PROTESTANT TOLERATION, A LYING APOSTATE, AND PERSECUTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 361, 19 March 1880, Page 9

PROTESTANT TOLERATION, A LYING APOSTATE, AND PERSECUTION.

(From Cardinal Newman's " Prospects of Catholics in England.") Ouii author (Dr. Wbately,) tells us that mockery in religious controversy, is as cowardly and cruel as the slaughter of women and children in war, and he presses on us the duty of the State to prohibit by penalties such interference with the comforts and feeling o f individuals: now, I repeat, what a remarkable illustration have Protestants supplied to this doctrine of a Piotestant divine since Michaelni » last . 3ho special champions of toleration, the zealous foes of persecution, how studiously and conscientiously, during nine long months, have they pmctised what they preached ! What a bright example have they set to that religious communion which they hold in such abhorrence on the ground of its persecuting spirit ! Oh tbe onesided intellect of Protestantism ! I appeal in evidence of it to a great banquet, where, amid great applause, the first judge of the Land .spoke of trampling Caidinal Wiseman's hat under his feet. I appeal to the last fifth of November, when jeers against the Blessed Sacrament and its rites were chalked up in the metropolis with impunity, under tho very shadow of the Court and under the very eyes of the Home Office and the police. I appeal to the mock processions to ridicule, and bonfires to bum what we hold most venerable and sacred, :iot only Pope and Cardinal and prie&t, but the very Mother of Our Lord, and the ciucifix itself. I appeal to those ever growing files of newspapers, whose daily tatk in the tedious succession of months, has been to cater for the gross palate of their readers all varieties of disgusting gossip, and of bitter reproach and of extravagant slander, and of affronting, taunting, sneering, irritating invective against us. I appeal to the buckram nuns of Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, and Uapham. ... I appeal to the outrageous language perpetrated in a place I must not name, where one speaker went the length of saying what the reporters suppressed for fear of consequenccr, that a dear tnend and brother of mine, for whose purity and honour I would die, mentioning him by name, went about the country, as the words came to the ears of those present, seducing young women. I appeal to the weekly caricatures, not of persons only and their doings, but of all that is held sacred in our doctrines and observances, of our rites and ceremonies, our saints and our relics, our sacred vestments and our rotancp. ... I appeal to the cowardly issue of a cowardly agitation, to the blows uealtinthe streets of this very town (Birmingham,) upon the persons of the innocent, the tender, and the helpless ; —not to any m&ult or affliction which has come upon ourselves, for it is our portion, and we have no thought of complaining,— but to the ladies and the school-girls, who, at various times up to the day I am recording it, because they arc Catholics, have been the victims of these newspaper sarcasms, and these platform blasphemies. I appeal to he stones striking sharply upon the one and the teeth knocked out of he mouths of the other. Dr. Wuatclv's words have been almost pr pbetic ; mockery and insult have literally terminated in the ? .y . 1D J ur y of those non-belligerents, who are sacred by the laws of a \ Vf llized warfare. Such are some of the phenomena of a religion w- en makes it its special boast to be the Prophet of Toleration. And in the midst of outrages such as these, my Brothers of of the Oratory, wiping its mouth and clasping its hands and turning up its eyes, it trudges to the Town Hall to hear Dr. Achilli expose the Inquisition. Ah ! Dr. Achilli. I might have spoken of him last week, had time admitted of it. The Protestant world flocks to hear him because be has something to tell of the Catholic Church. He has a something to tell, it is true ; he has a scandal to reveal, he has an argument to exhibit. It is £, simple one, and a powerful one, as far as it goes— and it is one. That one argument is himself ;it is his presence which is the triumph of Protestants ; it is the sight of him which is a Catholic's confusion. It is indeed our great confusion that our Holy Mother could have had a priest like him. He feels the force ot the argument, and he shows himself to tbe multitude that is gazing on him. ' Mothers of families,' he seems to say, ' gentle maidens, innocent children, look at me for lam worth looking at. You do not see such a sight every day. Can any Church live over the imputation ot such a birth as lam ? . . . Yes, you are an incontrovertible proof that priests may fall and friars break their vows. You are your own witness ; but while you nerd not go nut of yourself for an argument neither are you able. With you the argument begins: with you too, it ends : the beginning and the ending you arc both. When you have shown yourself you have done your worst and your all : you arc your best argument and your sole. Your witness against others is utterly invalidated by your witness against yourself. You leave your sting in the wound : you cannot lay the goldeu eggs for you arc already dead. For how, Brothers of the Oratory, can we possibly believe a man like this, in what he says about persons, and facts, and events, when he is of the stamp of Maria Monk, of Jeffreys, and of Teodore, and of others who have had their hour, and then