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Protestant Meditations on History and "Popery"

Spokesmen for Anglo-America in the New World, nineteenth-century American historians constructed a national history that traced America's development from colonial settlements of religious refugees and adventurers to an industrializing society whose progress was the joint result of Protestant and republican reformist energies. In the words of one Philadelphia journal, antebellum Americans would succeed in their pursuit of exemplary nation building if they could simply "bear in mind that they are the patriarchs of modern emancipation."^[1] Such progress, however, depended on a sustained rearguard action against a European past conceived of as contaminated by monarchism, aristocracy, and Roman Catholicism. If the revolutionary struggle had successfully deposed royal power, the struggle against Roman Catholicism continued. An enemy conventionally figured over the course of four centuries as popery, Romanism, or, more graphically, the Whore of Babylon, the Catholic church infiltrated the American Protestant historical imagination as a principal impediment to progress and at times as a principal attraction. If, as Cotton Mather proclaimed in his Magnalia Christi Americana , the workings of Providence demanded the defeat of the remaining "Baits of Popery " yet left in the church, those vestiges of Romanism proved curiously resistant, even against the postmillennial optimism of later revivalists like Jonathan Edwards, for whom America, after enduring an anticipated "very dark time," was to conquer the Antichrist and enjoy the coming of the millennium.^[2] In part because he thought the "power and influence of the Pope is much diminished,"

Edwards fought infidelity more than popery; but in claiming the dynamism of evangelical Protestantism as America's identifying possession, Edwards implicitly lodged Catholicism in the darkness of contemporary spiritual indifference.^[3]

Events in the decades following Jonathan Edwards's death in 1758 threatened such confidence in an American providential design. Especially in the aftermath of the American Revolution, Protestantism contended with disestablishment and the consequent rise of voluntarism, sectarianism, and secularization.^[4] Initially fought during the Reformation, the Protestant battle against Rome, in its variant denominational aspects, was reenacted and precariously legitimated by the spread of English Protestant culture in the New World. Catholicism continued to be silenced by a providential history that in the sixteenth century had performed two momentous and interrelated feats: the Reformation and the Puritan settlement of America. Antebellum America understood its privileged status as emerging from the doctrinal revolutions of the Reformation and from the ethnic superiority of those early "Teutonic" rebels against "Latin" tyranny. "The genius of Northern, Scandinavian life thenceforth asserted its supremacy," explained one essayist of America's emancipatory origins, "and reformations, discoveries of new worlds in the physical and mental sphere, free institutions, and popular governments were necessary, unavoidable facts."^[5]

The British Puritan imagination, analogizing from its understanding of the New Testament's typological fulfillment of the Old, conceived of the New World as both separating from and seeking to purify Europe. The Puritan reforming spirit, stemming directly from God and later strengthened by the alleged racial superiority of the Teutonic genius, continued to enact the divine will in nineteenth-century America's "manifest destiny" to extend its territorial boundaries.^[6] The major antebellum historians of America's southern and northern frontiers, William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman, stressed the "Anglo-Saxon" cultures' destined conquest of the land, its native American inhabitants, and European Catholic power. Intent on claiming the Puritan Christian teleology for the New World, early American Protestants like Mather and Edwards as well as later historians like Prescott and Parkman insisted that the Reformation had rescued the progressive workings of the spirit from the stasis or even regression of papal captivity.^[7]

This resuscitated evangelical force, heroically transported to the New World in the Puritan migration, reemerged in the nineteenth century as the Protestant Way, a cultural route invoked to unify an increasingly

