Yet there is no doubt that the church condemns liberty in the sense of the Reformation, and especially in that of the nineteenth century. Protestantism denies infallibility to the church and assumes it for the age, for the state, for public opinion—that is, for the world. The most shocking blasphemy in its eyes is to assert that the age is fallible and cannot be relied on as a safe or sure guide. We differ from the Protestant; we attribute infallibility to the church, and deny it to the age, even though the age be this enlightened nineteenth century. We do not believe it is always wise or prudent to suffer one's self to be carried away by the dominant tendency or passion of this or any other age. It is characteristic of every age to fix upon one special object or class of objects, and to pursue them with an exclusiveness and a concentrated passion and energy that render them practically evil, even though good when taken in their place and wisely pursued. Even maternal affection becomes evil and destructive, if not guided or restrained by wisdom and prudence. Philanthropy is a noble sentiment; yet men and women in our own age, carried away, dazzled, and blinded by it, only produce evils they would avoid, defeat the very good they would effect. The spirit of our age is that of the production, accumulation, and possession of material goods. Material goods in their proper measure and place are needed; but when their production and accumulation become with an individual or an age an engrossing passion that excludes the spiritual and the eternal, they are evil, and lead only to ruin, both spiritual and material, as daily experience proves.
The church, then, instituted to teach the truth and to secure obedience to the law of God, directed always by her divine ideal, is forced to resist always and everywhere the age, that is, the world, instead of following its spirit, and to labor for its correction, not for its encouragement. Hence always is there more or less opposition between the church and what is called the spirit of the age, and their mutual concordance is never to be looked for so long as the world stands. Hence the church in this world is the church militant, and her normal life one of never-ending struggle with the world—spirit of the age, der Welt-Geist—the flesh, and the devil. It is only by this struggle that she makes conquests for heaven, and prevents civil governments from degenerating into intolerable tyrannies, and society from lapsing into pagan darkness and superstition.
We have, we think, sufficiently disposed of the Protestant pretension, and if any of our readers think we have not fully done it, we refer them to the work before us. There is no doubt that the boldness, not to say impudence, with which the Protestant pretension is urged, and the support it receives from the rationalistic journalism and literature which form contemporary public opinion in Catholic nations, coupled with the general ignorance of history and the shortness of men's memories, accounts for the chief success of Protestant missions in unmaking Catholics, which, though very limited, is yet much greater than it is pleasant to think. Yet gradually the truth will find its way to the public; even Protestants themselves will by and by tell it, piece by piece, as they are now doing. They have already refuted many of the falsehoods and calumnies they began by inventing and publishing against the church, and in due time they will refute the rest.
The abbé shows very clearly that the toleration now accepted and to some extent practised, and the liberty now allowed to the various sects, will most likely have a disastrous effect on the future of Protestantism. It must sooner or later, he thinks, lead to the demolition of the Protestant national establishments. National churches cannot coexist with unlimited freedom of dissent. The English Church must soon follow the fate of the Anglican Church in Ireland. Its disestablishment is only a question of time. So it will be before long in all Protestant nations that have a national church. The doctrine of toleration and freedom for all sects and opinions not only tends to produce indifference to dogmatic theology, but is itself a result of that indifference; and indifference to dogmatic truth is a more formidable enemy to deal with than out-and-out disbelief or positive infidelity. A soul breathing forth threatenings, and filled with rage against Christians, can be converted, and became Paul the apostle and doctor of the Gentiles; but the conversion of a Gallio, who cares for none of these things, is a rare event.
With the several sects, doctrinal differences are daily becoming matters of less and less importance. Who hears now of controversies between Calvinists and Arminians? Even the New School and the Old School Presbyterians, though separated by grave dogmatic differences, unite and form one and the same ecclesiastical body; Presbyterians and Methodists work together in harmony; Orthodox Congregationalists show signs of fraternizing with Unitarians, and Unitarians fraternize with Radicals who reject the very name of Christian, and can hardly be said to believe even in God. One need not any longer believe any thing, except that Catholicity is a gross superstition, and the church a spiritual despotism, the grand enemy of the human race, in order to be a good and acceptable Protestant. A certain inward sentiment, emotion, or affection, which even a pantheist or an atheist may experience, suffices. The dread presence of the church, hatred of Catholicity, the zeal inspired by party attachment, and the hope of finally arriving at some solid footing, may keep up appearances for some time to come; the eloquence, the polished manners, the personal influence, and the demagogic arts and address of the preacher may continue for a while to fill a few fashionable meeting-houses; but when success depends on the personal character and address of the minister, as is rapidly becoming the fact in all Protestant sects, we may take it for granted that Protestantism has seen its best days, is going the way of all the earth, and soon the place that has known it shall know it no more for ever.
