that if you add the Lutherans and the Protestant Episcopalians of these United States together, they would not give as many souls as form the charge of three French Bishops. Yet they have seventeen Protestant Bishops, and you can inform us how many Lutherans! Where now is the overgrown Hierarchy ? In Germany?-No. The Catholic prelates there are fewer in proportion than in France! In Spain? The ratio here is 1 to 230,000! Italy? Yes; here, you say is an overgrown Hierarchy-the seat of the power of the Beast! The ratio is one bishop to 89,000 of the laity. Now in Denmark, the ratio is of 1 bishop to 241,000 Lutheran population, in Sweden and Norway, 1 to 183,000. The Lutherans together give us an average of one prelate to 212,000 people. The average of the Catholics is, one prelate to 306,000 population. This statement is always found to be the best mode of correcting your vague assertions. Where now is the overgrown Hierarchy-Clearly in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States!-It has one Bishop for 35,300 of the population: the Catholic Church in Italy and in Sicily has one Bishop for about 90,000. The average of the Catholic Church in Europe is one Bishop to 306,000 souls, that of the Lutherans in Europe, one Bishop to 212,000 souls. In Ireland the Protestant Episcopalians had lately one Bishop with a revenue equal to that of eight or ten Italian Bishops, to about 22,500 Protestant souls. Yet you who have no overgrown Hierarchy, and who taunt us with upholding it, aspire to a similitude with this Protestant Church, and declare that you are unlike us, for you do not love an "overgrown Hierarchy."

You tell us that "your church is destitute of wealth or power. If you mean this for the United States, I can tell you that you are not so destitute of either one or the other as the Catholics are. Do you mean it for Europe? To a certain extent the statement is true. But, go read the history of Europe, and you will easily perceive its cause. Why did the first Lutheran princes introduce your religion into their territory? Because it aided them to plunder the Church of its property, and to appropriate it to their own use, and to the use of their menials, and of their favorites; because by its aid they were confirmed in a despotic power, for Lutheranism proclaimed the principle that the civil ruler was the head of the Church in his own dominions. This Christiern saw, this Gustavus saw, this the renegade Grand-Master saw, as clearly as it was seen by Philip the Landgrave of Hesse, and by his associates. Hence, not only did Lutheranism unite in an indissoluble bond the Church and the State, but

she became the handmaid of the monarch for the purposes of the State, and in Europe her clergy are kept under the supervision of the prince, with the same regularity and the same facility that the ordinary police are kept. They are the salaried officers of the monarch, and should the Church receive any donation from the piety of her children, it is disposed of by the head. Thus it is that your Church is destitute of wealth and of power. It is so by your own procuration. The monarch, accustomed to have every order instantly obeyed, becomes exasperated when a Catholic prelate resists his mandate in the concerns of religion; and the Archbishop of Cologne is now a prisoner in Minden, because the Prussian King will not understand that the Catholic religion cannot be modified as easily, at his pleasure, as the Lutheran religion was.

Your reformation, as you call it, despoiled of their independent income the clergy, who in the worst times were the most impreg nable barrier for the protection of the people. Your religious changes took what the piety and the industry of ages had treasured for the purposes of religion: and with the sustenance of the clergy, the patrimony of the poor, and the gifts of the altar, were the avarice and the ambition of princes gratified, the clergy made a stipendiary police, the temporal and the ecclesiastical authority placed in the same hands and these hands left uncontroled. You may declaim against tyranny! You have, in the principles of your religious changes, done more to encourage, to support, to flatter and to uphold it, than had been done in Europe for centuries before; and in doing this you despoiled yourself and consented to your own debasement.

You recollect the fable of the envious man and of the avaricious man. You have prayed, Sir, to be deprived of some things, that we may be despoiled of every thing. Your Church is now reaping what your predecessors have sown.

And now, I ask you,-Do you covet the wealth or the power of the Bishop of Charleston?-This bloated member of the overgrown Hierarchy, at all events has hitherto, had an excellent mode of concealing that wealth and of wielding that power! But, seriously, Sir. You should not taunt him with his poverty. It is not his fault, if his flock are not rich and liberal.