fragmented Protestantism and to fight the threats posed by Irish and German Catholic immigration. Since the Reformation had freed believers from a church deemed tyrannical in part because of its philosophical resistance to the notion of change, "history" and America's Protestant sects were firmly identified, an alliance that occasionally extended to all of time itself: time was endowed with the same invincible commitment to reform. Thus the European Reformation, argued one New Englander, was a natural outgrowth of a universal phenomenon: "The reforming process, of which Luther's resistance was one of the stages, began before he existed, it survived when his wars were over, and will keep on long after our generation is in the dust." That Catholics should still exist after having been directed offstage nearly four centuries earlier greatly disturbed both conservative and liberal American Protestants, who alike concluded that their very position in the vanguard of history called for constant vigilance against the immigrant Catholic to maintain, even perfect, the virile autonomy of the "native" Protestant American self. As Emerson argued in his 1849 essay "Power," the "necessity of balancing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners." But if the emancipatory narrative unfolded initially in Puritan historiography pervaded antebellum periodical literature, sermons, and speeches, its consensus about the Protestant victory over a Catholic past was rendered internally fragile by the disputing Arminian and Orthodox persuasions—an internal schism that required a concerted resistance to the menacing Catholic immigrant and to the ahistorical, largely invisible, and profoundly magnetic power of popery.^[8]

Antebellum New England efforts forged a national identity that was not only oppositional but even "negative" in its essence, for it was profoundly shaped by a continued rejection of and rivalry with Roman Catholicism. Seeking to confirm a still provisional, self-consciously Protestant nationhood by contrasting it with what was familiarly called the "foreign faith," the romantic historians drew on colonial and eighteenth-century attitudes toward the repudiated church for their new progressive historiography. If the papacy had receded in political influence with Anglo-America's triumphs against both New Spain and New France, as an ideological figure known as popery or "Romanism" it received an alarmed scrutiny during the antebellum decades from ministers, novelists, statesmen, and historians, who often invoked the unlikely threat of papal overthrow to divert attention from intractable

national problems that finally had little to do with religion. Divisive sectionalism, urbanization, immigration, industrialization, race slavery, and finally the stresses in the formation of the middle-class family all challenged the notion of a national identity made coherent by its allegiance to Protestantism. To assert a national selfhood that was essentially religious enabled American Protestants of varying and often antagonistic denominations (and social classes) to minimize, if not resolve, racial, sexual, and economic divisions in the American nation.^[9]

If nineteenth-century American Catholics defensively divided the world between the one, holy, and apostolic church and the unchurched cosmos, American Protestants had their own troubling divisions to deal with. In several respects, conservative Catholic invective against the evils of Protestantism touched on painful truths of the national culture. The practiced controversialist Archbishop Martin Jay Spalding of Baltimore described the Reformation in extravagantly reactionary terms that pointed, however, to interpretive quandaries liberal Protestants were indeed struggling with, although of course they would have disagreed with Spalding's Catholic diagnosis:

It was not a merely local or transient rebellion against Church authority which was at hand, but a mighty revolution, which was to shake Christendom to its very centre; and to endure, with its long and pestilent train of evils, with its Babel-like sound and confusion of tongues, with its first incipient and then developed infidelity, probably to the end of the world!^[10]

American historians like Prescott and Parkman, the novelists of the American Renaissance, and writers of popular and domestic fiction were indeed troubled by a confusion of tongues, perplexed in part by a bisection of cultural time into an iconic Catholic "past," sealed off from the present and available for aesthetic and psychological rumination, and an emphatically text-oriented Protestant "history," extending from the Reformation into the antebellum present. The ideology of American Reformed Christianity constructed this vanquished, static, regressive Catholic "past": it appeared most commonly as a conglomeration of ruins and foreign cultures, Italian Renaissance and Baroque art (made available through new processes of reproduction), and a foreign "Latinate" or "Celtic" selfhood, seen by American tourists abroad and, with the onset of Irish immigration in the 1840s, confronted at home as well. Against this ideological construction of an imagistic, "idolatrous," and politically regressive Catholic past (itself a regressive construction that became very much "present" in antebellum America), Old and New

World Protestant "history" upheld the power of the "Word" against that of the "Image" and, by extension, the power of biblically allusive historical and fictional narratives against the suspiciously flesh-bound powers of Rome.^[11] Both Protestant religious polemics and American travel accounts opposed ahistorical Catholic "ruins" to Protestant "history" and the perilously attractive ahistorical corruptions of the Catholic body to the progressive and cleansing powers of the Protestant voice. Between Catholic matter and Protestant spirit snaked the dividing line of the Reformation, which had initiated a new religious narrative against the allegedly calculated falsehood of the pope's story and which reiterated crucial oppositions between autonomy, purity, and self-regulation, on the one hand, and the dangers of submission and "excess"—whether liturgical, aesthetic, or political—on the other.

