must call by that name—was condemned, crushed, and eradicated, except by its means, and through its decrees: Arians, Macedonians, Eutychians, Nestorians, Pelagians, and a thousand more, were anathematised by the Popes; and thus alone the doctrine of the Church was kept pure, and its faith unimpaired by their errors. Councils were called, canons framed only under their names and authority; and thus the morals of the faithful were improved and preserved. As the only means to disseminate it: for all portions of the earth, which have been converted to Christianity since the days of the apostles, owe the benefit to the Holy See. Scotland, Ireland, England, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, and Livonia, were converted, from the fifth to the tenth centuries, by missionaries sent from Rome. The East and West Indies are under the same obligation: they may be said to know nothing of Christianity, except as the faith of the Roman Church, to which they bow with submission. And I will say, without fear of contradiction, that while there is hardly a country under the globe where the sovereign pontiff has not many subjects, no other Church, as I have before shown, can boast of the power of conversion to any extent. or with any durability. Now, at the very time that you must suppose this antichristian system to have been employed by God, as his only instrument in preserving and disseminating Christianity, observe that it publicly boasted and referred to those very circumstances as a proof that it was the rock whereon Christianity was founded, the representative of the only authority whereon it was to be received as coming from God. And would he not have been countenancing to the utmost, so horrible an untruth and deceit, if you admit this hypothesis?

You will not tell me that God knows how to bring good out of evil, and can make use of the worst agents; and that it matters not if the gospel is preached even out of contention, so that it be preached.* Such means are his extraordinary resources, they cannot be the ordinary course of his provi * Phil. i. 17.

dence. I can conceive him sending a Sennacherib or a Nabuchodonosor, to convert his people, and purify them by chastisement: but I cannot, without blaspheming his goodness, imagine him giving such for their ordinary rulers, and entrusting to them habitually and for ages, the protection of his inheritance and of his worship. I can imagine a Balaam, who came to curse, forced against his will to bring blessings upon the people of God, and prophesy the rising of the star from Jacob; but I cannot admit, without outraging his sanctity, that the prophets, from Samuel to Malachi, might have been a series of so many Balaams, dragged against their will to instruct a nation, whom they should have surpassed in wickedness. Nor could St Paul have imagined all the apostles and teachers of the gospel for ages, publishing its doctrines only through a spirit of contention. Yet this is the parallel case, and such are the difficulties you incur, by supposing that the supremacy of the Holy See has existed in Christianity, in despite of the ordinances of God.

But admit it to have been given in Peter; and all is consistent; all is marvellous; all is beautiful. We trace through every age the fulfilment of the promise; we account for how it has stood the shock of so many convulsions; how it has risen unsubdued from under so many billows; how it has shaken off the mortality which gathers upon every sublunary establishment, and been the rock to which the parts of the vast edifice have been cemented, so as to have grown up into one holy building, and which has preserved them unshaken from age to age.

And it is, indeed, my brethren, an institution whose sublimity is worthy of God. To see religion thus become an object over which earth and its changes have no control; that scorns the boundaries, which man's ingenuity or nature's bolder hand has traced, to intercept all communication between man and man; which can make its decrees respected and obeyed by nations who never heard the Roman name and con quests, save in connexion with its truths; which can give a common interest, a bond of love, to people of the most different

speech, and hue, and feature, this is, indeed, the idea which we should naturally have formed of a religion coming from Him whose are the ends of the earth. What a thought, that when, on the coming festival of Easter, the sovereign Pontiff shall stretch forth his hand and bless his entire flock, that blessing will fly over seas and oceans, and reach climes to which the sun will not yet have risen, and fall as a dew on Churches which will not receive tidings of that day till long after the buds which are now swelling on the trees, shall have seared and fallen into their autumnal grave!

