N past uncivilized times Protestants

Protestants, and we and they had equally our penal laws. But now, wherever the English language is spoken, Protestants have proclaimed all persecution for religion's sake, as, in practice and principle, immoral and irreligious. To force a man to profess what he does not believe, we regard as grotesque and horrible. This is of the very essence of our mode of thinking -an integral portion of our Protestant faith and of our Protestant selves. Whatever differences among us may exist, there is no difference here. To this we have grown irreversibly under the tuition of a common Protestantism.

But can the same be said of Catholicism? Has this, too, been rising out of the slough. of the past? Has the teaching of the Ages impressed the same lesson on the Church of Rome? Now, that that lesson has never been learned there, is what fills the minds of Protestants with a feeling of insecurity and this feeling, the late decree vesting infallibility in one man; the making absolute submission to the will of the Pope the duty of all Catholics; and the news of a new Universal Catholic League,' having for its end the annihilation of all individualism and of the free play of the human faculties, have tended largely to augment.

Is the Protestant mind alarming itself needlessly? When, in Spain, an archbishop commands the people to vote for no one who tolerates the heretical doctrine of liberty of speech or liberty of worship; and this (he says) because the Pope commands it; and when he and his subordinates try to gag the press and so strangle in its cradle this Hercules of our liberties, what are we to infer? And then compare the magnificent men of this magnificent country, now plunged in half-anarchy and whole. ignorance, with the same country under its Moorish rulers, holding up the beacon-lights of learning and science to a dark and distracted age.

Is it not a strange phenomenon, which the results of Christian teaching have brought into such relief on the very foreground of our human history, that a religion based on the paramount claims of conscience and the purity of the affections, and of which it is a fundamental principle, that, whatever other gifts we may possess, 'without charity we are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal,' should, through the perversity and dogmatism of the human mind,* be so transmuted, that men have hated one another with the hatred almost of fiends, and persecuted to the death, with fearful tortures, their fellow-men, under the horrible delusion that they were honouring God by destroying His creatures? +

And this seems especially strange when it is considered that the Founder of their Faith had not only rebuked all persecution, but had laid down the broadest principles of universal toleration; for, when appealed to on this subject by His disciples, He replied, let the tares and the wheat grow up together in the world until the harvest at the end of it, then will God see that the bad be separated from amongst the good, (Matth. xiii., 24-30).

It is singular, too, that that which is not formally and precisely defined-the dogmatic creed-should have usurped the place of that which is of essential and

The Latin proverb-' Deorum offensa Diis cura,' Offences against the gods are the gods' affair, which may thus be paraphrased: Crimes against man are man's concern; the gods are competent to guard the rights of gods-is worth attending to. If this short proverb had been duly weighed; if the command of Christ, to suffer the tares and the wheat to grow together until the end of the world, had been obeyed; what oceans of blood; what crimes, and murders, and miseries, and madness would have been spared the world. This would, indeed, have been a gospel of peace; but what has 'Infallibility' done for us, but set the world by the ears, embittering existence and poisoning humanity at its

source,

The reader-and every one ought to be a reader here will find some very able and striking remarks on this aspect of our subject, in an article on The Ethics of Vivisection,' in the July number of the CANADIAN MONTHLY.

primary importance-the character of the individual; and that instead of man's destiny being made to depend on his obedience to the behests of his conscience according to the best lights he can attain to, he is believed to be a subject for punishment however fearful, because of not believing some dogma, which, owing to the native build of his mind, or the fashioning conditions of his life, or to both, it is morally impossible that he ever can believe. And yet men have persecuted one another for not being able to scale this wall of iron impossibility. They might just as well persecute them for not being able to climb to the moon.

One would think that a man might be saved, who, trying to believe aright, strove conscientiously to do his duty to God and man, whether he held to transubstantiation or believed it an absurdity; or that the earth rolls on its axis and not the sun round it : for what have these outside questions of the intellect to do with the ethics of the heart, or the goodness of the life, or the spirituality of the man? But, then, the ecclesiastic mind is something wonderful.

But it is said, 'let him hear the Church.' He may be gentle, generous, true, and noble in all the relations of life; but this one fatal flaw of not believing the infallibility of one man in Rome-for it really amounts to this-spoils all, and he, for this, becomes an outcast from heaven. And yet we read in these sacred writings, that pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.' And, really, this looks not so ill beside the decrees of Trent-anathemas and all! But then, religion and theology stand very wide apart.

