government. This embittered English against Irish, and Irish against English, through so many years of fiercest struggle over "Catholic Emancipation." This is the claim which has led Mr. Gladstone and other thinkers to make the severe arraignments of the Romish Church, and to insist that she must yield her oft-repeated boast of semper eadem, or be guilty of wretched duplicity in asserting that faithful subjects of Rome can at the same time preserve supreme loyalty to civil government.

Nor can we account for the severe enactments against Catholics which disgraced the statute books of England so many years upon simple religious grounds. It is true that, while the Reformed Church owed her very life to the right of private judgment, toleration and liberty of conscience were very little recognized. "Conformity with the new faith, as with the old, was enforced by the dungeon, the scaffold, the gibbet, and the torch." "A prince, being God's deputy, ought to punish impieties against God," said Archbishop Cranmer to Edward VI. See Lecky,"Rationalism in Europe,” chap. v. But an added reason is manifest in the fact that the Catholics of Elizabeth's day contested her right to the crown and plotted against her throne. Hence treason came to be associated with their religion. The severe measures of her reign were primarily designed to protect the State, but were, doubtless, greatly intensified by religious hatred. State and Church were so intimately blended that it was difficult to make nice discriminations between civil and religious loyalty. See May's "Constitutional History," chap. xi. It is plain that Rome had not, at the time of the re-enactment of the severe laws under Elizabeth, abandoned her claim to temporal supremacy. The "Act of Supremacy" would have been totally unmeaning in the presence and recognition of an undisputed duty of civil allegiance to Elizabeth, on the part of her Catholic subjects. The publication, in 1570, by Pius V., of his bull of excommunication against Elizabeth, and the absolution of her subjects from their allegiance and civil duties, is the plainest answer to those who pretend that the "Act of Supremacy" was aimed only at a hated religion. The continuance of this statute under the Stuart dynasty was in consequence of the doubt honestly entertained by the wisest and most liberal English statesmen as to the possibility of reconciling the claims of Rome with an

The period of the
Milton, it is true,

unreserved and undamaged civil loyalty. Commonwealth illustrates the same truth. would exempt even Socinians, Anabaptists, and Arians from suffering through the spirit of intolerance; he made an exception of the Catholics only on the ground that their religion was idolatrous, and idolatry should not be tolerated publicly or privately. But good Jeremy Taylor, under the Restoration, expresses himself very clearly in favor of the toleration of Catholics, unless they openly preach such doctrines as the nonobservance of faith with heretics, or that a Pope can absolve subjects from the oath of allegiance, or that a heretical prince may be slain by his people. Doubtless many continued their opposition to "Catholic Relief" from mere hatred of Catholic tenets, irrespective of the question of the public safety. But the utterances, from time to time, of the occupants of the Chair of St. Peter kept alive this suspicion, and thwarted the efforts of the friends of civil and religious equality to secure the passage of "Relief Bills," which were reported at almost every parliamentary session for nearly a century. So powerful was this suspicion to influence the course of public men, that, to relieve the Catholics from its burden, the well-known party of the "Protesting Catholic Dissenters" was formed in Ireland. This sect distinctly protested against the Pope's temporal authority, and against his right to excommunicate kings, and absolve subjects from their allegiance. A distinct bill, giving relief to the members of this society, was reported in 1791. So intense was the feeling which this bill awakened, and so thoroughly in earnest were the chief leaders in regard to this question of an undamaged civil allegiance of the Catholic subjects, that even Mr. Pitt addressed letters to several Catholic universities of the continent, in which the civil jurisdiction of the Pope over British subjects was distinctly submitted. Replies from several of these universities were to the effect that Catholics claimed for the Pope no power to absolve British subjects from their allegiance, and no right whatever to interfere with the civil government of that realm. But the more clear-sighted public men of that day were unable to allay their honest apprehensions, however inclined they might be to grant to Catholic subjects the largest freedom consistent with the safety of the realm. They knew that these utterances of the

