of literature and minister of the Gospel ought to be a man of sense as well as of education; and no man of common sense ever could believe it sinful to designate a great religious denomination by that name by which they are known and distinguished, and continually designated by men of every creed all the world over. No Protestant gentleman would ever call a Catholic to his face a papist. Why not? Because such language is offensive; because it would be a low and vulgar insult thus to address him. Will a gentleman do that behind my back which he would not do before my face? Will he say that of me in a public discourse which he is too courteous to say to me in private conversation? Above all, would he, after purposely misnaming me in the text of his oration, slyly slip his still harsher and more vulgar epithet into a foot-note, conscious that it would be too bad to utter it in public, yet unwilling to lose altogether the opportunity of displaying that spirit of little, mean malevolence which commonly actuates those who use insulting epithets, and substitute abusive language for solid arguments? If this reverend professor and minister of the Gospel will not amend his manners to gratify us Catholics, ought he not, at least, to pay some deference to the feelings and wishes of those truly liberal, courteous, and enlightened Protestants who have long since condemned and deprecated such vulgarity? Let him take a lesson in politeness from the Rev. J. Nightingale, an eminent English Protestant divine, who speaks as follows: "The reproachful epithets of 'Papist,' Romanist,' 'Popish,' 'Romish,' &c., are no longer applied to them (the Catholics) by any gentleman or scholar." The Rev. Dr. Butler, another Protestant divine, in a sermon preached at Cambridge, at the installation of the duke of Gloucester, says: "Popery, as it is called, is still a fertile theme of declamation to the old women and children of the year 1811. This term Papist is reproachful, conveys an erroneous idea,

keeps'alive a dishonorable prejudice, and ought to be abolished; nor will I ever believe that man a sincere friend to Christian liberty who persists in the use of it."

The government of the city of London has, in our own day, made the "amende honorable" to the Catholic body, by effacing from the monument, erected after the great fire, an inscription intended to insult and slander the Catholics, but which has in reality but served to perpetuate the infamy of their calumniators; and the same returning sense of shame and justice has caused the Protestant parliament of Great Britain, in all their recent legislation, to designate the Roman Catholics by their true and proper appellation. We would not wish to class a professor of one of our American colleges with the "old women and children" of the year 1846; and we hope that when our author again appears before the public, if ever he shall venture to do so, he will exhibit the manners and spirit of a true Christian and liberal-minded gentleman.

But we have charged him with want of liberality, as well as want of manners. In sustaining the latter charge, we have already proved the former. For additional evidence, however, take the following precious sample from the tenth page of the Address :

"So in Maryland, the force of circumstances made Lord Baltimore-a member of the British aristocracy-the founder of a republican and representative system of government; made him, whose conscience was perhaps in the keeping of a Jesuit confessor, the advocate of toleration and freedom in religion. It was not, we may be sure, his own principles that made this nobleman, still glowing with the zeal of recent conversion to a new faith, an advocate and founder of civil and religious liberty. The Christian will adore in this event the wisdom of that God who 'maketh even the wrath of man to praise him, and restrains the remainder thereof,""&c.

Some truth is told here, but more is suppressed, and a most uncharitable untruth is insinuated. Lord Baltimore was indeed the founder of civil and religious

liberty; but it should be added that the colony of Maryland was the only one in which civil and religious liberty were practically established, and could be fully enjoyed by Catholics and by Protestants of every variety of creed. Whatever may have been the theoretic opinions of Roger Williams, in point of fact the Catholic was not free to serve God according to the dictates of his conscience in any part of New England. He was not free from molestation even under the mild sway of the peaceful founder of Pennsylvania. But in Catholic Maryland a perfectly secure asylum for liberty of conscience was prepared for the dissenters of every degree, who were persecuted in Virginia, and for the Episcopalian, the Quaker, and the Baptist, who were exposed to be scourged and hung, if they dared to remain in any of the Puritan colonies. So much for the facts of the case, which are beginning to be familiar to the school boy, and ought not to be unknown to the learned professor. But now for the spirit of the reverend gentleman's remarks. He admits that Lord Baltimore was "an advocate and founder of civil and religious liberty." It is a bitter pill-a nauseous dose; but there is no avoiding it. So he admits the fact; but he maligns the motives and principles of the man whose conduct he is forced to commend. "It was not," he says, "we may be sure it was not his own principles that made this nobleman an advocate and founder of civil and religious liberty." Whose principles then was it? Surely not Luther's, who never tolerated opposition to his will, and who aroused the princes of Germany to exterminate the followers of Munzer. Not the principles of Calvin, the tyrant of Geneva, who maintained the doctrine that heretics must be burnt, and practised it on Servetus. Not the principles of John Knox, the church burner of Scotland, whom Dr. Johnson justly characterized as "the ruffian of the reformation." Above all, not the principles of the Puritans, who never had power, that they did not use it to per