been dropped by the indignation or the shame of mankind 1 What call is there on Catholics to answer what has not yet been proved ? What need to answer the evidence of one who has not replied to the police reports of Viterbo, Naples, and Corfu ? He tells me that a Father Inquisitor said to him, 'Another time' (that you are) ' shut up in the Inquisition,' (you) 'will not get away so easily.' I do not believe it was said to him. He reports that a Cardinal said of him, 'We must either make him a bishop, or shut him up in the Inquisition.' I do not believp it. He bears witness that "' the General of the Dominicans, the oldest of the Inquisitors, exclaimed against him before the Council, ' This heretic, we had better burn him alive.' " I don't believe a word of it. " Give up the present Archbishop of Canterbury," says he, " amiable and pious as he is. to one of these rabid inquisitors ; he must cither deny his faith or be biuncd alive. Is my statement false ? Am I doting ?" Not doting, but untrustworthy. " Suppose I were handed over to the tender mercies of this Cardinal (Wiseman), aud he had full power to do with me as he chose, without losing his character in the eyes of the nation, . . . should I not have to undergo some death more terrible than ordinary ?" Dr. Achilli docs not dote ; they dote who trust him. Why do I so confidently us&urt that he is not to be believed .' First, because his life for twenty

years past creates no prepossession in favour of his veracity ; secondly ' because during a part of that period, according to his own confession' he spoke and argued against doctrines, which at the very time he confessed to be maintained by the communion to which he belonged ; thirdly, because he has ventured to deny in the general what official documents prove against him in the particular : fourthly , because he is not simple and clear enough in his relation of facts to inspire any confidence in him ; fifthly, because he abounds in mis-statements and romance, as any one will see who knows anything of the matters he is writing about ; sixthly, because he runs counter to facts known and confessed by all. Indeed, I should not finish my lecture to-night, my Brothers, if I went through the series of historical facts which might be detailed in contradiction of the statements which this author advances, and in proof of the utterly false view which Protestants take of the Inquisition, and of the Holy Sec in connection with it. I will set down a few. A recent C.irbolie controversialist, a Spanish writer oE great name, Dr. Balinez, goes &o far as to say '' that the Roman Inquisition has never been known to pronounce the execution oE capital punishment, although the Apostolic Sec has been ocenpied, during that time, by Popes of extreme rigour and severity in all that relates to the civil administration." %1 We find." lie continues, "in all_ parts of ■Europe scaffolds prepared to punish crimes against religion ; scenes which sadden tbe soul wore everywhere witnessed, liome is an exception to the rule : Komc which it has been attempted to represent as a monster oE intolerance and cruelty. . . . The Popes, armed with a tribunal of intolerance, have not spilt a drop of blood : Protestants and philosophers have shed torrents." Moreover, tbe Spanish Inquisition, against which, and uot the Roman, it is more common to inveigh, though Dr. Achilli writes abont the Roman, the Spanish Inquisition, which really was bloody, is confessed by great Protestant authorities, such as llankc, and Guizot. to have been a political, uot an ecclesiastical institution ; its officials, though ecclesiastics, were appointed by the Grown, responsible to the crown, and removable at its pleasure."' It had. indeed, been originally authorised by the Pope, who, at the instance of the civil power, granted it a bull of establishment : but as soon as it began to act, it 3 measures so deeply shocked him, that he immediately commenced a scries of grave remonstrances against its proceedings, and bitterly complained that he had been deceived by the Spanish Government. The Protestant liankc distinctly maintaius that it was evcu set up against the Pope and the Church. •' As the jurisdiction of the Coiu-s," he «iys, "rested on the Royal Supremacy, so its exercise was made available for the maintenance of the Royal authority. It is one of those spoliations of the ecclesiastical power, by which this Government rose into strength ; ... in its nature aud its object, it was a purely political institute." Moreover, the Pope, anxious and displeased at what was going on, appointed a new functionary to reside on the spot, with the office of Judge of Appeals from tho Inquisition, in favour of the condemued : and when this expedient was evaded, he appointed special judges for particular cases; and lastly, when the ciuclty of the Spanish Government and its official s, lay and ecclesiastical, defeated this second attempt to ameliorate the evil, then he encouraged the sufferers to ilee to Rome, where he took them urvdc his protection. In this way it is recordedj that in one year he rescued 23,3 persons, and 200 in auother. Sometimes he directly interfered m Spain itself : in tbe beginning of one year he liberated fifty heretics : and fifty more a month or two later : three further interpositions of mercy are recorded within the year. Sometimes he set aside and annulled tbe judgments passed ; sometimes he managed to rescue' the condemned from the infamy and civil consequences of the sentence ; sometimes he