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should consent to defer; "otherwise," said he, "the Church, which its Divine Founder intended to be the household of love, and which He could not leave, and has not left, to be distracted by dissent and distressed by doubt, must become the prey of interminable disputes, and be a house divided against itself, and therefore must fall." He proceeded to point out the pernicious consequences to which men had been led by the unconstrained exercise of private judgment, in the Protestant societies of England, Scotland, Switzerland, and Germany. This was an easy matter, and the remarks he made on the necessary consequences of the uncontrolled use of private judgment, could not, I think, have failed to make a deep impression upon those who are disposed to maintain, in unqualified terms, this so-called Protestant axiom, which affords the greatest advantage to the champions of popery.

His subsequent observations were less successful ; indeed these controversialists, who are more fortunate in refutation, seem to fall into the error which they justly condemn, when they set about constructing a system of their own. Thus, in defining the papal authority, they differ so much from one another and from themselves, and above all from the Pope, that they seem to allow themselves the free exercise of private judgment in this all-important matter 2.

2 C'est l'Eglise elle-même et les papes qui ont laissé aux fidèles cette liberté d'opinion.

The Church, they say, is a monarchy; but what the nature and extent of the powers of the monarch is, neither he nor his subjects can tell! I have enquired not only of the Provincial of the Jesuits, but also of other ecclesiastics, what their opinion is concerning the temporal authority of the Pope, and I find they hold that the papal supremacy, in temporalibus, "was a very good and necessary thing for the period in which it was exercised;" but, in direct contradiction to the Pope's own assertions, it "is not a matter of faith, but of opinion; and not applicable in practice to the present times." Times, however, proverbially change; but Rome is unchangeable; and they deny not that the period, in which it may be expedient to be exercised, may recur. By asserting the necessity of the temporal supremacy of the Pope in the past, they concede the possibility of its exercise in the future.

Again, on the question of infallibility they are at variance with one another and with themselves. The Provincial of the Jesuits replied to my queries on this subject by stating that the Pope is the conservator of the faith of the Church, not its dictator; that he is its mouth and organ, and that when he has spoken ex cathedrá, his effatum does not immediately take effect, but waits for the sanction, either tacit or expressed, of the whole episcopal body of Christendom. He specified the Bull, Auctorem Fidei, directed against Scipio Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, and

his Italian reforms, as having complete validity, because there had been no remonstrance against it. On the other hand, it ought to be remembered, that the popes themselves, in the more ancient and more famous, and frequently reiterated Bull, In Cœná Domini, excommunicate, ipso facto, all persons who venture to appeal from a Pope's Bull to a General Council, i. e. who dare to ask for the general opinion of the Catholic Episcopate on any matter on which the Pope has spoken! Again, the Jesuit is at variance on this subject with his former self; he frankly owned to me that some time since he had subscribed the Gallican Articles, in which the Pope's independent infallibility is denied, or, as they express it, son jugement n'est pas irréformable; and he now avows to me his conviction that the Gallican Articles are not worth a straw, and he asserts, that at present they are not taught in any ecclesiastical seminary in France-though the Law (Art. Organ. Siii. 24) requires them to be subscribed by the Professors in all.

Even Bossuet himself, the great writer on the Variations, as he terms them, of Protestant Churches,— that most instructive of all books for Protestantshas varied from himself on this subject. Bossuet, as De Maistre shows in his work on the Gallican Church, affirmed, in his celebrated sermon on the Unity of

$ See note to p. 96, at end.

the Church, that no pope had ever fallen into heresy; and yet he afterwards made a catalogue of the here→ sies which popes had held!

I have observed that Romanist controversialists have a convenient way of getting rid of objections on this and similar matters concerning the papacy: Cite to them the cases of popes Liberius, Vigilius, and Honorius I., who have been generally believed by the world to this day to have lapsed into heresy, the first into Arianism, the second into Eutychianism, the third into the error of the Monothelites, and they reply either that some MS. has been recently discovered, or some learned treatise lately published, which sets these matters in a new light. Thus Cardinal Mai and his researches in the Vatican are very useful in case of a difficulty.

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The distinction they make between matters of faith and opinion seems to open a wide door to much very pernicious teaching on some of the most serious questions of practical religion. I detailed briefly to Père Boulanger the substance of what I had heard in the sermons on the Assumption above noticed, and asked him whether he did not think that the results of unscriptural, and, as it appeared to me, anti-scriptural teaching on so solemn a subject as the true Mediatorship between God and man must

La porte n'est pas si large qu'on pourrait le croire; car toutes ces matières sont déterminées par l'Eglise d'une manière précise et rigoureuse.

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be very baneful as far as regards the practice of the people, and highly offensive to Almighty God. He did not enter into the question of the truth of the doctrine there propounded, but said that there were many things left open by the Church, which had not pronounced any authoritative judgment upon them. Here, then, is a broad arena expanded for private judgment to expatiate and disport itself upon in its wildest vagaries, from the removal of the limits fixed by the principle of Scripture sufficiency in matters of faith.

He made a similar reply when I enquired how the Bishops of France could allow the books and processions and fêtes which are now so common, in honour of the robe of Argenteuil, in the very envi. rons of the metropolis; how could they reconcile it with their duty to the people committed to their charge, to permit them to go astray, and indeed to encourage them to seek after a delusion propounded as an object of religious veneration? He said that this again was a point upon which the Church pronounced no judgment; she thought it best to leave it an open question, and without authorizing the supposed relic, she might well believe that it supplied a very useful occasion and inducement to pious exercises and good works. Besides, sir, to show you that something may be said in favour of the robe, I had with me here a few days since a young English peer, now under education with our order at

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