of those who were at the head of affairs there; the conduct of states, they argued, being directed by national policy, not by the determinations of individual temper. This was a fallacious argument urged by inept politicians in a bad cause. The opinions of the ablest statesmen are in direct opposition to it; disproved as it is by the whole tenour of history, from which the maxims of true policy must be deduced. Under all forms of government, whether of the many, the few, or the one, the course of things takes its bias from the character of the rulers, and this more especially in arduous times. Forms of government, therefore, are more or less objectionable as they are more or less liable to this defect: and this is one reason why despotism is the worst form, it being the sure effect of great power to enfeeble or inebriate weak minds, and to infuriate or madden wicked ones. But the history of the Popes gives occasion to something more than political deductions. If other proof were wanting, it would afford irrefragable evidence that the Papal system which has been imposed upon the world as Christianity, is false. It is with love and adoration that we contemplate the Founder of our faith at his nativity in a stable; but who can be persuaded that his successors and repre

sentatives are to be found in the sty,..not of Epicurus,.,but of all abominations?

So long as the Bishops of Rome were contented to abide within the limits of their just authority, they were neither better nor worse than other Prelates, and reasonably may be believed to have been wiser and more religious than ordinary men. It was when their pretensions were at the highest that their personal characters were at the worst. You have spoken of their superior acquirements, Sir. At first there might seem cause to wonder wherefore this superiority did not always exist, and always in a far greater degree. The poor child whom the priests of Tibet, in their well-compacted system of imposture, exhibit as their earthly and incarnate God, is always one in whom they perceive the surest indications of docility and intellect. And undoubtedly in like manner Apis was always a bull of the best breed in Egypt: though, if in this age of religious restorations Bull-worship were restored, and the election thrown open to other countries, a good friend of mine, who has been pleased to name some of his stock after the worthies of my poems, would produce a Sockburn Short-horns from Grassy-nook which should put the best bull of Basan out of the field,

But neither in the case of Apis, nor of the Dalai-Lama, were any undue practices used in the election; the one was as passive in it, and as unconscious of what was going on as the other; and both bull-calf and bull-child (to use a Chinese idiom) were fairly chosen according to the qualifications required. Has it been so at Rome? If you call to mind the intrigues within and without the Conclave, the popular tumults, the private solicitations, the sinister motives and the dextrous manoeuvres, which usually accompanied the choice of a Pope, you must be conscious that, during the busier ages of the Papacy, the election was any thing rather than immaculate. And yet methinks an immaculate election should seem as necessary for the purity of the faith, or at least for the pretensions of the Papal Church, as that exemption from original sin which the Seraphic schoolmen first claimed for the Virgin Mary, and which one, who is less to be suspected of superstition than the hardest head that ever wore a cowl, would fain have persuaded the Council of Constance to establish for St. Joseph also. I speak of no less a personage than Gerson, the leader of the liberal Romanists in his age; who maintained that the Church* might

* Lenfant, Council of Constance, ii. 310.

err, and that the Pope must submit to the authority of a General Council; who scrupled not to tell one of those Councils that they used double weights* and measures, and weighed things in unequal balances; who treated the revelations of his day as contemptuously as you, Sir, I trust, would do those of La Sœur Nativité, notwithstanding the sanction which this last new and impious imposture has obtained from certain English Benedictines, Jesuits, and VicarsGeneral...with Dr. Milner at their head; who went farther than you, Sir, in freedom of opinion, for he asserted that miracles + had ceased; who publicly expressed a wish that Nunneries should be abolished, § because they had become brothels; who arraigned the corruptions and the rapacity of the higher clergy so boldly, that he has been classed among the precursors of the Reformation: would you desire a more liberal Romanist?.. But who preached things which he admitted || were not true, and yet he

* C. of Constance, i. vii.

† Ib. i. 470.

C. de Pise, ii. 226.

§ C. of Constance, ii. 97.

| Ib. i. 609. "We have no sentence or declaration of their Church against pious frauds (says Stillingflect); but we have large confessions from their own writers of the practice of them, and the good they are designed for; viz. to keep up the

preached them, because he said they might piously be believed; who proposed to increase the stock of superstitious notions, by appointing a festival for the Immaculate* Conception of St. Joseph; who complained that the heretics had the Bible in their own tongue; who called out for the axe to hew down heresies and heretics, and the fire to consume them,..say

devotion of the people. John Gerson honestly confesseth this to be the end of the legends and miracles of the Saints, and their visions and revelations so much talked of in the Roman Church,.. viz. to stir up the piety and good affections of the people for these things,§ saith he, are not proposed by the Church to be believed as true; but they are rather to consider them as things that might be done, than as things that were done. And it is no matter, saith he, if some things that are really false, are piously believed, so that they be not believed as false, or known to be false at the same time. And I wish he had added one condition more, viz. that the infallibility of the Church be not to be proved by them. But are we not like to meet with credible testimony in such things, where the most honest and learned among them think it is no great matter whether they be true or false?"-Second Disc. in Vindic. of the Protestant Grounds of Faith. 1673. p. 595.

* C. de Pise, ii. 202.

+ C. of Constance, ii. 109.

C. de Pise, ii. 226.

§ Gerson. Declar. Veritatum, t. i. p. 415.