4. The right of exercising authority in other dioceses besides that of Rome.

5. The privilege of reserving to himself the greater causes-le cause maggiori.

6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Of conferring any and every benefice in the territory of other Bishops; of exacting the Annates, or First Fruits; of receiving appeals; with the power of subjecting all churches. in all parts, to the ecclesiastical discipline of the church of Rome and lastly, the dispensing power of the Pope.

11. The Pope's pretended superiority to an Ecumenical Council. 12. The exclusive power of canonizing Saints.

Now, of the twelve abuses here enumerated, it is remarkable that ten, if not eleven, are but expansions of the one grievancethe Papal power as the centre, and the Pope as the one visible head and sovereign of the Christian Church.

The writer next enumerates the personal instruments of these abuses-1. The Cardinals. 2. The excessive number of the priests and other ecclesiastics. 3. The Regulars, Mendicant Orders, Jesuits, and the rest. Lastly, the means employed by the Papacy to found and preserve its usurped power, namely:1. The institution of a Chair of Canon Law, in the University of Bologna, the introduction of Gratian's Canons, and the forged decisions. 2. The prohibition of books, wherever published. 3. The Inquisition; and 4. The tremendous power of excommunication;-the last two in their temporal inflictions and consequences equalling, or rather greatly exceeding, the utmost extent of the punitive power exercised by the temporal sovereign and the civil magistrate, armed with the sword of the criminal law.

It is observable that the most efficient of all the means adopted by the Roman Pontiffs, namely, the celibacy of the clergy, is omitted by this writer;-a sufficient proof that he was neither a Protestant nor a philosopher, which in the Italian states, and, indeed, in most Romish Catholic countries, is the name of courtesy for an infidel.

One other remark in justification of the tenet avowed in this chapter, and I shall have said all I deem it necessary to say on the third form of a Church. That erection of a temporal mon. arch under the pretence of a spiritual authority, which was not possible in Christendom but by the extinction or entrancement of the spirit of Christianity, and which has therefore been only

partially attained by the Papacy-this was effected in full by Mohammed, to the establishment of the most extensive and complete despotism, that ever warred against civilization and the interests of humanity. And had Mohammed retained the name of Christianity, had he deduced his authority from Christ as his principal, and described his own Khalifate and that of his successors as vicarious, there can be no doubt that to the Mussulman theocracy, embodied in the different Mohammedan dynasties, would belong the name and attributes of Antichrist. But the Prophet of Arabia started out of Paganism an unbaptized Pagan. He was no traitor in the Church, but an enemy from without, who levied war against its outward and formal existence, and is, therefore, not chargeable with apostasy from a faith which he had never acknowledged, or from a Church to which he had never appertained. Neither in the Prophet nor in his system, therefore, can we find the predicted Antichrist, that is, a usurped power in the Church itself, which, in the name of Christ, and pretending his authority, systematically subverts or counteracts the peculiar aims and purposes of Christ's mission; and which, vesting in a mortal his incommunicable headship, destroys and exchanges for the contrary the essential contra-distinguishing marks or characters of his kingdom on earth. But apply it, as Wicliff, Luther,*

And (be it observed) without any reference to the Apocalypse, the canonical character of which Luther at first rejected, and never cordially received. And without the least sympathy with Luther's suspicions on this head, but on the contrary receiving this sublime poem as the undoubted work of the Apostolic age, and admiring in it the most perfect specimen of symbolic poetry, I am as little disposed to cite it on the present occasion ;— convinced as I am and hope shortly to convince others, that in the whole series of its magnificent imagery there is not a single symbol, that can be even plausibly interpreted of either the Pope, the Turks, or Napoleon Bonaparte. Of charges not attaching to the moral character, there are few, if any, that I should be more anxious to avoid than that of being an affecter of paradoxes. But the dread of other men's thoughts shall not tempt me to withhold a truth, which the strange errors grounded on the contrary as sumption reuder important. And in the thorough assurance of its truth make the assertion, that the perspicuity, and (with singularly few exceptions even for us) the uniform intelligibility, and close consecutive meaning, verse by verse, with the simplicity and grandeur of the plan, and the admirable ordonnance of the parts, are among the prominent beauties of the Apocalypse. Nor do I doubt that the substance and main argument of this drama sui generis (the Prometheus of Eschylus comes the nearest to the

and indeed all the first Reformers did to the Papacy, and l'apal hierarchy; and we understand at once the grounds of the great Apostle's premonition, that this Antichrist could not appear till kind) were supplied by John the Evangelist: though I incline with Eusebius to find the poet himself in John, an Elder of the Church of Ephesus. It may remove, or at least mitigate, the objections to the palliative language in which I have spoken of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, if I remind the reader that that Church dates its true origin from the Council of Trent. Widely differing from my valued and affectionately respected friend, the Rev. Edward Irving, in his interpretations of the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel, and no less in his estimation of the latter, and while I honor his courage as a Christian minister, almost as much as I admire his eloquence as a writer, yet protesting against his somewhat too adventurous speculations on the Persons of the Trinity and the Body of our Lord,—I have great delight in extracting from his “Sermons, Lectures, and Discourses," vol. iii. p. 870, and declaring my cordial assent to the following just observations: namely,-"that after the Reformation had taken firmer root, and when God had provided a purer Church, the Council of Trent did corroborate and decree into unalterable laws and constitutions of the Church all those impostures and innovations of the Roman See, which had been in a state of uncertainty, perhaps of permission or even of custom; but which every man till then had been free to testify against, and against which, in fact, there never wanted those in each successive generation who did tes tify. The Council of Trent ossified all those ulcers and blotches which had deformed the Church, and stamped the hitherto much doubted and contro verted prerogative of the Pope with the highest authority recognized in the Church." Then first was the Catholic converted and particularized into the Romish Church, the Church of the Papacy.

