Resolution, showing his Reasons why he will not be a Papist, &c. &c. On opening the pages, the first passage that met his eyes was the following:

"Q. What was there in the Romish religion that occasioned Protestants to separate themselves from it?"

"A. In that it was a superstitious, idolatrous, damnable, bloody, traitorous, blind, blasphemous religion."

This was enough for him who read; he became indignant, and, resolving to abandon a religion of which such a character was given, he emphatically declared, "I will be a Protestant!"

The feelings which animated Mr. Moore at this extraordinary crisis, are too well expressed by himself to allow us to suppose that we could convey them better to the reader:

I was now pretty much in the situation of Sir Godfrey Kneller, in the strange dream attributed to him, when, having arrived, as he thought, at the entrance of heaven, he found St. Peter there, in his capacity of gatekeeper, inquiring the name and religion of the different candidates for admission that presented themselves; and still, as each gave his answer, directing them to the seats allotted to their respective creeds. "And pray, sir," said the Saint, addressing Sir Godfrey in his turn, "what religion may you be of?"-" Why, truly, sir," said Sir Godfrey, "I am of no religion."-" Oh, then, sir," replied St. Peter, "you will be so good as to go in and take your seat where you please."

In much the same independent state of creed did I find myself at this crisis-having before me the whole variegated field of Protestantism, with power to choose on what part of its wide surface I should settle. But though thus free, and with " a charter like the wind, to blow where'er I pleased," my position, on the whole, was hardly what could be called comfortable. It was like that of a transmigrating spirit in the critical interval between its leaving one body and taking possession of another; or rather, like a certain ill-translated work, of which some wit has remarked, that it had been taken out of one language without being put into any other.

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Though as ignorant, at that time of my life, on all matters of religion, as any young gentleman brought up at a University-even when meant for holy orders could well be, I had, by nature, very strong devotional feelings, and from childhood had knelt nightly to my prayers, with a degree of trust in God's mercy and grace at which a professor of the Five Points would have been not a little scandalised. It was, therefore, with perfect conscientiousness and sincerity that I now addressed myself to the task of choosing a new religion; and having made up my mind that Protestantism was to be the creed of my choice, resolved also that it should be Protestantism of the best and most approved description.

But how was this to be managed? In a sermon which I once heard preached by a Fellow of our University, there was an observation put strongly by the preacher which I now called to mind for my guidance in the inquiry I was about to institute. "In like manner (said the preacher), as streams are always clearest near their source, so the first ages of Christianity will be found to have been the purest.' Taking this obvious position for granted, the deduction was of course evident, that to the doctrines and practice of the early ages of the Church I must have recourse to find

the true doctrines and practice of Protestantism: the changes which afterwards took place, as well in the tenets as the observances of Christians, having been, as the preacher told us, the cause of " that corrupt system of religion which has been entailed on the world under the odious name of Popery." To ascend, therefore, at once to that Aurora of our faith, and imbue myself thorougly with the opinions and doctrines of those upon whom its light first shone, was, I could not doubt, the sole effectual mode of attaining the great object I had in view-that of making myself a Protestant according to the purest and most orthodox pattern.

To the classical branch of the course taught in our University, I had devoted a good deal of attention. My acquaintance, therefore, with Latin and Greek was sufficiently familiar to embolden me to enter on the study of the Fathers in their own languages; while, besides the access which I was allowed, as graduate, to the library of our College, I had also, through another channel, all the best editions of those holy writers placed at my command. Of the Scriptures my knowledge had hitherto been scanty: but the plan I now adopted was to make my study of the sacred volume concurrent with this inquiry into the writings of its first expounders: so that the text and the comment might, by such juxta-position, shed light on each other.

Behold me, then, with a zeal whose sincerity at least deserved some success, sitting down, dictionary in hand, to my task of self-conversion; having secured one great step towards the adoption of a new creed in the feeling, little short of contempt, with which I looked back upon the old one. Bidding a glad, and, as I trusted, eternal adieu to the long catalogue of Popish abominations-to wit, transubstantiation, relics, fasting, purgatory, invocation of saints, &c. &c.-I opened my mind, a willing initiate, to those enlightening truths which were now, from a purer quarter of the heavens, to dawn upon me.-pp. 8-12.

