Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture;

"If any one pleases to answer this, and set his name, I shall probably reply. But the productions of anonymous writers I do not promise to take any notice of.

"I am, sir, your humble servant,"JOHN WESLEY."City Road, January 12, 1780."

But, sir, you know as well as any living man that the history of the Church, from the days of the first Pope down to the iniquitous reign of Pius IX., sustains Mr. Wesley in his views on this subject, and justifies the steps taken by the American party. Notwithstanding the oft-repeated profession of Catholic liberality and Romish toleration, so triumphantly paraded by you, and other interested aspirants and unprincipled demagogues, the Catholic Church has invariably shown herself to be destitute of both, whenever she had the opportunity of using them. Sir, intolerance is an element of her faith, and persecution a specimen of her piety; and no man knows it better than you do. In taking upon herself the obligation of "true obedience to the Pope," the Catholic Church imposes upon herself a task that proves beyond all doubt she cannot, under any circumstances, remain faithful to that obligation, and yet maintain "allegiance" to such a government as ours!

Sir, I have no patience with a Protestant minister who stands forth as the apologist of Catholicism; nor have I any confidence in one who does it, provided he is a man of intelligence, as I admit you to be. The only excuse I can render for your strange and inconsistent conduct is, that you are in your dotage; that you are a violent old partisan; and that you are the tool of designing demagogues, infamous disunionists, and unmitigated repudiators. I shall not be at all surprised to hear that you have apostatized from the Methodist Church, and gone over to the Roman Catholics. I learn from the Little Rock Gazette, a Democratic paper, that but the other day, Gov. E. N. Carway, of Arkansas, a member of the Methodist Church, had actually apostatized from Methodism, and the Protestant faith, and united with the Roman Catholics. And what makes his defection from the faith of his fathers still more notorious, his organ is down upon the Protestant clergy in bitter and unrelenting denunciations! I believe that you are preparing to go over to the Roman Catholics; and to justify your change, when the time comes, you now assert, "in humiliation but in candor," you say, that the people "have ten thousand times more to fear from Methodists than from Catholics." If you believe this, you ought to leave the Methodist Church instantly, even without the formalities of a withdrawal or expulsion – even though you should be denied admittance into the Catholic Church! I deny that we have "ten thousand times more to fear" from the Devil than we have from the Catholics; and according to your argument, the Methodists are worse than the Devil! This, their most bitter revilers and enemies do not believe; and for obvious reasons. The Methodist Church has no St. Bartholomew's Day, with its rivers of blood staining her garments: she never indiscriminately slaughtered the Albigenses, or Waldenses, or Huguenots: she never established an infernal Inquisition: she never lit up the fires of Smithfield: never burned the Holy Bible, and prohibited, upon pain of eternal death, the printing and circulating of God's word; and last, but not least, she has not sought to keep the people in ignorance. Wherever Methodism has been planted, the people have become great and happy. If you please, wherever Protestantism has prevailed, the people have been prosperous and happy. But look to Old Spain, Italy, the German Confederacies, Sardinia, Naples, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Bavaria, Baden, South America, and Mexico, where Romanism is the established religion, and the places of her influence are a hissing and a by-word in the eyes of the civilized world! Protestantism has done more for the world in the last hundred years than the Roman Catholic Church has for the eighteen hundred years!

Sir, the Puritans, of New England; the Hollanders, of New York; the Quakers, Lutherans, and German Reformed, of Pennsylvania; the Baptists, of Rhode Island; the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, of Virginia; the Lutherans and followers of Wesley and Whitefield, of Georgia; the Huguenots and Episcopalians, of the Carolinas; and the Seceders in several of the States, who were the religious pioneers of these States, were all Protestants and Know Nothings; and if they were living, they would be ashamed of you and your teachings. They selected this wilderness country as their home, in order that they might enjoy those religious privileges from which they had been debarred in the old world, by the very Church and people you are seeking to vindicate.

