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XII
INTRODUGTORY ESSAY.
them, and where
they
have
even
yet
no competitors.
Popery
is,
indeed, unlike any
other
form of
heresy;
it
resembles
rather
those
odious shapes of vice which,
however commonly practised,
are too
disreputable to admit of being
avowedly vindicated.
Unsupported
by
books,
it
finds
an
advocate
in
every unrenewed
heart, and an
argument in
every
unholy lust. Distrusting
the
fair
field
of contro-
versy,
it
depends
for success
on political
intrigue, and
the
subdolous
workings
of
its
priesthood.
With
such
an
adversary,
we
can only
adopt
measures of precaution.
Like
"the
pestilence
that
walketh
in darkness,"
the
progress of
the
evil is
most effectually stayed
by
drawing around
the
infected district
a
cordon
sanitaire,
in the
shape
of those treatises which
have
done good service
in their
day,
and
which
may
yet
serve,
if not
to
counteract the
poison once
imbibed,
at
least to arrest
the
contagion.
Our
object
in
the
following
remarks
is
not
to supplement
the
argument
of Barrow
in
his celebrated Treatise,
but
to introduce
the
reader
to it, by attempting, what did
not
lie
in
his
way,
to
trace
the
delusion of
papal
supremacy to its origin,
and to
show
the
bearings
of
this
on
the
present aspect of
the
Papacy.
Popery
is,
after
all, one
of
the
most ordinary
phenomena
of
human
error;
it
is
but
one of
the
many incarnations
of
the
spirit
of
priest
-
craft.
By priestcraft
we
mean
the
art
of
detaching
the
religious
conscience
of
man
from
the
Creator, its proper
object,
and
deposit-
ing
it
in the hands
of his spiritual adviser;
the art
which
reaches
its consummation
by cutting
off
all direct
intercourse
between
God
and
man,
by constituting the priest the
only
channel of
communica-
tion,
and
thus
enabling him
at
his pleasure
to
open or
shut the gate
of salvation, or
to
prescribe such conditions of admission as may best
suit
his own
interests
or those of
the
system of which
he
forms
a
part.
It
may
seem
strange
how
a spirit
so
abhorrent
from
that
blessed
gospel,
which brings
the
Christian man into
close
affinity
with his
God
and
Redeemer,
which confers
upon him
the
dignity
of
a
"royal
priesthood,"
and
classes
him among
"God's
clergy"
(1
Pet.
v.
3),
should ever have been ingrafted upon its simple institutes. The
history of
the
church, however, enables
us to trace
the
process from
its earliest
beginnings. Long before Constantine established
the
hierarchy,
and
conferred emoluments
and
prerogatives
on
the
church as
a
corporate
society,
as early
as
the third
century,
but
still
more
in the
fourth,
we discover
in the
writings of
the
more zeal-
ous
churchmen unmistakable
evidences
of a tendency to elevate