Present Catholic Dangers, BQR for July, 1857

Present Catholic Dangers

It would not become us to mingle as a partisan in the controversy, if controversy it can be called, between The Rambler and The Dublin Review,  the two leading Catholic periodicals in the English-speaking world; but as we were ourselves the occasion of its breaking out, we cannot in justice to either side pass it by in total silence. A year ago we took occasion, from an outcry raised against The Rambler for some theological articles which were very far from pleasing us, to commend the general character of the periodical, and to offer it some works of sympathy and encouragement. We spoke of it as a periodical very much after our own heart, and expressed our admiration of its fresh and vigorous thought, its free, bold, and manly utterance. But lest our admiration should raise it up new enemies among those who look upon every departure from the church, we intimated that, though it took the right direction, it did not go far enough for us, and in some respects lacked breadth and comprehensiveness. Understanding, or not understanding, our motive, the editors replied with great frankness, admitting the alleged defect, and excusing i, not o the ground of want of conviction, but of the necessities of their position, which prevented them from seeing their way clearly to follow the course we recommended. We cite their reply:

"Whatever is the fault of our published views, their lack of breadth and comprehension is rather a consequence of our want or ability to say what we mean in a masterly manner, and of the necessity that encompasses us to observe silence on many things, than of our want of perfect folds. England, and especially the little remnant of Catholic England, lives very much on tradition--lives by the past. We cannot criticize the past without breaking with that on which our editorial existence depends. We have to write for those who consider that a periodical appearing three times in the quarter, has no business to enter into serious questions, which must be reserved for the more measured roll of the Quarterly. Our part, it seems, is to provide milk and water, and sugar, insipid amusement and instruction, from which all that might suggest and excite real thoughts has been carefully weeded. These are the conditions sometimes proposed to us, as those on which our publication will be encouraged. We may, indeed, be as severe as we like in showing that there is not a jot or scrap of truth in any of the enemies of Catholics; that all who oppose us, or contend with us, are both morally reprobate and intellectually impotent. We have perfect liberty to make out, by a selection of garbled quotations, how all the sciences of the nineteenth century are ministering to their divine queen; how geologians and physical philosophers are proving the order of creation as related by Moses; physiologists the descent of mankind from one couple; philologists the original unity and subsequent disrupture in human language; ethnographers in their progress are testifying more and more to that primeval division of mankind into three great races, as recorded by Moses; while any serious investigation of these sciences, made independently of the unauthoritive interpretations of Scripture, by which they have hitherto been controlled and confined in the catholic schools, would be discouraged as tending to infuse doubts into the minds of innocent Catholics, and to suggest speculation where faith now reigns. People, forsooth, to whom the pages of the Times, and Athenaum, and the Weekly Dispatch, with all their masterly infidelity, lie open will be exposed to the danger of losing their faith if a Catholic speculates a little on questions of moral, intellectual, social, or physical philosophy, --if he directs his mind to any thing above writing nice stories, in illustration of the pleasantness and peace of the Catholic religion, and the naughty and disagreeable ends to which all non-Catholics arrive in this world and the next, --to any thing more honest than defending through think and thin the governments of all tryants that profess our religion and proving by 'geometric scale,' that the interior of a Neapolitan prison is rather preferable to that of an English gaol. We only wish we saw our way clearly to be safe in speaking out in a manner still more after Dr. Brownson's heart." 

There can be no doubt that this reply is keenly sarcastic, and in some measure contains its own refutation, we are not, however, surprised that it should have given offence to those, if such there were, against whom it pointed. The editors did not intend their remarks to apply, and they could not justly apply, o the great body of Catholics in the United Kingdom; but we presume, there as well as here, there are some to whom they are not inapplicable, -- very good people too in their way, very devout, and much more likely to save their souls than we are ours, who suppose that all the traditions of Catholics are traditions of faith, or at least no less sacred, and that to introduce any novelty in our modes or methods of presenting or defending Catholic doctrine is to introduce novelty in doctrine itself. In the view of these good people to question the traditional replies to popular objections, or the historical, scientific, or philosophical statements of popular apologists, is to betray a proud, arrogant, innovating, and indeed an heretical spirit and tendency. These must have been deeply wounded by the sarcasms of The Rambler. The Dublin Review, not usually on the side of those who are unduly wedded to the past, seems to have been stung by some of The Rambler’s remarks, and seizing upon the unlucky allusion to “the little remnant of Catholic England,” and coupling it with the fact that the editors of the offending periodical are converts of not many years’ standing, takes occasion to retort sarcasm for sarcasm, and to read them and converts in general, a severe, and even if a merited, certainly not a very palatable lesson. It rebukes them for their very great inferiority in Catholic things to those who have sucked in Catholicity with their mother’s milk. It accuses them of drawing a line between old Catholics and new converts, of disparaging the worth and services of those who have toiled form early morning and “borne the burden and heat of the day,” and of seeking to form a convert party. It even goes further, and accuses the editors of The Rambler and their friends of standing aloof from the Catholic body, of refusing to throw themselves into the great current of Catholic action, and of conducting themselves as critics of speculators, instead of hearty, loyal, and self-forgetting cooperators. All this is done with rare polish, unction, and suavity of manner; but we are forced to add that, however polished or unctuous, it has given pain to not a few old Catholics, and awakened a feeling of wrong in the bosom of more than one convert.

