Nature redux

As I've mentioned here before, one of the standard weapons in the Protestant anti-Catholic arsenal was that Catholicism was "the religion of human nature."  But that didn't stop Catholics from making the same accusation against Protestants.  Here's Charles Constantine Pise in Father Rowland: A North American Tale:

"...The Protestant system, my dear miss, is very easy, and congenial to human nature.  The Protestant sins, and to get rid of sin, has merely to repent in his heart.  That is to say, he may sin on from day to day, month to month, year to year, and at the hour of death, by merely believing and hoping in the merits of Christ, he flatters himself that he will not only be freed from sin, but from all punishment due to sin, and instantly wing his flight into the realms of heaven."  [1]

Father Rowland is the first and most famous [2] of the responses to Grace Kennedy's Father Clement, and not surprisingly, it works by inverting the original's plot while borrowing its approach: Fr. Rowland supplies virtually all of his proofs for Catholic doctrine by prooftexts from the Bible.  As with other Catholic controversial novels, the bibliocentrism is deliberately polemical, since it answers the Protestant charge that Protestantism (unlike Catholicism) is "in" the Bible.  And, as per the usual, the novel's claims about Protestantism's social appeal and effects are identical, by and large, with Protestant claims about Catholicism's social appeal and effects--as we can see here.  (Instead of bigoted Catholics, we have bigoted Protestants; instead of dysfunctional Catholic families, we have dysfunctional Protestant families; etc.)  Because, like Father Clement, Father Rowland is more a compendium of Catholic beliefs than a novel--think Karl Keating, fictionalized--it also shares in its opponent's narrative flaws: devoutly Protestant characters immediately topple like ninepins whenever Fr. Rowland challenges their beliefs, even though most Episcopalians would have been startled by his version of sola scriptura and any Protestant would have immediately driven a truck (or, given the time period, a coach) through the argument from silence.  Needless to say, Father Clement has the same argumentative problems from the opposite side, as the Catholic characters fall apart the moment someone so much as breathes an argument in opposition to their doctrines...

[1] Charles Constantine Pise, Father Rowland: A North American Tale (1829; New York: Arno, 1978), 120.
[2] I haven't been able to find a full-text digitized copy of the novel anywhere--even though it's the first Catholic novel published in America, and therefore of some literary-historical importance aside from its connection with Father Clement.