stamp which, though it finds little favour with the churches of England, is blasted with every anathema of heresy by the Church of Rome. All, however, represent that church as the great instrument of civilization during many ages. Thinkers will differ as to the period at which its influence began to decline; but M. Comte appears to me to be exactly right in placing it at the commencement of the fourteenth century, that is to say, about two hundred years before the Reformation. The quarrel of Philip the Fair with Pope Boniface, and the destruction of the order of the Templars, are distinct evidence that a change had then set in for the Papacy, momentous enough to have made Innocent and Hildebrand turn in their graves. Since that time there have been various reactions, and especially that notable one at the end of the sixteenth century, which Ranke has so admirably depicted; but upon the whole the decay has been progressive, and, according to all analogy, no human power can arrest it. The view taken by Mr. Macaulay of the permanency and probable duration of the papal system, only shows that that glance, which is so keen and comprehensive in other departments of history, does not estimate with the same accuracy the phenomena of religion. It seems to me impossible that an impartial observer who studies the Roman Catholic Church as she was in the sixteenth century, should believe that at any subsequent period she has exhibited as much spiritual energy as she did at that time. The founders of the order of the Jesuits were never equalled by any of their successors, and though that church has lost many minds of a high order, it is doubtful whether, in the course of the last two centuries, she has gained one really great intellect, except that of Mr. Newman. The case of Freidrich Schlegel, who intellectually was much inferior to Mr. Newman, has always appeared to me to be truly described by Mr. Carlyle in a wellknown passage-it was the child rushing and clinging to the bosom of the dead mother.

In no country has Catholicism produced greater characters than in France. France is the country of Hincmar, of Gerbert,

and of the leaders of the first Crusade. It is the country of St. Bernard and St. Louis, of Gerson, and Francis Xavier, and Vincent de Paul. But what great name has France furnished to orthodox Catholicism during the two hundred years preceding the present generation? The fame of Bossuet may perhaps procure him absolution, from the ultramontane divines, for the sins which he committed in the matter of the Gallican liberties; but that hard, cold, legal intellect, however powerful in controversy, was not, in the highest sense, religious. The most eminent religious minds, not only of France, but of Catholic Europe during that period, were Fenelon, Pascal, and those who, with Pascal, formed the splendid constellation of Jansenism. Fenelon, however, incurred the papal censures, for writings of which the fault was, that they were too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Beloved Disciple; and the pious prelate had himself to read the brief which condemned his heresies, in his own cathedral. The Jansenists, whose characters have been presented to the English reader with so much truth and beauty of delineation by Sir James Stephen', were essentially Protestants, and when they too incurred the condemnation of the Infallible Authority, the repulsion of the Catholic Church was expressed by the Jesuits, who prefixed to the papal constitution a woodcut of Jansenius, wearing his episcopal mitre, and disclosing under his vestments the cloven feet of the devil. To this day there is scarcely any book so painful to a true Catholic as the "Provincial Letters,"-in style, in logic, and in moral tone, the most perfect specimen of Christian controversy that can be found in the literature of Europe.

Mr. Newman.

All alliances with philosophy are dangerous to the Papacy. They give a temporary stimulus, but, in the end,

1 "The Port Royalists; Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography." A work which must have immense influence in producing juster and more charitable views of theological differences.

operate like poison; and this, sooner or later, will be found true in the consequences of Mr. Newman's conversion. The importance of that conversion is not to be denied. In the union of deep feeling and intellectual strength with force of character, it would be hard to find Mr. Newman's equal, and with these there is a sympathetic power peculiar to himself, which at Oxford is well known to have captivated every generous nature with which his own came into contact. Infinite, and never to be known before the Great Day, were the sorrows caused by his change. But, sincere as that change was, and permanent as it may be, it is still evident that he is infusing a certain rationalistic poison into that old church, which must hasten her destruction. One may gather from the "Tracts for the Times," how his mind must have traversed through all that cold region of German rationalism off to the very edge of the atheistic abyss, and then swept back like a comet in search of the central heat, and still overshot it. He has used the experience so gathered to temper afresh an old weapon of the Jesuits, which can do a good deal in the way of destruction, but is of no use for anything else. His habitual argument is, that if you do not stay on his side of the centre, you must go off into darkness, and this is wielded with great skill, but so as to make sad havoc with the convictions of many minds, especially young healthy English ones which have a strong appetite for reality and truth; for, of the two, they prefer the dark alternative. He may be able to drive them to give up the miracles of the New Testament, but they will not believe that of the saint floating upon his cloak. With full allowance, therefore, for the elasticity of Catholicism, the result must be that its old bottles will be broken by this new and fiery wine.

