mises of the Almighty in favor of the seed of David and ie kingdom of the Messiah, in the Book of Psalms,* and in ose of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, have failed;† then the more explicit promises of Christ, concerning this church and her pastors, have failed; then the creed itself, which is the subject of our present discussion, has been false.§-On this point learned Protestants have been wonderfully embarrassed, and have involved themselves in the most palpable contradictions. A great proportion of them have maintained that the church, in past ages, totally failed, and became the synagogue of Satan, and that its head pastor, the Bishop of Rome, was and is the man of sin, the identical antichrist: but they have never been able to settle among themselves, when this, the most remarkable of all revolutions which have happened since the world began, actually took place; or who were the authors, and who the opposers of it; or by what strange means these authors prevailed on so many millions of people of different nations, languages, and interests, throughout Christendom, to give up the supposed pure religion, which they had learned from their fathers, and to embrace a new and false system, which its adversaries now call Popery! In a word, there is no way of accounting for the pretended change of religion, at whatever period this may be fixed, but by supposing, as I have said, that the whole collection of Christians, on some one night went to bed Protestants, and awoke the next morning papists. That the church in communion with the See of Rome is the original, as well as the most numerous church, is evident in several points of view. The stone cries out of the wall, as the prophet expresses it,|| in testimony of this. I mean that our venerable cathedrals and other stone churches, built by Catholic hands and for the Catholic worship, so as to resist, in some sort, that which is now performed in them, proclaim that ours is the ancient and original church. This is still more clear from the ecclesiastical historians of our own as well as other nations. Venerable Bede, in particular, bears witness that the Roman missionary, St. Augustin of Canterbury, and his companions, converted our Saxon ancestors, at the end of the sixth century to the belief of the pope's supremacy, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, purgatory, the invocation of saints, and the other Catholic doctrines and practices; as learned Protestants in general agree.** Now, as these mission *Ps. lxxxviii. alias lxxxix. &c. † Isaiah, c. liv. lix. Jerem. xxxi. 31. Dan. ii. 44. Matt. xv. 13.-xxviii. 19, 20. § I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. ** Bishop Bale. Dr. Humphreys, the Centur. of Magdeb. &c. aries were found to be of the same faith and religion, not only with the Irish, Picts, and Scots, who were converted almost two centuries before them, but also with the Britons or Welsh, who became Christians in the second century, so as only to differ from them about the time of keeping Easter, and a few other unessential points, this circumstance alone proves the Catholic religion to have been that of the church at that early age. Still, the most demonstrative proofs of the antiquity and originality of our religion, are gathered from comparing it with that contained in the works of the ancient fathers. An attempt was made, during a certain period, by some eminent Protestants, especially in this country, to press the fathers into their service. Among these, Bishop Jewel of Sarum was the most conspicuous. He not only boasted that those venerable witnesses of the primitive doctrine were generally on his side, but also published the following challenge to the Catholics: "Let them show me one only father, one doctor, one sentence, two lines, and the field is theirs."* However, this his vain boasting, or rather deliberate impugning the known truth, only served to scandalize sober and learned Protestants, and among others his biographer, Dr. Humphreys, who complains that he thereby "gave a scope to the papists, and spoiled himself and the Protestant Church."+ In fact, this hypocrisy, joined with his shameful falsifications of the fathers, in quoting them, occasioned the conversion of a beneficed clergyman, and one of the ablest writers of his age, Dr. W. Reynolds." Most Protestant writers of later times§ follow the late Dr. Middleton, and Luther himself; in giving up the ancient fathers to the Catholics without reserve, and thereby the faith of the Christian church during the six first centuries, of which faith these fathers were the witnesses and teachers. Among other passages to this purpose, the above-named doctor writes as follows: "Every one must see what a resemblance the principles and practice of the fourth century bear to the present rites of the Popish church." Thus, by the confession of her most learned adversaries, our church is not less CATHOLIC or universal, as to time, than she is with respect to name, locality, and numbers. I am, &c. JOHN MILNER. * See Jewel's Sermon at St. Paul's Cross, likewise his Answers to Dr. Cole. . + Life of Jewel, quoted by Walsingham, in his invaluable Search into Matters of Religion, p. 172. Dodd's Church Hist. vol. ii. § See the acknowledgment on this head of the learned Protestants, Obretcht, Doumoulin, and Casaubon. Inquiry into Miracles, Introd. p. 45. LETTER XXVII.-TO JAMES BROWN, ESQ, &c. DEAR SIR OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. The I HAVE received the letter written by your visiter, the Rev. Joshua Clark, B. D., at the request, as he states, of certain members of your society, animadverting on my last to you; an answer to which letter I am requested to address to you. reverend gentleman's arguments are by no means consistent one with another; for like other determined controvertists, he attacks his adversary with every kind of weapon that comes to his hand, in the hope per fas et nefas of disabling him. He maintains, in the first place, that though Protestantism was not visible before it was unveiled by Luther, it subsisted in the hearts of the true faithful, ever since the days of the apostles, and that the believers in it constituted the real primitive Catholic Church. To this groundless assumption I answer, that an invisible church is no church at all; that the idea of such a church is at variance with the predictions of the prophets respecting Jesus Christ's future church, where they describe it as a Mountain on the top of mountains, Is. ii. 2, Mich. iv. 2, and as a city, whose watchmen shall never hold their peace, Is. lxii. 6, and, indeed, with the injunction of our Lord himself to tell the church, Matt. xviii. 17, in the case which he mentions. It is no less repugnant to the declaration of Luther, who says of himself, "At first I stood alone;"* and to that of Calvin, who says, "The first Protestants were obliged to break off from the whole world;"+ as also to that of the Church of England in her homilies, where she 66 says: Laity and clergy; learned and unlearned, all ages, sects, and degrees have been drowned in abominable idolatry, most detested by God and damnable to man, for 800 years and more.”