organs and documents of the Tractarian School: 66 'English Reformers are not trustworthy witnesses to Catholic doctrine."-" The English establishment is not the Church.""The Reformation was a desperate remedy-a fearful judgment." -"Bishop Jewell was a very unexceptionable specimen of an English Reformer, and a condemnable heretic."-" The Protestant tone of thought and of doctrine is essentially antiChristian.”—“ The National Church must be unprotestantized.” "In declining an active and visible union with the see of Rome, we forego a great privilege; and to talk of the blessings of emancipation from the papal yoke, is to use a phrase of a bold and undutiful tenor."—" The monastic life is the one most nearly of all things resembling the divine."—"Monasteries are places where miracles may be naturally expected."*"To a Christian believing all the astounding mysteries which are contained in the doctrine of the incarnation, the fuller belief in the real presence, even to the extent of the tridentine definition, is no serious additional tax on his credulity."-" Purgatory may be supported by a surprising number of texts."-" Devotions paid in particular places have a special efficacy; and therefore pilgrimages and anniversary feasts of patron saints are highly profitable." "The Pope is the Primate of Christendom-the earthly representative of the church's divine head."—" The holy see is the proper medium of communication with the Catholic Church."a-" Why should the corruptions of Rome lead us to deny her divine privileges, when even the idolatry of Judah did not forfeit hers."b" The religion of so called freedom and independence, hating superstition, suspicious of forms, jealous of priestcraft, advocating heart * Cambridge, like Oxford, is now infected with the Tractarian heresy. On Monday, March 18, 1844, a debate on the subject of monasteries took place. The question proposed was, that the dissolution of monasteries by Henry VIII. has been highly injurious in this country; and that the circumstances of the times imperatively demand the restoration of similar institutions. Affirmed by 88 against 60. a British Critic. See also the Christian Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1844. worship, is, as generally understood, inconsistent with the liturgy of our church."a-" Is it then a duty to forget that Rome was our mother, through whom we were born to Christ.”b—“ The very breath of the Protestantism of Dissenters has something sulphureous in it, and is full of self assumption and pride.”c— "I hate the Reformation more and more; it was a limb badly set: it must be broken again in order to be righted."—" Your trumpery principle about scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word), is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character of the original." "The mass book is a sacred and most precious monument of the apostles."f Now what disguise is there in all this? Is not the popery of such passages perfectly transparent? That there must be some disguise, or some mental reservation, in the writers, is evident, or they could never hold the incomes of the Protestant church while they hold the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church.* It may likewise be admitted that they now and then administer rebuke to their mother; but not for mortal, only for venial faults; and in such a gentle manner as to say, "with all thy faults I love thee still, my mother;" while the reformers are spoken of in the most degrading terms.t a Tract No. 41, p. 6. b Tract No. 66. c Palmer. e Froude's Remains, p. 249. d Froude's Remains, p, 433. ƒ Newman. * A Catholic writer says, "Our saints, our popes, have become dear to them little by little; our rites and ceremonies, our offices, nay, our very rubrics, are precious in their eyes, far, alas! beyond what many of us consider them.-Dr. Wiseman. Their writings teem with reproaches on the great principles successfully contended for at the Reformation, and also on the Reformers."-Bishop of Rochester. But, notwithstanding all this, Popery is disowned by the Oxford party; claiming for their doctrines a likeness to those that were taught in the church of the third and fourth centuries, and at a period anterior to the establishment of the Romish faith, they prefer the Council of Nice* to the Council of Trent. But as the catholicity of the Nicene age is as much, and in some cases more anti-Christian than the catholicity of the Romish church, their denial of Popery amounts to nothing: it is only the denial of a mere name, while they have the very thing of which that name is the usual and appropriate designation: for it is, I think, utterly impossible that they should speak of Rome in terms of such affectionate tenderness without having their hearts there also without being what, I think, every unprejudiced mind believes them to be-Papists. It should not, however, be concealed, that they profess to have found out, and to have established, and to have made known, the via media, i. e. the middle way between Romanists and Reformers, or a way in which the church of England and the church of Rome may walk hand in hand with no compromise of principle on either side. Hence the writer of Tract No. 90, labors to prove that the articles of the * Held in 325. The canons of which are the basis of the Roman Catholic faith. church of England were never intended to convey any censure or condemnation of purgatory; the worship of images; invocation of saints; the sacrifice of the mass; and other doctrines of the Romish church. But he might as well contend that the ninth commandment was never intended to convey any censure or prohibition, or condemnation, of the sin of bearing false witness against our neighbour. The twenty-second article, among other things, condemns the doctrine of purgatory. But in what manner does this writer prove that it was not intended to do so? He says the article condemns the Romish but not the primitive doctrine of purgatory. Is not this a subterfuge? Is it not clear that the article was intended to condemn purgatory altogether, and not merely that particular modification of it maintained by the church of Rome? And is it not true that at the Reformation the public mind knew nothing of purgatory but what was found in the church of Rome; and was it not therefore most natural for the Reformers to call it the Romish doctrine. Besides, if, (as No. 90 assumes) there was a purgatory in which the people ought to believe, as well as a purgatory in which they ought not to believe, would they not have carefully described it, and distin guished it from the Romish one?* But the whole tract is a mournful exhibition of that cunning craftiness whereby men lie in wait to deceive,” and a fair example of the spirit of that jesuitical religion which is advocated in the Tracts for the Times. This heresy is now taught in universities and public schools; dignitaries of the church have embraced it. The ears of the Queen have been assailed by it-tracts and newspapers, and magazines, carry it through the length and breadth of the land,-while, by means of school books and reward books, the youthful mind is imbued with it. Poetry and philosophy, and works of fiction, and even the theatret itself, are sought to be controlled and rendered subservient to the genius of tractarianism. The ultimate design of the movement is to make the clergy all in all, to compel the laity to bow down before a bigotted priesthood, and to restore that cruel dominion of dark and superstitious times when the rack and the The same writer likewise endeavours, by a similar kind of sophistry, to prove that the 25th article, which restricts the number of sacraments to two, was never intended to contradict the Romish doctrine, which extends it to seven! + The following is an extract from a card circulated in Liverpool, by the Puseyite party:-"It is indispensable for the resuscitation of the drama that it be thoroughly cleansed and purified, and its professors subjected to a moral discipline, like the church and the bar; that it have a religion, a dramatic priesthood, a catholic unity and character. Like the age itself, like religion and politics, it is Protestanized; and by the licentious exercise of private judgment, it has degenerated like many other institutions." D |