be appropriated to the procuring of a good mansion house for the mayor of the federal city, would they give up the money rather than permit him to be esteemed a perjurer? Suppose a good, warm-hearted, foolish countryman of mine were to swear an oath that they should not quit his table until they were drunk, would they be obliged to become intoxicated lest he should be a perjurer? I hope this will not be found their maxim of morality.

The principle of law, the principle of morality is prior to this oath. Listen to their own archdeacon:

a

"The parties in those cases are not obliged to perform what the promise requires, because they were under prior obligation to the contrary. From which prior obligation what is to discharge them? Their promise their own act and deed. But the obligation, from which a man can discharge himself by his own act, is no obligation at all. The guilt, therefore, of such promises lies in the making not in the breaking of them; and if in the interval betwixt the promise and performance, a man so far recover his reflection, as to repent of his engagements, he ought certainly break through them."

However, as my opponents perhaps will not be satisfied with a mere archdeacon of the English Church, it may be as well to give them the doctrine of the pure days of King Edward VI, with the approbation of her majesty Queen Elizabeth, who committed the crime of living in single blessedness they probably know as well as I do what is meant, cum grano salis. The Homilies have authority from the ratification of the thirty-nine articles, together with the acceptation of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. "But if a man shall at any time, either of ignorance or of malice, promise and swear to do anything which is against the law of Almighty God, or not in his power to perform, let him take it for an unlawful and ungodly oath."1 "And finally ye have heard

how damnable a thing

it is either to forswear ourselves or to keep an unlawful and unadvised oath."2

1 No. 7. Sermon of Swearing, part 2, paragraph 2.

Ib., last paragraph.

However, as Pope Innocent X had not the benefit of Dr. Paley's learning, it may be no harm to see by what light he was guided. I shall therefore make a few quotations from Popish authors whom His Holiness could have consulted, and in such dark times those little scintillations might have sufficed; though British divines might have been as much in error, as to the value of their authority, as the British soldiers were during the last war respecting the nature of fire-flies, when their scouts mistook them for sparks from flints preparing for the rifles which were to send them to a world of spirits. I shall, nevertheless, take one or two passages from St. Thomas of Aquin: "Some things are good under all circumstances, such as works of virtue, and such good things might be vowed or promised to be done. Other things are bad under all circumstances: such as things naturally sinful. And they can never be made the matter of a vow or of a promise. There are also some things which considered abstractedly are good, and under this view they may be the matter of 3 VOW or of a promise. But under certain circumstances they may lead to a bad result; and in this view they cannot be the matter of a VOW or of a promise.

2

Thus St. Jerome says of Jeptha, he was a fool in making a vow imprudently, and he was impious in its fulfillment."1 In his next question, St. Thomas, after laying down his doctrine and its supports from reason, to show that a person ought not to observe an oath which appeared to bind to the performance of an unlawful or sinful act, produces the testimony of St. Ambrose, in those words: "It is sometimes against duty to fulfill your promise, to keep your oath: as when Herod put John to death, lest he should not fulfill what he had sworn." My opponents know St. Thomas, and St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose, and all those writers of my Church were fanatics and poor ignorant creatures, who knew nothing of the mariner's compass, nor of the art of printing, which Romish men, however, invented, but as they wrote a kind of monkish Latin, which I feared they could not un

1" Summa," 2, 2d, q. 88, a. 11, ad secundum.

'Ib. a. 7, ad sec.

derstand, I give a translation in English. Thus they will perceive the archdeacon of a Church like theirs and my saints have agreed upon a principle; all that remains for them and me is to find the facts and to draw the con

clusion.

