We have done with the arguments by which the reverend doctors sustain their protest against the Roman Church, and will devote the rest of our space to a consideration of those by which they sustain their claim to be recognized as orthodox, Catholic Christians. Their line of argument is certainly remarkable, and must strike many of their readers with surprise. It is an attempt to take the position held by the Catholic Church during the first five or six centuries, to identify their cause with that of the early fathers and councils, to shelter themselves under the ægis of a Catholic creed, to use Catholic language, appropriate the Catholic name, and make profession of adhering to Catholic unity and the communion of the Catholic Church. There must be a wonderful charm and power about this word when even Presbyterians are compelled to bow before its majesty, and to acknowledge that their cause is lost if they cannot indicate their right to inherit and blazon on their escutcheon this glorious, world-subduing title. "The name itself of Catholic keeps me," says St. Augustine, the favorite doctor of the Presbyterians. The divines of the assemblies are, therefore, compelled by the very attitude they have taken, in justifying themselves as orthodox believers before the holy see, to claim that appellation which was the distinctive mark and sign of that ancient body whose faith is acknowledged by both sides as the standard and criterion of orthodoxy. This language is, however, evidently only adopted for the occasion. It is not the natural, ordinary phraseology of Presbyterians, who are not accustomed to teach and preach to their own adherents the necessity of Catholic unity, communion in the Catholic Church, agreement with the first six councils, or to call their doctrine the Catholic faith. These words must have a definite meaning. They are not mere phrases or pure synonyms of other words equally significant of the same ideas. Catholic is not merely another name for true, or scriptural, or apostolic. It will not do for one to give out a system of doctrine which he has constructed by his own private judgment upon the Scripture, or learned by a private illumination, or taken from the writings of a particular set of religious teachers, and call it Catholic because he thinks it is proved to be true, and ought to be universally received. The term Catholic includes in its signification completeness and integrity of truth; but its specific sense is concrete, visible universality of outward profession, the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, of Vincent of Lerins. This universality in time and space is the mark and outward manifestation of the integral, divine truth, and those who accept it and proclaim it as such must necessarily hold that the indefectibility of the visible church is guaranteed by Almighty God. It is unmeaning for those who hold that the body of the visible church, as organized under its legitimate pastors, can apostatize from the pure faith of the gospel, and the line of true believers be continued invisibly, or in a small, separated section of professed Christians, to make use of the word Catholic, or pretend to agree with the fathers of the first six centuries in their profession of Catholicity as opposed to heresy. The marks of the church, unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity, if they are really marks, as declared by all who profess to be Catholics in the genuine, natural, commonly accepted sense of the word, must be so burnt into the object they are intended to mark that they are ineffaceable and easily read and known by all men. The young Mohican hero Uncas was recognized by the aged Indian chief and prophet Tamenund as the legitimate heir of the noblest and most royal line of the northern sachems, by the figure of its sacred emblem, the tortoise, tattooed upon his breast. The name Catholic is, as it were, the totem which marks a peculiar ecclesiastical race, descended from the ancient fathers, indelibly stamped upon its breast as the sure sign of its legitimacy. It is in vain, therefore, that the Presbyterian doctors vaunt their acceptance of the Catholic symbol, the Apostles' Creed, including as one of its essential articles, "I believe the holy, Catholic Church." They do not believe this article in the Catholic sense, as understood by the whole ancient church, namely, as designating a well-known, specific, visible body, and implying a full belief of all the doctrines authoritatively proclaimed by that body. Among a thousand others we take one text of St. Augustine, which we have hit upon at random, expressing this sense: "Catholica fides est autem hæc—constitutam ab illo matrem ecclesiam, quæ Catholica dicitur, ex eo quia universaliter perfecta est, et in nullo claudicat, et per totum orbem diffusa est." "The Catholic faith is this—that the mother church was constituted by him, which is called Catholic, because it is universally perfect, and is diffused through the whole world."