The Church of Rome should not argue.

The Roman Catholic Church, as De Maistre tells us, is not naturally argumentative. He might have said that she never

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can be argumentative without being inconsistent. For the use of argument acknowledges the jurisdiction of that private judgment to which it appeals. But if private judgment has any right to deal with controversial questions, there is an end of church authority and church infallibility. The Church of Rome, therefore, takes Protestant ground whenever she condescends to reason. In the days of her strength she used the tone of command. The bulk of her controversial theology belongs to her declining age. It is the work of the followers of Loyola, whose indefatigable learning and logic worked out every imaginable line of defence, and whose zeal shrank from the use of no weapon which seemed capable of damaging an adversary. But it is a continuous exhibition of rationalism eating its way more and more into her vitals. Voltaire was not, as has been sometimes said, the spiritual child of Pascal, but of Pascal's opponents. It was natural, indeed, that the second of the great masters of French prose should snatch some graces from the inimitable style of the first; but not only in the literal, but the most comprehensive sense, Voltaire was the pupil of the Jesuits, and he transmitted their fatal lessons to those "architects of ruin" who applied his philosophy to practice. It was the same acute and remorseless casuistry which, in the sixteenth century, was suffered to play against the natural and instinctive defences of virtue, and which excused deceit and tyrannicide on behalf of the church-that, in the eighteenth, was used by unbelievers to justify every crime that could be committed in the name of the people.

But, notwithstanding the boasted unchangeableness of the Church of Rome, the Catholicism of the sixteenth century is not the Catholicism of the nineteenth, and least of all the Catholicism of any body of Englishmen. It is unfair to assume without proof, that any Roman Catholic now holds the doctrines of Sanchez and Escobar. Whatever may be the case with respect to the moral character of society at large, its moral perceptions have certainly been progressive. No Lutheran divine would now follow Luther, in giving leave to the Land

grave of Hesse to have two wives at a time. Exeter Hall would not imitate Calvin in sending Servetus to the stake; and the people of Scotland, however much inclined, would not literally subscribe to the judgment of John Knox, that it was a godly deed to assassinate Cardinal Beaton'.

The Papal Government.

In another important respect the Catholicism of the books is very different from Catholicism in fact. The Catholic theory implies that whatever spiritual vitality belongs to the Church of Rome should be found in its highest intensity at the centre, whereas in reality there seems to be only death at the centre, and life chiefly at the extremities. The moral vigour of every religious body is improved by severe trial. The Roman Catholic Church, both in Ireland and in England, has been saved from many corruptions of practice by poverty and hard treatment. In England alone, of all the countries of Europe, it has recently

1 This case should be studied, as a lesson of Christian charity, in judging of the opinions and characters of other times. Though exempt from the bias, whether religious or national, which may be supposed to influence Scotchmen, I cannot quite exclude from my own mind a certain sympathy in the admiration which John Knox felt for James Melvil, one of the assassins, who, he says, was a man "most gentle and most modest." Melvil seems to have acted purely from religious zeal, and he passed his sword through the Cardinal's body with the calm solemnity of a man executing a decree of divine justice. The Duke of Argyll, in his Essay on the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, characterizes the murder as it deserves, but says very truly that the deed might have been righteously done by the hands of the public executioner. The leader of the enterprise, however, Norman Lesly, was instigated by private vengeance, and some of his accomplices were hired to do the work by bribes from England. Yet John Knox joined the assassins soon after the crime was committed, and, what is more remarkable, calm Dr. Robertson, whose page seldom warms with a breath of human passion, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, can hardly speak of the murder except as an act of heroism. He tries to save his cloth by a word or two of the mildest censure, but one may see that his sympathies were with the assassins, almost as strongly as if he had himself seen the cruel and profligate prelate feasting his eyes on the torments of Wishart. Yet a Roman Catholic must look upon those assassins precisely as a Protestant does upon Clément and Ravaillac and Guy Fawkes.