actually summoned, censured, and excommunicated the Inquisitor : and after he took the part of the children of those whose property was forfeited to the Crown. Moreover he refused to allow the. Spanish Government to introduce their Inquisition into the Milanese, which then belonged to Spain, from his disapprobation of its rigour. Such conduct as this is but in accordance with the historical character of the Holy See, in all times aud in all countries. Doubtless in the long course of eighteen hundred years, there aie events which need explanation, and which Catholics themselves might wish otherwise : but the general tenour" and tendency of the traditions of tho Papacy have been mercy and humanity. _ It has ever been less fierce than the nations and in advance oi! the age : it has ever moderated, not only the ferocity of barbarians, but the fanaticism of Catholic populations. Let the accusations which can be made against it be put in form ; let the formal charges be proved ; let the proved offences be counted up ; aud then Protestants themselves will be able to determine what judgment is to be passed on the language in which they indulge themselves against it. "An actual hell," says their present oracle, Dr. Achilli. '• hocnis to be at the command of this Church, and it may be known by the name of the Inquisition. . . . The Inquisition is truly a hell, invented by priests. . . . Christianity suffers more uoav than in former times under this harsh slavery." The Inquisition, it seems, is a hell ; then there are many other hells in the world present and past, and worse hells-, though this is the only one of which Dr. Archilli has had experience. He, indeed, may be excused for not knowing that, in his ieprobation of the Inquisition, he is in fact virtually reflecting upon the nation, at whose good opinion he is aiming ; but Protestants, had they the caution of ordinary disputants, would have known better than to accept a field of controversy, far less dangerous to the enemy than to themselves. . . . Dr. Achilli, it seems, hat been imprisoned by the Inquisition, for preaching in Rome against the religion of Rome : and has no one ever been put in prison, or fined, or transported, or doomed to death in England, for preaching against the religion of England ? Those adversaries, indeed, of Catholicism pleaded that Catholicism was rebellion, and has Dr. Achilli had nothing to do with a party not only dangerous, but actually and contemporaneously subversive to the Pontifical Government ? It seems never to occur to a Protestant that he must not do in his own case what he blames in another ; and should he at any time leave off a practice, he is surprised that every one else has not left it ofl' at the same moment, and he has no mercy on any that has not : — like converted prodigals who arc sternly unforgiving towards t he vices they have only just abandoned themselves.

Tt is in my own memory, that a popular writer was convicted in the King's Bench, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment, for parodying passages of the Anglican Prayer Book. It is within my own memory, that an unbeliever in Christianity incurred a similar sentence, for exposing and selling his publications in a shop in Meet street. Why is Christianity to be protected by law if Catholicism is not 1 What has the Inquisition done to Dr. Achilli, which the King's Bench did not do, and more, to Hone and Carlyle ? Why is that so shocking to-day that came so natural to you thirty years ago 1 Not many years have passed since Unitarian worship was a legal offence ; the Unitarian creed was felony, and Unitarian congregations incurred the penalty of transportation. "If the civil magistrate,"' says Dr. Whately, "have no rightful jurisdiction whatever in religious concerns, it is quite as much an act of injustice, though of far less cruelty, to fine a Sociiii.-m than to burn him.'' Nor, indeed, was burning absent ; iivo men were burnt in Elizabeth's reign for denying the Holy Trinity, of whom the Protestant Bishop of Norwich burnt three. In the next reign tho Protestant Bishop of London burnt one, and the Protestant Bishop of Lichfield another. A third was sentenced, but tho compassion of the people saved him. Catholics have faied even worse : they have not indeed been burned, but they have been tortured, hung, cut, down alive, cut open alive, quartered and boiled. Nay, it is only quite lately, that heavy penal inflictions have been taken off the daily acts of our religion. Many of us, my Brothers, as you know well, wear about us crosses, pictures, medals, beads, and the like, blessed by the Pope : they are still illegal ; an Atpivs JDel is still illegal. Nay", five years have not fully passed, since the bringing them into the kingdom, and the giving them away, and the receiving nnd wearing them was punishable, by outlawry, forfeiture oC all goods and chattels to the Queen, and imprisonment for life. Yet British Law is the wonder of the world, and l!ome is anti-Christ. Nor has this prohibition been at all times an empty menace, as it is today : time was when it was followed out into its extreme consequences. The possession of an Agnus Dei was the foremost charge in the indictment brought against the first of our martyrs among the missionary priests in the reign of bloody Elizabeth. "As soon as the sheriff came into the chamber," say the Acts of the Martyrdom of Cuthbert Maine, "he took Mr. Maine by the bosom, and said to him, ' What art thon ?' He answered, 'lam a man.' Whereat the