:

We have seen what rights the Pope had in Germany, or if they say these were imaginary rights, I will answer: That he considered the rights to be in him and the Catholic princes and prelates and people believed the rights to be in him. It is true the Protestants asserted that he had no rights, and were enemies to his having any power in Germany or elsewhere, and one of the complaints of the Pope was that the Catholics knowing the object of the Protestants to be the destruction of his rights, invaded those rights to save their own privileges and purses. Thus he complained that those men were led by their heretical principles to try and bind Catholics to do him serious injustice; and he declared that any oath taken to heretics to do this injustice was not to be kept by Catholics, not because the oath was made to heretics, but because it was made to do injustice. It is, then, gross misrepresentation to publish to the world that the doctrine of the Pope is, that oaths made to heretics by Catholics are not binding. It is that fallacy which draws a general conclusion from particular premises. It is that fallacy which comes to a general conclusion from an accidental circumstance. It is faulty in several respects. Such fallacious arguments are seldom used by honest men; and when honest men use them it is only their ignorance which can plead their excuse. It is a species of sophistry highly discreditable to him who uses it; and it is that which is almost perpetually used against the Roman Catholic Church.

The Protestants of Germany made several attempts to destroy the Catholic establishments. 1. By procuring disqualified persons to be elected and installed into places for which only Catholics were qualified. 2. By placing Protestant laics in the places founded for Catholic clergymen.

3. By procuring, frequently by force and oftener by fraud, the secularization of Church property. What would my opponents say to the Roman Catholics of this Union did they pretend to be Protestants, and get elected upon the vestries of their churches, for the purpose of disposing of their revenues in a way injurious to their religion and beneficial to the Catholic Church? What would they say to them if they appointed Catholic laymen to fill the places of their pastors and kept them by force in those places, permitting them to hire Protestant clergymen at trifling salaries to go through the duties badly and irregularly, and pocketing large profits in the amount of difference between receipts and expenditures? What, if the Catholics had their chartered property seized upon and converted to the public purposes of the State, or divided amongst themselves? Yet of such a nature, as can be learned from the Protestant Archdeacon

Coxe, were the facts in Germany. These gentlemen may, if they will, say that Popery is error, but does his error destroy the Papist's right to his property-to the offices of his own Church and to their income?

It is time to come now to the treaty of Westphalia. It was signed at Osnaburg on the 6th of August, and at Munster on the 8th of September, 1648, after a negotiation of two years. The Protestant powers together with Sweden met at Osnaburg under the mediation of Denmark. France, Spain, and the Catholic powers met at Munster under the mediation of the Pope. At a very early period of the negotiations, Chigi, the nuncio of Innocent X, protested against the injustice to the Papal See and the German churches, and withdrew. He succeeded Innocent in the Papacy by the name of Alexander VII. The negotiators foresaw the opposition which would be given whose rights they knew they were destroying. Protestant archdeacon writes in his Austria: "As the protests of the Spain were foreseen, a particular strongest and most precise terms,

by the parties.

See what the history of the house of Pope and the King of clause, expressed in the established these treaties

as a perpetual law and pragmatic sanction, and declared null and ineffectual all opposition made by any ecclesiastic or secular prince either within or without the empire." There was besides this a special compliment paid to the Pope quite in the Lutheran fashion at that day, of placing him in a stipulation of the treaty in that company which it was thought was most appropriate. The archdeacon gives it to us in these words: "The principal contracting parties were allowed to include their allies, if nominated within a certain period, and received by common consent; and the different powers, specified under the sanction of this article, comprised all the European States, except the Pope and the Turkish Sultan."

We shall now see the Church property, which was conveyed away to indemnify the belligerents, and the whole Church property of the several denominations in the United States is far less than the Catholic Church was stripped of by this treaty: "Sweden obtained the Archbishopric of Bremen, secularized and converted into a duchy; and the Bishopric of Verden, secularized and converted into a principality. The Elector of Brandenburg, in return for part of Pomerania, ceded to Sweden, obtained the Archbishopric of Magdeburgh, secularized and converted into a duchy; the Bishopric of Halberstadt, converted into a principality; the Bishopric of Minden, converted into a principality; the Bishopric of Cammin, converted into a principality. The house of Brunswick Lüneburg, in return for the patronage in the Catholic Church, lost by its leaving the Catholic religion, received the property of the convents of Walkenrid and Groningen, and the alternate possession for one of the younger sons of the house of Hanover, of the revenues of the Bishopric of Osnabrück, the Bishop, a Roman Catholic, to have the alternation. By virtue of this clause, his Royal Highness, Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, and heir-apparent to the British throne, has received the income to the see of Osnabrück during the last sixty-one years, leaving the Catholics to find some way of