CHAPTER XXII.

THE DESERTED HOME OF THE ORPHANS.

"Now," said Murty O'Dwyer, one Sunday evening, as all the members of the Prying family were seated around the tea table, "will any body doubt the usefulness of confession? The very robber who, while under the influence of drink and evil advice, plundered the widow O'Clery and her orphans of their money, has returned from the scorching plains of the south, in obedience to the advice of the priest to whom he confessed, to make restitution; and he has made it."

"It beats all I ever heard," said Mr. Prying.

"That is only an ordinary occurrence with Catholics," rejoined Murty. "Thousands of dollars, and I might say millions of money, are yearly restored to those to whom it belongs, through the influence of this divine institution."

"I wonder what has Paul done with the rest of the money, after paying for the board of himself and his sister and brothers?" said Calvin.

"He has given me two hundred of it," said Murty, "to compensate me for what I lost on account of the malice of Dominie Boorman, the Presbyterian, because I could not believe according to his cruel code of irreligion. He paid one hundred dollars for masses for the soul of poor Cunningham, who died of fever and ague one week after his having made the restitution. Two thousand, I believe, Paul paid into the convent where his sister Bridget has gone to become a nun. And the rest, I believe, he spent in raising an elegant monument over his parents and beloved Eugene's remains. O, yes, I forgot; he paid five hundred dollars towards the new Catholic church, S.A., where his convert friends reside."

"It is to me the strangest thing on earth," said old Mrs. Prying, "how liberal these Catholics are in paying to the support of their religion. Where on earth do they get the means to put up such costly buildings as they have erected in scores, within my own knowledge, these past five years?"

"So far from this being strange," said Murty, "madam, it is the most natural thing in the world. We know the Catholic religion is true. We know it has God for its Author, and that through its teachings all men must be saved that will be saved. Knowing this, we understand the merit of supporting such an institution. What is the whole world to a man if he lose his soul? and how can a man save his soul, if true religion be wanting?"

"Ah, what a noble critter that Bridget O'Clery was!" said Calvin, changing the subject to her whose image stood uppermost in his mind, "What a pity," he continued, "that she should ever become a nun! Do nuns ever get married, Murty?"

"Don't you know so much yet, Calvin? Certainly, they never do get married. They vow to consecrate their hearts forever to God. In fact, they anticipate, here in this life, what all the blessed do in the next life--to live in God, and for God. I think the life of a holy nun," said Murty, kindling into enthusiasm, "is superior to that of an angel, and the merit far greater."

Here it is as well to state that Calvin Prying, of late years, lost all that zeal for stiff Presbyterianism that possessed him in his younger days,--an ordinary occurrence with American Protestant young men,--and that, instead of his former zeal, he now had the utmost indifference, if not contempt, for the teachers of the hard creed of his cruel namesake of Geneva. He had a heart, too; and though a phlegmatic and a rude one, it could not remain insensible to the chaste charms and virtuous beauty of Bridget O'Clery. For years this feeling was growing on him--the exhortations, and lectures, and advices of little Parson Gulmore to the contrary notwithstanding. In a word, though she was "Irish" and a pauper, in the slang of parsons and officials, and though the vulgar little dominie was continually ridiculing the Irish and the Catholics, Calvin saw that Bridget was beautiful in countenance, and light as a humming bird in heart--circumstances which insensibly made an impression on the rude material of which his own was made, creating there a feeling of love bordering on admiration and distant esteem. No sooner, however, did it reach his ears that the money was restored to the orphans, and he was told that Bridget was likely to have a portion of some thousands of dollars, than his former esteem and admiration, as if by magic art, was turned into love. And now, who dare say word against her? and how low, contemptible, and wicked the counsels of Parson Gulmore, who attempted to prejudice him against such a treasure, such a model of every virtue, such an angel, as she "always appeared to him to be"! He would have cheerfully "accepted the hand" of the poor "Irish" orphan when that hand had some thousands of gold dollars in its beauteous grasp. The Yankee is not remarkable for having an eye for the beautiful in nature or art; but when _dimes_ and _dollars_ are in prospective, none is more penetrating or sharpsighted than he. Beautiful paintings, cathedrals, the noblest creations of the chisel, the most enchanting landscapes have just as much attraction for his genius as they can be made available "for making money," and no more. It was from the same principle that Calvin Prying's love for Bridget O'Clery originated. Hence he was highly enraged at the idea of her going into a convent, and had a strong notion in his head to call a "public mass meeting," and pass resolutions against the constitutionality of allowing young ladies of respectable fortunes to enter convents. Indeed, he so far succeeded in creating an excitement in his favor about deterring Bridget from entering the convent, as to get, by the payment of a small sum, one of the daily papers of the city to write an article in his favor, entitled "_Abduction_!" During a few days, the editor of the same filthy sheet repeated his scurrilous attacks on Catholicity, not forgetting to squirt a good deal of his dirt on the Rev. Dr. Ugo, whom he blamed for encouraging the girl's vocation, and thus depriving the _hungry_ Presbyterian Calvin of a fair wife and a handsome fortune.

