in "head and members;" but still she must be infallible in matters of faith.

To the solidity of this structure have your divines committed the stability of the church of Christ: unless all this be true, the gates of hell have actually prevailed against her. A moral corruption in head and members; a system which ensured the continuance of this corruption, by repeatedly defeating the efforts of those who wished for a reformation, were, if we believe them, no subject of triumph to the enemy of God and man. As long as the authority of Rome was safe, the gates of hell had still the worst of the contest: let the Pope possess the heads of Christians, and Satan was welcome to their hearts. "The followers of Luther," says Bossuet*, "assuming the title of reformers, gloried that they had fulfilled all Christendom's desires, inasmuch as a reformation had been long the desire of Catholics, people, doctors, and prelates. In order, therefore, to authorise this pretended reformation, whatsoever church-writers had said against the disorders, both

* Ubi supra.

of the people and even of the clergy, was collected with great industry. But in this lay a manifest conceit, there not being so much as one of all the passages alleged, wherein these doctors ever dreamt of altering the church's faith; of correcting her worship, which chiefly consisted in the sacrifice of the altar; of subverting the authority of her prelates, that of the Pope especially-the very scope which this whole reformation, introduced by Luther, tended to."

If there be any conceit in the matter, it is that of admitting the extreme corruption of the Christian church, with the unavailing efforts of the advocates of reform, who preceded Luther; and yet blaming the Protestants because, by making the Pope's supremacy the " very scope" of their reformation, they took the only effectual method of putting an end to the evil. The absurd notion that the unity of the church of Christ depended on unity with the bishop of Rome, tied the hands of all Christians who wanted either the knowledge or the courage to examine the airy basis of that system.

The sword and the faggot, besides, stood in the

way of approach to that delicate point; else the invectives so carefully restricted to morals would not have always left the doctrines untouched. Submit your understanding to Rome; confess that you cannot hope for salvation out of the Pope's communion; acknowledge that immorality and wickedness do not detract from his supernatural privileges; and, on these conditions, you are at liberty to oppose the corruptions of the church of Christ. Conceit is not, indeed, a word which I should apply to such advice: deceit would seem more appropriate.

Invariableness in doctrine is Bossuet's criterion of the Christian characteristic of unity; but surely any set of men, who agreed on a system similar to that on which Roman unity depends, might equally boast of invariableness and unity: surely there cannot be, at least there cannot appear, any difference of opinion in a society which excludes every member who does not submit his own views to those of one individual, placed at its head; and which lays down, as an indubitable fact, that that individual, whoever he may happen to be, and whatever he may add to the common

doctrines of the society, always speaks the mind of his predecessors, and only gives explicitness to things implied in former decisions. Such is the artful contrivance which the author of the Variations of the Protestant Churches disguises into a miraculous unity of doctrine and belief; the effect, as he pretends, of Christ's promise of support to his church against the gates of hell. Raking up, besides, all the calumnies and atrocious reports with which the character of the opposers of Rome has been blackened at all times, and setting in the strongest light of mutual opposition the theological disputes which divided the reformers, he gives the whole weight of his authority and talents to a delusion, which nothing but an overwhelming combination of interest and prejudice could prevent his acute mind from perceiving. Had the Bishop of Meaux bestowed the ten-thousandth part of the perverse industry with which he followed that argument, in examining the gratuitous assumption on which it is founded, we may hope that his honesty would have directed his pen to some other topic. Instead of availing himself of the inveterate notion that Christ had established

an infallible judge in his church, lest, by the existence of doubt as to the sense of the Scriptures, there should be diversity of opinion among his followers-instead of taking it for granted that the victory of hell depended on the diversity of abstract doctrines among Christians, and not in the prevalence of dark works of wickedness, provided they were wrought in the unity of Papal faith he should, in the spirit of philosophical reasoning, have penetrated to that part of the argument which conceals the gratuitous assumptions whence the whole Roman Catholic theory has sprung. When Catholics have proved, without the aid of church authority, that the church of Christ must be infallible, then, and not before, they may object their variations to the Protestants.

The Protestants have varied in search of the divine simplicity of the Gospel, which Rome had buried under a mountain of metaphysical notions. The Protestants have varied, because they could not at once divest themselves of the habits of thinking which they had acquired in the Roman Catholic schools. The Protestants have varied, because they had the honesty not to imitate the