But the whole thing looks so grotesque and unreasonable, that prior to its adoption into the creed of any sane man, the foundation for such a belief ought to be subjected to the most searching criticism. We proceed, then, to examine the whole passage, text and context. If, says Christ, (Matth. xviii, 15)—if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between him and thee alone; and if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, take with thee one or two more, that in the

mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he neglect to hear them, tell it to the Church (ecclesia, assembly); but if he neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.'

Now remark that the case put by Christ is not one of faith at all-not one of orthodox or heterodoxy-but simply of wrong done by one member of the Church in any particular locality to another member of the same. If he neglect to hear you privately, or the brethren you take with you, or the church; if he ignore or spurn all advice tendered from every quarter, he must be content to be henceforth to you no more than any other outsider; and all this being premised, God ratifies your decree of exclusion against him, till at least he repents (v. 21, 22, &c.). Of course, the church means the assembly of believers in that place; for that every private misunderstanding between man and man should be carried to Rome could scarcely have been contemplated. But what has all this to do with the Council of Trent and its whole lumber of obsolete, unbelievable dogmas, or with the Vatican Council, or with the Pope's infallibility? And what a monstrous superstructure to build on so slight a base! Did the world ever behold the like of it?

But thou art Peter': what do you make of that? I certainly do not make of it, that Peter is Pope Pius the IX. But to proceed: 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell (Hades) shall not prevail against it.'

Now the argument takes this shape : the word Peter (Petros) means a rock, and on this rock (Petra) Christ built his church. But Peter (Petros) does not mean a rock, but only a rock-fragment. The Greek word for rock, i.e., the underlying rock on which a building would be raised, is quite a different word -Petra. Now in this, the true sense of the word, Paul tells us that other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus' (1 Cor. iii, 11.) If this be admitted, then not Peter but Christ is the foundation rock, the Petra, on which the church is built. But there is a sense in which Peter and the other Apostles might be said to be the foundation of the building, to wit, if it, the building commenced with them as its first or foundation stones, each of them a petros. But

what, in the name of common sense, has 'thou art Peter' to do with an old gentleman in Rome 1800 years after. Peter had just said, 'thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.' Whereupon Christ says, thou art Peter (Petros), and 'upon this rock (Petra) will I build my church.' I am the Christ, and upon this rock, this basis of thy confession, or myself, I will build my church. It was a mode of speaking, characteristically Christ's own. When (John ii.) he drove the Jews out of the temple, and they demanded a miracle in proof of his assumed authority, he said, 'destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' Then said the Jews, 'forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days.' But though he does not seem to have vouchsafed them the slightest intimation of the temple that was in his thoughts, his disciples inform us that he was all the while talking of the temple of his body. But in whatever way the similarity of sound and the affinity of sense of these two cognate words may strike, at first sight, the casual reader of this passage, the far more obvious literality of interpretation involved apparently in the words 'this temple' (in or close to which they were then standing), ought to lead to extreme caution in giving to an obscure passage an interpretation which unfolds such fearful consequences; just as their interpretation of 'the sun stood still,' &c., once led the Roman Church to infer that the earth was the centre of the universe, as poor Galileo found to his cost, and that our present system of astronomy was a fearful heresy.

In this connection, it is curious to notice that when Pope Gregory VII. stripped Henry of his Crown and conferred it on Rodolph, he employed this hexameter 'Petra dedit Petro, Petros diadema Rodolpho': i.e., the Rock gave the crown to Peter, Peterto Rodolph; so that I have infallibility with me in my interpretation. But if it be still insisted that the church is built on Peter, what can that have to do with Protestantism or Popery? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But He does not say that he will build His church on Peter, but changes the word petros (a masculine noun) to petra (a feminine noun), a word of an altogether different meaning, petra being the word a Greek would employ in speaking of the underlying Silurian rock-stratum of this

But

part of Canada, as we say the Silurian rock. We build with a Petros on a Petra. only look at the absurdity of the thing. Christ built His church on Peter; ergo, an old man in Rome—and, oh, how chosen !long centuries after, has the sole power to declare what every man in the world shall think and how he shall act. But whatever be the sufferings of the church in this world, the gates of Hades,'-the place of the dead -shall not avail to hold them in, for my people shall rise again in immortality, having burst the barriers of death and hell.

But he is Peter's successor! Of that you know as little as I do, and that is simply nothing at all. But what if he be? How does that alter the case. Did Christ say likewise that the church is built on the successors of Peter. If so, then I say, God help them! What! Built on Nicholas III, on Boniface VIII, or Alexander VI, with his sweet Cardinal son, Cæsar Borgia, or on two Popes excommunicating one another, or on three! Surely, in so stupendously important a matter we ought not to be left without the clearest and minutest information. But we read nothing about it— nothing of a stationary infallible tribunal in Rome for shutting down the valves of thought, and gagging the Galileos of science for venturing to affirm what every man today, from the Pope to his postilion, equally believes, as one of the solidest, most unassailable facts of the world. And what is the use of an infallibility, which the more it dogmatises, the more surely it goes wrong? Surely by this time they ought to give it up as a most unfortunate business.

