ROMANISM.

We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event: but it would be

uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with another, cousin-germane

to it; to wit: how easy it is to discern of any event, after it has

happened, whether or not it were antecedently likely. When the race is

over, and the best horse has won (or by clever jockey-management, the

worst), how obviously could any gentleman on the turf, now in possession

of particulars, have seen the event to have been so probable, that he

would have staked all upon its issue.

Carry out this familiar idea; which, as human nature goes, is none the

weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the rule "_parvis

componere magna_." Let us sketch a line or two of that great

fore-shadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Romanism.

That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil

characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both

His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a

hint dropped in his biography. Why should He, on several occasions, have

seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His

virgin mother.--"Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--"Who are my

mother and my brethren?"--"Yea--More blessed than the womb which bare

me, and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my true

disciples." Let no one misunderstand me: full well I know the just

explanations which palliate such passages; and the love stronger than

death which beat in that Filial heart. But, take the phrases as they

stand; and do they not in reason constitute some warning and some

prophecy that men should idolize the mother? Nothing, in fact, was more

likely than that a just human reverence to the most favoured among women

should have increased into her admiring worship: until the humble and

holy Mary, with the sword of human anguish at her heart, should become

exaggerated and idealized into Mother of God--instead of Jesus's human

matrix, Queen of heaven, instead of a ransomed soul herself, the joy of

angels--in lieu of their lowly fellow-worshipper, and the Rapture of the

blessed--thus dethroning the Almighty.

Take a second instance: why should Peter, the most loving, most

generous, most devoted of them all, have been singled out from among the

twelve--with a "Get thee behind me, Satan?"--it really had a harsh

appearance; if it were not that, prophetically speaking, and not

personally, he was set in the same category with Judas, the "one who was

a devil." I know the glosses, and the contexts, and the whole amount of

it. Folios have been written, and may be written again, to disprove the

text; but the more words, the less sense: it stands, a record graven in

the Rock; that same Petra, whereon, as firm and faithful found, our Lord

Jesus built his early Church: it stands, a mark indelibly burnt into

that hand, to whom were intrusted, not more specially than to any other

of the saintly sent, the keys of the kingdom of heaven: it stands, along

with the same Peter's deep and terrible apostacy, a living witness

against some future Church, who should set up this same Peter as the

Jupiter of their Pantheon: who should positively be idolizing now an

image christened Peter, which did duty two thousand years ago as a

statue of Libyan Jove! But even this glaring compromise was a matter

probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rotten Christianity.

Examples such as these might well be multiplied: bear with a word or two

more, remembering always that the half is not said which might be said

in proof; nor in answering the heap of frivolous objections.

Why, unless relics and pseudo-sacred clothes were to be prophetically

humbled into their own mere dust and nothing-worthiness, why should the

rude Roman soldiery have been suffered to cast lots for that vestment,

which, if ever spiritual holiness could have been infused into mere

matter, must indeed have remained a relic worthy of undoubted worship?

It was warm with the Animal heat of the Man inhabited by God: it was

half worn out in the service of His humble travels, and had even, on

many occasions, been the road by which virtue had gone out; not of it,

but of Him. What! was this wonderful robe to work no miracles? was it

not to be regarded as a sort of outpost of the being who was Human-God?

Had it no essential sacredness, no _noli-me-tangere_ quality of shining

away the gambler's covetous glance, of withering his rude and venturous

hand, or of poisoning, like some Nessus' shirt, the lewd ruffian who

might soon thereafter wear it? Not in the least. This woven web, to

which a corrupted state of feeling on religion would have raised

cathedrals as its palaces, with singing men and singing women, and

singing eunuchs too, to celebrate its virtues; this coarse cloth of some

poor weaver's, working down by the sea of Galilee or in some lane of

Zion, was still to remain, and be a mere unglorified, economical, useful

garment. Far from testifying to its own internal mightiness, it probably

was soon sold by the fortunate Roman die-thrower to a second-hand shop

of the Jewish metropolis; and so descended from beggar to beggar till it

was clean worn out. We never hear that, however easy of access so

inestimable relic might then have been considered, any one of the

numerous disciples, in the fervour of their earliest zeal, threw away

one thought for its redemption. Is it not strange that no St. Helena was

at hand to conserve such a desirable invention? Why is there no St.

Vestment to keep in countenance a St. Sepulchre and a St. Cross? The

poor cloth, in primitive times, really was despised. We know well enough

what happened afterwards about handkerchiefs imbued with miraculous

properties from holy Paul's body for the nonce: but this is an inferior

question, and the matter was temporary; the superior case is proved, and

besides the rule _omne majus continet in se minus_ there are differences

quite intelligible between the cases, whereabout our time would be less

profitably employed than in passing on and leaving them unquestioned.

