succeed in his efforts to protect his own person, for he was made a prisoner of war, and was retained in captivity till a costly ransom was paid for his liberation. Bonaparte carried Pius VII. to Fontainebleau, where a Concordat was arranged between them on the understanding that the Pope should not again return to Rome; he was however restored to the Vatican mainly throughthe instrumentality of the non-Roman States, Germany, Russia, and England. The reigning Pope, Pius IX., was a prisoner for some time in the Quirinal, whence he fled in the garb of a menial and found refuge in Gaeta. He was brought from thence, and placed in his see and in his chair, not by the prestige of his name, nor by the power of his arm, NOR BY THE INTERPOSITION OF HEAVEN, but by the bayonets of France.

When we consider the contrast between the characters and claims of many of the Roman Pontiffs, who, to the most ungodly, profligate, and ferocious dispositions have united the assumption of universal supremacy, temporal and spiritual, there is not presented to the mind a more repulsive and revolting picture of the wildest excesses and atrocities of infidelity, or the most abject prostration and gross debaucheries of heathenism.

But of all kinds of facts those connected with the Schisms of the Papacy are most conclusive in demonstrating the fallacy of the Papal pretensions. In the latter half of the fourteenth century, Urban VI., whose seat was at Rome, issued a bull of deposition against Clement VII., and all his adherents. The tenor of such an instrument is known to the readers of Papal history. On the other hand, Clement, whose seat was at Avignon, was not slow in hurling defiance and damnation against Urban and his party. It is obvious to all, that in this Pontifical strife the mantle of clerical infallibility was rent and the sceptre of Papal supremacy broken.

But one or two pregnant facts are yet to be told. The Church of Rome has not failed to own and canonize as saints individuals who lived in the services and died in the quarrels of these two anti-Popes; for she has canonized Catherine of Sienna, who espoused the side of Urban, and treated his opponent at Avignon as Antichrist and a member of the devil, and his cardinals as

*See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xlix.

devils incarnate; while she has canonized Peter of Luxembourg, who, at the time of his death, was Cardinal of Clement, and had received that dignity from his master's hands against the express prohibition of Urban, under pain of excommunication. Infidelity sneers at the ecclesiastical contest; Christianity weeps at the prostitution of her name in such a conflict; Reason insists that if the Church considers the one to be a saint, she ought to regard the other as a heretic; and Infatuation says to implicit Faith, "Both of them are saints."

It now remains to enquire what is the present aspect of Papal supremacy? Are the pretensions of the Pope now different from what they have been in the times that are past? Whoever affirms that a change has taken place, neither Pope nor cardinal, bishop nor priest, has directly made or formally assented to the affirmation.

The power of the Bishops of Rome has waxed and waned in the political firmament, and their policy has been as diversified as the shifting scenes in the drama of European history; but their purposes and principles are all stereotyped in the ambition of the human heart and in the very constitution of the Roman hierarchy. Till the present Pope shall rescind the canon law it is impossible not to believe that his pretensions are as high as mortal pride can rise, although they are often only as prominent as prudence will permit. And they are prominent enough to awaken all our watchfulness, and stimulate all the prayerfulness of the friends of liberty and the servants of God.

The recent appointment of a Cardinal to reside in England, and other proceedings connected therewith, have been avowedly justified on the plea that they are necessary to the introduction of the canon law into this country.

We insert from the pen of a learned writer, a summary of the contents of this universal code of the Popedom, so far as they relate to the matter in hand: “The canon law decrees and enjoins that all heretics (and every person knows that Protestants are deemed to be eminently such) are to be punished, where it can be done, by every kind of suffering that the art of man can devise: non-intercourse in trade, or in any way; disinheriting, expatriation, loss of property, imprisonment tortures, death in

any form but chiefly by being burned alive, and barbarous indignities to the dead corpse; even parents, brothers, and children are held guilty, and liable ultimately to the same punishment, if they do not their utmost for the execution of those penalties, or if they screen or support in any way the denounced heretics; that upon the excommunication or other sentence of the ecclesiastical authority being declared, the offenders are to be delivered over to the secular judge; that if the temporal authority refuse or neglect to inflict his part of the punishment, he shall himself be excommunicated, with the terrible consequences; and that informers, though accomplices, or convicted of perjury, shall be held valid witnesses. See, then, my countrymen, the benedictions provided for you by the Pope and his Cardinals." *

It has been shown by Lessius, a Romanist, author of some celebrity, that the power of deposing kings was claimed by Gregory VII., Urban II., aud Gregory IX., and by the following General Councils: Those of Letran, under Alexander III.; the Councils of Lyons, of Vienna, of Constance, of Lateran under George X., and of Trent. We have also recent examples of the same kind; the Pope in 1801 absolved the Freuch people from their oath of allegiance to Louis their King, and gave them authority to swear fidelity to Napoleon as First Consul; and again in 1809 he proceeded to excommunicate and anathematize Bonaparte.