sheriff, being very hot, asked if lie had a coat of mail under his doublet ; and so unbuttoned it and found an Agnus Dei case about his neck, which he took from him, and called him traitor and rebel, with many other opprobrious names." Maine was hanged, cut down alive, falling from a great height, and then quartered. He was the firstfruit "of a sanguinary persecution which lasted a hundred years. John Wilson, while they tore out his heart, said, •' I forgive the Queen, and all that are the cause of my death." Edward Campion was cruelly torn and rent upon the rack divers times. " Before he went to the rack he used to fall down at the rack -house door upon both knees, to commend himself to God's mercy ; and upon the rack he called continually upon God, repeating often the holy name of Jesus. His keeper asking him the next day how he felt his hands and Feet, he answered, 'Not ill, because not at all.' He was hanged and embowelled at Tyburn. ! Ralph Sherwin, came next. The hangman, taking hold of him with the bloody hands which had been busy with the bowels of the martyred priest who preceded him, said to him. thinking to terrify him, '' Come, Sherwin, take thou also thy wages." But the hoi}' man. nothing dismayed, embraced him with a cheerful countenance, and reverently kissed the blood that stuck to his hands ; at which the people were much moved. He had been twice racked, and now he was dealt with as his brother before him. Thomas Shci wood, after six months' imprisonment in a dark and filthy hole, was hanged, cut down alive, dismembered, bowelled, and quartered. Alexander Brian had needles thrust under his nails, was torn upon the rack, hanged, and beheaded. George Haydock was suffered to hang but a very little while when the sheriff ordered the rope to be cut, and the whole butchery to be performed upon him when he was alive and perfectly sensible. John Finch was dragged through the streets, his head beating all the way upon the stones ; was then thrubt into a dark and fetid dungeon, with no bed but the damp floor : was fed sparingly, and on nothing but oxen's liver. Here he was left first for weeks, then for months, till at length he was hanged and his quarters sent to the four chief towns of Lancashire. Richard White, being cut down alive, pronounced the sacred name of Jesus twice while the hangman had his hands in his bowels. James Claxton was fii-st put into Little Ease, that is, a place where he could neither stand, lie, nor sit; there he was fed for three days on bread and water. Then he was put into the mill to grind ; then he was hanged up by the hands till the blood sprang forth at his fingers' ends ; at length he was hanged, dying at the age of twenty-one years. These are the acts, these are the scenes which Protestants, stopping their ears and raising their voices and casting dust into the air, will not let us infliot upon them. No, it is pleasanter to declaim against persecution, and to call the Inquisition a hell, than to consider their own devices and the work of their own hands. The catalogue reaches to some hundred names What will the Protestants bring against the Holy See comparable to such atrocities as these 1 Not, surely, with any fairness, the burnings in Queen Mary's reign — the acts, as they were, of an English party inflamed with rage against their enemies, and opposed by Cardinal Pole, the Pope's legate, as well as by the ecclesiastics of Spain. . . The horrors I have been describing are no anomaly in the history of Protestantism. Whatever theoretical differences it has had on this subject with the Catholic religion it has, in matter of fact, ever shown itself a persecuting power. It has persecuted in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Holland, in France, in Germany, in Geneva. Calvin burnt a Socinian, Cranmer an Anabaptist, Luther advised the wholesale slaughter of the fanatical peasants, and Knox was paity to bloody enactments and bloody deeds. You would think that with scandals such as these at their door Protestants would find it safest to let history alone and not meddle with the question of persecution at all, from a lively consciousness of deeds identical with those which they impute to the Catholic Church. Not a bit of it. What, then, is their view of the matter ? Strange to say, they make it their plea

I of exculpation find the actual difference bpiwcou Catholics and them that they condemn persecution on principle. Jn other words, they bring their own inconsistency as the excuse for their crime. Now I grant them. I am far from disputing it, that a man who hold 3 a right principle and occasionally — nay often — offends against it, is better than he who holds the opposite wrong principle and acts consistently upon it : but that is not the present case. The case is that of persons who never once have acted upon the principles they profess — never once : for they cannot produce their instance when Protestants, of whatever denomination, were in possession of national power for any sufficient time without persecuting some or other of their polemical antagonists. So it has been, so it is now. Three centuries ago Protestantism in England set oft! on its course with murdering Catholic priests ; only a few months have passed since a clergyman of the Establishment gave out to his congregation that transportation was too good for us, and he thought we all ought to be put to death. So far from the Protestant party feeling any real shock at this avowal, a little while after a second clergyman, as influential