Protestantism and Popery.
CROLY, in the preface to his work on the Apocalypse, sets forth in very striking contrast the influence of Protestantism and popery upon a nation’s prosperity, in an epitome of the history of England for the past three hundred years. During this time, more or less, Protestants and papists have ruled alternately, the administration being sometimes Protestant and sometimes papal; and it is a matter of wonderful interest to mark how under papal rule England invariably sunk in national rank, and under Protestant rule as invariably recovered herself. There is an impressive lesson in this. We quote from Mr. Croly’s work above referred to, pp. 1–14, as follows:— The original Revelation declared the one true God; paganism was its corruption, by substituting many false gods for the true. The second Revelation, Christianity, declared the one true Mediator; popery was its corruption, by substituting many false mediators for the true. Both paganism and popery adopted the same visible sign of corruption, the worship of images. The Jewish history opens to us a view of the acting of Providence with a people appointed to the preservation of the faith of God. Every tendency to receive the surrounding idolatries into a participation of the honors of the true worship, every idolatrous touch was visited with punishment, and that punishment not left to the remote working of the corruption, but immediate, and by its directness, evidently designed to make the nation feel the high importance of the trust, and the final ruin that must follow its betrayal. A glance at the British history since the Reformation must show how closely this providential system has been exemplified in England. Every reign which attempted to bring back popery, or even to give it that share of power which could in any degree prejudice Protestantism, has been marked by signal misfortune. It is a striking circumstance that almost every reign of this popish tendency has been followed by one purely Protestant; and, as if to make the source of the national peril plain to all eyes, those alternate reigns have not offered a stronger contrast in their principles than in their public fortunes. Let the rank of England be what it might under the Protestant sovereign, it always sank under the popish: let its loss of honor, or of power, be what it might under the popish sovereign, it always recovered under the Protestant, and more than recovered; was distinguished by sudden success, public renovation, and increased stability to the freedom and fortunes of the empire. Protestantism was first thoroughly established in England in the reign of Elizabeth. Mary had left a dilapidated kingdom; the nation worn out with disaster and debt; the national arms disgraced; nothing in vigor but popery. Elizabeth, at twenty-five, found her first steps surrounded with the most extraordinary embarrassments; at home, the whole strength of a party, including the chief names of the kingdom, hostile to her succession and religion; in Scotland a rival title, supported by France; in Ireland, a perpetual rebellion, inflamed by Rome; on the Continent, the force of Spain roused against her by the double stimulant of ambition and bigotry, at a time when Spain commanded almost the whole strength of Europe. But the cause of Elizabeth was PROTESTANTISM; and in that sign she conquered. She shivered the Spanish sword; she paralyzed the power of Rome; she gave freedom to the Dutch; she fought the battle of the French Protestants; every eye of religious suffering throughout Europe was fixed on this magnanimous woman. At home, she elevated the habits and the heart of her people. She even drained off the bitter waters of religious feud, and sowed in the vigorous soil, which they had so long made unwholesome, the seeds of every principle and institution that has since grown up into the strength of the empire. But her great work was the establishment of Protestantism. Like the Jewish king, she found the ark of God without a shelter; and she built for it the noblest temple in the world; she consecrated her country into its temple. She died in the fullness of years and honor; the great queen of Protestantism throughout the nations; in the memory of England her name and her reign alike immortal. Charles I. ascended a prosperous throne; England in peace, faction feeble or extinct; the nation prospering in the full spirit of commerce and manly adventure. No reign of an English king ever opened out a longer or more undisturbed view of prosperity. But Charles betrayed the sacred trust of Protestantism. He formed a popish alliance, with the full knowledge that it established a popish dynasty. He lent himself to the intrigues of the French minister stained with Protestant blood; for his first armament was a fleet against the Huguenots. If not a friend to popery, he was madly regardless of its hazards to the constitution. Ill-fortune suddenly gathered upon him. Distracted councils, popular feuds met by alternate weakness and violence, the loss of the national respect finally deepening into civil bloodshed, were the punishments of his betrayal of Protestantism. The sorrows and late repentance of his prison hours painfully redeemed his memory. Cromwell’s was the scepter of a broken kingdom. He found the reputation and influence of England crushed; utter humiliation abroad; at home, the exhaustion of the civil war; and furious partisanship still tearing the public strength in sunder. Cromwell was a murderer; but in the high designs of Providence, the personal purity of the instrument is not always regarded. The Jews were punished for their idolatry by idolaters, and restored by idolaters. Whatever was in the heart of the protector, the policy of his government was Protestantism. His treasures and his arms were openly devoted to the Protestant cause in France, in Italy, throughout the world. He was the first who raised a public fund for the support of the Vaudois churches. He sternly repelled the advances which popery made to seduce him into the path of the late king. England was instantly lifted on her feet, as by the power of miracle. All her battles were victories; France and Spain bowed before her. All her adventures were conquests; she laid the foundation of her colonial empire, and of that still more illustrious commercial empire, to which the only limits in either space or time may be those of mankind. She was the most conspicuous power of Europe; growing year by year in opulence, public knowledge, and foreign renown; until Cromwell could almost realize the splendid