Michael Muller

“ Do Protestants believe this divine fact?
"Reason, it is true," says the Roman Catechism, "and the senses, are compelled to ascertain the existence of the Church, that is, of a society of men devoted and consecrated to Jesus Christ; no faith is necessary to understand a truth which is acknowledged by Jews and Turks; but do Protestants believe the privileges and dignity of the Church as Catholics believe them? By no means, because they have not the light of faith, which alone enables us to say I believe the Catholic Church." ”

“ Thomas says: “True faith is absolute faith in Christ and all his doctrine. Pagans and Jews, in publicly denying his divinity, are real infidels; but the heretic adopts or rejects the precepts of the Gospel according to his own private judgment, with full liberty of conscience. So this kind of doctrine, founded on private judgment, fantasy, and interest of individuals, is but a hideous carcass, a frightful skeleton of religion, and is no more the doctrine of Jesus Christ and his Church than that of Jews, Pagans, or Turks.” ”

“ Threats could not undo the heavenly truths, and therefore could not silence their confession of them. "Truth," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "is the good of the intellect, the life of the intellect, whilst falsehood is the evil, the death of the intellect. As long as man remained innocent, it was impossible for man's intellect to believe that to be true which was really false. As in the body of the first man there could not be the presence of any evil, so, in like manner, in his soul there could not be the belief in anything false." ”

“ This is only an ephemeral sect, without substance and without any divine authority; it is a plant not planted by the hand of Almighty God, and therefore it will be rooted up; it is a kingdom divided against itself, and therefore it will be made desolate; it is a house built on sand, and therefore it cannot stand; it is a cloud without water, which is carried about by the winds; a tree of autumn, unfruitful, twice dead, by want of divine faith, and therefore it will be plucked up by the roots ”

“ No man will be condemned on account of his ignorance, neither Protestant, nor heathen, nor, I may add, Catholic either. He can be condemned only because, when knowing Christ, he has refused to accept Him, to believe in Him, to do His will and keep His commandments. Instead of our Lords’ saying that to Protestants, who never knew the truth of his doctrines as taught by the Catholic Church, it is those Catholics he threatens to disown who, knowing Him, have denied Him by their sinful lives, —who, knowing the will of the Lord, did it not. ”

“ A man who has no love for the truth, a man who tells a willful lie or takes a false oath, is considered dishonored. No one cares for him, and it would be unreasonable to accuse of intolerance or bigotry because he refuses to associate with a man who has no love for the truth. It would be just as unreasonable to accuse the Catholic Church of intolerance, or bigotry, or want of charity, because she excludes from her society, and pronounces anathema upon, those who have no regard for the truth, and remain willfully out of her communion. ”

“ If we desire that all those who are not members of the Catholic Church should cease to deceive themselves as to the true character of their belief, and propose to them considerations which may contribute to that result, it is certainly not from enmity to their persons, nor from indifference to their welfare. As long as they remain victims of a delusion as gross as that which makes the Jew still cling to his abolished synagogue, and which only a miracle of grace can dispel, some of them will probably resent the counsel of their truest friends ”

“ It is very wrong to make the devil blacker than he is, and to call him the author of Protestantism; it is very wrong to say that Protestant belief is only human belief and availeth nothing unto salvation; that this faith is no absolute, divine faith in Christ and his religion; in a word, it is very wrong to represent Protestantism such as it is.
Nothing, he says, is to be gained by misrepresenting God and the devil, the teachers from God and those from the devil, truth and falsehood, divine and human faith, true and false Christianity. ”

“ If the Church believed that men could be saved in any religion whatever, or without any at all, it would be uncharitable in her to announce to the world that out of her there is no salvation. But as she knows and maintains that there is but one faith, as there is but one God and Lord of all, and that she is in possession of that one faith, and that without that faith it is impossible to please God, and be saved, it would be very uncharitable in her and in all her children, to hide Christ's doctrine from the world. ”

“ I ask, then, what do all Protestants, save those called Unitarians, believe about Jesus Christ? They believe precisely what the Catholic Church teaches, namely, that He is true God and true man, the Person of the Word of God incarnate, conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary; that He is the Messiah, the Redeemer; that by His infinite merits alone is the salvation of mankind possible or obtainable. ”

“ At present the gates of hell seem opened, and infidelity of every kind stalks lawless on the earth; the sacred truths of religion are reviled and denied, the Gospel; adulterated by countless contradictory interpretations; its original simplicity disfigured by loftiness of speech and the persuasive words of human wisdom. A thousand condescensions and compliances are admitted and received, by which the purity of faith and morals greatly suffers, and the "narrow way that leads to life," is converted into the "broad road that leads to destruction." ”

