nt an extract or two. The following brings forward tendencies
too little noticed by the antagonists of the papacy:

"A true British Protestant, whose notions of "Popery" are limited to
what he hears from an evangelical curate or has seen at the opening of a
Jesuit church, looks on the whole system as an obsolete mummery; and no
more believes that men of sense can seriously adopt it, than that they
will be converted to the practice of eating their dinner with a
Chinaman's chop-sticks instead of the knife and fork. He pictures to
himself a number of celibate gentlemen, who glide through a sort of
minuet by candle-light around the altar, and worship the creature
instead of the Creator, and keep the Bible out of every body's way, and
make people easy about their sins: and he is positive that no one above
a "poor Irishman," can fail to see through such nonsense. Few even of
educated Englishmen have any suspicion of the depth and solidity of the
Catholic dogma, its wide and various adaptation to wants ineffaceable
from the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the supernatural into the
natural life, its vast resources for a powerful hold upon the
conscience. We doubt whether any single reformed church can present a
theory of religion comparable with it in comprehensiveness, in logical
coherence, in the well-guarded disposition of its parts. Into this
interior view, however, the popular polemics neither give nor have the
slightest insight: and hence it is a common error both to underrate the
natural power of the Romish scheme, and to mistake the quarter in which
it is most likely to be felt. It is not among the ignorant and vulgar,
but among the intellectual and imaginative--not by appeals to the senses
in worship, but by consistency and subtlety of thought--that in our days
converts will be made to the ancient church. We have receded far from
the Reformation by length of time; the management of the controversy has
degenerated: it has been debased by political passions, and turned upon
the grossest external features of the case; and when a thoughtful man,
accustomed to defer to historical authority, and competent to estimate
moral theories as a whole, is led to penetrate beneath the surface, he
is unprepared for the sight of so much speculative grandeur, and, if he
have been a mere Anglican or Lutheran, is perhaps astonished into the
conclusion, that the elder system has the advantage in philosophy and
antiquity alike. From this