heretics ever do, to the Civil Powers. The Arian Schism was formed; it was protected by Emperor after Emperor. Arianism became a State tool against the Catholic Church. It infected Constantinople; it spread into Italy and Spain; it lasted for centuries. But where is it now? And where now is the Creed of Nicæa? The Homöousion is at this day in the heart of the whole Church throughout the world. So will it be with the Council of the Vatican. What the Council of Florence implicitly declared, and the Council of Trent assumed as of faith, that the Council of the Vatican explicitly defined. It is very true that since the Council of Constance, that is, since the great schism of the West, when the Civil powers of Europe, for a time, shook the visible unity of the Church by endeavouring to lessen the authority of its Head, the power of the Roman Pontiff has steadily consolidated itself.in the intellect and the will of the Church. was believed from the beginning has been now forced into explicit declaration. But while the Church has thus been more and more defining its faith with a Divine precision, the world has wandered off farther and farther into the wilderness of unbelief. The Council of Trent defined the particular doctrines denied by Luther's Reformation. But it did not deal with the master principle on which it rested. The chief character of the sixteenth century was the denial of the Divine authority of the Church, secured to it in virtue of a perpetual assistance of the Spirit of Truth. Three hundred years have unfolded the consequences of this denial. It is nearly complete in the rationalism and infidelity of Germany. The' Cen

What

turia prærogativa' has a mournful privilege of precedence in the Comitia of unbelievers. It has run its course, too, in Switzerland; and I must add, with sadness, it is running its course in the widespread doubt which is undermining the Christianity of England. Day after day I hear the words, 'I wish I knew what to believe, and why to believe anything:' and this from some of the noblest and most masculine natures, who recoil from the incoherence and contradiction of teachers who gainsay one another. But here is a subject on which I have no desire to enter. If I were asked to say what is the chief intellectual malady of England and of the world at this day, I should say, ubiquitous, universal doubt, an uncertainty which came in like a flood after the rejection of the Divine certainty of Faith. This uncertainty has already led multitudes to an entire rejection of Christianity; and they have not rested even in Deism. They have gone on to the rejection even of natural religion. They have no certainty that they have a conscience, or a will, or a soul, or a law of morality, or that there is a God. Three hundred years hence, when men look back upon the Council of the Vatican, as they now. look back upon the Council of Trent-I will say even thirty years hence, when the noise and dust of the present conflict is laid,—they who have faith left in them will recognise the Divine guidance under which the Council of the Vatican declared the existence of God, with all the truths radiating from it, as resting upon the witness of the visible world; and also the Divine certainty of the Faith, as resting upon the witness of the Visible Church, and finding its per

petual and infallible expression in the voice of its Visible Head.

But it is now more than time to sum up what I hope has been sufficiently proved.

My first answer to the charge that the Vatican Council has made it impossible for Catholics to render a loyal civil allegiance, is that the Vatican Council has not touched our civil allegiance at all; that the laws which govern our civil allegiance are as old as the revelation of Christianity, and are regulated by the Divine consti-. tution of the Church and the immutable duties of natural morality. We were bound by all these obligations before the Vatican Council existed. They are of Divine institution, and are beyond all change, being in themselves unchangeable. I have shown, I hope, that in the conflicts of the Civil Powers with the Church, the causes have arisen, not from acts of the Church, but from such acts as the Constitutions of Clarendon, the claim of Investitures, the creation of Royal Courts of final appeal, and the the like; that these invasions of the Spiritual domain ever have been from the attempts of Governments to subject the Church to their own jurisdiction; and now more than ever, from an universal and simultaneous conspiracy against it. A leader of this conspiracy said the other day, 'The net is now drawn so close about the Church of Rome that if it escape this time I will believe it to be Divine.' If God grant him life, I have hope of his conversion. For, that the Church of Rome will escape out of the net is certain, and that for two reasons: first, for the same reason why its Divine Head' rose again from the grave-'it was not possible that

1

He should be holden by it;' and next, because the Civil Governments, that are now conspiring against it, are preparing for their own dissolution.

Finally, I

have given the true and evident reason why, when some six hundred Bishops from the ends of the Church were gathered together, they defined the Infallibility of their Head—' Visum est Spiritui Sancto et nobis.'

1 Acts ii. 24.

CONCLUSION.

AND now there only remains for me the hardest and saddest part of the task, which has not been sought by me, but has been forced upon me. A few months ago

I could not have believed that I should have ever

written these pages. I have never written any with more pain, and none of them have cost me so much as that which I am about to write.

Thus far I have endeavoured to confine myself to the subject-matter of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet; but before I end, I feel bound by an imperative duty to lay before him, in behalf of his Catholic fellow-countrymen, the nature of the act which he has done.

He has not only invited, but instigated Catholics to rise against the Divine authority of the Catholic Church. He has endeavoured to create divisions among them. If Mr. Gladstone does not believe the authority of the Catholic Church to be Divine, he knows that they do.

If he thinks such a rising to be 'moral and mental freedom,' he knows that they believe it to be what his own Litany calls schism, heresy, and deadly sin.' If he believes religious separations to be lawful, he knows that they believe them to be violations of the Divine law. I am compelled therefore to say that this is at least an act of signal rashness.

No man has watched Mr. Gladstone's career as a statesman with a more generous and disinterested