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THE

ADMIRABLE LETTER

COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT,

REV.  , MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE
CAMDEN SOCIETY,

INVESTIGATIONS
ov THB
PUSEYITES.
TO BE HAD OF
J. B. THOMPSON, BOOKSELLER, GOSPOET; S. LELLI,
NEWPORT, ISLE OF WIGHT; AND ALL OTHER BOOKSELLERS.
Price Twopence.
1844.

THE

ADMIRABLE LETTER
or THE
COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT,

Rev. Sib,
The Camden Society having done me the unsolicited and unmerited
honour of placing my name among its honorary members, I feel not only
authorised, but conscientiously obliged to speak out what 1 inwardly think
of its efforts and object : and I am happy to be able to do so, in addressing
myself, not only to one of its most influential members, but to one for
whom I feel a most lively sympathy, on account of his talent, science,
courage, and, indeed, of every thing except what the Church which I
believe to be infallible, reproves in him.
I first thought that the Camden Society was merely a scientific body,
pursuing an object which, like all branches of history, is of "the utmost
importance to religion, and to which all religious minds could associate,
but like the French Comite historique, not setting up the flag of any special
ecclesiastical denomination. On a nearer study of your publications, I
have perceived that they are carried on, with the professed intention of
blending together the interests of Catholic art and of the Church of Eng
land, and of identifying the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages in Eng
land with the Anglican schism begun by Henry VIII. and Cranmer, and
professed at present by all those who agree to the Thirty-nine Articles.
Against this intention, I, as an honorary member of the said Society, beg
to enter my most earnest and most Catholic protest. First, and princi
pally, I protest against the most unwarranted and most unjustifiable
assumption of the tiame of Catholic by people and things belonging to the
actual Church of England. It is easy 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 Montmo
rency or a Htfward, and even enjoy the honour and consideration belonging
to such a name, till the reat Montmorencys or Howards hear about it, and
denounce him, and then such a man would be justly scouted from society,
and fall down much lower than the lowliness from which he had 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 the present ;
by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have esta
blished your Church, even by thc recent answer of your own University of
Oxford to tlie lay Address against Dr. Pusey, &c., where the Church of
England is justly gtyled the Reformed Protestant Church. Thc name
itself is spurned at with indignation by the greater half, at least, of the
inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indiffer
ent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of
the Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150,000,000 of children,
to dispossess you of tliis name. The Church of England, who has denied
her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the
bonds of unity and obedience. Let her, therefore, stand alone before the
judgment-seat of God and of man. Even the debased Russian Church, that
Church wliere lay des])otism has closed the priest's mouth, and turned him
into a slave, disdains to recognise the Anglicans as Catholics. Even the
Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries,
sneer at this new fictitious Catholicism. It is repudiated even by your
own hero. Laud, whose dying words on the scaffold, according to the un
contradicted version of contemporary histoiy, were, I die in the Pro
testant Faith, as by law established (a pretty epita])h, by-the-
bj'e, for the life of the future St. William of Canterbury !*) Consistent
Protestants and rationalists are more Catholic, in the etymological sense
of the word, than the Anglicans ; for they at least can look upon them
selves as belonging to the same communion as those who, in every country,
deny the existence of Church authority, or of revealed religion ; they have
at least a negative bond to link them one with anotiier : but that the so-
called Anglo-Catholics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and tlieir
contradiction, whose doctrinal Articles, wliose Liturgy, whose whole His
tory, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind, except those who
are born English and speak English ; that they should pretend, on the
strength of their private judgment alone, to be what the rest of mankind
deny them to be, will assuredly be ranked among the first of the follies of the
ninsteenth century. That such an attempt, however, should succeed, is,
thank God, not to be expected, unless it should please the Almighty to
reverse all the laws that have hitherto directed the course of human events.
You may turn aside for three hundred years to come, as you have done for
three hundred years past, from the torrent of liTing waters ; but to dig
out a small channel of your own, for your own private insular use, wherein
the living truth will run apart from its ever docile and ever obedient chil
dren — that will no more he granted to you, than it has been to the Arians,
tlie Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy.
I therefore protest, first, against the usurpation of a sacred name by
the Camden Society, as iniquitous ; and I next protest against tlie object
of this Society, and all such efforts in the Anglican Church, as absurd.
When the clergy and Catholic laymen in France and Germany; when Mr.
Pugin and the Romanists of England, labour with all their might to save
and restore the monuments of their faith — unworthily set aside by the influ
ence of that fatal spirit which broke out with tlie so-called Reformation,
and concluded with the French Revolution — they know that they are
labouring at the same time to strengthen, in an indirect manner, their
own faith and practice, which are exactly and identically the same as those
• See Hierolog-us.

