publications in the country. The present writer is far inferior to Thornwell, and is not a whit above the Brownlees, the Dowlings, the Sparrys, and that brotherhood. We hope it is but a temporary aberration, and that hereafter this periodical, with which we have had so many associations, will retrieve its character, and prove itself a fair and candid Examiner.

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ART. III. Four Years' Experience of the Catholic Religion : with Observations on its Effects upon the Character, Intellectual, Moral, and Spiritual. By J. M. CAPES, Esq. Philadelphia T. K. & P. G. Collins. 1849. 8vo. pp. 72.

THIS is an American reprint, in a cheap form, of an English work, by Mr. Capes, formerly a minister of the Anglican Establishment, who was received into the Church some five or six years since. It is a sort of compte rendu, which the author has judged proper to furnish his former brethren who still remain in heresy, of what during four years he has found Catholicity and Catholics in Great Britain. Its author is the founder and editor of The Rambler, one of the best conducted and most valuable periodicals in the United Kingdom, and commends himself to us as an accomplished scholar, of a high order of ability, firm faith, and fervent zeal. His experience is written in a tone of great candor and moderation, and can hardly fail to have a happy influence on many of his "separated brethren."

While we acknowledge the ability of the work before us, and add our own experience as a convert in confirmation of its favorable report of Catholicity and Catholics, we still have some doubts about the strict propriety of such works. They seem to us in their general character to be more in consonance with Protestantism than with Catholicity. With Protestants, religion has only a psychological basis, is purely a matter of private experience, and private experience is the rule by which they are accustomed to judge of its truth or falsehood; but with us, private experience counts for little, and we are accustomed to judge private experience by our religion, not our religion by private experience. If a man has confessions to write, and can write them like St. Augustine, let him write them by all means; but as a general rule we think it better not to be too fond

of parading our personal experiences before the public. If such experiences interest and attract some who are without, they also minister to their present false notions as to the grounds of religion, and hinder rather than facilitate their study of the true motives of credibility. Religion has an objective validity, an objective evidence, independent of your experience or mine, and our reliance, under the grace of God, should be on that. If Protestants reject the testimony of the Church herself, how can we expect them to accept ours as individuals, when ours as individuals is worth nothing, save as corroborated by hers? It is but justice, however, to Mr. Capes to say, that his book is not precisely a narrative of his religious experience, in the Protestant sense, and that it is mainly a report of facts with regard to our religion and its followers in England, which he has picked up during four years of his Catholic life, together with his reasonings and reflections on various important topics, intellectual, moral, social, and theological.

The author seems to us to have written in a form altogether more egotistical than was desirable. He apologizes for it, indeed, on the ground that, as he was relating what he had himself seen and remarked in himself and others, he could not well avoid it. He could not avoid speaking in the first person, it is true, but he could have spared us the long account in the beginning of his competency and admirable qualifications as a witness. All he says is, no doubt, true, but what was the need of saying it? Those who knew him were already prepared to admit him as a competent witness, and those who did not know him could not be prepared by his own panegyric on himself. They who would not take his word as to his experience could hardly be expected to take his word for his own competency and credibility as a witness. It would have been amply sufficient to have told in a simple, straightforward manner what he had to say, without prefacing it with an account of his own mental habits, and without interrupting the flow of the narrative to tell us that he "honestly asserts," "honestly believes," "fully believes," &c., what he is asserting. However, this is a matter of taste, and no one suffers from it except the author himself.

As a writer, Mr. Capes may be commended for his pure idiomatic English, but he is diffuse, sometimes wordy, and not always clear, direct, and forcible. He affects to write as a man of the world, as a layman, in a popular style, free from all technical terms or forms of expression usually adopted by professional writers. In this he follows the precepts of the rheto

ricians, but, perhaps, without considering the peculiar circumstances in which the Catholic writing in English is placed. A Protestant writing in English on Protestantism can avoid technical terms and expressions, and abandon himself to the current language of the people, because his Protestantism is itself vague and loose, and appears to far greater advantage in popular than in scientific language, and because the terms most appropriate to its expression have passed into the language of the market, and ceased to be technical, or, at least, become terms familiar to the general reader. But the Catholic writing in the same language on Catholicity cannot do this with safety, because his doctrines are definite and fixed, and because the terms which express them with clearness, exactness, and precision are not in common use. The English language has for three hundred years been usurped by heretics, and been chiefly used as a medium of one or another form of heresy. In its current use it is inadequate to the expression of orthodoxy, and consequently the Catholic writer is obliged, at the risk of appearing stiff and pedantic, to make a liberal use of technical terms and scientific forms of expression, if he does not choose to leave his meaning vague and uncertain. Our Oxford converts do not in general, as far as we have seen, appear to be sufficiently aware of this; they write on as they were accustomed to write before their conversion, in very good English, it is true, but with a choice of terms which leaves us perpetually in doubt whether their thought is sound or heretical.

