form in which that is avowed by a section, temporary toleration of a different faith is for example, of the Angelican communion, to them an unwelcome necessity. A system in England and here. Their logical sense of popular education not pervaded by Romust carry them to its conclusions, if log- man Catholic influences, is ensnaring and ical sense has been able to maintain itself dangerous. They have the courage of their through the enfeebling prettiness of their convictions; and they use without stint the previous career. instruments of Protestantism to further their system and to make it universal.

Some, holding the evangelical doctrine of the Divinity of our Lord, and the present operation of the Holy Ghost, find here what seems to them the necessary complement, and the justifying reason, of these transcendent disclosures; the only exact and final antithesis to Socinianism, or even to atheism. Some are drawn to it by the fervor of feeling, the energy of pathetic and admonishing eloquence, which mark the sermons of the Paulists, and of others who, like them, appear from their retreats to stir men's hearts as messengers from God. Some simply and gladly react into it from a restless, sad, and weary skepticism. But all are greatly in earnest when they go. They are true devotees, and they rarely return. They are usually Ultramontanists afterward. There is nothing languid, moderate, tepid, in their conviction or their feeling. They are resolute, enthusiastic, with a fire of zeal which works alike in brain and heart. And they have a tone of assurance in their words, and of certainty of victory. Bellarmine is their favorite theologian. De Maistre is widely popular with them. Hyacinthe and Döllinger are "fallen angels."

They had no trouble with the dogma of Papal Infallibility. It was desired and welcomed by them, as articulating what had been latent for centuries in the unvoiced consciousness of the Church, and as bring ing the whole system to its legitimate and prophesied climax. That Pope Honorius had been formally condemned by the Sixth Council, his dogmatic writings burned as heretical, and his name anathematized and stricken from the liturgy, was not even a hindrance to the eagerness of their faith.

Even present failure does not dishearten them. That they expect; and they can wait, for the Church lives on. The ages are hers; and to her supreme incorporeal life, which time does not waste nor change impair, the final victory always is sure!

If we are to resist the vast effort of these men, and to make the liberties which our fathers bequeathed to us, and the Gospel in which they surely trusted, supreme in the land, we must at least know more than we have known of the seductive and stimulating forces which operate against us, and which we are to encounter. To treat the cases of those who have gone from us to Rome as merely sporadic the effect of accidental causes, or of personal eccentricityone might as well treat thus the power which drives the Gulf Stream northward, or which hurls the monsoons of the Indian Ocean back and forth across the equator.

The one tremendous fact against them is that they can not alter, and can not obliterate, the record of the past. Their system has been abundantly tried; and, fascinating as it looks, its prodigal promises have been proved as unreal as the stately pleasuredome of Kubla Khan seen by Coleridge in his dream. The scheme which looks so seductive and magnificent, when searched by the passionless logic of events, when tested in the slow and solemn ordeal of succeeding centuries, in Italy, Spain, Mexico, the West Indies, turns out as unreal in what it claims and in what it proposes, as the island of Nowhere in the famous romance of Sir Thomas More.

They make great sacrifices for their convictions, and do it joyfully. Indeed, the Good men have lived under it, multitudes sacrifice becomes to them a fresh motive, an of them; saintly women, as pure and devout argument for the system which demands it. as ever brightened the earth with their pres-For, according to the cross shall be the ence; and such live in it now. But their crown, and they who have come out of great goodness is wholly and constantly paralleltribulation shall find their robes of a more ed outside their communion, because it has lustrous white. Before the intensity of their come, not from what is peculiar to that, but aspiration the ties of friendship, the strong- from the quickening light of God's Word, est bonds of earthly relationship, if tending and the transforming energy of his Spirit, to withhold them from the Church of their which we as freely and consciously partake. desire, yield and are severed as flaxen fibres In that which is peculiar to it-its hie ́in the flame. For they regard the system rarchy, its ritual, its efficacious sacraments, which they accept, not only as essential to its indulgences to the sinner, its vast and the future of mankind, to the well-being of complex organization, the concentration of persons, to the safety and glory of peoples all authority in its "Vice-God" at Romeand states; they regard it as alone Divine wherever the system has had its way it has in its nature, overwhelming in its authori-wrought such mischiefs that the pen hesity, whose touch should properly shatter and tates to recount them. consume whatever opposes it.

