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ing, that consistently with the premises laid down by the querist, I should be inclined to draw the following conclusion. If his religious opinions may be collected from his language, any unprejudiced person will pronounce him to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I cannot conceive his object for thus laying before the public his sentiments upon the work of Mr. Dallas

and confided in by too many of his readers, as Voltaire, cannot but be useful; and as this has been a subject of much contention and invective by all of the numberless modern sectaries, perhaps an account of the origin of the papał power may not be found uninteresting. I remain, sir, your most obedient servant,

Norwich, 1816.

F. J. LAMBERT.

THE ORIGIN OF THE TEMPORAL
POWER OF THE POPES.

If he be a true catholic, he will rejoice at the success of Mr. Dallas's endeavours in the vindication of a most respectable and persecuted body of men. Although he do not choose It is towards the age of Charlemagne to risk his name, still I hope that a that the temporal power of the popes lawyer's sneer will never prove detri- began; we shall now, therefore, | mental either to the jesuits, or any treat of this point of ecclesiastical other body of religious men. He is history. Voltaire, in the sixteenth at fall liberty to call me a jesult: and twentieth chapters of his Hisbut since he was not convinced by toire Générale, speaks very much at the asseveration of Mr. Dallas, he length of the origin of this power; will not perhaps believe me when I and all that we learn from him is, sincerely inform him, that I am no- that this power had no other origin thing but than the artful policy of the roman pontiffs, and an usurpation which is palliated by no title.

A CATHOLIC LAYMAN.

To the Editor of the Orthodox
Journal.

SIR,-Having lately perused with great pleasure an excellent work, written by the learned Abbé Nonnotte, refuting the vile calumnies and unfounded assertions of Voltaire, the hater and enemy of all christian religions, but especially the catholic religion, I have been induced to undertake a translation of some parts of this work, which I thought might afford amusement to some of your numerous readers, never having seen a refutation of any of his writings in our language. The following account, whilst it points out the errors of Voltaire as an historian, shews by what means the popes have acquired their temporal power. To expose the historical errors of an author so much read, and, unfortunately, so much admired

Voltaire, in treating the donation of Constantine as an imaginary donation, only follows the steps of all modern critics; but in making no more account of that which Pepin and Charlemagne made to the roman church, is another thing: he will permit us to be of a different opinion, and demonstrate the falsity of his notion.

"Is it probable," says Voltaire, "that Pepin should have twice passed the Alps with no other intention than to give cities to the pope ? The librarian Anastasius, who lived a hundred and forty years after the expedition of Pepin, is the first who speaks of this donation, and the best civilians of Germany refute it now a days. They tell us that the Lombard Astolphus, intimidated merely by the presence of the Frank, imme diately ceded to the pope all the exarchate of Ravenna; but if the popes

had had the exarchate, they would regard it as an usurpation, or we have been sovereigns of Ravenna and must be very unfaithful to conceal of Rome. Nevertheless, in the will the proofs which we have of the doof Charlemagne, which Eginhard has nations made to the roman church preserved to us, this monarch names by the French conquerors, and the at the head of the cities which be- high degree of authority, power, and longed to him Rome and Ravenna, sovereignity, to which they raised to which he makes presents. As for them. "Is it possible," says VolBenevento, the holy see did not pos- taire, "that Pepin can have twice sess it till a long time afterwards by passed the Alps, merely to give cities the donation of the emperor Henry to the pope ?" Not only is it possithe black, towards the year 1047." ble, but it is very probable, that so All these grave and important facts ambitious and generous a prince as he confirms by the detail of some Pepin, who aspired to royalty, and proofs, which he relates, of the de- who employed so well the pontifical pendence which the popes were in, a authority, in order to ascend the long time after Pepin and Charle-thrones-it is very probable that he magne. In the twentieth chapter he speaks as follows:

would have been willing to make a return. He made very handsome presents to the pope, it is true; but, after all, he only gave some cities which did not belong to him, and which only cost him the trouble of

