ture.

MR. CAMPBELL. If such is the nature of angels, they are virtuous by nature. Perfect liberty consists in acting in unison with our naBISHOP PURCELL. Then the angels are virtuous without being free. If the rebel angels were virtuous by nature, how did they happen to fall? And could not God have made the angels who are now good, by nature, or by grace, such from creation? I will now continue my argument. It does not exceed the power of God to make man infal lible. Christ was infallible; for he was God. Now if he could make twelve men infallible, as Mr. C. admits the apostles were, why could he not perpetuate the same power in favor of his entire church, since such infallible authority to teach his true doctrine is as necessary now, as it was at any former time?

Now I have another strong argument_here-it is old with us, but suggested anew by reading one of the Protestant papers, from New York. It is the Palladium, and my friend seems to know the editor, for he himself has given occasion for the very article in question. The argument is this: If tradition be fallible, and it was not known for 300 years, what books of the bible were genuine, and what spu rious, how shall we ascertain that we have the bible? How shall we ever know that the book is the book of God? The making of the ca non or list of books composing the inspired volume, was a difficulty yielding to but few others in magnitude, during the first four hundred years of Christianity, when, if we must believe my friend, infallibility had departed, with the last of the apostles, to heaven. How then can we be sure that our present canon is correct? Catholics can be sure on this vital point, for they have the voucher of an infallible guardian of the holy deposit, for its correctness; but Protestants, who have no such tribunal to enlighten them, how can they be sure? Catholics hold that infallibility was promised to the church by Jesus Christ. Its testimony is heard in a general council, or in the pope's decision in which all assent. The church can subsist without a general council. General councils are not essential-though frequently of use, because, though we all believe without exception, that the pope's decision, in which, after it has been duly made known, all the bishops of the Catholic world acquiesce, is infallible, still the decision of a general council declares in a more impressive and solemn, though not more authentic, manner, the belief of the Catholic world on the contested doctrine, and thus more effectually proscribe the contrary error. The celebrated Protestant, Leibnitz, remarked that there could be no certainty of a correct decision on religious matters, equal to that afforded by the decision of a general council. The four sects Mr. C. speaks of all agree in the belief of the infallibility of the church representative and of the church responsive; if I must employ these technical terms-and as he asks "could not the Holy Ghost, who inspired the apostles, teach as clearly as the Fathers in their councils?" I answer, Yes,' and he has so taught us to "HEAR THE CHURCH," for, no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation.

Let me now vindicate the humblest Roman Catholic of my flock, or of the world, from the charge of pinning his faith to the sleeve of any man, or of surrendering his conscience to the keeping of his priest. Catholics do not believe because the priest tells them to believe, but because they consider him to be the faithful interpreter of Christ and the

organ of the church, but should he dissent from the oracles of God and his ecclesiastical superiors, that moment they would quit him. They see his teaching accords with that which they have heard from others, which they have read, as the Catholic doctrine. If they doubt, they ask other priests, or the bishop. Thus while they know the priest to be orthodox, they hear him, or rather the church, they hear God and they believe God. And in this there is no servility. The faith he teaches and the moral law he expounds, have both come from God, and to God they owe and pay their vows. My friend misapprehends me. I did not say that Protestants hated Catholics. I say that some Protestants are often prejudiced against them, and I wondered they are not more so. If he could prove the odious proposition so long before you, the Catholic church would be a monster. I am sorry my friend has misunderstood the doctrines of the Catholics, and I am glad of the opportunity which is thus afforded me, of coming before the public and showing what are our real sentiments.

I come to the doctrine of infallibility again. I will begin my argument this evening, and conclude perhaps to-morrow morning. 1 beg leave to read what I have myself written on this subject:

Whoever reflects upon the countless varieties of human character, the ignorance of some men, the prejudices of others, the passions of all, will scarcely require that we should expend much time or labor to prove, that as long as men are commanded to form their religion for themselves, even though the book they receive for their guide should be the plainest in its language that divine wisdom could bestow, the sources of error will be never drained. No matter how pure the doctrine of that book, how holy its precepts, how luminous its evidences, occasions will occur, when these doctrines will be contested, these precepts denied, these beaming evidences obscure to the pride, the voluptuousness, and the love of independence, inherent in a perverted nature. Man, under the influence of such feelings, will read, will write; he will communicate his doubts and impart his prejudices to others; he will originate new creeds, and form new sects; he will raise altar against altar, and desk against desk; nor will any one, consistently with Protestant principles, have a right to ask him why he does so. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the right of forming religion, every man for himself, and the bible for us all, was first promulgated, the fierce self-constituted apostle sounded a deafening peal of defiance, and denounced all authority in religious concerns as spiritual tyranny. "Read the scriptures!" he vociferated to the astonished crowd of wise or foolish, learned or unlearned, that thronged to hear him. "Read the scriptures, and judge for yourselves: your reason and the spirit will enable you to understand them, as easily as you can discern hot from cold, or sweet from bitter. Read the scriptures they that run may read. Judge for yourselves!" They did read, they did judge for themselves; and they decided against their apostles, and against one another!

