But apart from appeals to texts, which we are almost weary of producing in favor of Catholic doctrine, and of the church who watched over and preserved those texts from destruction, the mutilation of which was wrought, as our author himself complains, not by us, but by the Protestants in the version of King James, and because we know that version to be mutilated, we appeal against its use in the schools which our children frequent: let us look at the broad Christian system, how it would stand as built up by this writer.
People who believe in Christ at all, and indeed all who acknowledge, as they must, Christianity to be a fact, a vast social system, existing under our eyes, looking back, see a time when it did not exist. A man came into the world at the point of time in its history which we fix upon as the beginning of the Christian era. At that time religion, speaking largely, consisted of the Hebrew and the pagan. The Hebrews were the chosen of God, and preserved the only true system which corresponds to the rational idea of the foundation and aim of humanity. This it kept to itself and did not seek to spread. Christ came, the man-God, and founded a new order, enlarging upon the old, which was to embrace in its bosom the universe, and lead all nations back and up to God. The change contemplated was the vastest that could possibly be conceived, the union of the discordant elements of human nature in a system entirely above the capabilities of that nature. Men were to be chaste, to be humble, to love poverty, to speak no evil, to obey, to mortify themselves always, to pray always, to acknowledge the nothingness of their nature. This man, Jesus Christ, came, and, before he had converted people enough to form a single city even, was crucified, rose from his grave, and ascended into heaven, leaving twelve poor ignorant, timid men, and a few others to spread this new doctrine, this new and all-absorbing social system, throughout the world and through all time. What did he leave to guide them in this tremendous work; a system, an order perfect in all its details, and capable of spreading with the contemplated growth of the church? or did he leave each to follow his own will and do what he could, by means of what is called personal union with himself, a being who no longer was present, visibly and palpably, before the eyes of men? As he chose men to do his work, to build up Christianity, he let them accomplish it after a human fashion, assisted by the saving fact that he would allow them never to err in the doctrines which he bade them preach: and to this end he gave them an order which was to be handed down forever: the apostleship. That was his government, and at this government was a head, Peter. And Peter, like all other human governors, at his departure handed his authority down to the next chosen to fill his place, the promise of the abiding Spirit passing to all, or the system must have broken down; and so to-day Catholics recognize in infallibility nothing more than the apostles recognized in the decisions of Peter at Antioch. And so this author is correct in saying that the church with Catholics comes first, and not the Bible; for the church embraces the Bible, which is only the written document of the laws and ordinances of God to man, the letter of the law resting in the hands of the government which has charge of it, but that government itself subject to the law. The government existed among the Hebrews before the law was ever written. This system which we have endeavored faintly to sketch here is denied by the Baptist. He says: Christianity comes this wise: Christ came, died, and thus regenerated us. All who believed in him were saved. “The apostles preached the Gospel. Men were pierced to the heart and asked what they must do.” They must be immersed, not as a necessity, for they were saved by the fact of believing; but this act of immersion gave them the entry to the church of Christ. Then the New Testament was written, not by Christ, though [pg 393] inspired by him, and left in the hands of everybody to interpret the law as he pleased.
Now, we ask, can this system commend itself to the human reason as rounded and complete enough to fulfil the Christian idea of a church, which should receive and embrace the whole world in one union of religious harmony? A book thrown into the world—for so it must look to human eyes who knew nothing of its divinity—which each one was to take up and interpret as he pleased; a book subject to more or less of change in transmission from language to language, and in the absolute loss of the living tongue in which it was originally written, and the verdict of its genuineness, the verdict for or against the teachings of a living God, resting upon the dictum of a grammarian.
If Christianity hangs on this, for we have not misrepresented the writer—then we refuse to be Christian at all; for such a system does not and cannot, as he alleges, “sustain the test of sound reason, of stern experience, and of infallible Scripture, which ordeal the Baptist idea of the church endures.”
We need trouble ourselves with this writer no further. There is a great deal more in the pamphlet that might be touched on as showing the either absolute or wilful ignorance under which writers of this stamp labor when speaking of Catholics. He speaks of the Catholic doctrine with regard to sacraments in this loose way: “They are useful to infants and the dying. Men come to them for grace apart from the state of their own hearts.” Now, Catholics will perceive the utter absurdity of such a statement at once. The sacrament of baptism is necessary to infants, who of course are unconscious recipients of it, as they are unconscious of the sin in which they are born. This stain which they inherit, but do not incur by any act of their own, is washed away by the sacrament ordained by Christ, which admits them into the society of the church at the same time that their birth admits them to human society, its privileges as well as its trials. Extreme unction is administered to the dying person, even though he be unconscious, and is the most touching token of the love of the universal Mother for her children, who at the last moment will, although the dying man cannot ask it, administer the sacrament which God has ordained for that occasion, because she knows that his heart desires such aid at its passage from the world. But all sacraments given to adults give grace only in proportion as the recipient receives them worthily.
“If the priest refuses to come, then the sufferer, infant or adult, must die unbaptized and unsaved.”
If this gentleman had only taken the trouble to consult a Catholic catechism, he would have been spared the trouble of putting this further absurdity into print. He would have found little children taught at school that “in a case of necessity, when a priest cannot be had, any one may baptize,” and the instructions for administering the sacrament; and furthermore, that, if a person were placed in such a position that even this means could not reach him, the very desire is sufficient, as sometimes happens in the case of sudden conversions and martyrdoms.
As for Catholicity necessitating a ritual, all religions must more or less. Do men object to the old law because of its glorious ritual? Is not the very Baptist-act of immersion a ritual, and their singing in common? So much so that, for neglect of this observance, Baptists cut off the whole Christian body from community [pg 394] with them. Which is harder to believe—the Catholic doctrine which teaches that we must obey the church which we believe to be the only church of Christ, and in support of which teaching we bring forward some very substantial proofs, or this? You may interpret God's Word as you please; that alone is sufficient; but you are not in communion with his church unless you are immersed; a fact which it is very difficult to twist out of the Scriptures.
Again, he shows his weakness in saying that “Francis Xavier, working on the Catholic idea, baptized millions of Asiatics, and believed that in so doing he had saved their souls. But the heathen remained heathen still. There is no evidence, so far as I am aware, that under his labors one solitary soul was transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.” Not one, but millions, so that Sir James Stephens, a Protestant lecturer on history in a Protestant university, calls him a saint, not only of the Catholic Church, but of the world. Colleges were founded by him, and thousands of Christians suffered martyrdom for the faith. But “Judson” is the apostle after our author's heart. Judson “lived to see thousands of civilized and christianized disciples in that dark Burman land; and the work still goes on, self-sustained by the power of a true hidden life.” This latter is a very saving clause; so truly hidden is the work that our author can point to no fruit resulting from it. And as for those “thousands of civilized and christianized disciples,” we took the trouble to look for them, and we regret to say, for our author's veracity, found them all “wanting.” Judson did not succeed in converting one either in Burmah or anywhere else; and his own sufferings seem to have been reduced to the martyrdom of marrying successively three wives.
If then, as our author says, “Logically there is no middle position between the high rock ground of Baptist truth and the low marsh ground of Catholic error; all things follow their tendencies, and it is easier to go down an inclined plane than to go up,” we fear that, for all he can do to prevent them, people will follow their natural tendencies. As a last word, we would strongly recommend him, before undertaking to set a church in its true colors before the eyes of men, to consider a little whether he knows anything of the subject he is writing about, and not stultify himself by an ignorance which looks like malice, though he calls it truth spoken in love.