The popes possessed at Rome rather a great credit than a legislative power; they had to manage, at the same time, the roman senate, the people, and the emperor. Lothai-going to make himself feared and rerius, in the year 844, passed the spected. Besides, this new king, who Alps, in order to get his son Louis was sensible how much the French crowned, who came to judge in of that time respected the holy see, Rome pope Sergius II. The pontiff followed in that respect the views of appears, juridically answers the accu- a very just policy. It was of consisations of a bishop of Metz, justifies derable importance to him to have -himself, and afterwards takes an oath the pope in his interest in case of reof fidelity to this same Lothairius, volution, and he effectually secured who was deposed by the bishops. that interest by magnificent gifts Lothairius even made this celebrated which cost him nothing. "But," and useless ordonnance, that the continues Voltaire, "Anastasius, pope shall be no longer elected by who wrote a hundred and forty years the people; that they shall apprise after the expedition of Pepin, is the the emperor of the vacancy of the first who speaks of it." If Voltaire holy see." had gone to the fountain bead of the It is thus that Voltaire demon-truth, he would not have formed all strates the falsehood of what all his these weak arguments, and these pititorians relate of the donations made ful reflexions; he would have known by our kings to the church of Rome. that Eginhard, historiographer, seLet us now examine the force of this cretary, and son in law to the empedemonstration. We cannot deny ror Charlemagne, speaks of this dothat the policy of the roman pontiff's nation in his ammals of the imperial has always been extremely enlight-house. Pepin," says he," caused ened, and that it has very much contributed to establish and strengthen the sovereign authority which they enjoy at the present day (1767); but we must be Avery ill-informed to

Ravenna, Pentapolis, and all the exarchate which depended upon Ravenna, to be given up, and made a

* Eginbart, Annal, ad, un 756.

present of them to saint Peter. He ..would have known that the annals of Fulda announce the same thing about the year 756;+ he would have known that Paul the deacon, secretary of Didier, last king of the Lombards, gives also nearly the same testimony, and supposes the same donations. Voltaire, therefore, is in error, and he leads others into error, when he affirms, that the first writer who has spoken of these donations lived one hundred and forty years after they were made. There are some French historians and contemporaries of Charlemagne who have spoken of them a long time before Anastasius.

saying, that Benevento was the popes only by the donation of Henry the black. It was not a donation, but an exchange.* The emperor ceded to the pope all his right upon the duchy of Benevento, and the pope ceded to the emperor the lands which the roman church possessed in Germany, and his rights upon Fulda and Bamburg. He is mista en in saying that the pope was obliged to answer juridically to a bishop of Metz.This bishop, son of Charlemagne, and uncle to the reigning emperor, thought he could assume an air of consequence at the court of Rome; but his attempts were without effect. The pope disdained the accusations of the bishop; he refused to compel the Romans to take the oath of fidelity which the bishop would have ex. acted for king Lewis; he declared that the Romans owed it only to the emperor. This firmness stopped the bishop, and the pope afterwards crowned young Lewis king of Italy. As for that ordonance to which Voltaire gives the epithet of celebrated, that the pope should be no longer elected by the people, and that they should apprise the emperor of the vacancy of the holy see; Neither is any thing proved by the this was a demand of the bishop made conduct which the popes were ob- on the part of Lothairius, and no religed to observe towards the enipe-spect was paid to it. We may judge rors. When these princes appeared near Rome with great armies, the popes did at that time what the minor princes of Italy do now a days. When a powerful French or German army appear in their provinces, the weaker pays his court to the stronger. In fine, Voltaire is not more fortunate in the facts that he advances, than in the arguments which he forms; he is mistaken in

What he afterwards says of the will of Charlemagne proves absolutely nothing. This prince, making by his will some donations to all the archiepiscopal sees of the empire, did not wish to exclude the two which were in the hands of the popes, for whom he had so much attachment, respect, and gratitude; besides, he had reserved to himself the rights of lord paramount. Thus these pious legacies by no means prove that Rome and Ravenna were, not given to the roman church.

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by this how far we may trust to the most positive assertions of Voltaire.

After having shewn all these deviations in treating of the origin of the pontifical power, we will now give an idea of them, historical, certain and capable of satisfying those who seek, in an exposé, the characters of truth.

It was the great Constantine who laid the first foundation of this power; it was the French emperors who raised it to the state at which it afterwards arrived; and it is time which has given it that consistency in which we see it now a days. Vol

Chap. 5, Hist. Générale,

It was with this answer that the Greeks were obliged to retire; and Pepin, having caused to be put in execution all the articles of

taire himself owns, that Constantine | was favourable to re-occupy it.gave a thousand marks of gold to the They sent a solemn embassy to Peroman church, thirty thousand marks pin, to demand it as a province of of silver, and fourteen thousand sols their empire. Pepin having heard yearly, and some lands in Calabria. their long harangue, answered them All this together making near two briefly, that he had taken nothing million, four or five hundred thousand from the Greeks; that he had only livres, according to the present value made conquests from the Lombards; of money; each emperor augmenting and that, having the right of dispathis patrimony. Italy afterwards, sing of them as he pleased, he had having been invaded by the bar given them, as he gave them still, to barians, the roman church lost seve- St. Peter. ral cities and possessions which belonged to it; but it never was in -greater danger than under Astolphus, one of the last Lombard kings.the peace, set out again for his kingThis prince aimed at Rome itself: the popes immediately sent to Constantine, in order to obtain some assistance, but the empire of the east was too weak and too ill-governed to be able to save Italy: they gave fine words to the deputies, and nothing more.. Rome, abandoned by its sovereigns, was not so by its pontiffs; they addressed themselves to the French princes. Pepin, whom the popes had so well served, in as-sisting him to the throne, served them in his turn; he passed into Italy at the head of an army, beat the Lombards, and obliged Astolphus to give up to the roman churcli the exarchate of Ravenna, and some other provinces. The Lombard king promised whatever they wished; but afterwards, not being able to resolve to make such great concessions to the pope, he took up arms again as soon as the French had repassed the mountains. The activity of Pepin soon made him repent of his infidelity in breaking his word. The Lombards having again, been beaten in eyery part, and driven from their best places, Astolphus was obliged faithfully to execute the conditions which the French king had imposed upon him. :

