Mgr. Louis de Ségur: Plain Talk about the Protestantism of Today [1868]

[Stone]

PART SECOND.


VI. On the Divisions of Protestantism.

— During eighteen hundred years, the Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, founded by Christ, and governed in his name by Saint Peter, and the Supreme Pontiffs his successors, has preserved the most perfect unity in the teaching of faith and in the practice of religion. From the beginning have innovators without number endeavored to introduce their individual ideas into the creed of this great Church. But she has invariably repelled them, and her doctrine, which shall last eternally, has remained one and pure.

During these last three hundred years, since the great rebellion has broken out, Protestantism has followed a course altogether different. Protestantism acknowledges as its fathers the Gnostics, the Arians, the Manicheans, the Nestorians, the Iconoclasts, the Albigenses, the Hussites, and the most scandalous of heretics. As a carcass will swarm with vermin, so this corpse of religion, dating its existence from such inglorious traditions, has never ceased down to our times to produce hundreds and myriads of sects which swarm out of its bosom. They gnaw its vitals, and gnaw one another. It is simply impossible to give the exact statistics of Protestant sects. What was accurate yesterday would not be so to-day. They spring into life and die away like flies. So far back as 1743, the Protestant minister Froereisen, in his address on being installed minister at Strasburg, acknowledged that "Protestantism is like a vermin, cut into many pieces which will move as long as there exists some strength, but will by degrees lose both life and motion."

In fact, what is a Protestant sect? Free discussion gives each and every one of its members an inalienable right to an absolute independence, so as to break the factitious unity of a body to which he is said to belong. Make up as many religions as there are sects, as many sects as there are heads, and in each head as many religious notions as there are whims, and you have a befitting idea of Protestant unity. The minister Vinet said it with grief, that "from the morrow after the Reformation, Protestants have existed, but no Protestantism."

I have before me an article clipped from an American paper giving a list, not complete however, of all the sects which existed in the State of New York. Let us copy it here: — Anabaptists, Baptists, New Baptists, Free Baptists, Separate Baptists, Strict Baptists, Liberal Baptists, Peace Baptists, Small Children Baptists, Glory Baptists, Hallelujahs, Christian Baptists, Iron Arm Baptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, Six Principle Baptists, Scotch Baptists, Baptists of the New Communion General, Black Baptists, the Independent or Puritans, the Cameronians, Shrivelled or Crispers, Campbellites or Reformed, Dunkers, Free Thinkers, Haldanites, Huntingdonians, Irvingites, Inghanites, Jumpers, Biblical Christians, Glassites or Sandonians, Old Presbyterians, and New Presbyterians, Scotch Congregationalists, Quakers or Friends, Unitarians, Socinians, Moravians or Unity Friends, Methodists or Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Reformed Wesleyans, French Methodists, Calvinists, Original Connexionists and New Connexionists, Swedenborgians, Plymouth Brothers, Rebaptized Christians, Mormons, Kellyites, Muggletonians, Romanian Perfectionalists, Rogessian Methodists, Secklers, Universalists, Walkers, Rothfieldists, Free Friend Disciples or Agapemonites, Lutherans, French Protestants, Reformed Protestants, German Protestants, Reformed German Protestants, German Catholics or Followers of Ronge, New Illuminati, English Anglicans, German Anglicans, French Anglicans, etc., etc., etc. Prodigious fecundity!

Surely France is not blessed with such an abundance. For there exist only some of the Reformed sects, the Protestants of the Augsburg Confession, Methodists, Anabaptists, Baptists, Pietists, Unitarians, Latitudinarians, Darbyites, Irvingians . . . It is, however, rather difficult to find out the fecundity of the varieties of French Protestantism, inasmuch as its pastors generally affect an air of touching fraternity, and take great pains to carry on their bickerings with closed doors, most carefully keeping out of sight what one of them indiscreetly calls clerical family snarls.* They seem afraid of French good sense, which would very easily draw from their variations and divisions, the famous consequence drawn in olden times by Tertullian against Marcion: "Thou art at variance, therefore thou errest."

How majestic, on the other hand, how grand is the Catholic Church, with her hierarchy, the guardian of her unity against the intestine discords and the interminable dismemberments which take place around her!

Florimond de Remond, in his History of the Rise and Progress of Heresy, remarks, in his old and quaint style: Had ye ever seen a regiment of noble soldiers with serried ranks, marching under the lead of a cuirassed chief, and after them the musketeers in beautiful order, and then the arquebusiers, with the rest of the troops, all keeping steps to the measured beat of the drum, and then had ye seen a swarm of monkeys, trotting about the streets carrying wooden swords and shouldering long reeds, beating their music on a tin pan, and every mother's son among them giving orders to his comrades, — well, ye would then recognize in the first the order of the true Church, and in the latter the disorders of those bastard churches which ape the True One.