The Month and Catholic Review (Volume 24-25) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875. Excerpt: ... responsibility. The one despise an authority they acknowledge, the other ridicule claims they reject What would be a mere act of arbitrary power by a non-Catholic ruler, may be a sacrilege in one who is or has been a son of the Church. Nero's persecutions were tyranny: Julian warred against the known truth. If men are to be judged, as far as possible, upon their own principles, those principles must be allowed to witness against as well as for them. A Protestant may support Henry the Second in his contest with St Thomas of Canterbury, because the Archbishop asserted claims which to a Protestant seem extravagant and intolerable. But he will not, therefore, if he reason justly, view the King's conduct with approbation. He will think resistance in general right, and yet think the King's resistance wrong. He will brand the Saint's demands as usurpations, and yet complain that those usurpations were withstood. And why so? Because the King professed and lived and died in principles which declared his resistance unlawful, and which conceded the rights he disallowed. Rebels inside the Church may indeed always find undisceming panegyrists outside her pale, but the praises of such men are not more worthless than they are undeserved. No man deserves credit for slighting tenets he conscientiously holds, and if he does not hold them conscientiously, so long as he does not abjure them, he is an impostor of the worst kind. We are not aware that Louis ever made or meditated any change of faith; and yet he imprisoned for eleven years, with circumstances of the most revolting cruelty, a Bishop and a Prince of his Church uncondemned by any tribunal which that Church recognizes as competent. He, notwithstanding, affected the character of a deeply religious man. He was consta...