instances with very little search. Always assume more than you
want; because you cannot tell how much you may want: put what is over into
the didn't-mean-that basket, or the extreme case what-not.

PROTESTANT AND PAPAL CHRISTENDOM.

Something near forty years of examination of the theologies on and
off--more years very much on than quite off--have given me a good title--to
myself, I ask no one else for leave--to make the following remarks: A
conclusion has _premises_, facts or doctrines from proof or authority, and
_mode of inference_. There may be invention or {34} falsehood of premise,
with good logic; and there may be tenable premise, followed by bad logic;
and there may be both false premise _and_ bad logic. The Roman system has
such a powerful manufactory of premises, that bad logic is little wanted;
there is comparatively little of it. The doctrine-forge of the Roman Church
is one glorious compound of everything that could make Heraclitus[71] sob
and Democritus[72] snigger. But not the only one. The Protestants, in
tearing away from the Church of Rome, took with them a fair quantity of the
results of the Roman forge, which they could not bring themselves to give
up. They had more in them of Martin than of Jack. But they would have no
premises, except from the New Testament; though some eked out with a few
general Councils. The consequence is that they have been obliged to find
such a logic as would bring the conclusions they require out of the
canonical books. And a queer logic it is; nothing but the Roman forge can
be compared with the Protestant loom. The picking, the patching, the
piecing, which goes to the Protestant _termini ad quem_,[73] would be as
remarkable to the general eye, as the Roman manufacture of _termini a
quo_,[74] if it were not that the world at large seizes the character of an
asserted fact better than that of a mode of inference. A grand step towards
the deification of a lady, made by alleged revelation 1800 years after her
death, is of glaring evidence: two or three additional shiffle-shuffles
towards defence of saying the Athanasian curse in church and unsaying it
out of church, are hardly noticed. Swift has bungled his satire where he
makes Peter a party to finding out what he wants, _totidem syllabis_ and
_totidem literis_, {35} when he cannot find it _totidem verbis_[75] This is
Protestant method: the Roman plan is _viam faciam_; the Protestant plan is
_viam inveniam_.[76] The publi