The facts now mentioned are in perfect harmony with the more personal pretensions of the present Bishop of Rome. It is mentioned by Dr. Townsend, in the journal which he has published of his tour in Italy, in 1850, that as he was leaving the presence of the Pope, with whom he had succeeded in obtaining an interview, a lady and gentleman from Cuba entered, and both knelt down as to God at the folding-doors of the audience chamber, and repeated the same homage in the middle of the room. The reigning Pontiff succeeded Gregory XVI., in June, 1846, and, of

*Reasons of Protestantism. pp. 44, 45, by Rev. J. P. Smith, D D.; London, 1851. "These particulars," says Dr. Smith, "I select out of many in the Canon Law (Corpus Juris Canonici Gregorii XIII., P.M. Jussu editum), 2 vols., folio, Frankfort, 1748, particularly in vol. 2, the decretals of Gregory IX,, Book 5, and those which form the 6th Book, published in 1698.”

course, inaugurated by the same formalities as his predecessors. Among other formalities he was elevated and placed upon the high altar of St. Peter's, where the bread and wine, as Romanists believe, are substantiated into the person of Christ, that the Lord Jesus may be offered in sacrifice for sin. The words of coronation are so plain that the dullest understanding cannot miss their meaning," Receive the tiara adorned with the triple crown, and know that thou art the Father of Princes and of Kings, the Ruler of the World upon Earth, and the Vicar of our Saviour Jesus Christ, to whom be everlasting honour and glory. Amen." To shew the interpretation put upon such acts and words, it may be mentioned that one of the leading Popish journals of the day, in reporting the proceedings, stated that the people hailed the newly consecrated Pope with the first, the second, and third adoration.

Some orators of the present day indulge in slighting or contemptuous expressions, as if the recent excitement regarding Popery were unreasonable, like

"Ocean into tempest tossed

To waft a feather or to drown a fly."

They speak of "the vain assumption of foreign imbecility, the tinsel dignity of bishops, the scarlet vanity' of cardinals, the fulminated folly of the Vatican." We have no fears whatever for the Church of Christ, and but few for the privileges of our own beloved land; but there are many reasons to be alarmed for the salvation of individual souls, and for the civil liberties of weak and infant States.

If the Popedom be correctly described as "foreign imbecility," how can the fact be explained, that its cruel behests against an independent queen and an innocent woman, whose island. kingdom was one of the first and fairest fruits of Protestant missions, were obeyed by the gallant admirals of chivalrous France? How can it be explained that the heavy bills* of "foreign imbecility" are duly honoured by the Chancellor of the British Exchequer ?

If there should be nothing more in Roman episcopal rank and power than "tinsel dignity," how should it be taking precedence

* We refer, of course, to the sums granted to the Church of Rome, especially in Ireland and the Colonies,

in Ireland and the Colonies, if not yet elsewhere, of some of the best blood of Britain's nobility, of some of her hereditary or hard-won titles of patriotism?

If there be nothing in a Cardinal's insignia but "scarlet vanity," how marvellous that it should have raised in the greatest, the richest, and the freest nation of the world such an unusual excitement.

If a Papal excommunication be only a harmless and ludricous ebullition of passion, it is a no less perplexing than painful fact, that so many millions of living men should be in greater practical and habitual terror of the Vatican's "fulminated folly," than of the thunders of the Divine law and the dread solemnities of the "eternal judgment."

Nothing is more common at present than to hear Romanists insisting upon the distinction between temporal and spiritual power, and protesting that the Pope's authority is entirely and exclusively religious and ecclesiastical, and that unqualified submission to Papal supremacy is compatible with obedience and loyalty to a Protestant monarch. Volumes might be written with extracts showing the frequency with which this sort of argument and defence is used. It is indeed the sheet-anchor of the cause. If such representations are to be credited, enough has been already said to prove that the Papacy of the nineteenth century has a widely different complexion and character from the Popery of the ten centuries preceding.

Let Pope, Cardinal, or Bishop openly avow that such a fundamental alteration in their religious system has been introduced and allowed; let them anathematize their predecessors as they yet anathematize Protestants; or, better far, let every past anathema be repented of, and every present anathema revoked, and then they will be entitled to credit when they affirm, that in their system spiritual power does not involve and carry with it temporal power. Every kind of language that speaks of the Pope's pretensions as not including universal temporal dominion, or that represents allegiance to Rome as consistent with fidelity to a Protestant throne, must be ever regarded and treated, if there be aught sacred in religion or precious in liberty, as the fatuity of profound ignorance or the finesse of deep diplomacy.