There is also among others than converts a mistake as to the obligations of the layman writing on theological subjects to be exact in his language. We take up a book written by a layman, by the illustrious Count de Maistre, for instance, all bristling, perhaps, with errors, and errors which become heresies in the minds of unprofessional readers, and if we complain, we are told in excuse, that the author was a man of the world, that he was not a professional theologian, and therefore was not to be expected to write with exactness. We may need, but we cannot accept, this excuse. If the layman cannot write on theological topics with exactness, both of thought and expression, he has no business to write on them at all. He who assumes the doctor's office must be held to the doctor's responsibility; and it is peculiarly important that this rule be enforced in these days of journalism and of lay-writing, when a very considerable portion of our popular literature is proceeding from the hands of the laity. In judging the man, we of course look

to what he probably means; but in judging the author, we must hold him to what he says, to the plain, obvious, and natural sense of his words, whether he be cleric or laic.

The tone of Mr. Capes's work is subdued, and exceedingly moderate. The author writes as if he was afraid some prim Anglican or fastidious Puseyite should suspect him of extravagance or enthusiasm. His statements are generally under the truth, and appear to the Catholic to be weak and tame. The author's motive has been a good one; he has believed that a calm, deliberate, and reserved statement will have more weight with Protestants than one in which he suffers his Catholic heart to speak out in its own unrestrained warmth and energy. But in this we believe he is mistaken. Heretics do not in our days doubt our ability, our learning, or our logic. What they doubt is our sincerity, that we believe our own doctrines. They look upon the intelligent Catholic defending his religion as a lawyer speaking from his brief. In a word, they doubt our honesty. Hence, what we say coolly, deliberately, in measured terms, expressly for them, has little weight with them as a body. They all feel, all, with here and there an exception, that they are daily and hourly professing what they know they in reality do not believe, and, judging us by themselves, they conclude it must be the same with us. They not only have no faith, but they have ceased to believe faith possible. What they are most anxious to know is, not whether good reasons can be given for our Church or not, but whether her intelligent members, men of learning, of good sense, of whole minds, do really believe her to be what she professes to be, do really believe what they profess to believe. Asseverations of our honesty and of the firmness of our faith weigh nothing with them, for they know by their own experience that such asseverations cost nothing, that a man who can profess what he does not really believe, can easily asseverate that he believes what he professes. They attend not to what we say, but to the unconscious manner, the unconscious look and tone, with which we say it.

Moreover, Mr. Capes, knowing the Protestant world as he does, needs not to be told that Protestants, save individual exceptions, under the influence of grace vouchsafed to lead them back to faith and unity, always put the most unfavorable construction on the words we use or the statements we make that they will bear. Candor and fair-dealing are not to be expected from them; otherwise we should be obliged to regard them as in good faith, and if they were really in good faith they

would not remain in their Protestant communions, but would be speedily reconciled to the Church. Candor and fair-dealing on religious matters are incompatible with the nature of Protestants, and it is always folly to look for them. What we say will always be taken by them in the worst sense it can be. Our moderation will be termed lukewarmness, our candor will be taken as "damning with faint praise," and our forbearance to state our attachment to Catholicity in terms most consonant to our own feelings will be construed into our disgust, if we are converts, at the change of religion we have made. Moderation towards heretics avails nothing to win them, and is usually a wrong to our Catholic friends. He who knows Protestants well, knows that it is idle to try to speak so as to suit them. We shall always have the most favorable effect on them when we pay little regard to them, but speak out naturally, simply, and truly from our own full Catholic hearts, according to the instincts, so to speak, of our Catholic faith and love.

We see clearly enough from Mr. Capes's book, that his faith is full and firm, that his heart is Catholic to the core, and that his real estimate of Catholic life is hardly less high than ours; but he restrains himself in the utterance of his sentiments too much, and is too much afraid of appearing extravagant or enthusiastic, of speaking from his excited feelings, rather than from his sober judgment. He speaks of Catholicity too coldly, without that glow of feeling with which the child always speaks of his tender mother, the lover of his beloved, and he submits to a dissecting of her influence on his own mind and heart, and to the running of a sort of Plutarch parallel between her and Church-ofEnglandism, which are to the warmth of our feelings half profane. What if we do appear extravagant, enthusiastic, to the heretical? The Apostles on the day of Pentecost appeared to the by-standers terribly extravagant and forgetful of proprieties. Some thought them drunk, filled with new wine; but three thousand were that day added to the Church. And it is rare that any, except those who appear extravagant, drunken even, to those without, have the consolation of being the instruments of adding large numbers to the faithful. Always will Catholics, filled with the spirit of their religion, and speaking and acting according to the inspirations of grace, appear to heretics and infidels to be extravagant, enthusiastic, carried away by their feelings, drunk even; for they are drunk, inebriated with the wine of the spirit. But what then? What need we care for Anglican primness, or Puseyite fastidiousness? What to us