followed by the constructors of those glorious piles, and by all the artists
of Catholic ages : and this object sanctifies their labour. But is this the
case with the members of the Camden Society ? Not in the least. They
are most of them ministers of the " Reformed Protestant Church as by law
established ;" pledged under oath to the Thirty-nine Articles, which were
drawn up on purpose to separate England from Catholic Christendom,*
and to protest against all the barbarous superstitions of the dark ages.
By attempting to re-establish their churches, chalices, and vestments, in
their original form, they are only setting under the most glaring light the
contradiction which exists between their own faith, and that of the men
who built Salisbury and York. Surely no man in his senses can pretend
that Dr. Howley and Dr. Mant profess the same faith, and follow the
same discipline, and acknowledge the same spiritual Head, as William
of Wykeham or Gundulph of Rochester; and no man in his senses can
deny that Dr. Wiseman and Dr. M'Hale do at least profess to obey the
same Holy See, to preach the same doctrines, and to practise the same
spiritual rites and sacraments, as all the episcopacy of the Middle Ages.
Let, then, the Camden Society put itself under the authority of Dr.
M'Hale and Dr. Wiseman, and then every thing will be right : but as long
as they do not, and remain under Dr. Howley and Dr. Mant and their
fellows, they are nothing but parodists, and inconsistent parodists. If
St. Dunstan and St. Anselm, St. Lanfranc, St. Thomas of Canterbury, or
Archbishop Chichely, could be called out of their tombs to resume their
crosiers in any English cathedral, their horror would be great at seeing
married priests reading English prayers in those desecrated edifices. But
assuredly their horror would he much greater still, if they were to find,
beneath copes like their own, and at the foot of altars like theirs, and rood-
lofts with crucifixes, and every other exterior identity, these same married
priests carrying in their hearts the spirit of schism, glorying in the re
volt of their forefathers, and pledged by insular pride to insult and deny
that infallible see of St. Peter, from which all those great saints had
humbly solicited the pallium, and for whose sacred rights they so nobly
fought, and conquered the insular pride and prejudices of their time.
Catholic architecture, and Catholic art in all its branches, are but a
frame for the sacred picture of truth. This one holy truth is beautiful
and pure, even amidst tbe worthless clergy and decayed discipline of Fun-
chal, even, and still more so, amidst the missionary dioceses of Polynesia;
although both here and there, she is deprived of the frame which the
humble genius of Catholic generations has worked out for her in western
Europe. But without her — or with her, defaced and adulterated by insular
pride — the most beautiful frame is fit for nought but for the antiquary's
shop. Supposing the spirit of the Camden Society ultimately to prevail
over its Anglican adversaries ; supposing you do one day get every old
* [It is asserted by modern High-Church Anglicans, that the Church of England
never rejected the communion of Catholic Christendom, but merely threw off the
usurped supremacy of the Roman Pontiff. This assertion is overthrown by the his
tory of the Reformation. It was the unanimous opinion of the British Reformers
that the visible Church had apostatised, that her chief bishop was Antichrist, and
that communion with her was unlawful. The HomUies of the Church of England
assert this in the most decisive manner. (Vid. Third part of the sermon against
peril of idolatry, p. 224, ed. Oxon, 1831.) For testimonies of individual reformers,
and other Anglican divines, see Essays on tbe Church, p. 323, ed. 1838. See also
the Archbishop of Canterbury's charge, just delivered.]

