Superstition Unveiled | Page 9

before you worship them. These remarkable words, originally addressed to the Heathen, lose none of their force when directed against the Christian.
No one can conceive a supernatural Being, and what none can conceive none ought to worship, or even assert the existence of. Who worships a something of which he knows nothing is an idolater. To talk of, or bow down to it, is nonsensical; to pretend affection for it, is worse than nonsensical. Such conduct, however pious, involves the rankest hypocrisy; the meanest and most odious species of idolatry; for labouring to destroy which the Universalist is called 'murderer of the human soul,' 'blasphemer,' and other foolish names, too numerous to mention.
It would be well for all parties, if those who raise against us the cry of 'blasphemy,' were made to perceive that 'godless' unbelievers cannot be blasphemers; for, as contended by Lord Brougham in his Life of Voltaire, blasphemy implies belief; and, therefore, Universalists cannot logically or justly be said to blaspheme him. The blasphemer, properly so called, is he who imagines Deity, an ascribes to the idol of his own brain all manner of folly, contradiction, inconsistency, and wickedness.
Superstition is universally abhorred, but no one believes himself superstitious. There never was a religionist who believed his own religion mere superstition. All shrink indignantly from the charge of being superstitious; while all raise temples to, and bow down, before 'thingless names.' The 'masses' of every nation erect chimera into substantial reality, and woe to these who follow not the insane example. The consequences--the fatal consequences--are everywhere apparent. In our own country we see social disunion on the grandest possible scale. Society is split up into an almost infinite variety of sects whose members imagine themselves patented to think truth and never to be wrong in the enunciation of it.
Sanders' News Letter and Daily Advertiser of Feb. 18, 1845, among other curiosities, contains an 'Address of the Dublin Protestant Operative Association, and Reformation Society,' one sentence of which is--We have raised our voices against the spirit of compromise, which is the opprobrium of the age; we have unfurled the banner of Protestant truth, and placed ourselves beneath it; we have insisted upon Protestant ascendancy as just and equitable, because Protestant principles are true and undeniable.
Puseyite Protestants tell a tale the very reverse of that so modestly told by their nominal brethren of the Dublin Operative Association. They, as may be seen in Palmer's Letter to Golightly, utterly reject and anathematise the principle of Protestantism, as a heresy with all its forms, sects, or denominations. Nor is that all our 'Romeward Divines' do, for in addition to rejecting utterly and cursing bitterly, as well the name as the principle of Protestantism, they eulogise the Church of Rome, because forsooth she yields, says Newman in his letter to Jelf, free scope to feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, and devotedness; while we have it on the authority of Tract 90, that the Church of England is in bondage; working in chains, and (tell it not in Dublin) teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies. Fierce and burning is the hatred of Dublin Operative Association Christians to Popery, but exactly that style of hatred to Protestantism is avowed by Puseyites. Both sets of Christians are quite sure they are right: but (alas! for infallibility) a third set of Christians insist that they are both wrong. There are Papists, or Roman Catholics, who consider Protestant principles the very reverse of true and undeniable, and treat with derisive scorn the 'fictitious Catholicism' of Puseyite Divines.
Count de Montalambert, in his recently published 'Letter to the Rev. Mr. Neale on the Architectural, Artistical, and Archaeological Movements of the Puseyites,' enters his 'protest' against the most unwarranted and unjustifiable assumption of the name of Catholic by people and things belonging to the actual Church of England. 'It is easy,' he observes, 'to take up a name, but it is not so easy to get it recognised by the world and by competent authority. Any man for example, may come out to Madeira and call himself a Montmorency, or a Howard, and even enjoy the honour and consideration belonging to such a name till the real Montmorencys or Howards hear something about it, and denounce him, and then such a man would be justly scouted from society, and fall down much lower than the lowness from which he attempted to rise. The attempt to steal away from us and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England that glorious title of Catholic is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present--by the coronation oath of your sovereigns--by all the laws which have established your Church--even by the recent answer of your University of Oxford to the lay address