The conflict between Protestant enlightenment and popish duplicity was early fashioned into epochal drama by John Foxe in his famous (and to Catholics, notorious) history, Actes and Monuments (1563). When, as Foxe recounts, "coloured hypocrisy, false doctrine, and painted holiness, began to be espied more and more by the reading of God's word," the revolutionary dynamic revealing the Word's power over the image was set in motion.^[12] Such an asserted triumph of textuality over European humanity's imagistic, duplicitous past could only be sustained by endowing the Word (in the confines of what early Dissenting preachers denoted the plain style) with the charismatic power, if not the palpable contours, of the abandoned image.

Modeling his history on the French Calvinist Jean Crespin's Book of Martyrs , Foxe in his martyrology displays a series of significations that interlock the sacred, the political, the aesthetic, and the technological. Thus he proclaims the invention of printing as a divine intervention in earthly affairs that makes possible the production of authentic history; the Word, made newly available to humanity by the printing press and soon thereafter by Foxe's heroic historiography, rivals and finally transforms the flesh of Foxe's martyrs into pointedly articulate and distributable text. In the transformative medium of fire that consumes a series of Marian martyrs Foxe's words themselves assume the rhetorical authentication of the passional suffering they record. Conversely each victim, in the agony of incineration, achieves the evangelical potency and historical permanence of Gospel text. Thus Foxe punctuates his historical account with execution tableaux in which text and flesh dramatically coalesce; martyrs read aloud from the Bible as they burn, words and flesh consumed in a synchrony that argues in turn for their mutual incorruptibility. Heretical and heroic like each martyr, the

Word in turn enforces the identity between martyr and reader of martyrdom:

There was a company of books cast into the fire; and by chance a communion-book fell between his hands, who receiving it joyfully opened it, and read so long as the force of the flame and smoke caused him that he could see no more. Then he fell again to prayer, holding his hands up to heaven, and the book between his arms next to his heart, thanking God for sending him it. (392)

Such tableaux, then, fuse the Book and the Body, reading and corporeal suffering, into a spectacular and revelatory historical action whose permanence derives not from the tangibility of the Catholic icon but from the gruesomeness of the icon's extinction. One particular polemical benefit of Foxe's martyrology, then, is its incorporation of the body's iconic and commemorative power into the new Protestantism. Foxe's history establishes distinctions between text and flesh specifically to deny them; the Word, as made present through Foxe's words, engineers the paradox by which the martyrs become new relics for their iconoclast audiences, translated from venerated body to venerated text. The Gospel sufficiently anesthetizes the flesh so that Foxe's Marian martyrs comment theatrically on their grisly transfiguration by clapping their burning hands to signal the absence of pain. That same Word interprets such theater for the populace. In a transformation extremely important for later Protestant historiography, the Word becomes the words of the historian, authenticated by their revelation of "popish" evil and consequent conversionary impact on the reader. Exposé and conversion are rhetorically and theologically linked, for conversion to Protestantism critically depends on the exposure of Catholic duplicity and wickedness. Thus in Foxe's accounts each burning is preceded by a ritual dialogue (of forgiveness, temptation to recant, etc.) between the martyrs and their Catholic persecutors, followed by the victims' invocations to the audience before the lighting of the fires. These spontaneous sermons by the bound victims provide cameo lessons in history, explaining how the imminent holocaust will contribute to the great battle against Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation.

