The Londoner can witness at his own doors a memorial of this tremendous power, as it was exercised over kings in days which even Protestants profess to venerate. Let him walk into the National Gallery, and recal the scene represented in one of Vandyke's masterpieces-the excommunication of the greatest monarch of the earth by St. Ambrose. What has Pius done now which Ambrose did not do then?

And the same has been done by the Popes in these last days of their temporal feebleness, as repeatedly as in the ages of their most exalted power. That very man who stirred up this terrible war, the Czar Nicholas himself, trembled-yes, literally, physically, trembled-in the presence of the aged and almost dying Gregory XVI. in his palace at Rome. Nicholas was a great man in England in those days; as the French Emperor, whom England now worships, was a very small man; but when Nicholas went to Rome, and tried to bully the Pope with his august presence and his tremendous threats, he found for the first time that he stood before his master, and he left the Vatican a discomfited tyrant.

Remember Napoleon the "Great," as people call him. He too was excommunicated by the Pope, and immediately afterwards came the defeat at Moscow. Espartero, also, was excommunicated, and in a few weeks fell headlong from the pinnacle of his power, and was an exile from his country. Sardinia is now the favoured pet of English Protestantisma great, heroic, and enlightened nation. Let us wait awhile and see the end.

As to making void " the laws" of an independent country, of course the Pope does it, whenever those laws are against the laws of God. He does it in the case of England to this very hour. There is one law of England which he utterly reprobates, denounces, and forbids all Catholics to obey. It is that "law" which sanctions the marriage of a divorced person during the lifetime of the remaining party to the original marriage.

When persons find fault with the Pope for thus interfering between temporal rulers and their subjects, they are bound in all consistency to transfer their indignation from his Holiness to a higher Power. If the Pope, in directing the spiritual affairs of Christians, finds himself suddenly coming athwart the regulations of human societies, that is no fault of his, and betrays no inclination on his part to push his authority beyond its limits. It is a consequence of that system on which it has pleased God to create the human race; a system in which the things of time and those of eternity are so intimately mingled, that in practice it is at times absolutely im

possible to separate the one from the other. The hypothesis upon which anti-Catholics or bad Catholics reason, when they attack the Holy See for opposing secular laws, is purely fallacious. They argue, that because secular government, as such, is of divine institution, and man is bound to obey just laws, therefore secular government never enjoins what is sinful, and men are bound to obey every law. The fallacy is transparent the moment it is stated; but the opponents of the Papacy nevertheless take care to assume this identical monstrous proposition. And then they manufacture a sort of fictitious zeal against the Pope on sham conscientious grounds, as though he were trenching upon the indefeasible rights of lawful governments. This is just the way with the pretended reasonings of Protestantism in all its manifestations. The real bearings of the questions at issue are studiously kept out of sight. Dust is raised in clouds; a loud shouting is got up about rights, and conscience, and laws, and tyranny, and all the rest of it; and so the eyes of the observer are blinded and his ears are stunned, and he accepts as undoubted truths certain propositions which are the rankest impositions upon his reason and common sense.

ANTHONY, EARL OF SHAFTESBURY,

A PROTESTANT CHAMPION OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

MANY years ago there was an enormously wicked club, whose members had resolved to evoke the Prince of Darkness; and the question amongst them then arose as to what shape his Satanic majesty should be requested to assume. Some proposed a dog, an ass, or an ape; others voted for some human monster of iniquity-a Nero, a Borgia, or, if we are rightly informed, the Regent Duke of Orleans. Could the query by any possibility have been proposed to ourselves, we should have perhaps suggested Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, grandfather of the author of the Characteristics, and ancestor of the present coryphæus of Exeter Hall in London. Such a combination of astuteness, cleverness, and wickedness, the world has rarely seen; and it is not a little remarkable, that his inherent animosity to the Church of God has descended, though of course without his moral víces, like an heir-loom in his family. Charles II. once told him, that "he was the most abandoned profligate then alive within the British dominions;" to which accusation Shaftesbury bowed

a polite assent, upon condition, as he implied, that the charge should be limited to the king's subjects, and not extend to royalty.

About two miles from Cranbourne, in Dorsetshire, stands the magnificent seat of Wimborne St. Giles, with the adjoining park watered by the river Allen; but it was not in the present mansion that the Achitophel of Dryden was born. Its predecessor existed for generations as a residence of humbler dimensions, and was brought into the family by Anne, daughter and heiress of Sir Anthony Ashley, who married the son of Sir John Cooper of Rockburn, in the county of Southampton. The fruit of this alliance was our hero, who first saw the light under the patrimonial roof-tree of his mother, at Wimborne, on the 22d of July 1621. The grandson of two baronetsmagnates far less common then than now-was sure to attract some attention in those rural districts, where brains were scarce, and his future possessions were to be large. But as a boy he was precocious, and every way remarkable. At fifteen he went to Oxford, and was admitted at Exeter College, where he studied hard for a couple of years; removing subsequently to Lincoln's Inn, that he might bury himself, as he afterwards said, " in the lumber of legal lore." What he learned from it was an acuteness of cunning, in which no man of his age could match him. Had he been destined for an attorney, he would have combined the faculties of the crocodile and alligator to the perfect satisfaction of the most critical Sir Joseph Jekyll. As it was, however, his ambition developed on a larger scale, and he advanced from a survey of the practice to an analysis of the principles of law; proceeding, moreover, still further, until he had thoroughly mastered the entire theory particularly developed in the constitution of his country. Here, in other words, he laid the foundations of his later career. Into the pleasures of the metropolis he just so far plunged as not to enervate his intellect, although they destroyed his moral principles, or at least materially helped to do so. There was a national crisis at hand, which would be sure to interest a mind like his, even more than sensualism. He got elected for Tewkesbury to that brief Parliament which met at Westminster on the 13th of April 1640, only to be dissolved almost immediately by the infatuated Stuart. Thunder-clouds gathered rapidly over the political horizon. Hampden, Pym, Eliot, and Oliver Cromwell, were already the idols of the hour.

