trial polity, with its own visible head, its own laws, its own penalties, and its own instruments (often secret ones), for the enforced regulation of men's actions in every relation and in every imaginable contingency of sublunary life." (P. 29.) "The system is irrevocable and irremediable."—(P. 21.) "When I compare the Church of Rome, as I now see it, with what I painted her to myself, with the imaginary realization of our blessed Saviour's scheme for fallen man's sanctification, no words can convey my horror at the contrast. I should often doubt the conclusions of my reason, mistrust my moral sense, and regard my certain knowledge as a dream, if God's written Word, and man's universal conscience, if the experience of both hemispheres and of ten centuries did not confirm me.”—(P. 33.)

II. POPERY A MONOMANIA.

Of late years, my friends, since I became more intimately acquainted, than I once was, with the wiles and workings of this delusive and destructive system, I have been led to adopt the conclusion, that Popery is a kind of monomania, under the influence of which, although a Papist may be, and often is, a man,

"Cætera qui vitæ servaret munia recto

More-bonus sanè vicinus-amabilis hospes,

Posset qui rupem, et puteum vitare patentem,"

he is prepared to sacrifice truth, mercy, and uprightness, at the shrine of falsehood, tyranny, and injustice, when, by doing so, he thinks he can do the Pope service, promote the aggrandisement of his apostate church, and obey the behests of her unprincipled ministers.

1. The first proof of this allegation I deduce from their acknowledgment of the Bishop of Rome as vicar of Christ, supreme head of the church, successor of Peter, and infallible in matters of faith. I have already

stated at great length the grounds on which it appears to me that, of all the arrogant assumptions ever urged upon human credulity, this fundamental doctrine of Popery is the most preposterous and the most unfounded.

The subject, however, is of such paramount importance, that I shall here lay before you a few considerations in reference to the questions of supremacy and infallibility, which were not so fully dwelt upon in the preceding letters.

On the first of these points, it is certain (says that profound divine, and admirable critic, Canon Wordsworth), that St Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, knew nothing of such a supremacy in Pope Anicetus; that Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, and the Synod of Asiatic Bishops, and St Irenæus, bishop of Lyons, and the council assembled in that city, knew nothing of any such supremacy in Pope Victor; that St Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, and the African bishops, knew nothing of it in Pope Stephanus; that St Augustin and the bishops of Africa knew nothing of it in Popes Zosimus and Boniface, and that the bishops of Rome themselves were ignorant of it for 600 years.-(Wordsworth's Theoph. Anglo. Part ii., p. 246).

The 101 fathers (says D' Aillé, p. 310) of the second general council, and the 630 of the fourth, were all of opinion, that the ancients had advanced the see of Rome above that of other bishops, by reason of the pre-eminence and temporal greatness of the city of Rome above other cities; and for the same reason, they also thought good to advance, in like manner, the throne of the patriarch of Constantinople to the same height with the former, by reason of the city, where he resided, being now arrived to the self same height of dignity with Rome itself.— (Concil. Constance, Can. 3.)

This supremacy is as hateful and antichristian an usurpation, in our own day, according to the judgment of the Greek Church, and many other Eastern communions,

as in the eyes of the most zealous of its Protestant antagonists. It is only two years since a firm and dignified protest has been put forth, by the Greek patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, assembled with twenty-nine bishops in synod, against the encroachments of Rome. This protest was called for by an attempt on the part of the Roman Pontiff to divide the Greek dioceses into Latin sees, similar to that which he has still more recently made in England. They do not shun to declare, that "the Church of Rome has cut herself off from the teaching of the apostles, upon many catholic and most essential articles of Christianity." Nay, they go so far as to affirm, that she is "the great heresy of modern times," having ceased to be "purely guided by the doctrine of the fathers, and to walk by the never-to-be-forgotten rule of Scripture and holy councils," and "claiming to herself the power of a spiritual monarch and arbitress, which not even St Peter possessed."-(Meyrick, p. 53.)

