Germany's own clergy willing drudges to his despotic rule. But the spirit of the age was one of advancement, and the superior clergy were loud in their complaints of political restrictions and disabilities. They obtained both freedom and favour in overflowing measure; and how have this freedom and power been employed? In building up the kingdom of Christ upon earth? or in establishing peace and harmony among the various confessors of his name? No; but in extending and confirming the power of the pope, and of his generals, the Jesuits; in crushing the civil and political liberties of the people; in casting suspicion on every free, intellectual movement; and in striving to obscure, if they could not extinguish, the light of science. The pure, simple, and, by all, comprehensible gospel, is dangerous, forsooth, to the people. It must therefore be first prepared and worked up into a system of scholastic subtleties and Jesuitical ambiguities, that the people may receive it only through the medium of the priests, and according to the prescription of the hierarchy. Rome is resolved to rule, and the people must be retained in the darkness of a blind credulity, to ensure the necessity of such a guide. Contrive but to darken the people's mind; cripple their judgment and enslave their courage; and then, if you can succeed in sowing seeds of suspicion in the hearts of their rulers, you pave the way of the Jesuits, and prepare a fair field for the exercise of their most refined arts of policy. Do these words sound harshly in the ears of men who, under the influence of papal dread, have learned basely to deny the light which science once forced upon them, and shamelessly lend themselves to encourage the grossest superstition? Behold the apostles of the Lord. They carried under the banner of peace the saving message of redemption from the power of sin and error, to all nations; and the power of truth hurled the idols from their altars. Even in our own day, there are yet to be found God-inspired men who courageously venture life itself on the burning plains of Africa, in order to extirpate. fetish-worship, which is a disgrace even to the degraded negro. But what is the employment of our superior clergy since their restoration to wealth, dignity, and power? The exhibition of an old rag, a fetish, on a Christian altar, as an object of reverence and worship to the ignorant, blindly-credulous multitude; and a religious body is not ashamed to justify the perpetration of such horrors in sacred places! A highly-gifted clergyman employs all his eloquence in adjuring heaven and hell, and the powers of this world, to arm themselves against men who dare to obey God's first commandment in preference to a delusion of priestcraft! Nay, so far is he carried by his holy zeal, as to denounce from the altar all those who, in the spirit of faithful subjects, are aiming to promote the advancement of civil and political rights, and to restrain the usurpations of the hierarchy, as not only condemned by church censure, but as revolutionists and contemners of monarchy; in plain terms, as guilty of high treason! In other dioceses, signatures are being sought to petitions, addressed to both the German confederation and their respective princes, in which protection is sought against that evil press' to which the same hierarchy owes so deep a debt for services rendered but a few years since, against those very powers now called upon to crush it. But why do not the clergy summon to their aid those spiritual assistants, over which they so lately held a review? Their numbers were announced at half a million; and surely such a host, assembled on one point, and for one special object, must be able to annihilate the obnoxious spirit of German freedom in a single onset. Such a strife were at least fair and frank; but are we not tempted to doubt the existence of truth in the world, when learned men are found endeavouring to amuse us with the disingenuous theory of a great distinction existing between worship and adoration? Is it possible that these gentlemen have never visited any resort of pilgrims, and therefore never witnessed the natural ebullitions of feeling, and the aberrations produced by an alarmed conscience, in a blindly-credulous and unenlightened concourse? Whoever will lay his hand on his heart, must own, to his own mind at least, that he himself can affix no faith to the real carrying out of this abstract theory. But why should not the people be deceived, if a pious end be thereby attained? Why, for example, may not the miracle-working coat have not only resisted the attacks of moths, mites, and the whole host of tiny tenebriones, during eighteen hundred years, but have likewise neutralized the influence of damp, and carbonic-acid gas? And even should it be proved, that in our Saviour's days the art of making a robe of such materials, and so artificial in construction, was unknown; and should it be objected, that Christ himself would assuredly have expended the money more characteristically than by the purchase of so highlywrought a garment, both scruples are done away with by the statement that the robe was self-made, and self-hid, too, at the period of Treves' destruction. Nor, after all, are these miracles half so wonderful as that of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, or of Christ's 'table-cloth,' which I have myself seen in St. John's de Lateran; or of the chapel of Loretto, which a couple of angels carried by night across the Adriatic. May God preserve to us, poor Germans, enlightened and pious princes; and, at the same time, guard the people against slackening their efforts in the pursuit of mental culture and moral improvement: for thus only can we hope to escape the state to which Spain and Italy (so highly favoured as they are by nature) have yet been reduced. The light of Christianity cannot fail to win its way into the kingdom of darkness, if we persevere to worship God in spirit and in truth. With these words I take my leave of a church, the efforts and aims of which I cannot reconcile with the spirit of Jesus Christ. 110 CHAPTER VI. REFORMATION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). The Holy Coat of Treves-Occasion of its Exhibition-Pamphlets of Drs. Gildemeister and Sybel-Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Holy Coat-Four Tests-Conclusive Evidence of the Imposture -St. Peter's Chair at Venice-History of the Holy Coat-Its alleged Removal from Palestine by the Empress Helena-Ingenious Theory of its Previous Preservation-Want of Documentary Evidence-Popular Legends-Extract from the Authorised Litany -Coat of Treves not Genuine according to Papal Decision-A Holy Coat in England-Brief Notices of other Garments, severally declared by their Possessors to be the Holy Coat. IF Bishop Arnoldi's object were to attract the eyes of all Europe to his favourite relic, he has assuredly accomplished his purpose; for millions to whom its very existence was previously unknown, have, during the last eighteen months, seen, read, or heard things concerning it, calculated to produce that state of feeling described in Revelations xiii. 3, "All men wondered after the beast." Doubtless some then gazed with admiring wonder (deluded by the false miracles), and many with indignant wonder, at the blasphemous presumption and daring defiance of the common sense of mankind; and a similar universal wonder, arising from similarly diverse causes, pervaded the civilised world when the exhibition of the surreptitious garment was announced, and persevered in, notwithstanding the indignation or scoffs of thousands upon thousands. Many and great evils have undeniably resulted to the bodies and souls of vast numbers, from this most unwise revival, by Bishop Arnoldi, in the nineteenth century, of the Tetzelian tactics, the anti-Roman effects of which were so deeply felt in the sixteenth. Yet never, perhaps, were the power and will of God to bring good out of evil more conspicuously displayed than on this occasion. The blind infatuation of one man has been made the means of opening the eyes of thousands to the incurable fatuity of Rome's counsels. The untimely production of one pious fraud has led to the detection and exposure of a hundred others; and the attempt to build up and beautify one individual Roman temple, has issued in the disseverment of a very large portion from her "universal church," and laid open to public view so many rotten beams and tottering pillars in the ancient structure, that Rome's best friends must begin to doubt. whether, if even this last "deadly wound should be healed," it can be for more than "a short time." As, therefore, the so-called "unseamed coat" has been the innocent, unconscious instrument of producing such great effects, some statement respecting its history, appearance, and pretensions, seems indispensable to a work professing to give a detailed account of the commotions to which it has given rise. Happily, the learned labours of two distinguished professors at the university of Bonn, Drs. Gildemeister and Sybel, render the task comparatively easy. Their two pamphlets have long been familiar to every German scholar who feels an interest in the late events; and they have therein given such large and multitudinous extracts from both German and Latin authors, that their assertions must be regarded as indisputable authority.* It is, * A just tribute to their merits is paid by Mr. Laing in his "Notes on the Pilgrimage to Treves," when he says, page xi., "The learning, |