Even the It has been powerful to depress peoples,

ite mistress, profanely painted as the Mother of God, hangs yet in the Vatican, who probably died by the poisoned wine which he had had prepared for his cardinals, and whose evil renown is scarcely matched by that of Cæsar Borgia his son-stands as one of its infallible popes, holding the keys of heaven for men.

If any system is doomed by its history, this is the one. Protestantisin has now so checked it, the advancing moral development of mankind has set such limits to its power, that these are largely facts of the past. The Vatican Court is now free from scandal. The Church at present seeks

ineffectual to uplift them. It has, with sure | rola, the traditional portrait of whose favorinstinct, discouraged and diminished secular enterprise. It has linked itself most naturally with the harshest and most tyrannous civil institutions. It has made religion a matter of rites, and a matter of locality; till the same man became a devotee in the chapel, and a bandit in the field. It has accepted a passionate zeal for the Church in place of the humility, the purity and charity, which Christ demanded; till the fierce Dominic becomes one of its saints; till forged decretals were made for centuries to bulwark its power; till its hottest anathemas have been launched at those who complained of its abuses; till all restraints of humanity or morality have been overleaped in many ex-strength through beneficence, not through cesses to which its adherents have been prompted from the altar. Its most devoted and wide-spread order, the Society of Jesus, in spite of its invincible heroism and its unequaled services to the popes, by the monstrous maxims which Pascal exposed, and the practices which expressed them, so kindled against it the indignation of Christendom that Clement XIV. was compelled to suppress it in all Christian states.

The rage of this system against whatever would hinder its march-against its own subjects when they have conscientiously paused in their submission-has had something transcendent in its pitiless malignity. The fierceness of its persecutions has been precisely proportioned to its power. The hand which looks so full of blessing has opened the deep of oubliettes, has added tortures to the rack, has framed the frightful Iron Maiden, has set the torch to martyr fires. The breath which should have filled the air with sweeter than Sabæan odors has blighted the bloom of many lives, and floated curses over the nations so frequent and so awful that life itself was withered before them, till their very extravagance made them harmless.

Instead of true wisdom, where this system has prevailed with an unquestioned supremacy, it has fostered and maintained wide popular ignorance. Instead of true sanctity, its fruit has been shown in peasantries debased, aristocracies corrupted, an arrogant and a profligate priesthood. It has honored the vilest who would serve it, and crushed the purest who would not. It sent gifts and applause, and sang its most exulting Te Deum, for Philip the Second; while its poisoned bullet killed William of Orange. The medal which it struck in joyful commemoration of the bloody diabolism of St. Bartholomew's is one of its records. Its highest officials have sometimes lived lives which its own annalists have hated to touch. Alexander VI., cruel, crafty, avaricious, licentious, whom it were flattery to call a Tiberius in pontificals-who bribed his way to the highest dignity, who burned Savona

control of the secular arm; by its helps to piety, not through appeals to physical fear. But its more spontaneous and self-revealing development has been in this more friendly Past. Therefore the nations whom once it has ruled, when they finally break from it, hate it with an intensity proportioned to the promises it has failed to fulfill, and the bitter degradations it has made them undergo. Atheism itself that moral suicide- -seems better to them than to be again subjected to Rome.

This is the system as realized in history, and there forever adjudged and sentenced. Of course this gives immense advantage to those who now resist its progress. It can not fascinate the nations again till the long experience is forgotten. But such is not at all its appearance as presented to those whom it wins to its fold. And we must look at it, in a measure at least, as those who honor and love it look, if we would understand its power, if we would know how it is that it hopes a second time to conquer the world.

Travelers have often and glowingly described the silver and golden illuminations of St. Peter's, as seen from the Pincian Hill at Rome, on the great Easter festival. Wonderful, ethereal, almost celestial, appears the majestic Basilica, with its dome, when suddenly over all its lines flashes that startling, unearthly radiance.

It has never been noticed, so far as I have observed, that the illumination is wholly confined to that half of the dome which fronts the city. The other remains frowning and stern, while this is glowing through the darkness like a golden temple let down by God from heaven to earth.