Not less cordially do I concur with Mr. Irving in his remark in the fol lowing page. For I too, "am free to confess and avow moreover, that I believe the soil of the Catholic Church, when Luther arose, was of a stron ger mould, fitted to bear forest trees and cedars of God, than the soil of the Protestant Church in the times of Whitfield and Wesley, which (though sown with the same word) hath brought forth only stunted undergrowths, and creeping brushwood." I too, "believe, that the faith of the Protestant Church in Great Britain had come to a lower ebb, and that it is even now at a lower ebb, than was the faith of the Papal Church when the Spirit of the Lord was able to quicken in it and draw forth out of it such men as Luther, and Melancthon, and Bullinger, Calvin, Bucer, and Latimer, and Ridley, and a score others whom I might name."

And now, as the conclusion of this long note, let me be permitted to add a word or two of Edward Irving himself. That he possesses my unquali fied esteem as a man, is only saying that I know him, and am neither blinded by envy nor bigotry. But my name has been brought into connection with his on points that regard his public ministry; and he himself has publicly distinguished me as his friend on public grounds; and in proof of my confidence in his regard, I have not the least apprehension of forfeiting it by a

after the dissolution of the Latin empire, and the extinction of the Imperial power in Rome--and the cause why the Bishop of Constantinople, with all imaginable good wishes and disposition frank declaration of what I think. Well, then! I have no faith in his proph esyings; small sympathy with his fulminations; and in certain peculiarities of his theological system as distinct from his religious principles I can not see my way. But I hold, withal, and not the less firmly for these discrep ancies in our moods and judgments, that Edward Irving possesses more of the spirit and purposes of the first Reformers; that he has more of the head and heart, the life, the unction, and the genial power of Martin Luther than any man now alive; yea, than any man of this and the last century. I see in Edward Irving a minister of Christ after the order of Paul; and if the points, in which I think him either erroneous, or excessive and out of bounds, have been at any time a subject of serious regret with me, this regret has arisen principally or altogether from the apprehension of their narrowing the sphere of his influence, from the too great probability that they may furnish occasion or pretext for withholding or withdrawing many from those momentous truths, which the age especially needs, and for the enforcement of which he hath been so highly and especially gifted. Finally, my friend's intellect is too instinct with life, too potential, to remain stationary; and assuming, as every satisfied believer must be supposed to do, the truth of my own views, I look forward with confident hope to a time when his soul shall have perfected her victory over the dead letter of the senses and its apparitious in the sensuous understanding; when the balcyon Ideas shall have alit on the surging sea of his conceptions,

Which then shall quite forget to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

But to return from the personal, for which I have little taste at any time, and the contrary when it stands in any connection with myself;-in order to the removal of one main impediment to the spiritual resuscitation of the Church it seems to me indispensable that in freedom and unfearing faith, with that courage which can not but flow from the inward and life-like assurance, that neither death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, the rulers of our Church and our teachers of theology should meditate and draw the obvious, though perhaps unpalatable, inferences from the following two or three plain truths:-First, that Christ, the Spirit of Truth, has promised to be with his Church even to the end-secondly,-that Christianity was described as a tree to be raised from the seed, so described by Him who brought the seed from Heaven and first sowed it:-lastly,-that in the process of evolution there are in every plant growths of transitory use and duration. "The integuments of the seed, having fulfilled their destined office of protection, burst and decay. After the leaves have unfolded, the cotyledons, that had performed their functions, wither and drop off." The husk is a genuine growth of

Smith's Tutroduction to Botany.

to do the same, could never raise the Patriarchate of the Greek empire into a Papacy. The Bishops of the other Rome became the slaves of the Ottoman, the moment they ceased to be the subjects of the Emperor.

I will now proceed to the Second Part, intended as a humble aid to a just appreciation of the measure, which under the auspices of Mr. Peel and the Duke of Wellington is now the law of the land. This portion of the volume was written while the measure was yet in prospectu; before even the particular clauses of the Bill were made public. It was written to explain and vindicate my refusal to sign a petition against any change in the scheme of law and policy established at the Revolution. But as the arguments are in no respect affected by this circumstance; nay, as their constant reference to, and dependence on, one fixed general principle, which will at once explain both why I find the actual Bill so much less objectionable than I had feared, and yet so much less complete and satisfactory than I had wished, will be rendered more striking by the reader's consciousness that the arguments were suggested by no wish or purpose either of attacking or supporting any particular measure; it has not been thought necessary or advisable to alter the form. Nay, if I am right in my judgment that the Act lately passed, if characterized by its own contents and capabilities, really is-with or without any such intention on the part of its framers-a stepping-stone, and nothing more; whether to the subversion or to the more perfect establishment of the Constitution in Church and State, must be determined by other causes;-the Act in itself being equally fit for either,--and offering the same facilities of transit to both friend and foe, though with a foreclosure to the first comer;-if this be a right, as it is my sincere judgment and be lief, there is a propriety in retaining the language of anticipation Mons adhuc parturit: the ridiculus mus was but an omen.

the staff of life; yet we must separate it from the grain. It is, therefore, the cowardice of faithless superstition, if we stand in greater awe of the palpable interpolations of vermin; if we shrink from the removal of excrescences that contain nothing of nobler parentage than maggots of moth or chafer. Let us cease to confound oak-apples with acorns; still less, though gilded by the fashion of the day, let us mistake them for golden pippins or renates,

The fruit from a pippiu grafted on a pippin, is called a rennet, that ia renate (re-natus) or twice-born.