ON THE PRESENT POSITION OF CATHOLICS IN ENGLAND: ADDRESSED TO THE BROTHERS OF THE ORATORY. BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D. PRIEST OF THE CONGREGATION OF ST. PHILIP NERI. 17, PORTMAN STREET, AND 63, PATERNOSTER ROW. LECTURE V. LOGICAL INCONSISTENCY OF THE PROTESTANT VIEW. A CONSIDERATION was incidentally introduced into the argument which engaged our attention last week, Brothers of the Oratory, which deserves insisting on, in the general view which I am taking of the present position of the Catholic Religion in England. I then said that, even putting aside the special merits and recommendations of the Catholic rule of celibacy, as enjoined upon the Priesthood and as involved in Monachism (with which I was not concerned), and looking at the question in the simple view of it, to which Protestants confine themselves, and keeping ourselves strictly on the defensive, still, when instances of bad priests and bad religious are brought against us, we might fairly fall back upon what may be called the previous question. I mean, it is incumbent on our opponents to show, that there are fewer cases of scandal among a married clergy than among an unmarried; fewer cases of mental conflict, of restlessness, of despondency, of desolation, of immorality, P and again of cruel slavery and hopeless suffering, among Protestant women, whether unmarried or wives, than among Catholic nuns. It must be shown that in such instances of guilt or sorrow which can be adduced, the priests accused have fallen into sin, the nuns compassionated have passed from happiness to misery, distinctly by virtue of the vow which binds them to a single life :— for till this is proved, nothing is proved. Protestants, however, for the most part, find it very pleasant to attack others, very irksome and annoying to defend themselves; they judge us by one rule, themselves by another; and they convict us of every sin under heaven for doing sometimes what they do every day. This one-sidedness, as it may be called, is one of the very marks or notes of a Protestant; and bear in mind, when I use the word Protestant, I do not mean thereby all who are not Catholics, but distinctly the disciples of the Elizabethan Tradition. Such a one cannot afford to be fair; he cannot be fair if he tries. He is ignorant, and he goes on to be unjust. He has always viewed things in one light, and he cannot adapt himself to any other; he cannot throw himself into the ideas of other men, fix upon the principles on which those ideas depend, and then set himself to ascertain how those principles differ, or whether they differ at all, from those which he acts upon himself; and, like a man who has been for a long while in one position, he is cramped and disabled, and has a difficulty and pain, more than we can well conceive, in stretching his limbs, straightening them, and moving them freely. This narrow and one-sided condition of the Protestant intellect might be illustrated in various ways. For instance, as regards the subject of education. It has |