Results of the Superstitions of Popery in Europe.
WHILE darkness and night covered the face of Europe, while the clergy through its domination was able to prevent people from tasting the fruits of the tree of science, the food of its own superstitions was sufficient for the minds of ignorant men. But when the invention of printing, when the Reformation, followed by the bold geniuses who entered into the path traced by Luther, had multiplied and diffused the means of learning, a glimpse of doubt was thrown upon the Roman Catholic Church by its long enslaved children; the tares were separated from the good wheat, and the spring of the human mind bounded with more strength because of its long compression. The pure and shining light of a new sun cheered the face of the earth. Human reason, emancipated from its bondage, began to breathe and to soar aloft. In proportion as the popish laws were looked into, they lost that illusion which had so long fascinated the eyes; like those objects seen in the midst of darkness, which fear or superstition represents to us as phantoms or dreadful beings, but which seen nearer, prove to be the most common things. Thus far learned and reflecting men have dissipated the main phantoms created by popery when not seen with the eyes of prejudice or ignorance, but with those of philosophy and truth. For the happy countries which, favored by heaven, have profited by the Reformation, a new era of prosperity has begun; but for other countries in Europe, remaining in the chains of popery, there has been no change for the better. Some men, who, by the superiority of their talents, were leaders of public opinion in the seventeenth, and, above all, in the eighteenth century, showed an open scorn for the faith of Rome, and overthrew its chief tenets by the irresistible force of logic and sarcasm. Those writers were considered so many suns, round which thousands of satellites made haste to revolve as round their center. These satellites became themselves suns for others. In this manner, from the first class of authors, from Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, to the poorest village schoolmaster, has been opened a vast school of impiety; for those men, improperly called "philosophers," were authorized to include the whole Roman Catholic system in the same reprobation by the grand and capital dogma of popery; that all its lessons, all its tenets, are of the same certainty, are all equally divine. Such a criminal principle put a terrible weapon into the hands of its enemies; for as soon as they had proved the falsity of purgatory, of indulgences, of relics, etc., they had the right, by a conclusion founded upon the doctrine of popery itself, to say that there was nothing true in any of its dogmas. Consequently they rejected altogether, with the superstitions of the clergy, the most sacred articles, such as the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the gospel, and even the very existence of God. Gradually it became fashionable among a certain class of society to believe nothing. Unbelief was diffused from the highest ranks to the lowest, which last, by a natural vanity, copy always from those above them. Ignorant men, indeed, do not know "logically" why they are unbelievers, but they reason thus: "Such a one is a learned man, he does not believe; I cannot do better than to imitate him." The original cause of this impiety is the revolting falsities of Rome, which, rousing the disgust of able men, have brought upon the word of God the indifference or the contempt of the peoples of Europe, because they have not distinguished between truth and falsehood. The result of this general unbelief is a deplorable immorality. When I look at France, Italy, and Spain, countries which, if Protestant, would have been so enlightened, so religious, so powerful, and see that they have been despoiled of religion (without which no nation can subsist) through the abuse of popish superstitions, and that they are from day to day suffering from a deep and alarming demoralization, I tremblingly interrogate the future to know their fate. For no one species of faith has taken the place of the popish faith in the greatest part of these countries. Many have been eager to tear down the old edifice; but no one has reared any other in its place. The peasantry under the immediate influence of the priests are yet attached to all the superstitions and pantomimes of popery; while in cities there remain scarcely any traces of religion. In Paris, for example, religion is confined in the churches to a mere theatrical representation, in which priests, sunk in the vices of their time and of their order, endeavor to kindle into life again a dead faith, by their gorgeous pomp, their ceremonies of the opera, their music of the ballet. Is there a human heart that would not bleed, when, entering those churches consecrated to the God of truth, one sees priests, whose intimacy with actresses is almost public, playing their parts, doing their best to strike the senses, either of those whom mere curiosity attracts to their "representations," to see and to be seen, or of some pious aged women, who are the only representatives of religion in Paris. We have glanced at the evils scattered through France and Italy by the superstitions of Rome; let us see what becomes of those countries, now that enlightened upon such gross falsehoods they laugh at them; let us see the deepness of their wounds, the natural result of