necessity of confessing. But women are more religious, more superstitious, and more submissive to priestly domination than men. Men have their business to think about, and often worship mammon. Religion is the highest of all mental occupations for women; their life is in it; it is their life—this and that to come. In Protestant as well as Roman churches women are the most and the best of the members. It has been so from the time they outnumbered the disciples at the cross and the grave of the Saviour. The confessional has its grasp on the women of the Roman Catholic Church; and through them it rules the households where those women are wives, mothers, sisters, children, or servants. It is enough for the purpose of the priests that they have one spy in a house; but the more the better, and the nearer that spy is to the head of the house the more valuable her service. The conduct of servants is carefully watched; and they are changed from time to time by the direction of priests, when the family has not the slightest suspicion of the cause. The priests often select willing and capable agents, who, in the capacity of servants, male and female, act as spies and emissaries in households they wish to supervise. The information thus obtained is recorded, transmitted to higher powers, and used, without scruple, in the secret and constant operations of the church to get control over the political and material interests of the state.'
"There is no excuse for this sort of thing. There is an untruth in almost every line. I don't charge The Observer with deliberate falsehood, but it needs a good deal of charity, in a case like this, to remember the difference between a mistake and a lie. Mark you, the writer does not say: 'I believe the confessional to be used for purposes of oppression,' 'I suspect that the priests keep spies in every household.' 'I dare say the church interferes with our servants,' 'I take it for granted that the priests repeat what is said to them in confession;' but all these vague and ridiculous notions are stated in the broadest manner, as admitted historical facts. That is to say, The Observer makes the most atrocious charges against us without a particle of evidence to support them. 'I guess they are true,' says the writer; 'any way, I will make them.' The less the proof, the more emphatic the assertion. Suppose I have a vague suspicion that my neighbor has stolen money, and on the strength of that suspicion, not knowing whether it is well-founded or not, and having no means of knowing, I proclaim him as a thief all over town. Whether he is one or not, I commit a grave sin by defaming him on mere suspicion; and if he turn out to be an honest man after all, the fact that I believed my own story will not save me from the consequences of uttering slander. The old grannies of Protestantism act upon the principle that it is quite fair to ascribe any imaginable sin either to the pope or the devil. The wickedness of both being infinite, it is impossible to overshoot the mark."
"Even if all priests were demons, I don't see why they must also be described as idiots. 'Spies in the household!' Can you imagine anything more childish than listening to Bridget's and Mary Ann's reports of the daily life of their master and mistress? Can you imagine any use to which such information could be turned by the church? The Observer no doubt supposes that the archbishop of New York has daily morning audiences with his domestic emissaries, who tell him what time The Observer editor got up, how many eggs he ate for breakfast, what remarks he made at family prayers, whether the children were good, and how much butcher's meat was used in the house during the previous week. Then just think of the Roman Catholic Church being a vast intelligence-office, through which servants are changed about from house to house! You flatter yourself that you chose your cook out of a number of applicants for the place. Nothing of the kind she was sent to your house by the priests, and forced on you by a kind of legerdemain, just as a juggler forces a card. You think you discharged your last chambermaid. Oh! no; she went away because the priests had duties for her elsewhere. And the reports of all these spies, The Observer assures us, are actually written out, and transmitted to headquarters! I believe there is no limit to the credulity of a no-popery zealot."
"I am glad to see, however, that some Protestants have recognized the value of the confessional to society, and have spoken warmly of its sacred influence. I suppose you know how much attention has lately been drawn to the great appalling sin of modern American women—the murder of their offspring yet unborn. It is a sin so prevalent that, as I remember reading some time ago in The Congregationalist, it is said that in a certain populous district in a large western city, not a single Anglo-American child had been born alive in three years! It has not escaped the notice of physicians that no such practice prevails among the Catholic population. Dr. Storer, of Boston, (a Protestant,) explains this difference in his well-known essay on the subject, by the influence of the confessional; and The Congregationalist took the same view. Indeed, both virtually admit that, if it were not for the confessional, the natural increase of population in the United States would be almost entirely checked."
