Fable the Basis of the Protestant View

Lecture 3 of Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England.

Delivered on Monday, July 14, 1851.

It was my aim, Brothers of the Oratory, in my preceding Lecture, to investigate, as far as time and place allowed, how it was that the one-sided view of the great religious controversy, which commenced between Rome and England three centuries since, has been so successfully maintained in this country. Many things have changed among us during that long period; but the hatred and the jealousy entertained by the population towards the Catholic Faith, and the scorn and pity which are felt at the sight of its adherents, have not passed away, have not been mitigated. In that long period, society has undergone various alterations; public opinion has received a development new in the history of the world, and many remarkable revolutions in national principle have followed. The received views on the causes and the punishment of crime, on the end of government, on the mutual relations of town and country, on international interests, and on many other great political questions, have sustained, to say the least, great modifications; sciences, unknown before, bearing upon the economy of social life, have come into being; medicine has been the subject of new doctrines, which have had their influence on various civil and municipal arrangements; how is it, then, that the feeling against Catholicism has remained substantially what it was in the days of Charles the Second or of George the Third? How is it that Protestantism has retained its ascendancy, and that Catholic arguments and Catholic principles are at once misconstrued and ignored? And what increases the wonder is, that externally to our own island it has happened otherwise; there is scarcely a country besides ours where Catholicism is not at least respected, even if it is not studied; and what is more observable still, scarcely a country besides ours, originally Protestant, in which Protestantism even exists at present, — if by Protestantism is understood the religion of Luther and Calvin. The phenomenon, great in itself, becomes greater by its thus seeming to be all but peculiar to the British population.

(Continue.)

P.S. Thanks.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 07/14/06 07:59:43 AM
Categorized as Historical & Literary & Religious & Speeches and Suchlike & The Present Position of Catholics.