There was no great tumult created, however. Election was approaching, and that absorbed all the excitable matter of the people, in spite of the newspapers. The disputes and defences of the faith which Murty O'Dwyer had to maintain since the departure of the young, "beautiful Irish girl," as Bridget was called, were many and critical; but an event now happened, that fanned the latent but active anti-Catholic fire into a furious flame.

One evening, at supper, after the news arrived at R---- Valley that Paul O'Clery was not only a priest, but stationed in the second city then in the Union, Amanda, casting her malicious eye at her youngest sister Mary, on whose calm cheek she saw, and seemed to envy, the innocent blush that started there, on having heard the paragraph alluding to Paul read and commented on, thus addressed her:--

"Ah, Mary, what do you say, now, to Paul, who is forever estranged from you? for he is not only a priest, but a missionary among the 'Irish,' and, of course, can never care about you again."

"I am glad to hear he is a priest," said Mary, in a gentle voice; "for I believe he will be more happy so than in any other situation in life. I am sure I wish him happy, for he was ever good and amiable."

"But yet," rejoined the old maid, "he never made you any return for all your fondness for him. He never writes you any loving letters, nor cares whether you are living or dead, or else he would write, or send you some tokens of friendship."

"You know a little too much, Amanda," said Mary. "I never asked him to write; and I know he loves me so far as to pray for me, and that's all he ever pretended to; and as for presents, I do not covet them, as I have got this beautiful one, a miniature of the mother of God, set in gold, which Paul presented to me when here last. See it here," she said, drawing it from her bosom. "I would not give this for all the presents in New York."

"Idolatry! idolatry!" cried out Amanda. "Idolatry!" cried out Calvin and the rest of the family. "Idolatry! yes, as the Lord liveth," groaned a hollow, dramatic voice, as he entered by the woodshed way to the dining room. It was that of Rev. Mr. Gulmore, who after a long absence, hearing the Romanizing tendencies that threatened to desolate this once stanch Presbyterian family, came, he said, "with his sickle," to cut down the cockles, and "weed out this once fertile but now overgrown garden."

"What is this I have been hearing?" thundered the little thick man, stamping on the floor. "Is it possible that my senses deceive me? or have I heard and seen the daughter of my friend, my Orthodox--once Orthodox--friend, draw forth her idolatrous bawble from her American bosom, and defend its use and veneration with her tongue? Is this true? Tell me! Speak!"

There was a short pause after this short declamation, delivered in the most passionate form. At length, Mr. Prying, senior, coolly answered, "Yes, Mr. Gulmore, I 'spect Mary is lost to your church, and inclined to the Catholic system."

"O Lord, forbid it!" cried the little thick man in white choker. "It cannot be; we cannot allow it. I shall storm heaven with prayers. I shall do violence to the Lord. I shall catch hold of him, and not let him go till he give back this lamb to my bosom."

Such were only _some_ of the expressions, blasphemously familiar, which this clerical mountebank made use of during a full half hour, that he almost electrified the whole company by his half-mad gesticulations and discourses. At length, when his legs began to fail, he got on his knees, or rather on his _heels_--a posture the Irish call "on his _grugg_." He prayed, and roared, and screamed, and he cried, as it were, shedding tears, to the alarm of the oldest members of the family, who feared he might burst a blood vessel, as he was a short-necked, plethoric, chunk of a man; and to the infinite amusement of Murty O'Dwyer and the younger members of the family, who, from the violence of the laughter that seized them, were in danger of meeting that fate from which the former wanted to save the parson.

