Protestantism: Its Ultimate Principle

I can remember the time when the antagonism with which for more than three hundred years the vast majority of the English people had regarded the Church of Rome, was one of the most powerful elements of our national life. It controlled our theological controversies; it was appealed to with confidence by the chiefs of political parties; its influence was obvious in.our social intercourse. Roman Catholic priests were regarded with mingled distrust, contempt, and dread. The characteristic doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church were spoken of with intellectual scorn; the pretensions of the Pope to infallibility, for instance — pretensions which at those times were not sustained by the authority of a General Council, — and the dogma of transubstantiation, were supposed to be too monstrous to require serious discussion; the invocation of saints and the homage offered to the Virgin Mary were treated as nothing better than idolatry, and reverence for relics as a childish superstition. All the instruments and apparatus of Romish worship, decorated altars, consecrated wafers, crucifixes, the gorgeous robes of the priests, were regarded as things which carried infection with them; and the worship itself as a profane insult to the majesty of God. In those days it was customary to speak of the Jesuits as men who had reduced equivocation and lying to a science, and consecrated falsehood in the name of religion; nor was there any crime from which it was imagined that a Jesuit would shrink if the ' interest of the Church appeared to require it. Most English people regarded the confessional with horror and disgust; it was an abomination not to be tolerated in a free and Christian community; an institution for corrupting the morals of women and for investing the priesthood with a dark and terrible power oyer the happiness of families and the liberties of nations. The Roman Catholic Church was the very symbol and representative of all the worst evils which can desolate Christendom; it had plunged Europe into darkness for centuries;