"THE Catholic Church: What Is It?" [From a contribution of the Bishop of Carlisle to the January Hibbert Journal, issued in this country by Sherman, French & Company, Boston.]
It is impossible to imagine how different, how marvelously and gloriously different, might have been the course of Christianity, its moral dominion and spiritual conquests, but for the financial greed and the lust of authority which have characterized the efforts to establish an imperial and hierarchial Catholicity—efforts which have driven simple-hearted, high-souled, God-fearing men by millions into noble exile, contemptuously called "schism" by those guilty of the exile.
A thousand years of trial on a scale which can never recur, and under circumstances favored by ignorance and nourished by the feudal spirit, impossible of repetition, have conclusively shown that, wherever else Catholicity may be found, it is hopeless to seek for it in the Roman Church, unless, abandoning her hierarchial pretensions and forsaking her medieval superstitions (Which may God of His goodness grant!), she returns to primitive truth and primitive simplicity.
Infallibility will not do instead of truth; especially a self-constituted infallibility proved both by experience and the reason of the thing to be palpably absurd. Nor will a specious, but spurious doctrine of development stand against the assaults of undeniable facts. The capital property of development is upwardness. The true name for downward development is reversion. But whether regarded from the point of view either of reason or faith, the developments of the Papacy for a thousand years have been downward—reversions in the direction of Judaism and Paganism. While the world has been moving onward and upward, the Church of Rome has been falling downward and backward. Catholicity is a grand and heavenly ideal, and can not be found in any organization so long as it continues of the earth, earthy.
