Protestantism

“ Are there more piety and more morality in Protestant than in Catholic countries? In which communities do you find the most humility, simplicity, religious faith, reverence for religious institutions, fear of God? In which do you find most of sympathy, kindliness, good will from man to man? The fierce civilization of Protestantism is hard, cold, and cruel. It tramples under its feet the weak. It accumulates wealth and power; but are these Christianity? Is London or Rome the best model of a Christian city? ”

“ We do not suppose the state ever intended to establish Protestantism as the exclusive religion of the schools; but such is the necessary result of excluding, no matter under what pretext, the teaching of our religion in them. Exclude Catholicity, and what is left? Nothing of Christianity but Protestantism, which is simply Christianity minus the Catholic Church, her faith, precepts, and sacraments. ”

“ Protestantism in its noblest form has found nothing more sublime than this conception of a Church where every good man is a priest; and there is nothing in the history of religious thought more saddening than these efforts of the people, ever hopeless, ever renewed, to protest against dogma, creed, perfunctory and vicarious religion, and to proclaim a religion of personal holiness alone. ”

“ Because thou hast forgotten Me, and cast Me behind thy back, therefore bear thou also thy lewdness and thy whoredoms.—Because she has forgotten the Lord and cast Him out of her mind, Protestantism shall endure unaided by Him the results of her own evil course. ”

“ The main spirit of Protestantism, then, has always been to declare every man independent of the divine authority of the Roman Catholic Church and to substitute for this divine authority a human authority. ”

“ And when we remember how modern is the rise of Protestantism, which, less elaborate and imperative in its forms, does not habitually compound for transgressions by performance of acts expressing subordination, and how very recent is the spread of dissenting Protestantism, in which this change is carried further; we are shown that the subordination of ceremony to morality characterizes religion only in its later stages. ”

“ By these two principal tenets of Protestantism, are combated the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, of righteousness through outward works, and of the church as an outward ordination and authority between God and man, with the divine right of binding and releasing, and at the same time, powerful to lead souls to God. ”

“ And since, though the method and the secret are equally indispensable, the secret may be said to have in it more of practice and conduct, Catholicism may claim perhaps to have more of religion. On the other hand, Protestantism has more light: and, as the method of inwardness and sincerity, once gained, is of general application, and a power for all the purposes of life, Protestantism, we can see, has been accompanied by most prosperity. ”

“ Instead of these abuses, Protestantism sets the power of conscience above the magistrate, and the authority of the word of God above the visible church. In the first place, it rejects the civil power in divine things, and says with the prophets and apostles, ‘We must obey God rather than man.’ In presence of the crown of Charles the Fifth, it uplifts the crown of Jesus Christ. ”

“ For you may slough your skin of State-patronized, easy-going Protestantism as easily as you can change your political convictions, and presently, with Modern Buddhism, or Spiritualism, or Platonism, Christian Science, Agnosticism, Mormonism, or Hedonism, be covered and clad anew, but Catholicism penetrates the bones, and permeates the very marrow. ”

“ Protestantism proclaims the liberty of Christian prophesying, the free and unimpeded access of every human soul to the heavenly Father, the spiritual equality of all men in the sight of GOD. The Protestant tradition is jealous for the evangelical simplicity of the Gospel, and in general may be said to represent the principle of democracy in religion. ”

“ A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church, the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. ”

“ And how can they have faith or believe in God who commune with those who resolve all faith, all belief, all truth, indeed, into a mere opinion, or an inward sentiment, varying with each individual? If Catholicity in Christian, if reason is authoritative in its own province, nothing is more certain than that Protestantism is in no sense Christian, and that persons living and dying Protestants cannot be saved. ”

“ But the position of Protestantism is even more contradictory and more desperate than that of the Catholic Church, in view of our insight into the fictitious character of the Gospels. For Protestantism has no means but history for the foundation of its religious metaphysics; and history, viewed impartially, leads away from those roots of Christianity to which Protestantism strives, instead of towards them. ”

“ It is characteristic of Protestantism, as of humanism in general, that it lays its chief emphasis upon the intelligence. If we go to church to [pg 186] practice the presence of God, must we not first know who and what this God is whose presence with us we are there asked to realize? So most Protestant services are more informative than inspirational. Their attendants are assembled to hear about God rather to taste and see that the Lord is good. ”

“ It is a picture which finds its counterpart in the Protestantism of to-day—a Protestantism full of worldliness, having a form of godliness, a great religious profession, but denying its only power (the Holy Ghost) , repudiating doctrine and listening to every fable of rationalistic philosophy sooner than to the truth of God. ”

“ Protestantism must fully accept the Bible as the ultimate and only standard of faith and practice, or it must be broken between the upper millstone of Roman Catholicism and the nether millstone of irreligious rationalism. ”

