Count de Montalambert, in his recently published 'Letter to the Rev. Mr.
Neale on the Architectural, Artistical, and Archaeological Movements of
the Puseyites,' enters his 'protest' against the most unwarranted and
unjustifiable assumption of the name of Catholic by people and things
belonging to the actual Church of England. _'It is easy,'_ he observes,
_'to take up a name, but it is not so easy to get it recognised by the
world and by competent authority. Any man for example, may come out to
Madeira and call himself a Montmorency, or a Howard, and even enjoy the
honour and consideration belonging to such a name till the real
Montmorencys or Howards hear something about it, and denounce him, and
then such a man would be justly scouted from society, and fall down much
lower than the lowness from which he attempted to rise. The attempt to
steal away from us and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the
Church of England that glorious title of Catholic is proved to be an
usurpation by every monument of the past and present--by the coronation
oath of your sovereigns--by all the laws which have established your
Church--even by the recent answer of your University of Oxford to the
lay address against Dr. Pusey, &c., where the Church of England is
justly styled the Reformed Protestant Church. The question then is, have
you, the Church of England, got the picture for your frame? have you got
the truth, the one truth; the same truth as the men of the middle ages.
The Camden Society says yes; but the whole Christian world, both
Protestant and Catholic, says no; and the Catholic world adds that there
is no truth but in unity, and this unity you most certainly have not.
One more; every Catholic will repeat to you the words of Manzoni, as
quoted by M. Faber: 'The greatest deviations are none if the main point
be recognised; the smallest are damnable heresies, if it be denied. That
main point is the infallibility of the Church, or rather of the Pope.'_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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