universities were mere opinions; they had in them no single element of authority. They clearly understood that, especially from the time of the Council of Constance, even Ecumenical Councils had been denied a determining authority; and what satisfaction could they feel at this opinion of university facul ties, who could have no guiding influence with the head of the Church? Nevertheless, these statements, and especially the "Declaration" of the vicars-apostolic and their coadjutors, in 1826, "who at that time governed the Catholic Church in Great Britain with episcopal authority," greatly influenced British statesmen, and, to a very considerable degree, also, some of the highest dignitaries of the Established Church. This “Declaration" affirmed that British Catholics held no religious principles nor ideas not perfectly consistent with their duties as Christians and British subjects. It was largely by these and similar assurances that the final passage of the "Catholic Emancipation Bill" was secured in 1829-an act of justice which should long before have received the support of liberal-minded statesmen. Certain it is that from this time there is noted a great revival of Catholicism in England. It is claimed that between the years 1840 and 1852 ninety-two members of the University of Oxford, and forty-three of the University of Cambridge, of whom sixty-three from Oxford, and nineteen from Cambridge, were clergymen, passed over to the Catholic Church. "In 1867 the number of distinguished converts to the Catholic Church in England amounted to eight hundred and sixty-seven, of whom two hundred and forty-three had been Anglican ministers.”—Vol. iii, p. 850. But what has been the effect of this leniency and of this revival? Clearly, the revival of the arrogance and of the assumption of authority which during the controversy over "Emancipation" had been studiously kept in the background, and by many had been most stoutly disavowed. In Pius IX. reappeared the spirit of Hildebrand, which embodied itself first in the bull of 1850-by which England was divided into ecclesiastical districts as clearly and boldly as in the thirteenth century—and more offensively in the dogma of infallibility of 1870. These acts have led Gladstone to impose upon the Romish Church the dilemma that she must abandon her favorite boast of semper eadem, or acknowledge that she was refurbishing the rusty weapons of the Middle Ages, which

during the progress of the contest for emancipation she stoutly professed to have laid aside. It is plain that Mr. Gladstone's severe arraignments have not been easy to answer; indeed, it may be confidently affirmed that even Cardinal Newman, with all his wealth of learning, has not been able to satisfy the mind of thoughtful Englishmen, simply because he has undertaken an impossible task, impossible from the very nature of the case. And it is the assertion of Alzog, in a grave work which now receives the indorsement of the ablest and most dignified ecclesiastics of the American Catholic Church, that "what was a political prerogative during the Middle Ages has remained a moral right ever since, and will continue so until the Church ceases to exist; for, morally speaking, the Pope is an abiding lawgiver to Christendom"-it is this, which may well put the American people on their guard against the encroachments of this Church, which seems, consistently with her leading dogma, to be only waiting the time when the "political prerogative" shall be again asserted.

It is in giving a final estimate of the period of the "Rise and Height of the Papal Power in the Middle Ages," from the accession of Hildebrand, in 1073, to the death of Boniface VIII., 1303, under a "General View of the Temporal and Spiritual Power of the Pope," that Alzog's warm sympathy for the genius of the medieval Church becomes most apparent. We are charmed with the eloquence of some paragraphs of this section, and we most gladly indorse many of the claims of the rights of this Church to rule by virtue of its vast superiority in learning and in the spirit of humanity. That the Church was the very best power during these rude ages few will doubt; and that she was entitled to give laws by virtue of a legitimacy founded on this superiority, most candid historians and right-minded publicists will concede. None have been more earnest in the defense of the medieval Church in these regards than Protestants themselves. Indeed, some of the rationalistic thinkers of our time have pronounced upon the conserving, ameliorating, and humanizing influence of the Church of this period a more splendid eulogy than has Alzog himself.

All are familiar with the discriminating analysis of the elements of ecclesiastical power given by Guizot, and with the hearty and just tribute to the great and abounding services of

the Church, which he pays. It is not, therefore, in respect to the magnificent benefits which Hildebrand and the successors who realized his policy conferred upon the medieval world of Western Europe that we dissent from the account of Alzog; in this we can heartily unite. But it is the concealment of the other side of this question which constitutes the basis of the denial of the correctness of our author's estimate. It is to the utterance of a half truth, which sometimes becomes more misleading than unmixed error, that the discriminating reader will object. It was in this "respect for liberty," " the second condition of a good government," as stated by Guizot, that Hildebrand failed. It was a "denial of the rights of individual reason, the claim of transmitting points of faith from the highest authority downwards, throughout the whole religious body, without allowing to any one the right of examining them for himself," and "in the right of compulsion assumed by the Romish Church--a right, however, contrary to the very nature and spirit of religious society, to the origin of the Church itself, and to its primitive maxims"-that we arraign the spirit of the pontificate of Gregory VII., and that of his successors down to the death of Boniface VIII. Here is found the kernel of that protest which has been reiterated, not since the sixteenth century alone, but from the hour when the divine Christ said, "If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed," and when his saved apostle brushed aside all veils and human mediators by the glorious declaration, "For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." Nor can we accept the defense of Alzog as expressed in the following words: "But it is to be noted that it was not the theologians who during the Middle Ages recognized and formulated the rights of the papal sovereignty, but jurists and schools of law."-Vol. ii, p. 636. Who inspired the decisions of the jurists? Who regulated the discussions and the principles inculcated in these schools of law? What could interpose to save those who taught tenets which were in opposition to the well-understood opinions of the Church from the tremendous consequences of papal excommunication?

Canon law and civil law were most intimately blended; and while the jurists formulated the law, this law must be in