But you will say, as you have done in substance, that this is no longer the characteristic of Romanism. Why is it not? Has she ever changed for the better? When did she renounce her doctrines and practices? Never! Rome is the same tyrannical system now, where she has the power, that she ever has been, and for ever must be. Wo to this land of ours, if ever Rome gets the ascendancy here! Her creed is the same here and now, in this respect, that it has everywhere been, and must always be. It is her boast that she is always right, and knows no change. She practices her unholy inquisitorial and Jesuitical doctrines in this country, as far as she can and dare act them out. Her whole system is adverse to our republican institutions and she hesitates not to declare it. She has publicly burned our Bible in different States in this Union, and recently, in New York and Pennsylvania. Archbishop Hughes, the Head of the Catholic Church in this country, has taken an oath, administered by the Pope of Rome, of which this is a part:

"Heretics, schismatics, and rebels to our said Lord (the Pope) or his aforesaid successors, I will, to my utmost power, persecute and wage war with."

The Church of Rome declares all who are not its members to be heretics. It is painful, in view of all these things, to see an old Protestant minister, whose head has been withered by the frosts of seventy winters, openly in the field advocating a Church whose Bishops, Priests, and members are "drunken with the blood of saints."

There is but one remaining feature of your singular address to Know Nothing Methodist Preachers to be replied to, and I am through. You assail the new party on the score of its secrecy, and of its concealment of its acts from the public. Had this objection come from any one but a Methodist Preacher, and a known advocate of Class-meetings being held with closed doors, I would now dispose of it without occupying as much space as I shall do in my concluding remarks!

Notwithstanding all the secrecy in the new Order of Know Nothings has been set aside by the act of the National Council which created it; and notwithstanding our members tell all about their Councils, where and when they meet, and our orators read out and publish to the world our obligations, rules, and principles, it is still objected that ours is a secret Order, liable to be used for bad purposes; that we travel about with dark lanterns; that our proceedings are not restrained by the wholesome check of public opinion!

Now, this, the great objection to our Order, comes from men who belong to Lodges of Free Masons and Odd Fellows, and who have taken all the binding oaths attached to the different degrees of these respective Orders! The same objection is urged against the American party, by men who belong to the Order of Sons of Temperance, who have deemed a rigid secret organization necessary to combat successfully a domestic evil! It is urged in bitterness against the Order, by demagogues and partisans, who have acted for years with the secret political conclaves of their respective parties, who have held their meetings with closed doors– kept their places of meeting a profound secret – and when they have adjourned, they have enjoined secrecy upon all present! Last, but not least, this secret feature is urged against the American organization by the vile apologists for the Catholic Church, and its corrupt Priesthood and membership, in this country. These demagogues know that the Roman Catholic Church is a secret society, directed by a talented, designing, and villainous HIERARCHY – absolutely controlled by an anti-Republican Priesthood, to a degree which has never been exercised by any political party in the known world! The Confessional is a secret tribunal, before which every member of that Church is required to make known, not only immoral actions, but every thought and purpose of the heart, and upon pain of incurring the anathema of the Church, which is equivalent to a sentence of eternal damnation! The corrupt order of Jesuits, the infamous society of San Fedesti, and the infinitely infernal society of Irish Ribbon Men – these are all oath-bound societies of the Catholic Church, connected directly with the horrid operations of the "Holy Inquisition."

Now, I put the question to any man of reason and common sense, if Roman Catholics and their patriotic Democratic admirers and advocates, in this country, are not the last men on earth who should object to the secret doings of the order of Know Nothings, even if their secrecy were kept up? Every Roman Catholic in the known world is under the absolute control of a secret society, by considerations not only of a temporal, but of an eternal weight!

