proper from their civil affairs. Wherever the spirit of freedom, even if ever so faintly, breathes, it resents and reacts against any intrusion of another people or Power into the circle of its interior concerns, as alike dangerous and disgraceful. As water finds its level, so, in a certain tolerable manner, the various social forces of a country, if left to themselves, settle down into equilibrium. In the normal posture of things, the State ought to control, and can control, its subjects sufficiently for civil order and peace; and the normal is also the ordinary case, in this respect, through the various countries of the civilised world! But the essential condition of this ability, on which all depends, is that the forces, which the State is to govern, shall De forces having their seat within its own territorial limits. The power of the State is essentially a local

power.

As

But the Triregno of the Pope, figured by the Tiara, touches heaven, earth, and Purgatory (Discorsi, 1. 133). We now deal only with the earthly province. against the local sway of the State, the power of the Pope is ubiquitous; and the whole of it can be applied at any point within the dominions of any State, although the far larger part of it does not arise within its borders, but constitutes, in the strictest sense, a foreign force. The very first condition of State-rule is thus vitally compromised.

The power, with which the State has thus to deal, is one dwelling beyond its limits, and set beyond the reach of its arm. All the subjects of the State are responsible to the State: they must obey, or they must take the consequences. But for the Pope there are no consequences: he is not responsible.

But it may be said, and it is true, that the State will not be much the better for the power it possesses of sending all its subjects to prison for disobedience. And here we come upon the next disagreeable distinction in the case of the Roman Church. She alone arrogates to herself the right to speak to the State, not as a subject but as a superior; not as pleading the right of a conscience staggered by the fear of sin, but as a vast Incorporation, setting up a rival law against the State in the State's own domain, and claiming for it, with a higher sanction, the title to similar coercive means of enforcement.

No doubt, mere submission to consequences is, for the State, an inadequate compensation for the mischief of disobedience. The State has duties which are essential to its existence, and which require active instruments. Passive resistance, widely enough extended, would become general anarchy. With the varying and uncombined influences of individual judgment and conscience, the State can safely take its chance. But here is a Power that claims authority to order the millions; and to rule the rulers of the millions, whenever, in its judgment, those rulers may do wrong.

and

The first distinction then is, that the Pope is himself foreign and not responsible to the law; the second, that the larger part of his power is derived from foreign sources; the third, that he claims to act, acts, not by individuals, but on masses; the fourth, that he claims to teach them, so often as he pleases, what to do at each point of their contact with the laws of their country.

Even all this might be borne, and might be com

paratively harmless but for that at which I have already glanced. He alone of all ecclesiastical powers presumes not only to limit the domain of the State, but to meet the State in its own domain. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland showed a resolution never exceeded, before the secession of 1843, in resisting the civil power; but it offered the resistance of submission. It spoke for the body, and its ministers in things concerning it: but did not presume to command the private conscience. Its modest language would be far from filling the os rotundum of a Roman Pontiff. Nay, the words of the Apostle do not suffice for him. St. Peter himself was not nearly so great as his Successor. He was content with the modest excuse of the individual: "We ought to obey God rather than man.' "'* Rome has improved upon St. Peter: 'Your laws and ordinances we proscribe and condemn, and declare them to be absolutely, both hereafter and from the first, null, void, and of no effect.' That is to say, the Pope takes into his own hand the power which he thinks the State to have misused. Not merely does he aid or direct the conscience of those who object, but he even overrules the conscience of those who approve. Above all, he pretends to annul the law itself.

Such is the fifth point of essential distinction between these monstrous claims, and the modest though in their proper place invincible exigencies of the private conscience. But one void still remains unfilled; one plea not yet unmasked. Shall it be said, this is all true, but it is all spiritual, and therefore

* Acts v. 29.

harmless? An idle answer at the best, for the origin of spiritual power is and ought to be a real one, and ought not therefore to be used against the civil order: but worse than idle, because totally untrue, inasmuch as we are now told in the plainest terms (negatively in the Syllabus, affirmatively in Schrader's approved conversion of it),* that the Church is invested with a temporal power direct and indirect, and has authority to employ external coercion.

Am I not right in saying, that after all this to teach the identity of the claims of Vaticanism with those of other forms of Christianity in the great and grave case of conscience against the civil power, is simply to manifest a too thinly veiled contempt for the understanding of the British community, for whose palate and digestion such diet has been offered?

The exact state of the case, as I believe, is this. The right to override all the States of the world and to cancel their acts, within limits assignable from time to time to, but not by those States, and the title to do battle with them, as soon as it may be practicable and expedient, with their own proper weapon and last sanction of exterior force, has been sedulously brought more and more into view of late years. The centre of the operation has lain in the Society of Jesuits; I am loath to call them by the sacred name, which ought never to be placed in the painful associations of controversy. In 1870, the fulness of time was come. The matter of the things to be believed and obeyed had been sufficiently developed. But inasmuch. as great masses of the Roman Catholic body before

* Schrader, as above, p. 64.

that time refused either to believe or to obey, in that year the bold stroke was struck, and it was decided to bring mischievous abstractions if possible into the order of still more mischievous realities. The infallible, that is virtually the Divine, title to command, and the absolute, that is the unconditional duty to obey, were promulgated to an astonished world.

3. Alleged non-interference of the Popes for Two

Hundred Years.

It has been alleged on this occasion by a British Peer, who I have no doubt has been cruelly misinformed, that the Popes have not invaded the province of the civil power during the last two hundred years.

I will not travel over so long a period, but am content even with the last twenty.

1. In his Allocution of the 22nd January, 1855, Pius IX. declared to be absolutely null and void all acts of the Government of Piedmont which he held to be in prejudice of the rights of Religion, the Church, and the Roman See, and particularly a law proposed for the suppression of the monastic orders as moral entities, that is to say as civil corporations.

2. On the 26th of July in the same year, Pius IX. sent forth another Allocution, in which he recited various acts of the Government of Spain, including the establishment of toleration for non-Roman worship, and the secularisation of ecclesiastical property; and, by his own apostolical authority, he declared all the