6
thing back again — copes, letterns, rood-lofts, candlesticks, and the abbey-
lands into the bargain ; what will it all be, but an empty pageant, like the
tournament of Eglintoun Castle, separated from the reality of Catholic
truth and unity by the abyss of three hundred years of schism ? The
question, then, is — have you, Church of England, got the picture for your
frame ? Have you got the truth — the one truth — the same truth as the
men of the Middle Ages ? The Camden Society says, yes : but the whole
Christian world, both Protestant and Catholic says, no : and the Catholic
world adds, that there is no truth but in unity, and this unity you most
certainly have not.
Who is to judge between these conflicting assertions on earth? Before
what tribunal, before what assembly, is this most vital cause to be brought
forward, to the satisfaction of those who have renounced the jurisdiction
of the Holy See, and that of the last oecumenical council? I know of
none ; but one thing I know, that before whatever earthly tribunal it may
be, as well as before the judgment-seat of God in heaven, agfdnst the
Church of England and her so-called Anglo-Catholics, will appear in for
midable array the seven millions of real Catholics, whom you call British
and Irish Romanists, and who will thus arraign the Anglicans on behalf of
ten generations of their ancestors, and on their own. " For the love of
unity and obedience, we have endured from the hands of these pseudo-
Catholics every extremity of cruelty, of robbery, and of insult ; we have
stood firm through every variety of military, legal, civil, and religious perse
cution; in the holes and corners where these persecutors have confined us,
we have kept true to every traditional beauty which they would fain now
recover. We have nothing to restore, became we have never destroyed
anything. We want no erudite quibbles, like No. 90 ; no dissertations
on long-forgotten rubrics, to enable us to believe in justification by works,
or in baptismal regeneration, to honour the Blessed Virgin, — to pray for
our dear departed. We have never doubted any article of Catholic faith,
and never interrupted any practice of Catholic devotion. Here we are
with our priests, our monks, and our bishops, and with the flame of
Catholic unity, which we have fed with our substance, and with our blood.
If these men, who after having robbed us of every temporal good, would fain
now rob us of our name, are Catholics, then we are not; then we have
been mistaken fools, and not we alone, but thirty-five Popes, and all the
Catholic Bishops, and all the Catholic nations in the world, who have till
now praised us, helped us, loved us, prayed for us and with us, as their
brethren. If they are Catholics, then Catholicism is but a shadow and
a name, and a paltry vestment, fit to be put on and off at the world's
pleasure." To this language the Church has answered long ago, in the words of
the Divine spouse : " My sheep hear my voice : and I know them, and
they follow me. And I give them life everlasting ; and they shall not perish
for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand.'' John x. 27, 28. ^
Does the Camden Society, that lays such a stress on history and tradi
tion, think that those mines are closed to every body except itself, or that
the world will not dive into them for any other purpose than the archaeolo
gical or architectural curiosities ? Do the Anglo-Catholics think the
world is blind to their own history ? that the events of the Reformation in
England are unknown abroad ? that the word apostacy is effaced from the
dictionary of mankind ?

