of England, and Life of the Duke of Ormond, are quite standard works. William Law's Serious Call is a most masterly piece of reasoning; so also are his Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, which remain unanswered for the best of reasons, because they were unanswerable; while his later mystic works, though they fly above the heads of the many, are so full of exquisitely beautiful thoughts, beautifully expressed, that as mere specimens of literary workmanship they cannot fail to be admired by persons of real culture and taste. George Hickes's Thesaurus, or Treasury of the Northern Languages, is a perfect storehouse of out-of-the-way knowledge. Thomas Brett's Collection of Liturgies is still valuable in the highest degree; Thomas Baker's Antiquarian Researches were of immense value; Nathaniel Spinckes's Devotions are still used by many pious, cultured souls; Thomas Ken's hymns have passed beyond the region of criticism; Henry Dodwell's voluminous works are at least as conspicuous for their profound learning as for their eccentricity; Charles Leslie's have already been noticed; and the list of nonjuring writings of really high calibre is by no means yet exhausted. And be it observed that all the works noticed above are exclusive of those which the Nonjurors were forced to write in defence of their peculiar position.

All the writers hitherto noticed were men of high and spotless characters; so also were most of those whose names have come down to us. One is, therefore, inclined to regard with suspicion the vague, general hints which Dr. Johnson and others have given of the immorality that prevailed among the rank and file of Nonjurors. 'Dolus latet in generalibus'; and of specific charges brought home to individuals we have few, if any, instances. Much capital has been made of the innuendoes (they are nothing more) of Dr. Johnson. It has been assumed that because he was a staunch Churchman and vehement Tory, his testimony, such as it is, has the value of that of an unwilling witness, who reluctantly owns the truth because, in spite of his predilections, facts are too strong for him. But is there not a fallacy in this assumption? Dr. Johnson now and then talked Jacobitism, but it was only talk; he was, of all things, the supporter of the established order. Now that is just what the Nonjurors were not, and the fact that they were not was quite sufficient to put the doctor out of any real sympathy with them. His insinuations, therefore, against them assuredly require proof, and of proof he gives absolutely none. That a body of clergy, turned loose upon the public, without any employment and without any means

of subsistence, should have had some feckless characters among them is highly probable; but it really is wonderful, considering the trying nature of their position, how few wellauthenticated instances of black sheep among the Nonjurors can be pointed out.

This same want of active employment, combined with great intellectual activity, and also a sense of the uncomfortableness of their position in being separated from those from whom they never desired to be separated, tended no doubt to heighten their internal disputes. The first of those disputes arose directly from the last of these causes. The Nonjurors all agreed that the separation should continue only so long as it was absolutely necessary. The only question was when did the necessity cease? Some thought that the death of the last but one, and the voluntary resignation of the last 'deprived father,' was a favourable opportunity for healing the schism. The bishops intruded into the sees not canonically vacant were only 'nulli' because they were 'secundi'; when they ceased to be 'secundi,' they ceased also to be 'nulli,' and might rightfully challenge the allegiance of sound Churchmen. To perpetuate the separation by consecrating suffragan bishops to take the places of the deprived fathers was to encourage schism unnecessarily—so argued Dodwell with great force, before the event in his Case in View, after it in his Case in Fact, and carried with him his friends Nelson, Cherry, and Brokesby. But Hickes argued with equal force on the other side; Charles Leslie and many others agreed with him, and the breach was not healed.

Subsequently the remaining Nonjurors, who received a considerable accession when George I. came to the throne, disagreed about the adoption of what were called 'the Usages,' which amounted practically to the use of the first Prayer Book of King Edward VI. But the extent and acrimony of this dispute have certainly been exaggerated. It has, for instance, been hinted by Carte, and assumed by Lathbury, that William Law took an active part in the dispute on the side of the nonusagers. Now every act of William Law's life is perfectly well known, he was as open as the day-light in the expression of his opinions, and there is not the slightest trace in his life, in his published writings, or in his private correspondence, of his having taken any part whatever in the matter. If he had taken any, it would certainly have been as 'an usager,' but he would never have considered the question of sufficient importance to dispute about.

Mr. R. J. Leslie tells us (p. 1), that Scotland is the part of the

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United Kingdom in which Charles Leslie's name and writings are held in the highest esteem, and we can well believe it. For, while in England the vast majority of the clergy swallowed, with more or less wry faces, the oaths, in Scotland the clergy were Nonjurors almost to a man. To give even the most cursory sketch of the Scotch Nonjurors would far transcend the limits of our space, neither would we uncharitably suggest motives; but it certainly is a fact that where the arguments in favour of the oaths were not backed up by the powerful reasons which establishment and endowment supply they were not so convincing as they were on this side the Tweed, and it is only saying that human nature is human nature if we suppose the 'argumentum ad crumenam' convinced some to whom logic might have appealed in vain.

ART. IV. THE AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHENTICITY OF PAPAL BULLS.

Innocenzo X. (Pamfili) e la sua Corte. Storia di Roma dal 1644 al 1655. Per IGNAZIO CIAMPI. (Roma, 1878.)