Our readers know that we ourselves have taken great liberties with converts who have attempted to fly before they were fledged, and that we have gone as far as the extreme limits of truth and justice in our efforts to avoid exciting the slightest jealousy or distrust in the minds of those who have been Catholics from their infancy; but with all respect for the writer in The Dublin Review, with whom in much he says w cordially sympathize, we must be permitted to say, in all sincerity and loyalty, that he has in our poor judgment borne too hard upon a class of men who have the right to me with encouragement rather than discouragement from those of their brethren who have never wandered into “a far country,” and who have the happiness of owing their Catholicity, under God, to the faith and piety of their parents. We converts were indeed born and brought up in heresy and schism, but through the grace of god we have abjured heresy and schism, and followed our convictions into the church, who has received us to her bosom as a true mother, and deigned to own us as her children. We see not wherein our merit is less than that of those who have had only to persevere in the way they were trained to go, or what greater right they have to boast over us than we have to boast over them. Neither of us, indeed, have any right to boast; for in both cases the glory is sue solely to Him who became man and died on the cross, that he might redeem us, purify us, and elevated us to union with God. We do not believe that it ever occurs to converts to place themselves in their own estimation above old Catholics. We look upon ourselves rather as the prodigal who has returned to his father’s house, and has been unexpectedly and undeservedly received as a son. We are aware of the superiority of those who have welcomed us among them, and readily acknowledge it, in all that which can come only from long training and familiar habit. They are, as it were, native-born citizens; we are only aliens recently naturalized, and we are far more likely to feel our inferiority, than to claim superiority, in Catholic things, to those who area “to the manner born.” 

It is but natural that converts should be inferior in that nice Catholic tact, and that quick and instinctive appreciation of Catholic thins, which belong to those who have been reared in the church, but, perhaps, they have, after all, some compensating advantages. They have a more intimate knowledge of the inner life of non-Catholics, and in general are better able to appreciate the obstacles which they find in the way of accepting the church and submitting to her authority. Coming to Catholicity free from all the old secular traditions, habits, and associations of Catholics. They can more easily discriminate between that is of religion and what pertains only to the social life, nationality, or secular having, customs, and usages of Catholics. In the concrete life of Catholics in all ages and nations there is much inherited from their ancestors, which, if not anti-Catholic, yet is no part of Catholicity, but which they do not always distinguish from their religion itself, and sometimes half confound with it. The Catholics of Great Britain and the United States are hardly more widely separated from their non-Catholic countrymen by their faith and worship, than they are by their associations, habits, customs, affections, and modes of thought and action, which are no necessary part of their religion, and are only accidentally connected with it. The convert, trained in a different world, is not wedded to these forms of secular life, and is able to distinguish them without effort from Catholicity. He can embrace Catholicity, so far as regards these, with less admixture of foreign elements, and attach himself more easily to it in its essential and universal character, free from the local habits, manners, and usages of an old Catholic population. This is some compensation, and places converts more nearly on a level with old Catholics than is sometimes supposed,, though it, no doubt, leaves them still far inferior.

The Convert, on being admitted into the church and beginning to associate with his Catholic brethren, does not always find them in all respects what he in his fervor and inexperience had expected. He finds the church altogether more than he promised himself, or had conceived it possible for her to be, but he finds, also, that, though in all which is strictly of religion, his sympathy with his Catholic brethren is full and entire, in other matters it is far from being perfect, -- through his fault it may be as well  as through theirs. He finds that they are wedded to many things to which he is a stranger, and must remain a stranger; that, in all save religion, he and they belong to different worlds, and have different habits, associations, and sympathies. Outside of religion he belongs to the modern world, speaks its language, thinks and reasons as a man of the nineteenth century, while they appear to live in what is to him a past age, have recollections, traditions, associations, which though dear to them, have and can have no hold on him. If he allows himself to dwell on these he is apt to form an undue estimate of the real sentiment and worth of the body into which he has been admitted. There is, with equal faith and piety on both sides, in matters not of religion, a real divergence between them, which not unfrequently leads to much misunderstanding and distrust on both sides. Each is more or less tenacious of his own world, each clings to his old habits, associations, traditions. The old Catholic feels that there is a difference, though he may not be able, in all cases, to explain its cause or its exact nature, and is disposed to think that something is lacking in the convert’s faith or piety. To satisfy him, the convert must sympathize with him in what he has that is not of Catholicity, as well as in what is, fall back with him into that old world inherited from his Catholic ancestors, and thus become separated in all things in which he is separated from the actual world of today. He naturally wishes the convert to embrace no only the Catholic religion, but all the traditions of Catholics, and defend the civilization of catholic ages and nations, and the conduct of Catholics in relation to religion and secular politics, with as much zeal and resoluteness as he defends Catholicity itself, although, in point of fact, to do so would require him to defend much that the church has never approved, and much that she has never ceased to struggle against. The convert, if a full-grown man, cannot do this. He cheerfully takes the old faith, submits unreservedly to the old church, but in what is not repugnant to faith or morals he sees not why he should change, or cease to be man of his own times or of his own country. He is unless of a very philosophical turn of mind, even offended by the old Catholic’s unnecessary and in his view unreasonable  attachment to the past, which was no better than the present, if indeed so good, to old methods, to old usages, no longer in harmony with the living thought of the age and country, and feels a vocation to emancipate his Catholic brethren from a bondage the church does not impose, an which seems to him to crush out their manhood, and deprive them of all ability to serve affectively their church, in the presence of non-Catholics.

