our cities, are pointed out and known as Catholic Churches. The priests no longer find it necessary to walk from house to house to inform the few scattered members of his flock at what time there will be divine service in the church; but every morning from the break of day until eight or nine o'clock, can be seen crowds of worshippers flocking to our churches. We are no longer numbered solely among immigrants, but about one-fourth of us are converts, * and about onethird of us are native born. Weare no longer regarded as an entirely illiterate class of human beings, since our schools and colleges are the most numerous, according to our population in the country; and the ablest and most learned of our opponents the pillars of the Protestant sects are daily coming over to us. Not one newspaper, but twenty or more, together with monthly and quarterly periodicals are busily engaged in reproducing Catholic literature and vindicating Catholic rights. We are no longer pointed at as belonging solely to what is called the common class of people, but we are to be found in the highest offices known to our government and in every trade and profession of life. Those who would break us on the rack,† or burn us at the stake if they had the power, will kneel down and worship us for our votes when an election is coming on."‡ We quote the above, not to suggest to our readers any lengthened r formal reply. It were easy to advert to the lands whence these Papal emigrants come, and to show the misery from which under the demoralizing and enslaving power of a tyrannical priesthood they have fled. It would be easy to point to Papal Mexico and Brazil, and Lower Canada, to the magnificent rivers inviting commerce and the fertile regions awaiting the industrial activity of settlers in these lands, and to ask why rather to a soil and to a society made what they are by Protestantism than to such regions which also enjoy the blessings of Popery-do these suffering ones come. It were easy to point to the freedom which they here possess-even freedom from their own priesthood and to the elevating social influences of a Protestant community which here, as also as in the north of Ireland, have helped to raise the condition of Romanists above that which they occupy in any purely Papal land. It were easy to adduce the statistics of Romish priests themselves, to show how much on the whole, Popery has lost by emigration to this country, and to prove that there are influences here at work which have only to be sustained with vigour, in order to prevent the aggrandizement of Rome. We quote the passage rather to show what emigration is actually doing for the Papacy among us, both as to the increase of the priesthood and the various agencies which are now at work to retain the votaries of the system and to add to their numbers by such machinery as Rome can so unscrupulously wield. The plans of the Papacy are always deeply laid. Rome can look to the future and wait until her schemes are matured and the fruit has become ripe. We point then to the Popery among us, and to the duty which such a state of society involves; and in order to prepare the minds of our readers on the subject of Romish teaching so that they may be familiar with the most convincing and powerful arguments which the advocates of the system have ever brought forward, we propose to take up and examine the positions of the greatest champion which the See of Rome has ever produced. Cardinal ROBERT BELLARMINE, or Bellarmino, was a nephew of Pope Marcellus II. and belonged to the order of the Jesuits. He was born in Tuscany, in 1542, and died in Rome in 1621, and Roman Catholics have ever admitted that he was by far the most powerful controversialist and defender of Papacy which their church has ever produced. He was born two years after that Paul III. by his Bull had sanctioned the order of the Jesuits which Loyola had instituted in 1534; and in the third year of his age, the Pope being constrained by the pressure of the Reformation on the one hand and the abuses of the church which had long been so flagrant on the other, consented to assemble the Council of Trent, which met in 1545, the year before Luther, having finished his warfare, was called away to his rest. The scriptures had been translated by Luther. Melancthon had prepared his celebrated Confession. At Worms and Spires the doctrines of the Reformation had been condemned, and yet the Reformation advanced so that in 1536 the Romanists and Protestants divided Germany very nearly equally between them. The ingratitude of Geneva had been displayed towards Calvin, and in view of their errors the citizens had received him back again on the 13th of September, 1541, the year before Bellarmine was born. We refer to these dates to show that the doctrines of the Reformation and the arguments by which they were sustained were now fully before the mind of Europe. The Reformed and Papal parties had taken their ground and hitherto the argument had by the consent of mankind when not controlled by the secular power, been assigned to the followers of Luther and Calvin. Rome sighed for a defender to uphold her cause, and it was under these circumstances that her greatest champion appeared. * This is too glaring. The rack is a familiar implement of the Papacy. The Shepherd of the Valley, September 10th, 1853. After an elementary education such as a person of his rank and station might command, Bellarmine entered the Society of Jesus at the age of eighteen