There is no doubt truth in this, and with but too many Catholics their religion is little more in practice than a lifeless form; but this, so far as due to the clergy, is due rather to their want of earnestness and zeal, which the author says they do not lack, than to their ignorance of contemporary Protestantism. We pay little heed to the reproaches of Protestants, more likely to mislead than to instruct Catholics; but we are quite willing to concede that in old Catholic nations there may be a want among Catholics of the sort of individual energy defined and demanded by the author; but, in the first place, we are disposed to think that his long study of Protestantism, which is based on individualism, and his observation of the part played by what Protestants call personal religion, have led him to overrate the importance of this outward individual zeal and energy in the church; and in the second place, he seems not to have sufficiently considered that they can hardly be looked for in a community accustomed for ages to rely on the civil power to look out for the defence of the church, and for her protection against heretics and heresies. In such communities the free action of the church has been crippled by the attempt of the state to do her work and only bungling it, and in which no call for personal effort in preserving and defending the church externally has been made on Catholics as individuals. The evil results naturally from the condition in which Catholics must be found when abandoned by the government that had hitherto saved them from all necessity of any personal activity in their own defence against external enemies. It can be only temporary, if the church is left henceforth free by the government to appeal to the individual faith, love, and exertions of the faithful under her direction.
There is, no doubt, much tepidity, formalism, and momentary imbecility in the face of the enemy in old Catholic populations; for not the just nor the elect only are members of the church; but abandoned or opposed as the church now is by the governments, and thrown back as she is everywhere upon her own resources as a spiritual kingdom, forced to be even in old Catholic nations once more a missionary church in every thing except in outward form, and obliged to appeal directly to the faithful individually, there can hardly fail to be developed in Catholics the personal qualities which the author thinks they do not now possess. The need of a robust and manly piety to struggle with the world and the enemies of the church will very soon call it forth, where religion is free and faith is not extinct.
We cannot but think, if the author had experienced the vexations and annoyances that we have from the personal and individual zeal and activity of Protestants of the revival stamp, each one of whom acts as if he were an Atlas and bore the whole weight of the religious world on his individual shoulders, he would much prefer its absence among Catholics to its presence. Not more troublesome were the frogs of Egypt, that came up into the kneading-troughs and the sleeping-chambers. It is not easy to describe the sensation of relief a convert from Protestantism feels on coming into the church and learning that he has now a religion that can sustain him instead of needing him to sustain it. With Protestants, the member bears the sect; with Catholics, the church bears the member. The sacraments are effective ex opere operato. We are disposed, moreover, to believe that Catholics best serve the Catholic cause by each one's doing in his own sphere his own allotted work. The unity of faith, and the unity of the spirit that works alike in all the faithful to will and to do, are sufficient to secure unity of action, and action to one and the same end, and to effect with marvellous rapidity the grandest and most magnificent results. This, we think, is the Catholic method, quiet, peaceable, orderly, and, if less showy and striking than the Protestant method, less noisy and prosy, far more fruitful in results. The Catholic is sustained, the Protestant must sustain.
For our part, we are grateful to the author for his masterly exposition of contemporary Protestantism; but we hope we may be permitted to say that, while we do not deny the danger with which it threatens the populations of old Catholic nations, we think he exaggerates it, and supposes Protestant negations are more powerful than they really are. It may be that the Catholic populations are not at present very well prepared to withstand the Protestant propaganda, allied as it is with rationalism and the revolution; but they cannot long remain unprepared. The revolution having, wherever attempted, resulted in the loss of old liberties without the acquisition of any additional civil freedom, must gradually lose its credit with the people, who must ere long be disillusioned; rationalism is too cold, too absurd, and too destitute of life to hold them in permanent subjection. Scientists and sciolists may adhere to it while its novelty lasts, but both the reason and instincts of the people reject it, and demand faith, religion. Protestantism severed from the revolution and rationalism is too much what the great Catholic controversialists met in the seventeenth century and vanquished for its revival to be able to gain and hold much new territory.
The real danger, in our judgment, is in the spread of secularism or the secular spirit among Catholics themselves. This is the only serious obstacle we see to the conversion of the American people to the church. Catholics here and elsewhere conform to modern civilization, and are carried away by its spirit. They follow the spirit of the age without knowing it; and though a Catholic may accept without scruple all the positive results of what is called modern civilization, he cannot imbibe and follow its spirit without great loss on the side of religion, which requires the renunciation of the world as the end for which one is to live and to labor. But there are even among Catholics very worthy men, men of excellent parts and rare learning, who virtually subordinate the spiritual to the secular. They have so far yielded to the secular spirit of the day as to place the defence of the church on secular rather than on spiritual grounds, and defend her claims as the church of God rather as necessary to secure civil liberty and advanced civilization than as necessary to save the soul and secure the beatitude of heaven. They are, in some degree, affected by the philanthropy or humanitarianism of the age, and occasionally confound it with Christian charity, which loves God supremely, and our neighbor as ourselves in God, or for the sake of God.
These men pursue a line of argument that draws off the Catholic mind from the kingdom of God and his justice, and fixes it on those things after which the heathen seek, secularize it, and lead it to think that our Lord's mission had for its object the multiplication of earthly goods and securing earthly felicity. They unintentionally play into the hands of radicals and revolutionists, by influencing Catholics to strive after social instead of spiritual progress, and making them feel that the great work for the church is less to train men for heaven than to make the earth a more pleasant abode for them; or that the proper way for men to work out their salvation hereafter is to work earnestly and perseveringly for the progress of civil and political liberty, and the reform of political and social abuses. It can hardly have any but a bad influence on the Catholic mind to find prominent Catholics urging their Catholic fellow-citizens to make common cause with the most notorious and irreligious infidel and radical leaders of the revolution, as if there could be any thing in common between Catholics and men who demand liberty only to emancipate themselves from the divine law and to suppress the church, or at least to restrain her freedom.
But we are forgetting our author. Of the three causes he assigns for the partial success in old Catholic nations of Protestant missions, we have considered only the third and last—the alleged ignorance of the clergy of contemporary Protestantism, the supineness of Catholics, and their lack of individual zeal, energy, and self-reliance. We have ventured to differ in some respects with regard to this alleged cause from the eminent author, and to take a deeper and a broader view of the real cause of Protestant success. We have traced it to the ascendency of the worldly spirit which has given birth to Protestantism itself, and, even in Catholic countries, deprived the church of her rightful freedom of action. We see the cause in the false relations of church and state that have hitherto subsisted in Christian nations, in the oppression and restraint of the church by the state. The other two causes, the impression that Protestant nations surpass Catholic nations in material wealth and well-being, and that Protestantism has founded and sustains civil and religious liberty, we must reluctantly reserve for a future article.