Certainly, there is here much misapprehension and exaggeration on both sides, and neither side is strictly just to the other. All old Catholics do not cling to the past; many of them are fully up with the times, and are men of their own age and nation’ and converts are not always deficient in sympathy with medievalism; indeed, some of them are too much attached to it, and far more than old Catholics hold that what is mediaeval is Catholic, and what is not mediaeval is not Catholic. Still, the principle that underlies the convert’s thought is sound; it is the principle on which the church herself always acts in dealing with the world. Herself unalterable and immovable, she takes the world as she finds it, and deals with it as it is. She found the world in the beginning imperial; she accepted imperialism, and labored to Christianize it. At a later epoch she found the world barbarian; and she took the barbarians as they were and Christianized and civilized them. At a still later period she found it feudal. She never introduced or approved feudalism itself, yet she conformed her secular relations to it, and addressed feudal society in language it could understand and profit by. In the same way she deals with our proud, self-reliant, republican Anglo0Sazon world. She concedes it frankly in the outset whatever it is or has that is not repugnant to the essential nature and prerogatives of our religion, and labors to aid its progress. She leaves it its own habits, manners, customs, institutions, laws, associations, in so far as they do not repugn eternal truth and justice, speaks to it in its own tongue, to its own understanding, in such forms of speech and such modes of address as are best fitted to convince its reason and win its love, and that too without casting a single longing, lingering look to the past she leaves behind. 

But all Catholics re not up to the level of the church, and not a few of them never study her history, investigate the principles on which she acts, or catch even a glimpse of her sublime wisdom or her celestial prudence. Many of them are merely men of routine, creatures of the traditions and associations inherited from their ancestors, and which they seldom even dream of distinguishing from their religion itself. These cannot sympathize with the convert who comes among them, bringing with him the active and fearless, not to say reckless, spirit of the nineteenth century. He is a phenomenon they do not fully understand, and they find him both strange and offensive. He breaks their rest, rouses them from their sleep, disturbs their fondly-cherished prejudices, even forces them to think, to reason, to seek to know something of the world passing around them, to take broader and more comprehensive views of men and things; in a word, to come out from the cloister and be active, living, energetic men in their own day and generation; and they not unreasonably look upon him as a rash innovator, a restless spirit, a disturber of the peace and repose of the church, because the things he wars against are regarded, by those who cherish them, not as hindrances, but as helps to religion. Indeed, they are at a loss to conceive what it is he wants or is driving at, and they suspect that he is really seeking to protestantize, secularize, or, at least, modernize the church, and they conclude that they may justly resist him, and inculcate doubts as to the reality of his conversion, or, at least, as to his perseverance in the faith. This is natural, and is to be expected by everyone, convert, or no convert, who attempts to effect a reform in any department of human activity.

The convert again, on his side, convinced of the soundness of the principle on which he proceeds, and the justice and purity of his aims, and not in all cases meeting that clear understanding among Catholics of principle of that firm and uniform adhesion to it he had expected, feels, at first, a sad disappointment, and though he abates nothing in his faith or his devotion to the church, is tempted to form too low an estimate of the spirit, understanding, and energy of the mass of his new brethren, and to take what is really true of a small number only, as characteristic of the whole body. He thus not ungrequently does great injustice to men who, in those very qualities he most admires, are far his srperiors. He forgets, too, for the moment, though he is freer than old Catholics from one order of old habits and associations, that he is less free from another, that as pure and as complete as he may regard his Catholic faith, it is nevertheless possible that he retains some of the old Protestant leaven, and unconsciously cherishes a spirit and tendency that the delicate Catholic instinct repels. It is possible that we who are converts have in us slight touch of Puritanism, and forget that not all who are in the church are of the church; that we make too much depend on human wisdom, virtue, and sagacity. God’s ways are not our ways, and it is very possible that brought up as we have been in Protestantism, and accustomed to rely almost solely on human agencies, ad to feel that it is we who sustain the church, not the church that sustains us, we may be urging in our zeal and enthusiasm, or in our impatience, methods of proceeding which God cannot bless, because they would rob him of his glory and transfer it to man. In dealing with principles no compromise is admissible, but in their practical application compromises are allowable, are almost always necessary, and we often endanger success as much by going too far ahead of those with whom we must act, as by lagging too far behind them ; we must deal with men as we find them, not only with men outside of the church, but also with men inside of the church. What we want may be just and desirable, and yet it may be our duty not to urge it, or not to insist on it, because, in the actual state of things, the Catholic body is not prepared to receive it, or to cooperate with us in obtaining it. There is never wisdom in urging what is impracticable. Never are we able to do all the good we would ; we must consent ourselves with doing all that we can, and preparing the way for our successors to do more. Catholics must work with the Catholic body, and none of us must suppose that we are the only ones in that body who have right views, true zeal, and effective courage. To some extent the writer in The Dublin Review may have only administered us a well-merited rebuke, for it may well be that we have no rightly judged this old Catholic body into which we have been incorporated, and that we have formed too low an estimate of the active virtues of its members.