Because Foxe's record of these sacred sacrifices assumes a power kindred to that of the Gospel, advertising to the world the horrors of Bloody Mary just as the Gospels published the persecuted glory of Jesus Christ, the Foxean imitation insists that exposure of Catholic iniquity serves as humanity's new access to revelation. Like Christ, Foxe must not

only expose and exorcise but also convert; in his professedly impartial documentary record of the burnings, the Protestant historian-martyrologist draws his readers into the conversionary state of the spectator by enforcing a parallel between witnessing the martyrs' deaths and reading of that witness: "And the fire flaming about them they yielded their souls, bodies and lives into the hands of the omnipotent Lord, to whose protection I commend thee, gentle reader" (418). While Foxe's history was influential enough to be chained to lecterns in English churches, its charismatic blend of hagiography and invective sounded increasingly anachronistic to nineteenth-century readers. The martyrologist Cotton Mather, a self-styled American Foxe, offering "unto the Churches of the Reformation, abroad in the World, some small Memorials, that may be serviceable unto the Designs of Reformation," was particularly distrusted by liberal antebellum Protestants, not only for his role in the Salem witchcraft executions but also for more generally symbolizing the persecutorial energies latent in American Calvinism.^[13]

For nineteenth-century Americans, religious liberation had lost its gritty detail of slow-burning wood and agonized flesh and had assumed the vague contours of humanistic freedom. Although a Catholic priest could still cause a national uproar by burning Protestant Bibles, the Word in its temporal expression as history was losing its numinous force.^[14] History had forsaken none of its progressive dynamic, but its goal had become increasingly abstract, even hypocritical, disguising beneath its optimistic terminology of emancipation and improvement the unsavory realities of imperialist expansion and race slavery. If nineteenth-century American schoolbooks pictured Western history as a "Hegelian process for the realization of the idea of freedom," neither the process nor the freedom was especially apparent.^[15] Depleted of its previous urgency and salvific aura, and challenged by denominational disputes in Protestantism itself, Reformed Christianity—particularly liberal New England Congregationalism and Unitarianism—could no longer easily dismiss the countertext of Catholic iconography and ceremony. Although declared discontinuous with the present, that iconic past, palpable in image and statue, cathedral and catacomb, lithograph and engraving, now intruded on the purified and printbound present.^[16] Thus as the Reformation receded, so too did the insurrectionary and purifying powers of the Word. New England Puritans had created and sustained their subversively conservative identity through a still rare written word that recounted the human conquest of an inarticulate past bent on silencing the Gospel. But by the mid-nineteenth century, Scripture was everywhere competing with the encroachments of a developing mass-printing market.^[17]

Although anachronistic, Foxe's drama of the cleansed "text" of Reformed Christianity overcoming the diseased embodiments of Roman Catholicism by the incendiary enumeration and publication of its fleshly corruptions still informed American sensibilities in the 1840s. A contemporary essayist, for example, distinguished Luther from Loyola precisely in terms of Lutheranism's textual supremacism: "But while Luther swore allegiance to the Holy Scriptures, the Jesuit gave himself to dreams and rhapsodies and to a chivalrous devotion to our Blessed Lady."^[18] Many accounts of Protestantism's historical development stressed the crucial cultural contributions of printing and of reading, particularly lay reading of the Bible, to the individual exercise of "private judgment."^[19] In describing his English ancestry, early America's most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, proudly noted how his Dissenter forebears ingeniously thwarted Anglican regulations against Bible reading.

