The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
Rhodes's Visible Unity of the Catholic Church, 140.
Ramière's De l'Unité dans l'Enseignement de la Philosophie, etc.,
284.
Sacrifice, the Double, 144.
Statutes of the Second Synod of Albany, 287.
Stanislas Kostka, Life of, 575.
Stations of the Cross, Album of, 576.
Sacred Heart, Devotion to, 720.
The Sun, 288.
Visible Unity of the Church, 140.
Visitation, History of the Order of, 719.
Vénard, Théophane, Life of, 858.
Waldenses, Melia on the, 428.
Wise Men, and who they were, Upham's, 431.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XI., No. 61.--APRIL, 1870.
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.[1]
LAST ARTICLE.
In our third article on the Abbé Martin's exhaustive work on
the future of Protestantism and Catholicity, we disposed of the
pretension of Protestants that the Reformation created and has
sustained civil and political liberty in modern society. We proceed
in the present and concluding article to dispose, as far as we
can, of the pretension that it has founded and sustained religious
liberty, or the freedom of conscience.
No fact is more certain than that the Reformation has the credit
with non-Catholics, if not even with some half-instructed Catholics
themselves, of having originated religious liberty and vindicated
the freedom of the mind. Here as elsewhere the formula of the age,
or what claims to be enlightened in it, is, Protestantism and
freedom, or Catholicity and slavery; and it is to its _prestige_ of
having founded and sustained religious liberty that Protestantism
owes its chief ability in our times to carry on its war against the
church. Protestantism, like all false religions or systems, having
no foundation in truth and no vital energy of its own, lives and
prospers only by availing itself of the so-called spirit of the
age, or by appealing to the dominant public opinion of the time and
the place. In the sixteenth century, the age tended to the revival
of imperialism or cæsarism, and Protestantism favored monarchical
absolutism, and drew from it its life, its force, and its sustenance.
The spirit or dominant tendency of our age, dating from the middle of
the last century, has been and is the revival of the pagan republic,
or, as we call it, democratic cæsarism, which asserts for the people
as the state the supremacy which under imperialism is asserted for
the emperor. Protestantism lives and sustains itself now only by
appealing to and representing this tendency, as we may see in the
contemporary objections to the church, that she is "behind the age,"
"does not conform to the age," "is hostile to the spirit of the
age," "opposed to the spirit of the nineteenth century."
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