Morris on the Incarnation

Brownson's Quarterly Review, July, 1852

Art. I. - Jesus the Son of Mary, or the Doctrine of the Catholic Church Upon the Incarnation of God the Son, considered in Us Bearings itpon the Reverence shown by Catholics to his Blessed Mother. By the Rev. John Brandk Mohkis, M. A., sometime Petrean Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford; and now one of the Professors at Prior Park.    London: Toovey.    1851.    2 vols.    8vo.

This is a work professedly written to conciliate a cer­tain class of Protestants, and to bring them into the Church by removing the obstacle to their conversion which they are supposed to find in the worship which we pay to the Blessed Mother of God., It attempts to do this by showing that, since Protestants concede that " the Word was made flesh," and that Mary, the Mother of our Lord, " was a good woman," they must concede that this wor­ship is proper; or, in other words, they must concede that this worship is in perfect accordance with the statements of the Fathers, and the definitions of the Church in regard to the Incarnation, and therefore that they cannot reject it as improper without falling into Nestorianism and Pe-lagianism. In working out his design, the author shows ability, zeal, and learning; he brings together valuable ma­terials very much to his purpose, and which must be new and striking to most of his Protestant readers.

With all deference, however, we must be permitted to express some doubts as to the utility of such works. Works, written in a proper spirit, against Protestants, for the purpose of showing them the utter untenableness of any form of Protestantism, cannot be reasonably objected to; but works written for Protestants, for the purpose of vindicating to them particular dogmas or practices of our Church, can hardly be of much use. To Protestants in­dividually, when they manifest a serious, candid, and in­quiring mind, when they show themselves really desirous of knowing and embracing the truth, and perfectly willing to be taught it, we should exhibit all patience, and do our best to answer all their objections, however frivolous; but in our public addresses to Protestants collectively, as a body or aggregation of bodies outside of the Church, it is never well to apologize, in the modern sense, for our relig­ion, or to assume the attitude of defence. Our proper method is always to attack, and compel them to act on the defensive. The party which acts on the defensive only, which suffers itself to be attacked in its lines, and seeks only to prevent them from being broken, in some sense confesses its own weakness, and declares that it has no expectation of conquering and seeks merely to save itself from defeat, which seldom fails to dispirit its own forces and to embolden and invigorate those of the enemy. Whatever apparent advantages Protestants have ever gained in their controversies with Catholics, they have gained by acting on the offensive; by simply throwing out objections, and keeping us busy with refuting them. Once put them on their defence, and compel them to state and defend their own thesis, and you have already vanquished them, for they have no defensible thesis.

There is no Catholic dogma, taken apart from the authority of the Church, that is defensible. Deny or waive the commission of the Church from God to teach, therefore her presence as infallible teacher, and there is nothing that she teaches us of faith that a wise man will undertake either to deny or to defend. To waive that authority, and to descend into the arena to combat with Protestants, is to concede them in the outset all they con­tend for, namely, the possibility of determining what is Christian faith without an infallible church. We can then combat only with arms borrowed from the Scriptures and the Fathers, and if with such arms we combat them successfully, the victory inures to them, not to us. We defeat ourselves by our very success, for our doctrine is, that, without the infallible authority of the Church, Christian faith is not determinable. We can in our controver­sies with Protestants appeal to the Scriptures and to the Fathers only to prove what the Church has always believed and taught as Christian faith ; but unless the Church is already conceded to be infallible in believing and teaching, this does nothing to settle the question as to what really is Christian faith. There are very few Protestants who will be favorably affected by such an argument, for there are very few, if any, who hold themselves bound to be­lieve a doctrine because the Church has always believed and taught it. The great majority of them, at least as we have known them, would regard that as an excellent reason, not for believing, but for disbelieving a doctrine. How often do we find Protestants alleging as a sufficient reason for rejecting a doctrine, that it is a doctrine believed and taught by the Church,- Popish doctrine!

Protestantism is not merely a protest against this or that Catholic doctrine, but primarily and essentially against all church authority, - against believing any thing because the Catholic or  any other body called  a church believes and teaches it.    The best method of dealing with it is, in our judgment, not to  stand  up   and ward off its blows, but to summon it to the bar and compel it to answer for itself.    It is of little use to define and defend our particu­lar doctrines against it; we should rather compel it to de­fine and defend the doctrines it professes to oppose to us. Let our controversialists with one accord, resolutely and perseveringly, attack Protestantism in its principle, or want of principle, and show that it  has no positive character, nothing but negation,  nothing positive to oppose to the authority it denies, for a dozen years or so, and very few Protestants would be found to pay it the least reverence. They would themselves  be forced to see that Protestant­ism has in reality no  principle, no bottom, and nothing but sheer negation, which is sheer falsehood, to oppose to Catholic faith.    It is really nothing but negation, and what passes for its principle is really nothing but the denial of all principle.    It is a mere system  of negations,  leading to universal  negation, that is, universal falsehood.    We ordinarily treat it - not Protestants, but Protestantism-. with quite too much tenderness and respect.    In itself it is absolutely nothing, and is intelligible only by the truth it denies.    J't has no being in itself, no substantive existence of its own, and consequently, the moment that it is thrown back upon itself, and compelled to maintain for itself an affirmative existence, it fails, melts into thin air, and vanishes in vacuity.

Take any so-called Protestant doctrine you please, ana­lyze it, and you will find that it consists of two parts, one affirmative, the other negative. The affirmative part will in all cases be found to be, as far as it goes, the Catholic doc­trine,-.what the Church believes and teaches, and always has believed and taught. Take, as an instance, the doc­trine of justification by faith alone. If there is any doc­trine which can be called Protestant, it is this. But this doctrine is affirmative and negative. Its affirmative part is justification by faith; but this is Catholic doctrine, not Protestant. It is, and always has been, the doctrine of the Church, and is hers as much as is any other doctrine. The distinctively Protestant element is expressed, not in the words justification by faith, but in the little word "alone," which Luther added in his version of the Scrip­tures. This little word is strictly negative, and serves only to deny the necessity of good works to justification, that is, the necessity of intrinsic justice to justification, as the Church teaches. As God is a God of strict justice and infinite veracity, and cannot declare, pronounce, or repute one just who is not just, it follows that without intrinsic justice there is and can be no justification, and therefore the Protestant opposes to the doctrine of the necessity of intrinsic justice, not something positive, not a substantive doctrine, but a sheer denial, that is, sheer false­hood. The same conclusion may be obtained by analysis in the case of all the so-called Protestant doctrines. What they have that is positive or affirmative is Catholic doc­trine, and therefore not distinctively Protestant; what they have that is distinctively Protestant is purely negative, and therefore false.

We must bear in mind, that of contradictories one is always necessarily false, and the other necessarily true, for truth can never contradict truth, nor falsehood contra­dict falsehood. Truth is always in being, and all being is true ; falsehood is in not-being, and all not-being is false. All false assertion is in asserting that not-being is being, or that being is not-being. If to the Catholic faith there is and can  be opposed  nothing but simple  denial, the truth of that faith and the falsity of the denial, or simple negation opposed to it, follow necessarily. If, then, Prot­estant ism as the contradictory of Catholicity be proved to be purely negative in its character, it is proved by that alone to be false, and Catholicity is proved to be true. The Protestant by simply denying Catholicity has not therefore done enough to put the Church on her defence. He has as yet done nothing to his purpose, and before she can be required even to plead to his allegations, he must oppose to her some affirmative doctrine, some truth, which he has, but which she denies.

Now what we contend is, that our Catholic controver­sialists should waive all direct defence of Catholicity, and compel the Protestant to state and define this affirmative doctrine, this truth, which he thinks he has to oppose to her teaching. We insist on this, because it is a fact well known, infallibly known, by every Catholic, that the Prot­estant has, and can have, no such doctrine, no such truth, - that he has, and can have, only pure negation. He sus­tains himself now by attacking us on the strength of some fragments of Christian doctrine which he has stolen from the Church. When he is let alone he denies, and denies only ; when hard pressed, he defends himself by abandon­ing his distinctive Protestantism, and resorting to these fragments of Catholicity. We must deprive him of this subterfuge, by showing that these fragments are not his, that the truth of which they are fragments is held by the Church in its unity and integrity, and that he must confine himself to his denials. The moment we force him so to con­fine himself, his aggressive power is gone, and he has more than he can do to take care of himself. He is then forced to comprehend that the positive elements on which he has been accustomed to rely, and which have served to keep him in countenance with himself, are not his, and that he as a Protestant has never had any right to claim them. He will then understand that, reduced to his distinctive Protestantism, he is reduced to pure negation, which is only another name for pure falsehood, and then that he must either escape to the Church, or sink into universal nihilism.

Every body knows that Protestants never state and de­fend any thesis of their own against us. Their method is to attack every thing and to defend nothing.    They throw out their objections without any inquiry, not only whether they are really objections to the Church, if sustained, but whether the principles which they must imply, if urged at all, are or are not sound. Nothing is more common with them than to urge contradictory objections, or to object to the Church for reasons which mutually destroy one an­other. The objections they usually urge, if objections, are so only by virtue of a principle from the logical conse­quences of which they would themselves recoil with hardly less horror than we. Now, what we ask is, that our con­troversialists, instead of laboring to prove that the objec­tions urged do not lie against the Church, should attack these objections themselves, and show Protestants what it really is they must maintain, if they persist in urging them. At first, Protestants will pay no heed to what we tell them ; they will continue for some time their old course, and reply to us only by a few sneers, a little personal abuse, or silly anecdotes against a pope, a cardinal, or an individual Catholic. No matter. If we keep on, if we persevere unitedly in carrying the war into their country and attacking them in their camp, they will soon be obliged to heed us, if they would not lose all their follow­ers, and be forced to engage in earnest in the work of de­fending themselves. This is all that we want, for the mo­ment we can compel them to act on the defensive, we have vanquished them.

