mote, the rights, honours, privileges, and authority of the Pope!

"I will not be in any council, deed, or treaty, in which any thing prejudicial to the person, right, or power, of the Pope is contrived; and if I shall know any such things treated of by any whomsoever! I will, to the utmost of my power, hinder them, and, with all possible speed, signify them to the Pope !

"I will, to the utmost of my power, observe the Pope's commands, and make others observe them!"

Here is the plain language of a paramount obedience. What could be said for the loyalty of the British subject, who would take such an oath to any other potentate? To a king of France! Or what must be the result, should circumstances compel a British king to make war upon the Pope, or upon any power in whose fortunes the Popedom took a decided interest? Here is established a secret correspondence; a bond of secrecy as to matters communicated, every one of which might be treasonable; and a solemn pledge to preserve and defend, not simply the Popish ceremonial and authority in matters of doctrine, but the Popedom and royalties of St. Peter against all men, including of course the king of the realm.

The whole being an old compendious system for the use of revolt, when the Pope, who may be a slave, or a fool, or a criminal, shall summon his subjects in the British empire. Or is our world of vicissitude and conflict, that is scarcely yet green after the trampling of war, secure that revolt shall never come, and come in a still mightier array of human passions and powers, to leave on it still deeper footsteps of carnage and sorrow. Even this trial may

not be far from our day. If there be truth in prophecy, it is foretold, past as the possibility of religious war seems to be, that a conflict shall arise, in which Religion, false and true, shall be the very principle of the struggle; in which it shall show, for the first time and the last, the whole tremendous depth of its power upon the mind of man; and by the collision shake, perhaps subvert, the social fabric of the world!

The Pope at his consecration swears to obsérve " every tittle of the general councils, including those of Lateran, Constance, Trent, &c., to preach the faith as delivered by them, and to defend them to blood."

The councils of Lateran and Constance are remarkable. That of Constance, assembled in 1414, for the curious purpose of determining

which of the three rival infallibles *, Benedict XIII., Gregory XII., and John XXIII., was the true infallible; was that by which Huss, in 1415, and Jerome of Prague, in 1416, were burned alive;-and by which the writings and bones of Wickliffe were ordered to be com mitted to the flames! The council of Lateran ordains that the goods of heretics shall be confiscated, that their kings and lords may make slaves of them ‡, and that any receiver or defender of them shall be excommunicated §, with all the inhuman and horrid penalties annexed to this cutting off from man.

They further ordain that " if any temporal lord shall not, on the requisition of the Church,

*The Papists, since the ridicule thrown on Papal infallibility, say that a Pope and a council make up infallibility; But they allow that an ordinance of the Pope, unless protested against in a council, is to be taken as the rule of the infallible Church. The Pope calls the council, and dissolves it at his pleasure. So his will is the law after all.

+ Bona ejusmodi damnatorum (scilicet hæreticorum) si Laici fuerint, confiscentur. 3 Concil. Later. tom. ii. p. 148. Confiscentur earum bona, et liberum sit principibus ejusmodi homines (hereticos) subjicere servituti. Late 3 C. 27.

§4 Conc. Lat. C, 3.

purge his territories from heretics, he shall be excommunicated, and, after a year's impenitence, his subjects shall be discharged by the Pope from their obedience, and his territories be given to Catholics, who having exterminated the heretics, shall possess it without contradiction."

The Council of Constance * commands that temporal lords shall, on "the requisition of inquisitors, archbishops, bishops, &c. seize heretics, and throw them into chains, until the Church shall pass sentence upon them."

It has been alleged in palliation of this monstrous code, that England has old atrocious. laws, the legacy of an unenlightened age. But with us these laws are never executed, though there is nothing to restrain our execution of them; they have almost sunk into oblivion; and they never start up from it but to be extinguished.

In Rome the "Councils" are the common learning of the priesthood; the successive Popes swear to observe them to the least word; and though they now have not the power to

* Sub arcta et diligenti custodia, ne fugiant, ponendo eos etiam compedibus et manicis ferreis, teneant, donec eorum negotium per ecclesiæ judicium terminetur. Conc. Const. Sess. 45.

execute those iniquitous laws through Europe, they have never abolished a word of them, with all the intelligence of Europe denouncing their atrocity.

All Protestants are heretics according to, not simply those ancient laws, but according to the public tenets of the present hour. Thus saith the Papist catechism, by Dr. James Butler, "Revised, enlarged, approved and recommended by the FOUR ROMAN CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOPS OF IRELAND, as a general catechism for the kingdom!

Q. Where are true Christians to be found?
A. Only in the true Church.

Q. How do you call the true Church?
A. The holy Catholic Church.

Q. Is there any other true Church besides the holy Catholic Church?

A. No. As there is but one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, there is but one true Church.

Q. Are all obliged to be of the true Church? A. Yes; no one can be saved out of it!" This is sufficiently exclusive; now comes the definition under which all Protestants are classed as heretics, and consigned to eternal conflagration.