MORE CATHOLIC PROTESTANTS.
By Editor
THE editor of the New York Evangelist, Dr. Field, is a defender of Catholicism. He thinks that the disposition to stand aloof from Catholics is "most mischievous to the church and country." He says: "The late President Hitchcock often said to us, when we discussed the dangers to society from socialists and communists, that we might yet come to look upon the Roman Catholic Church as the most conservative power in the country, if, by its influence over the Irish, it should keep them from running into the excesses by which so many of the French and Germans were carried away. It is conservative also in preserving the name of Christendom against the great flood of infidelity which is sweeping over the land. Here is a tremendous power exercised by the Roman Catholic Church over millions of our countrymen, and it is the height of folly and fanaticism to alienate it from us by standing always in an attitude of antagonism. Protestants as we are by inheritance and by conviction, yet we cannot deny that Roman Catholics may be good citizens, and useful members of society, and that many of them are humble and devout Christians—a fact which it is a sin against Christ not to recognize." And an Episcopalian clergyman of Central New York writes thus to Dr. Field:— "I do want to thank you for what you say about the treatment of Roman Catholics. How vastly better than infidelity is that church, and what a check it is to the same! Surely God is in it." Thus the evidence increases, to show that Protestantism is getting to be simply a name, with no meaning whatever. Such men as we have just quoted from have no right to the name "Protestant," since they have ceased to protest. Two questions are sufficient to prove this: 1. Was the Reformation a mistake—was the Catholic Church all right, and Luther and his fellow-reformers all wrong? 2. Has the Catholic Church changed one item in principle since that time? Both these questions must be answered in the negative. Then those who apologize for the Papacy now, would have opposed Luther and his work if they had lived in his day. If those who oppose Catholicism to-day are bigots, then Wickliffe, and Huss, and Jerome, and Luther, and Melancthon, and Zwingle, and others like them, were also bigots. Is the professed Protestant world ready to take this position concerning these men? We do not antagonize Catholics as individuals, but Catholicism as a system. But these men from whom we have quoted, seem to think that to deny215that Catholicism is a part of the Christian church, is to deny that any Catholics may be good citizens, or that there may be persons within its pale who, to the best of their knowledge, are followers of Christ. There are thousands of honest people in that anti-christian church, many of whom we have faith to believe will yet have their eyes opened to its true character, and will leave it. Just so there are many honest infidels who will yet accept the gospel. The same thing may also be said of many heathen. But because there are infidels and heathen who honestly desire to do right, and who do as nearly right as they know how, shall we laud infidelity and paganism? The fact is, and we have abundant evidence to prove it, that there is not in the whole world a more potent factor in the manufacture of infidels than the Roman Catholic Church. Not only so, but by its teachings it opens the flood-gates of vice and immorality, and almost puts a premium on licentiousness. Yet it hoodwinks sleepy Protestants by making much of the image of Jesus Christ, and by a profession of regard for the marriage relation. While we have not an unkind feeling for any Catholic in the world, we are glad to be known, as the Catholic Sentinel puts it, as "a foe to the Catholic Church and the Jesuits." w.