But Popes have been so confessedly fallible in so many instances, that ecclesiastics have had to invent for them an ex cathedra way-or new church-patent-for getting over that. Still now arises a new question, as to what is ex cathedra and what is not, some affirming, some denying, so that they will have to call another general council to determine that. But, perhaps, they will not; since it is a handy kind of doctrine; for when one prefers any particular notion, he can affirm the ex cathedra; and if he finds it inconvenient, he may take the other side. So that, as Dean Swift once wittily said, they might as well be without infallibility as not know where to find it when they want it. But then Dean Swift was a blockhead, for this kind of

moral see-sawing just answers to a nicety the views of the ecclesiastics. Still-and here is the peril-an occasion might arise to quicken men into unanimity, and then, ah then. . . . But I must hasten to another arm of my subject.

Now the Pope and Sir Francis Hincks have no strong liking for Orangemen. The Pope is opposed to all secret societies, and therefore institutes the greatest the world has ever known-this new UNIVERSAL CATHOLIC LEAGUE,' which is to 'absorb all existing associations, such as Catholic Clubs, the Militia of Jesus Christ, and the like,' with its 'centre in Rome,' and its fingers in every man's affairs.* And yet, in presence of this vivid, gigantic, all-ramifying secret society, how pales and dwarfs this little association of Orangemen.

To give some idea of the objects of the League, and of the scheme of its organization, I shall present the reader with some extracts from the London Daily News:

1. The centre of the league shall be at Rome. 2. The general presidence of the league shall reside in the Vatican, and, with it, the personnel of a general sectarial board.

5. The office of the general presidence shall have seven directions, each with a head division, and with secretaries.

Division first-Union of Catholic jurists; second, Catholic workingmen's societies; third, central committees; fourth, Catholic regions; fifth, diocesan functionaries; sixth, general depot; seventh, academic committee for the union of the learned in the scientific efforts of Catholicism.

The league shall have for its objects:

1. The defence of right and freedom in face of the laws restricting the church and the Pope. The restoration of the temporal power, of which the Pope has been despoiled in violation of the rights of the Holy See and Christianity-a restoration to be effected in the sight of justice, human and divine.

2. To expound and demonstrate the dangers of liberty falsely so-called.

3. To combat individualism.

6. To countermine the press.

9. To reunite all the forces of civilized society, its intelligence and its material resources, for the benefit of the holy cause.

10. To institute a central press for the reception and distribution of communications to all Catholic journalism.

II, To institute popular schools for technical instruction; to institute Catholic libraries, banks for the immediate advance of money, mixed clubs of the noblesse and bourgeoisie, directing clubs for the active agents of the league, workmen's aid societies.

* Were this league to be disolved to-morrow, or to be non-existant my reasoning would not be thereby invalidated.

The real objects, however, may be reduced to the one of Article 3-to combat individualism.' Yes, that it is against which has been directed from the infancy of the world, the enginery of all the despots, political and religious, the world has ever seen to grind down, in their mill, THE MAN; to fuse him into the mass; not indeed to destroy his thinking powers, but to index the direction they are to take, the groove they are to run in; to comb him down and sleekly discipline him to the service of ecclesiasticism; to rob himself of the brain that nature has given him, and to give him one clipped and pared to the pleasure of the Pope; and by stinting and stunting to reduce the stalwart limbs, and so force some grand Copernicus into the breeches of a dwarf. And poor Galileo! This man, of a free, bold intellect, had embraced the doctrine of a central sun and a rotating world. This was then a frightful heresy. Summoned to Rome, and the terrors of the Inquisition brought to bear on him-and he knew well what they meant-the poor, terrified soul of him, humbled and broken, uttered this shameful lie: 'With a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies.' Had he not learned with a vengeance what 'combating individualism' meant? And is it to be wondered at if we Protestants have some repugnance to this system of de-individualization ?

Article 13 simply means that, in this crusade against the liberties of mankind, 'the noblesse and the clergy,' the Aristocracies and the Ecclesiastics the world over, are to unite their forces-a new nineteenth century oligarchy of the two great castes of the world to bend their efforts to achieve for the new age what they had effected so happily for the old; to issue, as it did