Various and conflicting are the sentiments expressed at this juncture. Some affect comparative indifference to the present aggression of Rome, as a thing of little importance, and confidently rely on what they desiguate the "omnipotence of truth." We confess we are not of that number. The history of the human mind clearly shows that, when human depravity and secular interests are in alliance with error, truth -mere truth, without Divine agency-maintains too often an unsuccessful contest. Has not this indolent reliance on truth alone been a bane to the cause of truth in the present age? Was there ever an age when the truth was so clearly known, and so extensively dif fused as in the present day; was there ever an age in which men, by means of general education, and a teeming press, had such free access to the truth? And yet we see the most baleful, noxious, and puerile errors prevailing, and growing up with unwonted rankness and vigour. Nay, do we not often find that the most educated minds are among the first to be perverted? These facts sufficiently admonish us against a supine and too confident reliance on truth alone: indeed, it is not properly a reliance on truth, but an unwarranted reliance on man, whose history shows that he loves darkness rather than light.

Nor can we accord with those who apologize for Rome's insolent aggression, by a comparison thereof with the errors and assumptions of the National Establishment, and who on that account would dissuade us from action at the present crisis. Dissenters though we be on principle, we cannot forget that we are protestant dissenters. Our dissent from the National Establishment gives consistency and strength to our protest against Rome. Our consistency, we think, requires that protest to be made at the present juncture with more strenuous and determined effort The spirit that denounces errors in one church, cannot consistently be silent against the greater errors of another; and the principles which urge us to employ lawful means to free ourselves from the domination of the one, should impel us with accelerated force to resist the attempted domination of the other.

Though the cry of "No Popery" may be used as the shibboleth of party, yet would it be a melancholy day for England, if its population, and especially if its ministers, the official and appointed guardians of religious truth, were indifferent to the aggressions of the apostate Church of Rome; or if dissenters, from their hostility to an establishment, should indiscriminately confound the incongruities of the latter with the enormous errors of the former, and regard each with equal aversion. Grave evils there are, and we deeply deplore them, in the state church; yet let us be just to ourselves and the cause of truth. What are those evils compared with the monstrous delusions, the idolatries, the blasphemies, and the atrocities, unblushingly avowed by the Church of Rome? The idolatry of the mass, the glaring absurdity of transubstantiation, the worship of the virgin, the invocation of saints and angels, the doctrine of purgatory, the power to grant indulgences, the figment of infallibility, the fierce and fiendish anathemas denounced against heretics, the horrid cruelties of the inquisition, the power to absolve subjects from allegiance to their sovereign, and dispense with the obligations of oaths-these and a hundred other dogmas, repugnant to reason, to civil liberty, and fraught with absurdity and cruelty, are still maintained in the Church of Rome, while they are renounced and

repudiated by the Church of England. The great doctrines of the right of private judgment, and the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, are cardinal points in the Church of England; and these alone, admitted and maintained, are the grand elementary principles capable of working out for any church all the truth, the purity, and the freedom of genuine Christianity; but the repudiation of these principles by the Church of Rome, not only confirms all her existing errors and shuts out all reformation, but opens the way for yet denser darkness and corruptions more foul and abominable. That many unfaithful and treacherous men in the Establishment are propagating doctrines and pursuing a course which leads to Rome, is to be lamented, but their doctrines and their practices, too, for the most part, are condemned by the acknowledged principles of the Church itself. It is true, the Church of England recognizes a secular head in the person of the British sovereign. To this we conscientiously object, as an infringement of the authority of Christ: yet justice compels us to acknowledge that this evil bears no proportion to the arrogant and impious assumption of the Pope of Rome. The ecclesiastical authority of our sovereign is neither absolute nor fortified by the assumption of infallibility; but limited and constitutional. She cannot act according to her will, but only in conformity with existing laws, and through a responsible agency, subject in no small degree to popular control: while the Pope arrogateth to himself divine honours, opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; he changeth times and laws, and assumes to do according to his will and pleasure. With these facts before us, let us not confound things which essentially differ. If, as dissenters, we deplore the errors of the Establishment, and constitutionally seek the abrogation of all assumptions which trench upon our liberties, surely as protestant dissenters we are bound by our own principles to make Popery the object of our unmitigated abhorrence, and to resist by every constitutional measure its insolent encroachments upon our faith and our freedom.

