Now I must, before I end, say a few words to you about the late changes. Do those changes make matters better or worse? Let us pass over ages and centuries, and come to the present day, because I say we must make some change in our way of resisting the Church of Rome. I must state, and very rapidly, what these changes are. There are three of them. The first is, that a new dogma has been established. The new dogma amounts to this, without going into details, that Mary, the mother of Christ, was created, at the moment she began to exist, exempt from original sin. All human beings are guilty of Adam's sin, with one exception, and that exception is Mary. That exception dates from the very first instant of her existence. She never was, even in thought or in feeling, a sinner; she is consequently out of the pale of humanity; she is not a human being; she is more than a woman, she is something godlike from before her birth. That is the dogma. It is not new; it was invented in Spain; it is a Spanish, an Andalusian dogma. It was invented at a time when the Catholics in Spain were laboring very hard to expel from their country the Moors, the African Moslems, who were masters of a great part of Spain, and who had more science, more art, and more literary culture than the Christians of Spain, but who had absurd doctrines about the family and about religion, as well you know. Nothing could displease them more, could astonish them more, or could confound all their ideas more, than to tell them that a woman was godlike. They thought, as all Moslems have thought, that a woman had no soul; and here was a woman who was a goddess before her birth, who was always a goddess. This was something absolutely incredible to them, and it showed the great difference between Christians and Moslems, between Spaniards and Arabs. This became the general rule among the Spaniards of the southern part of the country, in Andalusia especially; and when they met one another they did not salute with words of good greeting, but for centuries it was the habit in Andalusia, when one Spaniard met another, to say to him, Ave Maria purissima, and the other answered, Sin pecado concepida, which means that that dogma was proclaimed every time two persons met. This dogma has been taken into special favor by the very powerful order of Jesuits. They thought it was important to the church; it was putting Mary in the highest honor, to have that dogma become the law of the church. But up to the present century, up to last year in the Roman Catholic Church, people could believe it or not; now the Pope has declared that henceforth every man who does not believe that dogma is eternally lost and damned. This he has decreed, after consulting with some bishops, with whom he conferred about it, but declaring that he did so of his own accord, because, as pope, he had a right to decide on that. He said, it is no new doctrine; it has always been in the church. As the great writer Father Perrone wrote, "That dogma has been developing itself in the church a long time." When I saw the Church of Rome speaking of a dogma "developing itself," I thought, This is the beginning of the end. If they understand that dogmas develop themselves, that they have not fallen like aerolites from the heavens, it seems to me that that is the end of infallibility. Some people think it was the beginning of infallibility, that it was the Pope for the first time declaring a dogma for all men without consulting officially or legally any one, and that when he had done this he had augmented his power. I must remark here, that when a pope is very weak, the general rule is, he does something extremely strong. When he is extremely weak, politically, materially, he generally makes some great demonstration of spiritual power. When Pope Gregorius VII. kept Henry in his shirt a whole night at the door of the castle of Canossa without opening the door to him, saying, "You are a sinner, do penance,"—when he did that, the Pope had been expelled from Rome, he had lost Rome, therefore he must prove his immense spiritual power, because his temporal power was lost. And when the present Pope has done acts of authority greater than any other pope, it has not been because he was strong, but because he was weak; to remain on his throne he wanted to have the bayonets of Louis Bonaparte to keep him in power. His own subjects would very soon have shown him a second time the way to the frontier, if they had not been prevented by the bayonets of that man. Thus the Pope did more towards asserting and confirming his own power than any of his two hundred and fifty odd predecessors. When afterwards he took a new step, it was in continuance of this. He called a council when three hundred years had elapsed since an œcumenical council had been called. I know old Roman Catholic families who had been waiting for centuries for the moment when an œcumenical council should assemble, to denounce before that council the encroachments of the Pope, and to ask that the popedom be kept within bounds for the future. Pio IX. had an œcumenical council called, and held it in his own house, in the Vatican. And there, in one end of one of the transepts of the immense church of Saint Peter, the Pope had himself declared infallible by the council. Thus all the other councils which had been the hope of such persons in the church as could not accept every word of the Pope, all those councils have been sacrificed, have abdicated, in the last of them, at the foot of the Pope. Now, the Roman Catholic Church has become very logically, what it ought to become, the same thing in the spiritual world that the Roman Empire became in the temporal world. The Roman Emperor was every thing; there had been priests and magistrates who had great powers; then the emperor made himself dictator, consul, tribune of the people; made himself high bridge-maker; took upon himself all dignities. He was every thing; and then the whole Roman Empire was one man; and sometimes it happened that that man was a mad man like Caligula, who said, "I am sorry that all men have not one head that I might cut it off." Such was the unity of the Roman Empire, and we see the same fact in the Roman Catholic Church to this extent, that there is one human brain that thinks for all Roman Catholics in the world, and if that human brain decides that such a thing is or is not, all other human brains must believe it, or be damned eternally; there is no choice. This is perfectly logical; this is not an unexpected change; this must have come to pass. As the Pope became physically weak, the more absolute became the necessity that this should be done. Now, he is weak, he has lost Rome. Although it was not in my way, I passed through Rome a few months ago for the purpose of seeing Rome free, and it was an immense joy to see that. I had seen Rome groaning under that proud, domineering government of the priests, who declared that their government was the best in the world, while the whole world called it emphatically il mal governo. Now I have seen it free; and I think no Bonaparte of France, nor any French Government, nor any other government, had any right to give up Rome to the priests, to prevent the Romans from being masters in their own house, from being free in their own city. I must declare to you, that if in one sense the Roman Catholic Church has lost a great deal because she has lost that great tradition, lost that long habit of ruling in Rome, and the high prestige that comes from it, yet the Roman Catholic Church has gained more perhaps than she has lost in this. You must not believe that the Roman Catholic Church is to disappear to-morrow, or the next day: that shall not happen. There are hundreds of thousands of souls who like better to have one man on a throne thinking for them, taking on his conscience and his honor the question of their salvation,—they like that better than to think for themselves; and there will be Roman Catholic churches for a long time to come. They will even be stronger in one sense, because that temporal power was so exercised that it caused great weakness; and now the Pope will be strengthened; will find more interest and sympathy, because he is a king without a crown, a king without a throne: in his weakness he will find new strength.