Nevertheless, we agree this far with The Rambler, with many of our fellow-converts, and a much larger number not converts, but Catholics from infancy, that the English-speaking Catholic world, to say nothing of Catholics who speak other tongues, are too timid and servile in their spirit, too narrow and hidebound in their views, too tame a feeble in asserting the truth, beauty, and majesty of their church ; that a free, more manly, and energetic spirit is demanded by the temper and wants of our times ; and that to act favorably on the modern world we should take more pains to place ourselves in closer relation with its intellect, and accept with more frankness and cordiality its historical, scientifical, and philosophical labors in so far as they have obtained solid and durable results. In matters of religion we are and must be exclusive, for truth cannot tolerate so much manifest intolerance towards either Catholics or non-Catholics, or feel that we have nothing to do or say in the great intellectual movements going on around us. It will not do for us to stand aloof from these movements, or to deny that any thing true has been discovered, or any thing valuable has been obtained by men out of our communion out of the church as well as I the church men have nature and natural reason, and in what pertains to the natural order may make valuable discoveries and important acquisitions. We can, in the times in which we live, be neither just to them nor to our church herself, if we remain ignorant of their labors, or refuse to acknowledge what of real merit they have. The whole non-Catholic world is not anti-Catholic. The church found much in Graeco-Roman civilization to retain, and the influence of the Roman jurists may be detected even in our works of casuistry. The modern non-Catholic world is not further removed from Catholicity than was the ancient gentile world. The civilization which obtains now in non-Catholic civilized nations is less repugnant in principle and in spirit to our holy religion than was the old Graeco-Roman civilization. As compared with that it is Christian. There is more in the labors of modern non-Catholic scholars, physicists, historians, poets, philosophers, that we can advantageously appropriate, than the fathers found in the labors of the great men of classic antiquity ; for in the order of civilization the church has never ceased to exert an influence on men even outside of her communion. Undoubtedly, we can save our own souls without any knowledge of the learning and science cultivated by non-Catholics ; undoubtedly the intrinsic value of their learning and science is far less than they imagine ; but we have in our age to seek the salvation of our neighbor as well as of ourselves, and to cultivate not merely our own personal piety, but those active and disinterested virtues which render us instrumental in saving others ; and to do this we must know thoroughly this non-Catholic world, master it on its own ground, and prove ourselves its superior in every department of thought and life.

We are not disposed to deny or to disguise our defects. We frankly concede them ; but they are easily explained and excused by the circumstances in which we have hitherto been placed. It is true, we do to some extent lack spirit, independence, energy and courage ; we do not assert and maintain our rightful position ; we do not lead, as we should, the intellect of the age ; and not a few of the finest minds, the ripest scholars, and most brilliant geniuses of the modern world are not in our communion, are indifferent or hostile to the church. But how long have we had our freedom? For three hundred years English-speaking Catholics have been an oppressed, down-trodden, and persecuted class. England boasts of her free constitution, and we admit that the English have always been the freest people in Europe. But till quite recently, Catholic Englishmen, with one or two brief intervals have, since the reformation, had no share in English freedom. They have been regarded as outside of the constitution, deprived of the native-born rights of Englishmen. Protestant England despoiled our Catholic ancestors of their rights, confiscated their good, robbed them of their churches, schools, colleges, and universities, and did all that power aided by satanic malice could do to force  them into apostasy, or, failing in that, to reduce them to the most abject poverty and ignorance, and to crush out their manhood. They were able to hold fast their faith only at the sacrifice of all else, only in bonds, confiscations, fines, imprisonments, exile, and death. All England and all Ireland have been drenched with the blood of catholic martyrs, and made hallowed ground. The catholic religion was proscribed by law, and the most terrible penalties annexed to its practice it save by stealth. The clergy were proscribed and forbidden to enter the kingdom, and if they did enter it, and were convicted of performing any sacerdotal function, they were hung, drawn, and quartered as guises, to live in secret, to conceal their character and take all possible precautions against capture, as criminals hiding from the officers of justice, in order to minister for a short time to the spiritual wants of faithful. With all their precautions they were caught and executed by hundreds. The history of Catholics in England during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, and to some extent under James I, repeats that of the early Christians of the martyr ages. How were the Catholics, despoiled, persecuted, oppressed, surrounded by spies, treated as outlaws, and everyday dragged to slaughter, to retain the bold, energetic, independent bearing of a ruling class? How should they not, when they had to resort to every expedient, make every shift, not forbidden by Catholic faith and morals, in order to save their lives, become in manner tame, feeble, suspicious, and evasive? They needed all their firmness and heroism when called before the magistrate, when subjected to torture, or led to execution and on those occasions their firmness and heroism rarely failed them. How, when stripped of their goods, deprived of their schools, excluded from the universities, and resisted at every point by authority alike vigilant and ferocious, were they to keep up their scholastic tradition, and to preserve the lead of literature and science?

During these centuries of persecution, Catholics could be expected to do no more that study to practice their religion in as quiet and as inoffensive a way as possible. They were thrown upon the defensive, and naturally adopted an apologetic tone. However firm they might be in the faith, or courageous to suffer for it, their position in the state, or rather out of the state, the disguise, the secrecy, the evasion they were obliged to study in order not unnecessarily to ger in which they lived of having their goods confiscated or their throats cut. Naturally told on their characters, and made them in the world. Amongst their enemies, cautious in their language and timid in their conduct; nor is it to be thought strange if, at times, the iron entered into their souls, if they felt that they were, in a worldly point of view, an inferior class, and lost the hope of seeing better days. Assailed on all sides, their religion everywhere misrepresented, grossly belied, and calumniated, what more natural or more excusable the that they should study, as far as possible, to apologize for it, to divest it of its more offensive features, that they should seek and dwell only on such things as would tell most in their favor? We see in the ages of persecution, in the oppression to which Catholics were subjected, in England and Ireland from the accession of Elizabeth, and in Scotland, from the accession from James VI. Down to the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill in 1829, enough to account for all the defeats to be detected in the great body of English-speaking Catholics at the present time, and that, too, without casting the slightest blame on our Catholic ancestors.

