"Protestantism Not a Religion" (Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1853)

Since their utter defeat in the seventeenth century by the great Bossuet, Protestants have hardly made any serious attempts to defend Protestantism as a religion, and they seem now very generally prepared to abandon its defense, save as a political and social order.  If we may judge from their words and actions, their discourses and their writings, the great majority of them not only hold Protestantism as a form of Christian doctrine and worship to be indefensible, but are disposed to reject all theological doctrines, articles, dogmas, or propositions of faith as addressed to the understanding, and to resolve Christianity itself into a vague and indeterminate sentiment, common to all men,- a universal fact in the natural history of man, coalescing alike with any or all forms of faith and worship, and as acceptable to God when coalescing with one form as with another.  They who pass for the more enlightened among them say with Pope, or rather Bollingbroke, whom Pope versified, “For modes of faith let graceless zealous fight, His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.”  They quietly assume that faith has no relation to life, and that one’s life can be right in any form of faith, or in none; thus entirely losing sight of Christianity as a supernatural life into which no one can be born without faith, or advance without faith perfected by charity.

We say only what the facts in the case warrant, when we say that Protestants everywhere virtually concede that ours is truly the Church of God, if it be a fact that our Lord founded any Church, or visible organization with authority to keep, witness, teach, declare, and apply his law, and out of which there is no salvation; and that Catholicity is unquestionably the true and only form of Christianity, if Christianity be any thing more than a collection of moral precepts and curious philosophical speculations, or a general principle of political and social amelioration, to be developed and applied according to the special wants, tastes, and convictions of the people in each successive stage in the progress of mankind through the ages.  Grant Christianity as a supernatural law, as a positive religion, as a fixed and determinate form of faith and worship, and they will none of them hesitate in their hearts, hardly in their words, to pronounce it and Catholicity one and the same thing.  They oppose Catholicity in reality, not because it is not, but because it is religion, and insist upon Protestantism, not because it is, but because it is not religion, or because, while it has the name and appearance of religion, it is in reality as good as none,- imposes no restraint on their reason or will, their fancy or their passions, emancipates them from all religion as law, and leaves them free to be of any religion, except the Catholic, or of none at all, as they please.

Hence Protestants even attempt to defend their system, if system it can be called, only on secular grounds, and as being wholly in the secular order.  They urge in its defense against us, than it is more favorable than Catholicity to the independence of temporal sovereigns, to thrift, to trade and manufacturers, to social progress, to mental activity, and to civil and religious freedom, that is, to the freedom of the temporal order from the restraints of religion.  Save for the sake of appearances, or as the effect of old Catholic habits not yet lost, they oppose Catholicity and defend Protestantism only by secular reasons.  No doubt they still adhere as tenaciously as ever to their Protestant movement, and boast of their “glorious Reformation”; yet certainly not because they regard it as the only true way, or even as a way, of salvation in the world to come,- certainly not because they regard it as best meeting the religious wants of the soul, and the best fitted to strengthen and console one on his death-bed; but because, in their judgment, it imposes the least restraint on reason and will, is the best thing for man as an inhabitant of this world and devoted to its transitory goods, and the most convenient for those who would live a free and easy life here without any grave reproaches of conscience,- because it relieves them of the necessity of submitting their understandings to a law, and from the performance of good works, and leaves them to indulge their own carnal nature, and to follow unabashed their own carnal nature, and to follow unabashed their own corrupt passions and inclinations.  This is the solemn fact, and in vain will they attempt to deny it or disguise it.

This should not surprise us, for Protestantism never was a religion at all.  No matter what may be the self-complacency of Protestants, the lofty airs they assume, the great, swelling words they use, or the grave tones in which they speak of their pure, unadulterated evangelical religion, the fact is, Protestantism, considered in itself, is not and never was a religion, true or false, never had a single religious element, never was sought and has never been upheld from any strictly religious motives.  Men may have combined some fragments of religious truth with it; they may have retained in spite of it some religious observances, but never were they moved to embrace it, or to contend for it, by any considerations of religion.  With the dissolute among the clergy and religious it was embraced because it emancipated them from the discipline of their superiors, freed them from their vows of chastity, and permitted them to marry; with kings, princes, and nobles, because it freed them from subjection to the Church, especially the Pope, enabled them to reign without any restraint on their will from the spiritual authority, and gave them the rich spoils of the churches and monasteries; with the laity generally, because it emancipated them from the clergy, and gave them the power to select, teach, commission, and govern their pastors and teachers; and with all, because it freed them from the good works and alms deeds, the fasts, penances, and mortifications, insisted on by the Catholic Church.  Its chief and in reality its only charm for those who embraced it was, that it asserted the dominion of the flesh over the spirit, and of the temporal over the eternal.  It had its root in man’s fallen nature; it was engendered by that spirit which everywhere and at all times works in the children of disobedience, and was fostered and sustained by ungodly civil rulers, who wished to reign supreme over God and his Christ.  The impious emperors of Germany, and faithless kings of France, who in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries made war on the rights of the Church, and sought to make the Pope their slave, their tool for oppressing their subjects, prepared the way for it, and it is only the development and generalization of that doctrine of the independence of the temporal order, which is even yet held by many Catholic politicians, courtiers, and demagogues under the name of Gallicanism, which is far older than Bossuet and Louis the Fourteenth, and the fatal consequences of which they are far from foreseeing.

