THE CONGREGATIONAL MAGAZINE. OCTOBER, 1841. "NO POPERY!" THE car should try words as the mouth tasteth meat, for if words are the vehicles, so also are they often the veils, of truth. The watchwords of party, and the sayings of the people, have not always expressed the things they meant. In the name of liberty, despots have been enthroned, and nations enslaved. In the name of Truth, her votaries have been discouraged, and error crowned. "For the glory of God," religion has been proscribed; and "for the good of the church," Christians, branded as "infidels," have been consigned to infamy and death. "Cæsar!" cried the maddened people, but no loyalty was in their cry: all they meant was Away with Him!" It has been the fashion to cry "No Popery!" meaning thereby to warn, lest Popery become ascendant, and to plead for the legislative depression of its friends. Who are they who have raised, and have Note.-The following letter will inform our readers from whence we have received this spirit-stirring article. 66 TO THE EDITOR OF THE CONGREGATIONAL MAGAZINE. "SIR,-The Committee of the Evangelical Voluntary Church Association have contemplated with much satisfaction your able and consistent advocacy of the great principles of civil and religious liberty, and feel a confidence in your readiness to promote especially that feature of them which respects the support of religion, by the voluntary contributions of its friends, instead of by compulsory assessments on the community. "The Committee indulge the hope, that your sense of the importance of adapting your advocacy of this principle to the exigency of the times, will lead you, not only to aid its progress by the direct efforts of your own pen, but by allowing the occasional insertion in your journal of contributions from gentlemen connected with this Society, made under the sanction of its Committee. I therefore enclose a paper, with the request that it may obtain an early insertion in your useful periodical. "I am Sir, yours very respectfully, "ANDREW G. FULLER, Secretary." N. S. VOL. V. 4 T ever been, and still are, loudest in the cry? Are they those exclusively, who have done the most by their writings, or preaching, or example, to expose the errors of the Romish church? Are they those who are furthest from Rome? Those who stand least upon human tradition? Those whose religion is most conformed to scriptural dictate? Those whose tolerance of others in general is most remarkable? Those who ask, and would have others ask, not of "the church," but of their own minds, "What saith the Scriptures?" It is notoriously otherwise. It is the spirit of Popery, the spirit of ascendancy that stimulates the cry, for it is that alone which fears a rival. Fellow countrymen! awaken to the fact, that it is solely because there is a national church establishment in this land—a state church—that we have reason to apprehend Roman Catholic ascendancy. It is true that Popery is advancing. It is true that Popery, assuming as it does for the church a divine right to judge for the people what is truth, is and must be intolerant. It is true that its history is written in blood, and that no denials, no arguments, or even sophistry, can wipe from its published and current documents its broad and glaring sanetion of whatever oppression, even unto cruel death, may be deemed needful to exterminate whatsoever is not submissive to itself. It is true that (whatever bright examples of ardent piety, of tender charity, and generous equity, may have been, or may be found in its communion) all that is terrible to rational liberty may be feared, if it should be armed with power giving scope to its persecuting and inexorable spirit. That Popery is advancing is no light thing-believe and tremble! But how shall it be arrested? By force? Nay! Even were it possible, which it is not, this were to act upon its own spirit, and to invite a day of dreadful retribution. How then? By discountenancing its spirit wherever found. And where is it found? Wherever man, the gentlest though he be and most sincere, and ever mitigating by his tears the hot fire of his zeal; wherever man compels or desires to compel others to sustain and teach any thing whatever as the doctrine and will of Heaven. It exists, therefore, in all national church establishments, as the very principle of their being, however comparatively tolerant, and however orthodox the church established. Whatever may or might be the church established, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, or aught else, the principle of its existence, as an established church, is one of compulsion, the compulsion in every case equally claiming to be justified by divine authority, and having no possible justification except upon the ground that those who enforce have a divine right to do so. This is the essence, the genius, the life of Popery. Popery sitting in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God, and consistently, therefore, spurning as contumacious every one who dares ask, What is truth? except of "the church," is but the principle fully developed. The principle of Popery, therefore, and of every church or individual who recognizes a right or propriety in the state, to teach or sustain religion at the public cost are so far identical-and so exactly are they thus far identical, that the keenest discernment may be defied to discover the slightest difference. If other churches and their adherents are less intolerant, their tolerance discredits their consistency. Every sect that does not repudiate the sentiment that the state should provide religious teachers for the people, is of necessity in principle, and ought to be in practice, if the principle is good, a persecuting sect. Every act of toleration by a church-supporting state, is contradictory and suicidal, and nothing was more rational in sincere advocates of our church establishment, as an institution religiously required, than their opposition to Roman Catholic emancipation, although nothing could be more irrational than their professions at the same time of tolerance in general, and their forbearance to condemn the legislative permission of any dissent. When the Roman Catholics were emancipated, (the state church continuing,) it was to be expected that they would rapidly prosper; that their cathedrals would soon rear their gorgeous and portentous fronts, and cast their proud and ominous shadows. It was to be expected that preparation would be made for a future struggle; that all that was noble and chivalric in the Catholic laity would be engaged as by new bonds and incited by new hopes, to further the fortunes of "the church"a church from which they might look for personal consideration in this world, and rewards in the next, proportioned to the glory it should reassume by their endeavours. Its members, now, free as citizens, naturally, and (according to their notions) rightly, strive to place it in that position of honour, which the constitution, or principle, of the national legislation assigns to the state church, and which position they see occupied, or rather usurped, as they would say, by another that has robbed it of its wealth, and shorn it of its crown. The Roman Catholics aiming to become ascendant! To be sure they are, and while the