"The Eclipse of Faith," Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1853 (A review of Francis Newman, the younger brother of John Henry Newman)

This is an American reprint of an English work, attributed to Mr. Henry Rogers, of whom, we must confess, we know nothing except that he is the author of several very striking articles in The Edinburgh Review.  The work itself, however, is one of the most remarkable works on religious topics, that has recently issued from the Protestant press, whether in England or in this country.  IT is directed chiefly against modern Spiritualism, or what Mr. Andrews Norton of Cambridge, some few years since, very happily denominated “the latest form of infidelity,” and which we have often treated in these pages under the name of Transcendentalism, of which Mr. Morrell in Scotland, Theodore Parker and Horace Bushnell in this country, and Francis William Newman in England, are the representatives best known to our readers.  Its design is to prove that this modern spiritualism, which professes to be Christian, and more Christian than Christianity itself, and which rejects all external authoritative revelation and falls back on a spiritual faculty of man’s own nature as the source of all religious truth, is in a religious point of view a mere illusion, and that there is no medium between rejecting the Bible as an external authoritative revelation and the rejection of all religion; and therefore that the modern spiritualists, whatever they may pretend to the contrary, are really infidels,- as much so as the old English Deists or the French Philosophers of the last century.  He proves this, we think, is a masterly manner, with great acuteness and force of reasoning, and with still greater wit and pleasantry.

The work has a slight thread of fiction running through it, on which the author strings his arguments and discussions.  It professes to be addressed by the writer to his brother, represented as a missionary among the heathen.  It opens with a letter to the brother, giving him a rapid sketch of religious affairs in England, and communicates to him the sad intelligence that a beloved nephew, a remarkably promising young man, has become a religious skeptic during a residence in Germany.  The writer professes to visit him, and if possible recall him to belief in Christianity.  The main body of the work consists of an imaginary journal of conversations held with his nephew, by the writer and others, during this visit.  The whole artistic management is of a high order, and the general literary execution may be warmly commended.  The several topics are skillfully introduced, and the conversations are easy, natural, sprightly, and well sustained.  Our limits will not permit us to make many extracts, but the following from the introductory letter with place the general subject of the work before our readers, and give them a fair specimen of the author’s style and manner.  It is only necessary to bear in mind, that the author has been endeavoring to remove his brother’s apprehensions of danger to Protestantism from the Puseyite or Tractarian movement:-

“No, it is not from this quarter that England must look for the chief dangers which menace religion, except, indeed, as these dangers are the inevitable, the uniform result of every attempt to revive the obsolete past.  The principal peril is from a subtle unbelief, which, in various forms, is sapping the religion of our people, and which, if not checked, will by and by give the Romish bishops in partibus infidelium than has always been the case.  The attempt to make men believe too much naturally provokes them to believe too little; and such has been and will be the recoil from the movement towards Rome.   It is only one, however, of the causes that widely diffused infidelity which is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of our day.  Other and more potent causes are to be sought in the philosophic tendencies of the age, and especially a sympathy, in very many minds, with the worst features of Continental speculation.  ‘Infidelity!’ you will say, ‘Do you mean such infidelity as that of Collins and Bolingbroke, Chubb and Tindal?’ Why, we have plenty of those sorts too, and- worse; but the most charming infidelity of the day, a bastard deism in fact, often assumes a different form, - a form, you will be surprised to hear it, which embodies (as many say) the essence of genuine Christianity!  Yes; be it known to you, that when you have ceased to believe all that is specially characteristic of the New Testament,- its history, its miracles, its peculiar doctrines,- you may still be a genuine Christian.  Christianity is sublimed into an exquisite thing called modern ‘spiritualism.’ The amount and quality of the infidel ‘faith’ are, indeed, pleasingly diversified when you come to examine individual professors thereof; but it is always based upon the principle that man is a sufficient  light to himself; that his oracle is within; so clear as either to supersede to necessity- some say even the possibility-  of all external revelation in any ordinary sense of that term; or, when such revelation is in some sense allowed, to constitute man the absolute arbiter of how much or how little of it is worthy to be received.

“This theory we all perceive, of course, cannot fail to recommend itself by the well-known uniformity and distinctness of man’s religious notions and the reasonableness of his religious practices!  We all know there has never been any want of a revelation;- of which you have doubtless had full proof among the idolatrous barbarians you foolishly went to enlighten and reclaim.  I wish, however, you had known it fifteen years ago; I might have had my brother with me still.  It is certainly a pity that this internal revelation- the ‘absolute religion,’ hidden, as Mr. Theodore Parker felicitously phrases it, in all religions of all ages and nations, and so strikingly avouched by the entire history of the world- should render itself suspicious by little discrepancies in its own utterances among those who believe in it.  Yet it is so.  Compared with the rest of the world, few at the best can be got to believe in the sufficiency of the internal light and the superfluity of all external revelation; and yet hardly two of the ‘little flock’ agree.  It is the rarest little oracle!  Apollo himself might envy the adroitness in the utterance of ambiguities.  One man says that the doctrine of a ‘future life’ is undoubtedly a dictate of the ‘religious sentiment,’ – one of the few universal characteristics of all religion; another declares his ‘insight’ tells him nothing of the matter; one affirms that the supposed chief ‘institutions’ of the ‘religious faculty’- belief in the efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of the soul- are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions!  As for those ‘spiritualists’- and they are, perhaps, at present the greater part- who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament, they are at infinite variance as to how much- whether 7.5, 30, or 50 percent, of its records – is to be received.  Very few get so far as the last.  One man is resolved to be a Christian,- none more so,- only he will reject all the peculiar doctrines and all the supernatural narratives of the New Testament; another declares that miracles are impossible and ‘incredible, per se’; a third thinks they are neither the one nor the other, though it is true that probably a comparatively small portion of those narrated in the ‘book’ are established by such evidence as to be worthy of credit. Pray use your pleasure in the selection; and the more freely, as a fourth is of the opinion that, however true, they are really of little consequence.  While many extol in vague terms of admiration the deep ‘spiritual insight’ of the founders of Christianity, they do not trouble themselves to explain how it is that this exquisite illumination left them to concoct that huge mass of legendary follies and mystical doctrines which constitute,  according to the modern ‘spiritualism,’ the bulk of the records of the New Testament, and by which its authors have managed to mislead the world; nor how we are to avoid regarding them either as superstitious and fanatical fools or artful and designing knaves, if nine tenths, or seven tenths, of what they recorded is all to be rejected; nor, if it be affirmed that they never did record it, but that somebody else has put these matters into their mouths, how can we be sure that any thing whatever of the small remainder ever came out of their mouths. All this, however, is of the less consequence, as these gentlemen condescend to tell us how we are to separate the ‘spiritual’ gold which faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism.  Each man, it seems, has his own particular spade and mattock in his ‘spiritual faculty’; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir.  You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, to listen to its responses exclusively?  Ask these men – for I am sure I do not know; I only know that the results are very different- whether the possessor of ‘insight’ listens to its own rare voice, or puts on its spectacles and reads aloud from the New Testament.  Generally, as I say, these good folks are resolved that all that is supernatural and specially inspired in the sacred volume is to be rejected; and as to the rest, which by the way might be conveniently published as the ‘Spiritualists’ Bible’ (in two or three sheets, 48mo, say), that would still require a careful winnowing; for, while one man tells us that the Apostle Paul, in his intense appreciation of the ‘spiritual element,’ made light even of the ‘resurrection of Christ,’ and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knows but little or next to nothing of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he proclaims that it ‘is revealed, after having been hidden from ages and generations,’ he himself manages to hide it afresh.  This you will be told is a perpetual process, going on even now; that as all the ‘earlier prophets’ were unconscious instruments of a purpose beyond their immediate range of thought, so the Apostles themselves similarly illustrated the shallowness of their range of thought; that, in fact, the true significance of the Gospel lay beyond them, and doubtless also, for the very same reason, lies beyond us.  In other words, this class of spiritualists tell us that Christianity is a ‘development,’ as the Papists also assert, and the New Testament its first imperfect and rudimentary product; only, unhappily, as the development, it seems, may be things so very different as Popery and Infidelity, we are as far as ever from any criterium as to which, out of the ten thousand possible developments, is the true; but it is a matter of the less consequence, since it will, on such reasoning, be always something future.