You say that "your temples are without images or imposing pictures." Why, Sir, so is the poor wooden Cathedral of St. Finnbar, so was the Church of St. Mary. But, Sir, you ought to know that not only is the splendid statuary of Thorwalsden, the images of Christ and of his Apostles to be the deco

ration of a Danish Lutheran Church, but in several others you may see what I have seen, the image of the crucifix upon the altar, and lighted candles, and pictures and other decorations. Some of the images I most admired as decorations, I have seen in Lutheran Churches. But I did not fall into the same mistake that a friend of mine did in Hamburg, where he waited a considerable time reading the prayers before mass, whilst he thought the clergyman was making the preparation, until an acquaintance informed him that he had mistaken a Lutheran Church for a Catholic one. You will not find every where that your forms" of worship are of the simplest kind."

In your 54th paragraph you ask “Do we differ least from them (Catholics) in withholding the word of God from the common people?" You should not have made this charge, until you had better examined the ground upon which it rests. You call the word of God-your translation of the Bible. Sir, you beg the position you have taken the ground is not yours. I deny that the book which you would give, is the word of God. The Catholic Church tells her children not to take your book, for she tells them that your book is not the word of God. When you prove that it is, you shall have advanced one step. But, Sir, with every disposition to treat you with respect, I tell you, that you never can, upon Protestant principles, make the smallest advance to that point.

Next, you give your book for the purpose of telling "the common people," to use it to aid them in forming a system of religion, each for himself. She tells them that the principle is an outrageous departure from the first maxims of Jesus Christ, as notoriously delusive as it is impracticable.

But, Sir, she gives to all her children the pure and uncontaminated word of God, to instruct them in the belief of what God has taught, and in the practice of what he has commanded. This is not the moment to enter upon so wide a field as this question would open. I merely make the remark to show that your charge is an unmeaning flourish, your position an usurped station. You have no evidence as a Protestant to know that any book contains a revelation of

heaven, and if you had, you would not well have entered upon the question which you have so boldly begged.

In your paragraph 54, you show something of your own character for a moment, I should be sorry, were I driven to class you with the wretched group of the Slocums, Brownlees and other miserable ministers who have given to their names an unenviable notoriety for their mean associations, their virulent bigotry and their recklessness of truth.

You say that you “do not lend a willing ear to every idle tale promulgated by bigotry against the morals of our priests and people." This is I believe no idle boast. Rogues and renegades, fools and impostors, have, if I am rightly informed, endeavored to work upon you by tales of scandal. You had, at least, the good sense not to commit yourself. I will go farther, for I believe it, and will say; you had the honor and the generosity to use those powers of mind that you possess, not to defame the clergy of the Catholic Church in this city, but to sift to the bottom, the tales that were whispered to you, and you had the discrimination to detect their falsehood, and the honesty to say openly what you believed. As a Catholic; I thank you for what you have done. I respect you for your honesty. Though I may now inform you, that had you pursued a different line of conduct; you would have had difficulties to overcome, of whose existence you had perhaps no suspicion.

You say, however, that "you do not countenance our errors." You will not then blame me for not having countenanced your mistakes.

I have dealt freely with your Sermon, I hope not discourteously with yourself, I have done what I conceived to be a duty. What we have written is before the little world that surrounds us.

Accept my apology, if any thing has es caped from my pen, that may be calculated to give you any personal offence, and be assured, that however I may feel myself obliged to differ from your religious opinions, there are not many who hold you in higher personal esteem. Adieu, if you will.__. I remain, Rev. Sir, yours, B. C. Charleston, S. C., August 30, 1838.

other texts which would appear more forcibly to establish the figurative commemoration of the Eucharist than the one in question, and we could produce very few in plain support of our own doctrine, yet we have no doubt that he believed upon this head as we do.

