tunately for us they are neither recondite, nor require much development. The Papal writers avow—

I. That the Roman Catholic Church was founded by St. Peter.
II. That it is an infallible judge in matters of religion.

III. That it never changes, and never has erred.

IV. That this Church is the only true Church of Christ; and,
V. That it is destined to destroy and survive all others.

That such are the ecclesiastical axioms on which the Papacy invariably takes its stand, no one can doubt who is at all familiar with its books, its controversies, its priesthood, or its history. On these axioms Hildebrand took his stand, in the famous struggle with the civil power of the empire, and of the states of Italy; and on the same ground the Dominican fathers and the Jesuits have proceeded throughout their career; and on the ground of these axioms the Council of Trent was convened, and published its dogmas in their name. The Papacy is, therefore, pledged to make good these propositions, or to renounce them, or to hold them in defiance of their commonly believed disproof. If it can make them good, then all other churches must fall, and it will become the only form of Christianity on earth; if it cannot make them good, and either renounce or modify them, then it will confess itself to have erred, it can then no longer boast of its semper eadem, and it must abandon the claim to be regarded any longer as an infallible authority in religious matters; but if it cannot make good these propositions, and yet maintains their truth, the Papacy will put itself ostensibly in battle array with logic, and with the general convictions, and must therefore fall.

In prosecuting our inquiry into the prospects of the Papacy, it must not be forgotten that she has the most disreputable history to overcome that ever attached to any community nominally Christian. We are unwilling to believe all that many Protestant writers have recorded of the past condition of this form of Antichrist; and to refuse large allowances for the rude temper, and the ill-disciplined thought of some of the antecedent ages in which the Papacy figures with loathsome prominence; and we are also ready to concede that in the time of more flagrant persecution, no party either in the Church or the State seems to have thoroughly understood the laws of conscience, and the rights of opinion. We readily yield to the plea that large bodies are prone to take their numerical strength for a test of truth, as small ones are often querulous and hypercritical. But when all allowances are made, there are three facts which the whole history of the Papal sect demonstrates with too voluminous an evidence to leave room for doubt; viz., that the Papal Church has always been animated. with a spirit of merciless persecution of its antagonists; that it has taught a depreciated morality; and that it has disfigured the whole external life of Christianity with the most flagrant abuse of the artistic element.

We are now, for the first time, awakening to enlarged views of history; but the moral uses of history have long been known, and

there is a law in all minds that connects the history of a dogma with the proofs of its verity, and that induces all men to receive the history of a church as the only unbiassed witness of its true character. How, then, with the disgraceful history that is inseparable from the Papacy, that is every day becoming more lucid, and more confirmed, will the Romish Church reply to posterity, when it is reproached with its undoubted murders, its well-attested intrigues, its omniform ambition, the concupiscent lives of a vast portion of its popes and dignified clergy, the tricks of saint-worship, the inquisitorial habits of the confessional, the over-reachings of the death-bed, the gaols crowded with innocent offenders against the fictitious laws of the priesthood; the course of Jesuitism, the abominations of monastic life, the frivolous employments of the cloister, the bribery of statesmen, the cozenage of the populace by scenic performances as a substitution of worship, the mutilation of records, the suppression of free thought, and the tyranny that has ramified throughout the system, from the baptism of a child of parents one of whom only was Papal, to the election of a pope, or the convocation of a council? Will the Romish Church affirm that all these well-proven evils, and that upon the authority of its own historians, are false ? Or pleading to their partial truth, will it impute most of them to the imperfect virtue of prior ages, and the rest to the imperfection of men? If, then, the Papacy deny the truth of these allegations, it sets itself in antagonism to the general voice of history, and repudiates that law of testimony on which all faith must be based, and by which all facts must be tried. In that case, then, it will be the Papacy versus History. But if it plead in part to the truth of the foregoing historic accusations, then it follows that this infallible Church was never infallible; or, that if it were infallible in doctrine, it was at a time when it was monstrous in morals; and that this "only true apostolic Church of Christ" has a history more infamous than that of the Cæsars; and that the popes and the priesthood have disserved religion far more by their vices, than they have aided it by their words. At any rate, the Papacy cannot obliterate its history, and posterity, that will be more rigidly scrutinous, and more zealous for truth, than we are, cannot but know how often popes have absolved subjects from the allegiance they owed their rulers; and that one christened the statue of Theseus to St. George, and others, those of Jupiter and Apollo to Peter and Paul. From this dilemma, when men come to be more generally the lieges of Truth, the Papacy cannot escape, and its own history will be one of the most potent elements that will work its ruin.

