From the moment that I accepted infallibility and a visible supreme headship over Christendom, I frankly and deliberately gave up my reason, or at least, in all matters of faith and discipline, solemnly purposed to renounce it. From that moment I never examined one single doctrine of the Church of Rome with any other view than to be able to defend it against heretics and other "infidels." And I not only gave up myself, body and spirit, but, God forgive me! I gave up all that was entrusted to me, all that was dear to me, to my new obedience. I believed myself to be the most thorough of Roman Catholics, a very fakir in my allegiance; and my ecclesiastical superiors believed me to be so too.

How often the strange unreality of this deep conviction must have occurred to you, dear Lord Shrewsbury, since our sad parting! Like the infallibility on which it was founded, it was a delusion. I never was wholly a subject of the mysterious Church of Rome, no more than tens of thousands of others who live and die in her.

I had put my natural affections under ban, I had renounced the senses which our Lord himself bade his Apostle, St. Thomas, apto finally. I had renounced much of my private reason. But I never had let go my conscience.

peal

And so I never was-you are not, my Lord, you never can be— truly a Romanist. No man can be truly a Romanist who is not so unlimitedly and without reserve. Conscience and the creed of

Pius IV. are contraries, contradictories. To make a consistent, congruous Roman Catholic, there must be unreasoning submission in morals as in faith. Bellarmine's inference from the Roman Catholic doctrine is only the inference of common sense. That doctrine practically blots God out from the moral government of all

the true believer, may be concealed, even at the expense of what we call perjury; but the crime even of secret heresy, nay, even of suspected heresy, stands in another category. Rome knows no horror like her horror of heresy. But, next to heresy, the highest of all sins in her catalogue, is THE VOLUN TARY TOLERATION OF AN HEREetic. With an heretic all bonds are de jure broken; and it is only by a cursed necessity that they may be submitted to de fucto. No matter what may be the danger of the denunciation, no matter what may be the fate of the denounced, the brother is bound, as he hopes for heaven, to betray his brother, the child his own father, the wife her husband. Nor is the want of power to bring proof any excuse whatever from the obligation. And not only is this denunciation of the nearest and dearest a bounden duty, but the fierce zeal that would lead a man voluntarily to assist in torturing the doomed HERETIC is, to this day, solemnly set forth in the public liturgy of Rome as a blessed title to canonization: and, year after year, the people of Italy and Spain are summoned to kneel before the altar of St. Ferdinand of Castile,' and bless God for the model-king, who, whenever an HERETIC was burnt, came forward, and with his royal hands heaped fagots on the pile, which, as he believed, anticipated hell.""CASES OF CONSCIENCE, by Pascal the Younger."-Bosworth, Regent Street. The Author gives the frightful but irrefragable authorities at length.

who believe it. "The Church," (that is, the baptized,) says Bellarmine, "is inviolably bound to believe that to be morally good which the Sovereign Pontiff commands, and that morally bad which he forbids.' The conscience must be ready to be given up to another and for another, who is held to represent Omnipotence, who is held to have the right to absolve from all individual responsibility, and to whom obedience paid blindly is accounted the very highest practice of Christian virtue. "LET HIM THAT DESIRES

TO GROW IN GODLINESS GIVE HIMSELF UP TO A LEARNED CONFES

SOR, AND BE OBEDIENT TO HIM AS TO GOD. HE THAT THUS ACTS

IS SAFE FROM HAVING ANY ACCOUNT TO RENDER OF ALL HIS ACTIONS. THE LORD WILL SEE TO IT THAT HIS CONFESSOR LEADS HIM NOT ASTRAY."*

But though my allegiance to the Church of Rome was a delusion, and a culpable delusion,-for it had its origin in carnalmindedness and pride, it was most sincere. The sacrifices which I made, and the ways in which I proved my devotedness, you, my dear Lord, and many other illustrious Roman Catholies, will not need to be reminded of, and will not allow to be forgotten. At the time I made those sacrifices, they were the almost involuntary expression of my passionate love to the Church of my imagination and my hope. They are even now my poor excuses to myself. Devotion to any cause, as to any person, finds its natural utterance in sacrifices. And to the last, it was not from sacrifices nor sufferings that I drew back-I drew back from nothing, even in my most secret thoughts, till I was required to be a conscious partaker in undoubted sin.