We must not look only, as often we do, on the sombre and sterile side of Romanism, if we would comprehend its attraction. We must know, and feel, that there are aspects of it in which, to those who look with admiring eyes on its immense illuminated front, it appears more beautiful and serene than any vision of poets, while as solid and commanding as the very, and only, Temple of God.

PROTESTANTISM, ROMANISM, AND MODERN CIVIL

IZATION.

BY THE REV. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D.,

Professor in Yale College, New Haven, Conn.

down to the present time, has never ceased to exert a profound influence upon society. Of the several agencies which have chiefly conspired to determine the course and the character of modern history, Christianity and the Church are first in importance. Attribute whatever weight we may to the legacy that was transmitted from the nations of antiquity, or to the peculiar genius of their barbarian conquerors, every discerning student must allow to Christianity the predominant part in moulding the history of the European communities now on the stage of action.

In this discussion I shall take "Civilization" in the broad sense, and include under the term all that enters into the improvement of the individual and of society-all the elements that unite to constitute an advanced stage of human progress. Whenever we contemplate the growth of civilization, we should not confine our attention to the organized institutions, political or ecclesiastical, which minister to the welfare of mankind, but should take into view, also, whatever influences spring from the individual and contribute to his well-being. In other words, the term "civilization" includes culture. The inventions and discoveries that lighten the burden of labor and conduce to material comfort, the safeguards of law, refined sentiments, literature, art, and science, the amenities of social intercourse-all that raises man above the rude and narrow life of the barbarian is embraced in this comprehensive term. In defining civilization, however, it has been justly said that no nation can be considered highly civilized in which a small class is possessed of the benefits of scholarship, the charm of polished manners, and the conveniences and luxuries derived from wealth, at the same time that the bulk of the population are sunk in poverty and ignorance, perhaps degraded to a condition of serfdom. Nor can that nation be deemed civilized, in the full idea of the word, where the fine arts flourish while agriculture and the mechanic arts are in a low state. Civilization should involve something like an impartial or proportionate de-ing the minds of undisciplined men, and imvelopment of the capacities of man and a fair distribution of social advantages. It should likewise carry within it the germ of further and indefinite progress.

We are absolved from inquiring, in this place, what sort of a civilization could exist, and how long it were possible for civilization to continue, without any aid from religion. Whoever believes in the teachings of Christ needs no argument to convince him that Christianity is essential to the enduring life of all that is excellent and noble in the products of human activity. "Ye are the salt of the earth." It is clear that Christianity, from the moment when it first gained a foothold in the Roman Empire

No enlightened Protestant, in our day, will be inclined to disparage the wholesome influence which the Roman Catholic Church may still exert in certain places and over certain classes of people. We are not disposed to undervalue the benefits which that Church, in the Middle Ages, when it was the only organized form of Christianity in Western Europe, conferred on society. We are even quite willing to concede that the Papacy itself, the centralized system of rule, which has been the fountain of incalculable evils, was providentially made productive of important advantages during the period when ignorance and brute force prevailed, and when anarchy and violence constituted the main peril to which civilization was exposed. Let us thankfully acknowledge the debt that is due to the medieval Church for preserving from utter destruction the remains of ancient literature and art, for train

parting to them what knowledge had outlived the wreck of ancient power and culture, and for curbing the passions and softening the manners of rude peoples. Christianity in the medieval Church existed in a corrupt form, but its life was not extinct, and it operated as a leaven, according to the promise of its author. Our attention is to be directed to more recent times. We have to compare the influence of Romanism with that of Protestantism, as that influence is seen in the course of the last three centuries, and as it is deducible from the nature of the respective systems.

