68 PERILS. — ROMANISM. 



conscience and the Word of God — to do this would be 

 to become a Protestant. There can be no appeal to his 

 reason or conscience, the decision is final and his duty 

 absolute. And, moreover, he stands not alone, but with 

 many millions more, who are bound by the most dread- 

 ful penalties to act as one man in obedience to the will of 

 a foreign potentate and in disregard of the laws of the 

 land. This, I claim, is a very possible menace to the 

 peace of society. 



If it seems to any that I have exaggerated the sur- 

 render of reason and conscience required of a good 

 Roman Catholic, weigh these words of Cardinal Bellar- 

 mine, one of the most celebrated theologians of the 

 Roman Church: "If the Pope should err by enjoining 

 vices or forbidding virtues, the Church would be obliged 

 to believe vices to be good and virtues bad, unless it 

 would sin against conscience." ^ 



The revised Statutes of the United States declare: — 

 ^^ The alien seeJciiig citizenship must make oath to re- 

 nounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign 

 prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, in particular that 



1 Bellarmine, Lib. 4, de Pontifice, c. 5. Bishop Kain, of Wheeling, West 

 Virginia, devoted his Lenten lecture, April 14, 1889, to Chapter V. of " Our 

 Country." In it he said that Bellarmine was here using the argument 

 rednctio ud ahsiirdum to prove the inerrancy of the Pope, and that he, 

 (Bellarmine) "draws the absurd and even blasphemous conclusion that 

 would result from such a denial of his thesis." Does the Bishop forget that 

 the whole force of a reductio ad ahsurdxim lies in the necessity of the se- 

 quence? Of course the absurdity of the conclusion does not prove the ab- 

 surdity of the premise unless the one follows necessarily from the other. 

 Tlie argument of Bellarmine has no force with a Protestant because he sees 

 that the declared sequence is not only not necessary, but is impossible. The 

 fact that such an argument can have weight Avith a Catholic, the fact 

 that Bellarmine could use it, shows that in such minds the sequence 

 is necessary, which, as was remarked in the First Edition, affords a most 

 excellent illustration of the " utter degradation of reason, and the stifling of 

 conscience." 



The writer did not imagine that good Catholics would believe the Pope 

 capable of error and, therefore, fear that they might some day be "obliged 

 to believe vices to be good and virtues bad." The point of the quotation, 

 which is missed by Bishop Kain, lies in the sequence which is affirmed by 

 Bellarmine. 