Assuredly Protestants do not avow this in so many words; assuredly they have a theory that their movement originated in a sincere and ardent attachment to Chrisitan truth, and an earnest desire for religious reformation.  To hear some of them talk, when in a romantic mood, one would be led to think that they really believe that the brutal tyrants steeped in crime and lust, the apostate monks, and renegade priests, who effected their so-called Reformation in the sixteenth century, were firm believers, the meekest and gentlest of men, peaceable and holy men, filled with the milk of human kindness, and animated with an ardent love of God, inoffensive in their lives, free from all turbulent passions, laboring only to preach the pure love of God, or the pure doctrines and morals of the Gospel, to win sinners back to their duty, and to induce all to love God supremely, and each his neighbor as himself.  How beautiful!  What a pity that it is all fancy, romance, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, with not the least conceivable approach to reality!

Protestantism, save in name and outward form, did not originate in the sixteenth century.  We find the first traces of it in Christendom, as far back as the time of the Arians, in the Byzantine court, with the eunuchs, courtiers, and flatterers of the emperors of the Low Empire, persuading them to usurp the pontifical power, and to make themselves supreme alike in temporals and in spirituals.  It is of pagan origin, and displayed itself in all its glory under those pagan emperors who claimed to be at once emperors, sovereign pontiffs, and gods.  It was revived in the Byzantine court as a reminiscence of the pagan empire, and maintained for the purposes of that centralized despotism which disgraced and finally ruined the Low Empire of the Greeks of Constantinople. 

In its essence, it is the substitution of the temporal for the spiritual, and man for God; in its original form, it was the union of the temporal and spiritual sovereignties in the hands of the temporal prince, that is, the conversion of the spiritual into a temporal authority.  From Constantinople it passed into Western Europe, first under the German emperors, then under the kings of England, France, and Sapin.  Henry the Fourth, king of the Germans, whom St. Gregory the Seventh excommunicated and deposed, Frederic Barbarossa, Louis of Bavaria, Henry Plantagenet and Edward the Third of England, Philip the Fair of France, and Peter of Aragon, were at least incipient Protestants, as is evident from the sympathy they call forth in every Protestant breast, and the fact that Protestantism honors their memory as its early sons and saints, and denounces as monsters of insolence and rapacious ambition the Popes, their contemporaries, who sought to curb their licentiousness and to repress their brutal tyranny.  Yet neither in the East nor the West was Protestantism in principle asserted or defended from religious motives, or for religious reasons.  The Byzantine emperors had no reference to the interests of religion; they sought only to enlarge their own power, and to make religion their tool for enslaving their subjects.  It was not religion that moved the emperors of the West, the kings of England, France, and Spain, to resist the Sovereign Pontiffs, and to seek to rob the Church of her rights and her possessions.  They did not seek to extend the empire of religion, and to bring all into subjection to the law of God; on the contrary, their precise, and to some extent even avowed object, was to restrict the province of religion, to enlarge that of the state, and to bring religion itself into subjection to the prince as an instrument of temporal tyranny.  In the very nature of the case, even without supposing the truth of the Catholic Church, if that were possible, their movement was irreligious; for it was against what they held to be religion, and avowedly in favor of the supremacy of the temporal order, which is the denial of religion, and in principle the assertion of atheism.  Under any supposition possible, the whole movement was purely in behalf of the secular order for its own sake, and such a movement, we need not say, is not and cannot be called a religious movement.  The best thing you can say of it is, that it is a diabolical movement, instigated by the Devil in his ceaseless warfare against the Eternal.

The history of the introduction and establishment of Protestantism, in the sixteenth century, in what are now the Protestant nations of Europe, fully confirms the assertion that Protestantism has no religious character, properly so called.  The contrast between its introduction and establishment in Catholic Europe, and the introduction and establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the pagan world, is a most striking proof of it.  Christianity went forth poor, without staff of scrip in her hand; Protestantism stepped at once into the rich possessions of the Catholic churches and monasteries, and found itself provided with temples, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, founded and endowed by Catholic piety and charity; Christianity had to make its way, not only against the old religion, but also against the corrupt nature of man, and the whole force of the temporal authority; Protestantism in every country where it gained a footing had the temporal authority and the corrupt nature of man on its side, as its unwavering supporters; Christianity had to encounter physical force, plunder, and murder; Protestantism wielded physical force, plundered, and murdered.  The Christians suffered persecution from the old religion, whether Jewish or pagan; the Protestants persecuted the Catholic religion.  The Christians demanded of the state the freedom of the Christian religion; the Protestants demanded the civil establishment of Protestantism, and the suppression, under the pains and penalties of high treason, of Catholicity.  The Apostles in propagating Christianity became martyrs themselves; the Reformers in propagating Protestantism made martyrs of others.  The Apostles and their associates gained the world to Christ by their preaching and their virtues; the Reformers gained the nations they did gain to the Reformation by the sword, fines, confiscations, imprisonments, exile, death,- by their tyranny, persecution, vices and crimes.  What can better prove that Protestantism is not Christianity, is not religion, is purely an affair of the flesh, excited and strengthened by hell, and led on by ungodly rulers, bent on destroying Christianity, and reigning supreme over God and his Christ?

Of course we do not mean to be understood that Protestantism was actually concocted by civil rulers, or that the primary motive of its invention was to favor the temporal sovereigns.  After Satan, its authors were lawyers, courtiers, demagogues, dissolute priests, and apostate monks, and their motive was emancipation from the restraints of Catholicity, and the promotion of their own temporal interests and pleasures, their ambition, their cupidity, or their lusts.  This end could not be gained without breaking the power of the Church, and treating her as non avenue in all the affairs of this world,- a thing then not possible without the aid and the supremacy of the temporal power.  But what we do really mean to assert is, the Protestantism made its way in the world only under the protection of temporal princes, by violence against Catholicity and Catholics, and that wherever it gained an establishment it gained it by the sword, civil or military.  Luther was protected in his movement against the Church by the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse, and indirectly even by Maximilian the First, and his grandson, Charles the Fifth, Emperors of Germany, who wished to make use of him to force the Pope to yield to the iniquitous demands they might have occasion to make.  His cause triumphed only in those states whose princes supported it with their policy, their arms, and their penal enactments against Catholics.  The reform in Switzerland gained an establishment only by first getting a control of the temporal government, and then using it to suppress by force the old religion, to imprison, banish, or massacre its adherents.  In England it was introduced and forced upon a reluctant people by the arts and tyranny of the king or queen and Parliament, and it was the same n Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  All this is notorious, and may easily be collected from Protestant historians themselves, by any one who knows how to read.

