APPENDIX, 12 437

these feelings, though I cannot pardon unprincipled submission to them, nor enough wonder at the infinite fatuity of the unhappy persons whom they have betrayed:-Fatuity, self-inflicted, and stubborn in resistance to God’s Word and man’s reason!-to talk of the authority of the Church, as if the Church were anything else than the whole company of Christian men, or were ever spoken of in Scripture* as other than a company to be taught and fed, not to teach and feed.¹-Fatuity! to talk of a separation of Church and State, as if a Christian State, and every officer therein, were not necessarily a part of the Church, † and as if any State officer could do his duty without endeavouring to aid and promote religion, or any clerical officer do his duty without seeking for such aid and accepting it:-Fatuity! to seek for the unity of a living body of truth and trust in God, with a dead body of lies and trust in wood, and thence to expect anything else than plague, and consumption by worms undying, for both. Blasphemy as well as fatuity! to ask for any better interpreter of God’s Word than God, or to expect knowledge of it in any other way than the plainly ordered way: if any man will DO he shall KNOW.² But of all these fatuities, the basest is the being lured into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests’ petticoats; jangled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible.³ I had hardly believed that it was possible, though vague stories had been told me of the effect on some minds, of mere scarlet and candles, until I came on this passage in Pugin’s Remarks on Articles in the Rambler:-

“Those who have lived in want and privation are the best qualified to appreciate the blessing of plenty: thus, to those who have been devout and sincere members of the separated portion of the English Church; who have

* Except in the single passage, “tell it unto the church,”4 which is simply the extension of what had been commanded before, i.e., tell the fault first “between thee and him,” then taking “with thee one or two more,” then, to all Christian men capable of hearing the cause: if the refuse to hear their common voice, “let him be unto thee as an heathen man and publican:” (But consider how Christ treated both).

† One or two remarks on this subject, some of which I had intended to have inserted here, and others in Appendix 5, I have arranged in more consistent order, and published in a separate pamphlet, “Notes on the Construction of Sheep-folds,” for the convenience of readers interested in other architecture than that of Venetian palaces.

¹ [The MS. has an additional passages here:-

“Allege, if you will, the authority of a flock to make sheep walks, but not the authority of the Church to make any other path to Heaven than the straight one long since made and for ever visible. Fatuity! to talk of the power of the Keys, as if we had not the record of St. Peter trying this same power (within three verses of the record of his supposed reception of it) and being called Satan on the spot.”

See Matthew xvi. 19, 23.]

² [John vii. 17.]

³ [The passage here following-“I had hardly believed ...” down to “artistical apostacy” (p. 439), is restored from ed. 1. In ed. 2 and later it was omitted, the appendix reading “... no treachery so contemptible. It would be so even if Giotto ...”]

⁴ [Matthew xviii. 17. Compare Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, § 4.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]