0127619

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

Rec Nov 7.1846

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, by THE AUTHOR,

In the Clerk's Office for the Southern District of New York.

DEAN, PRINTER, 2 ANN STREET, N. Y.

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INTRODUCTION.

WITHIN the last forty years, there has been, in the public mind of almost all Protestant nations, a growing disposition to reconsider the grounds of the great schism of the Sixteenth century, in consequence of which, so many have been separated from the unity of the Christian Church. During this period, numerous conversions to the Catholic faith have occurred, among men high in rank and station, and eminent in the walks of science and literature. England, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and the different States of Protestant, as well as Catholic, Germany, have all furnished remarkable instances. These examples appeared, at the time, to have had no effect on the general feeling of the nations in which they occurred. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible, in the good providence of God, that they should not have had great influence in predisposing the minds of others remotely, and perhaps without their own consciousness of the fact, to take a more calm and sober view of the whole controversy. The new religions had been undergoing the experiment of practice, for nearly three hundred years, side by side with the ancient faith. The results were before men's eyes; and it required only a dispassionate and sincere mind to judge of them. On the one hand, the Catholics were seen held together, under the most adverse circumstances of civil and social relations, in the universal communion of one Church. On the other side, Protestants always disagreed among themselves. Every effort made towards attaining unity, resulted, among them, in fresh divisions. The Catholic Church was seen moving onward, amidst the convulsions and disorders of the times, in the same undeviating course which had been traced out for her from the beginning;-the Protestants, on the other hand, exhibited the new system of religion as resting on no permanent

or immutable basis; but dependent on temporal circumstances, and the vicissitudes and uncertainty of human opinion. Under the former, reason recognized the dominion of faith in all matters of revelation; under the latter, reason was made the judge of faith itself; and the practical consequences could be traced, from the wild and fitful outbursts of religious feeling, which marked the first days of the great schism, especially in Germany, down to the cold and Christ-denying speculations of its rationalism in our own times.

The individual instances, to which we have alluded, of a return to the ancient faith, must have served as occasions for bringing these comparative results before the minds of serious and reflecting men of both communions. But they must have done more. The Catholic religion had been represented as suited only to ages of ignorance and mental darkness; and this prejudice must have been confounded, as men of the purest character, and most powerful intellects, were seen, from time to time, passing over to Catholicism in the full light of the nineteenth century. Such examples, and in increasing numbers, are witnessed from day to day. But within the last fifteen or twenty years, the controversy between the two communions has assumed new features, altogether favorable to Catholicity. Among the Protestant clergy on the continent, several distinguished authors have come forward to vindicate certain portions of ecclesiastical history, as well as the character of certain Popes, from the foul aspersions and misrepresentations of the earlier Protestant writers. In England, on the other hand, the venerable dogmas of the Catholic faith have been, to a great extent, vindicated in the writings of the Oxford Tractarians. In both cases, it is to be remembered, that the testimonies in favor of truth, are those of adversaries; but it is this circumstance that gives them additional weight, on the general bearing and issue of the great question. Protestants would not receive, generally, the testimony of Catholic witnesses on these subjects; but when some of the first men in their own ranks bear similar testimony, the effect is calculated to shake, to its very centre, the foundation of their prejudices against the ancient faith.