The Diet of Spires had made a decree concerning the change of religion and worship; fourteen towns of the empire refused to submit to it, and presented a Protest; hence men began to call the dissenters Protestants. As this name is a condemnation of the separated churches, they have several times attempted to assume others, but always in vain; the names which they took were false, and false names do not last. What was their meaning when they called themselves Evangelicals? That they adhered to the Gospel alone? In that case they ought rather to call themselves Biblicals; for it was not to the Gospel that they professed to adhere, but to the Bible. They are also sometimes called Reformers; and many people have been accustomed to call Protestantism, reformation; but it is enough to pronounce this word, to feel how inappropriate it is; religious revolution would be much more proper.
Count de Maistre, in his work Du Pape, has developed this question of names in an inimitable manner. Among his numerous observations, there is one very just one: it is, that the Catholic Church alone has a positive and proper name, which she gives to herself, and which is given to her by the whole world. The separated Churches have invented many, but without the power of appropriating them.—"Each one was free to take what name he pleased," says M. de Maistre; "Lais, in person, might be able to write upon her door, Hôtel d'Artémise. The great point is, to compel others to give us a particular name, which is not so easy as to take it of our own authority."
Moreover, it must not be imagined that Count de Maistre was the inventor of this argument; a long time before him St. Jerome and St. Augustin had used it. "If you," says St. Jerome, "hear them called Marcionites, Valentinians, Montanists, know that they are not the Church of Christ, but the synagogue of Antichrist.—Si audieris nuncupari Marcionitas, Valentinianos, Montanenses, scito, non Ecclesiam Christi, sed Antichristi esse synagogam." (Hieron. lib. Adversus Luciferianos.) "I am retained in the Church," says St. Augustin, "by her very name of Catholic; for it was not without a cause that she alone, amid so many heresies, obtained that name. All the heretics desire to be called Catholics; yet if a stranger asks them which is the church of the Catholics, none of them venture to point out their church or house.—Tenet me in Ecclesia ipsum Catholicæ nomen, quod non sine causa inter tam multas hæreses, sic ipsa sola obtinuit, ut cum omnes hæretici se Catholicos dici velint, quærenti tamen peregrino alicui, ubi ad Catholicam conveniatur, nullus hæreticorum, vel basilicam suam vel domum audeat ostendere." (St. Augustin.) What St. Augustin observed of his time is again realized with respect to the Protestants. I appeal to the testimony of those who have visited the countries where different communions exist. An illustrious Spaniard of the seventeenth century, who had lived a long time in Germany, tells us, "They all wish to be called Catholic and Apostolical; but notwithstanding this pretension, they are called Lutherans, or Calvinists.—Singuli volunt Catholici et Apostolici, sed volunt, et ab aliis non hoc prætenso illis nomine, sed Luterani potius aut Calviniani nominantur." (Caramuel.) "I have dwelt in the towns of heretics," continues the same writer, "and I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears a thing on which the heterodox should reflect: it is, that with the exception of the Protestant preacher, and a few others, who desire to know more of the thing than is necessary, all the crowd of heretics gave the name of Catholics to the Romans.—Habitavi in hæreticorum civitatibus; et hoc propriis oculis vidi, propriis audivi auribus, quod deberet ab hæterodoxis ponderari, præter prædicantem, et pauculos qui plus sapiunt quam oportet sapere, totum hæreticorum vulgus Catholicos vocat Romanos." Such is the force of truth. The ideologists know well that these phenomena have deep causes, and that these arguments are something more than subtilties.
So much has been said of abuses, the influence which they may have had on the disasters which the Church suffered during the last centuries has been so much exaggerated, and at the same time so much care has been taken, by hypocritical praise, to exalt the purity of manners and strictness of discipline in the primitive Church, that some people have at last imagined a line of division between ancient and modern times. These persons see in the early times only truth and sanctity; they attribute to the others only corruption and falsehood; as if, in the early ages of the Church, all the faithful were angels—as if the Church, at all times, had not errors to correct and passions to control. With history in our hands, it would be easy to reduce these exaggerated ideas to their just value, to which Erasmus himself, certainly little disposed to exculpate his contemporaries, does justice. He clearly shows us, in a parallel between his own times and those of the early ages of the Church, how puerile and ill-founded was the desire, then so widely diffused, of exalting antiquity at the expense of the present time. We find a fragment of this parallel in the works of Marchetti, among his observations on Fleury's history.
It would not be less curious to pass in review the regulations made by the Church to check all kinds of abuses. The collections of councils would furnish us with so many materials thereupon, that many volumes would not suffice to make them known; or rather, these collections themselves, with alarming bulk, from one end to the other, are nothing but an evident proof of these two truths: 1st, that there have been at all times many abuses to be corrected, an effect, in some measure necessary, of the weakness and corruption of human nature; 2dly, that at all periods the Church has labored to correct these abuses, so that it may be affirmed without hesitation, that you cannot point out one without immediately finding a canonical regulation by its side to check or punish it. These observations clearly show that Protestantism was not caused by abuses, but that it was a great calamity, as it were, rendered unavoidable by the fickleness of the human mind, and the condition in which society was placed. In the same sense Jesus Christ has said, that it was necessary that there should be scandal; not that any one in particular is forced to give it, but because such is the corruption of the human heart, that the natural course of things must necessarily bring it.
This concert and unity, which are found in Catholicity, are things which ought to fill every sensible man with admiration and astonishment, whatever his religious ideas may be. If we do not suppose that the finger of God is here, how can we explain or understand the continuance of the centre of unity in the see of Rome? So much has been said of the supremacy of the Pope, that it is very difficult to add any thing new; but perhaps our readers will not be displeased to see a passage of St. Francis de Sales, where the various remarkable titles given to the Sovereign Pontiff and to his see, by the Church in ancient times, are collected. This work of the holy Bishop is worthy of being introduced, not only because it interests the curiosity, but also because it furnishes matter for grave reflection, which we leave to the reader.