This levity on the part of the youngsters did not escape the notice of his _weeping_ reverence; and he no sooner recovered himself than he administered a sharp reprimand to all concerned, but especially to Murty.

"I pity men of your country," said he, addressing Murty,--who, it must be recollected, had made very great improvement in his education since we first introduced him to our readers,--"I pity men of your country, on account of the ignorance in which they are kept by the soul-destroying system of Popery that binds them down."

"Indeed, Mr. Gulmore," said Murty, "I am sorry you don't take some other means, besides those not very enlightened prayers you have volunteered to favor us with, to dispel and instruct our ignorance."

"Why, thou Papist boor, durst thou deny the power of prayer?"

"No, sir. I have great faith in prayer, especially the prayer of a 'just man;' but God forbid that I should regard your eccentric, indeed, I might say blasphemous, effusions as prayer! You talk of the 'ignorance' of my countrymen! Ah, sir, I have no hesitation in saying the most ignorant among them would be ashamed of such silly-acting and disgusting cant as you have just now delivered."

"I blame you not," deluded Papist; "you have not felt the 'power of prayer,' brought up in all the ignorance and idolatry of the 'scarlet lady.' But it is not for you I prayed or wrestled with the Lord, but for my beloved dove, this innocent victim of your idolatry and the hellish arts of your church. Do you not feel the change of heart, Mary, my love?" he said, approaching near to the girl. "Tell me, have I gained thee? Has the Lord heard my groanings, and sighs, and petitions for thy restoration to the creed of our Protestant fathers? Do, Mary dear, tell me the feelings of thy heart! Do, love, comfort me by the assurance that I have gained thee!"

"Mr. Gulmore," answered the good child, "I thought you had long since ceased visiting us, and we hoped never again to be annoyed by your ministrations. Your conduct in combining with my step-sister here, in conjunction with the late postmaster of S----, to prevent Paul from holding correspondence, has disgusted, not only me, but even father, beyond the limits of reconciliation; and whatever I may think of your religion, be assured I have no two opinions about yourself."

"O, she is lost, I greatly fear! Fallen is an angel from heaven! Save, save, O Lord!" cried the parson, as Mary Prying rose up from her seat and left the room.

The foregoing rebuke of the spirited girl brought this craven-hearted dominie at once to his senses, and during the remainder of the evening he was more rational in conduct and discourse, seeing that Mary was the darling of her father, who would allow the parson to make no reflections on the motives that actuated her in the steps she was about to take.

"I am afraid, parson," said Murty, breaking the embarrassing silence that continued for a few minutes, "I am afraid the lady has eluded the forceful grasp of your powerful prayer. I guess she will become a nun, too, notwithstanding your great efforts to make her sing

"But I won't be a nun; I can't be a nun; I'm so fond of pleasure that I can't be a nun."

"I greatly fear, yer riverince," said he, affecting the broadest Irish brogue, "y'ill have to phray a great deal yet afore you convart her from her resolution."

"We must submit to the decree of the Lord in all that he has planned from the beginning of the world, Murty," said the parson, resignedly.

"Think the Lord has decreed Mary for the nunnery, reverend and learned sir?" said Murty, affecting great politeness.

"Not exactly, Murty; but the Lord, by his inscrutable decree before the creation, has passed sentence on all accountable beings: some he has delivered over to irremediable wrath, and others he has predestined to glory and bliss eternal; and no efforts of men can reverse these irrevocable decrees."

"O, dreadful!" said Murty. "I always heard that God willed all men to be saved; that it was in every man's power to avoid evil, and do good; that the giving of the commandments supposed the perfect liberty of men; and that, supposing the grace of God, all men had the means of salvation within their reach. If your system were true, all efforts of man to save himself would be useless, and all your pulpits and sermons would be worse than useless; for they would be a gross imposition, and a loss of time."

