Replies

Orestes Brownson, a former Congregationalist minister. [O.A. Brownson: “Protestantism in a Nutshell,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review, October, 1849, Loc. Cit., pp.136-142.]

The works [on Protestantism] we have, excellent as they are in their way, and admirably fitted to guard the faithful against many of the devices of the enemy to detach them from the church, and to aid and instruct persons in heretical communions who are virtually prepared to return to the church, do not hit the reigning form of Protestantism; they do not reach the seat of the disease,, and are apparently written on the supposition of soundness, where there is , in fact only rottenness. The principles they assume as the basis of their refutation of Protestantism, though nominally professed or conceded by the majority of Protestants are not held with sufficient firmness to be used as the foundation of an argument that is to have any practical efficacy in their conversion. They all appear to assume that Protestants as a body really mean to be Christians, and err only in regard to some of the dogmas of Christianity and the method of determining the faith; that Protestantism is a specific heresy, a distinct and positive form of error, like Arianism or Pelagianism; and that its adherents would regard themselves as bound to reject it, if proved to be repugnant to Christianity, or contrary to the Holy Scriptures. This is a natural and a charitable supposition; but we are sorry to say, that if it was ever warrantable, it is not by any means warrantable in our times [October, 1849], except as to the small number of individuals in the several sects who are mere exceptions to the rule. Protestantism is no specific heresy, is not a distinct or positive form of error, but error in general, indifferent to forms, and receptive of any form or of all forms, as suits the convenience or the exigency of its friends. It is a veritable Proteus, and takes any and every shape judged to be proper to deceive the eyes or to elude the blows of the champions of truth. It is Lutheran, Calvinistic, Arminian, Unitarian, Pantheistic, Atheistic, Pyrrhonistic, each by turns or all at once, as is necessary to its purpose. The Protestant as such has, in the ordinary sense, no principles to maintain, no character to support, no consistency to preserve; and we are aware of no authority, no law, no usage, by which he will consent to be bound. Convict him from tradition, and he appeals to the Bible; convict him from the Bible, and he appeals to reason; convict him from reason, and he appeals to private sentiment; convict him from private sentiment, and he appeals to scepticism, or flies back to reason, to Scripture, or tradition, and alternately from one to the other, never scrupling to affirm, one moment, what he denied the moment before, nor blushing to be found maintaining that of contradictories both may be true. He is indifferent as to what he asserts or denies, if able for the moment to obtain an apparent covert from his pursuers.

Protestants do not study for the truth, and are never to be presumed willing to accept it, unless it chances to be where and what they wish it. They occasionally read our [Catholic] books and listen to our arguments, but rarely to ascertain our doctrines, or to learn what we are able to say against them or for ourselves. The thought, that we may possibly be right, seldom occurs to them; and when it does, it is instantly suppressed as an evil thought, as a temptation from the devil. They take it for granted, that, against us, they are right, and cannot be wrong. This is with them a 'fixed fact,' admitting no question. [b]They condescend to consult what doctrines they can profess, or what modifications they can introduce into those which they have professed, that will best enable them to elude our attacks, or give them the appearance of escaping conviction by the authorities from tradition, Scriptures, reason, and sentiment which we array against them. Candor or ingenuousness towards themselves even is a thing wholly foreign to their Protestant nature, and they are instinctively and habitually cavillers and sophisticators. They disdain to argue a question on its merits, and always, if they argue at all, argue it on some unimportant collateral. They never recognize it, unless it in their interest to do so, any distinction between a transeat and a concedo. and rarely fail to insist that the concession of an irrelevant point is a concession of the main issue. They have no sense of responsibility, no loyalty to truth, no mental chastity, no intellectual sincerity. What is for them is authority which no body must question; what is against them is no authority at all. Their own word if not in their favor, they refuse to accept; and the authority to which they professedly appeal they repudiate the moment it is seen not to sustain them. To reason with them as if they would stand by their own professions, or could or would acknowledge any authority but their own ever varying opinions, is entirely to mistake them, and to betray our own simplicity.

Undoubtedly, many of our friends, who have not, like ourselves, been brought up Protestants, and have not to blush at the knowledge their Protestant experience has given them, may feel that in this judgment we are rash and uncharitable. Would that we were so. We take no pleasure in thinking ill of any portion of our fellow men, and would always rather find ourselves wrong in our unfavorable judgments of them than right. But in this matter the evidence is too clear and conclusive to allow us even to hope that we are wrong. There is not a single Protestant doctrine opposed to Catholicity that even Protestants themselves have not over and over again completely refuted; there is not a single charge brought by Protestants against the church that some of them, as well as we, have not fully exploded; and no more conclusive vindication of the claims of Catholicity can be desired than may be, nay, than in fact has been collected from distinguished Protestant writers themselves. This is a fact which no Protestant, certainly no Catholic, can deny. How happens it, then, that the Protestant world still subsists, and that, for the last hundred and fifty years [we may add another hundred and fifty years to this figure. Ed.] we have made comparatively little progress in regaining Protestants to the Church?

We may, it is true, be referred to the obstinacy in error characteristic of all heretics; but, in the present case, unless what is meant is obstinacy in error in general, and not error in particular, this will not suffice as an answer; because, during this period, there has been no one particular form of error to which Protestants have uniformly adhered. No class of Protestants adheres today to the opinions it originally avowed. In this respect, there is a marked difference between the Protestant sects of modern times and the early Oriental sects. The Jacobite holds to day the same specific heresy which he held a thousand years ago; and the Nestorian of the nineteenth is substantially the Nestorian of the fourth century. But nothing analogous is true of any of the modern Protestant sects. Protestants boast, indeed. their glorious reformation. but they no longer hold the views of its authors. Luther. were he to ascend to the scenes of his earthly labors, would be utterly unable to recognize his teachings in the doctrines of the modern Lutherans; the Calvinist remains a Calvinist only in name; the Baptist disclaims his Anabaptist origin; the Unitarian points out the errors he detects In his Socinian ancestors; and the Transcendentalist looks down with pity on his Unitarian parents, while he considers it a cruel persecution to be excluded from the Unitarian family. No sect retains unmodified, unchanged, the precise form of error with which it set out. All the forms Protestantism has from time to time assumed have been developed, modified, altered, almost as soon as assumed, always as internal or external controversy made it necessary or expedient. Here is a fact nobody can deny, and it proves conclusively that the Protestant world does not subsist solely by virtue of its obstinate attachment to the views or opinions to which it has once committed itself, or in consequence of its aversion to change the doctrines it has once professed . . . .

A sort of honesty and sincerity we certainly concede to the generality of Protestants; but as to the end for which they profess their doctrines, rather than as to the doctrines themselves. The principle common to them, and the only one we can always be sure they will practically adhere to, is, that the end justifies the means. The end they propose is, neither to save their souls nor to discover and obey the truth, but to destroy or elude Catholicity. The spirit which possesses them maddens them against the church, and gives them an inward repugnance to everything not opposed to her. To overthrow her, to blot out her existence, or to prevent her from crushing them with the weight of her truth, is to them a praiseworthy end, at least a great and most desirable end: directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, it becomes the ruling passion after money getting of their lives, a passion in which they are confirmed and strengthened by all the blandishments of the world, and all the seductions of the flesh. Any means which tend to gratify this passion, to realize this end, they hold to be lawful, and they can adopt them, however base, detestable, or shocking in themselves, with a quiet conscience and admirable self complacency.