With the exception of the trials of Pius IX., the father of the Christian universe, the most venerable and the most magnanimous of all the oppressed, except this holy, old man, this pontiff king, surrounded by his legion of Machabees, crowned with his gray locks, his virtues, and his misfortunes, we know of nothing so beautiful as the devotion of our Catholic brothers of England, Scotland, and Ireland to God and his church, and the divine assistance which continually rallies new neophytes about them when God calls them. It is a flood destined to overspread the land. "Wonderful are the surges of the sea." [Footnote 37]
[Footnote 37: Psalm xc. 4.]
A religious of one of the missionary orders recently wrote from India concerning a Protestant lady whom he had met, and said, "Her conversation made me think that she was only a Protestant by mistake." How many Englishmen to-day are only Anglicans by mistake!
While the Episcopal Church is falling to pieces under the disintegrating influence of Protestantism, which is its essence, and of rationalism, which has invaded it, as the lamented Robert Wilberforce has clearly shown, [Footnote 38] many Christians born within its communion, but animated by a different spirit which urges them to the divine centre of Catholicity, are no longer willing to build their faith on the shifting sand of human opinions, and cement a religious society by the dissolving principle of private judgment. For them the authority and the common faith of the universal church are necessary: they demand the integrity of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the sacred guardian of apostolic traditions. For such as these, the book of Henry VIII. and John Fisher is a most striking monument of the unity and antiquity of the faith, a sort of beacon to show all in the great impending shipwreck of religion in England what direction they must take in order to find safety.
[Footnote 38: The principle of authority in the church.]
You who seek the unity of the faith, then, "one heart and one soul," [Footnote 39] see in what splendor she shines here.
[Footnote 39: Acts iv. 32.]
It is the King of England, and with him the most pious and learned English bishop of the sixteenth century, who makes his profession of faith, who glories in his submission to the authority of the pope, who defends the seven sacraments. Does a single bishop protest? Are Oxford and Cambridge silent? Do the secular and regular clergy, the parliament, the laymen of every condition of life, all acquiesce? Does not a single Englishman present this respectful remonstrance: "Sire, you are sacrificing the rights and prerogatives of your crown! A King of England submit to the pope! Is not one king the supreme head of the church? You defend seven sacraments: how so when there are only two?"
It was, then, evidently the faith of England that Henry VIII. and John Fisher defended; and this monument, reared before the schism and different creeds that it has created, shows us that those who would dare to deny the doctrines there put forth would be considered innovators, which, in the church of Jesus Christ, has always been considered synonymous with heretics.