10. Disputes with laymen in respect to the right of patronage to be decided by temporal courts.

11. Oral and written defamation of the Catholic religion, of the holy Liturgy, of Bishops and of priests, will not be tolerated. (This translation is from the German; but in the Gazzetta di Venezia, the sentence begins, The Emperor is bound not to tolerate oral or written defamation,' &c )

12. The opinions of the Bishops of the province will be taken at the presentation of new Bishops to the Papal Chair.

13. The Bishops alone have rights over the seminaries (theological); and it is for them to appoint the rectors, professors, and teachers.

14. The rectors are to be chosen by concurrence (konkurs).__The principal dignitaries of the chapter are to be nominated by the Papal Chair, when there is no right of patronage. The others are to be appointed by the Emperor; excepting when there is a right of patronage, or the Bishops receive permission to fill up the vacant places.

15. To the Emperor is given the privilege of appointing to all deaneries and rectories, when there is a right of patronage belonging to religious and school property, on condition that his choice shall fall on one of three persons, who shall be proposed by the Bishops after a previous regular concurrence (konkurs).

16. The Papal Chair, with the consent of the Emperor, has full power to establish new sees, and to make new divisions of those already existing.

17. His Majesty undertakes to give a sufficient kongrua (if the root of the word is congruere, it must here mean Imperial confirmations) to those rectories which are at present without them.

18. The property of the Church will be managed according to the directions of the canonical institutions; and in regard to its possession, those regulations will be followed which are prescribed by the canons.

19. The clergy belonging to the monasteries have a right to free communication with their superiors residing at Rome; and the latter have the full right to visit the convents in the empire, and to issue circulars respecting discipline, &c.

20. The monastic orders have the right to establish novitiates (institutions for the instruction of persons intending to retire from the world), and the Bishops, after having come to an understanding with the Government, to establish new monasteries and cloisters.

21. The property of the Church is declared sacred and inviolable. The Church has also the full right to acquire new property.

22. No suppression of the property of the Church, and no sale of the same, can take place without the intervention of the Papal Chair. The rights of the Bishops are never to be infringed on.

23. The property of the Church is to be managed according to the canonical ordinances. A mixed commission will be appointed for the administration of the vacant benefices.

24. The right to levy tithes to be maintained wherever it exists, and his Majesty pledges himself to give to the Church a good title to claim them, wherever it may be wanting.

25. All other matters which are not mentioned in this Concordat will be arranged according to the doctrines of the Church, and the existing arrangements which may be approved by the Papal Chair.

26. The Concordat is declared to be a state law for ever, and all the laws and agreements which have hitherto been valid in ecclesiastical matters are abolished throughout the empire.

475

Correspondence.

BIBLE-BURNING.

To the Editor of the Rambler.

SIR,-May a simple-minded Catholic request through your pages the answer of some straightforward Protestant to a very simple question? My case is this: I am in possession of sundry Bibles, King James's version. Some of these I intend to keep,-one, which contains the genealogy of my family from Noah downwards; and another, which was presented by Lady Jenkyn Jenkyns to my respectable grandmother (her ladyship's waiting-woman), are prized by me with a devotion about as religious as that which a late literary and talented royal duke impartially divided between his Bibles and his tobacco-pipes. But for the rest of my Bibles, what am I to do with them? It is clear that I cannot be a party to their redistribution; I have no right to give to others to read that which I may not read myself. To keep them by me is inconvenient, for they take up room which, in my six-pair back, I can ill spare; and besides, doing so only adjourns the question, does not settle it; sooner or later my beloved heirs and executors will have to make the decision which I shirk. Only one other course is open to me, and that is, to make away with them, to destroy them as Bibles. What shall I do? shall I tear them up, and sell them as waste-paper, to find their way to the grocer or the trunk-maker? I must own, that I have too great a reverence for a paper on which the name of God is written, whether in earnest or in mockery, to allow me lightly to decide on this course. It only remains, then, to me, as it appears, to make away with them in the most respectful way which I can. And certainly this is by burning. The rubrics direct, that any thing which falls into the consecrated chalice which cannot be consumed by the priest should be burned; such is the most reverential way of destroying that which has been in accidental contact with the precious Blood of our Lord. It seems reasonable, then, from mere considerations of respect, that I should treat in the same way such papers as have contracted an accidental claim to our reverence by having holy names printed or written upon them; but which we cannot preserve, either on account of their accumulation, or on account of the opinions which they advocate. Wicked, obscene, or infidel books may make a very free use of the name of God, sufficient to deter one from putting them to the various uses of waste-paper, and yet calling all the more loudly for utter annihilation. Such books I would respectfully burn.

