The sober part of the nation are
afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of
their pledges.
* * * * *
_April_ 29. 1823.
CHURCH OF ROME.
The present adherents of the church of Rome are not, in my judgment,
Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of
the primitive church for the first three hundred years. The council of
Trent made the Papists what they are. [1] A foreign Romish bishop has
declared, that the Protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he
conceived the enlightened Catholics to have been before the council of
Trent, than the best of the latter in his days. Perhaps you will say, this
bishop was not a _good Catholic_.[2] I cannot answer for that. The course
of Christianity and the Christian church may not unaptly be likened to a
mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters
mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its
stream. By some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from
the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the
refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader
current, and then cries out, "_We_ are the river!"
[Footnote 1: See Aids to Reflection, p.
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