in those countries. There, Sir, I found an account* of the Granadan manuscripts and relics, one of the most demonstrable impostures that was ever practised upon public credulity: yet was it solemnly and judicially ratified by the ecclesiastical authorities in Spain, who pronounced that the said relics " ought to be received, honoured, venerated, and adored, with due honour and worship :" and nearly fifty years elapsed before the Court of Rome condemned the palpable and detected fraud. There I read the Legend of Santiago; the History of the House of Loretto; and the Life of Maria de§ Jesus, Abbess of the Franciscan Convent of the Immaculate Conception at Agreda, whose biography of the Virgin Mary, as dictated to her by the Virgin herself, was published with the sanction of her Diocesan (who was one of the Council of State), of the Franciscan Order, of the Inquisition (by its Calificador, a Jesuit), of the General of the Benedictines, and of the Universities of Salamanca, Alcala and Louvain. And

* Misc. Tracts, vol. i. p. 345. Several Tracts, p. 99.

+ Misc. Tracts, vol. ii. p. 221. § Misc. Tracts, vol. iii. p. 141. cannot be disputed by the Salamanca and Louvain are

The value of their opinions English Romanists, inasmuch as two of those Universities upon whose authority the British Parliament is required to believe, that the infallible and immu

there I found a View* of "all the Orders of Monks and Friars in the Romish Church, with an account of their Founders, sufficient to help any one to form a right idea of the men, and of the writers of their lives."... After this, his accounts of the Portugueze Inquisition,† and of the Auto-da-fe, which he had himself seen, were not required to make me bless the day when Martin Luther was born.

Sir, I might have been told in England that these things were misrepresented, or at least exaggerated by Dr. Geddes;... that no such legends were to be found in Mr. Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, or believed by the Roman Catholics of the present age. But, incredible as it might seem that such abominable impos

table Papal Church at this day condemns, reprobates, and stigmatizes certain principles upon which, at no very remote period, it acted as notoriously as it professed and inculcated them. See Mr. Grattan's speech of May 25, 1802, upon the Catholic Claims. And Mr. Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic Church, Appendix, Note I. *Misc. Tracts, vol. iii. 357.

Misc. Tracts, vol. i. p.

385.

He saw one of the sufferers on that accursed day gagged as soon as he came out of the gates of the Inquisition, because, having looked up to the sun, which he had not seen before for several years, he exclaimed, "How is it possible for any people who behold that glorious body, to worship any being but Him that created it!" Misc. Tracts, vol. i. 406.

tures should ever have been palmed upon a Christian people, I knew that there was neither misrepresentation nor exaggeration in his state

ments.

The authorities were at hand. And that the belief in such things was still entertained among the people and kept up by the clergy I had proof before my sight: for I was in a country where Popery wore no disguise. Knowing that it was gaining ground in England, because its history has passed away from the remembrance of the nation, and its real and indelible character is no longer understood, one of the objects which I resolved to qualify myself for performing in due season, was that of exposing this baneful system in its proper deformity, and showing it to my countrymen such as it has been, is, and must continue to be, so long as it maintains its pretension to be infallible. That purpose will be pursued in these Letters. It has been partly fulfilled in the Book of the Church, some latter pages of which were written in that very room, looking over the river Thames, where in my boyhood I had first been attracted to a course of reading which in its consequences had thus produced it. More than thirty years had intervened; the house had several times changed its possessors; it was now occupied by another of my best and oldest friends. Old

thoughts and feelings returned when I was seated at this employment in that same pleasant apartment which had formerly been the scene of so many truant and yet most profitable hours: and though, as Ali says in his proverbs, "the remembrance of youth is a sigh," I had the comfort of experiencing that it is not accompanied with regret when we look back upon years which have been neither idly nor ill spent.

PROPER STYLE OF CONTROVERSY.

I PURSUE your arrangement, Sir, because my intention of making this volume an answer to yours in all its parts, may be facilitated by making it as far as possible its counterpart. That order leads me to notice your remarks upon the spirit in which controversies of this nature ought to be conducted. Just as I had come to this part of the subject, the British Catholic Association passed its vote of " thanks to Mr. Charles Butler, for his able refutation of the calumnies heaped upon the (Roman) Catholic Church by the Poet Laureate, Mr. Southey, in his Book of the Church." The thanks of that body, Sir, you have well deserved: but it is somewhat premature to decree a triumph before the field is won, and while too the antagonist is in full heart and strength. As to the charge of calumny, whether that will rest upon the Book of the Church, or the Roman Catholic Association, remains to be proved. Dr. Milner is included in the same vote of thanks: whatever notice I may think proper to bestow upon his obser