his excellent essay on the spirit and influence of the reformation, published in France in the year 1802, is decidedly of opinion, that if the French government had sanctioned by law this pledge of allegiance and fidelity against the usurped powers of the Pope, it would have effectually prevented the civil wars which took place in the seventeenth century and the dreadful revolution in the eighteenth, which, like a direct visitation of the Almighty, overturned the throne, and involved in its ruin the nobles and clergy who had successfully prevented its adoption. Lewis XIV. desirous of vindicating the dignity and independence of his kingdom from Papal encroachments, convened an assembly of the clergy in the year 1682, in which he required them to adopt the following decree, "that God has not given to Peter, or his successors, any power over the temporalities of princes, and that he cannot depose them or absolve their subjects from their oaths of allegiance." These doctrines were so far from being universally acknowledged in France, that but thirty-five bishops, and a few of the inferior clergy, trembling at the rod of their sovereign, voted the resolutions on which the decree was grounded; but they were anathematized by three successive Popes, Innocent XI. Alexander VIII. and Innocent XII. who withheld from the French prelates the Bulls necessary to sanction their functions, so that on the death of Innocent XII. a great number of them were incapacitated, and could not, on the Romish principle, officiate at the altar. The universities of Douay and Louvain joined with the holy see in maintaining these horrible dogmata of Rome; and so did the Sorbonne, till many of its doctors were banished, and the remainder, under the influence of fear, consented to register the King's declaration.* Lewis's triumph was but short-lived; • These universities maintained and defended, at this time, the Pope's dispensing and deposing powers, and yet their opinions were produced in England in 1789, and in Ire-` land in 1792, to prove that such doctrines never existed in the Romish church! In the year 1589, the Sorbonne pronounced the people of France absolved from their oath of allegiance to Henry III, and invoked them to rise in arms against him, because, contrary to the resolutions of the league, and the orders of the Pope, instead of persecuting, he protected his Protestant subjects; and they sent this decree to the Pope for his sanction. (Thuanus, lib. 97. sec. 8.)-On his death, Henry IV. succeeded to the throne, both by right of inheritance, and the will of his predecessor. But because by Papal sentences he had been excommunicated as a heretic, and deprived of the right of succession, the Sorbonne declared, that "it was forbidden by the divine law, to admit a sectary, or the favourer of a sectary, to the kingdom, and a manifest enemy of the church, who was by name excluded from it by the Apostolic See; that all who assisted him would be damned, and that those who opposed him, even to the shedding of blood, usque ad effusionem sanguinis, would enjoy eternal happiness, and a crown of martyrdom." (Idem, lib. 98, sec. 19.) These impious and illiberal fanatics, also, declared, that VOL. III. [Prot. Adv. Jan. 1815.] 2 A subdued by age and reverse of fortune, and under the guidance of two JESUITS, his confessors, he permitted the French bishops to return to their former creed, and to recognise the deposing and dispensing powers in their holy father; and in their letters to him they said, that they renounced the proceedings of the assembly convened by the King. All these procedures are to be found in Riboulet's History of Lewis XIV. What pretence, then, can the French nation have to boast of the liberties of the Gallican church, when all their monarchs, from Francis I. to Lewis XIV. were led by Papal influence to persecute their subjects, as heretics, with the utmost cruelty; with the exception of Lewis XIII. and Henry IV.* who were assassinated by the same influence, for having given peace and protection to their Protestant subjects. Lewis XIV, one of the most despotic princes that ever swayed the sceptre of France, was compelled by the clergy to recognize the dispensing and deposing power of the Pope, and to injure his kingdom, in its very vitals, by expelling from it nearly a million of his most industrious and loyal subjects, as heretics. It was a matter of great and general astonishment that Prince Talleyrand, the present clero-secular minister of France, when bishop of Autun, should make a motion in the National Assembly, so early as the year 1789, for the confiscation of the property of the French clergy, which motion was carried. Afterwards, when an emigrant in England, having