If you had pushed on a little further your Spanish tour, you would
have found at Grenada, depicted by the pencil of a monk, the mar
tyrdom of those holy Carthusians of London, who were hanged, disem
bowelled, and quartered, for having denied the supremacy of the author
of Anglo-Catholic Reformation. What! shaU the tombs of unknown
knights and burgesses be treated with the deepest reverence, and
singled out for admiration and imitation, because they are in brass, or
vrith a cross fleurie, or a dos d^anef And shall the blood of our martyrs
be silent, and their noble memory buried in darkness and oblivion ? Be
lieve it not ; such will not be the case ; no, not even in this world of sin
and error, and how much less before the justice of God ? Believe not
that we shall ever forget or betray the glory of Fisher, of More, of Gar
net, of those abbots who were hanged before the gates of their suppressed
monasteries ; of so many hundreds of monks, of Jesuits, of laymen, who
perished under the excutioner's knife, from the reign of Henry VIII. down
to the palmy days of Anglican episcopacy, under the first Stuarts ? Were
they not all Romanists ? Did they not die for the defence of the supre
macy of the See of Rome against the blood-thirsty tyranny of Anglican
kings ? Were they not the victims of the same glorious cause which
St. Dunstan, St. Elphege, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas had struggled for?
And were they ours or yours 9 I know that the modern Anglo-Catholics
would attempt to throw back on the Puritans of 1640, most of the sacri
legious devastations that attended the Reformation ; hut I know also that
Pugin, in that Article of the Dublin Review, which you were good enough
to lend me, has completely demolished that false pretence ; and irrefutably
demonstrated, that every sacrilege committed by the Puritans had been
inaugurated on a much larger scale by Cranmer and Elizabeth ; and I have
looked in vain through all the publicatians of the Camden Society for one
word of answer to this most damning accusation. As for moral sacrilege,
if I may so say, as for the surrender of spiritual independence and Christian
freedom to the sanguinary pride of royal theologians, assuredly the Anglo-
Catholic fathers of the sixteenth century have surpassed in that respect
every example of the kind, both in Pagan and Christian times. That
debauched and murderous tyrant, called Henry VIII., could find his
models amongst the monsters who reigned at Rome while the Church was
in the catacombs. But the slavish subserviency of the English apostate
bishops, to this baptised monster's caprices has remained unequalled since
their days, as it had been before them. Where was Latimer, that father
and martyr of the Anglican Church, on the 30th of May, 1538 ? — preach
ing at the stake where a Catholic friar was burning, for having denied the
king's supremacy over the Church of which Latimer was a bishop !
Wliere were Cranmer and the other prelates, from whom the modem English
bishops pretend to derive apostolical succession 9 — sitting at the council-
board of the tyrant, voting in his Parliament, helping him to butcher his
wives, his principal nobility, his best and most innocent subjects, and
acquiescing in his judgment against St. Thomas of Canterbury ! Has not
Cranmer come down to posterity branded with the monster's eulogium,
" That he was the only man who had loved his sovereign so well, as never
to have opposed the royal pleasure ?" ( Vit. Cranm., MS. apud Legrand,
ii, 108.)
Is there anything even in the annals of continental Protestantism, to be
compared to this ori^n of a reformed Church ? And has this Church