Mr. Morris understands this, and to some extent acts on it. He aims to refute the Protestant objections to the worship we pay to Our Lady, by showing what they imply, and what would be the consequences of admitting them. This is very well as far as it goes ; but in the first place, it is objections to a particular Catholic doctrine or Catholic practice that he analyzes and refutes, not objections to the authority of the Church, without which we could not our­selves defend the doctrine or practice objected to; and in the second place, the consequences which he shows must follow from admitting the objections urged are such as most Protestants can very easily accept, and from which very few except Catholics recoil. To show to a Catholic that the worship he pays to the Blessed Mother of God is in perfect harmony with the doctrine of the Incarnation, as set forth by the Fathers and defined by the early Coun­cils, and that to deny its propriety is to fall into Nestorianism and Pelagianism, is enough, all that can be neces­sary in his case; but it is just nothing at all to the great body of Protestants, or if something, it is only a good rea­son to them  for being Nestorians and Pelagians.    Who among Protestants are to-day any thing but Nestorians and Pelagians ?    Who is there to recoil from Nestorian-ism because it denies the Incarnation, or from denying the Incarnation because to deny it is to deny grace and to fall into Pelagianism?    The author assumes too much when he assumes that Protestants hold that; " the Word  was made flesh."    Some of them profess thus much, but very few of them hold it with sufficient firmness to feel them­selves bound by any logical inference you can draw from it, while the immense majority of them do not even hold it in words, and glory in denying it.     We are acquainted with no  Protestants who rise   above  Ncstorianism, and Pelagianism is the grand heresy of the age.    All Protes­tants who are not Maniclneans are Pelagians.    It is of no use to appeal to the symbols and formulas of the Protes­tant sects, for these are no longer believed, and are kept only for the purposes of controversy.    There may be a few thousands of  individual.  Protestants  in  Germany,  Great Britain, and the United States who really intend to believe the doctrine of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation as held by the Church in the early ages, and who would con­sider it a sufficient reason for rejecting a doctrine that it evidently contradicted them ; but the great mass, whether they know it or not, are ingrained unbelievers, and can be convinced by no ratio theologica, no theological reason, or arguments drawn from the analogies of faith.

Mr. Morris is unquestionably an able and learned man, but he was a Traetarian, and in spite of himself he judges Protestants generally by what he found to be true of the Tractarians. He may, perhaps, be disposed to retort upon us that we were Unitarian, and judge the Protestant world by what we found to be true of Unitarians. But we were Presbyterian and well acqainted with Anglicanism before we became Unitarian. Moreover, when we were a Uni­tarian our principal study was of the non-Unitarian sects. The Unitarians with whom we associated were not a mere clique with a peculiar language and profession of their own, living and conversing only among themselves, and hardly deigning to notice any thing occurring out of their own " set." In this they differed essentially from the Tractarians. These were a clique in the bosom of the Establishment, living, to a great extent, solely among themselves, with very little intercourse with any but per­sons of their own stamp. They all had the same mark, and it was as easy at a glance to say of one of them, He is a Puseyite, as it is to say of this man, He is a Quaker, or of that man, He is a Methodist minister, or a Presbyterian parson. Even when converted and received into the communion of the Church, nay, when carried through a course of theology and raised to the priesthood, the Pnsey-ite is as unmistakable as before. No man of the least discernment could mistake the production of a converted Tractarian for that of one who had been brought up a Catholic from his childhood. At every page the peculiar habit of thought and mode of expression of the " set " are apparent. Besides, you have but to look into the natural heart, abroad upon the Protestant world, and to observe the tendencies of the Protestant mind everywhere, to find conclusive proof that our judgment, by whatever it may have been influenced, is far more conformable to fact than that of the converted Tractarians. It is far more unfavor­able, we grant; but whoever considers the nature, tenden­cies, and effects of heresy will for that very reason con­clude that it is the more likely to be the true judgment. In judging the Catholic world our rule is, The more favor­able, the truer the judgment; in judging the uncatholic it is, The more unfavorable, the truer the judgment. The presumption is always in favor of the Catholic, and we can believe no evil of him till it is proved ; on the other hand, the presumption is always against the heretic, and we can believe no good of him till it is proved. We require proof to believe evil of a Catholic, or to believe good of a heretic. The most favorable construction must be presumed to be the true one in case of the former, the least favorable the true one in case of the latter.

The Tractarians, in the judgment of Protestants, are virtually Papists, and Father Newman has proved, in his own inimitable way, and by a perfectly legitimate applica­tion of his doctrine of development, that Tractarianism is repugnant to genuine Anglicanism, and, we may add, then a fortiori to all other forms of Protestantism. It will not do, then, to take Tractarians as in any sense the representatives of the Protestant world. They represent nobody but themselves, and are merely Protestants struggling to get out of Protestantism into Catholicity, without disown­ing the Anglican Establishment or going to Home. They have much in them that we like, but, logically considered, they can command no respect. They are neither fish nor flesh, nor yet good red herring. They are nice men, but shockingly bad logicians. In the general movements of our age they are a fact, but a fact of no great significance, and becoming less and less significant every day. The Westminster lievieio, under its new management, is a far better index to the tendencies of the Protestant mind even in England than The Christian Remembrancer, and The Weekly Despatch than The Guardian. Divine grace may be operating in this or that locality in an extraordinary way for the conversion of Protestants, but the Protestant world, as such, pursues its natural course towards the de­nial of all Christian doctrine, and therefore of all truth. Nothing is more evident than this to every one who has looked out from his own clique, and accustomed himself to take broad and continental, instead of narrow and insu­lar views. England is not all the world, nor are converted and unconverted Tractarians all England. If the author could, to use his own favorite word, - which, as he and his school use it, we detest, - realize this, he would write a work much better adapted to the state of men's minds than is the very elaborate; treatise before us.

Even under a purely literary and logical point of view, we are far from being able to commend the author's learned volumes as warmly as we could wish. It is un­pleasant to have to find fault with every work that comes to us from a converted Puseyite. We exce.edingly regret it. We wish some of the school would write and publish a work strictly Catholic in thought and expression, so that we could prove to them that we have no personal dislike to them, and are as willing to commend the true and the good coming from them as from any other source. We do not like the attitude we have been obliged to assume towards them ; but it is not our fault. These gentlemen were a clique, a peculiar school, before their conversion, and, unhappily, they remain so since, though no doubt un­intentionally, and without suspecting it. The only differ­ence we can detect in mental and moral characteristics between a converted and an unconverted Puseyite is, that the former believes a little more, and the latter a little less. We have just read a pleasant, though not a very able work, entitled, A Tour in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, fyc, by James Laird Patterson. The author commenced his travels as a Puseyite, but had the happiness to be convert­ed in Holy Week at Jerusalem, where he was reconciled to the Church. According to his account, he was con­ditionally baptized, and afterwards read his abjuration of Protestantism. Here it is the custom, we believe, for the convert to read his abjuration before receiving the Sacrament, - to put off Protestantism before being clothed upon with Catholicity. But it has struck us that the ac­count given by Mr. Patterson is significant, and may ex­plain many things which have puzzled us in the converted Tractarians, especially of the development school. They appear not to have been required to abjure their heresies before being reconciled to the Church ; at least, they seem never to have comprehended that such a requirement was made, or at all necessary, in their case.

It would seem from all that we can learn respecting them, that these excellent converts never came to the Church because oppressed with the burden of sin, - be­cause they wished to have quenched the flames of hell already kindled in their bosoms. They were not children of wrath as others, but were already good pious Christians in a degree, and needed not to have the Christian life be­gotten in them, but helps, which they could not find in the Anglican Establishment, to live that life in its perfection. They came to the Church, not to obtain sanctity, for that they already possessed, but to attain to heroic sanctity, the sanctity of canonized saints, which they became convinced that they could not have outside of the Roman Catholic Church. They had nothing to put off, no old life to reject, to anathematize, for the life they had lived was, as far as it went, the true Christian life, and what they wanted was something more than they already had, - not something radically different. Here, we apprehend, is the source of whatever misunderstanding there is between them and us. They retain their belief in the sanctity of the life they lived in the Establishment, and look upon conversion, at least in their case, as a putting on of Catholicity with­out any putting off of Puseyism, and their Catholic life as a continuation of their Puseyite life under circumstancea and conditions far more favorable to its development and growth. If they had been forced, as we were, to feel that we must come to the Church that we might have life, not merely that we might have it more abundantly, and that conversion and reception into the bosom of the Church were the commencement, not merely the continuation, of the Christian life, we suppose we should have found little in them with which we could not have sympathized. They would then have distrusted their past life, intellectu­ally as well as morally, and would have set themselves to learn as little children. They would have relied on none of their past historical reading or patristic learning, nor paraded it before us till they had reviewed it in the light of Catholic faith and theology. They would then have disturbed us with no novel speculations, and insisted upon no novel theories for the explanation of facts which have no existence out of the darkened understandings of heretics.

We have no wish to disparage in any respect whatever the merits of the illustrious author, to whose ability, learn­ing, zeal, and piety we pay a willing tribute ; but he seems to us to lack artistic taste, scientific method, and sound didactics. He is deficient in grasp and vigor of thought, in clearness and force of expression. His work has, properly speaking, no beginning, middle, or end, and he himself tells us that we may begin to read either with the first or the second part, as we choose. He has brought together a rich mass of materials, collected with great pains and labor, but he has not melted them down, and cast them into a uniform and consistent whole. His style is dry, hard, in­volved, and obscure. Without being verbose, it is need­lessly diffuse, accumulating proofs, which do nothing to strengthen each other, on points where very little proof is required, and leaving the points most in need of proof un-sustained by a single authority, - overloading with com­mentaries points which were originally clear and certain, and passing over with scarcely a remark those which were doubtful and in need of being elucidated. Indeed, we are at a loss to understand the author's state of mind, or to form any conception of the class of persons for whom he writes. He fails from first to last to win our confidence in his own judgment, and he very seldom enables us to determine the principle on which it rests, or the relation of that principle to the well-known principles of Catholic faith and theology. For the most part, his conclusions, we presume, are orthodox; but we feel very often that the processes by which he obtains them are exceedingly heterodox. His mental tastes and habits, his style and manner of writing, are to a great extent Protestant, or those of a man to whom truth has been presented piecemeal. He does not march straight to the heart of his subject, and lay open its central principle, from which all that appertains to it may be ex­plained in its unity and real order. He proceeds, even when his intention is the reverse, from facts to principles, from particulars to universals, from multiplicity to unity, in the true Protestant style. He does not appear to have learned that principles are before facts, the universal or general, the generic, before the particular, and unity before multiplicity, or that, if the general is never obtainable without the particular, it is never obtainable from the par­ticular ; that unity is no induction from multiplicity, ontol­ogy from pyschology, nor principles from facts. Hence he is seldom, if ever, truly logical. The Catholic has truth as a whole, in its unity and integrity, and therefore his method is to descend from the general to the particular, from unity to multiplicity, from principles to facts, and therefore a strictly logical method. He, when faithful to his privi­leges, borrows his light from the Creator, not the creature, enlightens facts by principles, not principles by facts, and particulars by the general, without which they are unintel­ligible, not the general by particulars. But the Protestant, having at best only some faint and broken reflections of truth, can only proceed by way of induction, which never leads to the truth, but the farther from it. And hence it is that Protestants, whatever their learning and ability, are always illogical and sophistical.

