Token of Respect to the M. Rev. Archbishop Eccleston, 688 568 - 686 Mt. St. Mary's College, near Emmitsburg, Md.-St. Joseph's Sisterhood and Academy, ERRATA. In the Music, p. 60, tenth bar of the base, instead of C oct. read B octaves. Page 194, col. 1, instead of Toledo read Grenada. In the July No. instead of folio 341-388, read 361 with the following folios to 408. Page 470, col. 2, parag. 2, instead of merit read mint. 529, col. 2, towards the end, instead of in obtaining the dispensation read after obtaining, &c. * 538, col, 2, towards the end, instead of burglary read grave robbing. THE UNITED STATES CATHOLIC MAGAZINE AND MONTHLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1846. THE CONFESSIONAL. "DU PRETRE, DE LA FEMME, DE LA FA- NE of the strongest and most striking evidences of Catholicity is found in the fact that its enemies can not attack it with any plausibility or semblance of success, without grievously misrepresenting its doctrines, and appealing against it to the worst passions of the human bosom. The Catholic religion always maintains her lofty position, as the handmaid of heaven, and the divinely constituted witness of the truth; she flatters not the passions of men in order to win their homage; she would not compromise one particle of the truth committed to her in deposit, VOL. V.-No. 1. 1 though by the sacrifice she should gain the whole world; she is prepared to fulfil her high mission, for the glory of God and the salvation of men, though she should, in the discharge thereof, be nailed to the cross with her divine Founder and Spouse. She changes not, though all the world is changing around her. Her institutions may displease the world, and become unfashionable; still she fondly clings to them; she will not suffer one of them to be impaired or destroyed: her mission is not to please men, but to save men. She will not "stoop to conquer," will not descend into the arena of the world, will not wield the weapons of carnal warfare, will not enter into alliance with flesh and blood. She will not stain the laurels of victory won during eighteen centuries of glorious strife with the world, the flesh, and the devil, by any such unhallowed means and hence it is that the world hates her. It hated her divine Founder before her, and for the self-same reason. She will not, because she can not, change; and her adversaries cry out that she is not adapted to the spirit of the age, which is eminently a spirit of progress and of change in every thing, from machinery to philosophy and religion. She proclaims to the world, as the revelation of God, many doctrines unfathomable to reason and humbling to human pride; and the world cries out, absurdity and nonsense! She enforces the divine obligation of many things painful to human nature; and men cry out that she is the enslaver of the world, and that her principles are incompatible with human liberty. Still she heeds not all their clamor, but firmly, yet mildly, pursues her divine pilgrimage of mercy and charity, without turning either to the right or to the left. It has ever been so. The tactics of the evil one in his assaults against the truth have not varied in the lapse of long centuries. From the time that he dared tempt Jesus Christ himself in the wilderness down to the very latest campaign he has made against the church of Jesus, the spirit of his warfare, as well as its chief appliances, has not changed. He tempted Christ by an impious and most unblushing appeal to the human passions of sense, of avarice, and of pride; and he tempts the disciples of Christ by the same appeal. To the disciples, as to the Master, he says: "All these things will I give you, if, falling down, you will adore me;" but the disciples answer, as did the Master, "Begone, Satan; for it is written, the Lord thy God thou shalt adore, and him only shalt thou serve."* We might easily illustrate all this by a reference to the different phases of the warfare against Catholicity in ages past. We might prove that, how different soever were the favorite modes of attack at different periods, they all nevertheless possessed this trait in common: they appealed to passion against truth. The old heretics did it; the modern dissenters still do it. The ancient heretics succeeded partially and for a time; they seduced many from the truth by their maddening appeal to a corrupt nature; but they St Matthew iv, 9, 10. finally disappeared from the arena together with their victims ; and the truth still stood forth triumphant, waving its unsullied banner of victory over a conquered world. The modern innovators have but renewed the same scenes of unhallowed warfare; of apparent victory, and final but certain and overwhelming defeat. It has ever been so; it must ever be so. He who could not deceive had said that the world should hate his disciples, but that "the gates of hell SHOULD NOT PREVAIL AGAINST HIS CHURCH BUILT UPON A ROCK." At the dawn of the reformation, Luther appealed to the political feelings and prejudices of the Germans against the primacy of the pope. He stirred up the slumbering embers of old feuds between the popes and the emperors, blew on them with the warm breath of his indignant invective, and enkindled a fire in the bosom of Germany which threatened to destroy the venerable edifice of Catholicity. He cried out at the top of his stentorian lungs that the Germans had been groaning for centuries in the bondage of a worse than Babylonian captivity, and that the day of their emancipation was at hand. Those whom he could not lure to his standard by the impassioned cry of LIBERTY, he wooed by the softer, but yet more insinuating, appeals which he made to their avarice or to their sensuality. To the princes he offered as a bait the plunder of the immense church property accumulated during ages of faith and piety; to bishops, priests, and monks he offered the additional inducements of a handsome wife and a comfortable establishment; to all he offered freedom from many painful restraints on the passions imposed by the ancient religion. Fasting, daily prayer, singing or reciting the divine office, celibacy, penance and mortification, were to be done away with; and Christians were henceforth to get to heaven by treading the primrose path of dalliance with human nature, with the light of only one single principle-that of faith alonebeaming upon them for their guidance. The painful restraint of church authority was to be discarded, and each one was to live as he listed, with his Bible for his guide, and his own private judgment as the only key to its meaning. With the employment of such means, no wonder that he gained proselytes; but the whole scheme was manifestly a down-hill reformation. The very same system of tactics was adopted at Geneva, in northern Europe, in Switzerland, in France, and in England; and with precisely the same results. Every where the same maddening appeal was made to the worst passions of the multitude; every where people were lured to the standard of revolt against the church by carnal arguments eloquently stimulating flesh and blood to war against the pope. All this is strikingly true of England. The bluff old tyrant, Henry