Bishops and Councils? The power of preserving, transmitting, preaching, explaining, and defining, in case of difference, the doctrine of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, but never of changing or modifying it, of taking away from or adding one iota to it.

On the contrary, how is it with the Reformation? We see its leaders, lights and apostles, arrogating to themselves in matters of faith an authority more than divine; pruning, curtailing and denying what they have affirmed, affirming what they have denied, sporting insolently with the Sacred Books, changing confessions of faith as they would change their clothes, and causing their contemporary and disciple, Dudith, to say: "Our people are carried away by every wind of doctrine. If you know what their religion is to-day, you cannot tell what it will be to-morrow.”*

Luther, after having crushed free-will, under the action of Divine foreknowledge, and made of man an automaton whom faith alone justifies and whose good works are so many crimes; after having taught that God works in us both good and evil, that he is no less the author of the treason of Judas than the conversion of St. Paul, that he condemns the innocent as he crowns the unworthy; Luther, after all that, directed his disciple Melancthon to re-establish in the Augsburg confession of faith, free-will and the merit of good works, and passed over in silence the cruel doctrine of predestination to evil. Afterwards Luther retracted his retractraction. He retained and defended the real presence in the Eucharist, notwithstanding the great desire he had to deny it in order to injure the papacy; and yet he promised a golden florin to Carlstadt if he would write on the other side. He

* Letter to Beza, Inter Epist. Beza.

† Bossuet, Histoire des Variations, etc., liv. ii.-Moehler, Symbolisme, book i. ch. 3.

denied transubstantiation as an impiety and a blasphemy, invented consubstantiation, declared both indifferent, returned to his first idea, then permitted transubstantiation to some churches of Italy.* Pressed by the reasoning of Satan, in the famous nocturnal conference, he abolished the mass as an infernal invention, then appeared disposed to re-establish it in order to sport with Carlstadt. He suppressed, re-established and allowed, at will, the oblation, the elevation and the adoration in the Supper. He recognised three, then four sacraments, and ended by retaining only two. As to the Scriptures, he curtailed everything which troubled him, and added the word which he needed, treated the Epistle of St. James as an epistle of straw, the Book of Job as a fable, &c. and justified the whole by saying: "I, Martin Luther, as I choose, so I ordain; since my will takes the place of reason."

History shows us in other leaders of the Reformation, and their successors in the ministry of the Bible, the same licence in matters of doctrine, a wonderful fertility in constantly renewed professions of faith, a rare skill in deceiving each other, in cunningly changing doctrines and in trafficking in them, and in the attempts they made at different periods to disguise their divisions and give themselves the air of unity. England, subjected by the Reformation to the spiritual gov ernment of its male and female popes, in less than one hundred and fifty years found it necessary to change her religion eight times.‡

* Histoire des Variations, 76.

† Ibid., livre iii.

An English publication (The Catholic Miscellany, June, 1826,) has the ingenious idea of giving to the picture of these eight religious transformations, the frame-work of the long life of the Englishman, Henry Jenkins, who, born in 1501, under Henry VII. did not die till 1670, under Charles II. One of the best saints of the Anglican Reformation, Cranmer, only lived sixty-five years, and yet he had time to change his religion seventeen times.-(Cobbett, Letters on the Reformation.)

Such were the men who succeeded in imposing their absurd vagaries for more than two centuries on fifty millions of men; such were the authors of those symbolic books which for a long time served as a rule of faith to various synods, among others to that of Dort, of so disgraceful and ridiculous memory. It was there that, just a century after Luther deriding the thunders of the Church had proclaimed the supremacy of each individual in matters of faith, that the representatives of the reformed Churches were seen armed with the spiritual sword, invoking even the secular arm against the unhappy remonstrants, to excommunicate them, and depose them with a unanimous voice, and why? because they refused to believe, on the word of the misanthropic reformer of Geneva, that God had resolved from all eternity to make Adam sin and to precipitate into hell a large majority of his descendants; that Jesus Christ had suffered death only for the benefit of a small number of elect; that grace was irresistible; sanctity inadmissible, and that the most abominable crimes were no obstacle to the salvation of any one who was justified by faith in Christ Jesus!*

It was by this solemn abjuration of liberty of opinion, by this shameless aping of the Catholic system, that Protestantism could resist the influence of the germ of incredulity that it bore in its bosom, and present to the unpractised eye an ap pearance of Christianity.

And since its writers and ministers, blushing at the absurd doctrines of their leaders, and the humiliating servitude which was imposed upon them, have thrown off the yoke of confessions of faith, and proclaimed individualism in religion, what do we see? Is the independence which these personages arrogate to themselves any advantage to the lambs of their flock? What have the Protestant people gained by this emancipation of their religious leaders, where habit or the * See Histoire des Variations, liv. 14.

laws still retain them in a sort of belief? They have gained the singular advantage of believing in the doctrine of the ministers, who have no longer a doctrine, and who declare that they no longer wish to hear it spoken of, in any way. Here are ministers notoriously incredulous, who still employ the Papist weapons of vow and excommunication to retain twenty thousand dupes in a religion which no longer exists.* There is the Lutheran consistory of Stockholm, which, in a petition to the first tribunal of the kingdom, demands the application of the royal ordinances, carrying confiscation of property, privation of all right to succession, and perpetual banishment, against all Swedes who should take it upon themselves to understand the Bible, otherwise than Gustavus Vasa, founder of the Swedish Church.t

If there yet remains any vestige of christian faith in Protestant Churches, it is in those countries where a phantom of the priesthood has retained a shade of authority. There the people still believe, because they hear, faith coming by hearing. Protestants have retained only that proportion of Christianity which they have preserved from Catholicism. Nowhere do they show themselves faithful to the principle of the Reformation, without becoming faithless to Jesus Christ.

It has now been sufficiently proved that the rule of Protes

* The discovery of this extremely curious fact is due to the learned Prelate, who, by his Recherches Historiques sur la veritable origine des Vaudois (Paris, 1836), has just added a beautiful supplement to the invaluable Histoire des Variations. (See Guide du Catechumene Vaudois, &c., by Mgr. Charvaz, Bishop of Pignerol; Paris, 1840; Turin, 1843; tom. i. p. 42; tom. iii. p. 68.

† Most journalists have dated this valuable document of religious toleration in Sweden, Oct. 17, 1843. The criminal who was the object of the persecutions of the consistory, was M. J. D. Wilson, a distinguished artist, recently converted to Catholicism.

Fides ex auditer. (Rom. x. 17.)

tant faith has no foundation in Scripture, in history, in the nature of Christianity, and of the human mind, since she has everything against her, even the conviction and conduct of her advocates. This demonstration will receive new light from what we are about to say touching the rule of Catholic faith.

CHAPTER XX.

CATHOLIC PRINCIPLE.-ITS IMMOVEABLE FOUNDATIONS IN

THE GOSPEL.

Is the rule of Catholic faith founded on Scripture? Does the Bible prove that Jesus Christ has established pastors who must preach his doctrine with a sovereign authority, throughout all the world, till the end of time, and that he has protected them against all serious error in their teaching, by his perpetual presence in the midst of them?

In order to answer this question, it is not necessary to spend much time in turning over the leaves of the Gospels. Let us listen to the farewell words of the divine Master to his apostles. "Go, therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."*

These words have no need of commentary, and all that the controversialists of the Reformation have invented to elude their force, only proves one thing-the commendable desire that Jesus did not say them, or that St. Matthew did not record them.† * 'St. Matth. xxviii. 18, 19, 20.

†The plan of this work excluding discussions of any length, the reader who wishes for more full Scriptural proof, in addition to that