Logic, as an art, is the intellectual application of princi­ples, and is determined, not by the human mind itself, but by the real or intelligible order which exists and operates independently of the human mind. Its office is not to dis­cover principles, but to apply them ; not to invent truth, but to demonstrate it. It always presupposes the mind that is to use it is already in possession of the principles to be ap­plied, or of the truth to be demonstrated or proved. Truth is being, or that which is or exists independently of the perceiving or reasoning mind, and principles are simply the ontological truth, either originally or by participation. Logic, therefore, depends on the real order, as much as does intuition itself, and consequently must proceed from, not to, the ontological truth or principle. It is then and must be deductive, and consequently all induction, not resolvable into deduction, is illogical, a mere sophistry. The peculiar Protestant philosophy, it is confessed on all hands, is the inductive, or, as it is sometimes called, the Baconian phi­losophy. This philosophy starts avowedly with the as­sumption that the general, the universal in the language of the Schoolmen, or, as we may say, the principle, is un­known, and that nothing is immediately apprehended by the mind but particulars, or simple facts. Its pretence is to rise from facts to the principle, from particulars to the general, from multiplicity to unity, from pscyehology to ontology, from man and the universe to God. But as the essence of logic is the application of principles to facts, not of facts to principles, &c, thus imitating in its own order, faintly, very faintly assuredly, the creative act of God by which he produces existences from nothing, (for facts with­out principles, particulars without the general, are unin­telligible, and to the mind as if they were not,) it follows of necessity that no inductive philosopher is or can be a good logician, and if he ever reasons logically at all, it is only on condition of reasoning illogically. If a Protestant is ever logical, it is only by denying while he affirms his own system, which is supremely illogical.

Now it seems to us that the learned author has not suf­ficiently distrusted his Oxford logic, which has for its basis the inductive philosophy. There is no doubt, that, to most of us who are converts from Protestantism, the truth has been presented, as he says, " piecemeal," and that we came to it in its unity and integrity only by successive steps, or rather by successive illuminations. This has been owing in part to the disadvantage of our position and training. But when a Protestant has once been really converted, he is inexcusable if he then finds it necessary to continue the Protestant method. His Protestant method never brought him to the Church; he was brought in spite of that method, by the power of Divine grace, his will co­operating therewith, and, so far as reasoning entered for any thing into the process, by his unconsciously in some cases, consciously in others, adopting and pursuing the Catholic method. Moreover, once converted and instructed in his faith, he has the truth in its unity and integrity. He can now seize it in its central principle, see the universe, natural and supernatural, from the point of view of its Creator, and descend from God to creature. He holds, so to speak, in his hand the principle of all things, from which all facts, all particular questions, are solvable. To proceed now as an inductive philosopher, as a Protestant who has truth only as reflected in faint and broken rays from the creature, is to forego his high privilege as a Catholic, and to derive, as to his manner or mode of thinking and writing, no advantage from his conversion. This is, as it seems to us, the precise case with our author. His conversion ap­pears to have been a putting on of Catholicity without a putting oft' of Protestantism, or the grafting of certain Catholic truths into his Oxfordism. Hence he attempts to explain and vindicate Catholicity by Oxford logic and philosophy. All this was natural, considering that the con­verts of his school regarded their Oxford life as sinning only by defect, as faulty only in respect to what it lacked, not in respect to any thing it professed to have. Still, if the author had reviewed his Oxford logic and philosophy, and freed himself from their trammels, we should not have had occasion to accuse him, as we have done, of lacking grasp and vigor of thought, clearness and force of expres­sion. If on becoming a Catholic he had taken the pains to adjust his philosophy to the ontology of the Catechism, he would have given us no occasion to complain of the diftuseness and obscurity of his work; and he would have compressed it within a third of its present dimensions, and made it far more complete, intelligible, and conclusive. As the case now stands, we are often at a loss to determine what he really means, and as we see he has an unsound philosophy, we dare not rely on his judgment, when we can determine his meaning, unless we can justify it from other sources. Whether it be Catholic or not, he gives us no means of knowing, for he does not connect the principle on which it rests with, or show its relation to, the well-known principles of Catholic faith and theology, although this is precisely what he proposes to do, and would have done, if he had followed Catholic instead of Protestant logic.
The author divides his work into three parts. In the first part he labors to prove, from the admission that "the Word was made flesh," that our Lord was perfect God and perfect man, and therefore wo can predicate of him in his human nature all that we can predicate of a perfect man, - or of any man, sin excepted. In his human nature, he has the proper faculties, affections, and duties of humanity, and therefore owed to his 'Virgin Mother submission, the love and obedience due from a son to his mother. All this is true, and the author has admirably developed and proved it. In this respect we can warmly commend his work. In his second part, he undertakes to prove from the admis­sion which Protestants must make, that " Mary was a good woman," that our Lord, from the first moment of his conception in her womb, enriched her with all communi­cable graces, and especially with full and complete knowl­edge of his own person and character, and of the whole mystery of redemption. Now, as Mary was at the least a good woman, she would naturally wish to know what manner of child it was that the angel had announced should be born of her, and which was conceived by the Holy Ghost in her womb. This wish would be known to the child as soon as formed, for all knowledge was infused into his human soul, by virtue of the hypostatic union, from the moment of conception. He knew the wish as soon as formed, and could comply with it, for he had all power. Thus as a dutiful and loving son he was bound to do so, and of course did do so. But, it may be said that he owed a duty to his Father as well as to his Mother, and it may not have been the will of God, his Father, that he should have communicated this knowledge to his Mother so soon and at once. Very true, it may have been ,so, but it is for you to prove that it was so. Therefore it was not so, and therefore he did communicate it! (Vol. I. pp. 352, 353.) This is a tolerably fair specimen of the author's logic, when he is not assisted by the Catholic author he chances to cite. There are many things very proper in pious medi­tation, which are, nevertheless, of no value as arguments, and which are very unsuitable to be proposed to those who are without; for some things may be very edifying to the pious believer, that are by no means convincing to the unbeliever. We say nothing of the conclusion at which the author arrives, for we do not know what is the current teaching of our divines on the subject. We have had, in the little time we have been in the Church, as much as we could do to learn what is of faith, without making our­selves acquainted with all the remote consequences which theologians have drawn from admitted theological princi­ples. We know that Our Lady had the grace of humility, and that if it was the will of God that she should for a time remain in ignorance of some things pertaining to the mystery of redemption, or the person and character of her Son, which we can conceive might have been the case, she would have had no wish to be enriched all at once with the knowledge supposed, for she had no will not in ac­cordance with the Divine will. We must, then, know by positive revelation what was the will of God in the prem­ises, before we can conclude any thing as certain on the subject, one way or the other. Consequently, to us, the whole fabric of doctrine which the author has constructed on the supposed Protestant admission that " Mary was a good woman," even if true, has no solid foundation in any thing he has advanced. We do not, let it be understood, dispute his conclusions ; we only question the process by which he professes to obtain them.

The author starts with a false principle, namely, that moral evidence can never give certainty, or any thing more than probability. The certainty of the believer, he sup­poses, is due not to evidence at all, but solely to the gift of faith, donum fidei, received in the Sacrament of Baptism. But the gift of faith adds nothing to the objective certainty, or the certainty of the matter of faith. What it gives is subjective certainty. It gives us a clearer view and a stronger hold of the objective certainty, but does not create or in any manner affect that certainty in itself. It consists in a supernatural illustration of the understanding, and a supernatural inclination of the will; but for this very rea­son it gives us a supernatural facility, not only to believe the truth proposed, but also to detect error and uncertainty, and consequently, instead of facilitating our belief of what is not objectively certain, or what is merely probable, it renders it all the more difficult for us to believe it; and hence, of all people in the world, Catholics are the least credulous. To deny all objective certainty, or to allow only an objective probability, is simply to declare all faith, except as an infused habit, absolutely impossible.    Overlooking this fact, denying all objective certainty, the author does not even aim in his logic to establish the objective certainty of his conclusions, and appears to suppose that he has done all that can be required of him when he has rendered it probable that they are not improbable, or in­credible. He concludes a posse ad esse, and seldom asks any thing better than tho argument, de congruo, - and what is worse, he contends that we can have nothing bet­ter. This proceeds from his false philosophy. He and his school are genuine psychologists. They do not, per­haps, intend to deny all objective truth; but they all con­tend that the form under which it is apprehended depends on the human mind itself, and that the truth apprehended by us would appear very different, if our minds were dif­ferently constituted, as we may suppose it actually does to superior beings. If this be so, there can be no objective certainty, and then no demonstration, and no absolute proof, moral or metaphysical, as has been shown over and over again by those who have so fully refuted the Kantian philosophy, whether as taught by Kant himself, or as modified by Coleridge, the metaphysician of the Tracta-rian school. The doctrine refutes itself; for if the nexus between the premises and the conclusion be not necessary, there is no objective certainty; and if no objective cer­tainty, how can you aflirm litness or congruity, or even probability? But if there is, why start with the assump­tion that there is not, and that the form of the object de­pends, either in whole or in part, on the subject? No doubt some Catliolics have been trained up psychologists, which we regard as their misfortune, but no Catholic is ever a psychologist in his theology. Truth is properly de­fined by St. Augustine to be being, that which really is or exists, and either we are unintelligent beings, or we appre­hend it, as far as we apprehend it at all, as it is or exists independent on our minds; for it. is of the essence of intel­lect to apprehend truth, as St. Thomas himself teaches, in teaching that truth is the object of the intellect, as good is the object of the will. Superior beings see farther than we do, and know truths that we do not; but truth, as far as we see and know it, wears to us the same form that it does to them. We regret, therefore, that the author has retained his Oxford logic and metaphysics. It is not well to set out by denying in principle all objective certainty, then to proceed to prove a thing, for aught we know, may be, and thence to conclude that it is fit to be, and if fit to be therefore it is, and may be taken as the principle from which Catholic doctrine may be concluded or vindicated. The fabries we thus erect are simply castles in the air.