While our puritan ancestors sacrificed their honours and emoluments on the principle of dissent from the evils they saw in the Establishment, they allied to their pious magnanimity an intense hatred to Popery. They had no soft words, no soothing epithets for the Man of Sin. Their masculine writings breathe instinctive abhorrence to the mystic Babylon; their allegiance to Christ admitted no complacent apologies for Rome. Their energetic piety nurtured uncompromising resistance to the spiritual monster, and nerved their athletic arm to deal deadly blows against the common foe. Should it not be even so with us, who inherit their triumphs without sharing their sufferings? Is not opposition to Popery the genuine offspring of enlightened and carnest piety? Has it not the solemn sanction of our holy religion? Benevolent as is the genius of the Christian system, it thunders against Popery its most terrible anathemas. It distinctly notes her position on the Seven Hills; it portrays in graphic lines her abominable character, as the common foe to truth, to man, and to God, polluted by her adulteries and stained with the blood of saints; it predicts her certain and total overthrow; and the crash of her destruction is the note that calls upon prophets and righteous men to exult in her doom; and the triumphant shouts of the Church on earth are echoed by the loftier

praises of Heaven, "Alleluia! salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God: for true and righteous are his judg ments: for he hath judged the great whore which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. And again they said, Alleluia! And her smoke rose up for ever and ever. And the four-and-twenty elders, and the four living ones, fell down and worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen, Amen! Alleluia!" Hatred to Popery is evidently an essential element of enlightened and healthy Christianity.

But in what form is our opposition to Popery to be directed at the present crisis? A question of immense importance and of no small difficulty; and to give anything like a satisfactory answer we must look narrowly into the nature of the aggression now attempted. This aggression is not simply an appointment of bishops for Roman Catholic congregations, or the substitution of bishops for apostolic vicars; it is

1. An arrogant claim of papal jurisdiction over all England and all its population. If the Roman Catholic people of this country desire bishops for themselves, by all means let them have such things; but let these bishops be stripped of every vestige of secular authority; let them have no titles involving jurisdiction, either temporal or spiritual, over protestants; and let them abjure the pretended power and authority of the Pope in relation to all secular and civil matters in this country. We have no desire whatever to infringe upon their religious liberty; but the assump tion of jurisdiction over the protestant population, which the Pope's division of this country evidently implies, and which the language of the Pope's bull and the Cardinal's letter clearly expresses, we have both the right to deny and the power to resist. In the papal bull the Pope speaks of the popish church as the "Church of England," his bishops, as "the bishops of England; " and Dr. Wiseman, in his letter, says, that "the great work is now complete, and that England has received a place amongst the fair churches which, normally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion." That we have not strained the language of either Pope or Cardinal, let the declaration of the popish journal, the Tablet, be heard. It says, "Rome has more than spokenshe has spoken and acted. She has again divided our land into dioceses, and has placed over each a pastor, to whom all baptized persons, without exception, within that district, are openly commanded to submit themselves in all ecclesiastical matters, under pain of damnation."

Thus, with all the authority of William the Conqueror, the papal usurper divides the fair counties of England into so many papal baronics, and the whole population, like so many sheep or serfs, are apportioned to their respective papal shepherds, and resistance is under penalty of damnation. "The great work is now complete," despite of sovereign, parliament, or people, and "Catholic England," the Cardinal says, "has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished." But stay; not quite so fast, Dr. Wiseman. All is not yet so "complete" as you imagine. We hope the good people of England will convince the haughty Italian priest that his palsied hand shall never stretch the despotic crook over their heads.

2. The proceeding of the Pope is not only an insult to our faith, but, as it seems to us, an act of contempt for our laws. The Law Times

has entered into an elaborate investigation of the law as it now stands in relation to this point, and arrived at the decision that, after all the changes and modifications which, from time to time, have been made in the statute law of this realm in favour of Roman Catholics, “the maintenance of the authority, jurisdiction, and power of the Pope in this country, is still illegal, and is still punishable by law." If such bo the case, and there seems no reason to dispute it, the Pope's aggres sion is a palpable infraction of our statute law; and as there can be but little doubt that he was well aware of the law in question, we can only regard his conduct as an instance of insolent contempt of our laws. He claims jurisdiction over the whole country, and calls upon its inhabitants to obey his dictum. Here, then, is a foreign despot setting up his authority over British subjects in despite of their sovereign and

their laws.