In commencing the labours to which he had now resolved to devote himself, our inquirer soon found out that the higher up he went in the investigation, the more satisfied he was with the results. Having then proceeded, in pursuance of his determination, founded on this discovery, he was very speedily astonished to find, even at the outset, that of the five holy men who were called apostolical fathers, as having conversed with the apostles themselves, or their immediate disciples, one was no other than a pope, an actual pope, being the third who filled the office so called from the time of St. Peter. This was St. Clement, who was not only a fellowlabourer of, but was actually ordained by St. Paul. In the records which contained this astounding fact, the candidate for Protestantism discovered another, quite as surprising a piece of news, namely, that an appeal from the church of Corinth was made to the church of Rome for its interference and advice, whereupon this very St. Clement addresed to the Corinthians a reply, which is allowed, on all hands, to be one of the most interesting monuments of ecclesiastical literature which we possess.

Our inquirer next encountered the writings of St. Ignatius, who immediately succeeded the apostle Peter in the see of Antioch.

This bishop is thought to have been the child whom our Saviour took up and set down in the midst of his disciples, as the model of their imitation. At all events, no one could have been better acquainted than Ignatius with the customs and feelings of the apostles, and yet how truly preplexing was it to our inquirer to find in Ignatius a staunch supporter of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation! Scarcely had he recovered from the disappointment which such disclosures occasioned, when another awkward fact met his eyes, namely, that Ignatius having been condemned to martyrdom, the faithful deacons who had accompanied him to Rome gathered up the few bones which the devouring lions had left, and, carrying them back to Antioch, placed them in a shrine in that city, around which, every year afterwards, the faithful kept their pious vigils in memory of the saint. Nor was it, by any means, an unimportant piece of intelligence, casually communicated in the story of Ignatius' martyrdom, that whilst that illustrious saint was passing through Asia to Antioch, on his journey to Rome, the intended site of his sufferings, he earnestly exhorted the churches to be on their guard against heresy, and to hold fast by the traditions of the Apostles.

Marvellous, says the traveller in search of a religion, were those discoveries, most marvellous indeed! Who could have thought it? Nevertheless, determined not to be lightly turned aside from his purpose, he proceeded from the first to the second century, to see what encouragement he might receive in the latter. The first authority he met with in this age was St. Justin Martyr, whose unequivocal testimony as to the belief in transubstantiation did not leave the inquirer a single syllable to say. "Accustomed (says he) as I had been to consider the papal jurisdiction as a usurpation of the dark ages, the clear proofs I now saw of the chain of succession by which its title is carried up and fixed fast on that "Rock' on which the church itself is built, convinced and confounded me." A little afterwards he is attracted to a passage from a cotemporary writer, St. Irenæus, who boldly says, that he can enumerate all those bishops who were appointed by the apostles and their successors, down to himself and his colleagues. In this document, too, St. Irenæus mentions the church of Rome, as that to which, on account of its superior headship, every other must have recourse. In this age, too (the second), testimonies of the most unimpeachable character are found by our traveller with respect to the general confidence in the authority of the unwritten tradition. The effect of his researches on this occasion are thus pleasantly stated by the sufferer himself:

It will easily be believed that, at the close of this long day's studies, I felt utterly disheartened and wearied with my pursuit. I had now found sanctioned by the authority of the Church's earliest champions,-some of them men who had the preaching of the Apostles still sounding in their

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ears," six no less Popish points of faith and observance than-1. The acknowledgment of a Sovereign Pontiff; 2. A reverence due to Relics; 3. Satisfaction to God by fasting, alms-deeds, &c.; 4. The authority of tradition; 5. A Corporeal Presence in the Eucharist; and 6. The Sacrifice of the Mass. Who can wonder if, after all this, I despaired of ridding myself of Popery? Heaving a heavy sigh, as I closed my ponderous folios, and with a sort of oppressed sensation, as if the Pope were himself bodily on my back, I went to bed feeling much as Sinbad the sailor would have done, if, after having shaken off, as he thought, the troublesome little old Man of the Sea, he felt the legs of the creature again fastening round his neck.-vol. i., pp. 38, 39.

