"Sixty confessors were made prisoners by Humeric, the tyrant king of the African Vandals, in the 4th century. He ordered their tongues to be cut out, even to the roots, inclusively; but notwithstanding this loss of their tongues, roots and all, they lived many years after, and spoke more plainly than ever."
The reverend Mr. Ward, a distinguished friend of Puseyism, now living in England, and looked upon by the Puseyites in the United States as one of the most able advocates of their wild doctrine, assures us with great gravity, and on the authority of the holy fathers of the middle ages, that the above fact is true, and as much entitled to credit as anything related in the holy Scriptures. He even tells us that "to attribute anything like idolatry, or anything approaching it, to such men as related the above and similar facts, was a fearful approximation to blasphemy against the Holy Ghost."
The Mr. Ward to whom I allude is well known to many literary men in this country, as the author of a work recently published, and called Wards Ideal of a Christian Church, The name of the work is assuredly an appropriate one. His church must be ideal indeed. It is something invisible, intangible, hitherto unknown and never heard of before. either in scriptural or church history; and where he found the materials, out of which he formed this ideal of a Christian church, must be known only to himself. But Mr. Ward is a philosopher,—so say the Puseyites,—and philosophers now-a-days have some strange dreams. They had such in all times and in all ages of the Christian, as well as the heathen world. "Oh! there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with learning, which their un-skilfulness knows not how to fling away. Sciences may be learned by rote, said my father to Yorick. Yorick thought my father inspired."
Whether Puseyites think Mr. Ward inspired or not, I am at a loss to know; nor am I a judge; but that he is a philosopher, is beyond doubt. Nor do I feel the least hesitancy in saying that he will have, one day or another, his name inscribed in the same niche, and his ashes rest in the same urn, with such distinguished men as Joe Smith, Hiram Smith and O. Brownson, all conspicuously eminent philosophers. The fact of my not understanding one word these eminent philosophers have uttered, is no argument against their ideal churches, or their ideal theories.
"I will enter into obligations this moment, said my father, to lay out all my Aunt Dinah's legacy in charitable uses, if the corporal has any one determinate idea, annexed to any one word he has repeated." Thus spoke the learned author of the Tristrapedia to Trim; but it by no means followed, that Trim was not a philosopher, no more than it does that Mr. Ward and other Puseyite doctors are not philosophers, though not one of them has any one determinate idea annexed to any one word they have said or written.
Thrice honored, then, be Monks, Mormonites, Millerites and Brownsonites. All will have their day, and so will common sense.
I am apprehensive that some will accuse me of levity in my manner of alluding to Puseyism. Others will say that I should have mentioned no names, or, if I did, I should have treated them with respect and kindness. Far be it from me to treat a grave subject lightly; but when I see the whole Christian world represented as profligate and the Popish world alone represented as sinless and pure, by the authors of Puseyism, I can scarcely treat such a false representation and perversion of truth otherwise than with contempt and irony; and when I bring before the public the names of some of the individuals who have merited this, by exhibiting themselves as the authors and abettors of these gross outrages upon all that is sacred among men and among nations, I only do them justice. Are acts alone, and not their consequences, to be noticed? Are we to take cognizance of effects, and pass by in silence their causes? Are we to wage a seven years' war against Ward's Ideal of a Christian Church, and against other ideals of moonstricken dreamers, and say not a word of the dreamers themselves, or the consequences that follow from them? Suppose we had here in Boston, or New York, the hydrophobia; suppose a citizen were in pursuit of the mad dog which introduced it; would any of my readers say to the citizen, never mind the dog, let him go but take care of the hydrophobia? Assuredly not the name, the color, the appearance of the dog, and the symptoms of his madness, should be proclaimed to the public, lest he might scatter the hydrophobia still further amongst them. Suppose an incendiary was seen on the streets of one of our large and populous cities, say, for instance, Boston or New York, and that our police officers were in pursuit of him; let us fancy a crowd of sympathizers interfering and saying to the officers, let that man alone; pursue him no farther; do not even mention that he is an incendiary; it may be the cause of sending him to gaol, or, perhaps, to the state prison for life; say nothing to any one against him,—but take care of fires. See well to it that the city is not burned. What, under these circumstances would be thought of the sympathizers? Who would feel for them if the city was reduced to ashes? Who would feel for them if their homes were rendered desolate, and their wives and children made houseless. I would not check the generous or natural flow of human sympathy, but I do not know that I should do wrong in saying, that such men deserved no commiseration.
Under these circumstances, why should I be accused of treating a grave subject lightly or ironically? Never did the witty Lord Shaftsbury utter a plainer truth than when he said, that ridicule is one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition.
I am aware that there are many objections to the use of ridicule and irony, in speaking on grave subjects; but, as Fielding very properly observes, there can be no objection to making use of its assistance in expelling and banishing all falsehood and imposture when once fairly detected; and as this method is for my present purpose unexceptionable, I think it will also prove efficacious.
Having perused the dreams, or, if the reader prefers it, opinions of the holy fathers, and taken a glance at those of a new sect amongst us called Puseyites,—which is but another name for Popery,—I could see no reason why I should believe them of higher authority than the Scriptures, or why I should not prefer the latter for my rule of faith. The holy fathers of the church of Rome, and her unbaptized children, Puseyites, seem to me of equal authority. I say unbaptized, because I know not that their reputed parents, the Pope and his spouse, the church of Rome, ever thought of such a thing as Puseyite. I am rather inclined to think that the venerable couple are, up to this moment, unconscious of having any paternity whatever in Puseyism. At any rate, their holy fathers, such as Mr. Ward, Newman and others, appear to me as demented and clean daft as any that ever existed in the middle ages. The "Knight of Cervantes," as a late number of the London Quarterly expresses it, "never abandoned himself to delirious musings, on the faded glories of chivalry, more madly than these sentimentalists to visions of Popish powers, and the glories of the saints."