“ Of course, it will be said that we have the happiness of living in the most enlightened of all ages; our knowledge is more perfect, our ideas more developed and refined, the human faculties more improved and better cultivated, than they ever were before; in fine, that the present race of mankind may be reckoned a society of philosophers, when compared to the generations that have gone before. How is it possible, then, that such stupidity can seize upon the human mind as to sink it into idolatry? ”

“ Hence we easily understand why even innocent Catholic children have an intuition of truth without fear and confusion, and talk of God and his mysteries as if they had conversed with angels, while they display a clear knowledge of the whole circle of revealed truths, in comparison with which knowledge the wild guesses and perpetual contradictions of the most famous and learned pagans, or unbelieving philosophers or sectaries, are but inarticulate cries. ”

“ The faith of the Catholic, therefore, is divine, because it is based on divine authority: He knows and believes that Jesus Christ speaks to him through his Church, and therefore he believes all the truths she teaches him, with the utmost firmness and simplicity, with an unwavering conviction of their reality. The fact that Jesus Christ has said it, has done it, has taught it to his infallible Church, and commanded her to teach it to all nations, is for him the weightiest of all reasons to believe it. ”

“ Learned men, outside the Church, may compose most useful works on the evidences of religion, or in defence of particular doctrines, or in explanation of the whole scheme of Catholicism. In these cases reason becomes the handmaid of faith. Still it is not faith; it does not rise above an intellectual view or notion; it affirms, not as grasping the truth, not as seeing, but as "being of opinion," as "judging," as "coming to a conclusion."
"The natural man, then, can feel; he can imagine, he can admire, he can reason, he can infer. ”

“ WHAT CATHOLIC FAITH IS. No one can go to heaven unless he knows the way to heaven. If we wish to go to a certain city, the first thing we do is to ask the way that leads to it. If we do not know the way, we cannot expect to arrive at that city. So, too, if we wish to go to heaven, we must know the way that leads to it. Now, the way that leads to it is the knowing and doing of God's will. But it is God alone who can teach us his will ”

“ Macedonius maintained that from holy Scripture he could prove that the Holy Ghost was not God; and Pelagius asserted, on the authority of holy Scripture, that man could work out his salvation without the grace of God. Luther asserted that he found in Isaias that man was not free; and Calvin tried to prove from Scripture that it is impossible for man to keep the commandments. There is no error so monstrous, no crime so heinous, no practice so detestable, which perverse men have not endeavored to justify by some passage of Scripture. ”

“ Catholic truths and rites are so beautiful, so great, so consolatory, that they draw one on to love and admire them with a natural love, as a prospect might draw one on, or a skilful piece of mechanism. Hence men of lively imagination profess this doctrine or that, or adopt this or that ceremony or usage, for their mere beauty's sake, not asking themselves whether they are true, and having no real perception or mental hold of them. ”

“ For instance, one single foreign element introduced into the blood produces death; one false assumption admitted into science destroys its certainty; one false principle admitted into faith and morals is fatal. The so-called Reformers started wrong. They would reform the Church by placing her under human control. Their successors have, in each generation, found they did not go far enough, and have, each in turn, struggled to push it further and further, till they find themselves without any Church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be a God. ”

“ For those, however, who reject the divine authority of the Church, the holy Scriptures can no longer be authentic and inspired writings— they are for them no longer the word of God; for they have no one who can tell them, with divine certainty, what books are, and what are not, divinely inspired; they have no one who, in the name of God, can command them to believe in the divine inspiration of the writers of those books. ”

“ For over three hundred years the Irish people have suffered, struggled, and died for the faith. They suffered poverty with all its bitterness, they endured exile with all its sorrows, they suffered outrage and even death itself, rather than lose their God. The minions of hell enacted the fiendish penal laws, and soon that country, so rich and fruitful in colleges and convents, became one vast, dreary wilderness. ”

“ How, then, could God the Father admit one into his Kingdom, who has always refused to do his will, - who, instead of learning to do the will of God, the full doctrine of Christ, through the Catholic Church, was himself his own teacher, his own lawgiver, his own judge, in all religious matters! ”

“ The principles and rule of faith depend on the authority and doctrine of the one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. So, out of the true Church there is no faith or salvation. When the light of faith and grace flashes upon the soul, then man firmly believes all that God has revealed and proposes for our belief by his Church. Hence an act of faith differs from all the other acts of the human intellect as to what is true or false. ”

“ If those Protestants who live in inculpable ignorance of the true religion are not guilty of the sin of heresy, does it follow that they are not guilty of sins against their conscience? But this needs a good explanation, which we will give later on; it needs a better one than the most prominent priest of the U. S. gives by saying: "To think that we Catholics are the only honest people is to be guilty of the most contemptible kind of pharisaism. The true Catholic never thinks in that foolish way. ”