It is painful to turn from these consoling thoughts, to meet the objections which prejudice or ignorance may make to this view of the Papal power. But I know that some may here wish to step in, and remind me of the volumes that have been written on the crimes and iniquities of Popes. I shall be told that for ages they were but a worldly-minded race of men, only grasping at earthly power, and trying to tear crowns from the heads of sovereigns; eager to grapple with all temporal dominion, and become at once the civil rulers, and the spiritual masters, of the world. In reply, I would first observe, that whatever may be the impressions of any individual regarding the character of some, or many, of the Roman Pontiffs, he has no right to apply them as a test for explaining the words of Christ, or for judging of the existence of an institution. Many holders of the Jewish high-priesthood disgraced their station, from Helio Caiaphas, and yet was not the holiness of that state therebessened, nor its divine constitution; nor did our Saviour, or St Paul, teach, that worship and reverence were not to be shown it. We know that even among the apostles there was one capable of betraying his master,of thus committing the foulest deed which the sun ever beheld: and yet does not that impair the character of the apostleship. And, in like manner, might we say, that if those Pontiffs who have disgraced their station, were summed up, they would not bear the same proportion to those whose virtues have been an honour to Christianity, as the traitor Judas does to the

apostolic body. If, therefore, the apostles dignity was not impaired, or their jurisdiction lessened, by that circumstance, I ask whether this institution should be judged by the crimes of some among its possessors?

But on this subject there is a mass of deception or delusion constantly repeated, such as if laid open would astonish men, seeing how they had been led into such gross misapprehension. In the first place, it is customary to bind together the private, individual character of Pontiffs, and their public conduct; and yet there is a distinction necessary to be kept between them, as I observed at the commencement of this discourse. Our Saviour, in giving them such power, gave them a means of great evil as well as of the greatest good; yet did not, at the same time, deprive them of individual responsibility—he left them in possession of their own free will, in a position the most dangerous to which humanity could be exposed.

This supposes the possibility of a certain number being unworthy of their station; and that such has been the case, no one will deny; but, at the same time, in a number of instances, there is more misrepresentation than could be found in any other part of history. With regard to the Pontiffs of the first ages, no man will gainsay that they were all worthy of what they have received,-a place in the calendar of saints. Of the Pontiffs of the later ages, in like manner, it has been acknowledged, not only by Catholic, but by Protestant writers,* not in former times, but very lately, that since the change of religion in some parts of Euro by the Reformation, nothing could be more exemplary, or more worthy of their station, than the conduct of all those who have filled the chair of St Peter.

The only part, then, of history, from which such objections can be drawn, is in those centuries which are commonly called the middle ages. Now, persons who profess to pass judgment on this period of history, are, in general, totally unacquainted with its spirit; and without being competent to judge, by their true standard, of measures then pursued, but judging only from * As by Ranke, in his History of the Popes.

he no less peculiar and narrower views of their own time, ¡nany condemn the conduct of the Popes, as being directed by nothing but a desire of temporal aggrandizement, and worldly imperial sway. But into this chaos and confusion, in which prejudice had plunged the history of those times, a bright. light is beginning to penetrate, and it comes from such a quarter, as will not easily give rise to suspicion. Within the last ten years a succession of works has been appearing on the Continent, in which the characters of the Popes of the middle ages, have been not only vindicated, but placed in the most beautiful and magnificent point of view. And I thank God, that they are, as I just said, from a quarter which cannot be suspected every one of the works to which I allude, being the production of a Protestant. We have had within these few years, several lives, or vindications of the Pontiff, who has. been considered the embodying type of that thirst for aggrandizement which is attributed to the Popes of the middle ages. I speak of Gregory VII., commonly known by the name of Hildebrand. In a large voluminous work, published a few vears ago by Voigt, and approved of by the most eminent historians of modern Germany, we have the life of that Pontiff drawn up from contemporaneous documents, from his own correspondence, and the evidence of both his friends and enemies. The result is—and I wish I could give you the words of the author-that if the historian abstract himself from mere petty prejudices and national feelings, and look on the character of that Pontiff from a higher ground, he must pronounce him a man of most upright mind, of a most perfect disinterestedness, and of the purest zeal; one, who acted in every instance just as his position called upon him to act, and made use of no means, save what he was authorised to use. In this he is followed by others, who speak of him with an enthusiasm which a Catholic could not have exceeded; and of one, it has been observed, that he cannot speak of that Pontiff without rapture.* * Eichhorn, Luden, Leo, Müller, and many other Protestant writers; whose attestations I hope to find a better opportunity to give at length. The English reader has, since this discourse was delivered, been enabled