[50] Moreover, the profession in general terms of holding the Catholic faith, or the avowal even of a creed completely orthodox, avails nothing to those who are outside the Catholic communion, and make their orthodox profession a pretext for keeping up a separate organization in opposition to the legitimate pastors. All the ancient separatists made a loud outcry that they were true, genuine Catholics. The modern ones, from the Greeks to the Presbyterians, imitate their example. There is a power residing in that name which all acknowledge. They feel that their claim to be truly apostolic, orthodox churches, holding the pure doctrine and order established by the apostles and apostolic men, will be utterly demolished if they yield the title to Catholicity. Hence they have tried to arrogate it to themselves, and to affix nicknames to the Catholic Church. But their efforts have always been in vain. When they are divested of the disguises and borrowed raiment which they throw around their own proper form, the sign on their breast is wanting, and none of the black paint with which they strive to smear it over can mar or cancel the indelible imprint which the numberless lancets of persecution have cut and graven into the very flesh of the majestic figure of the true body of the Son of God. Hear once more St. Augustine: "The Christian religion must be held by us, and the communion of that church which is Catholic, and is called Catholic, not only by its own members, but also by all its enemies. For, whether they will or no, the very heretics themselves and the offspring of schisms, when they talk not with their own friends, but with people outside, call the Catholic Church nothing else but Catholic. For they cannot be understood unless they designate her by that name by which she is denominated by the whole world."[51]
The profession of agreement with the first six councils is equally fallacious. Why the first six and not the last twelve? The Catholic Church receives all the eighteen councils with equal veneration, and is now preparing herself to celebrate the nineteenth, which will have equal authority with the first, because the fathers will be equally congregated together in the Holy Ghost, with the presence of Christ in the midst of them, and the inexhaustible virtue of his promise, Lo! I am with you always, even to the consummation of the world. The separated bodies of Christians are ranged in an ascending series of protesters against these councils, who reject a greater or lesser number according to the date or reason of the judgment pronounced in them against their several errors. The Greeks reject all but the first seven, the orthodox Protestants all but six; the Monothelites rejected the sixth, the Eutychians the fourth, the Nestorians the third, the Macedonians the second, the Arians the first, in which they are followed by the modern Unitarians. It is evident enough that there is a principle of consanguinity binding together all these families, from those who reject the Council of Nice to those who repudiate the Council of the Vatican. The Catholic Church is marked by the unbroken continuity of œcumenical councils. The other churches reject as many of these councils as seems good in their eyes, and accept the decisions of the others because they are in accordance with their own opinions. They do not submit to the councils; they judge them, and ratify such of them as they approve. The profession made by the Presbyterian doctors of receiving six councils amounts, therefore, to nothing as a plea in defence of their orthodoxy. Upon their own principle, they might just as rightfully reject these six councils as the seventh. They really reject and deny their authority as councils, they repudiate the very principle on which they were constituted, and affirm their own supreme right to judge. They acknowledge the truth of the doctrines which they defined; but it is purely on the ground that these doctrines agree with their own private opinions respecting the sense of the New Testament. The whole of this portion of the letter, in which the Presbyterian doctors attempt to use Catholic phraseology, is evidently nothing but a piece of special pleading. They do not venture the assertion that the church of the period of the six councils—that is, the three centuries and a half between the years 325 and 680—was identical in doctrine or discipline with the Presbyterian Church of the United States, which they represent. Nevertheless, they seem to wish to leave the impression on the minds of their readers that the fathers, the councils, the common belief and practice of those ages sustain their cause. The editorial comment in the Evangelist boldly asserts that such is the case. The small number of scholars well read in patristic theology who are found among the Presbyterian clergy will probably not risk their reputation for learning or put at hazard the success of their cause by any such rash statement. As a general rule, however, the Presbyterian clergy and theological students, though well-educated scholars in the college curriculum and certain special professional branches taught at the seminaries, have not turned their attention to ancient Christian history and literature. They know much more about Turretin than they do about St. Augustine. It is quite probable, therefore, that a very general impression prevails among them, that they are really on the whole in conformity with the doctrine of the great fathers of the ancient church. This is a delusion which a little study of the original works of the fathers themselves would soon dissipate. We could not desire any thing more efficacious for this purpose than the study of St. Augustine, called by Luther the greatest teacher whom God had given to the church since the days of the apostles, and revered in a most remarkable way by all those who follow the Lutheran and Calvinistic confessions.[52] The deeply learned men and independent thinkers among Protestants understand this well, and the notion of the half-learned sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Protestantism can take its stand on the era of the first six councils is a mere remnant of mist that hangs for a while over portions of the landscape, but is destined soon to disappear before advancing light. St. Augustine is diametrically opposed to the first principle of Presbyterianism and all Protestantism, that principle which is the dominant idea of the Presbyterian reply to the Pope.