3. While the Pope tramples under foot existing statutes, he proceeds, "in the plenitude of his apostolic power, to annul and abrogate," by anticipation, any future laws which England may dare to pass in contravention of his decrees. Let the despot speak for himself, and let all England listen : We likewise declare, that all which may be done to the contrary by any one, whoever he may be, knowing or ignorant, in the name of any authority whatever, shall be without force." This is plain speaking, and speaking like a Pope! We cannot misunderstand this language, nor entertain a doubt as to the authority against which it is pitched. The authority of the British Sovereign and nation is nothing before the resistless dictum of a Pope. It is as light as the feather in a tempest, and insignificant as the bubble on the ocean wave. This mighty potentate, who has only just recovered breath from his flight, and scarcely had time to implore succour from the virgin, now hurls defiance at all opposing powers, and in his haste to put down the mightiest antagonist, tells British subjects that he has already abrogated beforehand, any laws which may be passed to contravene his decrees. Were audacity and impotence ever so combined before? Were not the Papal history before us, we should be provoked to smile in contempt at the comic exhibition. But in connexion with the records of the past, and surrounding events at the present time, the matter is too grave for contempt. With the facts before us, how vain to tell us that Popery is changed! The words of Pio Nono express the quintessence of that Papal tyranny and arrogance which the Roman See exercised in its proudest and palmiest days. They remind us of the times when the fierce Hildebrand made nations tremble before him-when Celestine the Third kicked off the crown from the head of an emperor while kneeling, to show his prerogative of making and unmaking kingswhen Gregory the Fourth compelled an emperor to stand three days, in the depth of winter, barefooted, at the castle gate, to implore his pardon -when by Innocent the Third King John was excommunicated, his subjects absolved from their oath of allegiance, and the nation laid under the ban of a general interdict! If the power to do this now is wanting in Pius the Ninth, the disposition is not. The right to do it is clearly implied in the audacious and insulting declaration he has officially issued. Ought such an insult to the British Monarch, and such an interference with the liberties of British subjects to be tolerated? Are we, in the nineteenth century, first to be claimed en masse as spiritual

subjects to the Pope of Rome, and then to be told that "in the plenitude of his apostolic power" he abrogates and annuls all laws and all authority which may dare dispute his power to do this? We think our liberties are too well understood and too highly appreciated quietly to acquiesce in such arrogant assumptions.

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4. The Pope complacently assures the adherents to his hierarchy that his help and succour shall not be withheld when required. He says, for us, most assuredly they shall never have to. complain that we do not sustain them by our apostolical authority, and we shall be always happy to second their demands," dc. Poor Pope, in what a condition must he be to help others, when so recently he could not help himself from the disgrace of escaping as a disguised fugitive from the fury of his own people! But the mark of the beast is seen in this sentence as well as in the other. He will "sustain" them-how? Not by the power of his soldiery, but, as of old, by bulls, anathemas, interdicts, &c.; as the Pope has ever sustained his clergy in their collisions with either secular power or protestant truth. The time may not come in our own day, but if we quietly fold our hands at the present juncture, our children may reap the bitter fruits of our treacherous indifference.

5. The Pope, in order to give full effect to his scheme of aggression, appoints Dr. Wiseman as Cardinal and Archbishop. This is the individual who has the reputation of manifesting his aversion to a Protestant Sovereign by expunging from the Missal, with the concurrence of the Pope, a prayer for her present majesty, Victoria. We can easily conceive that her majesty was not disconcerted by the circumstance, and we can as easily perceive the animus which urged to such a disloyal step. This, we say, is the man elected by his Holiness to exercise the functions of cardinal in this country.

As the functions of a Cardinal and Popish Archbishop may not be generally known to our readers, we shall briefly state them; and that no one may suspect we furnish an uncandid statement of them, we shall give that statement in the language of an intelligent Catholic. He remarks: "As archbishop, he (Dr. Wiseman) will necessarily exerciso considerable temporal, as well as spiritual, authority over the subjects of his newly-erected see: and, as cardinal, he is not only counsellor to a foreign sovereign, but also, and to all intents and purposes, a foreign prince, within the meaning of the statute. He is, therefore, a foreign prince exercising temporal jurisdiction within this realm."

"If it be asked, in what the temporal jurisdiction' of the new cardinal will consist? I answer, First, that Dr. Wiseman, succeeding as 'Archbishop of Westminster' to the duties of vicar apostolic,' becomes trustee for the English Catholic body to a large amount of property, over a great part of which he holds an absolute control, and for the administration of which he has not only recently established a council, composed of members all appointed and removable by himself, but has already published what he calls a statute,' settling the laws and powers of this council, and declaring his intention of submitting this and other matters relative to the distribution of property in England to the approbation of the Pope; secondly, I reply that, in England, the clergy are wholly and entirely subject to the mere will of the bishop; so that, however exemplary or useful a man may be, the bishop may, at any moment, remove him from his cure, refuse him compensation for