HE HISTORY, DOGMAS, MORALITY, SACRAMENTS, BY THE REV. STEPHEN KEENAN, AUTHOR OF THE "CONTROVERSIAL CATECHISM," ETC. BOSTON: PATRICK DONAHOE, 3 FRANKLIN STREET T 492755 GR LENOS, AND Published with the approbation Rt. Rev. JOHN B. FITZPATRICK, Bis Boston. STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, PREFACE. We THE Divine Founder of Religion declared, that children in this world should ever be subjected persecution. That wicked men should appear in ery age, who would think they did God's work en they engaged in persecuting and oppressing d's people. The verification of this divine phecy is at once an irrefragable proof of the Eh of the Christian religion, and a triumphant ument to establish the great fact, which is at sent the subject of so much earnest inquiry ongst the learned and the pious, that the Cath: Church is the one true Church of Christ. d not, indeed, have recourse to the unity, sanc, catholicity, or apostolicity of Catholicism, to ve its divine origin, or its ever-continued divine tection; for, if we only read what Christ has told regarding what his Church should suffer in world, and then peruse, with attention, the hisof the continued sufferings and ever-successful ggles of the Catholic Church, we shall find no culty in discovering that she, and no other, is Church in which alone are verified the clear phecies which dropped from the lips of Jesus -ist. Our blessed Lord has declared, that his Church uld be ever persecuted. John xvi. 1, 2; 2 Tim. iii. 12; Matth. v. 11; Matth. vii. 24. The is the only Church which has never been hour, without suffering in some shape therefore, the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ, for there can be but Church in the world. Such is the triump unanswerable argument of the Catholic. any one be disposed to dispute our min sition, we ask him to point out any one C cept ours, which has continually suffered tion from the time of Christ to the pre Is it not true, we ask him, that all thos called churches, which differed in faith Catholic Church, and which appeared in at various periods since the time of Ch only ephemeral human institutions, withou particle of that divine, ever-enduring vita which Christ endued his true Church? Is it that the more modern forms of heresy, whe theran or Calvinistic, are, comparatively s only the creatures of yesterday? Where during the first fifteen hundred years of Chri and, if they had no existence during all th except in the heated brain of the fanciful f must be evident, even to the child, that nei one, nor all of these churches continually suff secution from the time of Christ to the pres since it is perfectly evident that what did could not be persecuted. Nay, we may add fear of contradiction, that all ancient as w modern bodies of heretics and schismatic from appearing to be the true Church, by ally suffering persecutions, have ever been, are, the most active, insidious, cruel, and per persecutors of the Catholic Church. Of have demonstrative proof even in our ow In Catholic France, Belgium, and German |