“ ‘Unhappy Paul!’ you will say.  Yes, it is no better with him than it was in our youth some five-and-twenty years ago.  Do you not remember the astute old German Professor in his lecture-room introducing the Apostle as examining with ever-increasing wonder the various contradictory systems which the perverseness of exegesis had extracted from his Epistles, and at length, as he saw one from which every feature of Christianity had been erased, exclaiming in a fright, ‘Was ist das?’  But I will not detain you on the vagaries of the new school of spiritualists.  I shall hear enough of them, I have no doubt, from Harrington; he will riot in their extravagances and contradictions as a justification of his own skepticism.  In very truth their authors are fit for nothing else than to be recruiting officers for undisguised infidelity; and this has been the consistent termination with very many of their converts.  Yet many of them tell us, after putting men on this inclined plane of smooth ice, that it is the only place where they can be secure against tumbling into Infidelity, Atheism, Pantheism, Skepticism.  Some of the Oxford Tractarians informed us, a little before crossing the border, that their system was the surest bulwark against Romanism; and in the same way is this exquisite ‘spiritualism’ a safeguard against infidelity.

“ ‘Between many of our modern ‘spiritualists’ and the Romanists there is a parallelism of movement absolutely ludicrous.  You may chance to hear both declaiming, with equal fervor, against ‘intellect’ and ‘logic’ as totally incompetent to decide on ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ truth, and in favor of a ‘faith’ which disclaims all alliance with them.  You may chance to hear them both insisting on an absolute submission to an ‘infallible authority’ other than the Bible; the one external,- that is, the Pope; the other internal,- that is, ‘Spiritual Insight’; both exacting absolute submission, the one to the outward oracle, the Church, the other to the inward oracle, himself; both insisting that the Bible is but the first imperfect product of genuine Christianity, which is perfected by a ‘development,’ though as to the direction of that development they certainly do not agree.  Both, if I may judge by some recent speculations, recoil from the Bible even more than they do from one another; and both would get rid of it,- one by locking it up, and the other by tearing it to tatters.  Thus receding in opposite directions round the circle, they are found placed side by side at the same extremity of a diameter, at the other extremity of which is the – Bible.  The resemblances in some instances are so striking, that one is reminded of that little animal, the fresh-water polype, whose external structure is so absolutely a mere prolongation of the internal, that you may turn him inside out, and all the functions of life go on just as well as before.” – pp.9-14

It will be manifest to our readers, that the author, as Anglican writers both at home and abroad have been in the habit of doing ever since its publication in 1845, treats Dr. Newman’s Theory of Development as a Christian theory, and speaks of it as if it were adopted by our Church.  If this were the fact, if we were obliged as a Catholic to accept that theory, we frankly confess that we should not know how to reply to the parallelism the author here asserts, and the very grave objections he and others draw from it against our holy religion.  Others may find themselves able to reply satisfactorily to these objections, but if that theory is to be accepted as Catholic doctrine, we cannot open our mouth.  It was the fact that writers like our author were treating that theory as Catholic doctrine, and the embarrassment we foresaw that it must occasion us in our attempts to defend Catholicity, that induced us, soon after its publication, though very reluctantly, to wrote our first essay against it, and to attempt to show, that, however natural it might be that Mr. Newman, while out of the Church, but on his way to it, should adopt such a theory, and however sincere and well disposed he might be in maintaining it, it is wholly incompatible with Catholicity.  All we ask of those who think we did wrong, is to reply to the author before us, without denying his assumption that the theory is accepted by Papists, that is, in his sense, by our Church.

For ourselves, it is well known that we have never adopted Dr. Newman’s theory, although we have uniformly expressed a high esteem for the man himself, and we have no hesitation in asserting that it is not a Catholic doctrine; the theory, as far as we are aware, is accepted in this country by no bishop, priest, or layman, and we think we are safe in saying that it is universally rejected by Catholics here, at least in the sense our author assumes it, and we have opposed it.  Some of our more distinguished Prelates, indeed, have looked upon the matter as of too slight importance to warrant our further discussion of it, and for this, as well as for some other reasons, we have come to the conclusion not to continue its discussion, and so far as we are concerned to let it drop; but the only question that has ever been seriously raised here since the publication of our first article on the subject has been simply, whether we have or have not rightly represented the theory; and even this question is very generally settled in our favor, for it is well argued that, if we had misapprehended or misrepresented it, Dr. Newman or some of his friends would have publicly set us right, and given a clear, precise, and true statement of it as they themselves understand it.  The authorities in England and Ireland have not indeed censured the theory, nor have they publicly approved it; and we have no evidence that it is accepted by a single individual out of the circle of the converts from Anglicanism.  Without the least hesitation, then, we say, that Development in the sense of Dr. Newman’s theory is no word, in the sense of rendering from time to time propositions distinct which were originally indistinctly, though explicitly, revealed, of opposing novel statements of old doctrines to the condemnation of novel errors, and of further explications of the faith contra errores insurgentes, as St. Thomas says, undoubtedly all Catholics admit, but in no other sense, in so far as regards matters strictly of Catholic faith.  In this sense, but in no other, has there been a growth or development of the depositum, which we must believe was transmitted complete in all its parts, and has been preserved by the Church of Rome, from the Apostles down to us, in its integrity, without addition or diminution, change or alteration.  At least so we have been taught, and so all the Catholic authorities we are aware of, with one voice assert.  The Anglican writers, therefore, we must needs believe, consult what they wish rather than what they have any authority for believing, when they gravely assert that “Rome has been driven to adopt the theory of development as her only possible method of meeting the historical difficulties in the way of her communion, suggested by Protestant scholars, and of defending her manifest and undeniable corruptions of the faith.”