What must we do, we Protestants, in the presence of this fact? Must we exaggerate, must we be unfair in our attacks? No. Must we go to sleep, thinking there is nothing to do? No, not that either. We must work; we must work steadily to give light and instruction to all. We have here,—and I have tried in a very rapid way to give you an idea of it,—we have here history. That is the greatest of weapons in such a case as this. Usurpers never like history, because they know very well that history condemns them. We must make history known, make the facts known, and proclaim liberty and the rights of the human conscience. We must do that over the whole world. I do not believe that Protestantism, as it has often been said, is nothing else but Roman Catholicism stripped of some of its abuses, and without some of its errors. It is something else. If there were time, and I could begin now instead of ending, I would try to show you that in the history of Protestantism, and even before Protestantism appeared, there has always been, next to that stream of power of Roman Catholicism, always becoming stronger and more encroaching up to these last days, another current of protest; there have always been men struggling for faith with liberty, who said, "That cannot be;" who understood better the Gospel, who liked the spirit of the Gospel, the spirit of God in Christ, better than the spirit of Rome. For centuries their mouths may have been closed; their speaking and teaching punished by death; but always they became more and more numerous, and active, and vigorous; and then came the great day of Luther. Protestantism has not been a negation, a remnant of Roman Catholicism, the negative side of Christianity. I cannot adopt that idea in the least. True Protestantism is full of the spirit of the Gospel; it is the living soul of Christ in the Church, it embodies the perfect conviction that there is truth, that there is salvation, that there is liberty, in the Gospel, and nowhere else so completely.
Now, we must consider the Roman Catholic Church as being an organization of power, the most dreadful, the most tyrannical, the most crushing organization of power that ever was. It is the master-piece of Roman genius. It has been preparing during centuries, and it has been complete only since yesterday. It is a great organization against liberty, against man's rights, against man's conscience, for the honor of a church and of a man. And this we must resist, too. In my country, I declare that the cause of all our ills, the fact that is at the basis of all our suffering and all our misfortunes, is nothing else than Roman Catholicism. This is against the conscience of many souls; this throws many people into sheer Atheism, because they see no choice between kissing the shoe of the Pope, as is done in ceremonies, and denying the existence of God. So they deny God rather than submit to the Pope. We must give them sound teaching, religious teaching; we must give them the Gospel. And I came to this country to say these things to you; to ask you to help us with all your might, and with all your heart, to do what is necessary should be done in France to-day; what will be necessary to be done in this country sooner or later, and what will be necessary to be done in all countries, to show more and more that "where is the Spirit of the Lord, there is liberty."
SELFHOOD AND SACRIFICE.
By ORVILLE DEWEY.
The title which I have chosen for this discourse, is Selfhood and Sacrifice. My purpose is, to consider what place these principles have in human culture. I use the word, selfhood, rather than self-regard or self-interest, because I wish to go back to the original principle—selfhood, according to the analogy of our language, describing the simple and absolute condition in which self exists; as manhood does that of man, or childhood, that of a child. And I say sacrifice, rather than self-sacrifice, because the true principle does not require the sacrifice of our highest self, but only of that which unlawfully hinders outflow from self.
The subject of culture has been brought before the public of late, by Professor Huxley, and Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Shairp. I do not propose to enter into the questions which have engaged their able pens, but to go back to those primary and foundation principles, which I have proposed to consider—the one of which is the centre, and the other, the circumference of human culture,—Selfhood and Sacrifice.
It is the object of this course of lectures, in part at least as I understand it, to discuss this subject—to discuss, i.e. the principles and grounds, on which right reason and rational Christianity propose to build up a good and exalted character. Now with regard to what Christianity teaches, has it never occurred to you, or has it never seemed to you, in reading the Gospels, that they appeal to self-interest, to the desire to be saved, in a way that is at variance with the loftiest motives? But it is appealed to, and therefore is, in some sense, sanctioned. And yet, as if this self-interest were something wrong, the prevalence of it in the world, the world's selfishness in other words, is represented by many preachers, as if it were the sum of all wickedness, the proof indeed, of total depravity. Here then, it seems to me, whether we look at Christianity or at the teachings of the pulpit, there is urgent need of discrimination. And there is another aspect of the same subject, which seems to require attention; and that is what is called, individualism—the mentally living, if not for, yet in and out of ourselves; claiming to find all the springs and forces of faith and culture within ourselves, to the exclusion of the proper influence of society, of Christianity, of the whole great realm of the past, by which we have been trained and formed; individualism, which says, "I belong to myself, and to nobody else, and do not choose to be brought or organized into any system of faith or action with anybody else." This, indeed, is an extreme to which, perhaps, but few minds go; but there is a tendency of this kind, which needs to be looked into.