No doubt Catholics fought and fought hard against Protestants, for there cannot well be war where there is only one party; but they did so only in self-defense.  They were not, and from the nature of the case could not be, the aggressors.  They were in legal possession, and had been for ages before the Reformers were born, and could have no occasion to make war on Protestants, if Protestants made none on them.   The Protestants were necessarily the first aggressors, and therefore responsible for all the errors and bloodshed which have followed.  They were needy adventurers, intruders, who had and could have nothing save as they unjustly and illegally dispossessed Catholics.  They could gain a footing in the world only by displacing those already in legal and rightful possession, by ribbing Catholics and plundering the Church.  No other way was open to them; and this way they took.  They began by assailing Catholics in their faith, which had also been their own, in which they had been reared, to which they were indebted for their science and learning, their culture and civilization, and which they had vowed and sworn to hold and to uphold even unto death.  They assailed it with falsehood and ridicule, even while professing to hold it, and to acknowledge the authority of the Church; and as soon as they became powerful enough in any particular place, they appropriated the Catholic churches to their own use, suppressed by violence the Catholic service, and installed a profane service of their own concocting.  They usurped the churches and monasteries, appropriated their revenues, forced the recognition of their innovations, proscribed the Catholic faith and worship, insulted, mobbed, plundered, imprisoned, exiled, or massacred those who would not curse their spiritual Mother, and forsake the God of their fathers.  What more serious aggression could be offered?  What less strange than that such frightful sacrilege, such brutal tyranny, such wholesale robbery and violence, should provoke resistance and drive Catholics to arms in defense of their faith, their Church, their liberties, their possessions, their lives, and all that makes life worth possessing?  Who can blame them?  Who blames the traveler for resisting, even to death, the highwayman, who, with pistol in hand, bids him “stand and deliver”?

Certainly we do not pretend that Protestantism in the sixteenth century was all included in the assertion of the supremacy of the civil power, or the authority of princes over the Church.  To do so would be to take a very narrow-sided view of what by way of courtesy we call the Reformation.  The Reformers certainly preached many heresies in opposition to Catholic doctrines, besides that of the independence of sovereigns, and the principal controversies of the time turned on these.  But none of these heresies were new; they were all old, and had all been refuted by Catholic doctors and condemned by the Church.  The only novelty Protestantism could boast was that of reproducing and combining in one general heresy all the particular heresies which had hitherto appeared and been anathematized separately.  But however much these heresies were insisted on by the Reformers, they were not insisted on for their own sake, and were contended for at all only inasmuch as they tended to abuse the spiritual and to exalt the temporal order,- to enslave the spirit and give dominion to the flesh.  There is not a single one of the so-called Protestant doctrines, in so far as it differs from the Catholic doctrine on the same subject, that does not depress the moral and religious order, diminish the authority of the spirit, supersede the necessity of good works, and enlarge the freedom and dominion of man’s carnal nature.  Such is undeniably the case with the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the inadmissibility of grace, the serf-will preached by Luther, and the priesthood or pontificate expressly claimed for each individual Christian by all the Reformers.  Such, too, was the rejection of the Sacraments, the denial of the merit of good works and alms deeds, penance, fasts, and mortifications.  The heresies were not valued for themselves, but for the end they favored; and whoever examines them will find that the end they favor is in all cases the emancipation of the temporal order and the subjection of the spirit to the flesh, the soul to the body.  It was this end, though probably not always- and with the mass perhaps seldom, if ever- clearly apprehended, yet in some manner apprehended, that lent the Reformation its peculiar charm, and created that wild and frantic enthusiasm in its favor, which marked the great body of its promoters and adherents, and which for a time, like that of the Saracens, swept everything before it.

No man can doubt this now, however it might have been doubted in the beginning.  The Reformation, in so far as it has had free scope, has been true to itself, and its variations have only served to place its real and essential character in a clearer light.   Its history is its best commentary.  In no instance has it deserted itself.  Yet it has, at one time or another, abandoned all its special doctrines.  The Confession of Augsburg, drawn up by its authors, and approved by Luther, abandons not a few of the doctrines which Luther began by calling the Church the whore of Babylon and the Pope Antichrist for not holding, and in Melancthon’s apology for that Confession, the Reform, on most doctrinal points, is made to speak almost like a Christian.  Refute any Protestant doctrine, save the denial of submission to authority, and you affect no one’s Protestantism.  The Protestant may abandon the doctrine refuted as indefensible, and strike it from the list  of genuine Protestant doctrines; but he is no less, in fact he is even more, of a Protestant than before.  Protestants have given up, one after another, all the points principally discussed in the outset between them and Catholics, but they are just as well satisfied with their Protestantism as ever they were, and as ready to proclaim the transcendent merits of their Protestant doctrines, the theological doctrines, the special heresies, at first promulgated and insisted on, were mere accidents in the movement, and by no means essential elements of Protestantism.  Protestants did not break from the Church for the sake of liberty to hold and preach their heresies, but they held and preached their heresies as the means of enabling them to break from the Church; or to crush the Church that they might revel in freedom from all spiritual authority, and live as they listed, without any one to call them to an account.