 Protestants have no right to assert that the theory is adopted by the Church, or accepted as Catholic doctrine, on the authority of a book, written not even by a Catholic layman, but by a Protestant, or at least by an author in transitu from Protestantism to Catholicity, even though that book may have remained uncensured.  The fact that no one has or can have any right to regard Dr. Newman’s Essay as authority for Catholic doctrine is probably the reason why the authorities in England have not censured it; and perhaps the reason why no particular notice has been taken of the fact that some retain the theory since their admission into the Church is, that full confidence is felt in their Catholic simplicity and intentions, and that in time they will outgrow it, and drop it of themselves.  Rome does not usually interfere in questions of this sort till they are formally presented for her adjudication, and we are not aware that this question has ever been so presented.  That the author of this theory has been honored by his superiors, and apparently enjoys their full confidence, is no indication that his theory is approved, because the honor and confidence may well be bestowed upon him for his learning, ability, zeal, and devotedness, or his merits in other respects; since, though he has not indeed publicly retracted the theory, he does not seemed disposed to maintain it with obstinacy, does not put it prominently forth, and is not engaged in any attempt to propagate it, or to persuade others to adopt it.

But the point to which we more particularly wish to direct the attention of our readers is not the parallelism which our author attempts to run between Catholicity and modern spiritualism,- a parallelism which, we repeat, we should not know how to deny, if Dr. Newman’s theory of development were Catholic doctrine; but the distinct admission that there is a subtle infidelity sapping the religious belief of the people of England, that an eclipse has come over the faith of the Protestant world, and that the great battle is not to be fought for Christianity itself.  All this is unquestionably true, and we are glad to find that it is beginning to attract the attention of Protestants themselves, and that grave and learned men like our author see and confess that there is serious cause for alarm.  To such Protestants as really desire to be Protestants without rejecting all Christian belief and giving up all religion, the present aspect of the Protestant world is very far from encouraging.  That world is rent asunder by two formidable parties moving in opposite directions, and each alike hostile to the Christian or religious pretentions of Protestantism.  Between Tractarianism on the one hand, and modern spiritualism on the other, what is called “Protestant Christianity” threatens to disappear, and the author has sounded his note of warning none too soon,- most likely not soon enough.

The Protestant world, as it presents itself to the philosophical spectator, is distinguishable into three classes, the Catholicizing class, the infidelizing class, and the unthinking, unreasoning, or inert class.  These three classes have their origin and foundation in Protestantism itself.  Protestantism, as we often have occasion to repeat, strictly taken, is purely negative in its character, but loosely taken, as it is by Protestants generally, it is a mixture of certain half-truths, or mutilated dogmas, retained by the Reformers from the Catholic Church, and certain infidel principles and denials which the Reformers opposed to Catholicity.  As embodied in the formulas or symbolical books of the several sects, the Catholic elements retained are incomplete and insufficient, and the infidel elements remain undeveloped.  The unthinking, unreasoning, or inert Protestants, who are a very numerous body, see nothing of all this, and never once suspect that Protestantism is not all of a piece, or that it is made up of heterogenous elements, and is in itself incoherent, incomplete, and insufficient,- uncertain, self-contradictory, and unsatisfactory to the mind that really thinks and reasons.  Pressed by no logical wants, feeling no necessity of unity, consistency, and completeness of doctrine, they are content to receive passively, without a thought or a question, the formulas of their respective sects, and find scope for whatever of mental activity they may have in matters unconnected with religion.  In a religious sense, these are simply dead, and of no account.  But the other two classes are aware of the incomplete and contradictory character of Protestantism as it came from the Reformers, and as it is still vaguely and nominally held.  They both see that it is heterogenous and incomplete, and they feel deeply and strongly the necessity of clearing it of its inconsistencies, of reducing it to doctrinal unity, and of developing and completing it.  The first class seize upon its Catholic elements, that is, on the Christian doctrines, which, in a form more or less mutilated, it still professes, and seek to develop and complete them in a Protestant sense.  Thus the tendency of the former is necessarily to Catholicity, and of the latter, to infidelity.  These two classes are all in the Protestant world that it is necessary to consider.  They divide between them all the intellectual life and activity in regard to religious subjects that Protestants can lay claim to.  The other class, under the religious point of view, are nobodies, at best only an inert mass.

The Catholicizing and the infidelizing classes of Protestants have been very well represented in England by two brothers, John Henry and Francis William Newman,- both remarkable men in their way, and very nearly equally distinguished for their ability, their acquirements, and their earnestness.  Both were brought up Protestants in the Anglican Church; both early felt the incompleteness and insufficiency of the Protestantism of the Reformation, and both wished to be Christian without ceasing to be Protestant or breaking with the Reformers.  But from this point they began to diverge.  The elder brother, now a Catholic priest and Superior of the English Oratorians, assuming that the real sense of the Reformation lay in the elements of Christian truth it retained, seized upon these, disengaged them from the negative principles connected with them in the minds of the Reformers, and labored to develop and complete them in a Catholic sense.  He thus originated the Tractarian or Puseyite party, whose aim is to be Catholic, without being Roman.  But he soon found that he could develop and complete Protestantism in the sense of the Catholic truths it professed to retain, without going to Rome, because only in her communion can Catholic doctrine be found or held in its unity, integrity, and completeness.  The younger brother, a more genuine Protestant from the beginning, assuming that the essence of Protestantism must lie not in what it professes to hold in common with the Church, but in the principles and denials which it opposed to her, seized upon these principles and denials, the infidel elements of Protestantism, and sought to disengage them from the Popish elements still retained, and to develop and complete them in a distinctively Protestant sense.  But he soon found that ho could not accomplish this purpose without pushing the Protestant denial of the authority of the Church, and its rejection of the sacraments and the priesthood, to their legitimate consequences, and that he could not do this without rejecting all external authority, all external revelation, and falling back on his own spiritual nature, as his only authority in religious matters, and the only revelation of the will of God to man.  Both seem to us to have been equally sincere in the outset, and both, considering the respective assumptions with which they started, to have been equally logical, and to have arrived at conclusions equally inevitable.  Neither foresaw where he must end.  The elder brother, resolved to be a Christian let come what might, found himself obliged to seek admission into communion of the Catholic Church; the younger, resolved at all hazards to be a Protestant, has found himself obliged to give up every thing distinctively Christian, and to fall back on mere Naturalism.