“ It is therefore historically correct that the same principle that created Protestantism three centuries ago has never ceased, since that time, to spin it out into a thousand different sects, and has concluded by covering Europe and America with that multitude of free-thinkers and infidels who place countries on the verge of ruin. ”

“ If popery judges men in meats, protestantism does the same in drinks and in the sabbath; they both judge men in holy-days and movable feasts; and though protestantism repudiates the worshipping of angels, it proclaims in its fasts, preparations, concerts etc., a voluntary humility, and celebration of "saints and martyrs," renowned in legendary tales for "the pride that apes humility." Let the reader search the Scriptures from beginning to end, and he will nowhere find such systems of faith and worship as those comprehended in the papal and protestant systems. ”

“ The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediæval Catholicism, with its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church, and you have early Protestantism before you. ”

“ Thus we see so-called Protestantism as a particular form of beast religion, a distinctive spirit that animates and dominates the sectarian system. The beast element is the man rule. We are not speaking merely of human instrumentality, which God certainly uses in his church when the will is wholly submitted to him and susceptible to his Spirit, but of that exercise and dominance in ecclesiastical matters which, as apart from God, is distinctly human. ”

“ We are not surprised that our Protestant fellow-citizens love to point with commendable pride to the example of their great and good co-religionist, though Protestantism, particularly that professed in his day, and by his family and associates, had little to do with the formation of his character or the regulation of his public actions; but as Catholics we yield to none in admiration and affection for the noblest citizen of our common country. ”

“ Now, when a religion is applied to the social and political sphere, its general spirit must be considered, rather than its particular precepts. So that in studying the points of this application in the case of Protestantism, we may consult the writings of the reformers with greater confidence than we could do for an exposition of Protestant theology; and accept them as a greater authority, because they agree more entirely among themselves. ”

“ Protestantism is a mixture of faith and reason agreeing pretty badly together, it must be confessed. The Protestant takes the Bible for a book, every word of which is inspired of God. He interprets it in his own fashion, and proves out of it every doctrine he requires to found a new sect. ”

“ Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. ”

“ All these churches do work which is interesting and vital, and their organization is very dear to the older members of their congregations, to whom Protestantism is not only a religion, but also an expression of freedom. ”

“ They brought Congregational Protestantism—the democracy of Christianity, involving, what they neither granted nor knew, the universal right of search for truth and justice, the natural right to take or reject, as a man’s own spirit should require. ”

“ Compare it with your Protestantism, and you will see the difference. Popery is ever at work, whilst Protestantism is supine. A pretty Church, indeed, the Protestant! Why, it can’t even work a miracle. ”

“ Protestantism, the name given to a movement headed by Luther in the 16th century, in protestation of the supremacy in spiritual things claimed by the Church of Rome, and made on the ground of the authority of conscience enlightened by the Word of God, conceived of as the ultimate revelation of God to man. ”

“ Protestantism, no doubt, in the main accepted the general Catholic, tradition, but the tendency of Protestantism, in reaction against the minute inquisition of the earlier theologians, has always been to exercise a certain degree of what it regarded as wholesome indifference toward the less obvious manifestations of the flesh. ”

“ There is no denying the fact. The variations of Protestantism, even during the lives of the reformers, the multiplication of Protestant sects, all appealing alike to the sacred text, and the experience of three hundred and more years, render it indubitable. Hard pressed by their Catholic opponents, Protestants were driven to the sad alternative of either condemning their separation from the Church and returning to her communion, or of giving up dogmatic religion as unessential and falling back on interior feeling or sentiment. ”

“ This spirit of pride and obstinacy is also most apparent from the fact that Protestantism has never been ashamed to make use of any arguments, though ever so frivolous, inconsistent, or absurd, to defend its errors, and to slander and misrepresent the Catholic religion in every way possible. ”

“ Protestantism that confines its gaze solely to the sublime central figure of the gospel story walks with averted face past the beautiful group of the holy women. Because others have ignorantly worshiped, therefore we must not even contemplate. ”

“ Nothing else can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics. ”

“ Whilst the Protestant world evinces so profound an interest in these Catholic productions, we feel that the Catholics of the country should have within their reach arguments unanswerable by the opponents of our religion, placing it in an impregnable position, whilst they expose the utterly indefensible condition to which they have reduced Protestantism. ”

“ The liberals insist upon individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a church. And it is true indeed that a church is an affirmation, that it subsists by the positive element in it, by definite belief; the pure critical element dissolves it. Protestantism is a combination of two factors—the authority of the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism disappears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism. ”

“ Protestantism has the method of Jesus with his secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has his secret with his method too much left out of mind. Neither has his unerring balance, his intuition, his sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power. ”

“ And thus Protestantism, having foolishly sought for the little help it requires at the hand of painting from the men who embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to receive it from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who read the Bible in search of the picturesque. ”