been charged with this, he said, in justification of his conduct, that some of the most enlightened persons in that assembly, with whom he acted, were desirous of establishing in France a limited monarchy, like that of England, which would afford a rational system of liberty; but they were convinced, from the gross bigotry and intolerance of the clergy, that they Henry and all his family, as heretics, had, by former Papal sentences, been rendered incapable of inheriting; and that he, with all other heretics, was annually excommunicated, and accursed at Rome, under the Bulla Cœnæ, which is proclaimed there publicly every year. (Idem, lib. 98, sec. 5.) In the year 1792, the Sorbonne denied that these impious doctrines were tenets of the Romish church! A pregnant instance of the consistency of infallibility! * Our great bard describes, very justly, those principles of Popery which have been fatal to the thrones and lives of sovereign princes, speaking in the person of Pandulphus ; "Then by that lawful power that I have, "From his allegiance to a heretic, "And meritorious shall that hand be call'd, could not accomplish it unless their monstrous influence, which arose from their immense property, was extinguished; and they wished that they should be supported by salaries paid by the state, like the Calvinistic clergy in Germany.* All governments have a right to defend themselves, not only against foreign powers, but against such of their own subjects as they suspect to be ill-affected to the constitution, and they should therefore, by proper test-laws, exclude such persons from the high and confidential offices of the state. The Tiers-Etat in France were convinced, from lamentable ex. perience, of the policy and necessity of adopting a test-law in the year 1613, to protect their country from the baneful effects of Popery, that deadly and ever wakeful enemy of pure religion and rational liberty. On the restoration, in 1660, the English nation were much in the same predicament with that of the French in the year 1613. The enlightened statesmen of that period perceived that the Protestant church had enjoyed but little peace from its first establishment, and that the altar and the throne had been overturned, in the preceding reign, by the indiscriminate admission of sectaries of every description into places of power and trust; they therefore wisely enacted test-laws, which Sir William Blackstone justly denominates the bulwarks of the constitution. Some statesmen of the present day, actuated by a rash and alarming spirit of innovation, have shewn an earnest desire to repeal, not only the test-laws, but the laws of provisors and premunire, which even Popish parliaments found themselves under the necessity of enacting,t to protect the state from the tyranny and rapacity of the Pope; though the events of the last twenty-five years, in Ireland,‡ prove that they are now more necessary than at any former periods. The zeal of these political empirics to propagate Popery exceeds that of Queen Mary; for though she manifested an enthusiastic desire to extirpate heresy, and establish the When Monsieur Marmontel published his Belisarius, universally and justly admired, he was severely attacked by the French bishops, because he praised and recommended in it religious toleration. Some of them having called him before them, he asked them what they required, as they said that their authority was supreme; they answered, "the power of the sword, to exterminate heresy, irreligion, and impiety, and to make all persons submit to the holy Roman faith." See Marmontel's Memoir, Vol. III. p. 41. + See the substance of them in Sir Richard Musgrave's observations on Dr. Dromgole's speech, p. 506 of Vol. II. From the year 1792 to the year 1798, the Irish Papists were endeavouring, with the aid of the French government, to deprive our gracious Sovereign of his crown. See unquestionable proofs of this in my fifth letter, Vol. I. p. 442-3, and in my tenth letter, Vol. II. p. 121. Papal supremacy, Sir Edward Coke observes, (3d Institute, 127,) that she did not venture to repeal any of the laws of provisors and præmunire, enacted previously to the first year of her father's reign. MEL ANCTHON. POPISH MISREPRESENTATIONS CORRECTED. - LETTER V. To the Editor of the Protestant Advocate. SIR;-The Papists, not content with libelling the authorised version of the scriptures in this country, have ventured also to libel the law of England. I shall return on a future occasion to the task, by no means a difficult one, of repelling the former charge, but I trust you will allow me to offer a few words, at present, in behalf of our legal constitution, respecting the point attacked by Mr. William Eusebius