But here I am in a fix. I happen to reside at Pontydwdlm; and my poor countrymen, who the other day let loose a mad-bull on an unsuspecting Cockney who was fishing on the Sabbath for red-herrings in our sparkling Dwdlm (the poor fellows were quite drunk, according to their immemorial usage on Sunday afternoons; but drunk or sober, they would have done the same on principle), would certainly burn me if they caught me burning Bibles. And I suspect this feeling exists outside the Principality. Mesdames Gamp and Harris are doing their little utmost to stir up the English mob to the same rational course of conduct; and its bigotry is easily fired, since its only religion is Sabbath and Bible worship. It seems, indeed, that this is all that is requisite

to make a good Protestant: Te-Kiki-Kiki, the New Zealand chief who serves before the mast in the Betsy-Nancy, "has evidently been thoroughly instructed in Christianity, because he refuses to scrub decks on the Sabbath." We get into a Sunday-train on a northern railway, where we find two half-drunken farmers talking so blasphemously and obscenely, that, to preserve our ears from pollution, we put our head out of window and whistle. We are savagely interrupted by one of the ogres, who threatens to pitch us out of the window-" Dom thee, dost thee not know it's the Sabbath?" Absolutely, then, we are afraid to make away with the Bibles in the mode which we conscientiously consider the most respectful. What, then, are we to do with them?

"Do with them?" indignantly breaks in the Protestant, "why, give them away. There are hungry souls in want of the bread of life. Destroy it at your peril." "My good sir," we answer, "just reflect a moment. Suppose some blasphemer were to make a translation of the Song of Solomon, or of one of St. Paul's Epistles, and were in every possible place to give an indelicate or a ridiculous turn to the expression of the sacred writer, what would you do with any copies of the book that might fall into your hands? The case is precisely the same with your Bible. It has been translated by men who have sought to give a blasphemous and abominable turn to all expressions which appeared to suit their purpose. I see you laugh at me, as totally unworthy of credit; then, if you will not believe me, at least believe one of your own writers, believe at least your own archbishop, believe the reviewer who quotes him in the October Number of the Blue and Buff for this year: Dr. Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his work on Apostolic Preaching, p. 186, third edition, note, says of the text, 1 Cor. ix. 27: This is one of the many passages which have suffered by the general bias of the age in which our translation was made. That general bias, (proceeds the Edinburgh reviewer) was Calvinistic-the bias, in our opinion, most thoroughly at variance with the spirit of the Gospel.'"

Now I put to the candid Protestant this case: A simple Christian, if he takes up a book and finds it impure, though he may yield to temptation and read it, is in no danger of accepting it as of religious authority: but a simple Christian, if he takes up what is given him as inspired Scripture, and finds that its tendency and bias is to Calvinism, or fatalism, or antinomianism, is in danger of believing this ism to be the revealed truth of God. Hence a book that professes to be the Bible, and yet is in places falsified so as to insinuate a false doctrine, which is not by any natural and known characteristic distinguishable as such, is a greater lie, a more blasphemous offender against the truth, than even a Bible paraphrased by a devil's chaplain so as to speak the language of Little's poems. Such a lie, such a blasphemy, by the confession of your own archbishop, is your Protestant Bible. You threaten to cut our throats if we, out of reverence for the holy names it contains and the mass of truth which shines in it, respectfully burn it. What are we to do with it?

Will any kind Protestant give me a serious and practical answer? I am in earnest, though I write flippantly.—Yours, &c.

Pontydwdlm, Nov. 21, 1855.

RICHARD AP WILLIAM.