‡ As to the argument in favor of an invisible church, drawn from 1 Kings, xix. 18, where the Almighty tells Elijah, "I have left me 7,000 in Israel, whose knees have not been bowed to Baal;" our divines fail not to observe, that however invisible the church of the old law was in the schismatical kingdom of Israel, at the time here spoken of, it was most conspicuous and flourishing in its proper seat, the kingdom of Judah, under the pious King Josaphat. Mr. Clark's second argument is borrowed from Dr. Porteus, and consists in a mere quibble. In answer to the question: "Where was the Protestant religion before Luther?" this prelate replies: "It was just where it is now: only that then it Peril of Idolatry, p. iii. * Opera. Pref. 66 + Epist. 171. was corrupted with many sinful errors, from which it is now reformed."* But this is to fall back into the refuted system of an invisible church and to contradict the homilies, or else it is to confess the real truth, that Protestancy had no existence before the sixteenth century. The reverend gentleman next maintains, on quite opposite grounds, that there have been large and visible societies of Protestants, as he calls them, who have stood in opposition to the Church of Rome, in all past ages.—True, there have been heretics and schismatics of one kind or other during all that time, from Simon Magus down to Martin Luther; many sects of whom, such as the Arians, the Nestorians, the Eutychians, the Monotholites, the Albigenses, the Wickliffites, and the Hussites, have been exceedingly numerous and powerful in their turns, though most of them have now dwindled away to nothing but observe, that none of the ancient heretics held the doctrines of any description of modern Protestants, and all of them maintained doctrines and practices which modern Protestants reprobate, as much as Catholics do. Thus the Albigenses were real Manicheans, holding two first principles or deities, attributing the Old Testament, the propagation of the human species, to Satan, and acting up to these diabolical maxims.† The Wickliffites and Hussites, were the levelling and sanguinary Jacobins of the times and countries in which they lived ; in other respects these two sects were Catholics, professing their belief in he seven sacraments, the mass, the invocation of saints, purgatory, &c. If, then, your reverend visiter is disposed to admit such company into his religious communion, merely because they protested against the supremacy of the pope, and some other Catholic tenets, he must equally admit Jews, Mahometans, and pagans into it, and acknowledge them to be equally Protestants with himself. Your reverend visiter concludes his letter with a long dissertation, in which he endeavors to show, that however we Catholics may boast of the antiquity and perpetuity of our church in past times, our triumphs must soon cease by the extinction of this church, in consequence of the persecution now carrying on against it in France, and other parts of the continent;§ and also from the preponderance of the Protestant power in Europe, particularly that of our own country, which, he says, is nearly as much interested in the extirpation of Popery as of Jacobinism. My answer is this: I see and bewail the anti-catholic persecution which has been, and is carried on in France and its de *Confut. p. 79. See an account of them, and the authorities on which this rests, in Letters to a Prebendary, Letter IV. Ibid. § Namely, in 1802 pendent states, where to decatholicize is the avowed order of the day. This was preceded by the less sanguinary, though equally anti-catholic persecution of the Emperor Joseph II., and his relatives in Germany and Italy. I hear the exultations and menaces on this score of the Wranghams, De Coetlogons, Towsons, Bichenos, Ketts, Fabers, Daubenys, and a crowd of other declamatory preachers and writers, some of whom proclaim that the Romish Babylon is on the point of falling, and others that she is actually fallen. In the mean time, though more living branches of the mystical Vine should be cut off by the sword, and though more rotten branches should fall off, from their own decay,* I am not at all fearful for the life of the Tree itself, since the Divine veracity is pledged for its safety, as long as the sun and moon shall endure, (Psalm lxxxix.,) and since the experience of eighteen centuries has confirmed our faith in these divine promises. During this long interval, kingdoms and empires have risen and fallen, the inhabitants of every country have been repeatedly changed; in short, every thing has changed except the doctrine and jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, which are precisely the same now that Christ and his apostles left them. In vain did pagan Rome, during three centuries, exert its force to drown her in her own blood; in vain did Arianism and the other contemporary heresies sap her foundations during two centuries more; in vain did hordes of barbarians from the north, and of Mahometans from the south, rush forward to overwhelm her; in vain did Luther swear that he * Since the present letter was written, many circumstances have occurred to show the mistaken politics of our rulers, in endeavoring to weaken and supplant the religion of their truly loyal and conscientious Catholic subjects. Among other measures for this purpose, may be mentioned the late instructions sent to the Governor of Canada, which Catholic province alone remained faithful at the time of trial, when all the Protestant provinces abjured their allegiance. To the same intent may be cited the letter of Dr. Kerr, senior chaplain of Fort St. George, quoted in the late parliamentary report. By this it appears that the Catholics in that province generally converted about three hundred infidels to Christianity every year, and that there was a prospect of their converting many of the Hindoo chiefs, but that our government set its face against these conversions. Thus is the obscene and barbarous worship of Juggernaut himself preferred to the religion which converted and civilized our ancestors. Juggernaut, as Dr. Buchanan informs us, is a huge idol, carved with the most obscene figures round it, and publicly worshipped before hundreds of thousands, with obscene songs and unnatural rites, too gross to be described. It is placed on a carriage, under the wheels of which great numbers of its votaries are encouraged to throw themselves, in order to be crushed to death by them. Now this infernal worship is not barely permitted, but even supported by our government in India, as it takes a tribute from each individual who is present at it, and likewise defrays the expense of it, to the amount, says Dr. Buchanan, of £8,700 annually, including the keep of prostitutes, &c. |