5. The same writer has affirmed that before the authority of the Church as a separate and supreme' jurisdiction can be admitted, it will be necessary to prove the existence of God, the revelation of Christianity, and the divinity of our Saviour, &c. This is what I said. I affirmed that no man could deny these principles without renouncing his Christian name or the coherence of his reason.' The reasoning powers of the objector are manifestly coherent.

6. The same objector says that I affirm that modern Cæsarism owes its rise to the influx into Italy of Greeks and Byzantinism after the fall of Constantinople. I made no such narrow assertion: but carefully enumerated many other causes. I affirmed that Cæsarism pervaded the Middle Ages,―nay, that it is in flesh and blood, and that Byzantinism was one of the causes which gave to Cæsarism a particular form. No Imperial or Royal supremacy had ever before attempted to suspend the canons of the Church, to prohibit the meeting of Councils, to annul their decrees, and to cut off appeals to the Holy See. They had always pretended to continue in union with Rome. The essence of Byzantinism is separation from the Holy See.

7. Again, we are told that the offence of the Emperor and Prince von Bismarck is that, in a country in which the clergy are State officers,' they are made to obey the laws. What laws? Not the laws which existed before the Falck laws. The Catholics of Germany are appealing to them, as Englishmen appealed to the laws of good King Edward.' They were willing to be, if I must use such a phrase, State officers,' under laws

which respected the Divine constitution of the Catholic Church. These laws they never did and never would refuse to obey. But the Falck laws are not these laws: they are new laws, tyrannous and persecuting. Rather than obey them, the Catholic Bishops of Germany have made their election. They refuse any longer to be 'State officers,' whatsoever costs, privations, or penalties they may have to endure. They have made their choice between two things, which I cannot better express than in the well-chosen words, 'the mess of pottage, or the portion of the bride.'

8. Lastly, notwithstanding incessant contradiction, we are told, over and over again, that the Catholic Church was the first to innovate; that the Vatican Council established as an authoritative article of faith a point on which opinion was formerly free; and that the plain truth is, that the decree of infallibility 'definitely cut the Church adrift from all existing moorings.' I cannot doubt that the public writers who make these assertions believe them to be true; but I am at a loss to conceive how men of undeniable ability, with the facts of history before them, can make such assertions. The governments of the world have consciously framed all their contracts and concordats with an infallible Church. The conditions on which those relations of amity were founded were always based upon the laws and principles of an infallible Church. The question as to the seat of that infallibility is not temporal, or civil, or political, or diplomatic, or external, but strictly internal, domestic, and theological. The Vatican definition has not altered, by the shadow of a jot or a tittle,

the relations of the civil powers of the world to the infallibility of the Church. To allege the Vatican definitions as a justification of the Falck laws appears to me to be a blot upon the good sense or upon the candour of those who allege it. Into which of the Falck laws does the infallibility of the Pope enter? No one can pretend to believe that it does. This declamation about the Vatican Council and the Pope's infallibility appears to me to be the evidence of a weak case. It is easy to create a prejudice against the accused when the world hates him, and there is a motive for doing so when the witnesses cannot agree together.

January 1, 1874.

CÆSARISM AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

READ BEFORE THE ACADEMIA OF THE CATHOLIC RELIGION,
DECEMBER 23, 1873.

My object in this paper is to inquire whether there be any special character in the conflict which the Church has to encounter at this day; and, if so, of what kind it is. In one sense the conflict of the Church and the world is always the same. The enmity of the world is one, and the truth is one; nevertheless the forms of that enmity are endless and always changing. In one point indeed the warfare of the world against the Church is always the same. It always uses the same weapons; but the motives and aims of those that use them vary. The weapons have been, are, and always will be, the civil power. For the first three centuries the Jews and the heretical sects excited the suspicions, fears, and hatred of the Roman Empire against the Church. In the Middle Ages the ambition or despotism of Christian princes wielded the civil power against the spiritual. Now for the last three hundred years, and especially in this century, it is a world departing from Christianity which uses the civil power for the oppression of the Church. In one word, the antagonist of the Church has always been Cæsarism, or the supremacy of the civil over the spiritual.

In a former paper I traced this out in the history of Christianity in England, and showed, first, with what

VOL. II.

K