[Footnote 20: Statistical Journal, 1859.]
Only 74 incarcerations for homicide in all England and Wales for the year 1852! Why, it is stated in the New York Herald of February 4th, that 78 persons were arrested last year for murder in New York alone. We can easily imagine what the grand total for the United States must be, and how much better is England, with its pauperism and crime, than the United States?
Mr. Seymour undoubtedly is "sprightly" enough, but only "instructive" by showing us the amount of nonsense which the public is expected to swallow without examination, where the Catholic Church is concerned, and the amount of fair play to be expected from a "model" of a Protestant controversialist.
But as a comparison based on "homicide" alone would prove nothing, any more than one based on drunkenness or robbery, Mr. Seymour institutes another, in respect to unchastity, or immorality, and here he sets up as his criterion the amount of illegitimacy among Catholics and Protestants respectively. In any community, the moral condition is to be estimated by the greater or smaller proportion of illegitimacy. We object to this as a very unreliable test. In some communities, an illegitimate birth is almost unknown, and yet they are the most corrupt and licentious on the face of the earth. Infanticide and foeticide replace illegitimacy. A young woman falls from virtue; but in spite of the finger of scorn which will be pointed at her, her sense of religious duty restrains her from adding a horrible crime to her sin. What is her moral condition in the sight of God, compared with that of the guilty one whom no fear of the Almighty has restrained from the commission of this crime? The absence of illegitimacy may be the most convincing proof of a state of moral corruption, as in Persia and Turkey, where no children except in wedlock, are suffered to see the light of the world. [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: Storer, Criminal Abortion, p. 32.]
There are good reasons why more illegitimate children might be expected to be born among Catholics than among Protestants, and yet the former be much more the moral than the latter. "The doctrine of the Catholic Church," says Bishop Fitzpatrick, "her canons, her pontifical constitutions, her theologians, without exception teach, and constantly have taught, that the destruction of the human foetus in the womb of the mother, at any period from the first instant of conception, is a heinous crime, equal at least in guilt to that of murder." [Footnote 22]
[Footnote 22: Ibid. p. 72.]
This is understood by Catholics of all classes, and inspires a salutary horror of the crime. Protestantism does not teach morality in this definite way, but leaves people to reason out for themselves the degree of criminality of particular offences. Let us listen to Dr. Storer, an eminent Protestant physician. "It is not, of course, intended to imply that Protestantism, as such, in any way encourages, or indeed permits, the practice of inducing abortion; its tenets are uncompromisingly hostile to all crime. So great, however, is the popular ignorance regarding this offence, that an abstract morality is here comparatively powerless; our American women arrogate to themselves the settlement of what they consider, if doubtful, purely an ethical question; and there can be no doubt that the Romish ordinance, flanked on the one hand by the confessional, and by denouncement and excommunications on the other, has saved to to the world thousands of infant lives." [Footnote 23] Rev. Dr. Todd, a Protestant minister of Pittsfield, Mass., to his honor be it said, has had the courage to declare the same thing in similar words. [Footnote 24] Dr. Storer proceeds, "During the ten years that have passed since the preceding sentence was written, we have had ample verification of its truth. Several hundreds of Protestant women have personally acknowledged to us their guilt, against whom only seven Catholics, and of these we found, upon further inquiry, that but two were only nominally so, not going to the confession." [Footnote 25]
[Footnote 23: Criminal Abortion, P. 74.]
[Footnote 24: Serpents in the Dove's Nest.]
[Footnote 25: Criminal Abortion, p. 74.]