It is chiefly against the conclusion to which, in his endeavor to be a consistent Protestant, Francis Newman has been forced to come, that the work before us is directed.  The author does not directly attack the conclusion itself; his main endeavor is to show that it is unchristian, and that the school which accepts it, however it may deceive itself, whatever use it may make of the New Testament, or whatever the praises it may affect to bestow upon the Author and Finisher of our faith, is really as infidel as that of Voltaire or D’Holbach, and far more absurd.  In this, certainly, as our readers well know, we agree with him, for we have maintained the same over and over again in our writings against Theodore Parker and the Transcendentalists; but is the author aware that, in proving this, though he proves much to our purpose as Catholics, he proves nothing to his own as a Protestant?  The real point he has to prove is, not that there is no medium between infidelity and rejecting the Bible as an authoritative external revelation, but that a logically minded Protestant can consistently with the distinctive principles of Protestantism hold the Bible to be such a revelation, or admit any external authoritative revelation at all.  This is the question he has to answer as a Protestant, and to this he gives no answer.

 The author must allow us to protest against the severe manner in which he treats his infidelizing brethren.  These men deserve his respect, not his censure.  As long as he chooses to remain a Protestant, and to maintain the justice of the Reformation, he has no right to complain of them.  On his premises they are manifestly right, and he is manifestly wrong.  These men have had no more wish than he to reject Christianity; they have only wished to maintain the Reformation, for which as a Protestant he should be grateful to them.  They have all been brought up on his Bible Protestantism, whatever that is; they have all been bred to regard the Bible as the word of God, as an external, authoritative revelation of the Divine will, and as able, as interpreted by the private judgment of each, to make them wise unto salvation.  Many of them commenced their career with great piety and fervor, after the Protestant fashion, and it must not be supposed that it has been without a long and painful internal struggle that they have rejected all authoritative external revelation, and fallen back on the “oracle within,” and sought to satisfy the religious wants of their souls with modern spiritualism.  The Phases of Faith, by Francis Newman, one of the most truthful and instructive books that has been published in our day, to those who know how to read it, although the most erroneous and false in its conclusions, unanswerably proves this.  It is in no spirit of wantonness, of irreverence, or of unbelief, that the earnest-minded Protestant inquirer, feeling himself bound at all hazards to be a Protestant, and holding, as all Protestants are bound to hold, that Catholicity is a gross and debasing superstition, gives up the Bible, gives up all external revelation, and seeks to derive a religion adequate to his wants from his own spiritual nature.  He does so, not because he would get rid of the Bible, not because he would throw away all religion, but because Protestantism leaves him no alternative, and he can on no other condition retain even a shadow of religion, without ceasing to be a Protestant.  Never shall we forget the joy with which our own heart abounded, when we fancied that Benjamin Constant  had proved that religion has a firm and solid foundation in a law of human nature, universal, permanent, and indestructible as that nature itself,- not indeed because it saved us from the necessity of believing the Bible or of submitting to an external authoritative revelation, but because for the moment it seemed to restore us to communion with the religious world.  It was indeed but the straw to which the drowning man clings, but it seemed to us something more, and to give us the right to say, I too am a believer; I too can look up to heaven and say, My Father; around upon mankind and say, My Brothers.  We dare here take our own experience as a Protestant as the key to that of the modern spiritualists.  We had a horror of infidelity, and we were utterly unable, without renouncing the Reformation and becoming a Catholic, to maintain belief in the Bible as an authoritative external revelation.  Unless, then, we could find a medium between believing it as such revelation and absolute infidelity, we must either go to Rome or give up all religion.  No such medium save that of the modern spiritualists was even conceivable, and we adopted it as the only alternative between Catholicity and infidelity. 

It is not strange that the other two classes of Protestants should fail to appreciate the infidelizing class;- the dead, unthinking class, because it is dead and unthinking, and has no suspicion of the inconsistency, incompleteness, and insufficiency of the Protestantism they passively receive from their sects.  They perceive and feel none of its difficulties, and therefore draw the most unfavorable conclusions against those who are laboring in any direction to remove them.  The Catholicizing party can hardly feel the difficulties felt by the infidelizing party, because they take it for granted that Protestantism lies essentially in the Christian doctrines it professes to hold, and that all one has to do to be a good Christian, and at the same time a good Protestant, is to develop and complete these doctrines in a Christian sense.  They regard the tendency of their infidelizing brethren as alike hostile to Christianity and to the real sense of the Reformers, and hence undertake to recall them by the authority of the Catholic truths still nominally held in their communion, without considering whether they have or not have any right to use it.  John Henry Newman never seems to have been aware of the real difficulties of his younger brother, and he sought to retain him by alleging the authority of the Church, which he might well have done, if he had been a Catholic priest, but which if a Protestant minister was only intolerable arrogance.  If we credit his brother’s account of the matter, Francis told him, and as long ago as 1824, that to be consistent he ought to go to Rome, and would ultimately go there, if he did not renounce his High-Church pretensions.  Francis, being a better Protestant than his brother, saw far more clearly the logical result of attempting to develop and complete Protestantism in a Catholic sense, and he seems early to have been convinced that he must either abandon all the positive doctrines professed by Protestants, and place Christianity solely in its negative elements, or go to Rome, unless he chose to reject all religion.  Go to Rome he would not, because, as against Rome, he took it for granted that the Reformation was right.  Whatever else might be true, Popery, he felt certain, was false, and whatever else might be false, Protestantism, he held, must be true.  It was of no use, therefore, to prove to him that he was false to Anglicanism; what he wanted was to be shown how he could consistently hold the positive Christian doctrines Anglicans professed, without being false to the Reformation.  Here was his difficulty, and this difficulty was not met.