It affords no slight presumption against this arrogant and unfounded claim, that fraud and forgery have been unblushingly resorted to in confirmation of it. Very many epistles (says Jeremy Taylor) of Popes, from St Clemens to St Gregory (about 500 years), were enforced on the church as the genuine writings of those excellent men, who governed the Church of Rome in all her persecutions and hardnesses, and of these epistles the present Church of Rome makes very great use to many purposes, and yet no imposture could be greater than this:-1. They are patched up of several arguments and materials, not at all agreeing with the age in which they are pretended to be written, but are snatched from the writings of other men in later times. 2. They were

invented after St Jerome's time, as appears in the citation of testimonies of Scripture from St Jerome's translation, and the author cited St Jerome's version of the Hebrew Psalter. 3. They were not known in Rome for eight ages together, which were a strange

thing, that the records of Rome should have no copies of the epistles of so many bishops of Rome. 4. They are infinitely false in their chronology; and he that invented them, put the years of false councils to their date, as Baronius himself confesses, quite reckoning otherwise; and in the epistles of the whole forty-five, the decrees of councils and the words of ecclesiastical writers are cited, who yet were not in all their ages, but wrote after the death of these popes who are pretended to have quoted them, or something is said that could not be done or said by them, or in their times. 5. They are written with the same style, and therefore it is no more probable, that they should be the genuine epistles of so many popes, than that so many men in several ages should have the same features in their faces; but these epistles say over the same things several times, even unto tediousness, and yet are the very same words, without any differing expressions. 6. Sometimes their words were most intolerably barbarous, neither elegantly fine, nor elegantly plain, but solecisms, impure words, and the most rude expressions, not unlike the friars' Latin, or the epistolæ obscurorum virorum. 7. None of the ancient writers of the church did ever cite any testimony from these epistles for 800 years together, only part of the epistle of St Clement was mentioned by Rufinus and the council of Nice. 8. None of those who wrote histories ecclesiastical, or of the church writers, made mention of them, but all that do, were about 830 years after the incarnation. 9. And all this beside the innumerable errors in the matter; and a more notorious cheat could never have been imposed upon the world, but that there are so many great notorieties of falsehood, that it would be hard to say which is greater, the falsehood of the pontifical books, or the boldness of the compiler. Now, if so great a heap of records can at once be clapped upon the credulity of men, and so boldly defended as it is by Turrian and Binius, and so greedily entertained as it is by the Roman confidents, and so often

cited as it is by the Roman doctors, and yet have in it so many strange matters so disagreeing to Scripture, so weak, so impertinent, and sometimes so dangerous, there is very great reason to reject the topic of traditions, which can be so easily forged, and sometimes rely upon no greater foundation than this, whose foundation is in water and sand, and falsehood that is most unstable.— (Jeremy Taylor).

That no bishop was acknowledged as supreme in the days of primitive antiquity, is elsewhere demonstrated by the same learned prelate, in a passage, which I shall transcribe for your consideration. "As is the power of the Holy Trinity one and undivided, so is the episcopacy divided amongst all bishops, but the power is the same," says Pope Symmachus. "The church," says Pope Damasus, "is committed to us in common, and we have no other way of being one flock, and one shepherd, but by speaking the same things," that is, consenting and giving into the common government. "It is all one," says Jerome, "there is no difference in worthiness and power, whether he be bishop of Rome or Eugubium, Constantinople or Rhegium, Tanaiser, Alexandria; what Peter was, that the rest of apostles were, he was the vicar of Christ on earth, and so were they, so are their successors." . . The power which the bishops have, they have it immediately from Christ, they are successors of the apostles; of all, not of Peter only, many apostolical churches, which were established by others, being succeeded in, as well as Rome. These things are evident in matter of fact, and universally affirmed in antiquity, clearly and without dispute. From hence it must needs follow, that, by the law of Christ, one bishop is not superior to another. "It remains," said Cyprian, at the council of Carthage, "that we all speak what every one of us doth think, judging no man, refusing to communicate with no man, that shall happen to be of a different judgment, for none of us makes himself a bishop of bishops, or by tyrannical terror compels his colleagues