But I am not done with these Democratic opposers of secrecy. The Convention which formed the Constitution of the United States, sat in the old State House in Philadelphia, with closed doors, from the 25th of May to the 17th of September, wanting only eight days of four months. That body of men had a Doorkeeper and Sergeant-at-arms, both under oath, to keep their doors barred, and all their proceedings a secret. So says Mr. Jefferson's biography! And such men as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Harrison, Hancock, Hopkins, and others, composed that body! During the war of the Revolution, General Washington, Generals Lee, Wayne, Marion, and others, organized a secret American Society, with its branches extending from North to South, having their passwords, signs, and grips, and writing to each other in figures, and "an unknown tongue," as the Know Nothings have been doing, and all, too, with a view to oppose Foreign intrigues and oppressions! It is as well known as any political truth, that General Washington, at the time of his death, was the President of the Cincinnati Society, a secret political society, in which, we see it stated on unquestionable authority, no man was eligible to membership unless he was a native American. The Columbian Order, known as the "Tammany Society," was a secret political society, and highly influential, and maintains its existence to this day, and without danger to the liberties of the country. Gen. Sam Houston publishes to the world that himself and Gen. Jackson were members of this Society. What say the anti-Americans to all these facts? Do they believe that Gen. Washington, or Jackson, would have united with any association or order not purely American? Would either have entered into any political league, when secrecy was enjoined, if he had not approved of the principle of secrecy in political associations? Never! From the characters of Washington and Jackson – the sacrifices they made for their country, united with their fervid patriotism, and their known preference for every thing American, I do not doubt for one moment, that if they were both now living, they would unite with the veritable Order of Know Nothings!

I believe the hand of God to be in this very movement, and as much in the secrecy of it, in the outset, as in any other feature. I regard the movement as one growing out of a great crisis in the affairs of our country, and a precursor of a sound, healthful, and vigorous nationality, and which will ultimately prevent the liberties of this country from being destroyed, by the machinations of such demagogues and factionists as now seek to excuse Romanism, and fellowship Foreign Pauperism. Secret societies are only dangerous to despots and tyrants, and history shows that these above all others have made war upon them. They have denounced and proscribed Masonry in every quarter of the globe, where they have had the power. The Pope, with the aid of his Cardinals, has crushed the ancient order of Free Masons in his dominions. There is not a Masonic Lodge in Italy. In our own country, not a single Catholic is to be found associated with the order of Free Masons; and why? Masonry is founded upon the Bible, and requires the reading of the Protestant Bible in all its Lodges, and this don't suit Romanism. We state these general and historical facts, without knowing any thing of our own knowledge of Masonry.

In the young and growing city of Knoxville, it is within our own knowledge, that many of the Irish Catholics attached themselves to the Order of the Sons of Temperance, with a view, as they said, of throwing around them the wholesome restraints of the Order. On the first visit of a priest to the city, commonly called "Father Brown," these Irish Catholics began to drop off one by one, until not one of them is now in the Order, and most of those who were, are daily seen drunk in our streets. Indeed, some of them in withdrawing had the candor to acknowledge that the priest required them to do so! And why? Because, in all the Divisions of the Sons of Temperance here, we have the Protestant Scriptures read, and have Protestant prayers offered up. This don't suit the Church of Rome!

I have the honor to be, very truly and frankly,W. G. Brownlow.

TO THE RIGHT REVEREND AARON V. BROWN, M. S

Sir: – I have received by mail a pamphlet copy of your "Letter to the Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers, Itinerant and Local, of the Methodist Episcopal Church South," covering twenty-eight octavo pages. I thank you for a copy of your Pastoral address; and I am happy to be able to infer from its teachings that you have made a profession of religion, before taking upon yourself "Holy Orders." I suppose the time of your conversion, you date back to the memorable period when you "saw sights" on Mount Pisgah, and had conferred on you the degree of Modern Seer, and entered upon the duties of "High Priest" of Democracy! As I am one of the parties addressed, and the customs of the Church and the country require a response to so grave a document, I have felt it incumbent upon me to perform the task. I may style this the Last epistle of Aaron, the Priest, and illustrious Chief of Foreign Catholic Sag Nicht Locofocoism!

