was only established by
confusion and anarchy. Do you feel your heart beat at the mention of
justice and truth? Acknowledge, then, what it is impossible to deny,
that Luther must not be compared with the apostles. The apostles came
teaching in the name of Jesus Christ their master, and the Catholics are
entitled to ask us from whom Luther had his mission. We cannot prove
that he had a mission direct or indirect. Luther perverted Christianity;
he withdrew himself criminally from the communion in which regeneration
alone was possible.

It has been said that all Christendom demanded a reformation--who
disputes it? But long before the time of Luther the papacy had listened
to the complaints of the faithful. The Council of Lateran had been
convened to put an end to the scandals which afflicted the Church. The
papacy labored to restore the discipline of the early ages, in
proportion as Europe, freed from the yoke of brute force, became
politically organized and advanced with slow but sure step to
civilization. Was it not at that time that the source of all religious
truth was made accessible to scientific study, since, by means of the
watchful protection of the papacy, the holy Scriptures were translated
into every language? The New Testament of Erasmus, dedicated to Leo X,
had preceded the quarrel about indulgences.

A reformer should take care that, in his zeal to get rid of manifest
abuses, he does not at the same time shake the faith and its wholesome
institutions to the foundation. When the reformers violently separated
themselves from the Church of Rome, they thought it necessary to reject
every doctrine taught by her. Luther, that spirit of evil, who scattered
gold with dirt, declared war against the institutions without which the
Church could not exist; he destroyed unity. Who does not remember that
exclamation of Melanchthon, "We have committed many errors, and have
made good of evil without any necessity for it"?

In justification of the brutal rupture of Germany with Rome, the
scandals of the clergy are alleged. But if at the period of the
Reformation there were priests and monks in Germany whose conduct was
the cause of regret to Christians, their number was not larger than it
had been previously. When Luther appeared, there was in Germany a great
number of Catholic prelates whose piety the reformers themselves have
not hesitated to admire.

What pains they take to deceive us! In books of every size they teac