sided over and recommended the true Gospel. It would seem then that the most ordinary impulse of gratitude should prompt him to respect an authority, from whose hands he has received the most inestimable of all treasures.

But still the Catholic Church is radically bad because she will not allow her children the free use of the bible,—that is, will not permit them to explain it as they please. And is a judge to be stigmatised as an enemy of the law, who, commissioned by the king, watches the integrity of that law, by preventing false and falacious interpetrations of its precepts? The scriptures contain the law of God. Now every law supposes the existence of a dispensing power, for without such a power the law can neither dispense itself, nor call to an account those who infringe its precepts. I maintain, therefore, that as it would be folly in an earthly monarch to frame a code of laws, and without appointing judges, leave them to the caprice and ever varying judgment of the people, so would it be highly derogatory to the infinite wisdom of God, to leave his divine law in the scriptures without a divinely commissioned authority to prevent error, by giving its precise signification; especially when he has pronounced that dreadful anathema against error-he that believes not shall be condemned. Reason loudly proclaims that God must have appointed such an authority, and the scriptures point out most clearly in whom he vested the divine commission. Has that authority been annulled? To justify those who condemn the Catholic Church, it must have been annulled. But He who says, though heaven and earth shall pass away, yet my word shall not pass away, declared to the Apostles and their successors in the same ministry, that he would be with them all days, and that the Holy Ghost should teach them all truth to the consummation of the world. These express promises of Christ cannot possibly have been falsified, for He is essential truth and cannot deceive. He is omnipotent, the Sovereign Master of events, and cannot of course be impotent to accomplish his will. Hence the Church, which he authorized to teach all nations, and which he commanded all to hear, under pain of eternal exclusion from the kingdom of heaven, must exist at the present day with all the plenitude of its original

power. But the Catholic Church most assuredly once possessed that authority, since it is the only society that can be traced to Christ and his apostles, and cannot be shewn to have separated from any other Church that existed before it. Therefore it is the true Church now, and the words of Christ are still addressed with all their energy to that Church-he that despises you despises me. If this is not the case, then the promises of Christ have failed, to assert which, is blasphemy against the immutable truth of God; but if the Catholic Church is, as it is proved to be, the authority established by God, then to impugn that authority is to rebel against God himself, according to the scriptures, which say-if this work or counsel be from God, you cannot overturn it, lest, perhaps, you be found to fight against God. We see then, in the first place, the dreadful consequences of calumniating the Catholic church; and in the second place, the absolute necessity of submitting to its authority, if we would serve God in spirit and in truth. For as the Holy Ghost is to conduct us into all truth, its exposition of the sacred word of God must be true, because the spirit of God cannot be in opposition to his own truths. Catholics, by proper submission to their Church, are not kept in ignorance, as it has been falsely and maliciously asserted, but are preserved in a constant uniformity of belief; and let those who pretend to make so much of the scriptures, judge if this be not entirely in unison with the words of our Saviour, where he says there is one fold and one shepherd, and where he prays that all may be one, even as he and his heavenly Father are one. But those who have rejected this authority are tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. Being without a guide, they draw from the word of God conclusions the most opposite and contradictory. One person reads the scriptures, and imagines that he can discover certain inconsistencies; he therefore rejects the whole, and shelters himself under the gloom of infidelity. Another, thinking it impossible for the eternal God to become man and suffer on the cross, looks upon the Saviour as a mere mortal man. A third bows down his understanding on the subject of the Trinity, although a mystery, but refuses to believe the doctrine of the real presence, precisely because it is insurmountable to human reason. A fourth rejects the sacrament of baptism,

agreed on the very corner stone of their religion, namely, whether the founder of it, Jesus Christ, is to be worshiped, as true God of true God, or whether it would be impiety and idolatry to do so, or to reverence him otherwise than as a holy prophet? The books, the sermons, the speeches in parliament of the bishops and clergy of the church in question, demonstrate that they are not agreed upon this and other fundamental articles of their faith, no more than they are upon certain moral obligations, such as the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract. This being so, I would ask the learned prelate, does your liberality extend to the formation of a Catholic church, one part of which will religiously adhere to the creeds of St. Athanasius and Pope Pius the fourth; while the other part is left to reject them as false and impious? In a word, were we to unite ourselves with the church of England, the great Catholic church would disunite itself from us.