There is one other feature in the history of the Papacy that must act destructively on it with posterity. It cannot be denied that from about A.D. 950 to A.D. 1400, the Papal Church was almost, if not entirely, the only form of Christianity that existed in Europe. Its sway was supreme, and all but undisputed. What, then, was the appearance of this Church during those four centuries and a half? All the histories composed of that age, and by contemporary writers, were

written by friends of the Papacy, and what do they say? Do they record any single period, even of seven or three years' duration, at that time, of undisputed Papal pre-eminence, in which pure and undefiled religion flourished in the Vatican? Is there any single nation over which the Papal power was fairly established, that did not suffer immensely for its connexion with the Pope? Is there a single instance of a people throughout the whole duration of this sect, that became eminently spiritual and happy in consequence of its subjugation to the Roman see? We affirm, on the contrary, that there is no nation, in which Popery has once been the predominant faith, that has not received such a check to its virtuous developments, as it was never able to recover. The celibate priesthood may now leer at these queries and suggestions, but posterity must be answered; and we repeat, that, as the Papacy cannot destroy its history, its history will destroy it. If we needed any illustration of the immense disadvantage of having to contend with a hostile history, we only require to consult a few instances, and we will choose one from the Papacy itself, the second from the Established Church of England, and the third from political history. Much is said of the probable reascendency of the power of the Jesuits; and it must be confessed that, if extensive learning, matchless discipline, and imperturbable courage, with minds of the first order, and plans of operation compared with which all other strategies appear blundering, could effect a restoration of the Jesuit sway, there would be reason to fear that event. What, then, forbids it? Merely the infamous history of the society, that once all but prostrated Europe, and, to a considerable extent, neutralized the further progress of the Protestant Reformation; and it is our persuasion that this hindrance of a section of Popery will be an impassable limit to the whole system. Or why is it that Protestantism limps so wretchedly in Ireland, but that allied, as it has been, with the persecuting and ignorant spirit of the political factions of the mother-government, it has become so obnoxious to the Irish nation, who cannot forget the State rectors and bishops drawing large revenues from parishes where they had no auditors, and carrying the tithe war with unmerciful rigour into the abodes of penury and widowhood; or that, however sound the arguments for the Protestant faith, the nation will not listen until the murders of Rathcormac and the proscriptions of Kerry are obliterated. Or why, when the French were mocked with so many caricatures of a republic, and so long oppressed and humiliated by the empire, did they not return cordially to a monarchy so frequently as they have had the opportunity? Simply because it was impossible to oblivionize the five hundred years of monarchic abomination, that, after carrying the French nation through every degree of spurious splendour, ended by converting its gentry into dependent harlequins, and its peasantry into beggars and serfs. And this, as we read the Sibylline verses of Gaul, appears to us to be one of the real secrets, that the French are too volatile and vain to stand by their republic till it attains its growth; they would rather be treated as the puppets and helots of an adventurer who leaves them the

shadow of independence, than put themselves under the wing of that monarchical government whose history reeks with blood, and alternates only from oppression, fraud, and debauchery, to a reign of cardinals, a bankrupt treasury, and proscribed freedom. The Frenchman is courteous enough to salute the manes of Charles the Debonaire, Louis the Saint, and Henry the Magnanimous, but he shudders at their sway, and prefers the frequent recurrence of revolution and the barricades to having any restoration of monarchy. A wider survey of human affairs would only bring us to the same conclusion, that an infamous history is one of the highest forms of retributive check with which the great God has limited the powers of wickedness.