They had got an English Bible, and to conceal and secure it, it was fastened open with Tapes under and within the Frame of a Joint Stool. When my Great Great Grandfather read in it to his Family, he turn'd up the Joint Stool upon his Knees, turning over the Leaves then under the Tapes. One of the Children stood at the Door to give Notice if he saw the Apparitor coming. . . . In that Case the Stool was turn'd down again upon its feet, when the Bible remain'd conceal'd under it as before.^[20]

Early republican novelists like Susanna Rowson (Charlotte Temple , 1794) and Hannah Foster (The Coquette , 1797) appropriated Protestantism's legacy of individual judgment to justify the writing and reading of female didactic fiction about the sexual temptation and destruction of women in the New World. At the same time, however, these novelists, uncomfortably aware that Protestantism could lead the independent soul astray, warned against the potentially anarchic effects of solitary reading, especially when the prerogatives of "private judgment" were extended to a young girl's reading of seductive letters: Mademoiselle LaRue's invidious injunction to her student Charlotte Temple to "open the [seducer's] letter, read it, and judge for yourself," abruptly perverts Charlotte's readerly devotion to Scripture; henceforth, she reads only the language of seduction and descends into sexual error, pregnancy, and death.^[21] When the Vatican in the nineteenth century tried to curb Catholic reading of the King James Bible and when American Catholics demanded that the Protestant Bible be excluded from public schools if Catholic Bibles were to be prohibited, American Protestants had further evidence of the tyrannical opposition of popery to the democratizing

effects of private (unguided) reading of Scripture. Indeed, when a Roman Catholic priest publicly burned Protestant Bibles in 1842, an event known as the Champlain Bible Burning, it recalled Foxean images of Protestant martyrs reading in the flames and was even proclaimed a revival of the Spanish auto-da-fé in the United States.^[22]

Combined with Scripture into a single progressive sacred text, history as a conventional term of antebellum Protestant periodical prose enjoyed the redemptive power of a language close to "nature" and hence divorced from the contaminations of culture. Americans who understood their country as "Nature's nation" relegated Catholicism to the realm of culture—an ideological region of artifice, complexity, and immorality.^[23] New World Christians, empowered by the lands apparently made theirs by divine fiat, strove to free themselves from the restraining grip of European culture as well as the insidious effects of urbanization and the inevitable artifices of a developing cultural life.

If fire was Foxe's primary image of release and self-purification from institutional corruption, water was central to the American Protestant symbolic imagination. For the early immigrant generations of religious exiles, the Atlantic ocean crossing powerfully suggested a renewed baptism into the life of the spirit and the land of promise.^[24] But water imagery also continued to convey antebellum America's cleansing from Catholic pollution. The German church historian August Neander (1789-1850) imagined history, in the approving words of one American critic, as a liquid flowing from the Old to the New World:

He [Neander] thus was pre-eminently qualified to trace the flow of Christian doctrine and influence from its sacred fountains down through its discolouring channels of transmission, through ages of darkness and eras of renewed light, through corruptions, heresies, and partial reformations, to these latter days, in which its still divided current rolls on to become one again in that happier future foreshadowed in the Saviour's prayer at the Last Supper.^[25]

By the antebellum decades, such transatlantic crossings had lost their typological force, in part because Catholic immigrants were now making that voyage. Purification was no longer accomplished by crossing the Atlantic, but, more metaphorically, by journeying from Europe to the American frontier. History flowed from the Old into the New World and then, quickly enough, from the eastern seaboard to the "Adamic" western frontier, in harmony with the imperialist notion of empire's westward course, first popularized by Bishop Berkeley. Like English Protestants,

historiography was itself freed of discolorations in this westward course. Since the "pure light of the Gospel, in penetrating the thick mist which enveloped the heathen world, became itself discolored at once,"^[26] it took the discovery of the New World to restore that light to purity, to liberate the divine schedule of events from the discolored, clogged impediments of the Old World. This formative symbolic opposition between European contamination and American purity played itself out not only in the triumph of the Protestant word over the Catholic image but also in the triumph of heuristic clarity over "Jesuitical" obfuscation. American Protestants were accordingly obliged to pursue their clarified vision with moral strenuousness. "Under the patronage of our free institutions," explained the anti-Catholic agitator W. C. Brownlee, "the religion of Christ enjoys an opportunity of working itself clear from the sediment of misrepresentation which has been cast into its pure fountain."^[27]