VIII, broke with the pope that he might secure a young wife in lieu of a most virtuous one, stricken in years, of whom he had grown tired; he brought his people over to his cause by a series of acts of highhanded tyranny which would have disgraced a Nero, and by a course of sacrilegious spoliation of altars and churches which would have disgraced Antiochus and Nebuchadonosor. But the master stroke of his policy, and of that of his successors, was the adroit and persevering appeal constantly made to the passions of the multitude. Open English history for the last three hundred years, and you will read evidences of this truth on every one of its sullied pages. The self same spirit pervades that phase of the warfare against Catholicity which consists in holding up its dogmas to exe cration as absurd and opposed to human reason, and its worship as a senseless mummery. The mystery of the adorable eucharist can not be comprehended, therefore it is absurd; the sacrifice of the mass based thereon can not be comprehended, therefore it is absurd and idolatrous; the ceremonies of Catholic worship can not be comprehended or appreciated, therefore they are downright mummery! With what other weapons does the Unitarian attack the mysteries of the incarnation, the atonement, and the trinity? and with what other does the deist attack all mysteries and all supernatural revelation? Do not the opponents of Catholicity, like the opponents of Christianity, stand forth self-convicted of blaspheming whatsoever things ahey know not ?"* Are they not convicted, by their mad course of opposition to Catholicity, of an implied consent to the destruction of Christianity itself? Do they not, like the infidels, "despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty ?" them look to it, and to the awful denunciation pronounced by the inspired Jude against those who do these things. Let This But by far the most vile mode of attack ever adopted by the enemies of Catholicity consists in an unblushing appeal to that low animal passion unfortunately inherent in our nature, which leads to crimes that St. Paul would not have to be even so much as named among Christians. may be pronounced the latest, it is certainly the most disgraceful, phase in the warfare against Rome. Reverend "nopopery "champions, boasted ministers of the God of holiness and purity, make no scruple whatever of treating with the most disgusting detail, both in the pulpit and through the press, certain matters which a pure minded Christian should blush even to think about. Such reverend ministers as the Sparries, the Brownlees, and the Breckenridges, think nothing of giving circulation to obscene matter which would cover with disgrace the most ordinary citizen, who lays no claim to any peculiar sanctity, but simply stands forth clad in the panoply of an honest and a decent man! They even sometimes go so far in their mad zeal against Rome as to desecrate the temple of God itself with obscenity, by preaching therein sermons not fit for ears polite, and with doors accordingly closed against the ladies! What is not fit for ladies' ears, is fit for preachers of the gospel, and quite good enough for † Ib. v. 8. * St. Jude v. 10. the temple of the living God! How blind is bigotry! how odious and detestable is hypocrisy! Can we wonder that our beloved country is so much overspread with immorality and infidelity, when such men as these pass as the accredited ministers of God's word, and the organs and leaders of his people? When they continue to do their dirty work without scarcely a re buke from the representatives of popular sentiment? The inspired apostle draws a graphic portrait of such men when he characterizes them as "raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion, wandering stars; to whom the storm of darkness is reserved for ever:" and, when he points the withering finger of denunciation at them, and says, "these are they WHO SEPARATE THEMSELVES, sensual men, having not the spirit." Nothing can be too bad for these men, provided it be only directed against the Catholic church. Their morbid appetite for scandal rejects no food, no matter how loathsome. The most obscene narrative of the most obscene and abandoned wretch, like Maria Monk, or of the most drivelling apostate, like Smith, Hogan, Giustiniani, and Ciocci, is precisely what most pleases their palate. They stop not to inquire what is the character of the writer or narrator, or what are his or her claims to be received as an accredited witness; provided the story militate against the pope and the Catholic religion, it is enough. The book is published and circulated with zeal; it is bought up and read with avidity by a certain class of the people stricken with the "no-popery" mania; and it has already done its deadly work before its refutation can be made public. The refutation, did we say? The refutation can not generally be made public; that is, it can not reach those who have been infected with the poison; the preachers and their agents will see to that; they are so fond of not keeping their people in ignorance, that they and their organs seldom, if ever, publish the refutation, how tri* St. Jude, vv. 13, 19. umphant soever it may be. Their people are thus allowed to read only on one side; poisonous error and calumny have already sped with the velocity of lightning to the remotest ends of the union on the wings of an untiring press; and when the truth comes "slowly limping after it," those ministers of truth (!) take special care to check or prevent its progress! How many, think you, of those hundreds of thousands who swallowed with avidity the poison of Maria Monk's obscene impostures-known by all to be impostureswere allowed to receive the antidote? How many, think you, of the Protestant religious press published a contradiction of that wicked book? And what vast multitudes are there not even now of the ignorant haters of the pope-of devout old ladies of both sexes-who still devoutly believe every syllable written in that infamous book? Of course, these people are never priest-ridden! We speak advisedly, and we know what we say. Is it not a burning shame that such things should be done in a Christian land, in the light of the nineteenth century, and by Christian ministers? And, when this course is still persisted in, in spite of all our just denunciation of its unchristian spirit and glaring injustice; when, as fast as one book of obscene horrors can be disposed of, the teeming press is in labor with another; when many heads start into existence in place of the one which we have stricken off from this hydra of an impure bigotry; and when even reverend preachers are the active instruments in causing all this mischief, and in pouring over this virgin hemisphere all this foul torrent of impurity, could we, we ask, have employed softer language. in rebuking a spirit so unclean? We know that in doing so we have with us the most enlightened and pure-minded of the Protestant community itself; and we feel convinced that this disgraceful method of warfare has already recoiled, and will still recoil, with terrible effect, on the heads of those same mountebanks who are now |