How to be Christian without renouncing the Reformation, is the great problem for every thinking Protestant.  This was the problem with which we ourselves struggled from 1830 to 1844, and which we tried in vain every possible way of solving.  It was the necessity we were under of rejecting each solution as soon as tried, that gave rise to the charge of fickleness and of constantly changing our opinions, which an unscrupulous newspaper press is so fond of urging against us.  We fell back, as we have said, on modern spiritualism, as the only alternative we could find between Catholicity and infidelity.  But we finally succeeded in discovering, what our author proves, that this modern spiritualism is only another name for the rejection of all religion.  Then there was for us no alternative but Catholicism or infidelity, and we chose Catholicity, though we should have retained to a greater degree the sympathies of our Protestant friends, if we had taken the other alternative.  The issue, however much Protestants may dread it, or try to evade it, must come to this at last.  The old Protestant controversies are obsolete.  Protestantism, as laid down in the formularies of the sects, has gone to seed; its stalk is withered and dry, and its root is dead.  It has exhausted itself, and now only cumbers the ground where it grew.  It is what Carlyle very justly calls a sham.  All living and active intellect deserts it, and ranges itself either on the side of the Catholicizing party, or on that of the infidelizing party, and the only real question now anywhere seriously debated is, whether we shall be Catholics or infidels.  All who have any tolerable understanding of the movements going on in the Protestant world see this, and in vain do the Old Hunkers or the Old Fogies that gather round the broken shrine of their idol seek to make up another issue.  Their lamentations only excite ridicule, and their arguments will only hasten the terrible issue they are so anxious to escape.  Neither party can be recalled to the dead formulas of the sects, for both have thought too much, and have become too clear-sighted, to be content with what has neither life nor sense.

The author is well aware of the existence of the two parties in the Protestant world, and of the danger they threaten to Protestantism as a religion; but he thinks the principal peril is from the infidelizing party.  We are not quite sure of this.  The Catholicizing party might not be the most formidable in Great Britain and the United States, for, unhappily, the people of these two countries are fearfully engrossed with purely material interests, and pay comparatively little attention to the wants of the soul.  Their thought, so to speak, is materialized, and their studies are chiefly of the physical sciences and their application to the industrial arts.  Money is their idol, the exchange is their temple, merchants and bankers are their clergy, and trade their cultus, or external service.  Nevertheless, even in these countries, the Catholicizing party is powerful.  It gains strength every day, and constantly are fresh, warm, ingenuous hearts calling upon Protestantism to answer whether she be really a religion or not. Every hour is she reminded of her incompleteness and insufficiency, alike for the intellect and the heart.  Everywhere are her famishing children begging her for the food she has not to give.  Can she hope to retain their love and obedience, if, when they ask her for a fish, she gives them a serpent; for bread, she gives them a stone?

If we pass into Protestant Germany, we find the Catholicizing party still more powerful, and gaining every day on the infidelizing party.  Germany is not at all what she was a few years ago.  A powerful reaction has taken place there against Rationalism and Transcendentalism.  Whatever is respectable in more recent German thought and German scholarship is on the side of the Catholicizing party.  To be sure of this, we need only study the later German theology, so ably and faithfully represented in this country by Drs. Nevin and Schaff, of the so-called Mercersburg school.  Perhaps still better evidence of it is furnished by the later German historians, whether they write general or particular, secular or ecclesiastical history.  Neander himself furnishes ample materials for refuting the Centuriators of Magdeberg, and Leo leaves the Catholic student little to desire.  The taste for solid studies still survives in Germany, and the German mind still retains its freshness, its energy, and its earnestness.  It is freer than the mind of any other modern nation from that frivolezza which Gioberti so justly represents as the principal characteristic of our age.  It has a straightforwardness, a downrightness, a heartiness, from which, in spite of its tendency to theorize, great good may well be expected.  The seriousness and erudition with which German scholars have vindicated Catholic ages and Catholic characters cannot fail to have a powerful influence on the course of German thought, and must tend not a little to strengthen the Catholic reaction now everywhere so visible.  Nobody, in Germany, who is anybody, would risk his reputation in repeating the old Protestant versions of Church history, or the old Protestant sneers at the Middle Ages.  Such a man would be looked upon as a new Rip Van Winkle.  We confess we hope much from the Catholicizing Protestants of Germany,- more indeed than from the Tractarians of England and this country; and it seems to us not unlikely that Protestantism will find itself before many years, not only tired and condemned, but executed, in the very place of its birth.  Our author may sneer, may speak of the madness and folly of expecting to revive the faith of the past; but he would do well to remember that what he calls the faith of the past has never itself fallen into the past; it has been always a living faith, and to revive it in the Protestant world is only to turn that world from the dead to the living.

But be this as it may, there is no question that the danger from the infidelizing party is great.  In the author’s own country that party is becoming numerous, strong, and active, and Protestants have nothing but a certain vis inertiae to oppose it. To oppose it to the Catholicizing party may indeed expel the infidelizing party, but to the advantage of Catholicity, not to that of Protestantism; for the Catholicizing party need only the courage to be consistent, and follow out their dominant principles to their legitimate conclusions, in order to embrace the Catholic Church, as is conceded or maintained by all not of the party itself.  It is of no use to oppose to them the dead and putrid carcass of the Protestantism of the symbolical books, nominally retained by the sects, for it is the living and active they seek, not the dead and rotten.  Our author, indeed, attempts to oppose to them a sort of Bible Protestantism that they have for sufficient reasons rejected, and which as Protestants they find it impossible to hold.  He tells them that they have no medium, as Protestants, between accepting the Bible as an authoritative external revelation, and rejecting all religion.  Be it so.  But tell us, say they, how we can accept that, and not be logically required to go farther, and make our peace with Rome.  You require us to be Protestants, to anathematize Popery, and pull the Pope’s nose.  All very good.  We are ready to do all this, and more too if you require it.  But tell us how we can be free to do all this, and yet assert the Bible as an authoritative external revelation?  Here is a question the author does not and cannot answer.

