Four bare, whitewashed walls — a lecture room
As a modem Protestant ^\Titer has well said —
" The Church is now rather a lecture room than
a place of worship." Protestantism has muti-
lated or destroyed in religion all that wins or
attracts childhood, and substituted in its place,
cold, lifeless, dry, intellectual abstractions. How
unlike Him

"■Whose arms eternal, were young children's home."

And how can that faith implant childlike
virtues of docility, gentleness, love, sweetness,
simphcity, and humility, in the heart of man,
when it fosters in his mind the notion that his
own judgment is supreme ?

Humihty is the first, the mother of all other
Christian virtues. Humihty leads man to pre-
fer the judgment of others to his own. Protes-
tantism, on the contrary, tends to make each
one prefer his own judgment to that of all others.
The beau-ideal of Protestantism, logically de-
veloped, is egoism, and the idolatry of self.
For its pretended obedience to God, or the
Holy Ghost, or its faith in Holy Scripture, is an
act which always involves the supremacy of



PROTESTANTISM. 133

private judgment ; consequently, its virtues are
but other forms of pride and self This fact
condemns Protestantism to an eternal sterility,
and explains why it has no martyrs, no saints,
no Christian heroes, nor even any- writers of note,
who have composed books on Christian virtues
or of devotion.
Protestantism having once for all denied all
infallible authority, it is impossible for it ever to
escape this vicious circle.
We again condemn Protestantism because it
fails to meet the wants of childhood, and is in-
competent to produce those virtues in the heart
which fit man for heaven, and give to man, even
in this life, a foretaste of the charms of paradise.