The great well-spring of practical iniquity in the Church of Rome, is what are called, THE COUNCILS OF PERFECTION.

These councils are poverty, chastity, and obedience, practised according to a vow. A vow of any of them, or of all three, may be made and religiously observed, either by persons living in the world of business or of fashion, or by persons living in a community separated from the world. The three vows do not, however, even in this latter case, constitute what is called a "religious" man or woman: and indeed, so far as I know, there is not a single religious woman, or legally professed nun, in any convent either in England or Scotland, though there are hundreds who believe themselves to be so, and who are not likely to be undeceived, any more than they are ever likely to learn that they have the right to demand a confessor of their own choosing.t

To constitute a religious, or one whose vows are recognised by

"St. Philip Neri," quoted by Liguori.

† I was once admonished, in writing, by the superior of a religious congregation, how extremely dangerous it was for a nun to be made acquainted with

the Church of Rome, it is necessary that the vows should have been made in an established community which has been solemnly acknowledged and, according to set forms, proclaimed to Christendom, by the Pope, as an order of the Church of Rome. Such, for instance, is the community of the Benedictines or the Jesuits. In the case of a female, moreover, in order to constitute a religious, it is necessary that she should be cloistered, that is, imprisoned for life. Finally, it is necessary, for either man or woman, that the vows should be perpetual. Any other religious vows, no matter with what solemnity of words or ceremonial they may be made, are only simple promises, which a bishop or a priest can at any mo ment dispense from, at the pleasure of either party, the presumed consent, or even the privity, of the person who has made the vows being unnecessary.*

As of course all vows are merely conventional in the Church of Rome,† the Pope can dispense with those of a real religious, but, inasmuch, as such vows are acknowledged to be really vows, and not only nominally so, the Pope reserves to himself the right to dispense from them.

A vow of poverty, in the mind of the Church of Rome, whether made in religion or out of it, does not include any idea of want, or suffering, or abjection. It allows the use of the largest amount of wealth, and when expedient, the proudest show of state, and the freest indulgence in luxury. It does not even forbid the personal possession or acquisition of property of any kind, with dominium radicale, provided the right of appropriating it to private purposes at private discretion be not set up nor exercised. It only forbids the possession or the use of property by the individual independently.

Nay, it may be well to add,-for these are truths as little known to Roman Catholics in general as to Protestants,-that the obligation of the vow of poverty, even in religion, does not require that a valid license, given to an individual to make use of wealth, should be limited to virtuous or lawful purposes. That license once given, the individual is as free from the obligation of his vow, as if it never had been made. He stands upon the footing of any unoathed person, just (say the divines quoted by Liguori) as when the Pope by dispensation allows near relatives to marry, he not only

*Dispensatio potest impetrari non tantum pro ignorante sed etiam invito. -LIGUORI.

This is so absolutely and unlimitedly true, that though the Pope is at liberty to swear whatever he pleases, it is impossible for him to bind himself, -the Vice-God, by any oath that he may make. This was logically proved and frankly maintained, without contradiction, by the General of the Jesuits in the Council of Trent. "Suppose," said Laynez, "the Pope were to engage, under a solemn oath taken by himself, not to make use of his dispensing power-the oath would cease to be obligatory the very instant that charity counselled him to break it!" PALL. CON. TRID. xxi. 14.

authorises the marriage, but he takes away the sinfulness of incest, even if there should be no marriage.*

The vow of chastity is frequently confounded with the celibacy of the clergy. There is no connection whatever between the two things, beyond their unity of purpose. The only vow exacted of the Papal clergy is the pontifical, or in fact, is the vow of obedience to the Pope or his delegate-bishop. Rome has never dared to exact the vow, or even the promise of chastity from any candidate for holy orders, either before, or at, or after ordination to the priesthood.