We as Catholics, unquestionably, hold the Bible to be the word of God, and an external authoritative revelation of his will; but no Protestant can consistently hold this, and whenever Protestants assert it they abandon the distinctive principles of the Reformation, and take their stand on Catholic ground.  Here is the fact which our author overlooks. What does he gain, then, by proving that the rejection of the Bible as such revelation is the rejection of all religion?  He proves nothing to his purpose, and relieves his infidelizing brethren from no difficulty.  All he proves, if he proves anything, is that there is no medium between Catholicity and infidelity.  With all his ability and acuteness, the author, when he has no longer our principles to reason from, an has something positive of his own to establish, falls into the ordinary cant of his party.  He talks of the Bible as an external authoritative revelation, and asserts that there is no medium between accepting it as such and absolute unbelief.  All very well.  So far we sustain him.  But what does he mean by the Bible?  Is the Bible anything save in its true and genuine sense?  What is that sense, the only sense in which it is or can be an external authoritative revelation from God?   Who shall tell us?  Shall each one determine it for himself, by his ow private judgment?  So he maintains, and so he must maintain, or cease to be a Protestant.  Then the Bible is to each one just what he interprets it to be, and may teach as many different doctrines as there are interpreters.  It is a contradiction in terms, then, to call it an external authoritative revelation; for then the authority is not in it, but in the private judgment of the interpreter.   These various interpretations, these different and contradictory doctrines which the sects deduce from the Bible, cannot all be true; yet what means or what right have you to distinguish between them, since all stand on the same footing?  Each has the Bible interpreted by private judgment in its favor, and no one has anything more.  The Bible and private judgment must be always equal to the Bible and private judgment, and therefore as respectable and as authoritative in the case of one as in that of another, and therefore respectable and authoritative in the case of none.

The author very happily refutes Parker’s “Absolute Religion,” and Newman’s “spiritual faculty,” by showing that neither is or gives a determinate system of religious doctrine and practice, but may coexist in the same mind with the grossest errors, the most debasing superstition, the foulest crimes, and the most disgusting immorality.  He shows that either is a mere abstraction, at best a mere susceptibility to religion; and he further concludes against the authority of each from the fact, that scarcely any two of the modern spiritualists are agreed as to what are its specific teachings or requirements.  This is just reasoning; but does not the author see that it may be retorted upon him with murderous effect?  By the very same process by which he refutes Parker’s “Absolute Religion,” and Newman’s “spiritual faculty,” they may refute the Protestant rule of the Bible interpreted by private judgment.  The Bible interpreted by each one for himself is in precisely the same predicament with the ”Absolute Religion” and the “spiritual faculty” with which he makes himself so merry.  Who needs to be told that, so taken, it is no specific or determinate religion; that the assertion of the Bible so interpreted may coexist in the same mind with the most shocking errors; or that the doctrines which Protestants derive from it, or hold with it, are as various as the sects into which the Protestant world is divided, and almost equal in number to that of individual Protestants themselves?  If he has a right to conclude against modern spiritualism from the fact that it does not secure to its adherents pure, unmixed truth and uniformity of belief, why not the modern spiritualists for the same reason conclude against the Bible interpreted by private judgment?

The author refutes the modern spiritualists so far as they make any pretensions to Christianity, and seeks to recall them to Bible Protestantism.  But what in the world is Bible Protestantism?  Will all Bible Protestants give us the same answer?  Shall we not receive from the sects different, and even contradictory answers?  Out author himself appears to be a Church-of-England man.  But what is Church-of-Englandism?  Who can tell?  Ask Dr. Pusey and the Tractarians, and you have one answer; ask Dr. Whatley, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, and you have another, and a very different answer.  To talk of Protestantism as something specific, definite, fixed, and determinate, betrays a want of common information or of common honesty, and the author’s Bible Protestantism must be conceded to be as vague and as indeterminate as Parker’s “Absolute Religion,” which is, as he himself attempts to define it, Be good and do good, and then- you will be good and do good.  No doubt of it; but what is it to be good and to do good?  All see that this “Absolute Religion” is a mere abstraction, and therefore a nullity.  What else is Bible Protestantism, which may mean anything or nothing, and has no meaning except that which the individual or sectarian Protestant mind gives it?

Protestants fall uniformly into the mistake of confounding belief that the Bible is inspired and contains an external revelation, with a belief of the revelation itself,- two very different things.  To believe that God has made such revelation, and that the Bible contains it, of itself implies no belief of what God has revealed.  The revelation, although contained in the Bible, is not the Bible as a mere book, but is the sense of the Bible, and is and can be believed only as that sense is intellectually apprehended and assented to.  Before you can claim to have believed that, you must know what it is.  This you cannot know without an interpreter of some sort,- either an external authoritative interpreter, as we hold, or an internal interpreter, as you maintain.  As a Protestant, you cannot assert an external authoritative interpreter, because that would require you to recognize the authority of the Catholic Church, and to abjure your Protestantism, a fact we beg you to remember when reasoning against the spiritualists, as well as when reasoning against us.  You must then fall back on the internal interpreter, that is, private judgment, or a spiritual faculty of the soul.  Here you have only your own private judgment, or your own spiritual faculty, to determine what is the revelation God has made, and this is not adequate for faith, because it determines differently with almost every different individual.  This not being able to determine with sufficient certainty for faith what the sense of the Bible is, it follows that the Protestant may believe that the Bible contains an external authoritative revelation, and yet not believe that revelation itself.    

Protestants sometimes reply to this, that God, when he made his revelation, intended it to be believed, and therefore he must have so made it that all who are required to believe it can ascertain with sufficient certainty for faith what it is.  He made his revelation in the Bible, and therefore private judgment must be able to determine what it is from the Bible alone, without any external authoritative interpreter.  The conclusion does not happen to follow.  Unquestionably, the revelation which God has made must be ascertainable by all who are commanded to believe it.  But it is not ascertainable from the Bible interpreted by private judgment.  Therefore that is not the way by which God has made it ascertainable.  This conclusion is evident on the very face of the Bible itself. God could never have contended that men should learn faith from the Bible alone, or from the Bible privately interpreted, because it is obvious, from the face of the book itself, that it was addressed to believers, whom it everywhere presupposes to have been already instructed at least in the rudiments of the faith.  There is no getting over this fact.  The Gospels were manifestly written for the instruction and edification of believers; the Epistles are all addressed to the faithful, and are nearly all simply pastoral letters designed to correct particular errors into which the faithful had, here or there, fallen, or were in danger of falling, and to give them in particular localities fuller instructions on certain points of doctrine or practice in regard to which they had been put imperfectly taught.  It is very absurd to pretend that a book if this sort, which was addressed to those who had already received the faith, which everywhere presupposes the greater part of the faith to be already known, and refers to its principal dogmas only as matters already believed, was intended by the Holy Ghost to be the medium, and only medium, of teaching the faith to those ignorant of it, and to be, as interpreted by private judgment, the rule for determining the revelation of God.  God is infinitely wise, and the characteristic of wisdom is to adapt the means to the end.  But here were no such adaptation.  Common sense is sufficient, if exercised, to satisfy everyone that God never designed the Bible without the intervention of the living teacher as the fountain from which his revealed word was to be drawn.  Deny the divinely commissioned living teacher, and you can make nothing of the Bible.  It is to you without significance, or at least a mere dumb idol, or a temptation and a snare.

