modern Catholic world, and are nearly as rife amongst us as among Protestants themselves. Our first work should be to unprotestantize ourselves, a thing we shall not very readily do, if our popular writers take care to deny or suppress Catholic truth as applicable to the secular order. Atheistical politics are well-nigh universal, and till we abandon them ourselves, we shall make poor headway against Protestantism. When we ourselves are afraid to assert the supremacy of the church, and the subordination of the state, and to maintain that the secular is for the spiritual, and not the spiritual for the secular, when we are afraid to acknowledge the supremacy of Peter in his successors, and deem it the part of prudence to explain away or half deny the papacy,-what have we got to say to Protestants? We yield every thing to them that they care for, and what have we to oppose to them? We tell our readers, again and again, that the theological matters discussed between Protestants and us are not the real questions at issue. They care nothing, as a body, for doctrines. They have no doctrines that they cannot give up at a moment's warning, if necessary to secure their secular success. The whole question turns on the unity and catholicity of the church, as the means of maintaining the supremacy of the spiritual order. As that. unity and catholicity are effected and secured by the papacy, the real object of attack is the pope and his spiritual authority, under God, over the whole secular order. whole question is here. Give up or deny that authority, and you give up or deny all that Protestantism really opposes, and embrace practically all that is living in it, and are Protestants in the only sense in which Protestants are worth counting. We must, therefore, if we mean to be Catholics, be truly we like the word-PAPISTS, and fearlessly assert the papal supremacy. We shall then get rid of our Protestant, heathen, or atheistical politics, and have a Catholic ground on which to oppose Protestantism. This is the first thing necessary for us. This done, we become politically and socially, as we are in faith and worship, a united body, able to move in one solid and unbroken phalanx against Protestantism, and to produce some effect on the minds and hearts of Protestants. The question will then be discussed on its merits, and we may hope that God will bless our efforts to persuade our Protestant brethren that they should no longer abandon themselves to the world which satisfieth not, but make it their sole business to live for God and heaven.

The

However, we must never forget that every age is a martyr age, and that the martyr spirit is the only spirit worthy of the true Catholic. We like, therefore, the little book before us, as showing how men can even in modern times die martyrs. It is well fitted to make us love the faith for which our fathers suffered so much, and to strengthen us to endure whatever persecutions for it the enemy shall be permitted to institute against us. Notwithstanding the few criticisms we have ventured on it, it is an excellent little book. Our objection to it is, that it takes too favorable a view of Anglicanism in regarding it as a form of religion, and is not quite ultramontane enough to suit our taste. Aside from these objections it is a good book, written with great power, serious intention, and in the true Christian spirit. We thank the unknown author for it, and hope he will not let his pen lie idle. These are times when none who can speak for the truth are permitted to be silent, and especially none who can speak so well as our author.

PROTESTANTISM AND GOVERNMENT.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1852.]

DURING the last winter, the editor of this journal, at the invitation of the Catholic Institute of St. Louis, gave in that city a course of five lectures on Catholicity and Civilization, in which he endeavored to maintain that all true civilization is of Catholic origin, and that all nations in the ancient world became barbarous in proportion as they departed from the patriarchal religion, and that all modern nations tend to barbarism in proportion as they recede from the Catholic Church. He did not maintain this thesis precisely as an argument for the church, for he contended that the church is spiritual, instituted not for the civilization of nations, but for the glory of God in the salvation of souls; he maintained. it because it is historically true, and because it is a conclusive argument against the carnal Judaism into which the world

*A Course of Five Lectures, delivered in St. Louis, on Protestantism and Government. By Hon. HUGH A. GARLAND. St. Louis, 1852.

has lapsed, and which proposes simply material civilization and temporal well-being as its sole end. His lectures were nothing but a running commentary on the sacred text, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you."

The conclusions of the lecturer were neither flattering nor acceptable to the carnal Jews and gentiles who listened to them. If his conclusions were sound, and nobody pretended that they did not follow irresistibly from his premises, and if what he alleged to be facts were really facts, the boasted progress and intelligence of the modern uncatholic world. could be regarded only as false intelligence, worse than no intelligence at all, and a progress towards barbarism, if not arrested, destined to end in savagism. The secular and sectarian press, with one or two honorable exceptions, kept up during the delivery of the lectures a continual fire against the lecturer and his assertions, and even sought to crush him beneath the weight of his own shameful writings prior to his conversion, and which he had long since retracted. But this was not enough. The lectures were listened to by large numbers of the most respectable and influential classes of the city, with deep interest, almost with enthusiasm. Nowhere had the lecturer ever found a more intelligent audience, or been listened to with more manifest respect and sympathy. Something was necessary to be done to counteract the influence of his decidedly anti-Jewish and anti-gentile lectures. So, at their close, a number of anti-Catholic citizens of St. Louis invited Hugh A. Garland, a Virginian, and formerly clerk of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, to deliver a course of lectures in reply to them, and to tell the people what they were to believe as to the compatibility of Protestantism with civilization and good government. Mr. Garland accepted the invitation so far as to consent to give a course of lectures on the same subject, or at least some branches of it, and the pamphlet before us consists of a phonographical report of his course.