in Manchester as the fiist-mentioned is in Liverpool, repeated the sentiment ; and still no shock or sensation in the Protestant public was the result. Doubtless they gave their reasons for wishing it, sufficient in their own judgment, and so too did the Protestant Elizabeth, so too did Gardiner and the other advisers of the Catholic Mary ; but still such was the upshot of their reasons, death to every Catholic priest. The present case, then, is not that of an individual, or a ruler, or a body politic laying down a good principle, and not being able at times and under circumstances, through passion or policy to act up to it j no, it is the case of a religion saying one thing, and on every actual and possible occasion doing another. Can such a religion extenuate its acts on the grounds of its professions? Yet this- is" the excuse, nay, this is the boast, the glory of the Protestanb party :—": — " We always do one thing and we always say another ; we always preach peace, but we always make war ; we have the face of a lamb, and the claws of a dragon. And we have another boast ; to be sure, we persecute, but then, as a set-off, you see, we always denounce in others what we are in the practice of doing ourselves ; this is our second great virtue. Observe, we, persecutors, protest aeainst persecution,— virtue one : next, we, persecutors, blacken and enrse the Papists for persecuting, — virtue two : and now for a third virtue, — why, we are so superlatively one-sided that we do not even see our own nttcr inconsistency in this matter, and we deny that what is a stigma in their case is even a scandal in ours. We think that profession and denunciation make up a good Christian, and that we may persecute freely, if we do but largely quote Scripture against it." And now I might leave Protestants to explain this matter if they can, and to unravel the mystery bow it is that, after all their solemn ' words against persecution, they have persecuted as I have shown, whenever, wherever, and however they could, from Elizabeth down to Victoria, fiom the domestic circle up to the Legislature, from black looks to the extremity of the gibbet and the stake ; I might leave them, but lam tempted to make them one parting suggestion. I observe, then, it is no accident that they unite in their history this abjuration with this practice of religious coercion ; the two go together. I say it boldly and decidedh, and do not flinch from the avowal. Protestants attempt too much, and they end in doing nothing. They go too far ; they attempt what is against nature, and therefore impossible. lam not proving this ;itis a separate subject ; ie would require a treatise. I am only telling the Protestant world why it is they ever persecute, in spite of their professions. It is because their doctrine of private judgment, as they hold it, is extreme and unreal, and necessarily leads to excess in the opposite direction. They are attempting to reverse rature, with no warrant for doing so ; and nature has its ample revenge upon them. They altogether ignore a principle which the Creator has put into our breasts, the duty of maintaining the truth ; and, in consequence, they deprive themselves of the opportunity of controlling, restraining, and directing it. So was it with the actors in the first French Revolution : never was there such extravagant praises of the rights of reason ; never so signal, so horrible a profanation of them. They cried, '-Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and then proceeded to massacre the priests, and to hurry the laity by thousands to the scaffold or the river-side. Far other is the conduct of the Church. Not to put the matter on higher and doctrinal grounds, it is plain, if only to prevent the occurrence of injustice and cruelty, she must — to use a phrase of the day — direct impulses, which it is impossible from the nature of man to destroy. And in the course of eighteen hundred years, though her children have been guilty of various excesses, though she herself is responsible for isolated acts of most solemn import, yet for one deed of severity with which she can be charged, there have been a hundred oE her acts, repressive of the persecutor, and protective of his victims. She has been a never-failing fount of humanity, equity, forbearance, and compassion, in consequence of her very recognition of natural ideas and instincts, which Protestants would vainly ignore and contradict : and this is the solution of the paradox stated by the distinguished author I just now quoted, to the effect that the religion which forbids private judgment in matters of revelation, is historically more tolerant than the religions which uphold it His words will bear repetition :—": — " We find, in all parts of Europe, scaffolds prepaced to punish crimes against religion ; scenes which sadden the soul were everywhere witnessed. Kotne is one exception to the rule ; Rome, which it has been attempted to represent a monster of intolerance and cruelty. It is true that the Popes have not preached, like the Protestants, universal toleration ; but the facts show the difference between the Protestants and the Popes. The Popes, armed with a tribunal of intolerance, have scarce spilt a drop of blood ; Protestants and philosophers have shed it in torrents."

Dr. GilmaTy Shea asks the wholly supcifluous question," "Is Mr. Froude a historian ? " but in answering it for the Philadelphia Catholic Quarterly he writes a trenchant criticism under which Mr. Froude is completely buried.