It will probably be said that the proposal was made on the supposition of the church of England's strictly adhering not only to her own creeds, including that of St. Athanasius, but also of her coming over to our peculiar creed, the abovementioned profession of Pope Pius. But is there the least rational ground for entertaining such a supposition? Has the Head of it signified a disposition to give up any part of his spiritual supremacy? Or has any one of its members in church or state professed to believe in transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, the invocation of saints, or any other point controverted between Catholics and Protestants? For my part, Mr. Editor, I think, and the same appears to be the opinion of Catholics in general, that there has been no period within this half century, when our unfortunate brethren of the establishment, in general, have proved more virulence against their Catholic fellow subjects, than during the reign of his present Majesty; in proof of which I might cite the votes of parliament, the publications of the church dignitaries, the different proceedings of the Orangemen, and the efforts of the Kildare Street, the Hibernian and other Associations, to drench the Catholic youth with protestantism, and to force us all to wear the guise, at least, of protestantism, even after our dissolution. But, Mr. Editor, the unadvised proposal of the young pre

late, is not barely useless and inexpedient, it is also wrong and productive of mischief. In a word, it is an apple of discord thrown among the Catholic clergy and laity of both islands. True it undoubtedly is, that it will be disavowed by the clergy in general, and particularly by the episcopal brethren of the proposer; still it is a lamentable dissention, that one catholic prelate should be found differing from the rest of them on points of such incalculable importance as those involved in the proposal. But as among the laity there must unavoidably be many persons ill-informed, or comparatively indifferent about the doctrines and the interests of their religion, à proposal of the present nature, accompanied with the prospect of great civil benefits attending it, cannot fail of setting them at work to devise what parts of the Catholic religion they can respectively give up, and what parts of the Protestant system they can adopt in consideration of such temporal advantages, with the certainty of producing internal enmities and divisions among themselves, and with the greatest danger of their stepping into the fatal gulph of heresy or schism. In the mean time, the ascendant religionists will make a pretext of our refusing to give up any part of our religion, for calumniating and oppressing us more grievously. Dr. Dupin, the Sorbonist, entered into a treaty of religious union with Dr. Wake; Archbishop of Canterbury, which ended in each of them being disavowed by his brethren, and the controversies between the parties became more acrimonious than ever. Dr. Herbert Marsh, by way of restraining the fanatical biblemen of the present day, maintained that the scriptures ought to be expounded with the help of tradition; when Mr. Gandolphy, trying to close with him and to draw him into the pale of the Church, he turned upon him in his Comparative View, and flew off from it by a tangent to a much greater distance than ever. The Rev. Mr. Wix, three or four years ago, wrote a book to procure a joint synod of Protestant bishops and Catholic divines, for the purpose of uniting us with the established Church; but as we could not come up to his terms, in lopping off what he termed the superfluous and superstitious branches of our religion, he grew angry, and wrote against us with the virulence of a Methodist. I am, &c.

Henley, June 6, 1824.

A CATHOLIC PASTOR.

FOX'S MARTYRS.

For the Catholic Miscellany

MR. EDITOR,-The Martyrs for the month of August, generally bear so great a resemblance to each other, not only in their inferior station of life, in their poverty and gross ignorance, but also in their presumptuous and insolent deportment before their judges, that it will be unnecessary to notice them individually; except where their cases so far vary, as to render a short detail interesting. They were, in most instances, labourers, mechanics, or petty tradesmen, who had imbibed the heterodox opinions which prevailed in King Edward the Sixth's days, and afterwards avowedly supporting the same in the succeeding reign, they were, after repeated examinations and exhortations, reluctantly condemned to suffer death, by judges, who, as Fox himself allows, shed tears whilst they pronounced the sentence, which doomed these poor infatuated beings to the flames. The first martyr, however, was a German who suffered upon the continent during the reign of king Henry the Eight, and another; Eagles; was executed as a traitor. The annalist, with all his art at misrepresentation, seems nevertheless to have had some difficulty in canonizing several of his martyrs, for this month, and some of them he has even exhibited, as possessing nothing of the humble deportment, or of the meek virtue, which mark the true christian. Yet, there are moderns who have not blushed to retail in a new dress, the trash which was first collected by this ancient falsifier; and among these, Dr. Robert Southey stands pre-eminently conspicuous. This multifarious writer, has, in his Book of the Church, unhesitatingly betrayed a bigoted prejudice, and to say the least, an utter ignorance of many facts of English history, which, in these boasted days of general knowledge, seem rather to bespeak the book, to be the work of some orange fanatic, than of a learned protestant doctor; but, like many of his brethren, the creed of this doctor veers with every gale of temporal interest, or of fancied patro-, nage, and he can almost, with the same breath, proclaim the existence of a purgatory, as in his Visions of Judgment, and foully calumniate his catholic fellow-subject, whose faith is fixed and immutable; impervious to the attacks even of Sir