The Protestant historical vision, then, claimed a virtually redemptive function precisely by defining history as Protestant, as a dynamic that cleansed the spiritual of its material dross by separating out the entangled strands of sanctity and corruption. For liberal New Englanders, in particular, Christian worship had grown steadily less Catholic by continuing to separate itself from the earthy, the inarticulate, and the literal. Unitarian Christians (who were greatly interested in Roman Catholicism during the 1830s and 1840s) placed themselves in this vanguard movement toward a fully literate, increasingly bodiless, "spiritual" religion; indeed, liberal Unitarians demonstrated their allegiance to the Word rather than worldly ecclesiastical power and theological incarnationalism by an increasingly symbolic reading of Scripture, a willingness to interpret the Word as a congeries of images, metaphors, and symbols.^[28] Religion's progress from the material to the spiritual, the ceremonial to the verbal was finally successful, then, because of the way providential history worked. As one Unitarian contended, sacrifice, as religious ritual, had already progressed from corrupt material offerings to pure spiritual ones because the "mode of historical development is that of a separation of things mixed, allowing individual representations to both of the contending principles." It was not just that, for example, communion tables were no longer to look like altars in Virginia's churches after disestablishment but also that American history was thereafter dedicated to the segregation of altars from tables, a continued disentangling of "things mixed."^[29]

Liberal Protestant voices performed this anti-incarnational function of extracting spirit from flesh, text from image to gain a righteously empowered purity. But in separating the elements of sacrifice one from

another, these voices also spoke a new language of radical simplification. By the mid-nineteenth century, the false could more readily be distinguished from the true thanks to history's personified capacity for organizing life into a drama of Catholic regressive "matter" conspiring against Protestant progressive "spirit" but ultimately vanquished by it. What individuals encountered when they personally inquired into the past was another matter. But for influential contemporary periodicals like the North American Review , the Christian Examiner , and Harper's Magazine , history's main role was as organizer and judge of a past whose ideological message was purposefully simplistic. It was in this judgmental, clarifying sense that Protestant history laid claim to a God-like function. While liberal Protestant clergy and novelists struggled to overthrow the aggressive exclusionism of orthodox Calvinism, which dismissed most souls to eternal perdition, they still clung to Calvinism's predilection for separation and purification in their meditations on national identity; if Protestant souls increasingly enjoyed the benefits of a liberalized theology that democratized the availability of the spirit, Protestant citizens were building a national identity ever more exclusionary.^[30] And if "foreigners" were no longer overtly "damned," they were frankly, and at times violently, excluded from the privileges of republican union.

The Roman church, naturally catalogued as ahistorical by the liberal antebellum religious press, its own histories invalidated as fiction or reactionary polemic, nonetheless guarded itself zealously from innovation, in part to protect itself from Protestant attack but also to maintain its divinely commissioned mandate to preserve its truths from the vagaries of historical change. Protestant critics, flatly refusing this redemptive view of changelessness, insisted that Catholic ahistoricity had little to do with the Eternal and much to do with the disguised tyranny of reactionaries. Many Americans were uncertain, however, whether Catholics opposed the purifications of history intentionally and conspiratorially, were victims of the divine plan, or, worse yet, were psychological and political dupes of "priestcraft." Was it even possible to distinguish among Catholics, or was papal authority so monolithic that it crushed any distinctions of gender, class, national origin, and temperament? From one perspective, the Roman church menacingly "set itself in systematic opposition to the Christian ideas of freedom and development announced by Jesus and his Apostles,"^[31] thus requiring Protestants of whatever denomination to militantly oppose any Catholic presence on American shores and to ferret out alleged papal conspiracies against American republican ways. From another perspective, because Cathol-

icism was seen as a human fabrication excluded from the divine-natural world of providential history, it was impotently mired in its own duplicities and suffered the consequent frailties of the human. It was not a global power but an uncanny survival of a European, even feminine, consciousness. From this patronizing (but potentially more sympathetic) perspective, the Roman church was to be pitied, even studied, and perhaps celebrated, but finally dismissed. Associated with the fabulous, with the world of fiction instead of fact, with stasis instead of progress, Catholicism represented the false narrative of Western culture to which one could respond with outraged, even paranoid, indignation or with tentative explorations of the motivations behind this Romish falsity.