THE remarkable work before us, which introduces us to the authentic history of the weak and luxurious pontificate of Innocent X. in all its manifold bearings on the fortunes of the Church and of the States of Europe, and even on literature and art, has a special interest for those who are engaged in estimating the real authority and importance of the productions of the papal Chancery-the bulls, briefs, encyclicals, and allocutions to which Cardinal Manning has attached so strange and meretricious a value. Hitherto we have been led to consider the question (if indeed it has been deemed worthy of consideration) as involving only the authority of such documents, and have generally left the fruitless discussion and the final decision in the subtle hands of the maximizers and minimizers of the Roman obedience. By both these classes it has been taken for granted that a bull or brief emanating from the papal Chancery (or we ought perhaps to say the Dateria), armed and equipped with the familiar figures of S. Peter and S. Paul, or the 'seal of the Fisherman,' ought to have instant reception and the most loyal execution, if only those useful but humble members of the Curia, the cursores of the Pope

have duly affixed them to the gates of S. Peter's, and of the Chancery, and exhibited them in the Campo di Fiori. It has been even assumed (and this is the doctrine of Zypæus, the learned Archdeacon of Antwerp in the seventeenth century) that the civil authorities have no right to examine into the authenticity of a bull, or to inquire into the circumstances under which it has been obtained, 1 far less to enter upon the more important question whether it is to be received and executed.

Such being the decision of earlier and more moderate Ultramontanism, we cannot wonder that Cardinal Manning, its more unqualified assertor and exponent, should be content with enforcing the absolute and divine authority of the products of the Dateria without venturing to enter upon any inquiry as to their origin or authenticity. The definitions and decrees of pontiffs speaking ex cathedra,' he writes, or as the head of the Church, and to the whole Church, whether by bull or apostolic letters, or encyclical or brief, to many or to one person, undoubtedly emanate from the divine assistance.' 2 Did it never occur to him to inquire how we can be able to establish the authorship or to clear up the authenticity of a mass of documents filling the sixty or seventy volumes of the Bullarium Magnum, besides endless supplementary collections of briefs, encyclicals, allocutions, and every other form in which infallibility presents itself before the world? Are these documents written in the heavens and in such legible characters that all whom they are assumed to bind can read them? Or are they not liable to all those incidents and accidents which are inseparable from every human document drawn up by fallible writers and recorded by equally fallible scribes? Can he claim an exemption for them from all those tests to which the authorship and authenticity of every human document must be submitted in order to determine its genuineness? Can he prove that in every case they truly represent the hand or the mind of the Pope and emanate from the infallible charisma? Can he prove, further, that they were not the outcome of bribery, intimidation, undue influence, or any other cause which would invalidate any legal instrument whatever? Signor Ciampi, in his higher capacity of a faithful historian of the eleven eventful years of the Pamfili pontificate, has lifted the veil from the secret tabernacle in which the Cardinal supposes a papal bull to have its mysterious and inscrutable origin; and we see

before us a very sublunary and ordinary public office in Rome -sacred only to intrigues, fees, and red-tapeism, the Dateria: the scene of the manufacture of all those documents to which the uninstructed believer in the infallibility looks up as 'undoubtedly' the product of a divine inspiration. The wholesale and most successful forgeries of Mascambruni, which form the most romantic and tragic episode in the history of Innocent's pontificate, while they form the special object of our present remarks, lead us back most opportunely to the history of papal bulls and of their falsification, which may truly be said to be coeval with the history itself. We may begin with the observation that in the case of the great and ancient records of our faith all Christians alike admit that their authority depends on their authenticity: upon the fact that they are either the actual production of the writers whose names they bear, or are the authentic reports of their doctrine received as such by the whole Church from the very period when they were its living teachers. We do not conceive for a moment that they are the product of the minds of others, to which they gave an officious consent or affixed an official seal. Still less do we imagine that they knew the recondite distinctions between an ex-cathedra and an ordinary utterance. The authenticity and originality of their writings rest upon far higher grounds than those which can be produced for a document which, assuming to be the work of the Pope, is in fact that of a deputy writing under the influence of a political party or a religious order, and merely obtaining an official seal to the heterogeneous production. They did not, nor did their successors, withdraw their work from human criticism and assume it to be exempt from those tests to which every other document is subject, but, like their Lord, appealed to the candour and justice of those whom they addressed, relying more on the artless simplicity of their style and the grandeur of the truths they proclaimed than on any claim of supreme authority and irresponsible power, such as that which Rome in all her bulls and encyclicals asserts usque ad nauseam. These characteristics of their teaching were, as Tatian tells us, the chief ground of his conversion to Christianity. The stylus curia would certainly have never commended it to him, nor the inflated and dictatorial language of the Roman Chancery. Furthermore, the authenticity and integrity of the apostolic writings were early tested on critical as well as on moral grounds. Apocryphal books affecting the names of the apostles and early disciples of our Lord were from the first separated from their genuine works as the chaff from the wheat. And though