The author, we are sorry to see, is not careful to mark the distinction between opinions in the Church and the opinions of the Church. He places the opinions in the Church, which he is not forbidden to hold, on the same line with doctrines of the Church, which he is not permit­ted to deny, and concludes indifferently from either, what is to be received as " the mind of the Clmvch." This is inexcusable. He has the right, when contrary opinions are held by respectable theologians, to adopt which opinion he chooses ; but he can hold it only as an opinion, not as faith. Where there are contrary opinions, both of which it is lawful to hold, cither may be held as an opinion, but neither can be held as Catholic doctrine, or as a principle from which positive arguments in defence of Catholic doc­trine may be drawn; lor the opinion that could be so taken it would not be lawful to dispute. It would in fact cease to be opinion, and become faith. The- author must remember that he is avowedly writing for .Protestants, and in his arguments with Protestants for Catholicity he can­not conclude from what are mere opinions amongst our own theologians. lie may refer to these opinions for the purpose of warding oil' Protestant objections, but he cannot make them the basis of an argument to prove that a given doctrine is Catholic doctrine, and ought to be believed as such. Among the loca theolotfica, or theological topics, we do not recollect ever to have seen opinions in the Church enumerated. We do not say that the opinion of the author is not generally the sounder opinion, but we do say that he often treats opinion as if it were faith, and erects on it a fabric which he will find very apt to-excite the derision or the blasphemy of those for whom he pro­fesses to write. We hold the worship which we pay to Our Blessed Lady too sacred and too tender to be exposed, as the author exposes it, to the rude scoffs of an unbeliev­ing world, and we think that, if he chose to defend it at all, he should have done so with more reserve, or at least with arguments, and from principles, which are able to stand the test of the most rigid logical criticism, not with principles which are perhaps questionable, and arguments which are at best ridiculous.

We are told (Vol. 1. p. H) that the first two sections of the work "may be said to belittle more than an expansion of meditations, which mainly contributed to the author's own conversion." This is obvious enough on their very face, and no doubt accounts for much in them of which we are obliged to complain. As the meditations of an Angli­can, working his way to the light, of which he catches par­tial glimpses from afar, whose rays now and then reach and cheer him with their wavmth and brightness, and render visible without dissipating the darkness which surrounds him, they are most admirable, and not unworthy of being studied. But why publish them, with all their necessary crudeness and inaccuracies? Why not correct them by subsequent Catholic study and experience? In them we see too plainly Hie Oxford student, who has as yet no clear and distinct perception of the truth, stumbling over diiliculties which a more thorough knowledge of Catholic theology would prove to be no dilliculties at all. The author appears here with all his Ox lord prejudices, with full confidence in his Oxford historical and patristic read­ing, and that lofty contempt which Oxford students always affect for the learning and judgment of Catholics. He disparages the edition of the Fathers by the learned Bene­dictines of St. Maur, and seems never to have thought it possible for a Catholic divine, not a graduate of a Protes­tant university, to instruct him, or in any manner to aid him in his researches after truth. Even the Angel of the Schools is too common an authority among Catholic stu­dents to command his respect. If he consults a Catholic author it must be an ancient Father whose sense is uncer­tain, or a modern doctor whose language is not always clear and delinite, or whose speculations do not enter into the current theology of the Church. All this is perfectly natural in an Anglican in the process of his conversion to Catholicity, but we must be pardoned lor saying, that it is not precisely what we look lor in a professor in a Catholic college.

The author makes a great display of learning. He amends the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and the Greek of the New, with wonderful facility, if not felicity, - cor­rects the text of a Father wherever the received reading does not happen to be to his purpose, and settles the gen­uineness or spuriousness of works uttribated to ancient authors, without the least hesitation, deciding against all Christian antiquity without the slightest misgiving. He gives up arguments and historical readings, on which the ablest of our divines have uniformly insisted, and does it not to win the confidence of Protestants, but to save Catholics from the reproach of ignorance and credulity, or then- criticism from the derision of their learned adversa­ries. Now in all this, for aught we know, he may be right. We are not learned enough to pass judgment on the solid­ity and accuracy of his learning. But the lofty airs he assumes, and his low appreciation of all Catholic intelli­gence and scholarship are not precisely litted to win our confidence. It would be well for us who arc converts to learn what Catholics really know, before we take it upon us to treat them as mere sciolists and pious fools, or for granted that we have brought into the Church an invalu­able treasure in our Protestant cultivation and learning. The Church, perhaps, could have contrived, with the bless­ing of God, to get along without us, much better than we without her. After all, we brought her nothing to boast of, nothing but our sins, our ignorance, and our inlirmities. Our conversion is not likely to create a new epoch in her history. And for us to suppose that we can throw new light on the sacred mysteries, and clear up in a new and more satisfactory way the abstruse points of theology which Catholic theologians have not yet settled, would, were it not presumptuous, be simply ridiculous. We ought to consider ourselves as knowing nothing except what we have learned since our reconciliation to the Church, at the feet of her teachers and pastors.

For ourselves, we confide in no judgments we formed prior to our conversion, and trust no historical or patristic reading we had then made, save so far us we have since reviewed it in the light of Catholic faith and theology. We have felt it necessary to learn all anew under the di­rection of Catholic teachers, who happen never to have been schismatics or heretics, and whom we have found abundantly able to instruct us in every branch of science and erudition. We know no reason why this should have been more necessary in the case of a converted Unitarian, than in that of a converted Puseyite.    Indeed, it strikes us as loss necessary, because the line of demarcation between Unitarianism and Catholicity is so broad and distinct, that no  one of  ordinary  discernment   can   mistake   it;   while Puseyism runs so near to Catholicity on so many points, so successfully counterfeits  Catholic doctrines and practices, that, if we are not on our guard, we may easily mistake the one for the other.    Human nature in the absence of Sa­tanic temptation can go far, and with Satanic aid may go much farther, in counterfeiting Catholic faith and sanctity, and it is not always easy to distinguish the asceticism of the Stoic, which springs from pride, from the asceticism of the Christian, which springs from humility, or the sanctity of Littlemore, for instance, so praised by Father Dominie, from the supernatural sanctity of the Catholic.    It requires an extraordinary grace to be a diseerner of spirits.    The same counterfeit is often effected in doctrine, and the re­semblance of the counterfeit to the genuine is often  so close, as to be most diflieult even for well-informed persons to detect.    The Oxford converts themselves were deceived, for the   sanctity which  they believed  they  possessed,  of which they were accustomed to boast, and to which for a long time they referred as a full justification of their re­maining in  the Anglican Establishment, they  held  to be true Christian  sanctity, when  in reality it was  no more Christian sanctity than is that exhibited by some Moravi­ans, Methodists, and Quakers, or even some of the ancient or modern   Pagans.    The closer the resemblance of one's life to Catholicity before, the more liable is he to err after, his conversion ; and the farther removed one's heresy from orthodoxy before   his  conversion,  the less liable is he to retain it afterwards.    The Tractarian  converts, from the peculiarity of  their doctrine   and practice  prior to their reconciliation to the Church, are, of all classes of English and American converts, precisely those who are the most likely to originate a new heresy among us, or to fail to ap­prehend and maintain Catholic doctrine in its integrity. Their writings must always be read with the presumption against them.    Therefore, of all should they be the most careful to rely in nothing on their past life, save as they review it in the light of what they have learned since their conversion, not under instructors who, like themselves, are but recent converts, of their own class, but under such as have been Catholics from their youth.   These hints and suggestions may not bo called for, and our impression with regard to the Tractarian converts may be wholly unau­thorized ; but we fear that what we have said, ungracious as it may seem, is not misplaced or mistimed. We sin­cerely wish, therefore, that, instead of giving us the med­itations which mainly contributed to his own conversion, the author had given us meditations and. arguments that originated in his Catholic faith and study, and therefore such as ought to convince those without of the truth of Catholicity. lie would then have written, not as a con­vert from Puseyism, but as a Catholic.

Our limits do not permit us to give a full, analysis of the author's work. The great body of his work is undoubt­edly Catholic, sound, and really meritorious, lint aside from the faults we have already found with its style, logic, and philosophy, and aside from the fault we shall soon have to find with the theory on which it is confessedly written, there are one or two points on which the author, in his direct teaching, is undeniably heterodox. In his table of contents we find this startling proposition : " Kven fatalism would nob exempt from moral responsibility." Here is his illustration and proof of it: -

" It has been shown by Butler, in bis admirable Analogy, that, if the opinion of a necessity or fato could be proved, it would do little to influence practice with any reasonable man. Whatever excuse can be made for the man who murders, or the child who steals upon the score of necessity, will also serve as an excuse for the magistrate who executes the one, or the parent who punishes the latter. And this among other considerations shows, that however intoxicated with fatalism men might be at the first draught of it, still after a while men would be treated as if they were i'veo, and forced against themselves to believe it. The very words for ' fate ' imply a speaker or distributor who made the fiitum to exist. Now if it be true that that fatalism whieli puts this reflection out of sight would leave moral obligations whore they are, then predes-tinarianism itself would not destroy them, the Catholic doctrine of predestination far less." - Vol. I. p. 119.