We think it undeniable that Protestants in the United Kingdom and in the United States, have a more though, a more comprehensive, and a more finished education than Catholics generally have in the same countries. In England, the Protestants not only deprived Catholics of their schools, colleges, and universities, but took them and their ample endowments, derived from Catholic sources, for themselves. They enriched themselves with our spoils, as was the case wherever the government became Protestant a fact never to be forgotten when speaking of the greatness, power, or civilization of the Protestant nations of Europe. The Protestants entered into the possessions of their Catholic ancestors, and took as their outfit the accumulations of ages of Catholic faith, zeal, liberality, and labor. Despoiled of the provisions they had made for education, forbidden both by their poverty and by law to make new provisions, Catholics had, for a long time, no resource but that of sending their children abroad to be educated in some continental school, which few of them could do, and which the government prevented all from doing as far as it was able. Catholics were excluded from the public schools and universities which their own Catholic ancestors had founded and endowed, and in Ireland at least, the Catholic father was prohibited by law, under severe penalties, from teaching his own child even letters, from sending him out of the kingdom to be educated, as well as from transmitting to him money to pay his expenses. Under these spoliations, these terrible penal laws, and with all the wealth, power, and patronage of the state against them, without means, without civil protection, proscribed and treated as outlaws, how were Catholics without a miracle to compete successfully with their Protestant enemies in the several branches of a finished liberal education? History tells us of the consternation with which the early Christians received the cowardly edict of Julian the Apostate, closing to them the schools of the empire, and yet the schools he closed to them had been founded, not by them or their Christian ancestors, but by non-Christian emperors, and they were supported from the imperial treasury. The British government under Protestant influence carried its injustice, its cruelty, its cunning, and its cowardice to an extent which Julian, astute and malignant as he was towards Christians, appears never to have dreamed of. He closed to the Christians the public schools of the empire, and forbid them the study of heathen literature, but he did not forbid them to found schools of their own, or to teach in them their own religion, philosophy, literature, and science. What should astonish us, therefore, is not that there is a disparity in education, in literary and scientific culture, between English-speaking Protestants, but that the actual disparity is no greater. 

Nevertheless, we must not conclude because our ancestors did well, did nobly under their circumstances, that we are to be content, under the far more favorable circumstances in which we are placed, with doing no more than they did ; we must do for our epoch as well, as nobly as they did for theirs. We are now in the English-speaking world comparatively free and untrammeled in our action, and we must learn to used our freedom,- without misusing it, of course,- and our best to obliterate from our hearts, and from our manners, all traces of our former servitude. We must feel that we are free men, and refuse for a moment to regard ourselves as in inferior or as an oppressed class. We must study not to appeal to men’s pity, but study to command their respect and admiration. To effect what we should aim at, and to acquire the commanding position in the modern world which is our right, we must undoubtedly adapt our system of education, our schools, colleges, and seminaries, more to the wants of the times and the country, and seek more carefully to prepare our youth for the work they have to perform in our new and altered circumstances. Our university must be founded on a larger and more liberal plan, embrace a larger circle of studies, an aim more at intellectual development, at encouraging free, vigorous, and original thought, and at rearing up a class of scholars, well versed not only in our own doctrines and traditions, but like Moses in “all the learning of Egypt,” who will be able to compete successfully with the non-Catholic scholars of the age, in their own peculiar province. When the world was Catholic, when the civil authority guarded, or professed to guard, the flock against the wolves from without, and the work of education was simply to promote the personal virtues, and to keep things quiet and as they were, it was, perhaps, not unwise to bring up children in ignorance of error, and to exclude them from all intercourse or acquaintance with its adherents. There was little call in the case of the many for secular learning and science, and the chief thing needed was moral an ascetic discipline. But in our times and country, we English-speaking Catholics were placed in a non-Catholic world, and the faithful should understand that to keep our children out of harm’s way, but keeping them in ignorance of the world around them, is impracticable. We cannot do it, except to a very feeble extent, if we would. Neither parental nor sacerdotal authority will suffice for that. We cannot fly danger, and as we cannot fly it, our only safety is in boldly confronting it. We must arm our children against it, not by ignorance, but by knowledge, by permitting them to learn under our own guidance and direction all that the non-Catholic philosophy, literature, and science are likely o teach them. The graduate of a Catholic college must be not merely an acute and subtle scholastic disputant, not merely and humble, pious, and intellectually-cultivated man, master, as far as at his years can be expected. Of all the learning and science of the age, whom no man out of the church can take by surprise, on any subject. We think, therefore, while our schools, colleges, and universities abate nothing in their ascetic discipline, or their religious training, that they should pay more attention to the secular learning and science of the day. To this end the circle of studies must be enlarged, and the university course prolonged. More attention should be devoted to the development, to the encouragement of free, bold, vigorous thought, and to individuality. And even originality of character. We must give full scope to the reason of the scholar, and not be afraid now and then of a little intellectual eccentricity. Better in our age sometimes to err, providing it is not from heretical spirit or inclination, than never to think. Nothing is worse for the mind than mere routine, nothing more fatal to all true greatness and intellectual progress than to attempt to mould all minds after one and the same model, and to maintain a certain dead level of intelligence. There is nothing in our religion itself that demands it. Catholicity does not fear, nay, she challenges free thought, and gives to reason full and entire freedom, all the freedom it can have without ceasing to be reason. In the world in which we live it is no less important that our young men should feel their freedom, and be encouraged to use it, than it is that they should feel and discharge their obligations to authority to suffer them to grow up with the impression that they are as Catholics in mental bondage, that what are to them the most inviting fields of literature and science are prohibited, and that they are doomed to forego the nobler part, so to speak. Of their natural manhood, is the worst policy possible, and tends only to drive from our ranks a large proportion of those who by their natural talents are the best fitted to extend and adorn Catholic literature and science.

