her hull uninjured, but her cordage worn, her rigging in disorder, and her sails tattered; she was more unseemly to the eye than in favor with her surveyors. It was in such a moment as this, that a disappointed, ambitious friar began to complain, and soon found associates, whose unrestrained passions found in his interpretation of the sacred volume, their long looked-for sanction; yet the congregated band of discordant separatists, was but a miserable minority of a single patriarchate of the Western Church. White may boast, if he will, of the unanimous conviction of contradictory divisions, that it was necessary to destroy the authority of the tribunal which pronounced them all equally in error.

If common sense be the interpreter of divine authority conveyed to us in human language, and that common sense is to be found on the side of the vast majority, White's fact fails him: and our fact being applied to this principle, suffices to point out the guide which he seeks, in that Church which pre-existed to the Gospels; from which the Scriptures received that testimony without which they would be a dead letter; which taught the doctrine of Christ before those Scriptures were written; and which, in the midst of the early controvertists, decided who held their true meaning; which preserved them through centuries of persecution, and ages of anarchy, and presents them to us this day, together with the history of their perversion, and their application, and the evidence of their authority. If common sense be that which is most common, which is Catholic, which is predominant in every age and in every nation of Christianity, and which now, as in every other age, is the expressed conviction of the vast majority of the Christian, that is, the civilized world, that common sense informs us that the Catholic Church, which is united to the Bishop of Rome as its head, and the centre of its unity, has been established by Christ to give his doctrine with infallible certainty, down to the consummation of the world; and as that doctrine is to be found in the correct explanation of the written law where it is ambiguous, that Church could not be the correct teacher of his law, if she could mislead us in that interpretation, nor would he send her to teach and command us to hear error from her lips; and if she errs, to what source shall we turn for certain knowledge. Thus, White's effort was to delude his readers into the very vicious circle in which they falsely charge us with moving, or to the alternative which he gives, private and fallible judgment, which would establish that a thousand contradictions are all divine inspirations of truth, communications from heaven.

Yours, and so forth,

B. C.

LETTER L.

CHARLESTON, S. C., Dec. 17, 1827.

To the Roman Catholics of the United States of America.
My Friends,-I now lay before you the concluding passages of
White's third letter.

"The Reformed Churches are taxed with their variations, as if, like Rome, they had pledged their existence upon infallibility. They have, indeed, varied and dissented from each other; with this difference from the oracular Church of the Vatican, that they have not disguised their proceedings, nor set up an Inquisition as the guard of their unity."

This again insinuates a plain falsehood, viz. that the unity of the Catholic Church is the result of the existence of the Inquisition. When White wrote those letters, the Inquisition did not exist in Spain, it did not exist in Portugal, it did not exist in South America, it did not exist in the East Indies, it did not exist in France, neither could it be said to exist in Italy: it never existed in any other part of the world: and the Catholic Church was and is in unity, though no such tribunal is now placed as its guard: she was in unity during twelve centuries before its institution: nor has the Irish Catholic been drawn away from that unity by the confiscations, the plunderings, the immoral and impious encouragement to children by bribing them with the family property for their seduction, by the imprisonments, the banishments, the gibbetings, and the worse than pagan oppression by which the Church of England sought and continues to seek its preservation. I say the Church of England, because with a very few honorable exceptions, it is her supreme head, her bench of Bishops, and her clergy and their connexions who have devised, and executed and perpetuated this worse than Dioclesian's code, to continue which, White himself has given his aid. "The only security of toleration must be a certain degree of intolerance, in regard to its enemies; as prisons in the freest governments are necessary for the preservation of freedom." For this he "volunteered his testimony in the great pending cause," when the question was concerning the repeal of this code which is to England a mantle of disgrace! Yet this is the man who writes of an Inquisition! ! !— The unity of doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church has subsisted and continues to subsist as well in affliction as in prosperity, equally firm and complete under the persecution of the Emperor of China, and the King of England, as in the free States of this continent, or in the Spanish dominions, or throughout the rest of Catholic Europe, where every man has perfect freedom of conscience. This precious passage

admits what could not be denied, that no Protestant Church can be certain that it teaches the doctrine of Christ: I do not understand what is meant by "disguising their proceedings.'

"But while the love of truth compelled the Reformers to expose themselves to the insults and raillery of their mortal enemies, by breaking into parties upon the more abstruse points of divinity; not even a doubt has disturbed their unanimity as to the insufficiency of the title to divine supremacy, by which Rome commands intellectual homage."