This is wretched sophistry, as well as bad theology. Butler is no great authority with us, but as cited by the author he does not attempt to prove that fatalism is com­patible with moral responsibility; ho simply contends that men, if they held it, would be practically obliged to act as if they held it not, and to distribute rewards and punish merits as they do now,- a mere truism. He does not assert, and far less does he prove, that, if fatalism were true, they would be morally responsible agents, and there­fore subjects of moral praise and blame. Because men would do as they do now in their practical conduct, through an irresistible fate, even assuming fate to be the decree of God, it would not follow that predesfinarianism itself would not take away moral responsibility. Fate, whether taken in the old heathen sense, or as the author explains it, stands opposed to free will; and does the author mean to say that without free will we should or could be morally responsible ? Predestination, in the Calvinistic sense, is repugnant, and always held by Catholic divines to be repugnant, to moral responsibility, because it destroys free will. It is simple fate, and renders its author, or he who spoke the /alum, the real actor in all the acts of man. And hence Calvin ma Ices Cod the author of sin. Predesti­nation, in the Catholic sense, does not take away moral responsibility, most assuredly, simply because it does not take away free will; because it is not fate, or a predestina­tion that executes itself without the free concurrence of the will of the predestinated, that is, the free concurrence of a will intrinsically free not to have concurred. How predes­tination, which is certain and infallible, can coexist with the freedom of the will, is a mystery which human reason can­not explain. But if the word fate has any meaning in our language, it denies free will, and if there is any thing certain in theology or philosophy, it is that the denial of free will is the denial of all moral obligation, of all merit and all demerit. It is therefore false, and, reference had to the definitions of the Church condemning Calvinism and Jansenism, even heretical, to say that "even fatalism would not exempt from moral responsibility." The au­thor, in his whole chapter on predestination, from which we have taken the passage cited above, seems to us either to use language very loosely, or else to be writing on a subject which he has by no means mastered. We can gather very little that is delinite from what he says. This, however, may be owing to our own ignorance and dulness of apprehension.

But here is another passage which, with all respect, we would recommend to the notice of his Eminence, Cardinal Wiseman, to whom these volumes are dedicated by the author: -
" Now suppose a state of things in which it was an acknowl­edged principle, not only that Christ did everything as an example to us, but also that it was a clear case that he on several occasions disguised  his  real  meaning, though  he  knew people  in general would draw a conclusion from his words just the opposite of that meaning. If this was the state of things in which the Fathers lived, it is plain that they might treat heretics as our Lord did the impertinent thoughts of his disciples, when he answered them by this wise but evasive climax. [St. Mark xiii. 82.] ilcnee it is clear, that if a number of passages can be quoted from the Fathers, in which the ignorance is ascribed to Christ's human nature without more ado, such passages may be nothing more than a convenient answer to present difficulties, and not in the least a statement of their real doctrine upon the subject. Until the reverse of this can be distinctly proved, it will not avail to quote these passages in defence of the Ignorantists [Agnoeta:]. There is no Catholic divine novv-a-days, probably, who would not admit that such evasive answers were not only no lies, but absolutely allow­able when impertinent questions were put. There are a very few, if any, Protestants, who would not practically use this principle in real life, however indignantly they may at first sight repudiate it. It is lawful in some cases for inferiors to answer superiors in this way ; as, for instance, if you asked a servant if he had been ever guilty of theft, for no one is obliged to criminate himself; but there are far more cases, where it is lawful for superiors to evade questions which inferiors have no right to ask. Hence it was law­ful for our Lord and Master, the absolute ruler of his creatures, to answer impertinent thoughts in this manner. And, by parallel rea­soning, it was lawful for the Fathers to answer heretics in a way which, while it disguised their own sentiments probably, neverthe­less did the heretics good. For it is always lawful to lead a man away from a greater sin by leading him to a less : thus nobody in his sane senses would deny that it was a virtuous deed to induce a man to stupefy himself by drink, who would only use his wits to avail himself of a solitary opportunity for murder of a man in mortal sin, or adultery mutually agreed upon. If any body would deny it, it must bo simply because he had never given the question a thought, or else because he was so dull of conscience as to pre­fer the ruin of two souls to the temporary suspension of the powers of one. Now if the Fathers could lead the heretics to blaspheme the human nature of Christ, to do so was to lead them to a less sin than blaspheming his Divine nature, which blasphemy might never bo forgiven, neither in this world nor in purgatory." - Vol. I. pp. 263 - 265.

The doctrine which the ordinary reader will draw from this language is, that it is sometimes lawful to lie for the interests of truth, and to do evil for a. good end; in other words, that "the end justifies the means," - the very doe-trine which is so generally, and so falsely, laid to the charge of Catholic theologians, especially the learned Fa­thers of the Society of Jesus. The author himself seems to warrant this interpretation of his language, for he says expressly, " Jesus would be condemned of Jesuitry by those out of the Church, if he lived in our days." (Vol. I. pp. 296, 297.) The author is not writing for Catho­lics, who may be presumed to know their own doctrine, but avowedly for Protestants, who are supposed to be ignorant of it, and who expect, as he must know, that a Catholic writing on this subject, which has been so much controverted, so foully misrepresented, and made the oc­casion of so much scandal, will state the Catholic doc­trine in a form as little likely to be mistaken for the one commonly charged against us as the truth will possibly permit. It is fair, then, to presume, if he not only does not disclaim expressly the doctrine charged, of which he clearly is not ignorant, but uses language which seems to warrant it, and in some respects certainly does warrant it, that he really holds and intends to teach it; for, under such circumstances, an author's doctrine is to be inferred, fully as much from what he refrains from denying as from what he actually asserts, and the rule for interpreting his language is to put upon it, not the most favorable, but the least favorable construction that it will bear, - especially when, as in the case before us, he is ex professo explaining and defending aconomia in presenting the truth, that is, the presenting it so as to avoid as much as possible the giving of scandal, or leading people into error and sin. If the au­thor holds that what is called Jesuitry, the doctrine that it is lawful to lie for the truth, and to do evil for a good end, is really reprehensible, why does he use language that may, without violence, be understood to imply it? Or why does he not take special pains to frame his language so as to guard against it, by marking clearly the distinction be­tween it and the true Catholic doctrine ?

What the author in the secrets of his own heart intends, we know not, and judge not, for we are treating of the author, not the man. We presume he means right, but he evidently thinks loosely, and expresses himself carelessly, almost wantonly. He neglects to distinguish between not telling truth, and telling what is not truth.    No doubt it is sometimes lawful, nay, sometimes our duty, to conceal or not disclose the truth we may happen to know, but it is never lawful to do so by telling that which is not true. When we are questioned by those who have no right, or on matters on which they have no right, to question us, and when the truth, if told, would scandalize or lead men into error and sin, as sometimes happens, we are free to practise what the Fathers called wconomia, or pru­dently to withhold it, and to evade the questions put; but never are we free to withhold it or to evade the questions put by answering what is false, or what, in a sense the hearers may not with due diligence ascertain, is not true. If the hearers are misled by the answers given, it must be by their own fault, not. ours, - by the inferences which they unnecessarily draw from our words. If the answers we give, in order to escape telling the truth we are either not bound to tell or bound not to tell, are false, in every sense, according to ordinary usage of language in like cases, or are true only by virtue of some mental restriction or reser­vation, or some peculiar sense of our own which the hearer has no natural means of ascertaining, they are inad­missible, for then they are literally lies, and it is never lawful, under any circumstances whatever, to lie. Such, briefly stated, is the doctrine of our theologians, as we could easily prove by citations, were they necessary for any other purpose than to show our learning, and within this doctrine can be brought all the examples from our Lord and the Fathers which the author refers to.

" It is lawful in some cases for inferiors to answer superi­ors in this way; as, for instance, if you asked a servant if he had been ever guilty of theft, for no one is obliged to crim­inate himself." In case the superior has no right to the true answer to the question, conceded ; but if he has, the case is not so clear; for it is not certain that no one is ever bound to criminate himself, or rather, when juridically in­terrogated, to confess an act which may criminate him. Under the Common Law, which obtains in England and most of our States, no man is bound to criminate himself; and it is understood on both sides that the state must con­vict the criminal by other testimony than his own, unless that is voluntarily given, or else not convict him at all. But this is not, as it seems to us, necessarily a principle of universal  law.     The good of the republic requires that crimes should be detected and punished, and the criminal, in his quality of citizen or subject, may be obliged, for aught we can see, if the republic chooses, to testify as a witness against himself, as well as against another; and if so, he must be bound to give true and faithful answers as much as any other witness. But be this as it may, and even conceding the right of the servant, in the case sup­posed, to give an evasive or equivocal answer, he certainly has no right to answer what is not true, or what, without any regard to his own mental restriction or mental reser­vation, of which his master can know nothing, is necessa­rily false. " There are far more cases, where it is lawful for superiors to evade questions which inferiors have no right to ask." Undoubtedly, within the limits of the rule we have laid down ; but there are none in which they have a right to evade even such questions by direct, plain, and necessary falsehood, or by an answer which must necessarily imply, in the ordinary usage of words in such case, what is not true.

" For it is always lawful to lead a man away from a greater sin by leading him to a less."    The author here shows that he holds that the alleged evasions of our Lord and the Fathers, of which lie has just spoken, did lead men into sin, though a less  sin  than  that which they led them from.   We deny both the fact here supposed, and the prin­ciple on which the author attempts to justify it.    The so-called  evasive answers of our Lord and the Fathers, or axuHomia, as it is termed, which they on some occasions practised, did not of themselves lead men to any sin at all, and it is nothing short of blasphemy, at least in the case of our Lord, to allege that they did.   The principle alleged in justilication is false.    Sin is never lawful, for by its very delinition it is the transgression of the law, and therefore it can never be lawful to lead a man to commit sin, since to lead a man to commit a sin is to participate of its guilt. Otherwise there would be gross injustice in punishing the accessory to a crime, whether before or after the fact.    It is lawful to lead a man from a greater sin, though in doing so you do not, cannot, and know you cannot, prevent him, if you do so, from committing a less sin ; but never is it lawful to lead him from it by leading him to commit the less; for in the former case the direct and only positive in­fluence of your action is to prevent sin, which is always not only lawful, but laudable, and all that can be said is, that you were not able to prevent all the sin the man was de­termined to commit; but in the latter case the direct ten­dency of your action is to lead a man to commit sin, which is never lawful. " Nobody in his sane senses would deny that it was a virtuous deed to induce a man to stu­pefy himself by drink, who would only use his wits to avail himself of a solitary opportunity for murder of a man in mortal sin, or adultery mutually agreed upon." If stupefying himself with drink in the case supposed is sin on the part of the man himself, we deny it; lor we may never do evil that good may come. If you say the stupe­faction is not a sin on the part of the man himself, we concede your conclusion, but then it is nothing to your purpose; for then it only implies that it is a virtuous act by lawful means, or means not unlawful, to lead men from sin, which, indeed, nobody in his sane senses will deny, whether the sin be great or little. The case is to your purpose only on condition that stupefying one's self with drink is always in itself sin, and if it be so, it is undeni­able that you cannot, without sin, for any purpose what­ever, induce a person so to stupefy himself. Whether it would in the case supposed be or be not a sin, we are not called upon to decide.