It is hardly worth while to notice the pretense of some Protestants, that the Bible interprets itself.  It does no such thing.  No book interprets itself.  If the Bible interpreted itself, it would have the same meaning for all, and none who read it could dispute as to its sense.  But such is not the case; for the diversity of opinions as to what the book teaches among Bible readers is notorious and proverbial.  The book itself being invariable, the same to all and to each, it is certain that diversity of opinions as to its sense can originate only in diversity of interpretation, which there could not be if it interpreted itself.  We repeat, therefore, the dilemma in which the Protestant necessarily finds himself.  The Bible must have an interpreter, either external or internal.  If you assert the former, you must renounce your Protestantism, and return to the Church; if the latter, you must abandon the Bible as an authoritative external revelation, because you have no means of ascertaining with sufficient certainty for faith, that is, a certainty that excludes doubt, what is the revelation, and therefore it cannot be alleged as authority for determining that revelation.  Moreover, if God has not so made his revelation in the Bible as to be ascertainable from it, he has not intended that we should ascertain it from the Bible.  Therefore the Bible is not an authoritative external revelation.  Therefore it is to be placed in the category of all well-intentioned books, and accepted so far as its teachings are confirmed by the “oracle within,” and no farther,- the precise conclusion of Parker and Newman, which our author justly resolves into the rejection of all religion.

We assure the author that he has no logic by which he can set aside this conclusion.  The great difficulty is here in Protestantism itself.  It has always betrayed, and will betray, its friends; for if you take it on its professedly religious side, and seek to develop and complete it in a Christian sense, it conducts you to Rome; if you take it on its purely Protestant side, on the side of its denials of Catholicity, and seek to develop and complete it in a purely Protestant sense, it conducts you to infidelity.  There is no help for it, for Protestantism cannot stand on its own feet, or subsist as a form of Christianity.  Whatever it has that even the great body of Protestants call Christian, are the doctrines, more or less mutilated, which it retained from the Catholic Church, and which find their complement, their unity and integrity, only in her teaching.  Every intelligent, thinking, and reasoning Protestant must therefore, in spite of himself, either Catholicize or infidelize.  The author in the work before us wishes to do neither, but the Catholic reader perceives at once that he has nothing of his own to oppose to either party, and is as weak, as vague, and as absurd as the modern spiritualist the moment he has no longer the authority of our Church to back him.  He asserts the Bible as the word of God, for we do and have always done the same, and he can sustain his assertion by our authority; he insists on an external authoritative revelation as essential to Christian faith, and in this too he is backed up by us.  In these matters he is strong with our strength.  But when he has to maintain something for which he cannot plead the Catholic Church or Catholic tradition, which as a Protestant he is bound to reject, something in which he separates from us, he cannot stand a moment before his infidelizing opponents.  Assuming our Church to be true, and Christianity to be identically what she teaches, he proves very clearly that he who rejects the Bible and all external authoritative revelation is an infidel; but deny our Church, assume the justice of the Reformation in its attacks on Catholicity, and the truth of the Protestant denials, can he then say this?  By what authority, then, can he say that the principles of these denials which the infidelizing Protestants  seize upon and call Christian, and assert as the very essence of Christianity, are not so?  Who gave him authority to say for others what is or is not Christian?  Wherefore has he any more right to insist that his notions are Christian, than they have that theirs are?

But it is unnecessary to pursue this line of remark any farther.  Protestants no doubt sometimes forget their Protestantism, throw themselves unconsciously back on Catholic principles, and produce some learned and able works in defense of the Christian religion.  But these works have on Protestant principles no value, because whatever tends to prove Christianity or to refute infidelity tends to prove the Catholic Church, without which Christianity is a mere abstraction, or an unmeaning word.  There are no abstractions in nature; no abstraction exists a parte rei; and whatever exists at all, exists in a concrete form.  There is no Christianity existing in the abstract, and not in the concrete; and they who talk of “our common Christianity,” or Christianity common to the Church and the sects, talk nonsense, if they do not talk blasphemy.  A partial or an abstract view, which shall be a true view as far as it goes, may no doubt be taken of Christianity, and such a view the sects very possibly may and sometimes do take; but that view is simply a mental fact, and is in no sense Christianity itself, as an objective reality.  Christianity is a concrete existence, and, like every concrete existence, has one form and one only.  It is Catholicity or it is nothing.  So, then, whatever Protestants may on our principles prove that is coincident with Christianity, it is idle to suppose that on their own principles they ever do or ever can advance a single step, either in proving the Christian religion or in refuting infidelity.

To the hard things the author says here and there in his work against our religion, only a brief reply is required.  We have already disposed of the charge that the Church accepts the Theory of Development, and with it the parallelism he absurdly enough asserts between Catholicity and modern spiritualism.  He would have us believe that Catholics deny the authority of the Bible, because they assert a divinely commissioned and assisted authority for declaring its true sense.  Does the lawyer deny the authority of the law because he asserts that the court has power to declare and apply it?  The Bible, we have seen, must have an interpreter.  We assert for interpreter the Church of God, appointed and aided by our Lord himself to declare infallibly its true and genuine sense; the author asserts for interpreter each reader’s own private judgment, that is, asserts for each reader the same authority  that we assert for the Catholic Church.  If we supersede the Bible, pray, what does he do?  If he does not, pray, by what right does he say we do?  Which is most respectful to the Bible, subjecting it to an infallible interpreter who cannot err as to its sense, or to an interpreter who can err and confessedly does err?  After all, our author does not rise above mere vulgar Protestantism.  Undoubtedly we take the Bible as by our Church, who has authority to determine its sense; but it is only the true and genuine sense of the Bible that is God’s word, and that sense once determined is law for all Catholics,- for the Pope and bishop, as well as for the humblest layman.  And from it there is no dispensation.