There is one point of contrast between the two systems which deserves to be placed in

the foreground of our inquiry. The Roman | scious of an allegiance of the soul to a higher Catholic system is the rule of society by kingdom-an allegiance which did not sua sacerdotal class. This is a fundamental persede his loyalty to the civil authority, characteristic of that system. The guid- but limited while it sanctioned this obligaance of the conscience of individuals, and tion. But the Church itself at length erectof the policy of nations, so far as their poli- ed a supremacy over the individual inconcy may be thought to touch the province of sistent with the free action of reason and morals and religion, is relegated to a body conscience, and even stretched that supremof priests, or, according to the recent Vatican acy so far as to dwarf and overshadow civil Council, to their head. The authority to de- society. It reared a theocracy, and subjectcide upon the questions of highest moment ed every thing to its unlimited sway. The resides in this body of ecclesiastics. It is Reformation gave back to the individual his not, indeed, like those hereditary priesthoods proper autonomy. The result is a self-rewhich are separated by an impassable bar- spect, an intellectual activity, a developrier from other orders of men, and which are ment of inventive capacity, and of energy found, as an established aristocracy, in cer- of character, which give rise to such achievetain Oriental religions. Nevertheless, it is ments in science, in the field of political aca limited class, admitting to its ranks none tion, and in every work where self-reliance whom it chooses to exclude, and assuming and personal force are called for, as would the exalted prerogative of pronouncing in- be impossible under the opposite system. fallibly upon questions of truth and duty, In the period immediately following the and of conveying or withholding the bless-Reformation, signal proofs were afforded of ings of salvation. Protestantism denied this truth. The little States of Holland, for this prerogative. It broke down the wall of separation between priest and layman. It accorded to the laity the full right to determine for themselves those questions over which the clergy had claimed an exclusive jurisdiction. It declared that the heavenly good offered in the Gospel is accessible to the humblest soul, without the in-home they were educating the common peotervention of a mediatorial priesthood. The -emancipation of the laity from clerical rule is one of the prime characteristics of the Reformation.

example, proved their ability to cope with the Spanish Empire, to gain their independence, and to acquire an opulence and a culture which recalled the best days of the Grecian republics. They beat back their invaders from their soil, and sent forth their victorious navies upon every sea, while at

ple, fostering science and learning, and building up universities famous throughout Europe. England, in the age of Elizabeth, proved that the native vigor of her people 1. Protestantism, as compared with the op- was re-enforced in a remarkable degree by posite system, sets free and stimulates the en- the stimulus derived from the peculiar genergy, intellectual and moral, of the individ- ius of the Protestant religion. It was the ual, and thus augments the forces of which period when she was acquiring her naval civilization is the product. The progress ascendency; the period, likewise, of Shaksof civilization, in the long course of history, peare, Bacon, and Raleigh. Who can doubt is marked by the growing respect paid to that the United States of America are—not the rights of the individual, and the ampler indeed wholly, but in great part-indebted room afforded for the unfolding of his pow-to their position, as contrasted with that ers, and for the realizing of his aspirations. of Mexico and the political communities of There was something imposing in those huge South America, to this expansion of the powdespotisms-Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Per-er of the individual, which is the uniform sia-in which a multitude of human beings and legitimate fruit of Protestant princiwere welded together under an absolute ples?

master. Such empires were an advance 2. The spirit of Protestantism favors uniupon a primitive state of things, where ev-versal education. The lay Christian, who ery man's hand was against his neighbor. is to read and interpret the Scriptures, and Yet they were a crude form of crystalli- to take part in the administration of governzation; and they were intrinsically weak. ment in the Church, must not be an illiterate The little cities of Greece, with their freer person. Knowledge, mental enlightenment, political life, and the larger scope which they under the Protestant system, are indispenallowed for the activity and the culture of sable. The weight of personal responsibility the individual-communities of citizens for the culture of his intellectual and spiritproved more than a match for the colossal ual nature, which rests on every individual, might of the East. Among the Greeks and makes education a matter of universal conRomans, however, although governments of cern. Far more has been done in Protestant law had supplanted naked force, the State than in Roman Catholic countries for the inwas supreme, and to the State the individ-struction of the whole people. It is enough ual must yield an exclusive allegiance. It to refer to the common-school system of Holwas a great gain when the Christian Church land, and of New England, and to Protestant arose, and when the individual became con- Germany, to show how natural it is for the

disciples of the Reformation to provide for judgment, to weaken the obligations of loythis great interest of society.