My first impulses were, upon reading your address, to call for your credentials, and to examine into your authority for assuming to dictate to the entire Ministry of the Southern portion of the Methodist Church. You must either enter the Ecclesiastical ring under the imposition of the hands of Bishop Soule or Andy Johnson. If Bishop Soule ordained you for the Ministry, and set you apart as the Lieutenant-General of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the presumption is that he examined you on doctrinal points, and upon all questions affecting the government of the Church, as was his duty, and is our custom, and that he found you orthodox! It follows, as a matter of course, that you renounced your heresy you advocated in the Hartford Convention, held at Nashville, and that you obtained forgiveness for that and numerous other "sins of omission and commission" – aye, for the whole catalogue of your inward and outward iniquities, which so eminently disqualified you for the work of the Ministry! But if Andy Johnson ordained you for the work, of which there is no sort of doubt, the Church South, through me, protests against your authority, and utterly refuses to submit to your teachings. Our Church does not agree with Johnson on the "White Basis" issue, or the great question of slavery; and in proof of this, I cite to the fact of her separation from the North, in 1844, upon this very question. She has within her bounds of communion, rich men and poor, educated and uneducated, and is unwilling to unite with him in arraying the poor against the rich, or the unlearned against the learned. Nor does our Church believe that Jesus Christ was a Locofoco, as Johnson asserts in his Inaugural, and held that Christianity and Democracy, in converging lines, led to the foot of Jacob's Ladder, and thence to heaven, via Mount Pisgah, from whose lofty summit you first beheld the promised land!

It therefore follows, that, in presenting yourself as a spiritual leader in the Church, called to the work, as you have been, by Andy Johnson, your case is fully met by a quotation from Job:

"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them."

A second passage, from the Book of Jeremiah, meets your case, and leaves no doubt that the inspired Prophet had you in his eye:

"We have heard the pride of Moab, (he is exceedingly proud,) his loftiness, and his arrogance, and his pride, and his haughtiness of heart.

"I know his wrath, saith the Lord; but it shall not be so; his lies shall not so effect it."

To be candid with you, Gov. Brown, I regard your address, under all the circumstances, as a display of the most brazen-faced assurance and the most unmitigated impudence I ever met with in my life! I have known for years that you were capable of great presumption, but in this insolent and dictatorial address you surpass yourself– you positively out-Herod Herod! In the whole history of the country, and of parties, I venture the assertion, that a parallel piece of impudence, and downright bold-faced assurance, cannot be pointed to, as the act of any partisan. It is really past all belief, if I had not your production before me. But more of this hereafter.

Copies of your pamphlet were distributed through the aisles and seats of the Annual Conference room in Nashville, and have been sent all over the South, to members of other Conferences. Your proof-sheet was seen ten days before the meeting of the Middle Tennessee Conference, and your "work of faith and labor of love" was ready for distribution when the Conference first convened, but you held it back till the Conference was ready to adjourn, and to a period so late, that a reply, if one had been deemed necessary, could not be made. This was cowardly, and in keeping with your political tactics and code of morals. In saying that this was in keeping with your code of morals, I allude to the Woodberry affair.

I shall now take up your address, Governor, and wade through its twenty-eight pages of double-distilled Sag Nichtism, sublimated impudence, and concealed advocacy of Romanism, mixed up with contradictions, false assertions, and glaring absurdities, as it is, from beginning to end. In the opening paragraph, you predicate your right to instruct the "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers" of the entire Church, South, upon the real or assumed fact, that you are "The son of a now sainted father, who for forty years ministered at your altars, the co-laborer of that noble band of Christian ministers, who, under Asbury and Coke, founded your Church in America!"

Alas, that any "sainted Father" should be represented by so degenerate a son – an irreligious son – not a member of any Church – but having the hardihood, in the face of those who know the facts, to disguise himself in the priestly robes of a "sainted Father" – like an ass in a lion's skin, to bray out against better men than himself, or, like a wolf in sheep's clothing, to steal into the fold, where that Father was accustomed to minister in holy things, and with soft and honeyed words, and hypocritical teachings, and Satan-like misrepresentations, seek whom he may devour! You tell the "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers," that you really "approve" their "creed," and, what is still more soul-cheering, you have "witnessed their growth and progress for years, with the highest satisfaction." This is very condescending in the "son of a now sainted father!" It is quite flattering! But these "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers," would receive all this with a greater degree of allowance, if they did not believe that your generous patronage, so lavishly bestowed upon them and their "creed," was prompted by a principle of which selfishness is the soul! They believe, and so express themselves in conversation, that your forced smile of approbation, your reluctant eulogy, have both been wrung from you, because you are a sycophantic partisan suitor for patronage, in the way of votes for your party. These Clergymen whom you address, think it a great pity that the "son of a now sainted father" should exhibit so much "satisfaction" at witnessing their prosperity, in theory, and manifest not one particle in practice. They think that you would be in your proper place, to be found among the mourners, instead of the teachers in their Church; and that it is high time, considering your age in life, and the extent of your iniquities, that you should be found upon your knees, in an altar full of fresh straw, at an old-fashioned Camp-Meeting, asking the pious to pray for you, and God, for the sake of the forty years labors of "a now sainted father," to have mercy upon you, and save your sinful old soul from that death that never dies.

