his church in refusing, even under such extremities, to yield one jot of its intolerant assumptions."

In a document, containing formal instructions on various topics, issued on the 27th of February, 1809, to the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and vicars capitular, of France, respecting the reformed churches of that kingdom. The Pope states, concerning marriage :-" Some of you demand from us a dispensation, or power of granting marriages, to be contracted between two parties, one of whom professes the Catholic faith, and the other an HERESY (Protestant); but, we suppose you perfectly well know that the true Catholic church, the church of Jesus Christ, has always strongly reprobated marriages with HERETICS; since the church abhors them, as Clement XI. said, our predecessor of happy memory, 'ob plurimum deformitatis nec parum spiritualis periculi quod præ se ferunt;' because of the great dishonour and spiritual danger which they produce. The same laws which prohibit Christians from contracting marriage with Infidels, in like manner forbid Catholics from making SACRILEGIOUS NUPTIALS WITH HERETICS: whence we have been most bitterly afflicted (as our predecessor Benedict XIV. of happy memory was,) to find the Catholics so madly entangled by a shameful passion, as not to abstain FROM SUCH

DETESTABLE COALITION, WHICH OUR HOLY MOTHER CHURCH EVER HATH CONDEMNED AND FORBIDDEN."

So much for the principles avowed by Bossuet and Pius VII. Let us now turn to the glozings and palliations of Irish doctors of the college of Maynooth.

"I know no part of the history of the Roman Catholic church," says Lord Bexley, "which has more justly excited the astonishment and indignation of mankind, than the proceedings of Pope Innocent III., and the fourth council of Lateran, which established the inquisition; preached the crusade against the Albigenses, in which historians compute that a million of persons of every age and sex were put to the sword; and declared, that all princes who did not exterminate heretics in their dominions, should be excommunicated and deposed.

"The Rev. Dr. Crotty, president of the College, and the Rev. Dr. Slevin, prefect of the Dunbayne establishment in Maynooth, were examined as to the decree of the council of Lateran. They coolly state, that as the council was composed of temporal as well as ecclesiastical authorities, they do not think the church answerable if there was anything erroneous or blameable in its proceedings, (though the Pope presided, and the council is known to have been only an instrument in his hands,) but that they do not consider the deposing decree as now in force.

"If any transaction could be worse than those of the council of Lateran, it would be the treacherous and cruel execution of John Huss, at the

council of Constance, after the safe conduct granted to him by the emperor, with the consent of the council. Here, indeed, Dr. Crotty is bolder, for he justifies the council on the ground that Huss merited his fate by attempting to escape when he found he was about to be burnt alive!

"In these two instances," continues Lord Bexley, "I have only stated the sentiments of individuals, though it may be judged what an influence the sentiments of men in such situations must have over the minds of their pupils, and I do not refer to transactions of this remote date with any view of dwelling on their enormity; but it is highly important that Protestants should know in what light they are represented by the leading Roman Catholic divines of the present day, and especially those who are charged with the education of our fellow-subjects, and who in their examination before the Commissioners of the House of Commons must have been supposed to have spoken with as much caution and wish to avoid offence, as a candid statement of their sentiments would admit, and who were allowed the fullest opportunity of revising and correcting their statements."

With such principles the practice of Roman Catholics of the present day too well agrees. Two instances will suffice to show this.

"In 1815, an English officer of high rank who lost his daughter (the last and loveliest) as they

were travelling in Spain, was himself obliged, with a former aid-de-camp, to carry her body on the sea-shore of Tarragona, and at midnight, a servant bearing a torch, and digging a grave between high and low-water mark, to read the funeral service over his child! In Gilly's Vaudois, 4to., p. 108, there is an account of the tomb, and the inscription to the memory of an English lady whom I well knew, and who dying at Turin, was removed for interment into the country of the Vaudois. And in 1823-4, (continues Sir R. Inglis,) as I learned by a letter from a connexion of the party soon after I had made this statement, an English gentleman, whose wife died at Florence, was obliged to remove her body to the distance of thirty miles, before a burying-ground could be found for a Protestant." "

XIII.

Tyranny of the Church of Rome over literary productions at the present day.

"THE tyranny of the Church of Rome over literature," says Sir R. Inglis; "her proscription at this day of all the great masters of the human mind, can be paralleled only by the tyranny and

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the proscription which she exercised five centuries ago, over minds and bodies alike.

"The volume which I hold in my hand, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, contains a list of the books which are at this time forbidden under the penalties of the Inquisition. It was printed at Rome in 1819; and I bought it there in the College de Propagandâ, in 1821. Pius VII. even in his last days, added largely to the list of books prohibited; and republished the whole Index, with all the censures and condemnations which Pius IV. and Pius V., two hundred and fifty years before, had pronounced against the literature which at that time had been proscribed.

"The first work to the exclusion of which I wish to call the attention of the House, is Bacon De Augmentis Scientiarum; the next is Locke on the Human Understanding; the next is Cudworth's Intellectual System; all alike taken from the faithful every where, and given up to the Inquisition. Let me add a minor fact connected with the Papal condemnation of Bacon's work; the date of the publication of that work preceded the date of the decree against it about fifty years; so little had the Church of Rome in that day risen to the level of the age, that fifty years had elapsed before the name and the work of Bacon appear to have reached the Vatican.

"It is true that the best modern literature of the land of these great men is not as yet proscribed; but may we not venture to believe,