It has been said:  “Mundus vult decipi”; the world wishes to be deceived; certainly the Anglican world does.  But no one else is taken in.  The Dissenter, the Nonconformist, and others who have no axe to grind, know well that “fine words butter no parsnips,” and are far too shrewd to be deluded.  Why, even the old Catholic cathedrals with their holy-water stoups, their occasional altars of stone, still remaining, their Lady chapels, and their niches for the images of the saints, as ill befit the present occupiers, and their modern English services, as a Court dress befits a clown.

That the sublime grotesqueness of the whole contention is clearly visible to other besides Catholic eyes is clearly proved by the occasional observations of the non-Catholic Press.  Here, again, we will offer the gentle reader a specimen.  The Daily News is one of London’s big dailies.  It has a wide circulation.  It is representative of a large section of the English people.  Let us select a passage from one of its leaders.  Speaking of the arrogance of the Anglican Church, which, as compared to the Catholic Church, is but a baby, still in long clothes, it gives expression to its views in the following caustic lines.  One might almost imagine it were the Tablet or Catholic Times that we are about to quote from, but, nothing of the kind, it is the Nonconformist organ, the Daily News.  It writes:  “The Anglicans may still persist in patronising the Roman Catholics as a new set of modern dissidents under the old name.  It is the sort of vengeance which, under favourable circumstances, the mouse may enjoy at the expense of the elephant.  If he can mount high enough by artificial means, the smallest of created things may contrive to look down on the greatest, and to affect to compassionate his want of range.  For purposes of controversy, the Anglican could talk of himself as a terrestrial ancient-of-days, and regret the rage for innovation, which led, not, of course, to his separation from Rome, but to Rome’s separation from him!  So the pebble, if determined to put a good face on it, might wonder what had become of the rock, and recite the parable of the return of the prodigal to the Atlas Range”; and so forth.  The fact is that every unprejudiced man, who has so much as a mere bowing acquaintance with the facts of history, knows perfectly well that before the sixteenth century the Church in England was united to the Holy See, and rested where Christ Himself had built it, viz., on Peter, the rock.  Whereas, after the sixteenth century, it became a State Church, dependent, not on Peter, but upon Parliament, and as purely local, national, and English as the British Army or the British Navy.  Bramhall tells us that, “whatsoever power our laws did divest the Pope of, they invested the King with” (Schism Guarded, p. 340).