He says, "Non crederem Evangelio nisi me commoveret Ecclesiæ Catholicæ auctoritas," "I would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do it."[53] Prof. Reuss, of the Protestant theological faculty in the University of Strasburg, says that "St. Augustine's principles come to their result in this famous saying, diametrically opposed to the fundamental principle of all Protestant theology."[54] Julius Müller, another professor in the same faculty, says of all the fathers: "This must be openly admitted by every unprejudiced historical investigation, that not merely the ecclesiastical theology of the middle ages, but even the patristic theology of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, are, upon every point that is a matter of dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism, more on the side of the former than of the latter."[55]
Presbyterians cannot make any thing by an appeal from the Council of Trent to the first six councils. They have no connection either by continuity of thought or succession with historical Christianity, and their only resource is to maintain that the true interpretation of the gospel, which was lost before the Council of Nice assembled under the auspices of Constantine, has been restored by Calvin, Luther, and Knox. How they can account for the fact that the church which, on their theory, had subverted the apostolic church, was unerring in its definitions of the great dogmas of the Trinity, Incarnation, Original Sin, and Grace, is only known to themselves. It is only by a happy inconsistency that orthodox Protestants have preserved that portion of the Catholic faith which they have received by tradition from their ancestors. The true Protestant principle of individualism necessarily tends to master the contrary principle of faith in the minds of Protestants, and to produce the doubt, the denial, the hostility to all positive dogmas which marks the most advanced rationalism. All this was working in Luther himself, whose brain contained the seeds of the bitter fruit which has ripened in the minds of his followers in our day. He himself was the prey of doubt, and gave utterance to the strongest expression concerning the absurdity of the principal doctrines of his own system.[56] Thrown upon the discussion of what the Scripture is, and what it means, with nothing to appeal to but private judgment, Presbyterianism, or any other form of Protestantism, has nothing to look forward to but an endless shock and collision of conflicting opinions, which can have no other effect than the resolution of the whole mass into its component atoms.
We have concluded our remarks upon the reply of the Presbyterian moderators to the pope's letter. While we have been forced to point out distinctly that the principle of its protest against the doctrine and authority of the Roman Church is totally subversive of all faith, yet we willingly acknowledge that some of the most sacred and fundamental dogmas of faith are held and professed by the respectable bodies in whose name it was written. Their doctrine is like a superb ancient torso to which plaster limbs and head have been added. Although their principle is equally destructive of all faith with that of the Arians, yet we by no means regard them in the same light. The authors of heresies who mutilate the faith are very different from those who receive and hold with reverence this mutilated faith. Their intellectual and moral worth, their philanthropy and zeal for God, the value of many most excellent works which they have written in defence of the divine revelation, we fully appreciate. That great numbers have been and are in the spiritual communion of the Catholic Church we sincerely hope. We desire that the schism which has separated them from our visible communion may be healed, not only for their own spiritual good, but also that the Catholic Church in the United States may be strengthened by the accession of that intellectual and religious vigor which such a great mass of baptized Christians contains in itself. Above all things, we desire that all who acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Sovereign should be united in mind, and heart, and effort, in order that his universal kingdom over the nations of the earth may be established as speedily and as completely as possible.
A HERO, OR A HEROINE?
CHAPTER I.
A HERO.
"You say he is handsome?"
"No; I said he was nice-looking, and gentlemanly, as of course Philip's cousin would be. But you know I judge only from a photograph."