"When hell," says an illustrious writer, "prepares some terrible calamity for mankind, it flings upon the earth a pregnant evil, consigning its development to time." The time for the development of this mischief was brief. The word was uttered, and it could not be recalled the principle was established, which it was too late to rescind. The disciples of the new apostles, reading, judging, deciding, became

apostles themselves. They claimed the right their teachers exercised. They claimed it to change, as they had changed. The Lutherans, multitudes of them, became Calvinists; Calvinists, Independents; Independents, Anabaptists; each sect the prolific parent of twenty others, all differing from one another, as much as each one differed from its parent-innovation. Mark now the inconsistency to which the evil working of this scheme reduced the first claimants of a right unheard of for fifteen centuries. "Obey!" they now cry aloud, with terror, "obey your superiors; submit to the pastors whom God has appointed to rule the faithful. It is their duty to instruct you, yours to follow the guidance of their wisdom." "What," they exclaimed, "becomes of the subordination which the scriptures so frequently enjoin, if each one can be the arbiter of his own belief? What becomes of humility, which religion so forcibly inculcates, if every individual presumes to be an oracle and a judge? What would become of civil law and social harmony and order, if the acts of our legislatures were left to the interpretation of every interested litigant? Forbear! forbear!" Such was the restraint, as every one knows, which Luther was under the inevitable necessity of imposing on the first followers of his revolt, in order to counteract the effects of the disastrous principle of mental emancipation, so highly eulogized when it was first proclaimed, and received with so much enthusiasm, until it was found to be a very Babel of the confusion of all creeds-another name, or else a cloak, for deism and positive infidelity. When we reason on principles rightly understood, whose immediate bearings and remotest consequences have been exposed to the examination of the reflecting world, for the last three hundred years, these arguments are as conclusive to-day, as they were when first urged; and when the right of any individual to believe whatever errors he honestly conceives to be truths revealed in scripture, is contested, he may say to his accusers, in the eloquent language of the Protestant remonstrants to the synod of Dort (itself Protestant), which had infringed their privileges in this respect: "Why exact that our inspiration, or our judgment, should yield to your opinion? The opinion of any society, our apostles, the first reformers, declared to be fallible; and, consequently, to exact submission to its dictates, they, with great consistency, defined to be tyranny. Thus they decided with regard to the church of Rome; and you, yourselves, have sanctioned their decision. Why, therefore, exercise a domination over us, which you stigmatized as tyranny in a church, compared to whose greatness you dwindle into insignificance. If resistance to the decisions of our pastors be a crime, then let us wipe out the stain of our origin, and run back together to the fold of Catholicity, which you and we have abandoned. If such resistance be no crime, why require of us a submission which we do not owe you. Allow us to differ from you, as you do from the parent church." From the unanswerable logic of this remonstrance, the conclusion follows irresistibly: 1. That every society formed on Protestant principles, being essentially fallible, none should assert the inconsistent pretension of controlling faith by authority, or of regulating creeds, under pretence of superior wisdom. 2. That no such society, and, therefore, no individual, in such society, can be sure of being in the right, as long as his Protestant neighbor, with as many resources of information, and as piously inclined as himself, has embraced the very

contrary of his opinion. 3. That as the entire system is based on the possibility of each one's being mistaken, where the most learned and pious have adopted such opposite conclusions, no one can ever make an act of divine faith, which is incompatible with uncertainty, and much more so with error. 4. That, as long as such a principle is upheld, there is no hope of union, no security; consequently, that either the whole system is false, or some expedient of union and unity must be discovered, to induce any conscientious and rational inquirer after truth, to believe that the Protestant society exemplifies the efficacy of the prayer of Christ for his disciples, the night before he suffered, that "they may be made perfect in one." We entreat our readers seriously to look into the different religions professing to have been founded by Jesus Christ, and seriously ask themselves the question, in which of all these, that " PERFECT ONENESS" (which, better than all other proofs, establishes the divinity of the Son of God, and convinces the entire world how much his heavenly Father loved him, and those whom he had given to him) may be found. Let not this inquiry be neglected, nor yet performed lightly; eternal life or death may be the consequence of its good or bad prosecution.

ny. tue.