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In the mean time, the Greeks, seeing the Lombards driven from the exarchate, thought the opportunity

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dom. After the death of Pepin, Desiderius, the last king of the Lombards, made fresh efforts to put himself in possession of what his predecessor had been obliged to cede; but he was still more unfortunate: he found in Charlemagne a hero still more formidable than Astolphus had found in Pepin. After a war which was of short duration, but which was very rapid, Desiderius was despoiled of all his states, and he was sent to France and placed in an abbey, where he finished his days. Charles took possession of his kingdom, assumed the title of king of the French and Lombards, and left the popes in the peaceable enjoyment of all that his father had ceded to them.

Some years afterwards, that is to say, in 801, pope Leo III. caused him to be proclaimed emperor by the Romans, and crowned him in that quality. The people took the oath of fidelity to the new emperor, who contented himself with the rights of lord paramount. Things remained in this state till the time of Charles the bald, grandson of Charlemagne; the latter ceded all the rights of the emperors in Rome to the pope, John VIII. as all contemporary historians

inform us.

This is what the most incontestible and certain monuments inform us of the origin of the temporal power of the popes.

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ago the catholics on this side of the water to whom I allude, a few of them knowingly, the rest unwittingly,

rangements in their own religion, for securing the protestant established religion, and though a form of salvo for the integrity of the catholic doctrine and discipline, was inserted in the pledge, yet it was plain to every person of reflection and experience, that, this security, in the opinion of the protestants to whom the pledge was given, could not otherwise be effectual than by shackling and crippling the catholic religion; still they, one and all, contended that they had entered into no engagement at all, but had barely testified what they called a spirit of conciliation. After four years spent in this unworthy quibbling or stupid delusion, the plain sense of the FIFTH RESOLUTION glared forth, beyond the power of quibbling in the bill of pain and penalties, of bribery and corruption,* of irreligion and schism, which some men had confidence to call a bill for CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION. What now was the conduct of the catholics above described? They said they disliked the bill, but that they could not prevent it now, that it had gone so far, that it was a protestant_not a catholic bill, &c. &c. &c. In the mean time it was notorious beyond

MR. EDITOR. Among the storms which the bark of Peter has encount-entered into a pledge to make arered during these eighteen centuries: Titubat, sed nun quam mergitur illa ratis: none have been so dangerous as those which have been raised by some of her own crew, or pretended assistants. The council of Rimini, collected by the christian emperor Constantius was ten times more fatal than the exterminating persecution of the pagan emperor Dioclesian; so also was the jansenistical reform of the church by the late tyrannical Joseph II. which we catholics of England and Ireland are threatened with, under the mockery of emancipation, in the report before the two houses of parliament at the present day. This variegated code of persecution has been collected abroad and imported into this country by a gentleman, who, during many years, passed for our warm and disinterested friend, and who, under that visor, was admitted into the councils of prelates, cardinals and popes. It is patronized and promoted by several other distinguished personages, equally professing themselves our friends. Still the conduct of these personages may be accounted for, because though they profess themselves the friends of the catholics themselves, and are so, as to temporal benefits, yet they pub-denial, that, if they had loved their licly protest, upon oath, against our holy religion more than their exreligion, as idolatrous and it would pected worldly distinctions and ebe scandalum magnatum to say, that moluments, they might, by a single they swear what they do not believe word or line addressed to Mr. Gratto be true. The wonder, however, tan or Mr. Elliot, have quashed the and the great mischief to our reli- bill in its course, and at once have gion at present is, that a certain num-stopped all the mischief which they ber of her own children, (who pos- had set agoing on the 1st of Feb. sessing the greatest share of worldly 1810, at the St. Albau's tavern. advantages are thereby stimulated to grasp at more) join in the conspiracy to betray their fellow mavigators and the vessel itself into the hands of an enemy. Seven years

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* The committee, which was to consist

chiefly of catholic noblemen and gentlemen, had the disposal of £1000 per annum, in under a protestant president, was to have each island, for undefined purposes !

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