The supremacy of the civil government, or the union of the royal or temporal prince, was a necessary consequence of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, as the necessary consequence of a similar reformation now would be to unite the political and pontifical authorities in the hands of the people, or rather of the demagogues who control the people.  Kings in the sixteenth century were strong, and could turn away any weakening of the spiritual power to the strengthening of their own; the people are now strong, and can appropriate to themselves whatever you may succeed in wrestling from Peter.  The reform operates now in favor of democracy; so far as democracy seeks to render itself absolute; but it will operate in favor of the “Higher Law” gentry, and help on individualism, just in proportion as individuals rebel against the despotism of the mass.  As we say by its aid, “People-king” and “People-pontiff” today, we shall say by its aid tomorrow, each for himself, “I am king, I am supreme pontiff.”  “I am my own king, my own priest, my own pope, my own church,” we have heard men say in sober earnest, and men too who pass for intelligent, and even great men.  The essence of Protestantism is the absolute independence and supremacy of the temporal as opposed to the spiritual; and it is the same in principle, whether it manifests itself in the form of despotism or anarchy, of the despotism of the king or the people, of slavery or licentiousness.  But without the aid of the secular authorities desirous of emancipating themselves from the authority of the Church, and appropriating to their own use the wealth of her churches and monasteries, it is as certain as any historical fact of the kind can be, that the Reformation never would have been attempted, and never could have succeeded if it had been.

We think, and we never cease to repeat it, that too much has been made of Protestantism under the theological point of view, and too much importance has been attached to the refutation of its attempted doctrinal statements.  It was not at first easy to see that Protestants had not some kind of attachment to the particular theological doctrines which they from time to time professed, and it was not unnatural to suppose that they made war on the Church because she anathematized their heresies, and would not permit them to hold them in her communion; but it is clear from the historical developments of Protestantism, that the Reformers did not oppose the Church because she opposed their Evangelism any further than it furnished them arms against the Church, especially against the Pope.  The destruction of the Papacy and of all spiritual authority was the primary motive of their movement, and anything that would contribute to this end was welcome, was seized hold of with avidity, and wielded with Satanic energy.  They did not ask what doctrines were true, but what doctrines would best serve their purpose in the particular circumstances in which they found themselves, which would least revolt the people, and which Catholics would find the most difficulty in refuting to the popular apprehension; - what doctrines would be most likely to command the sympathies of the people, and whose denial could be most easily construed into a denial of what the people had always believed to be essentially Christian.  Hence they insisted strenuously on justification by faith alone; and when the Catholics maintained that faith without works is dead, and cannot justify, they set up the cry, that the Pope and Cardinals denied the necessity of faith, and taught that we are justified by our works without the grace of Christ.  Hence, too, they insisted on the Bible as the rule of faith, and when the Catholics replied, that the Bible, to be the rule of faith, must be taken as interpreted by the Church, by the Fathers, by the Popes and Councils, they cried out to the people: “See the arrogance of the Pope and Cardinals! They set themselves above the Bible, and deny the authority of the Word of God!”  Then they quoted Scripture, as Satan did to our Lord in the wilderness, and poured forth streams of burning eloquence in praise of the Holy Scriptures.  But all was for the one purpose of demolishing the Church; and to effect that purpose we have seen them in later times ready to shift their doctrines and set up contradictory cries; thus proving that their whole Evangelism was adopted merely as a means to an end, and in no sense as the end itself.  It is all, except with a few old women of either sex, now abandoned, and now the cry is, Social progress! The rights of man!  Civil and religious freedom!  Earthly felicity! 

In Great Britain Catholicity must be put down because it encroaches on the prerogatives of the crown, and is incompatible with the civil and religious freedom of – her Majesty as the depositary of the royal and pontifical authorities, and of the laity to rule the clergy; in these United States it must be put down, or at least opposed, because incompatible with our political institutions, with democratic freedom, and because its progress would destroy our free republic and bring us into hopeless civil and religious bondage to a foreign potentate.  What does all this prove, but that specific Protestant heresies are of minor importance even with Protestants, and that the real object of their hostility is the Church herself, as claiming authority from God to keep, interpret, and apply his law; and that they seek to destroy her, because she asserts and maintains, where free, the supremacy in all things of the spiritual order, or the rightful dominion of God and his Christ?  “Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?  The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord, and against his Christ, [saying] Let us break their bands asunder; and let us cast away their yoke from us.” (Ps. 2. 1-3)  This is the secret of the whole movement, and say what you will, the whole of Protestantism is here condensed in the inspired words of the Monarch-prophet: “The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord, and against his Christ: let us break their bands asunder; and let us cast away their yoke from us.”  They would not bear the yoke of Christ and learn of him, although his yoke is sweet and his burden is light. (St. Matt. XI. 29, 30)

