"That dark lanthorn of the Spirit Which none see by but those that bear it;"
"By crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pyxes; Those tools for working out salvation By mere _mechanic_ operation,"
to protest against the return of Popery to this land, to the surrender of our consciences and our Bibles again into the hands of a fellow sinner.[H] "Quis custodet custodem?"--who shall watch our watcher?--was a question that men had been asking themselves for many years in England, but hitherto without result; till our pious Reformers, addressing themselves to the study of the Scriptures, received the sword of the Spirit, with which they were enabled to wage successful war against that wily serpent, coiled now for centuries round the Church of Christ, and waiting but a little further _development_ to crush her in his inextricable folds. Alike unallured by concessions and unterrified by threats, they boldly denounced the _heretical_ usurpation of Rome; opposing an honest conscience, and Christ the only mediator, to the caprice of councils, and the false unity of a pseudo-infallible head;[I] refusing to purchase their lives by rendering homage to any Phalaris of the Triple Crown.
[H] Bellarmine asserts (and who but a heretic shall dispute it with him?) that men are bound so far to submit their consciences to the Pope, as even to believe _virtue_ to be _bad_ and _vice_ to be _good_, if it shall please his Holiness to say so. (BELLAR. _de Rom. Pontif_, lib. iv. cap. v.) When things came to this pass, were we not justified in the insertion of that rough deprecatory clause that stood in our Litany--"From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities, Good Lord deliver us!"
[I] "We must seek to enter into the real divine unity; if not, the _pseudo_ unity to which Mr Newman would bring us back will be attempted once more among us; only to be followed, when its hollowness, its nothingness, its implicit infidelity, is laid bare, by an explicit infidelity, an anarchical unity, without a centre, without a God." (MAURICE'S _Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews_, p. 111.)
Their perjured faith, though zealot Popes command, Point to _their_ Bull, and raise the threatening hand: They deem'd those souls consummate guilt incurr'd, At conscience' fearful price, who life preferr'd: No length of days for bartered peace can pay, And what were life, take life's great end away?[J]