66 strong party; "it is confessedly the dominant power of the nation;" lust, cupidity, and every evil passion is enlisted on its side; it is emphatically the power of the world; and we know but of one power which is greater than the world, to whom it is given "to overcome the world," and that power is not Protestantism. Mrs. Stowe herself acknowledges this with the utmost simplicity: "The decision," she says, always gone in this way; the slave-power will not concedewe must." And again, Dr. Wilberforce, Protestant Bishop of Oxford, says virtually the same thing. After relating the history of Dr. Onderdonk, Protestant Bishop of New York, who refused to admit into the General Theological Seminary a young candidate for holy orders, otherwise perfectly eligible, on the score of his "identity with the people of colour," and who confessed to the young man himself, whom he was thus unjustly depriving of certain advantages to which he was both morally and legally entitled, that he was "yielding to the unrighteous prejudice of the community,"-Bishop Wilberforce goes on to say, "The Episcopalian body in America plainly has not been conscious of possessing power to stand up in God's 's name and to rebuke the evil one:"* he would have spoken still more correctly, if he had said that "plainly they have been conscious of not possessing" any such power. It is precisely the same with all the denominations. Ask a Baptist minister at New Orleans why he makes no attempt to interfere in improving the existing relations between masters and slaves, and his answer is prompt and candid,-" It would render us and our churches unpopular, and thereby destroy our usefulness." The Unitarian Parker reveals the whole truth by the use of the same word: "Most of the churches in the United States," he says, "exercise the power of excluding a man from their communion for such offences as they see fit, for any unpopular breach of the moral law." Popularity and unpopularity, these are the real touchstones, the Protestant tests of right and wrong, the secret springs of Protestant ecclesiastical discipline. Protestant ministers do not claim to have any real supernatural authority to expound the law of God and to enforce its observance, and nobody dreams of conceding it to them; they are, as some wit has cleverly described them," respectable gentlemen, dressed in black, who get into the pulpit every Sunday to say reasonable things;" reasonable or unreasonable, as the case may be, and the congregation is * History of the Church in America, p. 430. + See American Scenes and Christian Slavery, by E. Davies, p. 72. London, 1849. Letter to the People of the United States, p. 71. Boston, 1848. the judge of this; and if they say what is very offensive to men's pride, very injurious to their pockets, or very inconvenient in its interference with their social and political habits, they are apt to decide that it is very unreasonable; the remedy is easy, and they are not slow to avail themselves of it; "they withdraw from the preacher," says Mrs. Stowe, "and choose another." This, then, is one great secret of the retrograde course of Protestant action in the matter of slavery, viz. the absence of any living authority to declare with infallible certainty the law of God concerning the questions at issue; and another thing closely connected with this, and scarcely less important, is the absence of any direct and intimate communication in the Protestant system between the conscience of the individual and the authority of God's minister, so as to secure obedience to the law once expounded. It is true indeed that some, if not all, of the Protestant sects have, in theory at least, retained or revived the form of excommunicating grievous offenders; but in the first place, it is obvious that the very essence of Protestantism deprives that last and mightiest weapon of the Church of all its terrors. An excommunication which is not endorsed by the dogma, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is a mere brutum fulmen. It would be really ludicrous, if the subject were less solemn and the interests at stake something less valuable than immortal souls, to see the way in which the puny arms of some Protestant sect attempt to wield this terrible and trenchant weapon of the Church Catholic. One of the American pamphlets lying before us presents us with two specimens, one only more ridiculous than the other. The first, dated Salem, October 14, 1842, is addressed to a Miss Maria French, and signed by Brown Emerson and Jacob Hood, Committee (!); and warns the said Miss French that excision from a church of Christ is a distressing and awful event," since every one who is "justly cut off from a true church of Christ and does not return, is given up of Him to a reprobate mind." The second, dated from Boston, June 1, 1840, and signed by N. Adams, Pastor of Essex Street Church, hints still more explicitly at what appears to be the ordinary remedy of excommunicated persons among Protestants, namely, to pass over to "another church." "It is my painful duty," writes Mr. Adams, "as pastor, to send you the above vote. Now if you are, in the sight of Christ, an excommunicated person, no sympathy or protection which any professed church of Christ can afford you will lessen your guilt or restore you to membership in the Saviour's body. If we have done according to the mind of Christ in this matter, whatsoever is 66 loosed" (surely the pastor meant to have said bound) "on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Can any thing be more melancholy than this mockery of the most solemn practice of the Church? and can any thing be more puerile and powerless as a means of discipline? But in the second place, even supposing this remedy of excommunication were as efficient among Protestants as it is manifestly worthless, still is there not wanting some more gentle, more ordinary mode of bringing men's conduct into conformity with those rules and principles of action which the Church may have prescribed to them? Mrs. Stowe, indeed, seems to think so lightly of excommunication, that she gravely represents it to us as the duty of" a generous Christian man to encourage the authorities of whatever denomination he may happen to belong to, to inflict this punishment upon all slave-holders, even though he knows with certainty concerning himself, that, either from pecuniary embarrassments or some other cause, he must needs continue to be a slave-holder. "Should not a generous Christian man say," asks Mrs. S., "if church excision will stop