improbability that “before he died, he would make the name of an Englishman as much feared and honored as ever was that of an ancient Roman.” Charles II. came to an eminently prosperous throne. Abroad it held the foremost rank, the fruit of the vigor of the protectorate. At home all faction had been forgotten in the general joy of the Restoration. But Charles was a concealed Roman Catholic. He attempted to introduce his religion; the star of England was instantly darkened; the country and the king alike became the scorn of the foreign courts; the national honor was scandalized by mercenary subserviency to France; the national arms were humiliated by a disastrous war with Holland; the capital was swept by the memorable inflictions of pestilence and conflagration. James II. still more openly violated the national trust. He publicly became a Roman Catholic. This filled the cup. The Stuarts were cast out, they and their dynasty forever; that proud line of kings was sentenced to wither down into a monk, and that monk living on the alms of England, a stipendiary and an exile. William was called by PROTESTANTISM. He found the throne, as it was always found at the close of a popish reign, surrounded by a host of difficulties; at home the kingdom in a ferment; popery, and its ally Jacobitism, girding themselves for battle; fierce disturbance in Scotland; open war in Ireland, with the late king at its head; abroad the French king domineering over Europe, and threatening invasion. In the scale of nations England nothing! But the principle of William’s government was Protestantism; he fought and legislated for it through life; and it was to him, as it had been to all before him, strength and victory. He silenced English faction; he crushed the Irish war; he then attacked the colossal strength of France on its own shore. This was the direct collision, not so much of the two kingdoms as of the two faiths; the Protestant champion stood in the field against the popish persecutor. Before that183war closed, the fame of Louis was undone. England rose to the highest military name. In a train of immortal victories, she defended Protestantism throughout Europe, drove the enemy to his palace gates, and before she sheathed the sword, broke the power of France for a hundred years! The Brunswick line were called to the throne on the sole title of Protestantism. They were honorable men, and they kept their oaths to the religion of England. The country rose under each of those Protestant kings to a still higher rank; every trivial reverse compensated by some magnificent addition of honor and power, until the throne of England stands on a height from which it may look down upon the world. Yet in our immediate memory there was one remarkable interruption of that progress; which, if the most total contrast to the periods preceding and following can amount to proof, proves that every introduction of popery into the Legislature will be visited as a public crime. During the war with the French Republic, England had gone on from triumph to triumph. The crimes of the popish Continent had delivered it over to be scourged by France; but the war of England was naval; and, in 1805, she consummated that war by the greatest victory ever gained on the seas. At one blow, she extinguished the navies of France and Spain. The death of her great statesman at length opened the door to a new administration. They were men of acknowledged ability, some of the highest, and all accustomed to public affairs. But they came in under a pledge to the introduction of popery soon or late into the Legislature. They were emphatically “The Roman Catholic Administration.” There never was in the memory of man so sudden a change from triumph to disaster. Defeat came upon them in every shape in which it could assail a government; in war, finance, negotiation. All their expeditions returned with disgrace. The British arms were tarnished in the four quarters of the globe. And, as if to make defeat more conspicuous, they were baffled even in that service in which the national feeling was to be the most deeply hurt, and in which defeat seemed impossible. England saw with astonishment her fleet disgraced before a barbarian without a ship on the waters, and finally hunted out of his seas by the fire from batteries crumbling under the discharge of their own cannon. But the fair fame of the British Empire was not to be thus cheaply wasted away. The ministry must perish; already condemned by the voice of the country, it was to be its own executioner. It at length made its promised attempt to bring popery into the Constitution. A harmless measure was proposed, notoriously but a cover for the insults that were to follow. It was met with stern repulse; and, in the midst of public indignation, perished the popish ministry of one month and one year. Their successors came in on the express title of resistance to popery; they were emphatically “The Protestant Administration.” They had scarcely entered on office, when the whole scene of disaster brightened up, and the deliverance of Europe was begun, with a vigor that never relaxed, a combination of unexpected means and circumstances, an effective and rapid success, that if a man had ventured to suppose but a month before, he would have been laughed at as a visionary. Of all countries, Spain, sluggish and accustomed to the yoke of France, with all its old energies melted away in the vices of its government, was the last that Europe could have looked to for defiance of the universal conqueror. But if ever the battle was fought by the shepherd’s staff and sling against the armed giant, it was then. England was summoned to begin a new career of triumph. Irresistible on one element, she was now to be led up step by step to the first place of glory on another; and that Protestant ministry saw, what no human foresight could have thought to see, Europe restored; the monarch of its monarchs a prisoner in their hands; and the mighty fabric of the French Atheistic Empire, that was darkening and distending like an endless dungeon over the earth, scattered with all its malignant pomps and ministers of evil into air! It is impossible to conceive that this regular interchange of punishment and preservation has been without a cause and a purpose. Through almost three hundred years, through all varieties of public circumstance, all changes of men, all shades of general polity, we see one thing alone unchanged, the regular connection of national misfortune with the introduction of popish influence, and of national triumph with its exclusion.