Error in religion, when it results from the neglect of sincere and prayerful enquiry, is criminal. This no intelligent Christian will deGod is as essentially the God of truth, as he is the God of virHe can no more sanction error, than he can tolerate vice. His right is as absolute to the submission of the understanding, as to the obedience of the will; and as he, who violates one commandment will not be saved for the observance of the rest, so he that rejects one truth, which Almighty God has revealed-not that we may examine, contest, adopt or reject-but that we may believe it, has lost the merit of saving faith. It is to fix the otherwise perpetual variations of the human mind, and secure the anchor of our faith, not in the moving sands of man's vacillating judgments and uncertain opinions, but by lodging it deeply and indissolubly in the rock which the Divine Architect has made the foundation of his church, and against which the winds of error and the rain of dissolving scandal will rage and beat in vain, that the Word made Flesh vouchsafed to become the Light of the world.

The misfortune of the great majority of mankind at the present day, is not so much a blind fanatical attachment, (bad as this is) to the sect in which they chanced to be born, or were first instructed, as a certain latitude of principle, which has obtained the specious name of liberality, and which resolves itself into a fatal and unreasonable indifference to all religions, true or false. The infidel who has had but too frequent occasion to exult at the success of a wily system of hostility to revealed truth, affects to be unable to restrain his delight at beholding variety pervading the religious, as well as the physical world. Diversity of creeds is as pleasing to his eye, as the discrepancy of features in the human countenance. Incapable of reasoning, out of the sphere of matter, of which it is his inverted ambition to be a part, he holds the different religions professed by men to be so many institutions, prescribing for each country a uniform manner of honoring God in public; all founded and having their peculiar reasons in the climate, the mode of government, the genius

of the people, or in some other local cause, which renders one form of religion preferable, for them, to another.

The conclusion to be drawn from this doctrine, in as much as it levels all distinctions between truth and falsehood, good and evil, is humiliating to reason-but the infidel, for once consistent, recoils not before it the following is his language-" Sincerely profess, piously practise the religion of the country in which you live. In other words, born in a pagan country, adore its gods-sacrifice to Jupiter, to Mars, to Priapus, or to Apollo. In Egypt, you will render divine honors to the sacred ox, and the crocodile; in Phenicia, you will pass your children through the fires of Moloch; in one country, you will immolate human victims to your idol; in another, you will humbly bow before a block of marble, or of wood-before an animal, fossil, or a plant. Be not afraid; God will not send one man to heaven for having been born in Rome, nor another to hell for having been born in Constantinople. Therefore, in the latter place you will cry, 'God is God and Mahomet is his prophet;' and in the former, you will anathematise the impostor. A Christian in Europe, a Mussulman in Persia, an Idolater in Congo, on the banks of the Ganges an adorer of Vishnou, let not truth dictate the choice of your religion, but chance-let not reason decide, but the measurement of a degree of latitude, or longitude. Your credulous parent paid divine honors to an onion; preserve this domestic worship-a son can never do wrong in following the religion of his father." But all this, it will be said, is unworthy of God and degrading to man. Not at all, he replies, all religions are equal-you were born in this, to practise another would be presumption. Such is the reasoning of the instructor of Emile, the theology of Hobbes, the profession of faith of the author of Zaire. "Chretienne dans Paris, Mussulmane en ces lieux, J'aurois avec la Grece adoré les faux Dieux."

That the unbeliever should thus eat promiscuously of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, life and death, should not create surprise. His joy consists in his being able to doubt of the validity of the proofs of religion-his only peace in life, his only security in death being made to depend on the delusive conviction of the improbability of ever arriving with certainty at the knowledge of revealed truth-the only truth, after all, it must be admitted, which it is necessary for man to know-and consequently the only truth which God is bound by all his essential and unchangeable attributes to enable us to attain.

The basis of Protestant belief is, that the Scripture, this book of di vine revelation, is the only rule of faith; and that Jesus Christ having left on earth no living infallible authority to interpret it, every man is obliged to expound it, for himself, or in other words, to seek in it the religion, in which he is to live and by which he must be saved. His duty is to believe, what, it seems to him, this book clearly teaches and what as far as he has ascertained by subjecting it to the test of private examination, contradicts not his reason: and as no man has a right to say to another, "my reason is more vigorous, my judgment more sound than yours," it follows that every man should abstain from condemning the interpretation of another and should consider all religions, at least, as good and as safe as his own. This is the infidel principle in disguise. The Deist takes the book of nature, the Protestant takes the Bible. The former reads in his book, that the Supreme Being must