popish tenets. It has been said justly that "the literature of a country is the true picture of it." If, then, we read any of those books called French literature in the nineteenth century, we shall have a just idea of morals in France, the inevitable result of the superstitions of popery. Novels are poured out with a prodigious fecundity, and produced by the hunger of some hundred lazy men, who, knowing the wants and the taste of their contemporaries, heap together all the monstrous inventions of a disordered brain, and proffer this nauseating stuff to their readers. All these books are filled, with few exceptions, with the most indecent pictures of guilty love, seduction, sacrilege, incest, murder, poisoning, and crimes of every description. All religious feelings are either forgotten or treated with revolting scorn. The sacred ties of matrimony, of virtue, fidelity, probity, are laughed at, always represented as unhappy, while crime is always triumphant. And this is the food of many minds. The lady and the servant-maid read only these books in their hours of leisure. If you should walk into the bedroom of any woman whatever, what book will you find on her dressing-table as the book which she reads before sleeping, and in the morning as soon as she awakes? The Bible? Oh, no; nobody has the Bible. It is some of these infamous romances. The young girl in her academy, who has seen them in the library of her mother during the vacation, will procure them for herself, and deceive the surveillance of her teachers. She will form her heart from these poisonous pages. The young man in his college devours those impure pictures of criminal pleasures, and he dreams but of them, to the prejudice of his studies. Thus is the rising generation enlightened. In order, too, that the poor may share these advantages, cheap editions of the same works are printed, and trusted to peddlers, who carry them into the country, and sell them for a few pennies to the poor peasants, that their daughters, their children, may be thus enlightened. Many thousands of these editions have poured out from the press in every direction; and one finds them side by side with the book of superstitions of the priest, alike read and believed by every ignorant peasant who is able to spell them. The theater is perfectly on the same footing, and it brings before the eyes of the spectators, more vividly and more powerfully, a real corruption. In books one reads, in theaters one sees, true seductions. At first, indeed, they shocked the eyes; but now, a piece without those real representations would appear feeble and destitute of interest. Husbands carry their wives, mothers their daughters, fathers their sons; the workingman after his day's work goes here with his family, at least every Sunday; for on that day the higher classes of society abstain from the theater, too crowded by the throng and the lowest classes. Foreigners cannot understand the genius and taste either of the authors, or of the readers, or of the spectators. They ask themselves where Frenchmen look for such subjects, such pictures. This question is quite natural in a foreigner. But what will be his surprise when it is answered, that it is the true picture of real life. The superstitions which have so long besieged and filled the minds of the people, have given place to a complete indifference to religion, which has been followed by its natural result, a general immorality. From Paris to the smallest cities there is everywhere such a deplorable emulation in vice, suicides, murders, that there is scarcely a village which is not tainted with crime. Esteeming as nothing the most awful crimes, provided they accomplish their aim, they make use of fire, sword, and poison to succeed. Morality is not founded upon duty, but upon utility or ambition. If, instead of those public lessons of vice, the Bible was permitted to circulate among the people, then those guilty men would have read in it this word of God: "Thou shalt not kill;" and everybody would know that it is a crime to kill a king as well as any other man. Young men, instead of dreaming of revolutions to enjoy pleasures, riches, and honors, would have seen in the sacred book that it is the duty of a Christian to submit himself to the will of God, the great Author of all society. But alas! the divine book is unknown in France, Italy, and Spain, owing to the perpetual care of the clergy to conceal it. None among the people have the Bible, nor do they know what it is, but by some stories detached from it and dispensed by the clergy to favor their own designs; consequently nobody has any other rule of conduct than his own passions. Can we refrain from deploring such a state of things in a country which, by its geographical position, its influence, and the universality of its language and its books, will thus be forever a sink of corruption for the world? For such an evil, what is the remedy? Will the Roman Catholic dogmas ever be able to cure it? Everybody can answer; for this very evil is the result of the popish deceptions. Such a plague, indeed, would require all the science and art of a skillful physician. We know the nature of the ability and morality of its clergy. Shall some thousand ignorant priests, passing, after some appearance of study, to the altar and to the pulpit, be able to enlighten France and Italy upon those two grand causes of human misery—ignorance and immorality? Their childhood has been spent among the lowest class, the