secute all who differed from them in belief. The old and safe rule has been to judge a man by his actions. "By their fruits ye shall know them." Prof. Rey

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nolds rejects this rule, and with reason; for, tried by it, his standard-bearers of "Christian liberty," Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the Puritans, are a set of arrant persecutors, who, while they claimed liberty for themselves, gave the halter and the fagot to all who dissented from them. Ah! but the conscience of Lord Baltimore was perhaps in the keeping of a Jesuit confessor." What a pity it was not in the keeping of some disciple of Luther, Calvin, or Knox! Then he most certainly would not have been "the advocate of toleration and freedom in religion." A man of really liberal mindone who would not form his opinion of the Jesuits from their libellers, who would rather conclude in favor of a society from the fact that its enemies are generally the enemies of all religion and of all morality -such a man on seeking the historic proof that where Jesuits had the direction of consciences, there civil and religious liberty flourished, would infer that those Jesuits at least were enlightened, liberal, and humane. But this would be judging the tree by its fruits-a rule which the revilers of the Jesuits and the eulogists of the Puritans never will submit to. Having done the little that he could, or thought he could do, to blacken the fair fame of Lord Baltimore and the Catholic colonists of Maryland, the reverend professor, like the Pharisee of old, feels pious and thankful to the Lord, and quotes from holy writ to give an air of Gospel truth to his misrepresentations.

E'en ministers, they ha'e been kenn'd
In holy rapture,
Arousing whid betimes to vend,

And nail it wi' Scripture.

We could give other proofs of the writer's illiberality. On the seventeenth page we are told: "The Anabaptists, the Quakers, and various other fanatics sought a refuge in America." What

right has a Lutheran or a Calvinist to call the Quakers fanatics? With what grace does such a charge come from the encomiast of the Puritans? But, passing over smaller matters, we come to another glaring misrepresentation of history, with a brief notice of which we shall conclude.

"The French encyclopedists," says the Address," and followers of Voltaire were the natural offspring of the superstition of Romanism, and of the licentious reign of Louis XIV."

The licentious reign of Louis XIV, and the still more licentious times of Louis XV and the regency, no doubt did much to demoralize the French people, and prepare the way for wide-spread infidelity. But we have to do with the former part of the sentence. By the superstition of Romanism, the professor means the doctrines and practices of the Catholic church. How does he know that any of these doctrines or practices are superstitious? Is he an infallible judge? He does not pretend to be so. Is his reason better authority than mine-better than that of the great majority of Christians? Does he know it from the Bible? How? The Bible does not teach us so. But it is his interpretation of the Bible. Is his interpretation infallible? May it not be mistaken? How then dares he, on the strength of his own fallible and weak opinion, stigmatize as superstition the belief and practice of thousands of men more learned and better than himself? To come to the point, however, there never was a grosser mistake than to represent the infidelity of Voltaire and the French encyclopedists as the offspring of the Roman Catholic religion. History proves modern infidelity to have sprung from Protestantism, and reason shows it to be her genuine progeny. Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, brought up a Protestant in Protestant England, first systematized deism. He was followed by Hobbs, Blount, Toland, Lord Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Morgan, Hume, Chubb, and Lord Bolingbroke. Their works were read, admired, *P. 30:

