Review Role of Tradition
Response to an Objection
Difficulty of Answering False Charges
Accusation of Stealing a Pocket-Book
Don Felix Malatesta de Guadaloupe
Examples of Anti-Catholic Calumnies
Prelininary anecdote: “Mumpsimus” - Resistance to Correction
St. Eligius’ View of Religion
Catholics Sell Sin for Money
Murder at Edgebaston Monastery
Slander the Chief Basis of Anti-Catholic Feeling1
It was my aim, Brothers of the Oratory, in my preceding Lecture, to investigate, as far as time and place allowed, how it was that the one-sided view of the great religious controversy, which commenced between Rome and England three centuries since, has been so successfully maintained in this country. Many things have changed among us during that long period; but the hatred and the jealousy entertained by the population towards the Catholic Faith, and the scorn and pity which are felt at the sight of its adherents, have not passed away, have not been mitigated. In that long period, society has undergone various alterations; public opinion has received a development new in the history of the world, and many remarkable revolutions in national principle have followed. The received views on the causes and the punishment of crime, on the end of government, on the mutual relations of town and country, on international interests, and on many other great political questions, have sustained, to say the least, great modifications; sciences, unknown before, bearing upon the economy of social life, have come into being; medicine has been the subject of new doctrines, which have had their influence on various civil and municipal arrangements; how is it, then, that the feeling against Catholicism has remained substantially what it was in the days of Charles the Second or of George the Third? How is it that Protestantism has retained its ascendancy, and that Catholic arguments and Catholic principles are at once misconstrued and ignored? And what increases the wonder is, that externally to our own island it has happened otherwise; there is scarcely a country besides ours where Catholicism is not at least respected, even if it is not studied; and what is more observable still, scarcely a country besides ours, originally Protestant, in which Protestantism even exists at present,—if by Protestantism is understood the religion of Luther and Calvin. The phenomenon, great in itself, becomes greater by its thus seeming to be all but peculiar to the British population.
And this latter consideration is important also, as it anticipates a solution of the difficulty which the Protestant, were he able, would eagerly adopt. He would be eager to reply, if he could, that the Protestant spirit has survived in the land amid so many changes in political and social science, because certain political theories were false, but Protestantism is true; but if this is the case, why has it not kept its ground and made its way in other countries also? What cause can be assigned for its decay and almost extinction in those other countries, in Germany, Holland, Switzerland and New England, diverse from each other in situation, in government, in language, and in character, where once it flourished? Evidently it must be a cause peculiar to England; those foreign countries must have something in common with each other which they have not in common with us. Now what is peculiar to our country is an established Tradition of Protestantism; what those other countries have in common with each other is the absence of such Tradition. Fact and argument have had fair play in other countries; they have not had fair play here; the religious establishment has forbidden them fair play. But fact and argument are the tests of truth and error; Protestantism, then, has had an adventitious advantage in this country, in consequence of which it has not been tried,—as, in the course of years, otherwise it would have been tried, and as it has been tried elsewhere—on its own merits. Instead, then, of concluding that it is true, because it has remained here during three centuries substantially the same, I should rather conclude that it is false because it has not been able during that period to remain the same abroad. To the standing, compulsory Tradition existing here, I ascribe its continuance here; to fact and reason operating freely elsewhere, I ascribe its disappearance elsewhere.
This view of the subject is confirmed to us, when we consider, on the one hand, the character of our countrymen, and on the other, the character of those instruments and methods by which the Tradition of Protestantism is perpetuated among them. It has been perpetuated, directly or indirectly, by the sanction of an oath, imposed on all those several sources of authority and influence, from which principles, doctrines, and opinions are accustomed to flow. There is an established Tradition of law, and of the clergy, and of the court, and of the universities, and of literature, and of good society; and all these act upon a people peculiarly susceptible of the claims of personal merit, of embodied authority, of constituted order, of rank, and of reputation in the world, and little sensitive in comparison of abstract argument, logical sequence, moral fitness, historical results, or foreign transactions.