The author does not profess to reply to the course by the editor of this journal, but professes to go over the same ground, and, save in the correspondence between him and the gentlemen who invited him to lecture, he makes but a single allusion to him, and that, save as to its too compli mentary character, one to which we can take no exception. We might, therefore, very well regard ourselves as under no

special obligation to notice the pamphlet ; but as the correspondence which occasioned it is published at its head, and as it was no doubt intended to be a vindication of Protestantism against the Catholic lecturer, without the responsibility of a direct answer to his arguments, and as our silence might be misconstrued by the enemies of our faith, we have concluded not to let it pass without making it the subject of a few brief comments.

With the author personally our relations have long been friendly and affectionate, and we remember with great pleasure the intercourse we enjoyed with him, in the bosom of his own family and elsewhere, during our late visit to St. Louis, the great city of the West. We confess we were not prepared for such a course of lectures as he appears to have given, from a gentleman of his character and intelligence. Surrounded as he is by Catholics, in daily and hourly intercourse with them, and to some extent familiar with Catholic doctrines and treatises, we did not expect from him arguments against us which would hardly have been creditable to a Dowling or a Sparry. We speak of the arguments as to their substance, not of the language in which they are clothed, which for the most part is that of a gentleman, and unexceptionable.

The precise purpose of the author in his lectures he nowhere distinctly states, and we are at a loss to determine what general thesis he means to maintain or to refute. His lectures as a course appear to lack unity of design and distinctness of aim. The author has read a good deal on various subjects, has thought intensely, and has made many just observations; but he does not seem to have digested his materials, or to have worked out his thoughts, and reduced them to a system. He does not appear to have determined his principles and doctrines, and become able to state them clearly and distinctly, so as to bring his reading and observation to bear directly on their illustration and defence. His lectures are to us, though eloquent and high-wrought in passages, confused, indeed chaotic, and successfully defy our powers of analysis. We cannot reduce them to unity, and test their soundness or unsoundness by testing them in their principle. In a word, the author is far more of a Protestant than we had taken him to be, and, like all Protestants, argues and draws conclusions in general without any major premise, or, when he has a major premise, without any middle term. The only way of thoroughly reviewing such an

author is to take him up sentence by sentence, and examine each sentence by itself. This is not precisely the author's fault; no Protestant can write otherwise, without writing himself out of his Protestantism. Protestantism is essentially illogical and unintellectual, repugnant to the fundamental laws of reason, and the Protestant who should undertake in his writings against Catholics to conform to those laws, would at every step refute himself. We have neither the space nor the time to take up these lectures at length, and point out all that we judge unsound in them, and the author must expect from us only a few brief remarks on such statements of his as appear to us deserving of animadversion.

The author very properly, in his first lecture, denies and refutes the doctrine, popular in our times at least, that man began in the savage state; and consequently he denies and refutes, whether he intends to do so or not, the whole modern doctrine of the progress of the species, or the perfectibility of human nature. He also asserts a spiritual order, and maintains that it is above the temporal, or, in other words, he maintains the supremacy of the spiritual order. Thus far he has done well, and done much. His admission that man began in perfection, that is, in perfection as a man, not in imperfection, and his assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, contain in themselves the refutation of all his Protestantism, and substantially all that he alleges against the church. But though he recognizes a spiritual order, he does not recognize, properly speaking, the supernatural order, or at least, that God has not only given us a religion supernaturally, but also a supernatural religion. "Besides the faculties of understanding, and the passions, and the appetites, which belong to nature or this outward material order, man is endowed with reason, conscience, and high moral faculties, which teach him truth, what is right and what is wrong,the great guides given him by his Creator to accomplish the ends of his creation here. These faculties are the highest qualities that man possesses, and that distinguish him from the material world around him. These moral faculties, properly educated and properly instructed with the truths which God, his creator, has revealed to him by means of these faculties, can keep in subjection the animal appetites, and guide man to reason and justice. The spiritual quality, being supreme, should govern and control the whole man." We will not press the language here em