In these remarks we are not aware that we do more than repeat the convictions of the good fathers who have the principal charge of our higher schools and colleges, nay, what we are urging seems to us to be only the application to our age and country of the very principle on which the system of education adopted by the Society of Jesus was originally founded. That society arose at a time when the old scholastic system was losing. Or had lost its hold on the age, and had found a powerful rival, if not a conqueror, in the humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; and in organizing its schools its aim was, while it retained all that was good and applicable to the age in scholasticism, to surpass the humanists in their own peculiar line. The society did it, rolled back the tide of the heresy, gave new life and energy to Catholic learning, and took and kept the lead of European education and European thought for nearly a century and a half. Since then a new humanism has been developed, and we ask for to-day only what the Society of Jesus did in the sixteenth century, and what we believe it is doing or preparing to do now as fast as its means and circumstances will permit.

Closely connected with this subject is another defect of Catholics in this country, less easy to explain and excuse than those we have referred to. The Rambler seems to think that a portion of the Catholics in the United Kingdom are less disposed to tolerate free thought and free speech in open questions than they are in the United States, at least this is the construction that The Dublin Review puts upon its language ; but we are inclined to think the reverse is the fact. In matters of faith or orthodoxy the Catholics in this country are by o means too rigid or too exacting, and saving certain Jamsenistic tendencies now and then encountered, we are far enough from being too introlerant; wer are liberal enough towards heresy, and none too strenuous in our maintenance o0f the form of sound words; are all free to hold the opinion we prefer, and to follow our own judgment, we seem hardly to understand what toleration means; we practice very little of that mutual forbearance, that wise liberality, and that mutual respect and good will which our religion enjoins. Let an honest, upright, sincere Catholic, whose orthodoxy are above suspicion , defend in open questions an allowable opinion not in accordance with the opinion of a portion of his brethren, and they open upon him with a hundred mouths, denounce him, misrepresent his opinion or his arguments, appeal to popular prejudice against him, and do their best to ruin him in the estimation of the Catholic public. We suffer ourselves now and then in this respect to run even to shameful lengths; we need specify no instances, for several will readily occur to our readers. Many of us seem not tobe aware that we are bound to respect in others that freedom of thought and utterance which we claim for ourselves, or that freedom of opinion is as sacred in them as it is in us. There is nothing more uncatholic than to tyrannize over others in matters of opinion. So long as a man saves orthodoxy, says nothing to weaken dogmas, are free, and no man has the right to censure him for them, let them be what they may, to denounce them, to seek to render them odious, or to bring popular opinion in any respect to bear against them. They may be controverted, disproved, shown to be unsound, or even dangerous, if they can be, but only by fair discussion on their merits, and by legitimate argument.

Unhappily, this rule is far from being always observed. Judging from what we have seen and experienced since we became a Catholic, this rule is reserved only for special occasions, and in the discussion of matters in which we take no interest. If we have to deal with a strong man, who is to be presumed to understand himself, and to have some skill in fence, not a few of us make it a rule never to discuss the real question or never to discuss it on its merits. We make up a collateral issue, evade the real point in question, give our readers a false and mutilated view of the opinion advanced, detach a few sentences from their context, and give them a sense wholly unintended and wholly unwarranted, attack a conclusion without hinting at the principle from which it is obtained, and then proceed to refute the opinion we do not like, and which we have shaped in our own way, by arguments addressed not to the reason, but to the ignorance, the prejudice, or the passion of our readers. It would seem thjat the study is, through the unfair mode or treating the opinion, to damage in the estimation of the public we address, thje author, and then through the author, years of our Catholic life an instance in which an able and intelligent Catholic writer has been met by his Catholic opponents with fairness and candor, or his opinion discussed on its merits with courtesy or common civility. Our domestic controversies speak but ill for our civilization, our liberality, and our conscientiousness. Our so-called Catholic press, in regard to our disputes among ourselves, where differences are allowable, stands far below that of any other country, and indicates a lower moral tone, and an inferior journalism, and we must add, for the honor of American Catholic journalism, and we must intolerance, and the least fairness and candor towards their opponents , - we must labor to elevate the more dignified tone, and insist that their conductors devote more time and thought to their preparation, take larger and more comprehensive views of men and things, exhibits more mental cultivating, more liberality or though and feeling, and five some evident of the ability of Catholics to lead and advance the civilization of the country. We want the men who conduct out Catholic press to be living men, highly cultivated men, up to the highest level of their age,- men who are filled with the spirit of our holy religion, and will take their rule from the morality, gentleness, courtesy, and chivalry or the Gospel, not from their petty passions, envyings, and jealousies, or from a low and corrupt secular press, that disregards principle, mocks at conscience , seeks only success, and counts success lawful by whatever means obtained.

Our readers will not misunderstand us. We are advocating no tame, weak, or sickly style of Catholic journalism. We ourselves like pain dealing, if honest, and severity even, if it is the severity of reason, not the severity of passion. We respect an honest, downright, earnest style, which tells clearly, energetically, its author’s meaning without circumlocution or reticence. We have writers who in their language observe sufficiently the outward forms of politeness, and as far as mere words go are not discourteous, but who yet are highly reprehensible for their intellectual unfairness, for their want of candor and strict honesty in reproducing the doctrine, the real though, and the argument. The mere manner is a small matter; the substance is the thing to be considered. The American people do not need to ve addressed in baby tones; they are not, taken in mass, a refined people, but they are an earnest people, and like plain dealing, and demand of those who would gain their hearts, or their ears, sincerity, truthfulness, honesty, and courage. They cannot endure persiflage, or what they regard as unfairness, evasion, or cowardice on the part of a Catholic writer. Be manly, be true, be brave, be open, be just , and then be as strong, as cogent in your reasoning as you can. We complain of nothing of that sor; but we do complain of uncandid, unfair, and intolerant manner in which the views and arguments, and even persons of respectable and highly-deserving Catholics, are treated by those of their own brethren who are placed in a position to have more or less influence on the public opinion of the Catholic community.

