cordant Canons," which became thenceforth the foundation of the code of Rome, and which professes to give the sense of the Bible, the Councils and the Fathers, upon all matters ecclesiastical. To Gratien the Benedic. tine, therefore, Rome assures us, all must go, who would go to heaven. The Decretals of popes from 1150 to Gregory IX. in 1229, form a kind of second part of the Canon Law. In 1297, Boniface VIII. continued this collection of Decretals to his own times. John XXII. added to it, under the name Clementines, the constitutions of Clement V., his predecessor, in five books; and subsequently twenty constitutions of John himself under the name of Extravagants, and some other constitutions of his successors, were added. All these things, viz., the dicta of Councils, the guesses of fathers, the rescripts of popes, the sophisms of ecclesiastics, the vagaries of popish doctors, and the Roman conjectures of the sense of Scripture, unitedly form that mass of folly, cruelty, and chicanery which published in three folio volumes, goes under the title, "Corpus Juris Canonici;" which every papist swears he receives as a portion of his Christian faith, and by the light of which the Bible itself must be interpreted in order to be understood.

The simplicity and excellence of this infallible portion of the Roman rule of faith, must be so manifest from the mere statement of its contents and of the manner of their being brought together; that nothing more need be said in commendation of it, unless it should be to add, that it has been no unusual thing for Protestants to edify themselves by large collations of multitudes of its provisions, flatly contradicting not only the word of God, but each other. A most important privilege of infallibility; and one which the Jesuits, the best subjects of the pope, have so used in their instructions touching practical mo

* At the end of the Synopsis Papismi of Andrew Willet, is generally printed his Tetras ylon Papismi, in the iv. Pillar, and 4th part of which, he gives 100 contradictions of the Canons against themselves.

rality-as to prove, that as one may believe contradictory propositions and still be consistent with an infallible rule of faith, so may he also perform opposite moral acts, and be still under the guidance of an infallible religious authority. So that the practical as well as the rational end of the matter is, that to him who is infallible all faith and all practice is the same; for being a guide unto himself, the truth of principles and the morality of acts alter as he himself changes. Which, in the logic of Protestants would be equivalent to this, that as we are all sinful and blinded creatures, and therefore certain to go astray when left to ourselves; any pretence of infallibility which renders all admission and correction of error impossible, forces us when once we get wrong to be wrong for ever; and obliges us, every time our belief or conduct is inconsistent, to defend opposite things as equally true, and so to destroy all true faith and all sound morality; the result of our infallibility being that we must infallibly and incurably err. And so thoroughly does the fact agree with the reason of the case, that we may easily find in the infallible Canon Law, a positive provision or an implied rule, directly at variance with every leading duty and every practical truth of the Christian religion.

The existence and uses of this Canon Law, suggest one of the most palpable arguments against what is by sufferance called the church of Rome, but what is in reality far more a state than a religion. The Pope of Rome calling himself a vice-God, and his see the imperial, the sacred, and the eternal city-claims a dominion and authority extensive as the family of man. He parcels out the kingdoms and commonwealths of the earth amongst his lieutenants whom he calls patriarchs, primates, and bishops; and gives to them larger or smaller territories and powers as his own supreme will dictates. In these he establishes tribunals, erects prisons, collects taxes, distributes honours, inflicts punishments, administers justice;

* See Pascal's Provincial Letters; and De Pradt's Jesuitisme Ancien et Modern.

in short reigns. This Canon Law is his code of judicature, which supersedes alike the codes of God and of the nations and reveals its authors and prime administrators, as at once audacious usurpers of the prerogatives of heaven and systematic oppressors of the human race.* Thanks be to God, who has allowed the interests and hopes of man, even in this world, to be so indissolubly connected with the glory and permanence of his own authority, that this accursed Antichrist cannot destroy us without dishonouring him; and that the same acts which vindicated his own eternal majesty, released a world sighing for deliverance.