Why, Sir, the Devil himself would blush to perpetrate such an act of arrogance as you have done, in thus volunteering your advice to the "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers," of the Methodist Church. An old political party hack, who is not now, and never was, a member of any Church – an intriguing old sinner, who never even attends Church, and who, in this respect, shows that he neither fears God, respects the Christian Sabbath, nor "approves the creed" of any orthodox denomination, to be lecturing a numerous body of Clergymen, as to what they ought or ought not to do, it is the culmination of all that is called effrontery! The "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers" of the Methodist Church, wish the evidence of your conversion to God, before they consent to obey you, as "having the rule over them." Your approval of their "creed," and the "satisfaction" with which you have witnessed their progress, is not sufficient to satisfy their doubting minds, as long as you continue to ride into Nashville on Sabbath, and retail political slang at the Inn, or read Sag Nicht papers at the Union Office, to the neglect of the house of God, and the evil example set before young men, against the statute in such cases made and provided! We must, as Ministers, hear you relate your experience, in a regular class-meeting. Nay, more, knowing your raising, and your ability to "deceive, even the very elect," we must see you down upon your marrow-bones, surrounded by noisy and zealous officials, pounding you on the back, and exclaiming, as in the days of your "sainted father," Pray on, Aaron! We must hear you groan– we must see your sinful old bosom heave– we must witness the falling of big tears, as you publicly confess and manfully repent of your misdeeds – of the whole catalogue, of all the inward and outward iniquities of your past life – your sins of omission and commission, which God knows are more numerous than the hairs upon your old sinful head! I say we must see all this, and even more, before we can have faith in your teachings, as big as even a grain of mustard seed!

But you are the "son of a now sainted father" – you derive great "satisfaction" from the "growth and progress" of Methodism – you "approve" the Methodist "creed" – and hence, a glorious future awaits the Methodist Church: provided always, that her "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers" hearken to and obey your teachings, a thing they are very certain not to do, in the matter under consideration. It is a melancholy fact, that many of the sons of Methodist, and other Ministers, are very wicked and unpromising men; and it is equally true, and certainly notorious, that where they turn out to be sinners, they are sinners above all offenders, dwelling either at Jerusalem or elsewhere! I have no hesitancy in pronouncing you as hard a case, in a moral point of view, as ever came before the Church, and the only appropriate reply her ecclesiastical dignitaries can make to your address, is to appoint a day of fasting and prayer to God, for your conversion, to be observed throughout her borders. I now, as the appointed organ of the Church, set apart the first day of January, 1856, and I pray you, as one desiring the salvation of your soul, to be in the spirit and in a proper frame of mind on that day! Humble yourself before God – tell him that you were in error in stealing the livery of Heaven to serve the Devil in! Tell him that you are an old worn-out political hack – that you have grown gray in the service of sin – that during the whole of a somewhat eventful life, your labors have been in the dirtiest pools of party politics – that you have been insincere and unscrupulous in all your teachings and acts – that you stand before the people of Tennessee publicly branded by eight respectable and reliable citizens of Wilson county, as a falsifier in the Know Nothing controversy of the past summer – and that you are sorry for having come forth steeped to the nose and chin in political profligacy, to lecture grave Clergymen upon subjects you ought to set at their feet and learn lessons about! Tell your God, what he doubtless knows, that though the "son of a now sainted father," you are as full of devils as ever Mary Magdalene was – that like the "Imps of Sin," in Milton, these "yelp all around" you – that this is no reflection upon a "now sainted father," whose seeming neglect of your early training grew out of his continual absence from home, as is the case with most Methodist Preachers, – aye, tell your God, that once out of this scrape, you will never be caught in another of the kind! You say,