is, we cannot believe
it; the light of our whole mind, given us to walk-by from Heaven
above, finds it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe
it, we will not try to believe it,--we dare not! The thing is
_untrue_; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durst
pretend to think it true. Away with it; let whatsoever likes come in
the place of it: with _it_ we can have no farther trade!--Luther and
his Protestantism is not responsible for wars; the false Simulacra
that forced him to protest, they are responsible. Luther did what
every man that God has made has not only the right, but lies under the
sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dost
thou believe me?--No!--At what cost soever, without counting of costs,
this thing behoved to be done. Union, organisation spiritual and
material, a far nobler than, any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest
days, I never doubt, is coming for the world; sure to come. But on
Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to
come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and
ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do.
Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable.
We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let
us not be unjust to the Old. The Old _was_ true, if it no longer is.
In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or other
dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there
is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' is
foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on the
increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one of the
idlest ever started. Very curious: to count-up a few Popish chapels,
listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings,--to much dull-droning,
drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say: See,
Protestantism is _dead_; Popeism is more alive than it, will be alive
after it!--Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselves
Protestant are dead; but _Protestantism_ has not died yet, that I hear
of! Protestantism, if we will look, has in these days produced its
Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and the French Revolution;
rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom, what else is alive
_but_ Protestantism? The life of most else that one meets is a
galvanic one merely,