Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In a path so untrodden as that of the present work, it was scarcely possible that what, I presume, may fairly be called a first effort should be otherwise than defective. In retracing my steps, however, I find fewer errors to correct than I had anticipated: but much has occurred which appears of importance in the way of addition. It was, indeed, obvious, in the first instance, that the nature of the Indexes of Rome would be more adequately represented, and somewhat of the tædium of such discussions be relieved, by examples and observations exhibiting and illustrating their contents. The true apology, perhaps, for this defect is, the labour which it would have required to avoid it. Nor is it impossible that it may be supplied with more effect and benefit by the

b

interval for reflexion which has elapsed between the first and the present essay. Had the additions which presented themselves as desirable been sufficiently separable from the body of the former work, I should have preferred publishing them in such a form as not to render the first edition of inferior value. But this, it may be easily conjectured from the nature of the work, could not be done without considerable disadvantage to the entire subject. The additions now given, I repeat, appear to me important; otherwise I certainly should not have undertaken the labour of making them and among them, I apprehend the intelligent reader will not be the least gratified with the discovery-such at least it has been to me-of an Index of Sixtus V., which, obviously, has suffered the same disrespectful, or rather dishonourable, treatment, and identically from the same hands, and those the hands of a successor in the pontificate and a brother, as his celebrated, first authentic, and yet for its errors suppressed, edition of the Latin Vulgate.

:

In justification of the researches which I have

still continued to make, and now communicate, on this subject, I may be allowed to observe, that, after much and long reflexion it appears a matter of moment to the Christian and Protestant world, that a record, as complete and authentic as possible, should exist and be known, of a peculiar class of documents, from various intelligible causes highly inaccessible, issuing from a religious establishment, whose claims are estimated very differently by herself and by those who have thought it their duty to separate from her communion, and which, by their emphatic and minute exhibition of her body and spirit, furnish one, among divers other most satisfactory criteria, which of the two estimates is the just.

That the works, appearing under the form of Indexes, Catalogues, &c., however various, stili all belonging to, as coming from, Rome, are at least uncommon and extensively unknown, requires no proof more elaborate or unexceptionable than the, not only ready but forward, declaration of ignorance by the very persons who should be presumed to be best acquainted with them,-by

well informed members of the ecclesiastic community which promulgates and enforces them, and among whom alone they have the authority which they either actually possess, or were in ended to possess. Judging from my own feelings, as a Protestant, (and a more equitable rule cannot be devised,) on the supposition that, by the constituted authorities of the church to which I belong, there were published for the observance of her members, from time and time, books, of a nature so nearly affecting their constant daily occupations, as that of prescribing from what reading they should abstain, upon pain of the highest censures she could enounce, if we, as Protestants, were not ashamed of our ignorance of such authoritative promulgations, we should at least feel highly grateful to any individual, even of an opposite religious persuasion, who would communicate the information in which we were so obviously and deeply interested. It would not, perhaps, be an unreasonable expectation to look for the same gratitude from an ingenuous Romanist in the case which is exactly the converse.

That the miraculous ignorance, for which I have given the members of the Roman Church credit, is no gratuitous assumption, stands upon deliberate and public declarations of their own. I do not insist upon that of Charles Butler, Esq.*: but the statement of one, greater than he, as this eminent Jurist himself will allow, and delivered on a memorable occasion, is every way deserving of a repetition. The Roman Catholic Titular Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. MURRAY, when examined before the Committee of the House of Commons for inquiring into the state of Ireland, in 1825, thus answered a question proposed to him: The Index Expurgatorius has no authority whatever in Ireland; it has never been received in these countries, and I doubt very much, whether there be ten people in Ireland, who have ever seen it; it is a sort of censorship of books, established in Rome, and it is not even received in Spain, where they have a censorship of their own;

Few of them' (the Roman Catholics) 'know of the existence of the Index Expurgatorius.'—Letter to C. Blundell, Esq., prefixed to Vindication, p. lxxxiv. I am indebted for the reference to the PROTESTANT GUARDIAN, in its able review of this work, vol. i., p. 185.

« ElőzőTovább »