long schism the rival pontiffs used all their endeavours to keep their respective adherents at war, lest their own well-deserved deposition should be agreed on as one of the conditions of

It is of the dark ages that you speak, and therefore, I do not pursue the argument into later times. But how is it, Sir, that you have ventured even to hint at the personal characters of the Popes in those ages? "That a few in the long list," you say, "were stained by vice, is not denied; or that others exhibited the workings of those passions which too often accompany the possession of power. But can it be said (you continue) that even in the times of the greatest darkness, the Roman pontiffs were not generally distinguished by superior virtue and superior acquirements? Collectively taken, let them be compared with their contemporary princes in every age, and most assuredly they will not suffer in the comparison."... Bad, Sir, as some of the contemporary princes were, the worst of them would be scandalized by such a comparison. The Popes, during some centuries, are for their personal vices only to be paralleled by the Roman Emperors; and the excess and

* Lenfant, Con. de Pise, i. 59.

↑ Page 96.

extravagance of their depravity is to be explained only by the same cause.

Sir, I have no pleasure in contemplating the dark side of human nature. With your St. Norbert* I feel and know that it is good to believe in goodness. Even if my religion did not teach me on every occasion to form the most charitable judgement, inclination and habit would lead me always to look at things in their best and cheerfullest aspect; and I thank God, accounting it among my many blessings, that this youthful temper has continued with me into the yellow leaf. But it is sometimes necessary to read lectures upon the morbid anatomy of the human heart; and part of the infamy deservedly awarded to public and enormous offenders is, that they should thus be delivered over for moral dissection.

Some few years ago a certain party in this country used to insist that a government, in its transactions with other nations, should act without regard to the personal character

* Tanto procul dubio quisque fidelis piusque animus, ad omnipotentis Dei amorem et gratiam promerendam, propius accedit, quanto bonum, quod de alio audit, facilius credit, idque sibi ab eodem Domino Deo conferri optat et sperat. Qui non credit, non imitatur; qui vero non imitatur, nunquam perveniet. Vita S. Norberti, Acta SS.

of those who were at the head of affairs there; the conduct of states, they argued, being directed by national policy, not by the determinations of individual temper. This was a fallacious argument urged by inept politicians in a bad cause. The opinions of the ablest statesmen are in direct opposition to it; disproved as it is by the whole tenour of history, from which the maxims of true policy must be deduced. Under all forms of government, whether of the many, the few, or the one, the course of things takes its bias from the character of the rulers, and this more especially in arduous times. Forms of government, therefore, are more or less objectionable as they are more or less liable to this defect: and this is one reason why despotism is the worst form, it being the sure effect of great power to enfeeble or inebriate weak minds, and to infuriate or madden wicked ones. But the history of the Popes gives occasion to something more than political deductions. If other proof were wanting, it would afford irrefragable evidence that the Papal system which has been imposed upon the world as Christianity, is false. It is with love and adoration that we contemplate the Founder of our faith at his nativity in a stable; but who can be persuaded that his successors and repre

sentatives are to be found in the sty,..not of Epicurus,..but of all abominations?

So long as the Bishops of Rome were contented to abide within the limits of their just authority, they were neither better nor worse than other Prelates, and reasonably may be believed to have been wiser and more religious than ordinary men. It was when their pretensions were at the highest that their personal characters were at the worst. You have spoken of their superior acquirements, Sir. At first there might seem cause to wonder wherefore this superiority did not always exist, and always in a far greater degree. The poor child whom the priests of Tibet, in their well-compacted system of imposture, exhibit as their earthly and incarnate God, is always one in whom they perceive the surest indications of docility and intellect. And undoubtedly in like manner Apis was always a bull of the best breed in Egypt: though, if in this age of religious restorations Bull-worship were restored, and the election thrown open to other countries, a good friend of mine, who has been pleased to name some of his stock after the worthies of my poems, would produce a Sockburn Short-horns from Grassy-nook which should put the best bull of Basan out of the field.

But neither in the case of Apis, nor of the Dalai-Lama, were any undue practices used in the election; the one was as passive in it, and as unconscious of what was going on as the other; and both bull-calf and bull-child (to use a Chinese idiom) were fairly chosen according to the qualifications required. Has it been so at Rome? If you call to mind the intrigues within and without the Conclave, the popular tumults, the private solicitations, the sinister motives and the dextrous manœuvres, which usually accompanied the choice of a Pope, you must be conscious that, during the busier ages of the Papacy, the election was any thing rather than immaculate. And yet methinks an immaculate election should seem as necessary for the purity of the faith, or at least for the pretensions of the Papal Church, as that exemption from original sin which the Seraphic schoolmen first claimed for the Virgin Mary, and which one, who is less to be suspected of superstition than the hardest head that ever wore a cowl, would fain have persuaded the Council of Constance to establish for St. Joseph also. I speak of no less a personage than Gerson, the leader of the liberal Romanists in his age; who maintained that the Church* might

* Lenfant, Council of Constance, ii. 310.