amelioration, even down to the present day. In
England, it did the same; it broke down the bulwarks of the British
Constitution, derived from the Catholic Magna Charta; it set at naught
popular rights, and gave to the king or queen unlimited power in church
and state; and it required a bloody struggle and a revolution, one
hundred and fifty years afterwards, to restore to something of their
former integrity the old chartered rights of the British people.

Protestantism has always boasted much, but it has really done little for
the cause of human freedom. As to the liberties which we enjoy in our
country, we cheerfully award to our Protestant fellow-citizens the
praise which is so justly due them for _their_ share in the glorious
struggle.

But as to the power of Protestantism to maintain the Republic by
checking the great evils that have already sapped its foundations, it
has not any at all. How could Protestantism check infidelity, since it
leads to it? There are two causes of infidelity that have existed from
the beginning of the world. But about three centuries ago Protestantism
opened a very wide avenue to infidelity. Protestantism introduced the
principle, "There is no divinely-commissioned authority to teach
infallibly." Now infidelity exists in this principle of Protestantism,
as the oak exists in the acorn, as the consequence is in the premise. On
the claim of private judgment, Protestants reject the authority of St.
Peter, the Vicar of Christ. The Calvinists, going, as they do, by the
same principle, reject the Real Presence of our Lord in the Blessed
Sacrament.

The Socinians, following the same principle, reject, to-day, the
Divinity of Christ, and therefore abjure Christianity, and fall back
into utter incredulity.

The German and French philosophers, rationalists, and pantheists, of all
degrees, do not even stop at that; they go farther, and deny the
existence of a God Creator, and all by the privilege of free and private
judgment.

The individual reason taking, as it does, the place of faith, the
Protestant, whether he believes it or not, is an infidel in germ, and
the infidel is a Protestant in full bloom; in other words, infidelity is
nothing but Protestantism in the highest degree. Hence it is that Edgar
Quinet, a great herald of Protestantism, is right in styling the
Protestant sects _the thousand gates open to get out of Christianity_.
No wonder, then, that thousands of Protestants have ended,