Superstition Unveiled | Page 9

Heathen, and should
scorn to complain when the bitter chalice is returned to his own lips.
Universalists believe the God of Bishop Watson a supernatural chimera,
and to its worshippers have a perfect right to say, Not one of you
reflects that you ought to know your Gods 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