8
purified the dark and bloody stains of its origin by Its subsequent conduct ?
Was there ever a Church, except, perhaps, the Greco-Russian, since Peter
I., which has so basely acknowledged the supreme right of secular power,
the absolute dependence of spiritual jurisdiction on royal and Parliamentary
authority, from the days of Cranmer down to Archbishop Whately's last
motion on Church Government, debated upon, as he says in print, " with
the tacit acquiescence of the whole episcopal body ? " Was there ever a
Church, not even excepting the Russian, which so completely sacrificed tbe
rights and dignities of the poor to the rich, as the writer of the History of
Pues must know better than any one ? Was there ever, under the face of
Heaven, a more glaring focus of iniquity, oppression, and corruption, than
the existence of the Church of England in Ireland, as denounced, not
only by the groans of the Catholic victims, or by those foreigners,
who, like myself, have seen and cursed the abomination in its own den,
but by your own authorities, such as Strafford's correspondence with
Laud, and Monk Mason's Life of Bishop Bedell 9 Have not these pseudo-
Catholic bishops been sitting for centuries as Lords spiritual ia
a Parliament whence has issued that penal code against fellow-
Christians, the like of which has never been seen or imagined, even under
the reign of Terror and Atheism in France ? Have they not for centuries,
and without ever lifting up a dissentient voice, witnessed, approved, and,
for all I know, themselves taken those tremendous oaths against the most
sacred mysteries of the whole Catholic world, both Greek and Latin, in
that assembly, " Where," to use the words of an English writer, " the holiest
of holies has been chosen as the favourite object of the profanest treatment,
and pierced day after day by the jeer of the scoffer ; where alone denial
of the blessed Eucharist has been made a public, a legal, a national, a royal
act ; and where more impious blasphemies have been uttered, more sacri
leges committed, more perjuries pronounced, against the Divine Sacrament
than in the whole world besides ? And shall these men, forsooth, be
acknowledged by us as our brethren, or as our spiritual fathers ? Shall tbe
perpetrators and inheritors of these unexpiated, unrepented, unforgiven
sins, eome in quietly and sit down among the Catholic churches and
nations of the world, with bundles of tracts about hierurgical antiquities and
monumental brasses under their arms ; and shall we not one and all arise to
reject and expel them ? God forbid that we should do otherwise f There
is a place in thc Catholic Church for public penitents, whence many saints
have risen on the wings of humility and contrition to the glorious emi
nence of an Augustine : but there is no place for proud sinners, who would
shake off the chains of isolated error, without confessing their guilt and
that of their forefathers.
1 dislike every mixture of nationality with Catholicity j and the fatal
example of England is well calculated to justify this dislike in every
Catholic heart. But I cannot, in this circumstance, refrain from revert
ing, with legitimate pride, to the difference between the conduct of English
bishops of the sixteenth century, and that of the French hierarchy, when
exposed in 1790 to the fury of a much more formidable tyrant than Henry
VIII., to the whole of the French nation. The French bishops of that
period were far from being saints or ascetics; their high birth had been
generally the only reason for their promotion. They had to struggle, not
like the English bishops, at the issue of long ages of faith, of devotion, of
popular enthu8if^«« for the Church ; but after more than two long centu-

ries of secular invasion and monarchical despotism. Their people w«re not
like the people of England, up in arms for their monasteries and their
orthodoxy ; but, on the contrary, had been intoxicated during a hundred
years by the poison of scepticism and philosophical scurrility. Lastly, the
Galilean Church was not, like the Anglican, the immediate daughter of tbe
See of Rome : she had not been founded by a Papal legate in the sixth
century, but by St. Irenseus, St. Denis the Areopagite, and other disciples
of the Apostles. The Reformation which was imposed on her was not
obedience to a theological tyrant, but a pretended return to the primitive
Church, giving the election of bishops to the people, and allowing them to
communicate with the Holy See. And yet, out of a hundred and thirty-six
French bishops, /omj* alone betrayed their trust; the hundred and thirty-
two others gladly went forth to imprisonment, to exile, to deatli. When
you go to Paris, pray visit the Carmes, au ugly, insignificant, low, square-
built, modern chapel, without any vestige of archEeological symbolism, but
where the pavement is still red with the blood of the bishops and priests,
who were murdered there for having refused the oath to the civil constitu
tion of the clergy.* There you will learn at what price a national Church
can purchase the rights of talking about apostolical succession, and styling
itself a " branch of the Church Catholic."
But now let me suppose that the Camden Society and the new Anglo-
Catholic School have both gained their point ; that liturgy, architecture,
and theology are brought hack precisely to the point they were at the close
of the reign of Henry VIII., when, as Dr. Lingard so justly says, " To
reject the Papal creed was heresy, and to admit the Papal supremacy
was treason." Supposing all this, what will you have gained after all ?
Kothing at all, I should say, grounding myself on Mr. Newman's own
words. Does he not say, " We cannot hope for the recovery of Dissenting
bodies, while we are ourselves alienated from the great body of Christendom.
We cannot hope for unity of faith, if ice, at our own private will, make a
faith for ourselves in this our small corner of the earth. We cannot hope
for the success among the heathen of St Augustine or St. Boniface, unless,
like them, we go forth with the apostolical benediction. Break unity in
one point, and the fault runs through the whole body." (Sermons bearing
on subjectsof the day, 1843, pp. 149-50.) Butwhenthe workin which you are
engaged shall he achieved, you will he as far from unity as ever, and you
will only have alienated your Church from the great body of Protestant
Christendom, to which you were formerly accounted to belong, by that
general feeling which led the poor King of Prussia to give you his Pro
testant money and Protestant sympathies, in order to endow Protestant
bishoprics in Syria. But you will not have come one step nearer to unity,
because, as Mr. Newman says, " Break unity in onepoint," &c. . . . The
Greek Church has been at the point you aspire to ever since the eleventh
century; and can anything be further from unity with the Latin Church
thau she in the nineteenth ? Every Catholic will repeat to you the words
of Manzoni, as quoted by Mr. Faber : " The greatest deviations are none,
if the main point be recognised ; the smallest are damnable heresies, if it
be denied. That main point is, the infallibility of the Church, or, rather, of
the Pope." The Coptic, Maronite, and Catholic Armenian Churches,
although differing in everything outward from the Church of Rome, are in
* See the " British Critic," No. LXIV., p. 288—288.