"That is a good thing for The Observer to meditate upon; but I am afraid the venerable old alarmist is incorrigible. It is hard to reason with a man whose hair perpetually stands on end with fright."
"Yes, or with a professional dealer in bugaboos. But even if he believes all his stories, I don't see what good he can possibly expect to come of telling them. They are only irritating."
"Irritating! they are criminally dangerous. The greatest enemy to a community is the man who stirs up the animosity of religious denominations against each other. The natural effect of such stories is to inspire the ignorant and passionate on the one side with contempt and hatred, on the other with resentment; and how long can society be sure of peace when it is filled with such dangerous elements? Of course, the Catholics are not so silly or so wicked as to fly to arms whenever an insult is uttered against the church, neither are Protestants going to defend Luther and Henry VIII. with fire and riot; but suppose some unforeseen circumstance produces an outbreak, what a terrible responsibility will rest upon those who prepared the materials of combustion! Mr. Froude, speaking of the St. Bartholomew massacre, says, the guilt was the queen's, but her plan could never have been carried out, had not theological frenzy already been heated to the boiling-point. He is wrong in this case, for it is proved that theological frenzy had nothing to do with the slaughter; political frenzy is sometimes quite as dangerous; but I wish those who think he is right would apply his principle to the regulation of their own conduct. The frenzy which instigated the burning of the Charlestown convent, the bloodshed and incendiarism of the Native American movement in Philadelphia, and the Know-Nothing riots in different parts of the country, had been gathered up and nursed long beforehand by preachers like The Observer. They did not know what they were doing, I suppose, but others foresaw and predicted the consequences. Rant is always the forerunner of riot. The periodical excitement on the subject of popery which breaks out in the United States, like the cholera or yellow fever, has always been followed by lamentable disturbances. The man who makes his living by thundering at the corruptions of the Church of Rome, is an incendiary in fact, though he may not be in intention. Of course, it is a pity that men should be prone to anger. It is a pity that we are not always meek, and long-suffering, and forgiving; that we do not bear reproaches with patience, and repay calumnies with good deeds. Our Lord tells us to love our enemies, but only a few of us are good enough to obey him. If all Catholics were perfect Christians, The Observer might shout hard names at us until it was black in the face, and there would be no danger; but there is a good deal of human nature in us, after all, and it is better not to go near gunpowder with a lighted candle. I do not mean to say, of course, that there is danger of our deliberately resenting such attacks. We are far too sensible for that. No amount of abuse would, of itself, provoke us to break the peace. But such calumnious harangues tend first to draw a broad line of distinction between Catholics and Protestants, and keep them apart, which, alone, is a social evil; then they inevitably fill the two parties with mutual dislike, and, in time, drive them to antipathy; the bad feeling gets worse and worse; and some day accident brings about a clash, and there is a terrible explosion, nobody knows exactly how, and nobody knows who is most to blame. All we can determine about it is, to use Froude's words, that it could not have happened 'had not theological frenzy already been heated to the boiling-point.' I think it is high time that all decent citizens, all honest theological disputants, should set their faces against the Gospel of Frenzy. I am willing to meet any man in a fair controversy, but there is nothing but danger and aggravation in bandying hard names. The only legitimate object of controversy is to make converts, and you can't do that without good temper and honest argument. The apparent purpose of such tirades as those of The Observer, is merely to show the preacher's own party how much better they are than the rest of the world. Nobody but a fool could expect them to do any good to the Catholics; you can't make friends with a man by abusing his mother. It ought to be clearly understood that calm theological discussion over points of discipline or dogma is always in order; but atrocious charges, unsupported by a tittle of evidence, deserve no name but that of sheer calumny, and all good men ought to detest them. If Protestant preachers only carried into the pulpit and the editorial chair the same rules of morality which, I am happy to believe, they generally practise in private life, they would observe this cardinal principle, not to publish infamous accusations against their neighbors unless they have personal knowledge of their truth."