Mgr. Louis de Ségur: Plain Talk about the Protestantism of Today [1868]

[Stone]

III. A Word about Protestant Pamphlets and Tracts.

— With two kinds of tracts do Biblical Societies overflow the land.

First, and the more numerous, contain insipid tales, of a clammy and languid religiosity, wherein we are invariably treated with conversions performed at the mere sight of the Bible, women dying a most holy death, without confession, sacraments, or priest; an everlasting sanctimonious parson, very tolerant, with a honeyed and Biblical tongue; or a dame, very religious, all zeal for the Gospel, running from hut to hut, comforting the poor with a chapter of the Bible. In these tracts the Catholic Church is not openly attacked. Oh, no! The danger is only negative. It lies in that the ideas of the readers are puzzled by having presented to their admiration and imitation examples of a religion altogether opposed to genuine Christianity. The very silence about the Catholic Church is an attack made in perfidiousness. This premeditated silence, vaunted as a part of moderation, is inimical; and it has a purpose, — it leads people to ignore the Church, and let it slide. Happily, these stories are badly written, and mortally sickening; for which God should be thanked.

Tracts belonging to the second class are distributed with more judgment, and boldly attack the Holy Church. They are, for the most, violent disquisitions on what religion holds most venerable and holy; shameless calumnies against the clergy, blasphemies against the Mother of God, and falsehoods so revolting that they cannot be attributed to mere ignorance. As we read in a solemn warning by the Bishop of Strasbourg, they bear, at times, a Catholic title, and, to cover the snare, are adorned with pictures of Our Lady.

Protestants look upon the spreading of these tracts as a meritorious work, carried on with great unanimity by divided sects. They assume increased proportions every year. The old carrier, who formerly went about carrying his bundle, is transformed and multiplied. The fair sex becomes every day more and more interested in the enterprise. Rail-road cars are thronged with evangelists in petticoats. Cramming their pockets, their work-baskets, their bandboxes, with tracts written by their respective parsons, these women start for the crusade, determined to destroy the empire of superstition. They offer their little papers, distribute them, cast them abroad, intrude them upon you, or drop them. They slide them through Venetian blinds, thrust them under doors, and pin them on rails, or on trees, on the highways.

Nor is this a newfangled apostolate. Luther was not ashamed to follow it. He added the sting of caricature to the defamatory libel which he would write in the heat of his imagination, and with a system led by a genius not less malicious than brutal. Melancthon, the angelic, his favorite disciple, was his chief assistant in this cowardly business. Libels were they, and caricatures, prompted by such noble motives, and written in a revolting and sickening style. Although certain slippery points, upon which Luther could, so naturally, balance himself well, are somewhat roughened in modern tracts, yet we prefer to believe that those devout travellers, anxious as they are to thrust them upon the people, do not read them beforehand.