THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER.1

I.

IT is some time since I called public attention to an essay which appeared in the Christian Advocate, denying the fact of St. Peter having been at Rome. That periodical work was under the management of the Rev. Dr. Green, a Presbyterian minister of Philadelphia; and the appearance of the essay, together with the comments by which it was accompanied, were intended to insinuate that the claims made by the Roman Catholic Church were unfounded. 2 I have been informed by several respectable persons who differ from me in religious belief, that the evidence which I then hastily collected was abundantly sufficient to remove every shadow of doubt, if any was entertained, that the glorious Apostle was in Rome, was bishop of that city, and died there. The Rev. Dr. Green, has so far as I can discover, never made any retraction, nor corrected the error into which he contributed to lead his readers, nor exhibited the least symptom of regret for the part which he and his clerical brother played upon that occasion.

I have since then marked with a greater degree of attention the proceedings of the body to which this minis

1 This series of letters was occasioned, as the short note accompanying the extract from the Southern Religious Telegraph, which is prefixed to it, shows, by the denunciations made against Catholics, in this and similar publications, as the enemies of civil freedom. It contains a brief history of the origin, progress and commencing decline of the systematic effort to crush the rights and liberties of the Catholic communion, by classing its members with criminals against the State; an analysis of the theory of the federal government of the United States, in its relation to moral and religious questions, in which the essential difference betw en it and the European polity of the Middle Ages is pointed out; a defence of the Catholics of the United States against the accusation of hostility to its civil institutions; and a delineation of the course of policy which the party calling itself Evangelical." would seek to carry out, by means of a "Christian party in politics." The letters were first published in the United States Catholic Miscellany, numbers 4-18, vol. xi for 1831, and afterwards republished in a pamphlet.

? See article "St. Peter's Roman Episcopate," vol. i.

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ter belongs. Not only has it continued through a number of its presses to vilify and to misrepresent Roman Catholics, but it has by some of its publications endeavored to excite against them the suspicions and the hatred of all friends of civil and religious liberty. Not only has it sought, by means of associations formed under its auspices and directed by its influence, to secure for itself a widespread domination through the land; but it has collected vast sums of money, and prepared to organize a host of zealots to sweep from the valley of the Mississippi the religion of the survivor of that noble assembly that created the liberty which it enjoys. Not content with the possession of the vast power which it at present holds, it looks forward to the securing of a future monopoly, of a more extensive and absorbing nature, and hesitates not in the triumph of its calculations to anticipate what it considers the inevitable arrival of the millennium of its glory, when the youth that it now trains up shall with its principles assert their bloodless victory at the ballot boxes. Yet impatient of the delay and desirous of hastening the happy epoch, it makes unceasing efforts, at one moment to procure from Congress a fatal precedent in even one act of what it styles Christian legislation; and at another, to render Catholics more odious to their fellow-citizens or more suspected of being dangerous to the republic. Let it succeed in either way, and a passage will have been opened, through which it may pour the stream of its power, sweeping away the obstacles that retard, widening and deepening the channel by the impetuosity of its current, until, like so many new feeders, law gradually added to law shall have caused Church after Church to disappear; and if then an effort should be made to stop the torrent, if the dam itself should not be swept away, the inundation would spread over the face of the land and overwhelm the inhabitants.

I am not the only one who has beheld this; I am but one out of millions to whom it was visible; and, though silent until now upon the subject, I have heard and the

public has heard the facts proclaimed by very many; and I submit to Americans whether the assertions which I make are not sustained, amongst others, by the article entitled "The Republic in Danger," which has been published in the Southern Religious Telegraph, in the city of Richmond, in Virginia, and reprinted in the Catholic Miscellany.

The body to which I thus allude is not the Presbyterian Church. There are a large number of the members of that Church who have too much love of civil and religous liberty, too much affection for their fellow-citizens. and too deep a sense of common honesty to belong to the association. Nor is it confined to the Presbyterian denomination, though a number of the Presbyterian presses are the chief instruments for disseminating its principles; it embraces a vast multitude of other sects of various religious sentiments and forms of government. It is composed of the elect, the more sanctified and perfect of the land, as they esteem themselves; who leagued together in a holy covenant, to wage a war of extermination against infidels and Roman Catholics, are urged by as pythonic a spirit against unbelievers and "the beast," as their predecessors in Europe were against the Turk and the Pope, and frequently with the Turk against the Holy Father.

