We can prove the facts related above by Parson Gulmore to be literally true, and to have happened annually for years under the sanction of religious ministers, and exposed to the cognizance of fathers and mothers accompanied by their daughters and sons.
We publish these things reluctantly, on account of our readers; but we must tell the truth, though it be piecemeal and in fractional parts, rather than in the full view of its naked reality.
Is it not time to say to these hypocritical sects, "Physicians, heal yourselves"? Look into the conduct and constitutions of your own bodies ere you turn censors on others. The corruptions and deformities of your own bodies will take all your zeal, all your energy, and all your lives, to correct, purify, and eradicate, leaving the Catholic church to reform whatever abuses may have crept into the lives or morals of her children by the ordinary resources, which are ample, and always within her reach.
Really, the hypocrisy, audacity, and malice of the Pharisees of old, in persecuting Jesus Christ in the flesh, were not equalled, in degree or intensity, to the malice and hypocrisy of sectarians, under every Protestant title, in their unrelenting hatred of the same divine Person in his mystical body here on earth!
'Tis all nonsense to reproach Catholics with conduct similar, or as gross, as these instances of immorality which we justly charge on the Protestant sects. Catholics, as individuals, may be, and have been, guilty of grave crimes and scandalous immoralities; but does the church countenance or connive at their conduct? No; we say, emphatically, No. On the contrary, she condemns vice in every shape, and denounces, like another Baptist in the wilderness, the wrath of Heaven on the workers of iniquity. Is there one of her precepts, counsels, or rules, that guards not against sin and its occasions? According to the accusations of her enemies themselves, who reproach her, with too much severity, of imposing too many restrictions on the passions, is she not continually preaching up to her followers the necessity of self-denial, humility, purity, charity, prayer, fastings, watchings, and, above all, OF SHUNNING THE OCCASIONS OF SIN? Hence, in the whole volume of her history for eighteen centuries and better, we read not of one camp meeting sanctioned by her, nor that she ever authorized her ministers to feel "for the change of heart" in young ladies, to proclaim the use of "more straw" for the conversion of both sexes, or to raise funds by the abominable practices of the "donation parties" for the support of her institutions. And mind, these scandals the sectarian churches sanction and carry on under the sun of heaven, by day as well as by night, exposed to the jeers and ridicule of one another, and to the condemnation of the Catholic church. When they are such in "the greenwood, what would they be not in the dry"? If, like the Catholic church, they had the world to themselves for "a thousand years and more," what abominations would their spurious churches have not only tolerated, but have instituted and approved? If they have produced Mormons, Transcendentalists, Universalists, and spiritual rappers, in the nineteenth century, what monsters would they not have produced in the ninth?
In the "dark ages," the Catholic church saved the world, preserved literature, civilized real barbarians, and, above all, practised, as well as preached, a pure morality. The Protestant sects in this enlightened age, by their novelties, by their dissensions, and, above all, by the low standard of morals which they inculcate, threaten to throw the world back again to the dark chaos from which Catholicity has drawn it, and to substitute for the glory of Christianity the miserable philosophism and superstition of the degenerate days of paganism.
In proof of these statements, we refer any candid mind to the "spiritual rappers," "women's rights," "Mormonism," "gold hunting, and other manias," which, within the last few years, have sprung from the sectarian systems and their teaching, and from no other source.
We are horrified at the morals and tenets of the Gnostic sects, the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and other defunct heresies of old; but we doubt if any thing more impious, immoral, or absurd happened under the auspices of these by-gone sects than the blasphemies, delusions, and corruptions carried on under the cloak of your "camp meetings," "revivals," "mediums," "spiritual wife system," and other modern reproductions of the Protestant Christian churches, falsely so called.