The passage in question is taken from his 4th book against Marcion, and is the following:

Acceptem panem, et distributum discipulis' corpus suum illum fecit; Hoc est corpus meum dicendo, id est figura corporis mei. The translation which Mr. Ratio gives of the passage, is the following:

The bread being taken and distributed to his disciples, Christ made it his body, saying, This is my body, that is, the figure of my body.

In the first place we object to this translation; not that the words might not be translated so, but because they ought not to be translated so. We do not say that it is not a good syntactical translation of those Latin words as they are found so isolated, but it is not a correct representation of the meaning of Tertullian in that passage.

First, the context will not admit this translation as correct; next, the style of Tertullian will prove it incorrect; and thirdly it would make Tertullian assert what was not the fact.

To take the last. It makes Tertullian assert, that our Saviour said what the Evangelists do not record, and what no person ever asserted the Saviour to have said, viz. that at the institution of the Eucharist Christ added to the words which the Evangelists relate, "This is my body;" those other words, "that is, the figure of my body." The good gentlemen who are so anxious to preserve the bare letter of the Scripture from notes or comment as to threaten us with all the plagues that are written in the book, if we add one word thereto, ought not even upon the authority of Tertullian to have added five or six words without some scruple of conscience. But we will be told, they are not added to the Scripture, they are the explanation of Tertullian. Then it is no crime to add a note to help out the Scripture, which is so obscure as that therein a body means the figure of a body. We shall be told this is quibbling-we shall soon, we trust show that it is not. If Tertullian's meaning then was that our Lord said these words, he asserts that which is not true. It will then be admitted that Tertullian does not give them as spoken by our Saviour, but as his own comment. The words of our Lord were "This is my body," and Tertullian says that by those words, he made the bread, his body,

!

mark: Tertullian does not say, Christ by these words This is my body "made the bread his body, that is, the figure of his body." Thus he neither says that the Saviour used these explanatory words, "that is the figure of my body," nor does he say that the Saviour made the bread the figure of his body, but he distinctly says, that "he made it his body." But what are we to do with those words "that is the figure of my body"? Have they no meaning, no force? Are we to throw them away? Were they not written by Tertullian? We shall keep the words very carefully, and put them into their proper place, because Tertullian wrote them, and his sentence would be very inapplicable to its object without them.

What was his object? To refute Marcion. One of Marcion's errors was that our Saviour had not a real body. Tertullian's object was to prove that Christ had a real body and that in the new law he fulfilled the figures of the old law, by substituting the realities, and in this very place he is proving the fact that Christ had real flesh and blood, from the circumstance that in the old law which was a figure of the new, there were several figures of the body and blood of Christ, which were all completed by the substitution of the reality of the body, in the new, for the figure of the body in the old. And in this special place his argument is to the following effect: "In the old law, the bread of proposition, &c. was a figure of the body of Christ, for which he was to substitute the reality in the new law, and he did substitute the reality when at his last supper he took bread and gave it to his disciples, and by the words This,' which in the old law was a figure of my body, is my body,' made it his body, therefore Christ had a real body and not a figure of a body, for he put his body instead of the figure of his body, which in the old law was bread.”

Now we have to show the grounds of our statement. First, there is no question but the error of Marcion was what we state: next, the object of Tertullian was what we state; again, there is no question that his general line of proof is what we have laid down. Then if Tertullian's special argument was not what we have exhibited, his whole passage is nonsense, and so far from refuting Marcion, which all acknowledge he did, his words are without object, connexion or meaning, and so far from doing any violence to his style, we translate it most accurately. Whoever examines his works will discover them to exhibit a rapidity of thought which rushed to give his whole conception and then turned back to explain. This renders his style uneven, sometimes obscure, always crabbed and negligent; because whilst he