There is nothing more natural than that all who withdraw from unity should assert that it is not necessary; that all who oppose the decisions of a tribunal, should deny its authority. This is an admirable unity! But what are the more abstruse points of divinity? Whether God is one in nature, and three in subsistence. The truth of this which is the most abstruse point of divinity, is for instance not to be ascertained by human sagacity; but by the simple knowledge of the fact that God said such was his nature and subsistence. If he said so; all they who believe in the doctrine of the Trinity are correct, all they who deny it are in error: the want of unity which we charge upon Protestants is not a want of unity of opinion, but a want of unity of doctrine, want of unity of Faith. What White calls the abstruse points of divinity are the doctrines which Christ revealed to man, and he acknowledges that the Reformers, as he calls them, "break into parties" respecting those doctrines. It is clear that as a body they teach glaring contradictions; it is equally plain that some, if not all of them, must teach what contradicts the doctrine of Christ, and no one of them can give us certainty that the contradiction is not taught by itself; thus, by the avowal of White and of the junta, in no Protestant communion can a person have certainty that he does not contradict what the Saviour taught. Mark then the state to which upon their principle Christendom is reduced. The Roman Catholic Church says that it will give the doctrines of revelation with infallible certainty. "No," they exclaim, "neither you nor we, nor any other body can so give them." Of course no human being can be certain that he knows what God has taught. Faith is the belief of what God has taught; that belief must be founded upon certainty by destroying certainty, they subvert Faith:

:

"That, indeed, was the only point of controversy which common sense could decide; and the renunciation of all the worldly advantages to which the Roman Church invited the Reformers, had left their judg ment unbiassed."

Suppose I grant the truth of the first supposition; history forbids me to grant that of the second. The Reformers, as they are called, had

almost all their worldly motives against the truth. The first princes who in Germany and in England protected the dogmatizers, had their worst passions to gratify; and found that gratification opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, and sanctioned by the Reformers, Luther, Melancthon, Corvin, Bucer, Adam, Leningue, Wintferte, Melander, Cranmer, and so forth. They renounced no worldly advantages to which the Roman Church invited them.

"Other disputes in divinity must be settled by a long, difficult and laborious process of inquiry; but a privilege is a matter of fact which, if not evidently proved, becomes a nonentity.

I thought that the Scriptures made "divinity" very easy to the meanest capacity, so that all who could read the Scriptures, might understand divinity, but it seems White is coming back to his Catholic principles, that common sense will first exhibit to you a witness, and the witness will then testify what God revealed. This is our Catholic principle.

"Now, the peculiar privilege claimed by Rome, essentially precludes doubtful proofs of its existence. A doubtful gift from God with a view to remove doubt, is a mockery of his wisdom. If the common sense of many learned and unbiassed minds is found to agree in denying that the Scripture passages alleged by Rome, in favor of her miraculous infallibility, contain a clear promise of that gift, or describe in whom, and how it was to exist after the decease of the Apostles; the pretensions of the Pope and his Church must be visionary."

By no means, until it is first shown that there is no other mode of knowing the truth of a fact but from the Scripture. This is the old fallacy to assert that our proof of the existence of an infallible tribunal is derived only from the Scripture: and, that the common sense of a minority is the proper rule for interpreting the Scripture. Now we admit neither position; we say that before the Scripture was written, evidence existed of the facts that Christ had made St. Peter head of the Church, and that this office was to continue with his successors, and that Christ made that Church the infallible witness of his doctrine. Common sense observed and acknowledged these facts before St. Matthew wrote his Gospel, therefore it is not from that Gospel the proof was first had, although that Gospel was the first written portion of the New Testament; and what common sense then without the aid of Gospel knew to be facts, might be exhibited as facts to us, although they should never have been recorded in the sacred volume.

Again, suppose I were to admit that amongst the Protestants there were many learned and unbiassed minds: I hope it would be admitted

that amongst the Catholics there were also many learned and unbiassed minds: and if, as is the fact, the Catholics are four times as numerous as all the Protestant sects united, I have four times as many learned and unbiassed minds for the Catholic, as I have for the Protestant explanation, unless the senseless, arrogant and untenable position were taken that a Catholic cannot be as learned or as unbiassed as a Protestant. In Great Britain this has been attempted, and in America there is a strong disposition amongst some Protestants to take the same ground; but like many other old British follies it is on the wane. Thus if common sense of learned men with equally unbiassed minds, or minds equally biassed to opposite sides, be the proper interpreter of Scripture passages: common sense being the sense of the great majority, not that of the small minority, the Catholic explanation is that which is correct and not doubtful.

In all this I have given to White an unfair advantage, because I have not pressed what I could and what is the fact, that when without the aid of Scripture, I learned the infallibility of the Church, from common sense, I then learned from the same source that this infallible Church and not her disunited opponents, was the tribunal to give me its accurate meaning. To admit a Protestant interpretation in such a case, would be like setting up the rejected glosses of a non-suited litigant, as of equal authority with the decision of a supreme court of appeals.

"The negative proof, in such cases, the absence of a clear titlehas the strength of demonstration. Nothing can weaken its force upon a candid mind, but the very common habit of starting away from newly discovered truth in fear of its consequences, which we have previously condemned.

"I am aware that, unable as you must be to find a direct and sufficient answer to this argument, and inclined to admit its truth, as an honest mind will make you; yet a crowd of such consequences will deter you from the path into which reason is ready to lead you.-A Church subject to error and division!-You shrink from such an inference, without remarking that the preconceived and unproved necessity of having an infallible Church, is the true and only source of that illogical process, by which you have endeavored to establish the certain existence of infallibility, upon the uncertain sense of a few words of the Gospel."

The whole of this is now but empty sound, and false suggestion; because it is not upon the uncertain meaning of a few words of the Gospel, but upon a notorious fact, as also upon the very nature of faith, that we establish the certain existence of infallibility. Those I have before given.