It was an age of suppressed internal agitation and profound hypocrisy. Hollowness seems to have been the order of the day. Patriotism, morals, and religion, moved in one universal masquerade. The court carried on government with

no inconsiderable degree of apparent dignity; but with utter unconsciousness that the ground would before long actually yawn beneath its feet, and swallow up the crown of the sovereign, the coronets of the aristocracy, and the gilded croziers of a pretended Protestant episcopacy, in the common earthquake. Puritanism, too, sat dreaming over pious projects of its own,-liberty of a particular kind, Presbyterianism in all the platitude of its dullness, sermons of interminable length, prayers uncircumscribed by forms, ministers with sour faces and no surplices, sabbaths wrapt in sackcloth, a suppression of fairs, wakes, mummers, dancings, dice, cross-buns, hot cakes, and spiced ale; and above and beyond all, the deletion or destruction of every conceivable vestige of Popery. Neither party seemed to have any notion that they were musing or mocking over a mine of moral gunpowder,-the righteous results of an unhallowed spiritual revolt, covering its deeds of darkness beneath the name and pretences of a Reformation. The nation, therefore, having gone wrong for a hundred and twenty years, reeled forward in its judicial blindness; many a sincere conscience feeling inwardly that matters could never be right, yet few or none able to see or know how the awful spell of illusion might be really dissolved. Thus affairs effervesced into the very essence of imposture. The social and political atmosphere swarmed with knaves and pretenders. Maladies enough there evidently were, and on such a colossal scale, that every quack with his notions, texts, or nostrums, could obtain a hearing generally far beyond his deserts. The horrors of what Clarendon so pompously describes as the Great Rebellion, were the natural consequences flowing from the events that had gone before, and could no more have been avoided than any other effect proceeding from its original causes. Mankind had sown the wind, and had for their just punishment to reap the whirlwind.

The wealthy heir of Wimborne St. Giles had closed neither his eyes nor ears to the phenomena amongst which he was thrown. Full of that self-conceit, which too many of his contemporaries called philosophy, he resolved to carve out a course which, come whatever might, should be at least favourable to his private fortunes. Hobbes had already written, although he had not published, his book De Cive, which afterwards grew up into the Leviathan; but the future Earl of Shaftesbury was one with him in several of his grand axioms, particularly as to its being lawful under any circumstances to make use of evil for our own advantage. "If I were cast," says the sophist of Malmsbury, "into a deep pit, and the devil would lend me his cloven foot, I would gladly lay hold of it

to be drawn out." It should never be forgotten that the essence of Protestantism is infidelity, where its genuine principles are carried out into their logical consequences. Both these reasoners held revelation as not being obligatory upon the conscience; that civil laws are the only rules of good and evil; that antecedently to them every action is in its own nature indifferent. The separation of their systems merely began from certain tendencies in Hobbes towards an apparent admiration for absolutism as a form of social government; whereas, even at the commencement of his career, Shaftesbury might be termed a constitutionalist, like the Girondists in France, or their successors the late Doctrinaires. He had profited too well in his midnight lucubrations at Lincoln's Inn not to sympathise with the well-grounded popular grievances of the Star-Chamber and High Commission Courts, martial law instituted by royal proclamations, privy-council warrants, forced loans, purveyance, wardships, embargoes, prohibitions, arbitrary imprisonments, ship-money, and the dispensing powers of the crown. But at the same time, he recoiled from the canting patriotism of the conventicles, and their awful preachers, until selfishness had rendered him casehardened to it. When Charles I. therefore hoisted his standard, young Cooper avowed his allegiance, and even joined the court at Oxford, where he projected a scheme not for subduing or conquering his country, but for reducing such as had either forsaken or mistaken their duty towards the executive. It may well be imagined how little all such wire-drawings would be relished amongst the needy, boisterous cavaliers, who clung to the pure divine right of kings, as an article of their creeds almost as dear to them as their hounds, their harlots, or their horses. Even decent hypocrites, like Hyde and Colepepper, not to mention the solemn honest Lord Falkland himself, displayed rather a cold shoulder towards the youthful wit, who knew far more than they or their master did of the real limits of prerogative, and where its cruel assumptions chafed the pride and privileges, or annihilated the loyalty of a justly irritated people. Wounded at once with the polished arrogance of such lofty courtiers, and probably foreseeing how certainly their folly would be followed by its own punishment, his mind fell back upon the parliament; and notwithstanding the receipt of a royal autograph from Charles to invite his further attendance at Oxford, he removed to the metropolis, where a cordial welcome awaited him. Clarendon tells us, that he now "gave himself up body and soul" to the popular party. Accepting a commission from that power, whose manners and pretensions he loathed and