But our traveller was still far from having contracted a friendship for Popery; and he resolved to allow of no relaxation in his efforts to find out an excuse for becoming a Protestant. But the further he went in his inquiries, the greater was his distance from Protestantism; and, on comparing notes, he found that he had three other modern Catholic practices to score down, as being sanctioned by the authority of the primitive fathers of the church. These were prayers for the dead, veneration of images, and crossing. After this, he plainly acknowledges that any reasonable person would have given up the search; and this he would have done, he says, were it not that he had peculiar reasons for wishing to become a Protestant. He accordingly continued his investigations amongst the fathers of the third and fourth centuries; but, alas! still without being able to detect amongst them a single Protestant. The answer of every writer of authority was, that he belonged to the one Catholic church, the centre of which was the chair of St. Peter at Rome. This was either the language or meaning of all the great fathers of the third and fourth centuries. Passages are then quoted to show the belief on several disputed points. On the authority of the church and tradition, the quotations are from Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, St. Cyprian, Eusebius, St. Basil, St. Epiphanius, and St. Chrysostom; on the primacy of the successors of St. Peter, we have also St. Cyprian, St. Jerom, and St. Chrysostom; on satisfaction to God by penitential works, St. Cyprian and St. Ambrose; on prayers for the dead, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Ambrose, St. Epiphanius, St. Chrysostom; on invocation of saints and of the blessed Virgin, Origen, St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, St. Hilary, St. Basil, Ephrem of Edessa; on relics and images, St. Hilary, St. Basil, Ephrem, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and Ñilus.

Upon the subject of the invocation of the Virgin, the traveller has no doubt whatever that the worship of the Blessed Virgin, as that is and has always been understood by Catholics, formed a part of the devotions of Christians from the very first ages of the church. The writer admits candidly that the veneration paid by the Catholic church to the Virgin Mary has been abused, and that to a scandalous pitch, in the modern world. But though such VOL. II. (1833) No. I.

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abuses existed, and though in even the first ages of the church these abuses were found, yet were they always the subject of denunciation as practices of idolatry. In short, our inquirer, after going through the works of all those illustrious fathers mentioned above, fairly confesses that the Popery of the nineteenth century' differs in no respect from the Christianity of the third and fourth; and that if the flower of the early church, such as St. Ambrose and St. Basil, could borrow the magic night-caps of their cotemporaries, the seven sleepers, and were, after the long sleep of nearly fifteen hundred years, to open their eyes at Old Leighlin, the residence of Dr. Doyle, near Carlow, not only, says the writer, would these saints be proud to know such a man, but they would find him agreeing with them in every iota of their creed.

The doctrines of purgatory and auricular confession, Mr. Moore (for we love to call things by their right names) observes, though not expressly mentioned by any of the earliest fathers, are nevertheless implied so strongly, as to leave no doubt of their existence in the primitive church. There is nothing, he argues, more obvious, than that the church, from the earliest times, prayed for the dead; and the ancient liturgies are full of proofs that such was the case. But praying for the dead, of necessity involved a belief in the existence of some intermediate state into which souls pass after death, where the prayers of the living faithful may be of use to them. Justin Martyr, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, and all the fathers of the first ages, concur as to the existence of a middle state. Other quotations, from the most eminent of the fathers, prove the practice too of auricular confession.

The great paramount doctrine of the Eucharist, or Real Presence, is reserved by Mr. Moore for a series of chapters, which present by far the most extraordinary proofs of any in the work, of his diligence in research. He says it is quite clear, that in the two first centuries at all events, the steady belief of the Christians was not only that the body of Christ was really and corporeally present in the sacramental bread, but that this bread underwent a miraculous change after consecration. This belief seems to have been universally avowed before the era of Tertullian, and it is in the writings of this great authority that we find the first tokens of that system of secresy respecting the mystery of the Eucharist, which, for reasons that will be explained, it was deemed expedient to establish.

The system of secresy was called by the fathers, The Discipline of the Secret, and from its nature deserves to be considered. There is no doubt whatever that, with the view of meeting prejudices, the apostles and disciples of Christ acted upon the design of imitating, as far as was in their power, consistently with what they owed to their trust, the policy of the Pagans; at all events, a distinction which was made by the latter in their congregations, between the initiated and the uninitiated, was adopted