years, on the 30th of September 1560. His progress in learning was so great and he attained in early life such a reputation that he was ordered to preach even before he was ordained priest, which rank he received from the hands of Cornelius Jansenius, Bishop of Ghent, in 1569. He taught divinity at Louvain and preached there in Latin with so distinguished a reputation that even from Holland and England, several Protestants went to hear him. After a residence of seven years in the low countries he returned to Italy and was appointed in 1576 to read Controversial lectures by Pope Gregory XIII. in the new college which that Pope had founded. So successfully did he acquit himself in that situation, that Sixtus V. when sending Cardinal Cajetan as his Nuncio in the time of the League, appointed Bellarmine as his divine in that legation in case there might be any occasion for his entering into any dispute with the Protestants. He returned to Rome at the end of six months, when he was gradually promoted from one rank to another, until in 1599 he reached the dignity of a Cardinal at the instance of Clement VIII. who on his nomination used these remarkable words regarding him, "We choose him because the church of God does not possess his equal in learning." Four years afterwards he was created archbishop of Capua, and having discharged the duties of the See for about four years, he was recalled to Rome by Paul V., who thought that his great talents, learning and zeal could be better employed in the councils of the papacy. In this situation he remained until his death. His elevation to the pontificial chair was often suggested, and Henry IV. considering him the least objectionable of the candidates in his time, wished for his election. On the first meeting of the conclave of Leo XI., he had a majority of votes, and again in the conclave of Paul V. it was seriously designed by many to nominate him. He had condemned in his writings the lax discipline and immorality of the monastic institutions; and while it appears that he had a strong dislike to the responsibilities of the papal throne, he has left registered a solemn vow that, if he were elected, he would abolish the system of favouritism and corruption which prevailed. His determination was never put to the test; for the electors aware of his tendency and believing him, as is avowed by his eulogistic papist biographer, to be too honest and attached to the Jesuits, he was saved from any effort to encounter the fraud, falsehood, intrigue and corruption which had reigned in full vigour at Rome. His works are very numerous; most of them written in Latin, in a clear and concise style, though by no means clothed with elegance or eloquence. His greatest work is his Disputations or Controversies, concerning the cardinal points which are at issue between the Romish and Reformed Churches, in four volumes, folio, in Latin, of which the fourth book of the second volume comprises his famous "Notes (or Signs or Proofs) of the (true) Church." When his controversial works appeared they were not considered at the time, nor have they been since esteemed, as his own mere opinions, but as authorized vindications of the principles and doctrines of Popery, both spiritual and temporal. They were revised altered and corrected in later editions under the authority of the Papal government; and they now stand as the most powerful defence, and most authentic and genuine record of that twin spiritual and temporal rule. There have not been wanting great names, such as that of Scaliger, who have held, that Bellarmine did not conscientiously believe the doctrines and hold the principles which he publicly advocated; but to this estimate of his character we can by no means agree. We are satisfied that the facts which his biographers record and the whole circumstances of his laborious career, which were all and at all times in the same direction, will show that his mind was fully under the sway of Romish tenets and that an unwavering veneration for the long established prerogatives of the papacy was among the most striking characteristics of his mind. Indeed no writer ever showed more ardour in sustaining the assumptions of the bishop of Rome, and he has laboured with infinite zeal and adduced the strongest arguments in the papal armory to prove that the Pope was not only the head of the Church in things spiritual but that he possessed the power likewise of deposing sovereign princes, as may be seen in his "Treatise about the Power of the Pope in Temporal Matters," a work which was condemned by the Catholic parliament of Paris as dangerous to all civil government and pushing the pretensions of the Head of the Church to an extravagant excess. And yet strange as it may appear, this very work was placed by order of Sixtus V. among the condemned books in the catalogue of the Inquisition, because Bellarmine maintained that the deposing power of the Pope was indirect and not direct; or in other words because he did not sufficiently assert and defend the papal right and claim to universal despotism as being authorized by the immediate fiat of Heaven! He wore out his life in the service of the Church and gradually sunk into some of the most absurd and filthy habits of asceticism. He would not permit the gnats and vermin that tormented him to be killed, because "their present life was their only paradise, and it would be cruel to deprive them of it." At his death according to his Romish biographers, he bequeathed the one half