Page:An Index of Prohibited Books (1840).djvu/36

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

xxx

PREFACE.

stained,) but in the blood of the Lamb which changes them to white."^[1]

The martyrs here most justly dis-canonized are so truly his Holiness's martyrs, that he is entitled to the full and sole credit of their murder — himself

↑ As concerns James's Oath of Allegiance it may be worth while to consult the account given by Charles Dodd author of the Ecclesiastical History in his Secret Policy of the Society of Jesus, &c., letter xiv. pp. 190-5, of the way in which those gems of purest Catholicity could play fast and loose with oaths and obligations, either of allegiance or rebellion; and how, by their own conduct in defiance of Papal fulminations, they justified the secular clergy, who took James's oath with the same heretical contempt of the head of the Church. The whole of Dodd's work is replete with exposures of Jesuitic immorality and knavery, as pungent and indignant as any which might be expected to flow from a Protestant pen: and it is a matter of some surprise, that the author should appear almost wholly unconscious, that no small measure of the castigation, which he deals out to individuals certainly very deserving of it, recoils upon the communion of the castigator himself. True, as is done in many similar cases, he endeavours to atone for his apparently traitorous severity by occasional sallies of superfluous bitterness against presumed heretics: but the spontaneous advantage which he has given those heretics, while he only thought of avenging a personal quarrel, is neither affected nor diminished by this circumstance. Campion, it appears, made no acruple of professing obedience to be due to Elizabeth as a lawful sovereign. The work is uncommon, and, at the present, and apparently approaching, crisis, peculiarly valuable. That this, as well as the History of the College of Douay, which gave occasion to it, as exciting the intemperate attack of a son of Ignatiusis, a production of C. Dodd, though both are anonymous, is considered as not admitting a doubt by a very competent witness in the Catholicon for 1816, Vol. IV. pp. 120, &c., signing himself K, and who, I presume, is the Rev. Mr. Kirk of Lichfield.

[1] As concerns James's Oath of Allegiance it may be worth while to consult the account given by Charles Dodd author of the Ecclesiastical History in his Secret Policy of the Society of Jesus, &c., letter xiv. pp. 190-5, of the way in which those gems of purest Catholicity could play fast and loose with oaths and obligations, either of allegiance or rebellion; and how, by their own conduct in defiance of Papal fulminations, they justified the secular clergy, who took James's oath with the same heretical contempt of the head of the Church. The whole of Dodd's work is replete with exposures of Jesuitic immorality and knavery, as pungent and indignant as any which might be expected to flow from a Protestant pen: and it is a matter of some surprise, that the author should appear almost wholly unconscious, that no small measure of the castigation, which he deals out to individuals certainly very deserving of it, recoils upon the communion of the castigator himself. True, as is done in many similar cases, he endeavours to atone for his apparently traitorous severity by occasional sallies of superfluous bitterness against presumed heretics: but the spontaneous advantage which he has given those heretics, while he only thought of avenging a personal quarrel, is neither affected nor diminished by this circumstance. Campion, it appears, made no acruple of professing obedience to be due to Elizabeth as a lawful sovereign. The work is uncommon, and, at the present, and apparently approaching, crisis, peculiarly valuable. That this, as well as the History of the College of Douay, which gave occasion to it, as exciting the intemperate attack of a son of Ignatiusis, a production of C. Dodd, though both are anonymous, is considered as not admitting a doubt by a very competent witness in the Catholicon for 1816, Vol. IV. pp. 120, &c., signing himself K, and who, I presume, is the Rev. Mr. Kirk of Lichfield.

[1]