most ignorant, superstitious families of the peasantry, who cause their boys to become priests that they may become rich, and thus the supporters of their kinsmen. With this view the lad is brought up; he sees his poor parents occupied in hard labor, and often starving. He judges it to be more eligible to study at the expense of public charity. He learns how to read and write at the age of twelve or fifteen; learns some words of Latin, geography, and history. When he leaves the college, he goes to his family, which he astonishes by his ability, because his poor parents do not know how to read, and they gaze with admiration upon their learned gentleman. Afterward he is sent to a677seminary, where his knowledge is completed by poring over theology, by reflecting upon stories of ghosts, devils, legends, miracles; such as those of Francis Xavier, who, in proof of the possibility of a body's being in many places at the same time, was seen in two ships at the same hour; of a Jew who pierced a wafer with a knife, and from which blood flowed, as the best proof of the real presence; of a devil who pointed out, and marked with his pencil, the priests, who, while in the church, were inattentive instead of praying; of a woman, who, having a horrible cancer, changed the worms thereof, by her patience, into diamonds; and a thousand other tales, at which it is not permitted to laugh under pain of expulsion. This single fact gives a just measure of their mind, for all is faithfully received and firmly believed. Besides this, they preserve all their native coarseness of manner and habit, and when all this is joined to superstition, and the self-complacency of a man clothed in an ecclesiastical garb, who believes himself a species of god, participating in the infallibility of his divine church, the result is the education of the coarsest, the most ignorant, and most ridiculous being in the world. I repeat it, can this boor in a cassock ameliorate the state of minds, even leaving out of the question his immorality, the natural result of his position, and speaking only of his ability? It is easy to conceive how professors in seminaries fill the heads of their worthy pupils with the most exaggerated opinion of popery; for among the clergy, more even than among common Roman Catholics, there are the knaves and the dupes. Those churls are the blind instruments of the bishop, who does not blush after the above detailed instruction in the seminary; to use, in sending them into parishes, the very words of Christ to his apostles: "As my Father hath sent me, so send I you." Therefore, among such a clergy, the spirit is always the same; and if it does not display itself so fully now, it is owing to the want of occasion, not to any change in its system. Instead of laboring to remedy the state of their country, they think but of power, of influence, of riches, of the domination of their church, of the destruction of heretics. The cruelty of the clergy, so infamous by their horrible persecutions of every religion different from their own, by the torrents of blood shed in its wars, has proved that its spirit is imperishable. Their predilection for darkness is the same, because they have more than ever reasons for hating the light, like owls whose eyes are dazzled by the sun. By every means in their power they stop the diffusion of knowledge; they persecute all schools that they do not themselves teach, calling them inventions of the devil; they prevent boys from going to them, or parents from sending them, under pain of excommunication here on earth and of damnation in the next world. Many hundreds of monasteries, convents, and cloisters are, as formerly, the abodes of idleness and ignorance (not to say more), where the people are compelled to feed with their substance those beings devoted to laziness under the appearance of perfection. At the head of the popish army are the Jesuits, the most cunning and daring body, the true personification of popery, the true grenadiers of the pope, twenty times banished by the wisdom of Government, and which always finds some way to creep in again; a body composed of knights errant, who wander from city to city, from village to village, to spread everywhere superstition and ignorance. As in former times, the clergy coin money from masses, indulgences, and relics. These profitable inventions increase by new discoveries, by new accumulations, as the ball of snow increases in rolling. Less free than formerly, on account of the press and of diffused knowledge, the Roman Catholic clergy has added to its native corruption a deeper hypocrisy. Its celibacy, its education, its gloomy relations of the confessional, are an unceasing source of corruption and crime. In short, if it is easy to see the ill they produce, especially on the minds of children, of women, and of the ignorant, it is as difficult to discover the utility of this burden on the earth as to find the philosopher's stone. I have given a true picture of the Roman Catholic clergy in the nineteenth century. Let us hope, then, that God will prevail over all opposition; and that at length the pure light of the gospel will shine upon those countries of Europe from which the unchristian system of the religion of Rome has banished it. And let Americans be ever watchful in guarding their liberties against the encroachments of Rome, remembering what the great Lafayette said, "American liberty can be destroyed only by the Roman clergy."—Converted Catholic.