A glance at the men and the means by which the Reform was introduced into what are now the Protestant nations of Europe will fully confirm all this.  Of the men little need be said.  They were all either renegade priests and apostate monks, or princes notorious for their vices, their crimes, and their brutal tyranny.  There is not one of the prominent leaders of the Reformation in whom you can discover a single redeeming moral feature.  Luther, Melancthon, Zwingle, Farel, Calvin, Beza, Cranmer, as well as the princes who protected them and supported their cause by their arms and their policy, were men who exhibited in their lives, at least from the moment of their revolt against the Church, not a single Christian, and scarcely a single heathen virtue.  Those princes were all perjurers; they were al guilty of sacrilege and robbery; some of them were gross gluttons and drunkards, wallowing in the mire of sensuality; and all of them were brutal tyrants, and both as men and princes the successful rivals of the worst emperors in the worst days of pagan Rome.  Not Nero, Decius, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Maximin were more cruel persecutors, or persecutors on a larger scale, than not a few of them.  John the Elector of Saxony was one of these princes.  He was the greatest glutton of his age, and was obliged to support his protuberant belly, stuffed with wine and viands from early morning, by means of an iron hoop.  We may well understand his infatuation for a Reformation that abolished Lent, fasts, and abstinence on Fridays and Saturdays.  His cupboard was more richly garnished than any other in Germany with vases of all sorts, stolen from the refectories of the monks and the sacristies of the churches.  His son Frederic exhausted his time and health at the table, or in the chase, and, like him, devoted to wine and good cheer, scarcely knew his Catechism.  The Landgrave, Philip of Hesse, was proverbial for his lewdness.  A shameless adulterer, who, to resist the assaults of the flesh, after a while demanded and obtained from Luther and his associate Reformers permission to sleep with two wives.  Wolfgang of Anhalt was so grossly ignorant, it is said, that he had never been able to make the sign of the cross, and Ernest and Francis of Lunenburg, though they would not suffer their servants to pillage the churches, took care to rob them with their own hands.  These were the best of the lot, against whom we have the least to say.  The Protestant princes of Germany generally, while their private characters were as corrupt as need be, were obliged to observe some measure in their public conduct, through the influence of the Emperor and the faithful princes of the empire.  The character of Henry and Elizabeth of England is well known, and needs not to be dwelt upon.  Our friend Paul Peppergrass, Esq., save that he is too favorable to the Queen regnant, has done enough for the latter in his Spaewife, or the Queen’s Secret; and M. Audin, with all his admiration for the former, and depreciation of Clement the Seventh, has furnished evidence sufficient that he had no loyalty, that he was a brutal tyrant, and the slave of his lusts.  Christiern and Frederic of Denmark, Gustavus Wasa of Sweden, both as individuals and as sovereigns, fall far below the common heathen standard; and no Protestant, acquainted with their history, can have the effrontery to claim for them, even in his eyes, any other merit than their unprovoked and brutal hostility to the Church of Rome, and their successful defense of Protestantism.

Christiern, of Christian the Second, in 1519, succeeded his father, John the Second, king of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, by the Union of Calmar united under one crown, since 1397.  He was crowned the following year by the archbishop of Lunden, and took a solemn oath to maintain the Catholic faith, and the privileges of the clergy and nobility, privileges which very much restricted the royal power.  The Estates also made him promise that he would do nothing, during his life, to procure the throne, which was elective, not hereditary, for any one of his children, or for any other person.  He was of an ambitious, despotic, cruel, and perfidious nature.  He removed the grandees from the administration of the kingdom, and committed the management of affairs only to persons of low birth and mean condition.  His principal counsellor was a Netherlandish woman, whose daughter was his concubine.  He was devoted to the Pope and the Roman Church, indeed, but only inasmuch as he could turn his devotion to his own interest.  He permitted in 1517, the Papal Nuncio, Arcimbold, to preach the indulgences in the kingdoms of the North, but only in return for a present of eleven hundred florins; and as the Nuncio did not satisfy him with regard to certain political intrigues in Sweden, he took from him the following year a much larger sum collected for the Basilica of St. Peter.

Sweden was then divided into two parties, the one having at its head Gustavus Trolle, Archbishop of Upsal, and ex officio President of the Senate, and supporting Christiern; the other, having for its chief Sture, Administrator of the kingdom, demanded a national king, contrary to the Union of Calmar.  This last party deposed the Archbishop, razed his castle, and imprisoned him in a monastery,- an illegal proceeding certainly, but which, it is said, was approved by the Nuncio, who engaged the Archbishop to submit to it.  But in 1518, Christiern arrived before Stockholm.  Being repulsed by Sture, he had recourse to artifice, and proposed an interview with the Administrator in the city, and obtained six hostages selected from the first families.  These hostages, among whom was Gustavus Wasa, having come on board the Danish fleet, were treated by the perfidious monarch as prisoners, who departed with them for Denmark.  In 1520 he returned to Sweden with an army; the Swedes were defeated, and Sture mortally wounded.  The Archbishop of Upsal presided over the Swedish Estates, and proposed the recognition of Christiern, which was done.  A general amnesty was proclaimed.  Stockholm, whither had retired Sture’s widow, resisted for some little time.  Christiern himself came with his fleet, and anchored before it.  Almost all the clergy, and a portion of the nobility, went on board to render him their homage.  The city at length consented to receive him.  He made his entry into the city, September 7; promised to preserve to Sweden her liberties, to give the widow of the Administrator an establishment in Finland, and to forget the past.  He deferred his coronation to November 2, convoked the Estates for that day, and departed for Denmark.  On his return to Sweden, near the end of October, he demanded of the bishops and senators an act recognizing him as hereditary monarch, and caused himself to be crowned by the Archbishop of Upsal two days after.  There were on this occasion feasts and rejoicings, in which he showed himself attractive and affable, but only the better to conceal his wicked designs.  Under pretext of executing the Bull of the Pope against those who had deposed the Archbishop, but in reality to pluck down the best heads in the kingdom, and to inaugurate his despotism by their blood, he caused them, in spite of the amnesty, to be dragged before a judicial commission, and, according to some historians, without even waiting for any sentence, sent the executioners to announce to them their last hour, refused them the consolation of confessing to a priest, and had them executed publicly,- senators, lords, and bishops, in one and the same day, to the number of eighty or ninety.  Not content with the murder of so many noble personages, he abandoned the inhabitants of Stockholm, without distinction of age or sex, to the fury of his troops.  As a tiger, when he has once tasted blood, Christiern seemed insatiable.  In his return from Sweden to Denmark he caused scaffolds to be erected in all the towns through which he passed, especially in Wadsten, the land of St. Bridget.  In the monastery of Nidal, though he had been received there with great honors, he caused the abbot and the monks to be seized, on coming our from Mass, and cast into the river, with their hands tied behind their backs.  The abbot, having broken from the cords, attempted to save himself by swimming, when the tyrant caused his head to be smashed with the blow of a lance.