Protestantism, with all deference to our author, who pronounces it imperishable, we venture to say, has well-nigh run its course. It began by divorcing the church from the papacy and subjecting religion to the national authority, subordinating the spiritual to the temporal, the priest to the magistrate, the representative of heaven to the representative of earth. It constituted the national sovereign the supreme head and governor, the pontifex maximus, after the manner of the Gentiles, of the national religion, or the national church, and punished dissent as treason against the prince. It was at first, and for over two centuries, bitterly intolerant, especially against Catholics, whom it persecuted with a refined cruelty which recalled, if it did not surpass, that practised by paganism on Christians in the martyr ages.
Tired of persecution, or finding it impotent to prevent dissent, Protestantism tried after a while its hand at civil toleration. The state tolerated, to a greater or less extent, at first only Protestant dissenters from the established church; but at last, though with many restrictions, and with the sword ever suspended over their heads, even Catholics themselves. From civil toleration, from ceasing to cut the throats and confiscate the goods of Catholics, and of Protestant recusants, it is passing now to theological tolerance, or what it calls complete religious liberty, though as yet only its advanced-guard have reached it.
The state, unless in the American republic, does not, indeed, disclaim its supremacy over the church; but it leaves religion to take care of itself, as a thing beneath the notice of the civil magistrate, so long as it abstains from interfering with state policy, or meddling with politics. To-day Protestantism divorces, or is seeking to divorce, the church from the state, as it began by divorcing both her and the state from the papacy; it divorces religion from the church and from morality, Christianity from Christ, faith from dogma, piety from reason, and it resolves into an affection of man's emotional or sentimental nature. We find persons calling themselves Christians who do not believe in Christ, or regard him as a myth, and godly, who do not even believe in God. We have men, and women too, who demand the disruption of the marriage tie in the name of morality, and free love in the name of purity. Words lose their meaning. The churl is called liberal, things bitter are called sweet, and things profane are called holy. Not many years since, there was published in England, and republished here, an earnest and ingenious poem, designed to rehabilitate Satan, and chanting his merits as man's noblest, best, and truest friend. In the mean time, every thing regarded as religion loses its hold on the new generations; moral corruption of all sorts in public, domestic, and private life is making fearful progress throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, the mainstay of Protestantism; and society seems tottering on the verge of dissolution. Such is the career Protestantism has run, is running, or, by the merciless logic to which it is subjected, will be forced to run. What hope, then, can Protestants have for its future?
As to the future of Catholicity, we are under no apprehensions. We know that never can the church be in this world the church triumphant, and that she and the world will always be in a state of mutual hostility; but the hostility can never harm her, though it may cause the spiritual ruin of the individuals and nations that war against her. The Protestant world have for over three hundred years been trying to get on without her, and have succeeded but indifferently. Sensible and earnest-minded men among Protestants themselves boldly pronounce that the experiment has failed, which most Protestants inwardly feel, and sadly deplore; but like the poor man in Balzac's novel, who has spent his own patrimony, his wife's dower, the portion of his daughter, with all he could borrow, beg, or steal, and reduced his wife, his children, and himself to utter destitution, in the recherche d'absolu, they are buoyed up by the feeling that they are just a-going to succeed. But even this feeling cannot last always. Hope too long "deferred maketh the heart sick." It may be long yet, and many souls for whom Christ has died be lost, before the nations that have apostatized learn wisdom enough to abandon the delusive hope, and turn again to Him whom they have rejected, or look again, weeping, on the face of Him whom they have crucified. But the church will stand, whether they return or not; for she is founded on a rock that cannot be shaken, on the eternal truth of God, that cannot fail.
The Protestant experiment has demonstrated beyond question that the very things in the Catholic Church which are most offensive to this age, and for which it wages unrelenting war against her, are precisely those things it most needs for its own protection and safety. It needs, first of all, the Catholic Church—nay, the papacy itself—to declare and apply the law of God to states and empires, to sovereigns and subjects, kings and peoples, that politics may no longer be divorced from religion, but be rendered subsidiary to the spiritual, the eternal end of man, for which both individuals and society exist and civil governments are instituted. It needs the church to declare and enforce the law, by such means as she judges proper, that should govern the relation of the sexes; to hallow and protect marriage, the basis of the family, as the family is of society, that great sacrament or mysterious union, typical of the union of Christ with the church, which is indissoluble; to take charge of education, and to train up, or cause to be trained up, the young in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or in the way they should go, that when old they shall not depart from it; to teach maidens modesty and reserve, and wives and mothers due submission to their husbands and proper care of their children; to assert and protect the rights of women; to train them to be contented to be women, and not to aspire to be men, or to usurp the functions of men, and to bid them stay at home, and not be gadding abroad, running over the country and spouting nonsense, free love, infidelity, impiety, and blasphemy, at suffrage conventions and other gatherings, at which it is a shame for a woman to open her mouth, or even to be present; and, most of all, to exercise a vigilant censorship over ideas, whether vented in books, journals, or lectures, and to keep from the public those which tend to mislead the mind or corrupt the heart, as a prudent father strives to keep them from his children.