ON THE THIRD POSSIBLE CHURCH,

OR THE

CHURCH OF ANTICHRIST.

Ecclesia Cattolica non, ma il Papismo denunciamo, perchè suggerito dal interesse, perchè fortificato dalla menzogna, perchè radicato dal piu abbominevole despotismo, perchè contrario al diritto e ai titoli incommunicabili di Cristo, ed alla tranquillità d'ogni Chiesa e d'ogni Stato.-SPANZOTTL

Thus, on the depluming of the Pope, every bird had his own feather: in the partage whereof, what he had gotten by sacrilege, was restored to Christ; what by usurpation, was given to the King, the (National) Church and the State; what by oppression, was remitted to each particular Christian.-Fuller's Church History of Britain, Book v.

ON THE CHURCH, NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL.

If our forefathers were annoyed with the cant of over-boiling zeal, arising out of the belief, that the Pope is Antichrist, and likewise (sexu mutato) the Harlot of Babylon: we are more endangered by the twaddle of humid charity, which (some years ago at least) used to drizzle, a something between mist and small rain, from the higher region of our Church atmosphere. It was sanctioned, I mean, both in the pulpit and the senate by sundry dignitaries, whose horror of Jacobinism during the then panic of property led them to adopt the principles and language of Laud and his faction. And once more the Church of Rome, in contrast with Protestant dissenters, became "a right dear, though erring sister." And the heaviest charge against the Romish Pontificate was, that the Italian politics and nepotism of a series of Popes had converted so great a good into an intolerable grievance. We were reminded that Grotius and Leibnitz had regarded a visible head of the Catholic Church as most desirable; that they, and with them more than one Primate of our own

Church, yearned for a conciliating settlement of the differences between the Romish and Protestant Churches; and mainly in order that there might exist really, as well as nominally, a visible head of the Church Universal, a fixt centre of unity. Of course the tenet that the Pope was in any sense the Antichrist predicted by Paul was decried as fanatical and Puritanical cant.

Now it is a duty of Christian charity to presume that the men, who in the present day employ this language, are, or believe themselves to be, Christians; and that they do not privately think that St. Paul, in the two celebrated passages of his First and Second Epistles to the Church at Thessalonica (I. iv. 13–18; II. ii. 1–12), practised a ruse de guerre, and meant only by throwing the fulfilment beyond the life of the present generation, and by a terrific detail of the horrors and calamities that were to precede it, to damp the impatience, and silence the objections, excited by the expectation and the delay of our Lord's personal re-appearance. Again: as the persons, of whom I have been speaking, are well-educated men and men of sober minds, it may be safely taken for granted that they do not understand by Antichrist any nondescript monster, or suppose it to be the proper name or designation of some one individual man or devil exclusively. The Christians of the second century, sharing in a delusion that prevailed over the whole Roman Empire, believed that Nero would come to life again, and be Antichrist: and I have been informed that a learned clergyman of our own times, endowed with the gift of prophecy by assiduous study of the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse, asserts the same thing of Napoleon Bonaparte.

But, as before said, it would be calumnious to attribute such pitiable fanaticism to the parties here in question. And to them I venture to affirm that if by Antichrist be meant—what alone can rationally be meant-a power in the Christian Church, which in the name of Christ, and at once pretending and usurping his authority, is systematically subversive of the essential and distinguishing characters and purposes of the Christian Church: then, if the Papacy, and the Romish hierarchy as far as it is Papal, be not Antichrist, the guilt of schism in its most aggravated form lies on the authors of the Reformation. For nothing less than this could have justified so tremendous a rent in the Catholic Church with all its foreseen most calamitous consequences. And

so Luther himself thought; and so thought Wicliff before him. Only in the conviction that Christianity itself was at stake,— that the cause was that of Christ in conflict with Antichrist,— could, or did, even the lion-hearted Luther with unquailed spirit avow to himself;-I bring not peace, but a sword into the world. It is my full conviction, a conviction formed after a long and patient study of the subject in detail;—and if in support of this competence I only add that I have read, and with care, the Summa Theologiæ of Aquinas, and compared the system with the statements of Arnauld and Bossuet, the number of those who in the present much-reading, but not very hard-reading, age would feel themselves entitled to dispute my claim, will not, perhaps, be very formidable;-it is, I repeat, my full conviction that the rites and doctrines, the agenda et credenda, of the Roman Catholics, could we separate them from the adulterating ingredients combined with, and the use made of, them by the sacerdotal Mamelukes of the Romish monarchy for the support of the Papacy and Papal hierarchy, would neither have brought about, nor have sufficed to justify, the convulsive separation under Leo X. Nay, that if they were fairly, and in the light of a sound philosophy, compared with either of the two main divisions of Protestantism, as it now exists in this country, that is, with the fashionable doctrines and interpretations of the Arminian and Grotian school on the one hand, and with the tenets and language of the modern Calvinists on the other, an enlightened disciple of John and of Paul would be perplexed which of the three to prefer as the least unlike the profound and sublime system he had learned from his great masters. And in this comparison I leave out of view the extreme sects of Protestantism, whether of the frigid or of the torrid zone, Socinian or fanatic.

During the summer of last year, I made the tour of Holland, Flanders, and up the Rhine as far as Bergen, and among the few notes then taken, I find the following:- Every fresh opportunity of examining the Roman Catholic religion on the spot, every new fact that presents itself to my notice, increases my conviction that its immediate basis and the true grounds of its continuance are to be found in the wickedness, ignorance, and wretchedness of the many; and that the producing and continuing cause of this deplorable state is, that it is the interest of the Romish priesthood that so it should remain, as the surest, and, in fact,

only support of the Papal sovereignty and influence against the civil powers, and the reforms wished for by the more enlightened governments, as well as by all the better informed and wealthier class of Roman Catholics generally. And as parts of the same policy, and equally indispensable to the interests of the Papal Crown, are the ignorance, grossness, excessive number and poverty of the lower ecclesiastics themselves, the religious orders included. When I say the Pope, I understand the Papal hierarchy, which is, in truth, the dilated Pope and in this sense only, and not of the individual priest or friar at Rome, can a wise man be supposed to use the word."-Cologne, July 2, 1828.

I feel it as no small comfort and confirmation to know that the same view of the subject is taken, the same conviction entertained, by a large and increasing number in the Roman Catholic communion itself, in Germany, France, Italy, and even in Spain; and that no inconsiderable portion of this number consists of men who are not only pious as Christians, but zealous as Roman Catholics; and who would contemplate with as much horror a reform from their Church, as they look with earnest aspirations and desires towards a reform in the Church. Proof of this may be found in the learned work intituled Disordini morali e politici della Corte di Roma-evidently the work of a zealous Romanist, and from the ecclesiastical erudition displayed in the volumes, probably a priest. Nay, from the angry aversion with which the foul heresies of those sons of perdition, Luther and Calvin, are mentioned, and his very faint and qualified censure of the persecution of the Albigenses and Waldenses, I am obliged to infer that the writer's attachment to his communion was zealous even to bigotry.

The disorders denounced by him are :—

1. The pretension of the Papacy to temporal power and sovereignty, directly or as the pretended consequence of spiritual dominion; and as furnishing occasion to this, even the retention of the primacy in honor over all other Bishops, after Rome had ceased to be the metropolis of Christendom, is noticed as a subject of regret.

2. The boast of Papal infallibility.

3. The derivation of the Episcopal power from the Papal, and the dependence of Bishops on the Pope, rightly named the evil of a false centre.

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 grievance— the 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 monarch 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