wrote rapidly, he also endeavored to be concise. We shall adduce one or two instances of his peculiarity of style. In his book against Praxeas he has this passage, Christus mortuus est, id est unctus; translated as the passage in the objection is translated by Ratio, this is, Christ was dead, that is anointed; this is perfect nonsense, for it is asserting death to mean being anointed if it would mean any thing. Tertullian first gave his whole proposition, "Christ is dead," then turning back to explain what he before omitted, but wishes state, he adds, "that is anointed." Where was the omission? After the principal word "Christ." Thus the meaning of his sentence is obviously this, "Christ, that is, the anointed, is dead." Common sense shows this to be the meaning, and this is perfectly intelligible when we know that the word Christ signifies anointed. A little farther on we have this passage, Id quod est unctum, mortuum ostendit, id est carnem. Now by Mr. Ratio's rule we should translate it thus, that which is anointed he shows dead, that is flesh, and by construction dead must mean the same as flesh. But knowing the writer's style makes common sense give us the meaning, that which is anointed, that is flesh, he shows dead.

By the same rule we translate the passage in question, Acceptum panem et distributum discipulis corpus suum illum fecit. Hoc est corpus meum dicendo, id est figura corporis mei: thus, That bread which was taken and distributed to his disciples, he made his body, saying, This, that is what was the figure of my body, is my body. In translating it thus we are certain, for many reasons, that we gave Tertullian's meaning. First, it agrees perfectly with his style as we have seen.

Secondly we do not make the writer contradict himself as the other translation does; for that makes him say that Christ made the bread his body, and then asserts that it was not his body, for it was only the figure of his body.

Thirdly, The very words which follow prove our meaning to be that of the writer, those words are: figura autem non fuisset, nisi veritatis esset corpus. Now those words are the conclusion of his argument upon this topic, in this sentence against Marcion, which argument we have before alluded to-"The old law contained figures of the realities of the new law. Bread, in the old law, was a figure of the body of Christ; in the new law, Christ put the reality in place of the figure. He changed the bread which was the figure of his body, into his body, when he said, This is my body.' But it, the bread, would not have been a figure of his body, unless that sacrament was the body of truth." That is,

there could have been no figure in the old law, unless there was a reality in the other. The writer's object was to refute Marcion who held, amongst other errors, that Christ had not a body? Unless he admitted that Christ's real body was in the Eucharist, this line of argument would have been ridiculous, for Marcion could have easily retorted" In the old law bread was a figure of the body of Christ, yet you avow that in the old law Christ had not a body. Now in the new law you say bread is a figure of Christ's body; your argument proves nothing against me, for I only require in the new law what you grant in the old law. In the old law there was a figure in bread and no real body, in the new law there is a figure in bread and no real body."

Fourthly, Tertullian takes up for his principle that which was used by St. Paul, viz. that the prophecies of the old law, faintly showed the facts of the new; and that the figures of the old law, were its facts which were but shadows, or types of the facts in the new law. In this same book against Marcion, a little forward, is this passage," Cur panem corpus suum appellat, et non magis peponem, quem Marcion loco cordis habuit non intelligens veterem fuisse istam figuram corporis Christi, dicentis per Hieremiam; Venite conjiciamus lignum in panem ajus; scilicet crucem in corpus ejus? Itaque illuminator antiquitatum quid tunc voluerit significasse panem, satis declaravit, corpus suum vocans panem." Why he calls bread, and not rather other food which Marcion had instead of a heart, his body, not understanding that that was an ancient figure of the body of Christ, saying by Jeremias: Come let us cast wood upon his bread, to wit, the cross upon his body? Thus the illustrator of antiquities has sufficiently declared what he then wished bread to signify, calling bread his body.”

The writer shows in a variety of places, that in the old law bread was a figure of the body, and in the passage under consideration he shows Marcion, those figures were fulfilled by placing the reality in their stead; thus by his words he made the bread which in the old law was the figure of his body, his body, by the words, this is my body,' and bread would not have been a figure of his body, if his body was not given under the appearance of the bread: Jeremias foresaw the facts, and tells us that the wood of the cross is to be laid upon the flesh of Christ, when he carried it to the place of his crucifixion. Therefore he says to Marcion, Christ had real flesh upon which that cross was laid as Jeremias prophecied.

Fifthly, explaining the prophecy of Jacob, Genesis xlix, he has this passage in the same