"There is where you are in error, Murty," said the parson. "Churches, pulpits, Bibles, and ministers are the machinery the Lord makes use of to secure the perseverance of the elect."

"That talk appears to me silly," rejoined Murty. "The elect are to be saved, or they are not; if they are to be saved by the decree of God, then there is no use of you and your machinery; if they can lose their 'election,' and become reprobate, then your theory is contradictory, absurd, and grossly perversive of the gospel. Take your choice of the horns of the dilemma."

The parson here entered into a very unintelligible explanation of a subject which constitutes, in defiance of common sense and of the plainest teaching of the gospel, the leading dogma of Presbyterianism; namely, foreordination, or the eternal decree of every man's election or reprobation, irrespective of free will, good works, or even the all-saving merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.

"How contradictory the tenets of sectarianism!" said Murty. "You, that accuse Catholicity of teaching absurd and incredible doctrines, are yourselves enslaved by the most incredible and contradictory creeds. It is the same in every sect. Take the Methodists, and they are the very contrary of what their name signifies. Instead of following any _method_ in their mad orgies, they would seem to be, _intellectually_, the successors of the ancient bacchanalians. They would carry man back to his primitive _woods_, and, by the medium of plenty of 'straw,' would annihilate the distinctions between the sexes, by introducing a promiscuous intercourse, and legalizing, by custom, the most indecent practices."

"You have been at a camp meeting then, I see," said the parson, glad that attention was turned from his own sect to one that was a rival of it.

"Yes, sir, I have, I regret to be obliged to confess," said Murty; "and I must say that the Methodists, by their conduct there, showed themselves more ingenious in inventing the means of election than those of the church of Calvin."

"How so, Murty? In what do they exceed the Presbyterians?"

"Why, in this, that they have beat you hollow in securing salvation. You make use of churches, pulpits, parsons, Bibles, and anti-Popery lectures to secure the election for the brethren; but the Methodists secure the same gift by means of some 'straw.' At the camp meeting held last year at M----ville, of which the Irish laborer who spent a night there said, 'that there were more _souls made there_ than convarted,'--at that meeting, where there were twenty thousand persons present, I heard a preacher cry out, 'More straw! more straw! Fifty souls lost for the want of straw!' Now," continued Murty, "this is what I call progress, to make as much out of a good bed of straw as you do out of all your church machinery for saving souls."

"Ha! ha! ha!" said the parson, turning to Mrs. Prying. "He is right; I saw and heard them myself at such absurdities."

"Then," said Murty, "you or any other Americans who are aware of such gross impositions on the credulity of your people, and of their gross ignorance, should be the last persons on earth to reproach the Irish or any other people with ignorance, superstition, credulity, or fanaticism. Good night, parson, and every time you are tempted to reproach an Irishman with ignorance, think of 'More straw! more straw! Fifty souls lost for the want of straw!' and that this sermon was preached in enlightened America of Bibles!"

After the departure of Murty from the room, Gulmore, to make amends for his senseless conduct in his attempts to convert Mary Prying, became very complaisant, and, for the want of a better subject, resumed the subject of the extravagances of the Methodists where Murty left off. He knew, also, that old Mrs. Prying had an antipathy to that sect.

"The Irishman is an amusing fellow, I perceive," commenced he; "he is not far wrong in his description of the Methodists, I can tell you."

"I never could bear that denomination," said Mrs. Prying, "especially since the time that Morefat carried on over in Vermont; and I am still more displeased since that Minister Barker seduced Amanda to his meeting, together with others of our regular members."

"They are a horrid set!" said the dominie. "Did you not hear of the donation party at brother Funny's, last new year's?"

"No. Do you mean the talk about Miss Talebearer?"

"Worse than that, although nothing secret. Nothing that the whole town has not heard. You know Mr. Funny was rather poor, having been but a few months on the 'circuit;' and so Mrs. Plumpcheek, wife to Aaron Plumpcheek, while he was off in Virginia, went to the party, and there offered to kiss every man that would pay her a dollar for the proceeds of the donation! The consequence was, that she realized seventy-five dollars in hard cash, though most of the boys paid her but two shillings. And thus poor Brother Funny made a handsome sum by the _free charms_ of Mrs. Plumpcheek! Ever since her husband is made jealous, and I think he has reason."

