tice, and as such would have been protected from all molestation.'

I have drawn this out, because a question absolutely chimerical has been raised to disturb the confidence of the English people in their Catholic fellow-countrymen. And I have given the reason and the principle upon which, if the Catholics were to-morrow the 'Imperial race' in these Kingdoms, they would not use political power to molest the divided and hereditary religious state of our people. We should not shut one of their Churches, or Colleges, or Schools. They would have the same liberties we enjoy as a minority. I hope the Nonconformists of England are prepared to say the same. As we are in days when some are 'invited,' and some are 'expected,' and some are 'required' to speak out, I will ask my fellow-countrymen of all religious kinds to be as frank as I am.

XIII. I have now given, I hope, sufficient evidence to prove the assertion made in the second letter quoted at the outset of these pages; namely:—

'That the relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers have been fixed immutably from the beginning, because

1 Our older writers, such as Bellarmine and Suarez, when treating of this subject, had before their eyes a generation of men who all had been in the unity of the faith. Their separation therefore was formal and wilful. Their separation from the unity of the Church did not release the conscience from its jurisdiction. But if Bellarmine and Suarez were living at this day, they would have to treat of a question differing in all its moral conditions. What I have here laid down is founded upon the principles they taught, applied to our times. Cardinal Tarquini, in treating the same matter, has dealt with it as it has been treated here. Juris Eccl. Publ. Institutiones, p. 78.

they arise out of the Divine constitution of the Church, and out of the civil society of the natural order.'

And we have also seen how far from the truth are the confident assertions put forward lately, that the Church ascribes to its head Supreme Temporal as well as Supreme Spiritual Power.

Further, we have seen with what strange want of reflection and of depth the Pontifical acts of the old Catholic world are transferred per saltum to a world which has ceased, in its public life and laws, to be Catholic, I may almost say, to be even Christian.

Finally, I have shown, I hope, what are the relations of the Church to the Civil Powers of the world; and I have given evidence to prove that those relations have been fixed from the beginning by reason of the Divine constitution of the Church, and have been declared by Councils, not only before the Council of the Vatican, but before the Council of Trent; and, therefore, that to charge upon the Vatican Council a change in these relations is not only an assertion without proof, but an assertion contrary to historical fact.

CHAPTER III.

AGGRESSIONS OF THE CIVIL POWER.

MR. GLADSTONE says:—

'It is the peculiarity of Roman theology that, by thrusting itself into the temporal domain, it naturally, and even necessarily, comes to be a frequent theme of political discussion. To quiet-minded Roman Catholics it must be a subject of infinite annoyance that their religion is on this ground more than any other the subject of criticism; more than any other the occasion of conflicts with the State and of civil disquietude. I feel sincerely how much hardship their case entails, but this hardship is brought upon them altogether by the conduct of the authorities of their own Church.''

His pamphlet from beginning to end bristles with the same accusations against the Catholic Church. His whole argument might be entitled, 'Reasons to show that in all Conflicts the Christian Church is always in the wrong, and the Civil State always in the right; or, 'On the outrageous Claims' and 'Exorbitances of Papal Assumptions,' contrasted with the Innocence and Infallibility of Civil States.' This seems to me to be history read upside down; and not history only, but also Christianity. I can hardly persuade myself that Mr. Gladstone would contend that even in the Constitutions of Clarendon St. Thomas of Canterbury was 3 Ibid. p. 25.

1 Vatican Decrees, p. 9.

1

2 Ibid. p. II.

'Mr. Gladstone says, upon what evidence I do not know, 'The Constitutions of Clarendon, cursed from the Papal Throne, were the

the aggressor, and Henry II. was within the law; or that either the Pope or Archbishop Langton began the conflict with the 'Papal minion John;' or, again, that in the question of Investitures and Ecclesiastical Simony, the Emperors of Germany were on the side. of law and justice, and St. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. were aggressors. And yet all this is necessary to his argument. If he is not prepared to maintain this, the whole foundation is gone. But I do not know how any man who believes in the Divine office of the Christian Church can maintain such a thesis. And I have always believed that Mr. Gladstone does so believe the Christian Church to have a Divine office, which, within some limit at least, is independent of all human authority.

But as the contention before us is not of the past so much as of the present, I will come to the facts of the days in which we live.

My third proposition, then, is, that any collisions now existing between the Catholic Church and the States of Europe have been brought on by changes, not on the part of the Church, much less of the Vatican Council, but on the part of the Civil Powers, and that by reason of a systematic conspiracy against the Holy

work of the English Bishops.* St. Thomas himself says that 'Richard de Luci and Jocelin de Balliol, the abettors of the Royal tyranny, were the fabricators of those heretical pravities.' Herbert of Bosham, who was present at Clarendon, says that they were the work of 'certain nobles (proceres) or chief-men of the kingdom.' The Bishops were indeed terrified into submitting to them, but the Constitutions were in no sense their work.

* Vatican Decrees, pp. 57, 58.

Ep. St. Thomæ, tom. iii. p. 12, ed. Giles, 1815Vita St. Thome, tom. vii. p. 115, ed. Giles.

See. No one will ascribe to the Vatican Council the Revolution in Italy, the seizure of Rome in 1848, the invasion of the Roman State in 1860, the attacks of Garibaldi against Rome, ending with Mentana. And yet there are people who ascribe to the Vatican Council the breach at the Porta Pia, and the entry of the Italians into Rome. Such reasoners are proof against history, chronology, and logic. If anybody will persist in saying that the two and twenty years of aggression against the Holy See, from 1848 to 1870, were caused by Pius IX., I must address myself to other men. That Pius IX. has been in collision with those who attacked him is true enough. So is every man who defends his own house. Who, I ask, began the fray? From the Siccardi laws down to the laws of the Guarantees, who was the aggressor? But where the Pope is concerned logic seems to fail even in reasonable men. The other day Prince Von Bismarck told the Catholics of the Reichstag that they were accomplices of Kulmann, and therefore, as he implied, his assassins. Moreover, he affirmed that the war of France against Prussia was forced on the French Emperor by the Pope and the Jesuits. How providentially, then, though altogether fortuitously, no doubt, had Prussia been for three years massing its munitions of war and putting France in the wrong by intrigues in Spain, and fables from Ems. Nevertheless, all these things are believed. Prince Von Bismarck has said them. But surely they belong to the Arabian Nights.

Now, I have already shown that, before the Vatican Council assembled, there was an opposition systematically organised to resist it. It was begun by certain