" If the Fathers could lead the heretics to blaspheme the human nature of Christ, to do so was to lead them to a less sin than blaspheming his Divine nature, which blasphemy might never be forgiven, neither in this world nor in purga­tory." Certainly, if blaspheming our Lord in his human is indeed a less sin than blaspheming him in his Divine na­ture; but to blaspheme the human nature of Christ is un­questionably a sin, and therefore the Fathers could not law­fully lead the heretics to commit it even for the purpose of preventing them from committing the greater sin of blas­pheming his Divine nature. What the author might have said, all he needed to say, and perhaps all that he thought he was saying, is, that it was lawful for the Fathers to prevent, if they could, the heretics from blaspheming the Divine nature of Christ, though they suffered them, since they could not prevent them from doing the one or the other, to blaspheme the human nature, and that in doing so they would have been performing a virtuous action, because they would have prevented, if not all sin, at least the greater sin. If he had said this, nobody could have objected, or pretended that he favored, what is popularly called Jesuitry, - a doctrine which he ought to know, if he does not know, is no Catholic doctrine, and is falsely and calumniously laid to the charge of the illustrious So­ciety of Jesus.

What the author really intends may or may not be orthodox, but his doctrine as he develops and sets it forth is certainly false and scandalous, for his language is well fitted to confirm the calumnious accusations of Protestants against us. This is not the first time we have encountered this detestable doctrine among the Tractarian converts. Wo found it in Dr. Newman's Essay on Development; we have found it in some of their contributions to The Dublin Review, and it seems to have been adopted by the whole school, both before and since their conversion. The Tractarians in the Anglican Establishment were, as they felt, in a false position. They held doctrines and observed practices which that Establishment repudiated, while they asserted its full authority to teach, and their duty of unre­served submission to its teaching. Their study was to advocate what their Church condemned without compro­mising themselves, or saying any thing which could be made the ground of convicting them of positively depart­ing from her standards. The most disingenuous publica­tion we recollect ever to have read was the famous Tract No. 90, written by Dr. Newman before his conversion. The position of the whole school was a practical lie, and its more distinguished members were laboring with all their might to teach their Church, while they confessed her right to teach them, and made as if they learned only from her. They thus contracted a habit of .disingenu­ous writing, which, while it suggested their meaning so plainly that nobody could really mistake it, yet did not often positively commit them to any thing for which their Church could call them to an account. They were aware of this, even boasted of it, and they justified it on the ground that the end they had in view was a good end, and that they were laboring in the interests of Catholic truth and piety, - the precise ground assumed by our author in defence of the Fathers, and even of our Lord himself. When the excellent Father Glover sent Dr. Newman, then at Rome, by the hands of the lamented Father Shaw, our first article against his Essay on Development, with the request that he would read it, he replied, as Mr. Shaw in­formed us, " that he had heard of the article, but he had no time nor wish to read it. He had no hard feelings against the writer personally for having written it, but he was sorry that he had done so, for he had reason to believe that the Essay was doing great good in England." So he looked only at the effects his theory was producing, or sup­posed to be producing, in a particular locality, without at all troubling himself with the question whether it was true or false; that is, he was willing that the theory, even if false and mischievous, should go uncontradicted, if for the moment it per accidens facilitated the conversion of a few Anglicans. This is the only principle we can deduce from the reason he assigns for regretting the publication of our article against his Essay, and this is identically the principle Mr. Morris generalizes and sets forth in the work before us, or what is properly termed Jesuitry.

We find it, in consequence of this Tractarian habit of expressing more on some occasions than is professed, ex­ceedingly difficult to hold the writers who have come to us from the Tractarian school to any fixed or definite state­ments. They are vague and uncertain, loose and vacillat­ing. They do not distinctly state a thesis and abide by it. They are developmeutists. Their thesis grows or changes as they proceed, expands or contracts, becomes now this, or now that, according to the exigencies of the argument. Father Newman, in his Lectures on the Difficulties of An­glicans, has occasion to touch his theory of development. He approaches it with great modesty, and with statements perfectly unexceptionable. You begin to feel that he has renounced it, or that after all he has never really meant any thing more by it than is warranted by the received theology of the Church. His first statement is perfectly satisfactory, and if we stop with it, we have no objection to offer. But we read on, and what in an ordinary writer would be only a logical development, or an illustration of his thesis, becomes unexpectedly an increase or growth of the thesis itself. The development, instead of a logical or an illustrative development, which merely enables us to see the original statement in its true light, and in its logi­cal contents and relations, turns out to be a development by accretion, and takes in other and additional statements. which entirely change the character of the original thesis, although a careless reader might not observe it. This is, we suppose, an illustration of what!..he means by growth of doctrine. Just so is it with the author before us. His first simple statement of Catholic morality is unexception­able ; but as he proceeds to develop it he takes up new principles, - accumulates a series of illustrations which de­velop his doctrine into another, almost totally the reverse of the one with which he set out. You see this, you feel it, you know it; yet, if you accuse him of holding the doc­trine with which lie ends, you will have no little difficulty in convicting him of doing so; for he has so expressed himself, that, if hard pressed, he can contract his doctrine to his first simple statement, and, when the pressure is re­moved, expand it to any dimensions he pleases. The great body of Catholic readers will, in consequence of their own logical training, be disposed to interpret him always in accordance with his primitive statements; Protestants for whom he writes, and who better understand his method of writing, since it is very much their own method, will much more truly interpret him by his last statements, and take his developed as his real doctrine. It is singular, that complaints of the sort we here bring are precisely the complaints which the Fathers and all our modern contro­versialists uniformly bring against the heretics they are opposing. Our author and his school, if free from heresy, have at least the usual arts of heresy, and a most heretical manner of writing.

The author is a developmentist, and along with his main design has evidently wished to show, on the one hand, that Protestants can make nothing of the Fathers without the infallible Church as living interpreter of them, and on the other, that Catholics can make just as little of them with­out the theory of development. The former is done to show Protestants why he is a Catholic, the latter to show us why he was an Anglican, or not sooner converted,- how he can be a Catholic now without blaming himself for having been so long an Anglican, notwithstanding his profound knowledge of the Fathers. He could not remain an Anglican, because he could not without the Church determine fully what is Christian doctrine; he could not become a Catholic before the invention of the theory of development, because such arc the omissions and contradictions of the Fathers, and such the discrepancies between their teachings and those of the present Church of Rome, that it was impossible, without a theory which Roman divines had never recognized, or at least never made use of, to reconcile the Church with the Fathers, and the Fathers with one another, or a given Father with himself. He does not say all this in just so many words, but he seems to us to imply it throughout his book. Catholics may, he says, reconcile the difficulties presented by St. John Chrysostom without the theory of development if they can ; he cannot, and does not attempt to do it. He docs not, we own, bring the theory prominently forward, but he presupposes it, and confessedly attempts to explain only those diilioul-ties which would be dilliculties in case the theory were received as true. There can be no reasonable doubt that he holds it, nor is there known to us any reason for sup­posing that it is not still held by Father Newman and all the converts of his school, or that they do not still consider its invention or its statement and regular development as an important contribution to Catholic theology.

We have no intention of entering anew, at any great length, into the discussion of Dr. Newman's theory of de­velopment. We have heretofore discussed it sufficiently. We have taken great pains to reexamine the question with­in the last three or four years, and have been only the more confirmed in the judgment of it, which we have already ex­pressed over and over again. We think the theory un­called for, unauthorized by a single Catholic writer of the least note, and also false and pernicious. The Dub/in Re-view had the temerity, indeed, to cite Suarez in support of it; it might as well have cited our own pages, for the statement of Catholic doctrine which we opposed to it was given in almost the very words of Suarez literally translated, although we had not read him at the time on the subject. We have since read him, and we must tell The Dublin Revieiv that its charge, that we, in commenting on its citation from him, took his statement of a theory he was combating for his own, is not well founded. From that citation alone, we had collected the doctrine of Suarez correctly, notwithstanding the Reviewer had cited him very unfairly.

We do not ourselves lay claim to any extensive or pro­found knowledge of the Fathers ;  we  have neither read them all, nor all the works of any one of the more volu­minous of them. Hut we have at least looked into some of them, and ascertained enough to be able to assert, without rashness, that they present no difficulties which require for their explication the development theory ; and we can easily prove as much from the pages of Mr. Newman's Essay and the book before us. Both Mr. Newman and his disci­ple, Mr. Morris, afford ample evidence that all the doctrines which they call developments, in so far as they specify them, were believed and held by the Church from the earliest ages. That the faith in the course of time has, in some respects, gained in evidence, light, and distinctness, as says St. Vincent of Lerins, no man who knows any thing of the subject doubts ; but that the Church has in process of time taken up or evolved new doctrines, implied in or required by the original deposition, unknown to her ov to her 'Fathers in the first ages, we do most unequivocally deny. That we can in all cases sustain this denial with­out appeal to the decisions of popes and councils, we do not assert; but in arguing with a Catholic, or one who professes to be a Catholic, that is no objection. We are not obliged, in order to sustain it to a Catholic, to prove by an authority independent of popes and councils, that a given doctrine was known and believed at a given time, for if that authority has decided that it has always been the faith of the Church from the first, the question is set­tled, and no Catholic can open his mouth.