Sectarians, you who are so loud in your pretended zeal for education and morals, you who talk so much and loudly about the corruption of Popery at home and abroad, why do you not cast the beam out of your own impure eyes, and then you may see in your own land of plenty, carried on under the _sanction of what you call religion_, scenes such as the annals of paganism can scarcely parallel.

We can prove the facts related above by Parson Gulmore to be literally true, and to have happened annually for years under the sanction of _religious_ ministers, and exposed to the cognizance of fathers and mothers accompanied by their _daughters_ and _sons_.

We publish these things reluctantly, on account of our readers; but we must tell the truth, though it be piecemeal and in fractional parts, rather than in the full view of its naked reality.

Is it not time to say to these hypocritical sects, "Physicians, heal yourselves"? Look into the conduct and constitutions of your own bodies ere you turn censors on others. The corruptions and deformities of your own bodies will take all your zeal, all your energy, and all your lives, to correct, purify, and eradicate, leaving the Catholic church to reform whatever abuses may have crept into the lives or morals of her children by the ordinary resources, which are ample, and always within her reach.

Really, the hypocrisy, audacity, and malice of the Pharisees of old, in persecuting Jesus Christ in the flesh, were not equalled, in degree or intensity, to the malice and hypocrisy of sectarians, under every Protestant title, in their unrelenting hatred of the same divine Person in his mystical body here on earth!

'Tis all nonsense to reproach _Catholics_ with conduct similar, or as gross, as these instances of immorality which we justly charge on the Protestant sects. Catholics, as individuals, may be, and have been, guilty of grave crimes and scandalous immoralities; but does the church countenance or connive at their conduct? No; we say, emphatically, No. On the contrary, she condemns vice in every shape, and denounces, like another Baptist in the wilderness, the wrath of Heaven on the workers of iniquity. Is there one of her precepts, counsels, or rules, that guards not against sin and its occasions? According to the accusations of her enemies themselves, who reproach her, with too much severity, of imposing too many restrictions on the passions, is she not continually preaching up to her followers the necessity of self-denial, humility, purity, charity, prayer, fastings, watchings, and, above all, OF SHUNNING THE OCCASIONS OF SIN? Hence, in the whole volume of her history for eighteen centuries and better, we read not of one _camp meeting_ sanctioned by her, nor that she ever authorized her ministers to _feel "for the change of heart_" in young ladies, to proclaim the use of "more straw" for the conversion of both sexes, or to raise funds by the abominable practices of the "donation parties" for the support of her institutions. And mind, these scandals the sectarian churches sanction and carry on under the sun of heaven, by day as well as by night, exposed to the jeers and ridicule of one another, and to the condemnation of the Catholic church. When they are such in "the greenwood, what would they be not in the dry"? If, like the Catholic church, they had the world to themselves for "a thousand years and more," what abominations would their spurious churches have not only tolerated, but have instituted and approved? If they have produced Mormons, Transcendentalists, Universalists, and spiritual rappers, in the nineteenth century, what monsters would they not have produced in the ninth?

In the "dark ages," the Catholic church saved the world, preserved literature, civilized real barbarians, and, above all, practised, as well as preached, a PURE MORALITY. The Protestant sects in this enlightened age, by their novelties, by their dissensions, and, above all, by the low standard of morals which they inculcate, threaten to throw the world back again to the dark chaos from which Catholicity has drawn it, and to substitute for the glory of Christianity the miserable philosophism and superstition of the degenerate days of paganism.

In proof of these statements, we refer any candid mind to the "spiritual rappers," "women's rights," "Mormonism," "gold hunting, and other manias," which, within the last few years, have sprung from the sectarian systems and their teaching, and from no other source.

We are horrified at the morals and tenets of the Gnostic sects, the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and other defunct heresies of old; but we doubt if any thing more impious, immoral, or absurd happened under the auspices of these by-gone sects than the blasphemies, delusions, and corruptions carried on under the cloak of your "camp meetings," "revivals," "mediums," "spiritual wife system," and other modern _reproductions_ of the Protestant Christian churches, falsely so called.