of his soul to the Virgin Mary, and the other half to Jesus Christ! and thus finished one of the most laborious lives which have ever been devoted to the support of superstition and tyranny. After his demise it was seriously contemplated to place him in the calendar of the Saints because of the extraordinary services which he had rendered to the Romish Church by his writings. Out of seventeen cardinals we are informed by a Romish historian that ten voted for his canonization (Dupin, Cent. XVII. book 5.) So great was the impression that his talents and character had made even on the intrigue and corruption of Rome. The only Romish Divine of controversial celebrity in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, who approximated to Bellarmine in effective services to the Papacy, was BOSSUET, the Bishop of Meaux; and while they resembled each other in their untiring zeal to uphold the church, they were in many respects exceedingly dissimilar. The genius of Bellarmine fitted him for synthetic construction. aimed at building up a fortress around the church, from which it might in safety assert its prerogatives and send forth its high behests to Princes, Potentates and abject Peers. For the erection of such a structure he wrought up the materials which during an assiduous life he has collected and, with an untiring devotion, he reared fortress after fortress until he thought his work secure. Bossuet, although at times dogmatic, excelled especially when forcing his way into the camp of the enemy, he sought to divide their forces or to confound them by leading them to assail each other. Bellarmine builds up a system and so strengthens it that it can go forth in unresisting energy to accomplish all that unlimited rule may demand. Bossuet enters the ranks of his opponents and persuading every separate regiment that they are not the whole army and that therefore there is no use in resisting, prepares the way for all to submit to the authority which Bellarmine by his synthetic process had so laboriously constructed. Bellarmine was at home in deducing from Romish premises the consequences, both spiritual and temporal, which gave to the papal court an unquestionable sway. Bossuet revelled in the supposed discreVOL. IV. No. 1. paney of opinion between the various shades of Protestantism and in his demonstrations that, as all separatists from "The Church of Christ" had fallen into soul-destroying heresy, so Protestantism which rejected the church of Rome, must either lapse into Socinianism or Infidelity. Bossuet in his "Expositions of the Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church" attempted the dogmatic style of controversy, and won laurels by his work which among its trophies enumerates the conversion of Marshal Turrene, -the commendation of two Archbishops, nine Bishops and three Cardinals-which was twice approved of by Pope Innocent XI., and which the clergy of France marked with their imprimatur, declaring that it contained the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church; yet after all in this celebrated performance he only followed in the wake of Bellarmine. It is in his "History of the Variations in the Protestant churches," in which Bossuet displays his own peculiar powers, by his effort to identify Protestantism in principle and fact with every heresy of a former age in so far as they and it were equally different from each other and from the Church of Christ, and consequently none of them entitled to that appellation or to assume the possession of its powers. It is only in the fifteenth chapter of this celebrated work that he assumes the dogmatical character, and here again he moves in the wake of Bellarmine, while he endeavours to show the divine authority of the church, her marks, and the claims of the church of Rome to the exclusive possession of them. Bellarmine is the type of Italian Popery where the spiritual openly lords it over the temporal; Bossuet is the exemplar of the French Romanist, kept in some measure of control by a powerful central civil power. Bellarmine sets forth the wholesale demands and most enslaving claims of the Papacy before the Italian mind without any guile. Bossuet, writing for Protestants and in a land where civil law had a place and authority, rubs off all asperities and presents the Papal system in the most inoffensive and attractive form. The former writes to rule, the latter to win. Bellarmine is a legislator, Bossuet is a special pleader at the bar. Bossuet is plausible; Bellarmine is open and candid. Bossuet grasps a principle and yet fears to show the results to which it may lead; Bellarmine stands on a principle and proclaims to all the world the length and breadth and heighth and depth of every consequence of his theory. In address Bossuet excelled; in iron steadfastness Bellarmine stood supreme. Both were devoted to Rome and both served the Papacy in an eminent degree. They were different in character, but each possessed the attainments which fitted him for his country and his age. The examination of Bellarmine's Notes it will thus be perceived, is almost equivalent to a dissection of the decrees of a Council, confirmed by the authority of a Pope; and we trust that ere the series is concluded, we shall to a certain extent have contributed to awaken the minds of some members of our Church to a more intelligent understanding of the claims and the consequences of those claims, both temporal and spiritual, which are still put forth by Rome. In Eng |