The intolerance which we complain of ,and which seeks to crush an opponent by bringing extrinsic forces to bear against him, and which refuses to discuss the points in dispute on their merits, is the greatest discouragement and hinderance to free, original, and manly thought that can be conceived. It introduces a false standard of judgment, and subjects that thinker or the writer to a test which neither the church nor the state imposes. If tends to make authors and journalists the slaves or popular ignorance, prejudice, or caprice, into a papacy, or to substitute it for the pope and councils, for the church and her pastors and teachers. It dwarts the intellect; it freezes up the will-springs of thought; it prevents one from rising above commonplace, and renders him tame and feeble. Every man should always be free to ask. What is true? What is just? What needs to be said? What will people say? Or what will gain me a momentary reputation? Great practical questions every day come up which deeply concern the state, and even religion, and in the discussion of which the Catholic publicist must take part if he is to be a man of his age and country, a living man and not a fossil. He must be free to take part and adhere to principle, without any fear of the popular opinion of the North or the South, of the East or the West, of this party or of that. Truth knows no geographical boundaries, and is not determined by sectional lines, nor is it to be subordinated to the petty passions and interest of office-holders or office seekers.

We have the right to expect Catholics to have conscience, to be wedded to principle, and prepared to stand by it to the death. When they understand themselves and appreciate the liberty of thought and expression their religion allows, they are never intolerant; and never seek to excite public opinion or bring the force of popular or party prejudice to bear against an honest and intelligent writer, who happens to advance, within the limits of free opinion, something not in accordance with their own convictions. They feel and know that it is their own convictions. They feel and know that it is theirs to sustain him in the exercise of this lawful freedom, and to shield his reputation from the attacks of ignorance or malice. They may frankly controvert his opinions, if they deem them unsound, but they will do it with argument, with fairness, and candor, without seeking to lessen him in the public estimation, or detract any from his merits as a man and as an author. They must do so, or we shall have few men appear in our ranks with sufficient force of character and strength of mind to serve us in our hour of need, to meet on equal terms the enemies of our cause ; or to give a free and healthy development to Catholic literature and science. We must place in our publicists, who prove themselves true men, a generous confidence, and treat them with justice and liberality.

The Rambler has very justly remarked in one of its numbers that in the English-speaking world there is a very general, deep-seated impression that we Catholics, when our religion is in question, lack frankness and courage, and that we are indeed disingenuous, untruthful, and cowardly. That such is the impression is undeniable. We are never supposed o be open and frank ; and it is believed that we trim, evade, use mental reservation, in a word precise what they express by the word jesuitry, whenever our religion is in question. No doubt, to some extent, this impression was originated by the cautions and shifts, disguises and reserve to which our ancestors were obliged to resort in the time of persecution in order to escape the terrible penal laws enacted by the Protestant government ; but however that may be, or whatever may have been the origin of  the impression, it certainly exists, and operates more than any one thing else, to our disadvantage. It prevents our explosions and defenses of our religion from being received with respect. We are regarded as impeached witnesses, as unworthy of the slightest credit when we speak of our religion. Nothing is more important to us than to remove this damaging impression. We cannot remove it by exclaiming against it, by denying its justice, and asserting by words our own truthfulness and courage. Our words are precisely what is not believed. We can remove it only by deeds, only in showing by our acts that we are frank and truthful, open and courageous ; that we shrink from the frank avowal and defense of nothing really pertaining to our religion, or from recognizing and meeting no historical or scientific difficulties alleged against the claims of our church ; that there is nothing in history or science, in Catholic ages, nations, or practices, that we would conceal, or are not prepared openly to avow, and so far is Catholic, boldly defend.

Now, we think it cannot be denied of it should suffice, that we have the right to throw ourselves on the maxim, “Every man is to be accounted innocent till proved guilty.” This may do very well for us, but we cannot expect it to satisfy our enemies, who think they have proved us guilty. It must be admitted that there are appearances against us, and that some of us have occasionally indulged in what The Rambler terms “literary cookery.” Some of our writers have notoriously trimmed, like the late Charles Butler, pared off the features of our religion supposed to be the most offensive to Protestants ; that we have in our popular controversies from ignorance or policy passed over historical passages difficult to explain, and by carefully selected extracts from scientific writers made the scientific tendencies or the results of the scientific investigations of the age, appear more in our favor than they really are. Our popular apologists have, when they could, evaded, or when they could not evade, have met unfairly, and not frankly, the fact in the delicate questions of religious liberty, the inquisitions, burning of heretics, and the papal supremacy. No doubt our popular writers have been governed by it seems so to us, that what at one time may be truly prudent, at another may be grossly imprudent. In the beginning, the church adopted and for some centuries preserved more or less strictly the disciplina aroani, but in our days the discipline of the secret, whether desirable or not, is impracticable. The church has been too long in the world and played too conspicuous a part on its theatre for that. She is a public body, and her history is as open to her enemies as it is to us, and they can read history as well as we. There is no historical fact that can by any effort of ingenuity or malice be twisted to her discredit that is not already known to them, and made the most of against her. When we consider this fact in connection with the impression so widely and damagingly prevalent, that, when we speak of our religion, we are no better than tricksters, liars and cowards, it seems to us that the only prudent course is that of entire openness, and frankness, which conceals and attempts to conceal nothing. No special pleading we can resort to, no historical cookery possible, no subtile distinctions, and ingenious explanations conceivable, will ever convince the non-Catholic English-speaking world that Gallicanism truly represents the Catholic doctrine as to the power of the pope and the relations between the spiritual and the temporal orders; that the church does not teach, and Catholics are not required to believe, that out of the church there is no salvation; or that the modern doctrine of religious liberty professed by the non-Catholic world, and which is tantamount to religious indifferentism, is Catholic doctrine, or that it has not been condemned by popes and councils and the practice of the church in all ages. All efforts to this end are so much labor lost, nay, worse than lost; for they tend only to confirm the impression already so strong of our cowardice and unscrupulousness in explaining or defending our religion and its history. The rebukes we received a few years since for our alleged imprudence in publishing our essays on the papacy has persuaded nobody out of the church that we were unorthodox, and has had the effect only of confirming the non-Catholics world in their belief in the lack of frankness, honesty, and courage on the part of Catholics. Mr. Chandler’s famous speech in congress on the temporal power of the pope, may have seemed to Catholics an admirable reply to the charges brought by the Know-Nothings against us, but to the non-Catholic world it has seemed only an ingenious perversion of evident historical truth, and a transparent evasion of the real difficulty. The non-Catholic world believe us, not him, for they know that we are truer to the common sense view of history than he is.

