can, in some
measure, respect the other feelings which have been the beginnings of
apostasy; I can respect the desire for unity which would reclaim the
Romanist by love, and the distrust of his own heart which subjects the
proselyte to priestly power; I say I can respect these feelings, though
I cannot pardon unprincipled submission to them, nor enough wonder at
the infinite fatuity of the unhappy persons whom they have
betrayed:--Fatuity, self-inflicted, and stubborn in resistance to God's
Word and man's reason!--to talk of the authority of the Church, as if
the Church were anything else than the whole company of Christian men,
or were ever spoken of in Scripture[98] as other than a company to be
taught and fed, not to teach and feed.--Fatuity! to talk of a separation
of Church and State, as if a Christian state, and every officer therein,
were not necessarily a part of the Church,[99] and as if any state
officer could do his duty without endeavoring to aid and promote
religion, or any clerical officer do his duty without seeking for such
aid and accepting it:--Fatuity! to seek for the unity of a living body
of truth and trust in God, with a dead body of lies and trust in wood,
and thence to expect anything else than plague, and consumption by worms
undying, for both. Blasphemy as well as fatuity! to ask for any better
interpreter of God's Word than God, or to expect knowledge of it in any
other way than the plainly ordered way: if _any_ man will do he shall
know. But of all these fatuities, the basest is the being lured into the
Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken
glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine of an
organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests'
petticoats; jangled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a
belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no
imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible. I had hardly
believed that it was a thing possible, though vague stories had been
told me of the effect, on some minds, of mere scarlet and candles, until
I came on this passage in Pugin's "Remarks on articles in the
Rambler":--

"Those who have lived in want and privation are the best qualified to
appreciate the blessings of plenty; thus, those who have been devout and
sincere members of the separated portion of the English Church; who have
prayed, and hoped, and loved, through all the poverty of the maimed
rite