Andrews in the Popish Orthodox Journal for October last, p. 380. Mr. Andrews quotes the following passage from Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, I. C. 7. " All blasphemies against God, ALL impostures in religion, as falsely pretending to extraordinary commissions from God, and terrifying or abusing the people with false denunciations of judgment, inasmuch as they tend to subvert all religion and morality are punishable by the temporal judges with fine and imprisonment, and also such corporal infamous punishment as to the court in discretion shall seem meet, according to the heinousness of the crime. Now, will this scribe [the Editor of the Literary Panorama, whom we are proud to recognise as a friend to the Protestant religion] shew that the Inquisition, against which so much abuse has been levelled, possesses or ever assumed a greater power than what is here granted to the executive of this country. And if those who have so repeatedly changed their own doctrines, have authority to punish and correct others for doing the like; surely the ministers of that religion which has never been altered, but remains still the same, have equal power to decide upon the truth or falsity of any new fangled doctrines which may be attempted to be spread among the people of Spain or Portugal.-The Inquisition, at least as far as the Catholic clergy are concerned, never pretended to more authority than what is conceded in Hawkins's Pleas to the British Cabinet; and as to the tortures said to be practised upon the unhappy prisoners, they are entitled to the same degree of veracity as the infamous tenets attempted to be fixed upon the Catholic religion, and were invented, no doubt, to gloss over the barbarous executions which took place in Elizabeth's reign, when so many Catholic priests were hung, drawn, and quartered, and their bowels burnt, for no other crime than the exercise of their priestly functions." Will Englishmen endure this Popish rant? Is it not lamentable to observe any man so besotted with Papistical delusion, as to fancy that a mass of misrepresentation, such as this, can be crammed, like a poisonous bolus, down the throats of our countrymen? Does it not seem clear, unless Mr. Andrews be a bigot of the first order, that he despairs of being read by Protestants, for certainly only Papists, and very Papists, can swallow stuff like this?-When the poor wretch Eaton, the other day, became amenable to the law, for vending a blasphemous book tending to subvert all religion; was he seized in the dead of night, and hurried by a horrid crew of unknown ministers of vengeance into a dungeon? Did he lie there secluded from the sight of men, and deprived of all hope of consulting with his friends, or procuring legal advice? Was he compelled to accuse himself, or tauntingly asked to guess at and name the offence which he had committed, and on account of which he was apprehended? Was a confession elicited from him by the force of the rack, or was acuteness given to interrogatories by torture? And at last was he chained to a stake and burnt alive?Let Mr. Andrews answer these questions, if he can. If he answer them truly, he must condemn himself." The executive of this country" disdains to have recourse to the diabolical proceedings of the Inquisition; our Protestant State detests them; and let Mr. William Eusebius Andrews know, that it is particularly to prevent the introduction of such horrors into this realm of Britain, that you, Mr. Editor, monthly advocate the cause of the Protestant religion, and that I, an bumble individual, am emboldened to take up my pen in supporting the Protestant ascendancy. The powers granted to the executive branch of the state by the legislative, are very different from those assumed and put in force daily by the Inquisition. King Ferdinand, under the direction of his confessor, seems rapidly advancing to destruction; and Mr. Andrews betrays his want of discretion by turning the eyes of the people of England to countries groaning under the oppression of the Inquisition; for the re-establishment of that bloody tribunal in Spain, cannot but operate against the propriety of placing power in the hands of the papists here in England. Mr. Andrews is mistaken-the levelling of abuse against the Inquisition, cannot be necessary, if it could be of any service. It is sufficient to paint it in true colours, to describe it as it is, in order to ensure it the detestation and abhorrence of all Englishmen whose common-sense is not deteriorated, or destroyed by the artifices of Popish emissaries. The Inquisition admits of no trial by jury, and acknowledges no writ of habeas corpus!-Mr. Andrews's assertions, throughout the passage above quoted, - |