Suffice it to say, that "God worked those special miracles," and not the

unconscious "handkerchiefs or aprons." "Te Deum laudamus!" is

Protestantism's cry; "Sudaria laudemus!" would swell the Papal choirs.

Let such considerations as these then are in sample serve to show how

evidently one might prove from anterior circumstances, (and the canon of

Scripture is an anterior circumstance,) the probability of the rise and

progress of the Roman heresies. And if any one should ask, how was such

a system more likely to arise under a Gentile rather than a Jewish

theocracy? why was a St. Paul, or a St. Peter, or a St. Dunstan, or a

St. Gengulphus, more previously expectable than a St. Abraham, a St.

David, a St. Elisha, or a St. Gehazi? I answer, from the idea of

idolatry, so adapted to the Gentile mind, and so abhorrent from the

Jewish. Martyred Abel, however well respected, has never reached the

honours of a niche beside the altar. Jephtha's daughter, for all her

mourned virginity, was never paraded, (that I wot of,) for any other

than a much-to-be-lamented damsel. Who ever asked, in those old times,

the mediation of St. Enoch? Where were the offerings, in jewels or in

gold, to propitiate that undoubted man of God and denizen of heaven, St.

Moses? what prows, in wax, of vessels saved from shipwreck, hung about

the dripping fane of Jonah? and where was, in the olden time, that

wretched and insensate being, calling himself rational and godly, who

had ventured to solicit the good services of Isaiah as his intercessor,

or to plead the merits of St. Ezekiel as the make-weight for his sins?

It was just this, and reasonably to have been expected; for when the Jew

brought in his religion, he demolished every false god, broke their

images, slew their priests, and burnt their groves with fire. But, when

a worldly Christianity came to be in vogue, when emperors adorned their

banners with the cross, and the poor fishermen of Galilee, (in their

portly representatives,) came to be encrusted with gems, and rustling

with seric silk; then was made that fatal compromise; then it was likely

to have been made, which has lasted even until now: a compromise which,

newly baptizing the damned idols of the heathen, keeps yet St. Bacchus

and St. Venus, St. Mars and St. Apollo, perched in sobered robes upon

the so-called Christian altar; which yet pays divine honours to an

ancyle or a rusty nail; to the black stones at Delphi, or the

gold-shrined bones at Aix; which yet sanctifies the chickens of the

capitol, or the cock that startled Peter; which yet lets a wealthy

sinner, by his gold, bribe the winking Pythoness, or buy dispensing

clauses from "the Lord our God, the Pope."

There is yet a swarm of other notions pressing on the mind, which tend

to prove that Popery might have been anticipated. Take this view. The

religion of Christ is holy, self-denying; not of this world's praise,

and ending with the terrible sanction of eternity for good or evil: it

sets up God alone supreme, and cuts down creature-merit to a point

perpetually diminishing; for the longer he does well, the more he owes

to the grace which enabled him to do it.

Now, man's nature is, as we know, diametrically opposite to all this:

and unable to escape from the conviction of Christian truth in some

sense, he would bend his shrewd invention to the attempt of warping

that stern truth to shapes more consistent with his idiosyncrasies. A

religious plan might be expected, which, in lieu of a difficult, holy

spirituality, should exact easy, mere observances; to say a thousand

Paters with the tongue, instead of one "Our Father," from the heart; to

exact genuflections by the score, but not a single prostration of the

spirit; to write the cross in water on the forehead often-times, but

never once to bear its mystic weight upon the shoulder. In spite of

self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by means of eggs, and pulse, and

hair-cloth, to pamper the deluded flesh with many a carnal holiday; in

contravention of a kingdom not of this world, boldly to usurp the

temporal dominion of it all: instead of the overwhelming

incomprehensibility of an eternal doom, to comfort the worst with false

assurance of a purgatory longer or shorter; that after all, vice may be

burnt out; and who knows but that gold, buying up the prayers and

superfluous righteousness of others, may not make the fiery ordeal an

easy one? In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite

purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician loveth;

how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance with intermediate

numia, cycle on epicycle, arc on arc, priest and bishop and pope, and

martyr, and virgin, and saint, and angel, all in their stations, at due

interval soliciting God to be (as if His blessed Majesty were not so of

Himself!) the sinner's friend. How comfortable this to man's sweet

estimation of his own petty penances; how glorifying to those "filthy

rags," his so-called righteousness: how apt to build up the hierarchist

power; how seemingly analogous with man's experience here, where clerks

lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the

government, and the government before the sovereign.

