PRIVATE JUDGMENT.—STATE OF ENGLAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 108, 22 May 1875, Page 13

PRIVATE JUDGMENT.— STATE OF ENGLAND.

The reputed father of the so-called " Reformation " in England, Henry VIII., knew well that the right of private judgment in interpreting the Bible must lead to the gravest social evils, and was indeed incompatible with any fixed authority in the civil or ecclesiastical order of society ; that it would lead to insubordination and confusion, and consequently to vice and war. He accordingly inveighed against all who presumed to interpret the Bible according to their own " phantasie," as he expressed it. But he denounced them in vain. From his day to ours England has suffered from these " phantasies ;" she is especially suffering from them at this hour. So long as men are cold and indifferent, or nearly so, about religion, so long as they act merely from habit or motives of worldly interest, the tenets of the so-called " Reformation " may be comparatively harmless. But when they seriously attempt to act from principle, from religious principle, as so many in England are vow doing, then the hollow and unsatisfactory nature of Protestantism, its tendency to breed licence -and confusion, come to be painfully seen and felt. England is now passing through a new Reformation, upon which every Catholic must look with the most lovely interest. He sees his religion now receiving at the hands of Englishmen a degree of serious consideration, such as it has never met with since the days of Henry VIII. The Established Church in Ireland has "vanished like a dream." The Established Church in England is tottering to her fall, assailed from without by open enemies, and torn to pieces within by contending factions, her pretended friends acting on their " private judgment." The grand old Catholic Church is rising like a giant refreshed, and slowly but steadily advancing from one triumph to another, Without the aid of royal power or physical force, but by the sheer force of goodness, reason, and truth she is under God gradually bringing into willing subjection of her spiritual authority all classes from the lordly baron in his hall to the humble artisan and peasant in their cottage. What a happy and glorious prospect for England and^the Church does not tliis open up ! Laic.