Liber Humanitatis, Essays

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 edition. Excerpt: ... IS ROMANISM A CORRUPTION OF CHRISTIANITY, OR IS IT ITS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT? THREE LETTERS TO A FRIEND IN ANSWER TO AN INQUIRY SO WORDED IN "THE INDEX" (AMERICAN JOURNAL), MAY, 1872. I. HE opinions advocated in the papers you have forwarded are no doubt startling, but they are stated with fairness and candour, and the time has come for Christianity to quit the "Champ Clos" and to fight in the open field and in the face of day. Above all things, we must, as believers in divinely-communicated truth, avoid the mere fence and sword-play of Evasion, and shun that special pleading, "the speaking lies for God and arguing deceitfully for Him," which the righteous spirit of Job so strongly deprecates, and which is the bane of ordinary preaching, and of religious writing in general. I have not met with Mr. F. Newman's letter, referred to, " On Roman Catholicism viewed as the corruption of Christianity," but when the Editor of the Index in replying to it says that he looks upon Romanism as being rather " its genuine outcome," he meets me on familiar ground. I have been strongly impressed lately by some remarks of Isaac Taylor's, who, after speaking in his Life of Wesley of a certain narrowness inherent in Methodism, goes on to say that whatever in it contradicts or jars upon natural feeling does so equally in Christianity itself, or would do so if we met it boldly face to face. While reading these words I saw how their truth applied not only to Methodism and other extreme and rigid phases of Protestantism, but also to Roman Catholicism, and I felt that what in one case we are accustomed to call peculiarity, and in the other exaggeration or distortion, is but the assertion of certain principles native to Christianity, which Christianity, as seen in...