golden bait invites, they will be. It was injustice to exclude them from equal rights with other citizens, on account of their religion, but it was madness to admit them to their present freedom, (supposing it could be helped,) without at the same time dissolving the alliance between church and state. The emancipation was a just act, but the justice stopped short. It was the partial opening of a door that should indeed never have been shut, but which, if the parties holding the key-side were right in doing so, they should have kept closed-especially against those who were well known as stern assertors of a prior right to be the warders. To admit them to the warders' side, the wardship being a lucrative affair, was to invite their craft and cupidity, and to invoke their energy, union, and perseverance, in effort to seize the golden prize. When emancipation was conceded the warder's office should have been abolished. It is true (nothing is more so) that the legislature opened the door unwillingly, and to avoid what it deemed a worse evil. But this only shows the false position in which the principle of national church establishments places a government. It must refuse justice or concede a fool's justice, that is, a justice destructive of its own ends, and stultifying its own views. It must sternly resist all encroachments on the church's supremacy, denying altogether religious liberty, and persecuting all her opponents even unto death, or it must contradict her high claims and peril her existence as the state church, by licensing her rivals to proclaim their opposing doctrines, and to proselyte from her communion; thus encouraging their aim, and enlarging their power, to effect her expulsion. There is no consistent medium, no medium that does not revolt right reason and true religion, between the intolerance of fiercest Popery and the equal liberty of perfect voluntaryism. But this is not all. To be menaced with loss of liberty, to see manhood trampled in the dust, to see Britons bound to a priestly chair, to see their children blinded to their birthright and recreant to their name, themselves the victims, and preparing to be the instruments, of priestly arrogance-this is not all; for all this might be, and no interests be touched but those of time, no destiny affected beyond the narrow compass of a mortal's life, and then no ground had existed for strongest adjuration, no ground for appeal in the names of eternity, immortality, heaven, and perdition. Not only is all that manhood shrinks from involved, but all that Christianity holds dear; the destruction of vice, the triumph of virtue, the worship of God in spirit and in truth, the salvation of men and the honour of Christ as sole head of his church and last judge of mankind. The principle which constitutes the power of Popery, and which alone makes its follies fearful; the principle that it is the duty of those who have the means, to enforce upon the people the support of the opinions and teachers of "the church;" and which principle is equally that of all established churches, is no less dangerous to truth and man's immortal weal than it is to his temporal peace and dignity. Admit it, and whatever there may be revolting to reason and outrageous to humanity, whatever there may be derogatory to the word of God in tradition, of distortion and perversion in ceremonies, of deadliness in formalism, of poison in heresy, of discouragement to simple godliness, and holy zeal, and healthful practice-all may be sanctioned, animated, and seven times strengthened, by force of law. Reject it, and all these things are comparatively innoxious, having no public stamp of truth, no artificial support, no fostering beams of public recognition and legislative sanction investing them with a guise of virtue and propriety in the eyes of the uninquiring, and gathering and combining, as their friends and apologists and fierce defenders, and alas! their victims, all who account fashion bliss, and spirituality disgrace, and the requirements and interdicts of true religion bondage. It is this which renders error fearful. If Popery could not be established, if the principle of national church establishments were repudiated L by the nation through its legislature, the power of Popery for evil would have small scope, and its spirit of dominancy no pabulum. Why does Puseyism attract so much attention, and excite in Protestants so much alarm, but simply because it is in the state church that it appears? Had it arisen elsewhere, it would have glimmered in despised and impotent obscurity, and found fewer to sustain its dishonest claims, and to assist in diffusing its noxious gleam. Awake, fellow-countrymen, to the fact that Popery is advancing. No longer trifle with the fact, but mark well how and where it is advancing. It is in the established church, and nowhere else amongst nominal Protestants, that Popery, scarcely disguised, is doing its deadly work, and rapidly diffusing its degrading influence, stamping credulity as faith, and faith as infidelity, and forging chains in the name of that truth which is the charter of liberty. It is the church established by law that shelters all who may choose to call themselves of its fold, be their doctrines or even practices almost ever so opposed to its own articles, and so comprises not only the good, but arrays under its name the most varied and opposite opinionists in fortified and honoured hostility to truth and piety, within and without its pale. Awake, fellowcountrymen, from the delusion that has blinded you, and turn the tables, not in anger, but in fair retort, on those who have misrepresented the natural, and indeed the inevitable, though unconcerted, combinations of dissenters with others, not against the church which happens to be established, but merely against invasions of their own equitable liberty, resulting from the establishment and maintenance of that church by force of law. Turn the tables on these calumniators of, so far, blameless men, seeking no spoil, aiming at no injury, but aspiring simply to effect an object which appears to them of highest import to the nation's weal. What do they seek but the dissolution of a legislative arrangement, which they believe is, and must be, while man is man and the arrangement exists, the grand inlet to the ministerial function of worldly, and therefore incompetent, men; the great obstacle therefore to the progress of social piety; the shield of heresy; the spring and support of formalism; the foe of inquiry, and consequently the opponent of just liberty; and so the source of discord, and of that combination, which is alleged as matter of complaint, but which cannot but exist so long as there are good men who believe the arrangement to be wrong, and patriotic men who deem it injurious, and men, good and patriotic, or otherwise, who feel it to be unequal, and so, of necessity, opposed to sound and useful legislation? Fellow countrymen ! are ye indeed men? Then dare to look at this legislative compact between the church and the state. Suppress all passion, banish prejudice, and look calmly at the thing as a matter in which your country and the world, yourselves and your children, have the deepest and most enduring stake. Why should you hesitate thus to |