together with the natural hatred which men entertain for a church or government against which they have rebelled, they were led to draw contrasts between the results of Protestantism and Catholicity; so that it became customary to attribute all the enlightenment, morality, progress, and liberty of the world to Protestantism, and to represent Catholics as cruel, ignorant, corrupt, and in every way depraved. Luther, as we should naturally expect, led the way in this style of controversy.
“The Papists,” he said, “are for the most part mere gross blockheads.… The pope and his crew are mere worshippers of idols and servants of the devil.… Pope, cardinals, bishops, not a soul of them has read the Bible; ‘tis a book unknown to them. They are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches, rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness.… Seeing the pope is Antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate.… The pope is the last blaze in the lamp which will go out and ere long be extinguished—the last instrument of the devil, that thunders and lightens with sword and bull;… but the Spirit of God’s mouth has seized upon that shameless strumpet.… Antichrist is the Pope and the Turk together.… The pope is not God’s image, but his ape.… Popedom is founded on mere lies and fables.… A friar is evil every way; the preaching friars are proud buzzards; all who serve the pope are damned; the Papists are devoid of shame and Christianity.”[3]
This is the style of Protestant controversy which, except in form, still lingers in this nineteenth century. Protestant devotion, it may be said
without sarcasm or exaggeration, consists essentially in a holy horror of popery. Were it possible to eliminate the Catholic Church from human society, Protestantism would at once fatally assume an attitude towards the world wholly different from that in which it now stands. At present, when attacked by evolutionistic pantheism—which means all the sophistries of the day—it takes refuge behind the historic fortress of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and, when encountered by the church, it makes an alliance with cosmism or anything else. Were the Catholic Church not in existence, it would be forced at once to build a fortress of its own; for the Bible is only a breastwork, which must be in charge of a commander-in-chief if we hope to hold it for the sovereign Lord. From the beginning, then, Protestants branded Catholics with a mark of infamy; they were idolaters, worse than pagans, for the most part gross blockheads, who fall an easy prey to the designing arts of priests and monks, who are only knaves and rogues, whose chief aim is to carry out the fiendish purposes of the pope, the arch-enemy, Antichrist, the devil in the flesh; and thus the church becomes the Woman of Babylon, flaming in scarlet, and alluring the nations to debauch.
No evidence, therefore, is needed to show that Catholics are immoral, depraved, thoroughly corrupt. To doubt it would be to question the truth of Protestantism and to believe that something good might come out of Nazareth. In good sooth, do not the Catholics, as M. de Laveleye says, admit the fact themselves?
We often hear persons express surprise that intelligent and honest Protestants should still, after such sad experience, be so eager to believe
the “awful disclosures” of “escaped nuns,” and to patronize that kind of lecture—of which, thank God! Protestants have the monopoly—delivered to men or women only, in which the abominations of the confessional are revealed and the general preternatural wickedness of priests, monks, and nuns is made fully manifest. This, to us, we must say, has never seemed strange. The doctrine of total depravity is an article of Protestant faith, and, when applied to Catholics, to none other have Protestants ever clung with such unwavering firmness and perfect unanimity. When disagreeing about everything else, they have never failed to find a point of union in this. Even after having lived and dealt with Catholics who are kind-hearted, pure, and fair-minded, in the true Protestant there still lurks a vague kind of suspicion that there must be some mysterious and secret diabolism in them which eludes his observation; that after all they may be only “as mild-mannered men as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat”; and after his reason has been fully convinced that the Catholic Church is the only historical Christianity, he is still able to remain a strong Protestant by falling back upon the undoubted total depravity of Papists. Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, the most careful and instructive self-analysis which has been written in this century, or probably in any other, declares that after he had become thoroughly persuaded of the truth of the Catholic Church his former belief that the pope was Antichrist still remained like a stain upon his imagination; and yet he had never been an ultra-Protestant. Many a Protestant has ceased to believe in Christ, without giving up his faith in the pope as Antichrist.
It is not surprising, in view of all this, that Protestants should have habitually held the church responsible for the evil deeds of Catholics.
When quite recently the excited Germans charged the dynamite plot of Thomassen upon our American civilization, we replied, with perfect justice, that such crimes are anomalies, the guilt of which ought not to be laid upon any nation, and all reasonable men admitted the evident good sense of our answer; but Protestants the world over have been unanimous in seeking to hold up the church to the execration of mankind as responsible for the St. Bartholomew massacre. Is Protestantism answerable for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford? Religious fanaticism, no doubt, had much to do in urging him to butcher idolaters and slaves of Satan; but we should blush for shame were we capable of thinking for a moment that such inhumanities are either produced or approved by the real spirit of the Protestant religion.
We know of nothing in the Catholic Church which in any way corresponds with Protestant anti-popery literature; indeed, we doubt whether in the whole history of literature anything so disgraceful and disreputable as this can be found, unless, possibly, it be that which is professedly obscene, but which has nowhere ever had a recognized existence; and we question whether even this is as discreditable to human nature as the “awful disclosures” and “lectures to men or women only” of Protestants.