and some of them translated in France and the north of Germany; and the French and German infidels were for a long time "mere echoes of their English masters." When Luther generously bestowed on all mankind the glorious privilege of interpreting the Bible, each man for himself, the immediate and natural effect was, that among those who accepted the gift, there arose almost as many interpretations as interpreters. It was in vain that he tried to coax or compel their private judgments to conform to his; it was in vain that he condemned them to the flames of hell for disputing his infallibility. His fatal gift was, like Pandora's box, irrecoverable. Immediately we hear him complaining that some of his disciples deny this truth, and some that; and some even are bold enough to reject the two great mysteries of the trinity and redemption. For rejecting these mysteries. Servetus was burnt by Calvin's direction at Geneva, and Gentilis was executed at Berne. But still the principle of private interpretation worked its way.. Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglianism were its first fruits. Socinianism. came in its turn. It was one branch of the "great reformation." It expunged mysteries, especially the divine incarnation, the redemption, and the trinity, from the Christian symbol.. It had as good a right to its interpretation of the Bible as any other sect. Its arguments against the divinity of Jesus Christ were precisely the arguments of Zuingle, and Bucer, and Calvin against his real presence in the eucharist.. "This is my body; this is my blood," is a figure of speech: it means "this is not my, body, is not my blood," said most of the reformers. "The word was made flesh is also figurative," said Socinus.. "Transubstantiation is not named in the Bible. Neither is a divine incarnation. The incomprehensible must be rejected." "Agreed," exclaim all the Socinians, Unitarians, rationalists, neologists, deists, and atheists in the world.. "The senses testify to the presence of nothing but bread

and wine in the eucharist." "So the senses testified to the presence of nothing but a human child in the manger, and a dying man on the cross." The deist and atheist again concur with the Protestant.

But if private judgment is all-sufficient to determine the sense of revelation, it is, a fortiori, qualified to decide on the truth and necessity of a revelation; again, a revelation, the doctrines of which can not be infallibly ascertained, is no revelation. Protestantism, or the principle of individual interpretation, has produced hundreds of contradictory creeds, no two of which can be right, though all may be wrong. "There is no such a thing as an infallible church; that notion is one of the superstitions of Romanism;' there is no infallible creed; no absolute certainty that any doctrine is true." "Then I do not know with infallible certainty that the books of the Old and New Testament are inspired."

Such are the thoughts that must pass through the mind of every Protestant who, true to the principle of private judgment, does not take his faith implicitly from his minister or his parents, but reasons for himself. He may very naturally conclude that no revelation has been given us. His infidelity is but the development of the Protestant spirit of doubt and denial. He is only protesting against a few more mysteries. Herbert, and Hobbs, and Voltaire, Dalembert, Diderot were good Protestants in principle. They read the Bible, interpreted, each one according to his own private judgment, and submitted it to the authority of reason, which (such was their private judgment) rejected its claims to inspiration, and its pretensions to consist

ency and truth. They were not the children of Catholicity, which, true to their origin and native instincts, they hated and warred against with all their force. They were the natural, the genuine offspring of Protestantism. And they glory in their descent from it; they hail Martin Luther as the emancipator of human reason. They have merely carried out his principles to their ultimate consequences.

We may hereafter return to this subject, which is too fruitful and instructive a theme to be disposed of incidentally in noticing a literary address. Professor Reynolds would do well to study history and the connection of cause and effect, before he ventures again to trace the genealogy of modern infidelity.

In regard to the subject of Professor Reynolds' Address, we think an "American literature," viewed as something altogether different in character from "English literature," is a dream never to be realized. We have writers unsurpassed

by any British writers of the present day. Irving, Bryant, Prescott, Brownson, Story and Bancroft are of this number. But their pre-eminence arises in great part from their study of the best British models, and their care to draw from the good old "wells of English undefiled." We speak and write the language of Shakspeare and Milton, of Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, and Burke. We never can have any other than an English literature. The narrow, selfish, pitiful spirit of nativism can never be introduced into our literature. But we hope the day may come, and we think it is advancing, when the English literature of North America shall be as a great ocean, into which the British isles shall pour their tributary streams.