Napoleon III and the Papacy [pp. 686-702]

Napoleon 11I. and the Papacy.
of Ireland. But in this country, the Catholics are not behind
in their zeal for education. They enter freely and at great
expenditure of funds and labour into competition with the Protestant system of universal education; and though, for the most
part, they take this course as the only condition of successful
rivalry with the prevailing Protestantism, the effect is to
change the entire Catholic policy in relation to mental culture,
and by consequence, to modify, in important respects, the
details of discipline and worship. The difference between the
methods for public edification in the Catholic assemblies of this
country and those of thoroughly Catholic countries, strikes all
travellers who witness it. This invariable conformity shows
that the tendency of the two bodies under mutual influence is
in the Protestant line, and not in the Catholic. Thus also the
withholding of the Scriptures from the laity, which is an undeniable and prominent feature of Romanism, in theory and practice,
gradually disappears in this country, as in other countries increasingly Protestant, and the Scriptures, in the same form as
used in public teaching, are distributed among the people.
And the people are instructed in public on the presumption
that the Bible is possessed and read in their families. We
have ourselves heard in Catholic assemblies, whole discourses
framed throughout on this presumption, and in this respect
not differing at all from those of a Protestant pulpit. The
cases we witnessed were those indeed of the most cultivated
congregations of an enlightened city; and though not probably
a sample for the whole Catholic population, prove nevertheless
the tendency to conformity; which is our point. And what we
have said of education, and of the popular use of the Bible, is
equally true of other matters, which we should mention if time
would permit.
It would therefore not be contrary to the course of Providence in analogous cases, if silent and half unconscious, and
legally unauthorized modifications of Romanism should go on,
and be immensely accelerated as the time draws nigh for all
antichrists to be destroyed; and if, in process of time, the
dissolving petrifaction of the ante-reformation Catholicism, in
trying to recover some dim sense of her identity, should find
that she was not. Thus England awoke, upon a time, to the
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