There is another insuperable obstacle to the reascendency of the Romish Church to be found in the great increase of popular intelligence. It is the fashion for smart writers to affirm that such is the supple policy of this hierarchy, that it can as easily establish its supremacy among an intelligent as an ignorant people. We do not believe this, and simply because it is both irrational and impossible. The world was never as enlightened as it is now, and in this assertion we use the terms world' and enlightened' in their enlarged signification. We do not say that the literary men of some past select periods were inferior to the analogous classes at present, for that would be to contradict facts. But though we have a few illustrious artists, statesmen, and authors, who are attached to the Papacy, we have millions whose grandfathers could not read: we have millions of the second and third sections of society who are become extensive thinkers, who read Locke, De Morgan, M'Culloch, and Whewel, as well as the best histories and periodical literature. These classes, in former times, were the moorage-ground of the Papal power, and received the dictation of the priest as a higher authority than that of Newton or Bacon. But the homage to priestly opinion is passing away as one of the consequences of the growth of independent thinking. And we have not far to look for instances of the robust power, and the sturdy habit of this popular thought. The homage of individual opinion is fading throughout society. Men apply the Protestant dogma of the right of individual judgment to all kinds of questions, and in England alone every night the moon looks down on thousands of social gatherings, in which men meet to sharpen one another's wit, to attack mutual prejudices, to browbeat insolent power, to question the prescriptive rights of antiquity, and to push the powers of reason into every question that is of daily occurrence. Those who are thus keen in the arena, whether it be more or less formally educative, disperse only to carry to their homes and shops a keener introspection of the judgments and motions of their neighbours. Will it be pretended that Popery ever had such an element as this to deal with before? When and where we would know? for though it must be admitted, that the brilliant era of Fontenelle and Moliere, of Machiavel, and the great artists, did not appear to be hostile to the Papacy; it must be remembered that neither France, Germany, nor Italy, had, at those epochs, any thing like popular intelligence; and it

is well known to our readers, that the bulk of our countrymen could scarcely sign their names. When men cannot read, they cannot think correctly, for history forms a material element in all correct thinking, as almost every question is more or less historical. Wondrously changed, indeed, now, is the state of the people, any hundred of whom taken at random from the streets, and subjected to a close examination on any of the leading topics of history, politics, morality, or trade, would yield an amount of accurate knowledge which the nobles of France did not possess, when Cardinal Mazarin befooled the governments of Europe, or when our Walpole unblushingly served out his bribes to the Parliament, and poohed all considerations of morals or decency. Popery has never done battle with this popular intelligence, at present, nor will it be eager for the encounter, as it knows better than we do the state of its chances of ignominious defeat. Unhappily for the people themselves, their bias, at present, is not all towards religious subjects; but fond as they are of the artistic and the antique, Wiseman knows full well that he has far more reliance on the sentimental maiden and the ignorant housewife, the finical dowager and the effeminate men of rank-than on the strong-minded tradesmen, the keen mechanic, or the shrewd speculator.

Society is distinguished at present, and this is the natural result of its mental growth, by a marked aversion to arbitrary power. This, we conceive, will be one of the surest barriers against any permanent reencroachments of the Roman system, which, whether we regard it in its literary, its social, or its religious aspects, can only be considered as a well-concealed scheme for governing mankind by one inferior intellect, and a correspondently irresponsible one will. We plead to having a secret preference of the government by one, as it is simple, expeditious, and final. It saves the endless litigency of opinion, the war of words, the competition of wits, and the struggles of rival candidates; but the government of one will that we require is, that the judgment that rules that will should be really infallible, and that will itself be perfect in virtue. To both of these qualities Rome lays an impudent claim, which, however, every step of her history falsifies, and every wire with which she works her pedantic hierarchy makes ridiculous. How far the government of mankind, without its consent, is distasteful to the age, is proved by the fact, that even those absolute monarchies which have the oldest prescriptions, and are fortified by the greatest array of physical force, have found it necessary to ameliorate the condition of their subjects, even in advance of their petitions; or, in other words, to pack the saddle with wadding, lest the steed should become galled, and fling his rider. The same consciousness of what the spirit of the time demands is evident among ourselves, and hence we have, within the last twenty years, seen the exclusive spirit of aristocracy, uninvited, relax several parts of the political machinery to avert the possibility of a strain. The fact is, men will now only submit, in one form or other, to self-government; and any theory that opposes that, is sure, when the popular spirit has had time to comprehend its bearings, to be met by resistance. It follows, as a matter of course, if society will not