With such instincts, we shall not be surprised to find that this Nero of the North had a natural sympathy with the god and the religion of Luther,- a tyrant-god, who punishes us not only for the evil we cannot help doing, but even for the good we do, and do the best we can,- a god without faith, who breaks his word, and abandons his Church, after having promised to be with it all days, to the consummation of the world;- a religion which makes man a machine, good works so many crimes, and crimes so many good works,- which gives in principle every man himself for his only law, but in fact to all for their only rule artifice and force, otherwise tyranny.  Thus, in 1520, he himself demanded a Lutheran preacher, and assigned him a church in Copenhagen, whence he might retail his new Gospel.  The following year he prohibited the University of his capital from condemning the works of Luther.  The archbishop of Sweden possessed in property the island of Bornholm; he claimed it for the crown, and the Archbishop resigned in order to withdraw himself from embarrassment.  As the Canons refused to accede to the good pleasure of the king, he sent them to prison, and took possession of the island in 1521.  He nominated his old barber and favorite, Schlaghock, Archbishop of that metropolis, then, in the following year, 1522, caused him to be hung and burnt for having counselled the massacre of the bishops and lords at Stockholm.  In his code of laws he prohibited every bishop, priest, or monk from acquiring any property, unless he was married.  He also prohibited all ecclesiastics from appealing to Rome, or having their causes judged in the Roman courts, and he ordained that all ecclesiastical causes should be terminated within the kingdom before a tribunal instituted by himself. (*Schroeck Hist. de la Reformation, Tom. 2 p.67; and Rohrbacher, Hist of Univ. Eglise Cath., Tom. 23. Pp. 292-295)

Christiern, though always professing himself to be always a Catholic, as enabling him to work more effectually for the destruction of the faith and the liberties of his subjects, was succeeded in 1523, in the Danish throne, by his paternal uncle, Frederic, Duke of Sleswig and Holstein.  He on his coronation also, though a Lutheran in his heart, swore to maintain the Catholic faith and the rights of the bishops.  Dissimulation was necessary to prepare his people for apostasy.  But in 1526 he took under his protection a Lutheran preacher, an apostate monk, and named him his chaplain.  In 1527, in the Diet of Odensee, he announced that he should not keep his oath, for Luther had discovered many abuses in the ancient religion of Denmark, Sweden, and the Christian world; consequently it was his royal will that the two religions, the new of Luther and the old of St. Anscarius, should be placed on a footing of equality, till the convocation of a General Council.  But he did not stop there.  In spite of the opposition of the bishops and a part of the nobility, the king made the diet resolve,- 1. That the bishops shall no longer seek confirmation of the Pope, but henceforth of the king; 2. That the clergy, the churches, and the monasteries shall preserve their actual goods, till dispossessed by the laws of the country; and 3. That ecclesiastics and monks be permitted to marry.  Thus this Protestant king did not blush to break the oath of his election, to rob his people of the faith of their fathers, the Church of her goods, the Pope of his primacy, the bishops of their divine mission, so as to make of them and other ecclesiastics mere civil functionaries, employees of the police, consoling themselves for their apostasy and degradation, in the arms of a wife who was not and could not be theirs.  Christiern the Third finished the apostasy of Denmark by violence, in 1533.  He cast the bishops into prison, and liberated them and restored their goods only on condition that they renounced the goods of the Church, and desisted from all opposition to the Protestant innovations.  These kings purchased the consent of the nobles which Catholic faith and piety had dedicated to God.  Similar measures forced Norway into apostasy in 1537, and Iceland in 1551.

The Reformation was introduced into Sweden very much in the same way.  Gustavus Ericson, or Wasa, whose father fell in the massacre of Stockholm in 1520, escaped, in 1519, from the Danish prison in which he was detained.  During his sojourn at Lubeck he imbibed a taste for the religious revolution of Luther, and kept up a secret correspondence with an apostate monk.  Having, under various disguises ,entered Sweden, and being sustained by the peasants of Dalecarlia, who were zealous Catholics, he beat in several encounters the Danes who occupied the kingdom, was chosen Administrator in 1521, and King in 1523.  The Swedish kings were elective; and they possessed only limited powers and very moderate domains.  The nation was jealous of its liberty, and would not suffer its kings to be too powerful.  Gustavus availed himself of the present occasion to change this state of things.  Lutheranism seemed to him an admirable means to enrich himself with the goods of the churches and monasteries, to confiscate the liberties of his subjects, and to subject conscience itself by breaking the spiritual independence of the bishops, and making himself Pope, and imposing himself and his future descendants on Sweden as hereditary kings and popes.  What Gustavus could comprehend, he could only execute.  Three priests returned into Sweden preaching the heresies of Luther; he favored them, seconded them in every way, only recommending them to act with prudence, so as not to divulge his secret and stir up public opinion against him; for the mass of the nation were as yet sincerely attached to the religion of their fathers.  Of these three sectaries, he appointed one Professor of Theology in the University of Upsal, the second preacher in the great church of Stockholm, the third chancellor of the kingdom.  He deposed the Bishop of Westeras, and Canute, Archbishop of Upsal, under the pretext that they were engaged in a conspiracy, and for the latter substituted John Magnus, or Store, who, however, persevered in the Catholic religion, as did also his brother Olaus Magnus, Archdeacon of the Cathedral of Strengnes.  Among the Dominicans charged with the Inquisition in Sweden there was a prior who was secretly a Lutheran; Gustavus gave him a commission to visit all the monasteries to sow in them the seeds of the Reformation.  The strongest  opposition he found was among the religious of his own order.  Gustavus threatened to expel them from the country, and forthwith derived them of their power as Inquisitors.  In 1525, Olaus Petri, a priest, one of the three sectarians, whom he had established as preacher at Stockholm, was publicly married, and Gustavus, far from being displeased, was himself present at the nuptials; this scandal was immediately imitated by many monks and nuns.  Gustavus seized the monastery of Gripsholm, and expelled the religious.  The people showed signs of discontent, but to seduce and enslave them, it was necessary to destroy the power of the bishops, and the best way to do this was to disunite or separate them, and promise their spoils to the nobles.  The Archbishop of Upsal was primate of the kingdom and legate of the Pope.  Gustavus sent him into Poland, ostensibly to negotiate his marriage with the princess royal, but in reality to deprive the clergy of Sweden of their head and center.  Having thus deprived the Catholic clergy of their chief, he proceeded to strike them a severe blow.  The two deposed prelates, Canute, Archbishop of Upsal, and Sunanveder, Bishop of Westeras, had sought refuge in Norway; Gustavus contrived to draw them back into Sweden, accused them of sedition, and put them to death in 1527.