The author considers, also, that to be required to believe on the authority of the Church is spiritual despotism; but he himself asserts that to deny an external authoritative revelation is tantamount to infidelity, and maintains, and requires all to maintain, that the Bible is such authoritative revelation.  He then requires all to believe on the authority of the Bible, and, we presume, recognizes no one’s moral right to believe any thing contrary to its teachings.  God in the Bible says so, is for him a final answer to all questions.  If God in his Church says so, which is final for us in all cases, is spiritual despotism, how does he escape the charge of asserting a like despotism?  What in relation to mental freedom is the difference in principle in saying that we are to believe what the Church teaches, or that we are bound to believe what the Bible teaches?  The rule is as absolute in the one case as in the other, and the only difference is, that in the one case we have a living teacher, with regard to whose teaching there is no obscurity or uncertainty, while in the other we have a dead book, whose teachings after our best efforts remain dark and doubtful.  In the one case we may have certain truth, in the other we can have only uncertain opinions or mere guesses; but the submission demanded to authority is precisely the same in both cases.  It is singular that Protestants, who are continually asserting the authority of the Bible, and at the same time denouncing the Catholic Church as a spiritual despotism, never appear to be aware of this!  The probability with the majority of Protestants is, that the assertion of the authority of the Bible is only an indirect way of denying all authority; for the Bible is authority with them only so far as they fancy it is in their favor.  When it is against them, they deny or explain it away. 

But it is time to draw our remarks to a close.  There is no doubt that a crisis is forming in the Protestant world, rent as it is by the two contrary movements we have described.  The author is right in calling his work The Eclipse of Faith.  All who are living and active among Protestants feel that for them faith is at least eclipsed.  We have but to study with some little care the movements in regard to religion among them, to be assured that they are well aware that thus far, as to what it has established, Protestantism has proved a failure, and the Reformation has belied its promises.  They see and feel that they cannot stay where they are; that they must either recede or push on farther.  Their Protestantism, as it has been and is, does not satisfy them, and their movements are all directed to obtaining a religious form and faith which they have not.  The most staunch Protestant feels that Protestantism is not, though he trusts it will speedily become, the truth.  The later German theologians, the Catholicizing school, are looking for something more than they have, and the infidelizing school is not contented with the position it has taken up.  All feel that something is wanting, that as yet their Protestantism is incomplete and insufficient.  They are seeking, not practicing, religion.  Hence on all hands is the effort going on to complete Protestantism in one sense or another.  We have no disposition to treat with unkindness these efforts, and indeed we are pleased to see them, for they must soon bring about, if they have not already in fact brought about, a crisis in the fate of Protestantism, since on the one hand they will lead from Protestantism to the Church, and on the other will make it clear to all that Christianity cannot be retained without renouncing forever the Protestant Reformation.  They will force all to acknowledge that the real issue of our age, as we asserted some nine years ago, is between Catholicity and infidelity.  This is the real issue, let who will deny it.  Out of the Catholic Church faith is not merely eclipsed, it is extinct.

We cannot look upon the Protestant world, whose hopes, fears, and passions we so long and so deeply shared, without being ourselves more or less moved.  The little of life they retained from the Church has been exhausted; the few rays of light which were reflected upon them from the truth which for them had sunk below the horizon are gone out.  God and heaven recede from their view.  For them the bright stars are extinguished, the sun is darkened, and the moon turned to blood.  The earth quakes beneath their feet, and the universe seems on the brink of dissolution.  Fear seizes their hearts, and the poor Protestant seems to himself to stand alone on a mere point in space, with a universal blank around him.  He sees no Father in heaven, no kindred on earth.  The frightful abyss yawns on all sides of him, and he is unable to endure it.  He would fain fill it up even with “spirits and goblins be damned.”  He feels that it would be a consolation to believe even in the Devil, for the Devil is something, and something is better than nothing.  What shall the poor man do?  Return to the Church of God, draw new life from her breasts, and rest his weary head upon her maternal bosom?  No, he will not yet do that.  Absolute denial he recoils from with horror.  What the shall he do?  Alas!  We see what he will do, nay, what he has done and is doing.  He revives long-forgotten necromancy, invokes the spirits of the dead, and reestablishes in the nineteenth century the worship of demons.  The fact stares us in the face.  Here, then, proud and loud-boasting Protestantism, is what you have come to at last.  You can go no farther.  You can sink no lower, for a lower deep there is not.  You have sunk to the lowest depths of ancient heathenism, and in our very midst, in our own city, called not inaptly the Athens of America, you revive and practice the grossest superstitions of the old Gentiles, from which two thousand years ago Catholicity had redeemed the world.  It is not a thing pleasant to think of. 

Is the darkness of heathenism to gather once more over the world, and are the devils to have again their temples and their worship, and again to deceive the nations by their ambiguous oracles and their lying wonders?    We do not believe it.  But Protestants, it seems to us, soon see that the only salvation of the race from this terrible catastrophe is in a return to the Catholic Church.  She alone has power to put the demons to flight, to dispel the darkness of error, and dissipate the clouds of superstition.  She has done it once for the nations, and she can and will do it again, when they shall have learned enough from their apostasy to feel that apostasy from the Church involves sooner or later a relapse into demonism, or the worship of devils.  Have they not already learned this?  We think they have, or well-nigh learned it, and therefore we regard the fall of Islamism and Protestantism as an event by no means distant.  Events march in our day with fearful rapidity, and ass God is evidently intervening in a special manner in behalf of his Spouse, his Beloved, for whom he gave his life, and whom he hath purchased with his own blood, there is no saying how soon such an event may take place.

 Turkey is only propped up by the rivalries of the Christian powers of Europe, but must fall at farthest within a very few years, in spite of those rivalries.  And her fall will involve that of Islamism.  Russia, a schismatic power, may indeed come down to the Bosphorus, which for a time may be disastrous; but if she does, she must, in order to continue there, cease to be schismatic.  England will ere-long lose her colonies, for she is adopting the system of allowing them to govern themselves, and, once accustomed to govern themselves, they will not long consent to remain in the condition of colonies; and once reduced to her island home, she ceases to be able to uphold Protestantism, and must herself return to Catholic unity, which she broke only in a pet and for political reasons.  This country, of course, will follow in the footsteps of England.  China must soon openly tolerate our missionaries, and Japan be opened to them, and then the whole world will acknowledge the successor of the Fisherman as the Vicar of Christ on earth.  The child may be now born that will live to see this glorious consummation, which sooner or later is sure to be effected.  The powers of darkness have had their day, and though the Church in this world will always be the Church Militant, yet not always shall we look back upon the Middle Ages, and regret them as the Ages of Faith.