A very curious illustration of the bitterness of these Roman
Catholic amenities has been furnished lately in the columns of the Catholic journal called the TVeekly Register, where the proprietor of the Tablet, Dr. Herbert Vaughan, has been defending himself ably enough against the attacks of some exceedingly bitter anonymous assailants, who have spared neither his paper nor himself, charging him, for instance, with "falsifying history," "assaulting the whole episcopal body by a disgraceful withholding of historical facts," and again, with affixing "forged appendages" to a quotation from St. Bernard. As far as our knowledge of the Tablet goes,—and it dates only from a few months back,—we should have thought these last charges curiously untrue. The Tablet, like the great Ultramon- tane Quarterly, the Dublin Review, is, no doubt, exceedingly harsh, and, as we should think, uncharitable, in its condemnations of heresy, or what it thinks so,—but both editors seem to us to set a rare example of candour to Protestants in the perfect frankness with which they habitually confess their own blunders,—the rarest and most unwelcome of editorial tasks, and the one which always excites in our minds the heartiest respect. Of course, their opponents have the great moral disadvantage, as far as temper and equanimity are concerned, of writing under the fear of eccle- siastical censures and interdicts, which are immediately applied,— so they assert—to deter any detected Galilean.
Previous page