Celibacy, in the priests of the Papal communion, is not only wholly and merely a matter of discipline, but it is only a matter of local discipline, which it has never been thought wise to make universally obligatory upon the priesthood of that communion. And this fact has for some reason or other been recently acknowledged in a letter written by Dr. Wiseman to Mr. Allen, a clergyman of the Established Church. The letter is dated Jan. 26, 1851, and without prevarication truly states, that "the" (Roman) "Catholic Church considers clerical celibacy as a matter of discipline. Hence many churches in communion with Rome have a married clergy." And you, my Lord, may be aware that Julius III. (the Monte of the Tridentine Council) commanded Cardinal Pole to legalize the marriages of the secular Papal clergy in England, and that Pius VII., following the example of his predecessor of "blessed memory," by a bull dated August 15, 1801, did the same thing for France. These concessions, however, were not made for any moral purpose, but out of political expediency. Bellarmine frankly prefers certain incontinence in the clergy to their tolerated marriage. Nay, he goes further, and says, "for any who have made a vow of continency, it is a greater crime to marry than to give themselves up to incontinence." And the comparative value which Rome sets upon the purity of those who minister at her altars, may be inferred from this, that their habitual disregard of this obligation, provided it be modest, that is, provided there be no public scandal, (and no marriage,) is not a bar to their

* Non est censendum quod superior dans licentiam, eam limitet tantum ed usus licitos; quia ipse dando licentiam generalum, vult et potest tollere impedimentum, quod subditus habet ex licentiæ defectu ad vendendum. Pari modo ac si Pontifex dispenset cum consanguineis ad matrimonium, non solum dispensat ad actum conjugii sed tollit malitiam incestus, etiam quoad cop illic. THEOL. MOR. v. 31, II.

Of the authenticity of this letter the following note is sufficient evidence: "The Rev. H. Allen begs to inform the Rev. Pierce Connelly, that the correspondence between Cardinal Wiseman and himself respecting the Eastern Maronites, has been published in the Brighton Gazette of the 13th of the present month. Brighton, Feb. 26, 1851."

De Monachis, lib. ii. c. 30.

lawful daily celebration of the holy Eucharist. It is not the crime, but the scandal, that is visited with ecclesiastical censures. And the crime must not only be public, but also notorious, or evident to the majority of the neighbourhood or of the convent; "ut factum (continuatum or habitual) non solum sit publicum, sed etiam notorium, seu ita evidens majori parti viciniæ, seu collegii, ubi ad minus sint decem, ut nulla, possit tergiversatione celari."

The vow of obedience is, in general, the only one that is recommended to persons in married life, or to those who have not made up their minds to enter into religion.

How far the obligation of this vow reaches, internally and externally, when once made, will be best told in the words of Ignatius Loyola. "It is impossible to deny that OBEDIENCE includes not only the doing of what is commanded and the willing of what is done but the submission of the judgment also, that whatever is commanded should be thought right and true; for OBEDIENCE is a HOLOCAUST wherein the whole man, without any reserve whatever, is immolated to his Creator by the hands of his minister. The noble simplicity of blind obedience is gone, if in our secret breasts we call in question whether what is commanded be right or wrong."

Cruelty in the Papal clergy has always been proverbial; but its relentless exercise under the authority of this vow, upon hundreds of thousands, from the troops of religious sent out to certain death on speculation, that they may be boasted of, down to its secret victims practised on in convent walls, or, more secret still, those for whom no mother-abbess nor sister-nun exists to give hope of sympathy, timid women, cut off from the world which they still live in, can no more ever be imagined than it ever will be told. The last sort are perhaps beyond the reach of remedy; but that a Protestant nation, which paid so dearly to give freedom to the poor negro, and now by law protects the Indian widow even from herself, should tolerate convents of oathed nuns, is to me now little less amazing, than would be the selling of Government-licences to kidnap women for Australia. Such nuns, as is avowed by the Papal authorities here in England, are de facto prisoners for life, and will not voluntarily be allowed to be released from their secret confinement, unless they can compass a moral impossibility.*

It is true, that, though these counsels are most absurdly, and to

"If she chooses to put on the black veil, then she will not be free in conscience to leave the convent; that is it cannot be allowed her to violate the solemn promises she will then have made to God. Whoever has

been subject to such compulsion, (to enter a convent,) may protest against her profession at any time within five years after it, and, if she can prove that her profession was made against her will, she will be allowed to quit the convent."A Letter to the Editor of the "Times," signed "I. W. HENDREN, Bishop of Clifton."