PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.

T is very common for persons who are labouring

IT

under any bodily infirmity to send for a physician, and to tell him that they are suffering under some calamity quite unlike that which is really afflicting them but the wise physician does not refuse to help them because they have entirely mistaken the name and nature of their disease; and he proceeds to prescribe remedies, not according to their misapprehensions, but according to the better judgment which his superior knowledge gives him of their case. In a similar manner, when either sectarian disputes have arisen in the Church, or political differences in the State, the various parties stigmatize each other by names descriptive of the original grounds of quarrel, but which survive long after the matter of the disputes has ceased to be the true characteristic of either; and their successors contend for expressions which no longer accurately define what they mean to convey.

There is a succession of disputes going on between Protestants and Papists, and the grounds of their quarrel are represented in a different manner by

almost every writer. You, however, like the wise physician, looking down from the superior heights of true Catholicism, to which you have been brought, will not find it difficult to discern that the essence of the antagonism between Popery and Protestantism really consists in the struggle on one side for individual responsibility, and on the other for the authority of the priesthood to annihilate that personal responsibility, and render every man, according to their own simile, a mere stick in the hand of the priests, and ready to declare black to be white, and white to be black, according as the priest shall order him. Thus the question at issue between these great divisions is of far more importance than that about any dogma; for it is about the very essence of the being of man, his nature, and the duties arising out of the faculties with which he is endued. I have often endeavoured to impress upon you, and recal again the subject to your recollection, that each succeeding dealing of God with man, and instruction given to him, is not a substitute for, but an addition to, what has been previously taught him; so that the duties of man when brought into society, either of a family, of a State, or of a Church, do not annihilate any powers, privileges, rights, immunities, or responsibilities which he had in an insulated condition, though it may modify and increase them; and

no pretended deference due to a priest can take from you the prior responsibilities and duties of a man, of a husband, or of a father, or of a master, of a sovereign, &c.

As individuals of different characters are subject to different kinds of temptation and faults, so are different classes of men. Protestants, in their assertion of the truth of personal responsibility, have been carried into the error of denying that they receive more light from God, through channels appointed by Him to convey it, than they can get from any other sources; and, therefore, they deny (some openly and some covertly) that God has instituted such channels at all. The vice of priests is to usurp over the laity; and this vice may be more easily committed in one sect than in another, but its root is in the heart of every priest. It is most easy to commit it in those sects where there is most piety, most devotion, and most spiritual-mindedness; and it is impossible to commit it in semi-infidel congregations. This indicates where the redress must be found. It is in vain to expect that priests will ever be other than usurping over the rights of the laity; and it is the duty of the laity to keep the priests in order, by rejecting every act, as it arises or occurs, in which they meddle in families, or in any way attempt to carry by force their opinions or their

views of duties. The laity must keep down the vice of the priests by asserting their own rights, on all occasions, where the priest seeks to interfere with them, and so teach the priests that they have rights which it is their duty to preserve intact as much as it is the duty of the priests to preserve theirs; and priests must learn from the laity the duties of men, of husbands, and fathers, as much as the laity on their side learn of worship, and ceremonies, and theology from the priests. You see that this is the way by which liberty is preserved in the State. It is useless to expect that sovereigns and nobles will not abuse power, and usurp over the rights of the people; and, therefore, the people must resist all such encroachments whenever made: and it is done in England, and was once done in all Christian countries, by the people retaining in their power the public purse; since, without the means of paying soldiers and others to help them, an individual sovereign could not succeed against the mass of his subjects. If the sovereign claims, as an exercise of his prerogative, to do an act which violates the law, subjects must refuse to obey and if the attempt be made on the community, the people must say, "You may order "what you please; but you shall have no means to

times that the Church is a great machine, in and through which everyone who wishes to go and receive counsel from God may do so. But that counsel does not take away from the person asking it the responsibility of acting upon it. It is a common practice for all men to throw their faults on the advice given to them by others. When God asked Adam why he had disobeyed Him, he replied that it was his wife's fault, for she had given him the advice; and when Eve was asked, she threw the blame upon the serpent. That, however, did not, in God's sight, excuse their disobedience; they were responsible for the use of the advice which they had received. Many other examples are found in Scripture. The use of the Church is well expressed in an old Greek prayer, adopted in our Liturgy, where we are taught to pray that we "may, with the help of God's Church, "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." The Church, with its ministers, is not a machine to lord it over the liberties and responsibilities of man; but a machine for all mankind to use, each one in the exercise of his own liberty and responsibility.

For the most part, the ministers are continually forgetting this; the temptation to commit the sin of priestcraft is continually operating upon them; their very zeal and anxieties impel them in the same direction, and they think that, by the exercise of.