Here is where, we apprehend, the developmcntists are principally at fault. They probably do not always con­sider their theory as absolutely necessary to remove any difficulties the Catholic may encounter in explaining and vindicating the faith to Catholics; they more frequently consider, most likely, their theory as chiefly necessary in the case of those without, or more especially in the case of learned Anglicans. These, not accepting the authority of the Church, cannot, without such theory, get over the difficulties presented to their minds by the Fathers, nor can we without it satisfactorily explain those difficulties to them. But the theory is either true or false. If true, it is as true for us as for them; if it is false, we have no right to propose it to them. Do our developmentists hold that their theory is false, or, as Mr. Newman calls it, only " an expedient," and simply make use of it to remove the unfounded prejudices of Protestants, justifying themselves in doing so on the ground that it is lawful to use falsehood in the interests of truth? This, we have seen, they are not free to do. Either we need the theory to explain the alleged difficulties to ourselves, in case we are to explain them at all, or we do not. If we do not, the difficulties are themselves unreal, imaginary, and the theory of devel­opment itself is false; for there has been no development in the sense it alleges. If we cannot explain to Protes­tants the difficulties they find, or imagine they find, with­out it, we must let them go unexplained. We are anxious for their conversion, but we would not knowingly advocate a false theory, even if by so doing we could convert Ihe whole world. God could save all the world, if he would; indeed, he wills all to be saved, and provides all with suf­ficient means; but he will save no one at the expense of truth, or without the voluntary concurrence of the subject, or in any other way than the one he has established. It will not do, as we have observed is sometimes the case with the converted Tractarians, to understand what St. Paul says about beguiling as if it authorized us to deceive or cheat people into a belief of the truth.

Certain it is, that the theory cannot be accepted or used if it be false, or not true. To use it as an hypothe­sis or expedient for the explication of certain alleged facts, whether true or false, will not answer, because it is itself only an induction from those facts, and therefore a fact or a no-fact itself. To allege it, in case it is false, is not simply to allege a false explication of a fact, but a false fact. ]t depends for its truth on the facts it is to explain, and can­not be conceived as true if those facts, in the character alleged, are themselves unreal or do not exist. If, as com­monly believed, the faith has come down to us from the first in its purity and integrity, without diminution or ad­dition, the facts alleged do not exist, there has been no development in the sense of the theory, and therefore the theory, which must presuppose those facts, is false and in direct contradiction to the truth; consequently, inadmissi­ble even as an hypothesis or expedient. The develop-mentists should, then, first of all establish the necessity of the theory, by establishing the existence of an order of facts which demand it. What we ask of them, then, first of all, is to give us a precise statement, with full evidence of their reality, of the facts which they propose to explain by their theory, or of what they call developments, or proofs of development. Regarded as an hypothesis or ex­pedient for the explication of facts, nobody objects to it, in case the facts themselves exist; for it is then only a gen­eral or scientific statement of them, since those facts must themselves be developments. Under this point of view, the objection is not that it does not explain the facts, but that the facts do not themselves exist, and cannot be said to exist without denying the whole Christian religion.

Now, we respectfully request the developmentists, in the first place, to establish the fact, not that there has been development in some sense; or that there have been from time to time, and even may be hereafter, new definitions of faith on the occasion of new errors or heresies; or that cer­tain points of faith, originally formally proposed indeed, but ingiobo, as we may say, have, in the course of time, as they have been controverted and made the subject of special study, been more distinctly drawn out and precisely stated than they were at first, - for this no Catholic denies, or dreams of denying; but that there has been the order of facts they contend for, or actual development in the sense their theory presupposes, - that is, that, as time has rolled on, new doctrines have been evolved from the original de-positum, or assimilated to it, which were unknown to the primitive believers and not formally, though indistinctly, believed by them, - for their theory means this, or it means nothing; and in the second place, to draw up a complete and authenticated list of the doctrines, dogmas, or propo­sitions of faith, which they hold to have been obtained by development, together with the exact date of the time when they respectively first became known to the Church, and were adopted as part and parcel of her creed. Till they do thus much, all controversy with them on their theory, save as to its metaphysics, must be carried on in the dark, and be incapable of being brought to any definite issue. Surely this request is reasonable, and we hope they will not refuse to comply with it. We make the request far more for their sake than for our own. We think that they have taken up their theory without any thorough ex­amination of the real character of the facts which they propose to explain by it, and that they continue to hold it, because they have never seriously undertaken to define it even to themselves, and have never settled in their own minds, with exactness and precision, what they do or do not mean by it. We have found all the advocates of tin; theory with whom we have conversed, however clear and definite on other subjects, no sooner touching upon it, than they become all at once vague and uncertain in their views, vacillating in their expressions, and unable to hit upon any statement which seems exactly to express what they mean. This comes, we apprehend, from the fact that what they mean is neither defined in their minds nor capable of being defined, and that any statement they can frame will either express too much or too little to satisfy them. If the de-velopmentists should undertake to comply with our re­quest, they would most likely discover this, and find that they either mean no more than their opponents concede, or else that they mean what no Catholic can hold, and there­fore come to the conclusion, either that they have been making a great ado about nothing, or that they have un­wittingly fallen into a most grave error, which it imports them to lose no time in abandoning. Their theory would either vanish in smoke, or be found untenable and perni­cious, as hateful to them as it is to us. We do them no injustice when we say, that they are not only inexact writers, but loose thinkers. The attempt to write with a little more exactness and precision would soon compel them to think with more exactness and precision.

No doubt, many will think that remarks like these can­not, without injustice, be applied to Dr. Newman. Dr. Newman is in some respects, we grant, clear and acute as a thinker, and choice and exact as a writer; but he is a man of a sharp rather than a broad and comprehensive intellect. He has little faculty of grasping a subject in its unity and integrity, and he never masters a subject by first seizing it in its central principle, and thence descending to its several details. To use a form of expression borrowed from him­self, he takes in an idea, not as a whole, but by viewing it successively under a variety of separate aspects, - by walking all around it, and viewing it successively under all its aspects. He thus attains only to particular views, never to unity of view, or to the comprehension of the idea as a whole. No man has, within the range of these particular views, a clearer or a keener sight than he, and no man can more clearly, vividly, distinctly, accurately, or forcibly express what he thus apprehends. But nevertheless, when­ever he attempts to mould his particular views into a sys­tematic whole, he becomes confused, obscure, vague, and vacillating. His mind is a purely inductive mind, the im­personation of the inductive philosophy, and proceeds not from unity to multiplicity, from principles to facts, but the reverse. He will seize on a particular fact, and generalize it into the basis of a universe. In consequence of the narrowness and unphilosophical character of his mind, his attention is fixed for the time being always on one par­ticular aspect of a subject, which he necessarily treats provisorily, as if it were the entire subject in its unity. His language, chosen for the expression of that particular aspect, lacks breadth, comprehensiveness, and becomes in­appropriate, obscure, and false as the representative of the truth not merely as he views it, but as it really is in itself, independent of him. So we cannot, with all his particular merits, which are very great, exempt him from the common complaint which we make of his whole school.

The greater part of the offence we take at what the devel-opmentists inculcate is not to what they openly, distinctly, and formally state ; but to what they hint, insinuate, or bring in incidentally, or as it were by way of illustration, or development. The direct thesis, when they have a direct thesis, which they profess to maintain, we can in most cases accept ; but they no sooner state it, than they bring in surreptitiously, as if in illustration or support of it, mat­ter which we are obliged to reject with horror. Inciden­tally Mr. Morris tells us that St. Augustine's doctrine of predestination and grace was in his time a novelty, that is, we suppose, a development, and that it was not generally accepted in the East (Vol. I. pp. 130, 131). This grave charge against the great doctor of grace, if it could be. sus­tained, since it is undeniable that the doctrine taught by St. Augustine in his latest writings on this subject is that of the Church, would go far towards sustaining the theory of development. But there is not a word of truth in it. It is no new charge ; it was made by the old Pelagians, and especially the Semi-Pelagians, and their successors in modern times have never ceased to repeat it. Suarez *(footnote:  * Prolegomenon VI. cap. G.) takes it up ex professo, and refutes it; and the great Bossuet, in his Defense de la Tradition et des Saints Peres *(footnote:  * Livre V. chap. 5 et seq.) against M. Simon, who had insisted upon it in his Histoirc Critique des principanx Commcntateurs de Nouveau Testa­ment depuis le Commencement da Christianisme jusqu-a Notre Temps, etc., replies to it at great length, completely refuting it in both its parts, and, what is more to our pres­ent purpose, expressly denying and refuting the theory of development at the same time. Mr. Morris is found in bad company when he brings this charge, and we advise him in the next edition of his work to cancel it. It is true, he brings it for a very different purpose from that of M. Simon, Grotius, and other Pelagians or Semi-Pelagians, and without looking upon it as a charge at all; but Suarez terms it " a calumny," calumnia, and Bossuet treats it as virtually heretical, and we cannot look upon it as any more true when alleged by a developmentist, than when alleged by a Pelagian, when for a good than when for a bad purpose. Bossuet and Suarez, on a question of this nature, are very respectable authorities, and, besides, they sustain themselves by a most formidable list of Fathers, both East­ern and Western, among whom in the East we find St. Gregory Nazianzen, and our author's favorite, St. Ephieni, both of whom teach the same doctrine as St. Augustine. But after all, it is possible that the testimony of Catholic di­vines who have never had the advantage of being brought up in heresy will not weigh much with our author, when opposed to his favorite theory, and hence we will spare our­selves the trouble of citing some decisive passages bearing on the theory, from so decidedly a Catholic doctor, and therefore so inconsiderable an authority, as St. Thomas of Aquin.