6. The impiety of Rome, forms a regular climax. To the Church, the Pope, the Councils and the Canons, she adds, as infallible expositors of the mind of the Spirit, and so infallible guides in matters of faith, those she calls "the fathers," of whom she teaches her children to say, that while they "admit the sacred Scriptures," they will never "take or interpret them otherwise, than according to the unanimous consent of the fathers."+

Who "the fathers" are, in the sense of the Roman standards, is a question never yet settled. And it is probable no binding decision will ever be made on the subject; since the object of all these impious decrees is not to settle the substance of faith, but to establish the supremacy of Rome; and the more uncertain it is what men ought to believe, the more complete is the authority of that See, subjection to which is indispensable to salvation. What "the fathers" really wrote, how much of that which has come down to us under their names was real

* The reader will find the argument glanced at in this paragraph developed with great eloquence and force by M. Jurieu, in the Prejuges Legitimes Contre Le Papisme, Premiere Partie, chap. xii. and xiii.

† Creed of Pius IV., second additional article. Council of Trent, fourth session, Decree on the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books; there were present at this session only fiftyeight persons, who, in the name of the universal church, perpetrated this horrible impiety.

ly theirs, and how far it is possible for us to understand their mind truly, from those mutilated fragments which constitute all that is left of many of the most respectable of them; are questions of literary history and criticism, about which learned men are entirely divided, in regard to which the mass of mankind never can arrive at a solid conclusion, and which being supremely indifferent to the peace and welfare of our souls, cannot, without the grossest folly, be alleged to have any connexion with the true meaning or perfect obligation of God's holy word. The more ancient the fathers are, the fewer of them have escaped the wreck of time and chance, and the less do we know about their real sentiments; insomuch, that we have not the undoubted writings of more than seven or eight of those of the first three centuries, and even of some of these but fragments; and nothing at all, certainly known to be much, if any, earlier than the middle of the second century. It is to be considered also that the Christian writers of those early ages, were engaged on topics so entirely different from those which now occupy our thoughts, that their labours, even where they have been preserved, are of very little use in settling any dispute between us and Rome. For example, those of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and some others, against the religion and the gods of heathenism; those of Irenæus and of the same Tertullian against the Gnostics; and those of Cyprian, who discourses almost wholly upon the virtues of the church and its discipline. But as to transubstantiation and the adoration of the host, the supremacy of the pope, the worshipping of images, and the like; perhaps not a man in the whole church of Christ, for the first three centuries, ever spoke or wrote upon one of them. Morover, let us never forget, that if we had full and unquestionable proof that many persons, from the earliest times, held to every dogma of Rome, it would be no better presumption in favour of the truth of those errors, than now exists in favour of those which, as we know from the

New Testament Scriptures, prevailed not only under the Jewish dispensation, but were, from the very beginning insinuated into the churches of the new; so that if Rome could prove by the fathers, which indeed she cannot, the antiquity of all her heresies-it would be perfectly easy to prove, and that by more unquestionable witnesses, that those of the Pharisees and Sadducees, of the Nicolaitans and many others, were more ancientand therefore, by her own argument, more respectable.

The truth however, is, that no age of the Church can be selected in which her doctors and pastors have taken and interpreted the Scriptures, with any thing approaching to a unanimous consent; and that if instead of confining our inquiries to the earliest ages, we are obliged to come down so low as to the twelfth century in order to embrace St. Bernard, whom the papists class with the most renowned names of the preceding centuries; we shall find a heterogeneous mass of folly, propagated by learned teachers and high ecclesiastics, as incapable of being reduced to a general consent, or even to sense itself, as the tongues of Babel. And even the earliest and most respectable of the fathers' have erred, not only singly but in companies, and have strenuously contradicted each other upon points of the gravest importance; and what is more perfectly ad rem in our present discussion, they have been often and utterly disallowed by Rome herself, in points precisely held by the most and the ablest of them, and in some of which they were beyond all controversy right, and Rome wrong. Thus, it is evident that the ancient fathers, with Augustine, Chrysostom, and Ambrose at their head, believed that the virgin Mary was conceived in original sin; which the Council of Trent denies. Again, Melito of Sardis, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen, St. Hilary, Epiphanius, Athanasius, Ruffinus, and St. Jerome, are not only wholly at variance, with the same Council of Trent as to the Cannon of Scripture, but with