All this was entirely expectable: and I can conceive that a deep

Reasoner among the first apostles, even without such supernal light as

"the Spirit speaking expressly," might have so calculated on the

probabilities to come, as to have written, long ago, words akin to

these: "In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving

heed to seductive doctrines, and fanciful notions about intermediate

deities, ([Greek: daimoniôn],) perverting truth by hypocritical

departures from it, searing conscience against its own cravings after

spiritual holiness, forbidding marriage, (to invent another virtue,) and

commanding abstinence from God's good gifts, as a means of building up a

creature-merit by voluntary humiliation." At the likelihood that such

"profane and old wives' fables" should thereafter have arisen, might

Paul without a miracle have possibly arrived.

Yet again: take another view. The Religion of Christ, though intended

to be universal in some better era of this groaning earth, was, until

that era cometh, meant and contrived for any thing rather than a

Catholicity. True, the Church is so far Catholic that it numbers of its

blessed company men of every clime and every age, from righteous Abel

down to the last dear babe christened yester-morning; true, the

commission is "to all nations, teaching them:" but, what mean the

simultaneous and easily reconciled expressions--come out from among

them, little flock, gathered out of the Gentiles, a peculiar people, a

church militant, and not triumphant, here on earth? Thus shortly of a

word much misinterpreted: let us now see what the Romanist does, what,

(on human principles,) he would be probable to do, with this

discriminating religion. He, chiefly for temporal gains, would make it

as expansive as possible: there should be room at that table for every

guest, whether wedding-garmented or not; there would be sauces in that

poisonous feast, fitted to every palate. For the cold, ascetical mind, a

cell and a scourge, and a record kept of starving fancies as calling

them ecstatic visions vouchsafed by some old Stylite to bless his

favoured worshipper; for the painted demirep of fashionable life, there

would be a pretty pocket-idol, and the snug confessional well tenanted

by a not unsympathizing father; for the pure girl, blighted in her

heart's first love, the papist would afford that seemingly merciful

refuge, that calm and musical and gentle place, the irrevocable nunnery;

a place, for all its calmness, and its music, and its gentle

reputations, soon to be abhorred of that poor child as a living tomb,

the extinguisher of all life's aims, all its duties, uses and delights:

for the bandit, a tythe of the traveller's gold would avail to pay away

the murder, and earn for him a heap of merits kept within the cash-box:

the educated, high-born and finely-moulded mind might be well amused

with architecture, painting, carving, sweet odours, and the most

wondrous music that has ever cheated man, even while he offers up his

easy adorations, and departs, equally complacent at the choral remedies

as at the priestly absolution; while, for those good few, the truly

pious and enlightened children of Rome, who mourn the corruptions of

their church, and explain away, with trembling tongue, her obvious

errors and idolatries, for these the wily scheme, so probable, devised

an undoubted mass of truth to be left among the rubbish. True doctrines,

justly held by true martyrs and true saints, holy men of God who have

died in that communion; ordinances and an existence which creep up,

(heedless of corruption though,) step by step, through past antiquity,

to the very feet of the Founder; keen casuists, competent to prove any

point of conscience or objection, and that indisputably, for they climax

all by the high authority of Popes and councils that cannot be deceived:

pious treatises and manuals, verily of flaming heat, for they mingle the

yearnings of a constrained celibacy with the fervencies of worship and

the cravings after God. Yes, there is meat here for every human mouth;

only that, alas for men! the meat is that which perisheth, and not

endureth unto everlasting life. Rome, thou wert sagely schemed; and if

Lucifer devised thee not for the various appetencies of poor,

deceivable, Catholic Man, verily it were pity, for thou art worthy of

his handiwork. All things to all men, in any sense but the right,

signifies nothing to anybody: in the sense of falsehoods, take the

former for thy motto; in that of single truth, in its intensity, the

latter.

Let not then the accident--the probable accident--of the Italian

superstition place any hindrance in the way of one whose mind is all at

sea because of its existence. What, O man with a soul, is all the world

else to thee? Christianity, whatever be its broad way of pretences, is

but in reality a narrow path: be satisfied with the day of small things,

stagger not at the inconsistencies, conflicting words, and hateful

strifes of those who say they are Christians, but "are not, but are of

the synagogue of Satan." Judge truth, neither by her foes nor by her

friends but by herself. There was one who said (and I never heard that

any writer, from Julian to Hobbes, ever disputed his human truth or

wisdom) "Needs must that offences come; but wo be to that man by whom

the offence cometh. If they come, be not shaken in faith: lo, I have

told you before. And if others fall away, or do ought else than my

bidding, what is that to thee? follow thou ME."