The free circulation of the Bible in Protestant lands has disseminated an instrument of intellectual, as well as of religious, improvement, the good effect of which is immeasurable. As a repository of history, biography, poetry, ethics, as well as a monitor to the conscience and a guide to heaven, the Bible has exerted an influence on the common mind, in all Protestant nations, which it would be difficult to exaggerate. The practice of interpreting the Bible and of exploring its pages for fresh truth affords a mental discipline of a very high order. How often have the Scriptures carried into the cottage of the peasant a breadth and refinement of intellect which otherwise would never have existed, and which no agency employed by the Roman Catholic system, in relation to the same social class, has ever been able to engender!

3. That Protestantism should be more friendly to civil and religious liberty than the Roman Catholic system would seem to follow unavoidably from the nature of the two forms of faith. Protestantism involves, as a vital element, an assertion of personal rights with respect to religion, the highest concern of man. Moreover, Protestantism casts off the yoke of priestly rule, and puts ecclesiastical government, in due measure, into the hands of the laity. As we have already said, it is a revolt of the laity against a usurped ecclesiastical authority.

alty toward the civil magistrate, and to exalt by contrast the divine authority of the Church. When the civil magistracy presumes to exercise prerogatives, or to ordain measures, which are deemed hurtful to the ecclesiastical interest, a radical doctrine of revolution, even a doctrine of tyrannicide, has been heard from the pulpits of the most conservative of religious bodies.

Generally speaking, however, the Church of Rome is the natural ally and supporter of arbitrary principles of government. The prevailing sentiment, the instinctive feeling, in that Church, is that the body of the people are incapable of self-guidance, and that to give them the reins in civil affairs would imperil the stability of ecclesiastical control. To this reasoning it is often replied by advocates of the Roman Catholic system that Protestantism opens a door to boundless tyranny by leaving the temporal power without any check from the ecclesiastical. The State, it is said, proves omnipotent; the civil magistrate is delivered from the wholesome dread of ecclesiastical censure, and is left free to exercise all kinds of tyranny, without the powerful restraint to which he was subject under the medieval system. He may even violate the rights of conscience with impunity. The State, it is sometimes said, when released from its subordinate relation to the Church, is a godless institution. It becomes, like the pagan States of antiquity, absolute in the province of religion as in secular affairs, and an irresistible engine of oppression. It must be admitted that Protestant rulers have been guilty of tyranny; that, in many instances, they can not be cleared of the charge of unwarrantably interfering with the rights of conscience, and of attempting to govern the belief and regu

in a manner destructive of true liberty. The question is, whether these instances of misgovernment are the proper fruit of the Protestant spirit, or something at variance with it, and therefore an evil of a temporary and exceptional character.

The Church of Rome teaches men that their first and most binding duty is to bow with unquestioning docility and obedience to their Heaven-appointed superiors. How is it possible that Protestantism should not foster a habit of mind which is incompatible with a patient endurance of tyranny at the hands of the civil power? How can Prot-late the forms of worship of their subjects, estantism, inspiring a lively sense of personal rights, fail to bring with it, eventually at least, a corresponding respect for the rights of others, and a disposition to secure their rights in forms of government and in legislation? How can men who are accustomed to judge for themselves and act independently in Church affairs manifest a slavish spirit in the political sphere? On the contrary, the habit of mind which the Roman Catholic nurture tends to beget leads to servility in the subject toward the ruler, as long as an alliance is kept up between sovereign and priest. It is true that the Church of Rome can accommodate itself to any of the various types of political society. Her doctors have at times preached an extreme theory of popular rights and of the sovereignty of the people. While the State is subordinate to the Church, any form of government may be tolerated; and there may be an interest on the part of the priesthood in inculcating political theories which operate, in their

The imputation that the State as constituted under Protestantism is heathen depends on the false assumption that the Church and the priesthood as established in the Roman Catholic system are identical, or so nearly identical that one can not subsist without the other. It is assumed that when the supervision and control which the Church of Rome aspires to exercise over the civil authority is shaken off, nothing is left but an unchristian or Antichristian institution. The fact that a layman can be as good a Christian as a priest is overlooked. The Christian laity who make up a commonwealth, and the Christian magistrates who are set over them, are quite as able to discern, and quite as likely to respect person