FIFTH LETTER ΤΟ N. WISEMAN, D.D. CONTAINING A REPLY TO HIS REMARKS ON LETTER I. WITH ADDITIONAL PROOFS OF THE IDOLATRY AND SUPERSTITION OF ROMANISM BY THE REV. WILLIAM PALMER, M.A. OF WORCESTER College, Oxford. OXFORD, JOHN HENRY PARKER; J. G. F. AND J. RIVINGTON, LONDON. WHEN you thought it necessary to call publicly on a clergyman of the English Church for proofs of charges which he had made years before against the doctrines and practice of Romanists, and which had been just repeated without any peculiar reference to yourself, or any other circumstance which particularly obliged you at this time to make such a demand; and when you availed yourself of this opportunity to present the doctrines of your Communion to the notice of the English public; it does not seem to me that you have any reason to complain, if another clergyman uses the same liberty which you have yourself taken, and proceeds with a discussion to which you have led the way. The question which formed the principal subject of my first Letter was one, which most deeply and even vitally affects the religious character of Romanism. It was no less than this: Whether in the Church of Rome, created beings receive honours which are only due to God; whether this idolatrous worship is sanctioned and encouraged by authority amongst you, and is allowed generally by the members of the Roman communion without any protests or expressions of dissent. : In maintaining that such an idolatrous worship exists and is authorized amongst you; it was, at the same time, most readily admitted, that every Romanist is not necessarily an idolatera; because idolatry is only allowed and sanctioned in the Roman Church it is not enjoined or imposed on all its members. This is a distinction which you are still unwilling to recognise, and by losing sight of it, you easily involve my statements in apparent contradiction b. Could time be spared for the discussion, it might easily be shewn, that there is no contradiction in those statements. An intelligent reader will easily disentangle them for a Letter I. p. 6, 43. b Wiseman, Remarks, p. 6, 10-13. I shall only observe, that you are mistaken in supposing that I admit “ an immense aggregate of idolatrous Churches into a portion? with Christ's true Church." (p. 13.) To speak of the Roman as an idolatrous Church, would seem to imply that all its members must be idolaters, which I am not prepared to affirm. Romanism, however, i. e. the more popular system of religion in the Roman Church, is superstitious and idolatrous. |