Having been excluded from the nation's forward movement and the history that had articulated and continued to promote it, Roman Catholicism ironically attained a crucial place in defining New World Protestantism and maintaining that self-definition through the antebellum decades. It played the fiction to Protestantism's truth, the failure to its progress, the weaker femininity to its superior masculinity. Observers called the Roman church a yarn spinner, turning out ever taller tales to meet the "pressing and practical" demand for miracles in Rome. A typically condescending description of the process of beatification assures readers that "no story or miracle can be invented, so preposterous that it may not be overmatched by what is received, sanctioned and magnified in the Sacred City to-day."^[32] The spectacle of such a globally institutionalized power intricately allied with fantasy nonetheless intrigued suspicious empiricists. Understood as fictional rather than authentic, the Roman church could then exert the proverbial seductions of fiction. Emerson, writing in 1847, faulted Protestantism for its sectarianism while praising the collectivist aesthetic of Catholicism as most natural and hence amenable to the transcendentalist imagination:

The Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. . . . The Protestant, on the contrary, with its hateful "private judgment," brings parishes, families, and at last individual doctrinaires and schismatics . . . into play and notice, which to the gentle, musing poet is to the last degree disagreeable. . . . The Catholic Church is. . . . in harmony with Nature, which loves the race and ruins the individual.^[33]

Indeed its delusions were understood as hoodwinking its most intelligent defenders; even the famous Catholic convert and controversialist Orestes Brownson was disoriented by its illusions. So Brownson's efforts to

explain (and defend) Catholicism—efforts that by 1870 had amounted to some twenty volumes of essays and fiction—were compared to Captain Perry's efforts to reach the North Pole by unwittingly hiking north on an iceberg moving south. Against the "current" of the age, Brownson was laboring vainly to "reach the north pole of a frozen and arctic religion."^[34]

If Orestes Brownson, ex-Transcendentalist and very much ex-Protestant, uncomfortably personalized the threat of Catholicism's attractions, New England observers often disguised their discomfort by incorporating the Roman church into the very drama of Protestant reform. Thus one essayist declared that "somewhere the antagonist should stand forth to give battle, and occupy the strength of heart, head, and arm of the youthful era of a better social organization; and the Catholic Church is that embodiment and that antagonist."^[35] Those who prided themselves on being above the bigotry of anti-Catholic nativists (who campaigned for punitive restrictions on Catholic immigration and voting rights) consigned Catholics instead to a parental role in the family romance of Protestant self-development. In this drama, popery played a ritual parental figure—a menacing but eventually impotent opponent, one whose defeat had already been decided and whose threat was finally an intriguing one.

By contrast, religious alarmists like Samuel F. B. Morse, painter, inventor of the telegraph, and anti-Catholic agitator, saw the Roman church actively contending against the nation's republican principles. Ironically, Morse's paranoid nationalism endowed the immigrant church with a genuine, if menacing, vitality. Shocked by public indifference to alleged papal conspiracies, Morse reminded his readers that the blood shed by Catholicism was "still wet upon the dungeon floors of Italy" while the "spirit of '76" lay sleeping.^[36] But for those relatively uninfected with nativist emotion, Catholicism was simply not strong enough to pose a serious threat. Its role in history was effectively finished. "In the providence of God it had a purpose to fulfill, and it has fulfilled it," declared one journal with quiet confidence.^[37] It was a sentiment echoed by many other genteel voices of the day as they took turns at politely interring Catholicism. Somewhat less graciously, the Reverend Nicholas Murray (a Catholic turned polemical Presbyterian minister) exulted that "popery" was "like unto a bladder once blown to its full extension, but now dry, beyond the power of holy oil or water to soften, and rent beyond the power of priests to patch up, and utterly incapable of a new inflation."^[38]