In the third part of his work, the author undertakes to prove the immaculate conception of Our Lady, or her per­fect immunity from all stain of original sin. We have only glanced at this part, for it carries on a discussion in which we have no wish to engage. We believe as firmly in the immaculate conception as any one can believe a point which has been questioned, and on which the Church has not as yet formally pronounced, and we always avail our­selves of the privilege allowed us when we say the Litany of Our Blessed Lady, our own dear Mother, to add, " Reg, sine labe  conccpta, or a pro nobisP    We  know no reason why, if it be of faith, the Church cannot so declare it, and whether it be  so or not she is the judge, not we. Whether it is or is not desirable that she should decide the case which  has for so many years been pending in her court, it is not for us to say.    She does not need our con­sent, or our counsel, and we have not the impertinence to tell her what we do or do not wish.    We look to her to in­struct us, and we trust we need but to hear her voice to be ready to obey it, whether it commands what we have or have not wished.    But there is little doubt in our mind, that the doctrine of development is favored by many, be­cause they wish the Church to define the immaculate con­ception to be of faith, and that those who wish to advocate the theory are extremely solicitous to  have this decision made.    The former think the doctrine would much facili­tate, if not the definition itself, at least its reception ; the lat­ter, that the definition would give the seal of the Church to their theory.    A learned friend of ours, in a conversation the other day, after conceding that Mr. Newman's theory of development was wrong, yet would have some theory of the kind allowed, because of the general desire to   have this question defined.    We see no need of any theory of development in the case.    The simple question to be de­cided is, not whether the immunity of Our Lady from all stain of original sin is or is not sufficiently developed to be ruled an article of faith, but whether it be or be not an Apostolic and Divine tradition.    If it is, the Church can declare it to be so; if not, she cannot define it to be of faith, for to define a point to be of faith is neither more nor less than to declare it to be an Apostolic and Divine tra­dition.    The definition demands no doctrine of develop­ment, either to be made or defended, and in defining it the Church will give no more countenance to such a doctrine than she does in deciding any litigated point of faith.   We see nothing in our theology to change in case the defini­tion should be made.   We should not, unless the Church ex­pressly so decided, regard the definition either as a develop­ment or as the result of development; for the fact that it has not hitherto been made would count for nothing, since the case is not now taken up anew, but has really been in court ever since a serious controversy first arose on the sub­ject, and the action has been continued without being decidcd. Why the Church has not decided it sooner, or why, having delayed it so long, she should decide it now, is no affair of ours. She is the legitimate judge, not only of what is the faith, but of the time when it is proper to de­fine it.

But it is time to draw our remarks to a close. We cannot expect that all we have said will be acceptable to the Oxford converts and their friends. We expect to be censured, and censured severely; but we have said noth­ing in wantonness, or from any personal motive. The author and his friends have never crossed our path, and are not likely to do so. Their line in life runs remote from ours. They have done us personally no injury, and con­ferred on us no benefits. Personally there is no reason in the world why we should be opposed to them, or should not in all respects sympathize with them. We have no prejudices against them because they are converts, and can have none, for we are a convert ourselves, and only a year older as a convert than Dr. Newman himself. In learning, cultivation, piety, and fervor, we are not worthy to be compared with the meanest of them. Why, then, should we attack them? Sure enough, why should we? Certain it is, the odds are against us, and most people will presume that, in a controversy between them and us, they must be in the right and we in the wrong. If they are as wrong as we pretend, how happens it that there is nobody in England to show it?

Then, again, it may be said, these converts against whom you are writing are learned and peaceable men, men who have left all to follow Christ, for the most part priests of the Church, devoting themselves without reserve to the glorious work of training souls for heaven, and of winning back England, their native country, to the faith. Why attack them? Why disturb them in their sacred work? Why throw obstacles in their way? All this and much more may be said, all this and much more we have said to ourselves, and it has not been without a full sense of the responsibility we incur, nor without a painful struggle, that we have written what we have. It has been from no private motive, it has been from no indifference to the work in which they are engaged, that we have undertaken the ungracious and most unpleasant task of criticizing their writings.    We have done what we have, because we fear, and not we alone, that they are originating or reviv­ing a destructive heresy, from which both England and this country may receive great harm. Neither learning nor talents, nor zeal nor piety, are perfect safeguards against heresy. Jansenius, for aught we ever understood, was a really learned man, a great man, and an exemplary bishop; and yet he originated a most pestilent heresy. Gioberti is a man of talents, genius, and learning, and he was so scrupulous in the outset that he said his (Mice on his knees; and yet has he made shipwreck of his faith, and, as we are told, is living now in Paris without a single exterior or interior mark of the sacerdotal character. God may be doing a great work in England, and bestowing freely his grace for the conversion of those who have been so long estranged from his Church, and we certainly have no disposition to interrupt the work, even if it were in our power, or to increase the difficulties of those engaged in it. ]Jut England is not all the world to us, and the present moment is not all the time we consider. Erroneous or heretical, writings do not all their mischief at the moment of their publication, nor in the country of their authors. The language of England and the United States is the same, and works written and published there find their way here, and exert here hardly, if any, less influence for good or for evil, than if originally written and published here. They may, owing to peculiar circumstances, exert there, for the moment, a good, or not a bad influence, and yet exert here an influence only decidedly bad, and both here and there, hereafter, a most pernicious influence. We have a right to look, under our pastors, to the interests of truth in our own country, and to condemn any books which come under our notice that are likely to do grave injury here, although circumstances may counteract their evil tendency elsewhere. ]>ut in reality we believe' the writings of the school in question are doing great harm even in England, and we judge no from what we see in the anti-Catholic periodicals of that country, all of which charge, without any qualification, the doctrine of develop­ment upon the Church, and tell us that Rome, having failed in her attempts for three hundred years to vindicate her corruptions by denying that she has added to the faith, now concedes that she has made additions, and hopes to defend them by calling them developments.    It is because we have honestly believed, whether mistaken or not, that the writings of this school are filled with many grave errors, and cannot but be deeply prejudicial to orthodoxy, both here and in England, both now and hereafter, that we have written against them. What we have done we have done conscientiously, and not without seeking guid­ance from the Source of all light, and receiving instructions from those from whom it is our duty to learn in all docility. We have written with great plainness and directness, be­cause the case seems to require it; with earnestness and decision, because we could not write otherwise if we would; but we have written nothing in pride or in anger, and if any thing has escaped us that is contrary either to Christian truth or to Christian charity, we wish to retract and condemn it in advance. We have nothing to say as to why the task of exposing them has been left to us, yet it is easy to see, by a reference to existing facts, wliy the task could be better performed here than in England.

Let not our readers, however, suppose for a moment that we are blind or insensible to the many merits of the men in question. The greater part even of the work be­fore us is truly excellent, and it contains upon the whole a masterly discussion of the subject it professes to treat. What is objectionable, though it pervades in some sense the whole work, really takes up but a very little of its space, and probably would not be noticed by a majority of readers, or, if noticed, would be set down not to an un­sound theory adopted by the learned author, but to his want of accurate information on some points, and to the inexactness and carelessness of his language. This is probably the case with most of his English Catholic read­ers. We cannot so set it down, for the reasons we have given in the course of this article; yet let no one so wrong us as to imagine that we question the good faith of the author, or doubt his determination to be a true Catholic believer. He is, we make no question, an excellent pro­fessor, a faithful and zealous priest, who would give his life for the faith, or for a flock intrusted to his charge. In all these converts of whom we speak, there is much to command our warm admiration. They are free from much of the timidity and compromising spirit heretofore not un-frequently encountered in English Catholics. They are no slaves to public opinion; they are open and fearless in the profession of their faith. They are, and that in our estima­tion atones for much, no Gallicans, that is, no favorers of the doctrines usually termed Gallican, though by no means pe­culiar to Frenchmen. They are for the most part, as far as we have been able to discover, in regard to the mutual rela­tions of the spiritual and temporal orders, genuine Papists. They show no desire to reduce the primacy of Peter to a mere primacy of order, nor, with all their Anglican preju­dices, any wish to make Catholicity as near like Angli­canism as possible. On all questions of this nature they are honorably distinguished, and nobly maintain the ground which we in our humble way and with our feeble abilities attempt also to maintain. They exhibit much of the ro­bustness and sturdy independence which wo admire in the Fiiiglish character. They also appear to have a deep and tender devotion to the Blessed Mother of God, with which we should be sorry not to sympathize with all our heart. In a word, were it not for the Tractarian habits they still retain, their low estimate of Catholic learning and talent, their bad logic and false philosophy, and their abominable theory of development, we would cut our right hand ofF sooner than write, and pull out our tongue by the roots sooner than speak, one word against them.

The principal errors which we detect in our author and his school appear to us to have originated very innocently, and we are Jar from intending any moral blame in indicat­ing them. These writers seem to us to have begun their study of Catholic theology where they should have ended. They appear to have begun with the Fathers instead of the modern theologians, or the great scholastic doctors. In the correspondence we have had with some of them, they have sneered at contemporary theologians for studying compendiums. Now we belie've, with all deference, that all study of Catholic faith and theology should commence with compendiums, and /irst of all with that admirable compendium, the Catechism. From the Catechism we would proceed to the next briefest and simplest compendi­um, and from that we would proceed to St. Thomas and his commentators. When we had well mastered scholastic theology, we would proceed to the Fathers, but not till then, because to us the key to the Fathers is in the scholastic theology. We prize the Fathers above all price, and when once one is prepared to read them, there is no reading, after the Holy Scriptures, more or equally profitable. But without such preparation, without the key which unlocks their sense, one is almost as liable to misapprehend and wrest them to his own hurt as he is the Sacred Text itself. They were written at a remote period, with special refer­ence to the peculiar controversies, states of mind, and modes of thought at the time, and the reader who alights on them without a previous accurate knowledge of the chief points of Catholic theology will find them filled with obscurities, and bristling with difficulties, which he will hardly be able to solve or clear up.

Our Tractarian friends, brought up to look upon con­temporary Catholics as an ignorant, feeble, cunning, cred­ulous, and superstitious set of mortals, far inferior in learn­ing, talents, and morals to themselves, and accustomed to regard the Scholastics as dealing mainly in vain subtilties and distinctions without a difference, very naturally passed from the study of their jejune Anglican theology to the study of the Fathers, whom they were forced to read through the spectacles of their more famous Anglican divines. They thus not only had not the requisite prepa­ration for studying them, but had views and habits which wholly unfitted them for studying them, with even passable success. They have come from the Fathers down to the Scholastics, whom they have studied not profoundly, and have interpreted them by the Fathers, instead of interpret­ing the Fathers by them. Hence their theory of develop­ment, and other errors, adopted to reconcile the Fathers and the later theologians. Nothing was more natural, and we ourselves fell into kindred errors, partially for the same reason; and had we not been put to the study of a brief compendium, and from that upon a rigid course of scho­lastic theology in one of thej commentators on St. Thomas, we might and most likely should have continued in them to this day. Having, to some extent, made ourselves ac­quainted with Catholic theology, the Fathers became some­what intelligible to us, and we cannot now find the diffi­culties in them with which they formerly seemed filled. St. Augustine is now by preference our master in theology and philosophy. Our friends on the other side of the water will understand from these remarks, that it is not themselves personally that we censure, but solely what we regard as their errors.