The insult offered to the clergy of Ireland is equally offensive and touches us still more closely. It is not so bad an epithet which is applied to them, but, while it is vague enough to make it difficult to seize and expose the precise calumny which the writer intends to fasten, it is forcible enough to make it as insulting and opprobrious as any epithet which a gentleman could well use, or a refined and scholarly periodical suffer to appear on its pages. It is like the gross caricatures of Harper’s Magazine. We blush at the thought of noticing such an aspersion on the Irish clergy. The priests of Ireland brutal? The Irish people are not a brutal people, and it is impossible that a brutal clergy should spring from them. The clergy are loved by their people, they cannot therefore be brutally cruel; they are respected by them, and therefore they cannot be brutally vicious. They are educated men; they meet noblemen and gentlemen on equal terms. Irish society is cultivated, refined, and polished, and the Catholic priests of Ireland are respected by the respectable Protestants of Ireland. Such an accusation as this could not be made in Dublin, or on the floor of the British House of Commons, without calling derision on the head of the unlucky person who ventured to use a sort of language about Catholics, which polite society is beginning to regard as unfit for its ears.
It is no wonder that a gentleman so prejudiced against the Catholics and their religion as Mr. Scribner has shown himself to be, should be astonished or puzzled at the conversions which have taken place in the past twenty-five years:
“How one educated in the Protestant faith can become a sincere Papist it is difficult for us to understand, and to many minds the thing seems impossible” (p. 516).
He tries to diminish, and as far as possible to shirk the difficulty by laying the blame on Anglicanism and Puseyism:
“It must be remembered that for an Anglican or Puseyite to become a Catholic is a very different thing from the conversion to Romanism of any other intelligent Protestant.”
The perusal of Dr. Newman’s Lectures will show that the Protestant view and the Protestant prejudice have had as deep and strong a hold in the English Establishment as in the Kirk, and, therefore, the difficulty remains where it was. But, although we may allow that a High-churchman is logically nearer to a Catholic than is a Presbyterian, there are plenty of cases of the conversion of those who were brought up in the other Protestant churches. Hurter, Phillipps, Stolberg, and De Haller were Lutherans. Mr. Lucas was a Quaker, and F. Baker was brought up a Methodist; Dr. Brownson was a Unitarian, and Judge Burnett was a Campbellite. There are numbers of converts in the United States from the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, and other denominations. It does not alter the case that some of the best known of the converts who were brought up in various sects became Episcopalians first, and afterwards Catholics. For, as our author asserts, they became by that step “almost Catholics.” And how did they first become convinced of those “almost Catholic” doctrines, and altogether Catholic principles which they only logically followed out when they became Catholics? Then, again, we have the two Drachs, the two Ratisbons, Hermann and Veith, who were Israelites. Infidels, too, have been converted, as well as Protestants and Jews; men of every country, rank,
and profession, noblemen, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, physicians, merchants, military and naval officers, have embraced the Catholic faith. Since the time of the so-called Reformation, these converts have amounted to hundreds of thousands, and it is our opinion that there must be at least fifty thousand at the present moment in the Catholic Church of the United States. This fact must, therefore, be looked in the face, and it must be admitted that there is something in the Catholic religion which is capable of convincing the understanding and winning the homage of the most intelligent, upright, and conscientious persons, even though they have been educated in Protestantism.
Mr. Scribner admits, with a commendable candor and frankness, the sincerity and excellence of Father Faber:
“One at least who followed Dr. Newman into that communion deserves, as far as his love for the Lord Jesus and his self-sacrificing zeal are concerned, to be held as a model—Frederick William Faber. In his numerous devotional books, in all his correspondence, and in his hymns, almost all of which are of the highest order for beauty, tenderness, and spirituality, there breathe sweet humility, childlike trust in Jesus as the Saviour of the lost, and the most loving submission to the divine will.... And yet this man, whose self-sacrificing piety and loveliness of Christian character all must acknowledge, was, during almost the whole period in which he so earnestly sought the good of others by his incessant toil, as sincere and thorough a Romanist as if he had drunk in the system with his mother’s milk.... But as long as one retains with these errors (‘the monstrous doctrines of transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the Mass, the supremacy of the Pope, purgatory, the worship of the saints, and the adoration of the Virgin’), however inconsistently, the essential truths of the Gospel, his holding them is not incompatible with piety. Whoever is a true worshipper of Christ is born
of God, and that the subject of this biography worshipped and loved the Saviour it is impossible to doubt.... One great lesson taught by this biography is the lesson of charity, and that we should be cautious in assuming that a man is not a Christian because he is a Romanist. Undoubtedly, when we obey the injunction of the Scripture to pray for ‘all saints,’ we pray for many who are in the Church of Rome. Even a Romish priest who prays to the Virgin, and who teaches the people to pray to her, as Faber certainly did, may be, like him, an humble worshipper and lover of Jesus. And though he may practise austerities, he may do so in a different spirit from that which actuates the masses in his own church, for, instead of being full of self-righteousness, he may have no confidence in his own righteousness.... We may admit, etc., and yet believe that God has a people in the Church of Rome who live and die within her pale” (pp. 515, 516, 517, 531, 532).