this terrible evil, let it come, though it does bear hardly upon me? Better that I suffer a little injustice than that this horrible injustice be still credited to the account of Christ's Church. Shall I embarrass the whole Church with my embarrassments? What if I am careful and humane in my treatment of my slaves? what if in my heart I have repudiated the wicked doctrine that they are my property, and am treating them as my brethren? what am I then doing? All the credit of my example goes to give force to the system. The Church ought to reprove this fearful injustice, and reprovers ought to have clean hands; and if I cannot really get clear of this, I had better keep out of the Church till I can" (p. 422). Others, however, it is to be presumed, having a juster notion of what excommunication really means, and of the consequences which it entails when it means any thing and has any consequence at all, must surely look upon it as an extreme remedy, and one that is not lightly to be made use of; and thoughtful and sensible persons, if such there be among the Protestants of America, must surely feel the want of some more gentle and private, yet powerful instrument, whereby the admonitions and practical decisions of their Church may be made to penetrate into the inmost soul of the people, and dutiful obedience to them be enforced; in a word, such an instrument as is provided by Catholics in the tribunal of penance. There are many other points in Mrs. Stowe's book on which we should have liked to make some observations; for the present, however, we must forbear, and will only, in conclusion, beg our readers to turn over in their minds the opposite side of the picture which we have now laid before them, and to observe how, humanly speaking, the secret of the Church's strength and unflinching firmness in all her struggles with evil is to be found in the double root of the hierarchy and the confessional. The Christian priesthood and episcopacy, with the Pope at their head, proclaiming publicly with a voice of authority what is the law of God, and then the same priesthood privately in the tribunal of penance bringing home that law to every man's conscience, and trying their work by it; these two-the one a more than human legislator, the other a gentle yet most efficient executor of the law-are able to accomplish, by God's blessing, without violence, without injustice, and with the most complete success, social reforms and revolutions of the utmost magnitude; reforms of which Protestantism too is very conscious of the need, which it blindly attempts to compass, but through its impotency and its ignorance only succeeds in rendering every day more and more difficult. CATHOLIC TALES AND NARRATIVES. Joe Baker; or, the One Church. Burns and Lambert. James Jordan; or, the Treasure and its Price. Dolman. JOE BAKER has the honour of commencing a new series of the Clifton Tracts; and from the excellence of the beginning we augur well for what is to follow. Those of our readers who have already enjoyed the agreeable acquaintance of James Jordan, will not fail to derive equal pleasure from an introduction to Joe Baker; for between the two it is not difficult to detect a decided family resemblance. Both are honest rightminded Englishnen, in whom a somewhat rough-grained disposition, incident to their birth and education, is tempered with a native goodness which is singularly characteristic of many thousands of the same class at this moment in our England. Joe Baker follows the trade denoted by his name; his origin is thus graphically told by himself: "I never knew my parents; I can only guess that I am about fifty years of age; and when, how, or by whom my name of Joseph was given to me I cannot tell. The first thing I recollect is being one of many small children, clad in a canvas garment, allowed to play in a yard, and fed on oatmeal, bread, and potatoes. It was said that we belonged to the parish. I have nothing to say of kindness or unkindness; we belonged to the parish, and, as such, were treated as little animals, and were kept alive. We never learnt any thing; and as I have since found out that I am able to learn, I can only suppose that we were never taught any thing" (p. 1). About ten years of age he is taken off the hands of the parish by a baker, in whose establishment he is turned to account in every possible way; he has plenty to eat, and his full share of hard words and hard blows; but he grows fast, becomes strong, hearty, and merry; and moreover, for the first time in his life, gets a surname-the neighbours call him Joe Baker. His "first friend" is charmingly described, with much of the same true nervous pathos which went straight to our hearts in James Jordan. By degrees young Baker recommends himself to his master, who has him taught reading, writing, and ciphering; so that when he reaches the age of twenty-one, he is one of the most promising young men in the parish. Religion does not trouble his thoughts much, except that a general regard to decency of behaviour is considered by himself and his master as a necessary requisite to success in their trade. 6 "At last, one day my poor old mistress died. She went out of life, as she sat in her chair, just as you would blow out a candle, it seemed; and nobody cared more about it. Master drank more spirits and water, and took it stronger, and was in a hurry to get the dead out of the house. I too was glad to have the funeral over; for I had always carried myself above religion,' always treated it as an unmanly thing, fit for women and children only; and I found the corpse a very uncomfortable sight. Where was the old woman? That senseless flesh was her, and yet it wasn't her. Sometimes I started in my work, almost thinking she might be by my side, come back to tell me something; for I still felt that man was better than the beasts, and that there was that in him which would never die. "Sometimes people came in to see the corpse; sometimes they made remarks. One said, that she had lived and died without God; that she had worshipped nothing but money; that 'twas an awful sight to see the remains of such as she was.' Then I spoke angrily, and bade them hold their tongues, and not judge a woman who was better than themselves. Then others came, and said they remembered the day, twenty years and more ago, when she had been converted; and that grace was never lost, and that such would be saved in spite of works, and that she was 'gone to glory.' Then I would be more angry still, and yet laugh at them, and say that if glory' |