10
unity, since they acknowledge her supreme authority. The Anglican
Church, even brought back to the most Catholic externals, can never be
in unity as long as she denies her legitimate mother.
One thing quite certain is, that individuals or churches cannot be both
Catholic and Protestant ; they must choose between one and the other.
In politics, in literature, transactions and compromises are advisable and
indeed, are often the only thing possible ; but in religion, in eternal truth
there is none. Notwithstanding Dr. Jelf, there will never be any via
media between truth and error, between authority and rebellion, no more
than there is between heaven and hell. If Fisher was right, then was
Cranmer wrong ? they cannot be both right, both the murderer and the
victim. If Archbishop Plunkett was a martyr, then Archbishop Laud
was not. If the Church of France is to be admired for having held out
against schism through martyrdom and exile, then the Church of England
must be blamed for having given way to schism. It is like the
ostrich, that thinks it saves itself from the hunter, by refusing to look at
him, to say that the present English Church is a holy, although less distin
guished branch of the Church than that of Rome. If the Church of Rome,
when she maintains that out of her pale there is no salvation, and that she
alone has the power of governing the Christian world, is not infaUibly right,
then she is infallibly wrong ; and so far from being a distinguished branch
of truth, she is founded on imposture or error; and in neither case can be
a true Church. On the other hand, if the Church of England is not the
only true Church on earth, then she is an apostate rebel.
There is only one sure way of passing from error to the one sure truth ;
that which St. Remigius showed to the first Christian King of France.
When baptising him, he said, "Bow thy head, proud Sicamber; burn
what thou has adored, and adore what thou hast burned."
It is true that to reconciled and forgiven rebellion may be granted certain
privileges, as conformable to the weakness of a fallen Church. The
Anglican Church may demand what was granted in 1595 to the united
Greeks of Poland — the degrading exception of married clergy, and. the
use of the national language in the Liturgy. These concessions are not
incompatible with the essentials of faith or authority ; but they would
make the re-united Church of England sadly different from what she was
in the days of St. Dunstan or St. Anselm.
I am not a doctor, nor a minister of the Church ; I am only her soldier,
faithful though unworthy. But I can fearlessly assert that among the
millions who belong, like me, to the Church of Rome, there is not one
who, being led by leisure or duty to consider attentively what is now going
on in England, would arrive at a different conclusion from mine. Seeing
the profound ignorance which reigns among even the best informed
Anglicans (such as Mr. Faber) on the feelings and duties of Churchmen
out of England — seeing also the furious prejudices which animate the
New School against English and Irish Catholics, probably on the old
Pagan principle of Odisse quem Iteseris, I have presumed to think that it
might not be quite useless to you to hear the opinion of a Continental
Catholic, than whom no one can be more interested in England's welfare,
or more attentive to her present struggles. Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
Need I beg of you to acquit the warmth and asperity of my language of
any intention of personal disrespect to you ? No, surely not. I have much
too high an opinion of you not to be certain that you will perfectly under-

