Catholic doctrine in his controversy with St. Cyprian, which was doubtless the case; and next, that there was room for doubt, whether Cyprian was ever excommunicated at all, and he referred to a recent publication as one of great learning on this subject. And when, further, I mentioned the expressions of Firmilian, Bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, to the same Pope Stephanus, Lites quantas parásti per Ecclesias mundi, peccatum quam magnum exaggerásti quando te a tot gregibus scidisti, excidisti enim teipsum! as a plain proof that Pope Stephanus had proceeded to an act of excommunication; he at first questioned the genuineness of that epistle, and then, supposing it genuine, made no scruple of rejecting the authority of Firmilian as of no importance whatever, even on a matter of fact!

I have been struck, by the way, with this capricious rejecting of authority by Romish ecclesiastics, even in the same breath with which they charge Protestants with a wanton exercise of private judgment of which they of the Church of England, at least, are no more guilty than the Church of Rome. He seemed

Les Catholiques ont plus de liberté que toutes les sectes chrétiennes pour exercer le jugement privé, parce qu'ils peuvent l'exercer en toute sureté dès qu'ils admettent un tribunal infaillible qui prononce au dernier ressort. Les ecclésiastiques ne soumettent jamais à leur raison personnelle que les questions laissées par la sagesse du SaintSiège ouvertes à la controverse. Une autre reflexion: comment invoquer l'autorité de l'Eglise quand on raisonne avec un Protestant qui ne l'admet pas ?

to me to afford another instance of this practice, when I said that we, of the English Church, revered the same fundamental principles of Christianity as himself; that we venerated the sacred Scriptures ; that we received the three Creeds, and the first four general Councils; that we acknowledged universal primitive tradition as the channel of evangelical truth and of apostolic order; that we accepted the holy Orders and Baptism of the Church of Rome, and recognized the Church of Rome to be an apostolic Church, and the Bishop of Rome as holding an apostolic see; that we had not separated ourselves from the Church of Rome, but had been excommunicated by it because we would not-and could not-submit to her unscriptural terms of communion; and that we would gladly acknowledge and revere the Bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter ought to be reverenced, provided he would act in the spirit of St. Peter, and of the ancient Bishops of Rome; and that we should be glad to meet him, and all true Catholics, on the common ground of the apostolic age of Christianity. To all which he rejoined, that we, "Protestants, had very exaggerated notions of what they, Catholics, accorded to the Roman see. For example, they had no faith, he said, in the Pope's personal infallibility even as Pope; they did not regard him as a revealer of the Divine will; that it would be absurd to suppose that God would work a perpetual miracle to preserve even the Bishop of Rome from error; he was only the

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guardian and interpreter of the tradition of the Church." When I expressed my doubt whether this was the Pope's own view of his own powers, and referred to the Bishop of Rome's unequivocal claims of spiritual and temporal supremacy in his Jus Canonicum, he said, that the decrees of the canon law were valid with respect to discipline, but were of no weight in contravention of the dogmatic principles of the Church. This seemed to me another exercise of private judgment on his part, surpassing any ever made use of by any sound and enlightened Protestant.

The distinction between doctrine and discipline', which appears to give much scope for illusions, (for who can define where doctrine ends, and discipline begins?) is the common resort of Roman controversialists, when pressed with the fact of the non-acceptance in France of some of the decrees of the Council of Trent, and of the famous Bull, In Cœna Domini. Their rejoinder is, that the dogmatic canons have always been received here, and that the non-reception applies to the disciplinarian ones alone. However, this exception is scarcely necessary at present, for with the dissolution of the Gallican Church the council of Trent has now gained universal supremacy in this country; and the temporal claims of the Bulls, In Coena Domini, and Unam Sanctam, &c., are reserved by the papacy for a convenient 7 See Note to p. 26, at end.

season, and that, probably, in her own estimation at least, not very distant.

My host spoke with much praise of the labours of English theologians, especially Bishop Pearson, in the illustration of Christian antiquity. He expressed an earnest desire to see a complete English edition of the works of the Venerable Bede; he evidently wished the Church of England to be in the same position as it was in Bede's age, and he employed a kind of theological sorites to prove that it ought to be so. "You profess," he said, a reverence for the apostolic Fathers; you respect, therefore, their immediate successors, Ignatius, Irenæus, Cyprian, and therefore Augustine, therefore Gregory the Great, therefore Augustine of Canterbury-and where will you stop? You must come to Bede, and Alcuin, and Becket, for which last he professed unbounded admiration, if you are true to your own principles, and you must come at length to what we are, and to what Rome is at the present day." (This soritic reasoning, by the way, is what Cicero calls captiosissimum genus argumentandi.) I told him we should be happy to do so as far as Holy Scripture allowed us; but we could not find there that there exists any authority independent of a direct Revelation, and none such was now to be expected, to propound articles of faith not found in Scripture, and still less in opposition to it. He said that Rome was disposed to make all advances towards us that she could consistently do;

she was willing, as he expressed it, "to open her arms to us, but she could not move her feet." He asked my opinion of the real presence; and when I had told him that the Church of England, in her Catechism, teaches that the body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper, but that she did not venture to determine in what manner they were there present, but that it was not her opinion that they were there present in a bodily substance,-"Well, sir," he said, "it is a satisfaction to converse on these topics, and to find that there are so many points in common between us, and I may say in the language of St. Augustine, that although you are not du CORPS de l'Eglise, vous êtes bien de l'ÂME."

I have omitted to mention, that before this visit I went to a large establishment of French missionaries, especially designed for China and the East Indies, (Rue de Bac, No. 120,) where I saw one of the principal among them, the director, le Père Dubois, a very venerable person, of great vigour and spirit, and eighty years of age, whose room looked into a beautiful garden, and was hung with a kind of arras representing Chinese scenes; his great heroes among the British nation were Father Mathew and Daniel O'Connell. This is the common feeling in France, in the religious world at least. He appeared to take special pleasure in contrasting, with a tone of gentle irony, the difference between himself and