I consider then the production which I now undertake to review, not as a document of any one of the Churches of our country, but as publishing the well-known sentiments of a large body diffused through several of the Churches and spread through all the States. Whatever the other objects of this body may be, I shall not now undertake to develop; but shall confine myself at present to showing that its treatment of Roman Catholics is not only uncharitable and unjust, but is manifestly at variance with the spirit of our political institutions.

I shall quote from their own version of the Scriptures the description given by St. Paul of charity, in the thirteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians: "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity

vaunteth not herself, is not puffed up, doth not behave herself unseemingly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, and endureth all things."

Whoever reads their productions, whether they be the reports of Bible distributions, of tract supplyings, of missions abroad or at home, of temperance societies, of revivals, or "Sabbath" observance societies, or whatever else that belongs to the associated body, will necessarily often meet with mention of Roman Catholics, and one of the leading exhibitions is the vulgar and unkind substitution of nicknames for the appellation by which this body is and has been known throughout the world. Great Britain, it is true, took the lead in this lowest species of offensive, unkind, unseemly, insulting, and therefore uncharitable scurrility; not indeed in point of time or of virulence, but of legalized and common phraseology. Luther previously had bestowed the appellation of Antichrist upon the Pope for the first time in 1520; designated him as the Roman homicide, and threatened "that the name of the Pope should be taken from beneath the heavens:" he called him "a wolf possessed by an evil spirit." On a subsequent occasion he declared that "the Pope was so full of devils, that he spit them and blew them from his nose."

In his subsequent writings he uses nicknames where he can, and would not vouchsafe to the adherents of the ancient Church any name but that of Papists. I do not now enter upon the question of his doctrine or his mission, but I assert, that be the errors of those whom we oppose what they may, the bestowal of a nickname is an evidence of the want of common courtesy; kindness and charity are violated by the persons who continued to use the term, especially in the spirit which gave it origin. It was in the same spirit that Luther in 1534 called Henry VIII of England, "a fool," "an idiot," "the most brutal of swine and asses." It was in the same spirit that when he came forth, in 1521, from his Patmos, as he called

the place of his retreat, he declared in his sermon in the church at Wittemberg: "It was the word, whilst I slept quietly and drank my beer with my dear Melancthon and Amsdorf, that gave the Papacy such a shock;" and that, when he threatened to re-establish the Mass, he asks his associates: "What hurt will the Popish Mass do you?" It was in this spirit that he styled Rome, Babylon, the Pope, the man of sin, the beast, etc., and the Church, the whore of Babylon, etc. Indeed, he left scarcely room to any succeeding imagination to extend the nicknomenclature.

Yet, though to him is due the invention, Great Britain has the discredit of introducing this vocabulary into her public legislation, and her high authority made that fashionable which in its origin and its essence was vulgar, unseemly and uncharitable. The object was to express contempt, which is not only unkind but is never sought after, save by those who are envious, vaunting, or puffed up. It contains no argument, but betrays a symptom of its absence; for it is generally observed that he who is anxious to fasten a nickname upon his adversary, seldom makes the effort until he has failed in adducing a reason. The works of the principal English Protestant divines will go down to other days, lamentable monuments of the fact, that a perverse fashion is able to contaminate with rude and uncharitable vulgarity minds of the first order and of the best education. The statute book has, however, ceased to be the vehicle of scurrility, not only in Great Britain, but in the United States. During upwards of thirty years the calm and steady process of critical investigation has continued to rub away the stains which the reckless spirit of a bad and disastrous age has fastened upon those who were exhibited as too contemptible for association, too wicked for endurance, though not too poor to be victims of rapacity; for such was the state to which the Catholic subjects of the British crown were reduced by the potent spell of nicknames and persevering audacity of unrestrained calumny. The plots with which they were charged are now acknowledged by the highest authorities