it except by a frank acknowledgment of error from the party which is in the wrong, and that party is England. I justify none of the violent language which has come from the other side; but the injury was done by England, for Ireland was in no way responsible for the assumption of those empty ecclesiastical titles by which the new penal law was provoked. But public opinion, when it gets into a passion, is more intolerant and unreasonable than any despot, and public opinion was not calm in England on the matter of the papal aggression. If it had been, it would have been seen that that aggression could only become important from the noise that might be made about it. It would have been seen that the pretensions of the Pope to carve out England into ecclesiastical sees were very fit matter for laughter, but not at all fit matter for resentment; and that intrinsically there was no more in it which should disturb the national composure, than in that celebrated assumption of the Khan of the Tartars, who, when his own meal was over, used to give public permission to all other sovereigns to go to dinner. But ever since the time of Titus Oates, England has been subject to fits of absurdity about popish hobgoblins; and on the last occasion, in combating with such ostentatious phantoms as the Archbishopric of Westminster, she contrived to fall foul of the real flesh-and-blood prelacies of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, which are things as solid as the monarchy itself, and with which the violent collision of the Government must always be in the last degree dangerous. The mischief thus done ought to be undone, by retracing the steps which led to it; and I do not give up the hope that the time will come when success will attend an appeal, if made by influential statesmen, from Philip drunk to Philip sober-from England fanatical or foolish, to England restored to her usual good sense and moderation.

Religious Aspect of the Papal Question.

But the pride and the Protestantism of England will resent the imputation that any wrong has been done; and many will think that the desolation of the empire itself is not too great a risk to be incurred, in order to check by any means what they regard as a pernicious superstition. Here is the true difficulty of the question. For it is by religious and not by political considerations that this fatal policy is sustained. It is necessary, therefore, to advert, though it can be done only very slightly and imperfectly, to the religious bearings of this question. I shall do so in no spirit of controversy with Roman Catholics, but solely for the purpose of showing the grounds upon which a Protestant may be satisfied that the Roman Catholic system is not really formidable, and that the old yoke of the priesthood never can, by any possibility, be reestablished.

The Roman Catholic Church has an immense history, and cannot be understood apart from it. That church is certainly not an invention of the dark ages, for a Protestant writer, inferior to none in learning, eloquence, or power of philosophic thought, Mr. Isaac Taylor, has shown the existence of Roman Catholic practices as far back as the times of Cyprian and Tertullian. Within about a hundred years from the death of the apostle John, celibacy had already become meritorious. The whole church system was in fact a gradual growth, taking in much from the ancient paganism, and much also from the belief and practices of the northern barbarians whom it converted. But with all these accretions of human error, the living spirit continued to work, and was long the main counterpoise to the evil passions of the feudal ages. The most masterly expositions of the working of the church during that period have proceeded from Guizot, a Protestant; Comte, certainly anything but a Catholic; and Neander, who, indeed, with all his Protestantism, was a Catholic, but a Catholic of that

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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