confirmed by oath, privileges, indulgences, letters apostolical, or any thing else to the contrary."

It is unnecessary to go further. The council had cautiously introduced saving clauses to preserve the power of the Pontificate entire, without defining what that power was. It being therefore left unlimited, and asserted immediately to the extent marked by the Bulls just quoted; what is there to which it may not be conceived to reach and apply, wherever it is acknowledged, and whenever occasion may give it scope for action? It may not act, it may be repressed; but it neither is, nor can be, insensible of its pretensions, or inattentive to the scope for action. Nor is it inexpert to seize advantage, or inert in the use of it. Whether then the Pope be deemed infallible, or not, the authority of the See of Rome has been, and may be, held to be unlimited by its adherents; because that (which is the same thing in effect) it is left undefined; and that the sanction of its anathemas is believed to be so perfect, as to exclude from salvation by a judicial exertion of that authority. What other power then, with which it can possibly interfere, can safely regard it without jealousy, or cherish it without danger? Nor does the evil rest here. A delegation of the same power subsists virtually in every priest, by the power of refusing absolution, or granting it, except in reserved cases, according to his own discretion; by which means the ignorant may be compelled, or encouraged, to disloyal acts, by any who are disaffected of the clergy, and it pass as the indiscretion of the priest only. The effects hereof may be seen even

where disloyalty was not concerned, in the result of a late trial in Ireland, where the victim of such a discretionary use of the priest's power had happily the means, and the good sense, to apply to the laws of his country for redress. In the church of England, if a clergyman refuse to administer the sacrament, he is obliged to notify the cause to his ordinary within fourteen days; and therefore the ordinary, if he ratify it, becomes responsible to the state; and, if the cause be not clearly proved to be sufficient, an action will lie for the injury. In the church of Rome the necessity for a similar regulation is tenfold, and it has therefore fortified itself against it, with the whole force of its spiritual artillery.

It may be worth while to observe the mode in which this spiritual artillery was used by Pius the Fourth himself. "Let him, whoever he be, that shall presume to infringe upon this* Bull, know," (such are his words) "that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God, and of the blessed Peter and Paul, his apostles." I am well aware that the decrees of the council of Trent, and the Bull of the Pope, where they interfered in several points as to civil rights, and the authority of Princes, were resisted openly by the government of France, and secretly by Spain; but, if the See of Rome could not enforce them there,

* Nulli ergo omnino hominum liceat hanc paginam nostri declarationis, statuti, ordinationis, et decreti infringere, vel ei auso temerario contraire. Si quis autem hoc attentare præsumpserit indignationem omnipotentis Dei, ac beatorum Petri et Pauli apostolorum ejus, se noverit incursurum.-Bull for the Revoking of Privileges.

C

it did so wherever it could.

And what less than in

fallibility does the Pope, by this very denunciation, arrogate to himself? Whatever may have been resisted in temporals, the power that denominates itself Apostolic, and presumes that the wrath of Heaven fulminates wherever he points out the object, claims a prerogative, which those who admit may well consider as that of infallibility; and however this claim may have been resisted in temporals, in spirituals little, very little, if any thing, short of its full force seems to be admitted by every one of the Romish communion *. In this respect, also, the Romish church is more dangerous to a state than others, that its assumed spiritual power, emanating from the Pope, works through the general body to its remotest extremities, decisively and uniformly, whithersoever it be directed; and it is the result of the experience of every state, in which it has been permitted to take its course, that its object has been so much more of a temporal, than a spiritual nature; that it has endeavoured constantly to obtain the whole direction of both, and too often fatally succeeded. But the Hon. Author of The Conside

*The doctrine of infallibility does indeed take various shapes, and adapts its form to the occasion, and the person to whom the doctrine represented. To the ignorant it is involved in obscurity, and appears indefinite in its extent to any degree, to which the gloomy medium of superstition can magnify the imaginary representation. To the casuist it is presented in the more circum→ scribed dimensions of an assurance, that the church of Rome cannot so far fall away from Christianity, as to teach or adopt any fundamental error. The difference is, however, more in the words, than the reality.

rations, in answer to the objection, that the constitution in church and state might be exposed to some hazard, by the admission of the Roman Catholics to power, replies, "If I am not a knave, this reasoning, if just, proves me, at least, to be a fool, since it supposes me weak enough to admit, as essential points of belief, any tenets whereby the constitution of the country could be endangered."-P. 43.

Whatever it may prove, it is an incontrovertible fact, that the belief of the Papal power's being of divine authority, in its enormous assumed extent, has intruded on the constitution of every government wherein it has had power. The approbation or disapprobation of the church determined, in a great measure, the loyalty or disloyalty of the people; whilst, by means of the monastic orders, its influence reached to every individual speedily and surely. The church of Rome had an interest ever distinct from, and often opposed to, that of the states with which it had to do; and particularly in drawing money, and in promoting its favourites. To serve this interest, the monastic institutions were the most powerful engines a deep and vigilant policy could have invented. They afforded numbers, who had leisure sufficient to pervade all stations, even the recesses of obscure life, to impress individually, and

continually, upon their adherents, the purports of

their mission; who could, whenever the ambition of a Pope demanded it, instantaneously raise the standard of rebellion from one end of a kingdom' to the other. How far it was folly in those who, taught to believe that their eternal welfare depended upon

their obedience to the See of Rome, were ready to give up every temporal advantage that stood opposed to it, is not the question. The fact is, they were ready to act upon the principle; and if the principle had been well founded, though perhaps not according to the wisdom of the world, it would have been acting gloriously. The ignorant, that is, the great majority of mankind, can act, in public affairs, only from instruction; and if the instructors be a politically close connected body, with an interest distinct from that of the state, then, at what time soever the two interests shall clash, that of the state cannot but be infallibly injured. That this has been the case in Ireland, has been the too-fatal experience for many years. The clergy of the Romish church, in that kingdom, have a double interest distinct from that of the state the interest of spiritual promotion by the authority of the church of Rome, and the interest of temporal emolument, partly dependent, upon the number and zeal of followers, and partly expectant of such a change of the political system, as might give them temporal possessions of a less uncertain tenure and value. These interests, natural in themselves to man, and, whilst the moral principle of the individual, and the safety of the state are not endangered by them,. not only allowable, but sometimes laudable, are unfortunately, by the policy of the See of Rome, so bound to its will, so determined by its decisions, and #o powerful in the energy and extent of their agency, that hitherto, at least, they could not be safely encouraged by a Protestant state.

It is true these interests ought not to be considered