11
stand the motives that have dictated my words ; and I hope that you will
see, on the contrary, a mark of deep respect on my part for your turn of
mind and your personal character, I have written to you as to a man
who knows the value of truth and the value of a soul. I should certainly
not have done so to most members of your schism. Although taught by
conscience and authority to look upon the Church of England as one of
the most awful forms of sin and pride that have ever appeared in the
world, I have loved and esteemed several of her children. I feel a com
passionate sympathy for those of her ministers who know the weight of
her present degradation. But, at the same time, I feel a most legitimate
terror for the fate of their souls when I see them, after having removed
the rubbish which their forefathers had piled up to the very clerestory of
their Church, close their eyes against the light which, from the past and
present, is now pouring down npon them. They are thus losing that
invincible ignorance, which is the only reason which the Church admits
for not belonging to her ? This feeling has inspired me with the thought
of thus writing to you. This feeling must plead my excuse, if I
have wounded your feelings. Indeed, I wish I may have done so.
Truth is a weapon intended to wound and destroy everything that
is not truth. Non veni pacem mittere sed gladium. Convinced as I
am that you do not belong, as you say I do, to a distinguished branch of
the Church, but that you are in error, and that wilful error is mortal sin,
I have spoken for the love of your immortal soul. If I have Act^ so
roughly, it is the roughness of love, Is there not more charity in pVlling
roughly back a man who is on his way to perdition than in bowing him
civilly on to the brink of the precipice ?
This letter requires no answer. We are not called upon to carry on a
controversy with each other. The ground on which we stand is unequal,
and the odds between us would be uneven. To convert you as well as all
heretics, is, and must be, my desire, but not my province. Toconvert me
can neither be your province nor your desire. You cannot look upon me
as being in a state of rebellion as I do you. What would become of me if
I was to be convinced of the truth and right of the Church of England ?
I must then immediately doubt the truth and right of the Church of France,
which acts and teaches the very reverse ; for what is true and right on the
north of the Channel cannot surely be otherwise on the south. And yet,
according to the principles laid down by Mr. Faber and the British Critic,
supposing myself convinced of the error and misconduct of my own Church,
I must wait till she recognises it herself before I have a right to act up to
what I think true, and to save my own soul. Alas ! what a lamentable
nondescript sort of thing I should be.
Our position is, therefore, quite different. The faith I profess, the
authority I obey, the holy sacrifice of Mass at which I assist, the very
prayers I daily say, are fitted for you, for me, for the Portuguese ox-driver
who is passing under our vdndows, as well as for the savage who is at this
moment being baptised in Oceania. Your faith,your spiritual superiors, your
Liturgy can be of no use but to those who are English born and English
bred. This shall be my last argument, for it would alone suffice to show
¦which of us is the Catholic. You cannot, in conformity with your ovm
doctrine, wish me to be what you are. I can, and indeed I must, wish you
to be what /am. To you I can say, like Paul to Agrippa "I would to
God, that both in a little and in much, not only thou, but also all that hear

12
me this day, should become such as I also am, except these bands : " or
rather, as Bossuet beautifully modifies this text in speaking, I believe, to
one of your own communion, prasertim vinculis his, the bonds of faith,
of obedience, of unity with the past, the present, and the future.
In conclusion, let me beg your acceptance of the enclosed papers,*
that will show you how the torrent of grace is flowing among Romanists,
and what are the fruits of Mariolatry. It is a good thing to write books,
like Mr. Newman, about the miracles of the fourth century; but it is
better still to acknowledge and experience miracles in the nineteenth.
Never, assuredly, were miracles more wanted than in these ages of light,
and never, I may say, were they more abundant ; for can there be a greater
miracle in the world than the sudden and mysterious conversion of sinners
in an age like this ?
May that Blessed Lady, who has been so long the object of the jeers and
blasphemies of Anglican divines and Anglican travellers, and who seems
now at last to inspire your countrymen with some degree of veneration —
may she use her omnipotentia supplex to enlighten, to bless, and to console
you ! Such will be for ever the prayer of your obedient servant and
sincere well-wisher,
LE COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT.
Funciiaij, (Madeira,) February 20th, 1844.

* Annals of the Archconfraternity of the Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 04077

066

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