The Sun.
London, England, 1864-08-31 00:00:00

Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

On Sunday afternoon Dr. Goss, the Roman Catholic
bishop of the diocese of Liverpool, laid the foundation stone
of a new Roman Catholic chapel at Euston, a village a few
miles from Preston. The chapel will cost about £3,000, and
will accommodate upwards of 400 people. Mr Pugin, of
London, is the architect of the building.
After the ceremony the bishop addressed the concourse of
people present, about 2,000. In the course of his speech he
said—Do not let any one suppose that this is a vain cere-
mony which we have been performing. We doubt there are
some who will tell you they saw the ceremony, saw the
procession, saw the priests walking round the building, saw
them headed by a cross, and even saw the bishop himself
bow down and worship it. Worship it I Why, my brethren,
we no more worship that cross than we worship the pillars
and the scaffolding which have been raised for the erection

of this building—but we honour it, love it, and bow down
to it becalm it contains the sacred image of Him who died
for the redemption of man. Who is there who does not love

and honour the image of a good friend, a brother,or a sister
In these days, after photography has multiplied portraits of

almost every created thing, there is hardly a man so poor
who does not wish to have the image either of his children
or his wife—not a woman hardly who does not wish for the

portrait of her husband or her children, of her mother, or of
some loved ene—and look upon them in their hours of trial,
in their times of trouble, and call to mind the lessons which
in life they gave them,and derive some comfort, some hope,
some pleasure from the contemplation of them. There is
many a man who has been cheered and made happy for the
time by looking upon the portrait of his mother—of that
mother whose body is decaying in the ground, whilst her
eyes seem to look upon him as in the happier days of the
past. So we feel a reverence and a love for the cross—for
that image of Josue Christ to whom we feel that we owe
everything we possess. He has redeemed us, saved us, and
broken open the gates of heaven, and given us a title to the
regions of the blessed. Therefore vain are the slanders used
against us as to falling down and worshipping images. And
there are those who will tell you that this ceremony is a
piece of Popish mummery, that it is a foreign superstition,
and that we are Italian in our notions and feelings; that we
are not genuine Englishmen; that we are perverts to our
country; that our allegiance is divided ; that we do not obey
the Queen as our legitimate sovereign; that we place the
Pope of Rome above all the powers of this country ; and that
our allegiance to our sovereign is spurious, and our loyalty
without foundation. If those who bring such charges as
these against us had studied the hist gy of this eugutry—if
they had examined the events of the ptst:-.-they would find
that for 300 years we have stood faithfully to the throne of
the country, even at the expense of out lives, and that we
have risked our fortunes in defence of the Crown. Why
was it that we stood by the Stuart,? Was it because they
were Catholicly inclined? Yet we have never been so de-
serted as by the Stuarts. It was through them and whilst
standing up in defence of the country that we lust much of
our properity, that many of our priests lost their lives, that
they were hunted like wild beasts, that they had to fly from
their houses and their homes. We were aliens in our own
country. We were hunted down as traitors and robbers.
And why? Because a change had come over the country;
no longer was the old religion allowed ; and although Eliza-
beth bore a hard hand upon us—long she had been cruel—
we did not suffer as much from her persecution as from that
in the time of the Stuarts, How did the Catholics conduct
themselves when Cromwell with his iron warriors arose to
crush the irjuries which were then supposed to exist ? The
Catholics, up to a man, were found faithful to the side of the
Stuarts. And why ? Because it is the very principle of their
religion—they cannot, and they dare not be otherwise—they
must be loyal, as they must be honest and just, and observe
all the other Christian virtues. For we believe that loyalty
is a duty that we owe to the Crown, just as much as we hold
it necessary that we should observe the virtues of justice, of
chastity, of temperance, and of prudence. Therefore, I
say, away with accusations brought against Catholics that
they are not loyal. We are not Italians, but Englishmen.
And let me tell you that our ritual and doctrines are not
new—we are not the followers of a new ritual, of new ser-
vices; our ceremonies and principles are not the product of
modern imagination and recent enactments ; but they come
down to us from antiquity, and there is no Catholic church
in the land whose doctrines and ritual are not of pre-refor-
mation origin, and whose operations have not been blessed
with the same creed as that which used to exist among our
ancestors. If your ancestors were to rise up from the dead
and saw any of you bowing to a different creed they would
ignore you—if they saw any of you worshipping according
to the present Catholic creed they would at once recognise
your fellowship and fall down before the same altar and bow
to the same saintly names as yourselves. I know it is gene-
rally said that the grandness, the greatness of England has
been dependent upon the change of religion which has taken
place in the land. But why has not the same thing made
Holland great? There was a time when she threatened
even our land—when a Dutch admiral sailed up the Chan-
nel with a broom at his masthead, intimating thereby that
he had swept the English out of the seas. Yet Holland has
fallen—fallen from a great country to something less than
a second-rate Power, and yet Holland has always remained
true to her principles of religion. And there was a time
when the Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden came down upon
the peoples of ,the western nations, and crashed many in
the very midst of his might. Yet where is Sweden now?
Yawned armor! Conm the an. ion, • she has
stood by and seen that poor little kingdom of Denmark
actually devoured and worried by the great Powers of Ger-
many, and has not dared to lend a helping hand. And yet
Sweden has remained always constant, always firm to
the principles of the Reformation—to the religion which
England has changed for that of her forefathers. If
the changed religion —if religion at all, as advo-
cated by many in these times made a nation
great, if it has made England great, the countries I have
named would surely have been great indeed. Has religion
anything to do with it ? No, my brethren ; it is not on ac-
count of religion, but on account of the discoveries of coal,
and iron, and cotton, which have made this country great.
Is it the religion of the Reformation that has made us great
and prosperous? Is it not rather through our discoveries
and experiments, and trade in coal, and cotton, and iron,
which have made this country known to the utmost bounds
of the earth? No, believe me, religion has nothing to do
with the depression of one country or the elevation of
another. The religion we profess is not, I need hardly say,
now, or strange, or foreign. It is the religion which the
country professed, which our ancestors loved, from the
days when the, great Gregory, the Pope, sent forth mis-
sionaries to convert our Saxon forefathers. There was a
time when our poor ancestors roamed over the fields and in
the woods, more like savages than men. Then the Roman
legions came and invaded the country; they reduced our
ancestors, or rather raised them, to a point of civilisation.
Then the Roman empire gave way, and savage persons
from Denmark and Saxony came down upon the country
and conquered its inhabitants, and reduced it again to a
state of servitude. Some of the inhabitants were sold as
slaves, end carried to Rome, There they attracted the atten-
tion of the great Gregory. lie saw them, inquired from
what nation they came ; ho looked upon their fair faces,
and saw their long, flowing, comely locks; he was told that
they were Angles; and when he heard this ho eaid, "Non
Avg sed angeliforent, si essent Christiani"—They would
not by Angles, but angels, had they been Chrietians."
Gregory bent missionaries to England from Rome, and
they remained amongst our forefathers until the lust of
Henry VIII. burst through the bonds of the law, and be•
cause the Pope would not allow him to be divorced from
his wife, he separated himself from the Church of Rome.
But he only separated from her jurisdiction. He believed
in the same doctrines, and he sent men to the scaffold
because they dared to pro:ess what were called the prin-
ciples of the Iletortuatiou, 3tti; liewy patted away, and