After going through the farce of resigning and reaccepting the crown, Gustavus proceeded with a bolder step, and made the Estates resolve that the revenues of the crown should be augmented by the goods of the bishops, churches, and monasteries, and that the bishops should have for their support what it pleased the king to give them, who would have full power to govern the churches and monasteries; that the nobles should have also the right to resume the goods given, sold, or pledged by their ancestors; that no one should be permitted to say that the king wished to introduce a false religion; on the contrary, all the inhabitants of Sweden must hold in the highest esteem the pure word of God as taught by the Evangelical preachers. (Schroeck Tom. 2. P.36)  Thus the Estates of Sweden denied the faith of their fathers, embraced the new heresies, and declared their king infallible, on condition that the nobles pillaged, robbed, the churches and monasteries with him.  Cicero said, indeed, that “unjust decrees no more deserve to be called laws, than the plots of thieves.” (de Legibus, Tom. 2 n. 5)  Plato, in his Minos, holds the same language.  But they were pagans.

Over thirty monasteries were suppressed in Sweden, and plundered by the king and nobles.  One of the first three sectaries was Lawrence Petri.  IN 1521, Gustavus caused him to be elected Archbishop of Upsal, which see was not vacant; and as the intruder was unwillingly received by the chapter, he gave him a guard of fifty men, and substituted Lutherans for the faithful canons.  However, the three sectaries, the two brothers Petri and the Chancellor Anderson, were not sufficiently submissive to the caprice of the monarch, and incurred his disgrace.  In 1540, he compelled Lawrence Petri to preside over a commission that condemned Olaus Petri and the Chancellor to death.  The same year the king-pope succeeded in causing the Swedish royalty and papacy to be declared hereditary in his family.  Thus a nation, hitherto Catholic and free, lost at once its faith and its liberty, by the artifice and violence of an able usurper.  Modern philosophy calls this usurper by the title of Great, which shows what both the title and modern philosophy are worth. (Rohrbacher, Tom. 23. Pp. 296-300)

These scraps of history, which we translate from the Abbe. Rohrbacher’s excellent History of the Church, will show by what sort of men, and by what means, the Reformation was introduced into the Scandinavian kingdoms.  It was introduced by civil tyrants, who established it by artifice and force, and suppressed the Catholic religion by violence, plunder, and civil enactments.  In a similar manner, by similar agencies, was Protestantism introduced and established in every country in which it became or is even now dominant.  Not only was Protestantism introduced by the arts, the violence, and the brutal tyranny of the civil rulers, who espoused it, but it has maintained itself only by the aid of the civil power, which ordained it to be received, and suppressed the Catholic worship by the most severe system of civil pains and penalties.  Till quite recently, it was not lawful to exercise the Catholic worship, or for a Catholic even to live in any one of the three Scandinavian kingdoms; and even now it is not lawful for a Dane, a Swede, or a Norwegian, to abandon the state establishment, and become reconciled to the Church.  No Catholic has, or can have, any civil rights in those kingdoms, and for a Lutheran to become a Catholic is confiscation of goods and perpetual banishment from the kingdom.  We are aware of no Protestant state on the Continent of Europe in which it is not against the civil law either to reconcile a member of the state religion, or for him to become reconciled, to the Church.  If there be any exception to this remark, it is of a very recent date.  In several of the German Protestant states, Catholics are, indeed, not punished simply for being Catholics, and the Catholic worship is tolerated for the Catholic portion of the population;  but we know of none in which Protestants have the legal right to become Catholics.  The Prussian government recently complained of the Catholic missionaries for receiving converts from Protestantism to Catholicity.

The sketch we have given of the introduction and establishment of Protestantism in Denmark and Sweden is substantially the history of its introduction and establishment in England.  It was first introduced by the king and Parliament.  Henry the Eighth was an artful as well as a despotic prince.  With the mass of the Lutheran heresies he had no sympathy; he had profited by his early theological studies too much not to reject them with contempt, but he was from his coronation opposed to the Papacy, except as vested in himself.  This is evident from the alterations he made in his coronation oath, the day after he had taken it.  For a time, however, he lived on good terms with the Pope, and even sustained his cause against France and the Emperor Maximilian the First; but partly because he found it for his interest to do so, and partly, no doubt, through the influence of Cardinal Wolsey, not indeed one of the best, but one of the greatest, men England ever produced.  As soon as the Cardinal fell, Henry broke through all restraints, and gave free scope to his own brutal and despotic nature.  It is a great mistake to suppose that the divorce case was the cause of Henry’s schism.  It was only its occasion; and there can be no doubt that he would have broken with Rome on occasion of the least contradiction from the Pope.  He only waited a pretext for declaring the independence of the crown, and for usurping the spiritual authority.  The refusal of the divorce gave him this pretext.  In executing his purpose, he proceeded with art as well as tyranny.  He did not shock his people by at once proclaiming the new heresies and suppressing the old Catholic faith and worship.  He maintained the general Catholic faith, the Sacraments, and the Mass, and hung or burnt those who taught any thing against them.  He levelled his blows at the Papacy, and labored only to throw off the power of the Pope, in order to claim it for the nation, that is, for himself.  He flattered and won over all his bishops, already his creatures, save the Bishop of Rochester, Cardinal Fisher, by releasing them from their dependence on Rome, and gained the nobles by distributing among them the spoils of the rich abbeys and monasteries.  He worked upon the fears of the clergy through the terrible writ of proemunire, and by bribery, cajoling, force, and the axe of the executioner, he broke their power.  Having broken his kingdom from Catholic unity, and made the king pope as well as king, he prepared the way for Somerset, the Protector during the reign of the boy Edward, to introduce Protestantism, and to suppress the Catholic worship.