We agree precisely with our friends as to the duty of observing prudence, but we differ from some of them as to what in our age and country is prudence. We believe that a bold, fearless, manly, and truthful avowal and defence of our religion in its offensive as well as inoffensive features, is the only legitimate prudence in the world we have to deal with. We believe the only prudent course is to throw ourselves upon the truth, and leave the truth to sustain us. If the facts of history or of science are really against us, we cannot maintain the claims of our church, if we would; and if, though not really against us, they present difficulties that in the present stage of historical and scientific progress we are unable satisfactorily to explain, we lose nothing by frankly avowing the fact. In history we know no such difficulties. In science, in philology, ethnology, and geology, we do find difficulties that we are not ourselves able to explain, on any principles we are acquainted with so that they shall harmonize with Catholic dogmas. These difficulties, however, do not disturb our faith, for it would be extremely illogical to argue against the church from our own ignorance. But they exist in the present state of science, and we gain nothing but a new confirmation of the damaging impression against us by refusing to acknowledge them. We here and everywhere shall do bet to be open and courageous, to confide in truth, and to have no fear but the God of truth will sustain us, and give success to his own cause.

The old nursing and safeguard system has ceased to be practicable. We cannot keep from the faithful a knowledge of these difficulties and what our enemies allege against us, if we would. We disguise not from ourselves or from others the dangers to which our children and youth are exposed in this proud, self-reliant, and conceited Anglo-Saxon world. But we must face the danger with brave hearts and manly confidence. The church is comparatively free, and is no longer crippled by having the temporal power for her dry nurse; but she is left with our any external support from the state. She is forced, from the nature of the case, to fall back on her own resources as a spiritual kingdom, and make her appeal to reason and will. She can subsist or make her appeal to reason and will. She can subsist or make progress in the Anglo-Saxon world only as she can convince the reason and win the heart. The only obedience she can count on is a free, intelligent, voluntary obedience, yielded from conviction and love. Such is undeniably the fact, and we should none of us by our reminiscences of a different past be prevented from frankly and loyally accepting it. Our sole reliance under god is in the ability of our church to meet all the demands of intelligence, and to command by her intrinsic excellence the intellect of the age. This being the case, we must give to intellect its free development, and the case, we must give to intellect its free development, and treat it with respect even in its aberrations, though not the aberrations themselves when incompatible with faith or sound doctrine.

We have acknowledged and commented on certain defects which converts, like ourselves, seem to detect in the Catholic population of Great Britain and the United States. And yet these are, after all, not defects that can be predicated of any considerable portion of that population, at least at the present moment. They are defects, moreover, shared by many converts, to as great a degree as by our old Catholics, if not even in a greater degree. They are, however, every day disappearing, and with freedom and the opportunity to give full scope to their Catholic life, the great majority of our Catholic population are assuming that high, manly tone, that open, frank, ingenuous manner, that sense of equality, which becomes them in the presence of their enemies. We would not be understood as having written in a querulous tone, or in a censorious spirit. We have merely wished to give our views on several questions which have been raised in England, with the desire not of finding fault with the past, or of denying that a great improvement has taken place, but of vindicating for Catholic publicists their rightful position, and of stimulating our brethren to greater improvement hereafter. We have defended converts from what what we have regarded as unjust insinuations, and intended to rebuke the taunts to which they are sometimes subjected; but it has not entered into our thought to place them above old Catholics, or to favor in the remotest degree here or elsewhere a convert party. For ourselves, personally, it is only by an effort that we can bring home to our own mind that we spend upwards of forty years outside of the Catholic communion. We think, feel, and act, according to our knowledge and virtue, as a Catholic, and as nothing else. We find it difficult to draw a line between ourselves and those who have been Catholics from their infancy. Our interest, our affections, and our lot in life are all bound up with this old Catholic body into which, through the grace of God, we have been admitted as one born out of due season. Their faith is our faith, their hopes are our hopes, their God is our God. Whither they go, thither we go with them; where they dwell, there will we dwell. We will recognize no schism between them and us, and it is on them under God we place our reliance for the future of our religion in the English-speaking world. In our own country our hopes rest mainly on the young Catholic generation growing up. We find much in them to deplore, but in every city and considerable town throughout the Union, we find a noble band of Catholic young men, some born here some born abroad, who seem to us filled with the right spirit, who love their religion, who are not ashamed of it, who are willing to live it, and live for it, and who are able to recommend it to the non-Catholic world, by their high-toned virtues, their simple, unaffected piety, their intelligence, their high sense of honor, and their manly bearing and conduct. May God bless them.