The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-02-14 00:00:00

ROMISH LECTURE: MR. ANDE.RDON
AGAIN.

LAST night, at the Concert-hall, the Rev. W. H.
Anderdon, a pervert to the Romish Church, delivered
his second controversial lecture ; in which he undertook
to prove, that, as there was a church on earth, "it was
not a Protestant body."
Protestantism, the lecturer said, like many other terms,
had considerably advanced and expanded in the lapse of
time. The spring deeper than in political changes, and
the principle of Protestantism had been inherent in man
since the fall ! If they were to define it, it might be
called an act of intellectual and moral rebellion which
made an individual or a section rise up against the
authority vested in the great whole, disbelieved its mis-
sion to teach and govern, and so rejected its creeds or its
precepts. Protestants, therefore, differed from what was
called infidelity in this :—lnfidelity pure rejected the
Divine authority speaking through the moral government
of the universe or the written word ; Protestantism re-
jected the same authority speaking through the church.
It was one principle manifested on a different subject
matter. Both rejected what was really Divine and au-
thentic, and called it human and fictitious. Protestantism,
then, was the most ancient form of human opinion. It
seemed to have begun with our first mother, Eve, when
she determined to take the forbidden fruit, for she did but
exercise her private judgment, in what was after all
simply a matter of faith against appearances. Dathan
and Abiram were Protestants of the first rank. They
were the Cranmer and Ridley of the new Mosaic
Reformation, and they stood up, to adopt Protestant lan-
guage, with a modest meekness, to assert the independence
of the human mind against the dictating old man, who
was the lawgiver of Israel. They and Borah would have
been delighted could they but have seen such reformers as
would arise in the distant 19th century. Protestantism,
in its very nature, was the direct opposite of the church,
inasmuch as it abhorred the very notion of such an autho-
rity as should be inherent in a church. A Protestant
generally, taking out such exceptions as were miracles of
mercy, was an unbeliever, as he was more or less of a
Protestant ! That was the assertion of Count de Maestre.
.If God had spoken to a certain amount, he was to be
heard to that full amount. To take all He had said in
every part as an integral part, was to accept His Revela-
tion ;—to halve and quarter it, to weigh part against part,
to summon the eternal words to the bar of our private
reason, and a lawful king had ere now been brought before
the revolutionary tribunal of his born subjects—to sub-
mit the divine declarations to the analysis of our poor
judgment—to call one book canonical and another apocry-
phical • or this doctrine revealed truth, and that unwar-
ranted tradition, just because we so decree ; or one funda-
mental and another non-essential, by the standard and
measure of ourselves—all that, he said, was not to accept
Revelation, but it was to Protestantise and pull to pieces !
The Protestant believed that he went by Scripture, but
he was really going by tradition fully as much as
the Catholic; the only difference was this, that he
was taking a human instead of a Divine tradition as
the rule of his faith. Man professed to reveal, for he
professed to interpret, and they knew that in human
things the judge who interprets and applies the law,
occupies a position nearly as authoritative as the
legislator who just framed it. Mr. Anderdon then
went on to show how satisfied Romanists were of
the truths of the doctrines taught by their church,
as one proof of their truth and efficacy. He gave a
scurrilous sketch of an English gentleman's attend-
ing church, sitting on the pew that his father sat in,
using his Prayer-book for a while, kneeling on a hassock,
and then composing himself "to criticise the sermon."
This was hailed with loud laughter and cheering by the
audience. He next quoted expressions of Goethe, favour-
able to Romanism, although he was the idol, and might
be the parasite, of a Lutheran court. Men were
furious, the lecturer said, because the Catholic church
would not change. She was the only corporate body influ-
enced by the succession of time. She inherited as a fore-
taste of eternity the fruits of her experience, and her faith
was without decline. The tourist from New Zealand
would have completed his sketch of the ruins of St. Paul's
from the broken arch of London-bridge, before a syllable
or iota should have faded from Pope Pius's creed ! (Loud
cheers.)
We cannot pretend to carry our abstract further, from the
lateness of the hour. During an interval in the lecture,
a gentleman, whom we understood to be the Rev. Mr.
Bardsley, asked if questions would be permitted at the
conclusion ? Mr. Anderdon answered, that as that
was only a lecture, and not a meeting for discus-
sisn, it would be inconvenient, and the gentleman had
better postpone any objection or reply he had till next
Monday, when, we may state, that the Rev. J. B. Lowe
lectures in reply.