The English people, deprived of faithful shepherds, and shaken in their faith, were still attached at heart to the religion of their fathers; but the short reign of Mary, the best sovereign England has had since Edward the Confessor, and one whom we, as of English descent, delight to honor, did not suffice to consolidate the descent, and place the Papal supremacy on a firm footing in the kingdom.  Mary’s unfortunate marriage with Philip of Spain, added to the hatred of the Pope that of the Spaniard; while her still more unfortunate consent to Philip’s declaration of war against the Sovereign Pontiff, interrupted the blessing of God on her exertions to restore permanently the Catholic religion.  The cause of Catholicity became allied in the popular mind with that of Spanish dominion, and a new and more legitimate national feeling was thus aroused against the old religion, and in favor of the Reformation.  Yet Elizabeth, who succeeded Mary, and consummated the apostasy of England, ascended the throne as a Catholic, professed herself a catholic, and swore to maintain the Catholic religion.  Had she avowed herself a Protestant, she never could have been crowned.  She and her counselors all dissembled their Protestantism till they had obtained the power, and then only little by little threw off the mask.  She first severs her kingdom from communion with Rome, and thus knocks out the keystone of the English hierarchy; she then expels all the faithful bishops from their sees, and intrudes creatures of her own; then abolishes the Mass, establishes a new service, prepared from old, and commands all her liege subjects to assist at the new-fangled worship, under the most severe pains and penalties.  Thus, whether we speak of henry, Edward, or Elizabeth, the reform was introduced into England and established by the temporal authorities, by perjury, fraud, sacrilege, robbery, and brutal tyranny,- all for the purpose, not of promoting religion, and uniting in the crown the royal and pontifical authorities.  It has also been maintained in the land of our ancestors by the most shameful penal laws that ever disgraced the code of any nation, civilized or barbarous, and by the most cruel and unremitted persecution of Catholics.  The penal laws were to some extent repealed in 1829, but the first step to their revival has been taken in the recent Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and the spirit of persecution is revived with almost its old ferocity.  The late trial of the Very Rev. Dr. Newman, for alleged libel on the renegade Achilli, has proved that no Catholic can in any case that touches Protestant prejudice hope for justice from an English court and jury.

If from England we turn to Zurich, Berne, and Geneva, pass to the Dutch Netherlands, or cross over into Scotland, we have, in principle, only the same sickening story to repeat.  Everywhere the reform is the work of perjury, fraud, sacrilege, robbery, imprisonment, exile, and massacre.  In France and Ireland all these were attempted, but happily in vain, and both kingdoms have remained substantially Catholic. Now are we to be told, “in the middle of the nineteenth century,” that the motive which inspired the actors in the tragedy, and induced the employment of these base and criminal means, was a religious motive?  Are we to be so mocked?  Are our understandings to be so insulted?  No. The men who adhere to Protestantism, if they ever investigate their own motives, know perfectly well that they adhere to it only because it emancipates them from all religion, by subjecting religion now to the state and now to the individual judgment or caprice.

 This is the only solution of the problem.  The Reformation in principle was not an attempt, though a mistaken or an unlawful attempt, to get a purer and better religion than the Catholic; it was simply a rebellion against God, of hell, and hence it is that we seldom affect or disturb it by refuting its heresies. Hence the reason why we everywhere and at all times object to treating it as a form, though a false form, of Christian doctrine and worship, and insist that it shall be treated solely as a sin.  Protestants in defending themselves only on political and social or secular grounds concede that they have no religion to defend, and that it is not as a religion they adhere to the Reformation.  We must oppose Protestantism, not as a false theology, but as a revolt of the flesh against God,- as the mad attempt of men to set themselves up above their Maker, and to live as they list.

No doubt many Catholics will think this too severe, but it is because we apprehend that there are some who will so think that we say it.  We wish our friends to be fully aware of the enormity of Protestantism.  We are not wholly ignorant of the infinite tenderness of the Gospel, and we can admire, as well as others, the beauty of Christian charity.  We know, too, that many, very many, Protestants are amiable in their social relations, are faithful to their engagements, and honest in their dealings, and so far very superior to their Protestantism itself; but not therefore are we to confound their purely human or Gentile virtues with the supernatural virtues of the true Christian.  We know what allowances also to make for ignorance and for prejudices early instilled in the minds of Protestants; but we are speaking to Catholics, who are always in danger of thinking too favorably of those who are involved in the Protestant rebellion against God.  We have no wish to be severe; we speak not in wrath; we would willingly lay down our life to bring Protestants into the Church of God; but we believe it true kindness, true charity, to strip off the mask from Protestantism, to expose its real features, and to compel it to bear its own appropriate name, so that all the world may see that there is no medium between Catholicity and no religion, any more than there is between virtue and vice, truth and falsehood; Christ and the Devil.  If this offends, then let it offend; if it do not offend God, we shall remain at our ease.