We will not indulge in any premature gratulations over victories we may hope to gain for the Catholic cause in controversy with the Congregationalists, or conversions which may be looked for from among their ranks. We shall on both sides agree that the truth is likely to prevail in the end, and that whatever conquests truth may make redound more to the honor and advantage of the vanquished than of the victors. In expressing our satisfaction that this controversy is inevitable, we do not intend to indicate a desire for a _polemical_ controversy in the rigorous sense of the word. We do not wish to see the Catholic and Protestant pulpits waging a theological artillery duel against each other; or a violent strife for mastery, with all the bitter, hostile feelings which it engenders, inaugurated between the Catholic and Protestant portions of the population. On the contrary, we have particularly in view in what we are writing at present, to bring forward certain considerations tending in an entirely opposite direction. We desire, so far as our humble influence extends, to forestall controversy of the sort alluded to, and to point out what we conceive to be the true spirit and manner in which both sides should approach the subject of the differences which unhappily divide us.
There are two ways in which we may carry on controversy. One way is, for each side to place its own exclusive truth and right in the strongest light, to affirm its doctrines in its own peculiar phraseology in the most positive and dogmatic manner, and to take a position as far remote from that of the other side, and as unintelligible to its opponents as possible; moreover, to take the worst and most unfavorable view possible of the doctrines and positions of the other side, and to impute to them all the most extreme consequences of their principles which seem to ourselves to follow logically from them.
Another way, is to conduct controversy, not from the two opposite extremes of doctrine where the differences is widest and most palpable, but from those middle terms in which both parties agree, and in relation to which they are intelligible to each other. From these middle terms we may proceed to the extremes, and thus endeavor to settle the points in which we differ, by the aid of those in which we agree. The points of difference also, may be perhaps reduced by mutual explanations, and a substantial agreement be proved to exist in some doctrines where there is an apparent contradiction in the terms used to express them.