Bishop of his diocese, and went to Rome to submit his tenets to the judgment of the Pope, to whom he was presented by Cardinal Mezzofante. The Pope did not pronounce judgment, but seemed disposed to support the Bishop; and M. Bautain and his colleagues, M. Bonnechose, Goschler, Ratisbonne, (some of whom, I believe, had been converted from Judaism,) submitted to the Papal decision, and soon after left Strasbourg for Juilly.

terest.

His observations, therefore, on the nature and use of the Papal authority have more than ordinary inHe was, in our conversation, particularly emphatic upon this subject. He began with asking, "In England, when there arises any dissension, for instance, such as those which are now agitating your Church, what Court of Appeal is there to put an end to it? Where is the head, where the mouth, to speak and to order in litigated and controverted questions? Is it the Archbishop of Canterbury? is it each Bishop in his own diocese? is it a Synod of Bishops and Clergy? We see your controversies, and we hear of no tendency to a determination of them; we hear of your battles, but see no movement towards peace. But with us the case is very different: an altercation arises; there is discussion on this side and that: but since we are all children and brethren in one spiritual house, as soon as our holy Father has spoken, there is an end of the controversy, and harmony is restored. And this is according to the natural order of things;

there can be no visible society (and the Church is the most perfect of all visible societies) without a visible head. You present to the world the anomalous sight of a body without a head. Consider also that there is something marvellous and divine in the preservation and power of our spiritual head. Look at the succession of Popes in the same See, always glorious and majestic, for 1800 years! Consider again the wonderful and superhuman effects, moral and religious and political, produced by a power apparently so frail and feeble in all physical respects, as that of the Bishop of Rome. Even at this present time, when the old man of the Vatican, decrepit and care-worn as he is, speaks from his pontifical chair, the effect of his voice is felt in every part of our own sceptical and demoralized France; it strikes fear even into the heart of the Emperor of all the Russias, and is echoed through the woods of America! Contrast this condition of unity and obedience in which the children of the Church of Rome live with regard to each other and to their spiritual Father, with your own wretched, disorganized, and disordered condition. You have no spiritual authority to which you defer; you were created by Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth; you are ruled by Sovereigns and Parliaments; you have none of the spirituality of a Church; you are separated from the great body of Christendom; you maintain your ancient right and title to be Toto divisos orbe Britannos; and your destiny, I

fear, will correspond to your present state: you will, I predict, reap the natural harvest of the seed which you have sown. Your Sectaries and Dissenters are gradually becoming more and more powerful; your State is asserting new claims in ecclesiastical matters; you will have the same battle to fight concerning national education which we are fighting in France. The revolutionary spirit will fall upon your Bishops and Clergy; it will strip them of their wealth, and will make them the victims of its power. To your other difficulties will be added that which will arise from Ireland, a country which feels keenly the oppression which it has suffered from England in the interests which affect it most nearly-those of its Religion and of its Church."

I have put down here the observations of the Abbé Bautain in a consecutive order, though they were made separately in the course of conversation, and broken by replies. Let me add one or two other remarks which fell from him. He said that he regarded the Papal temporal power as good for those times in which it had been exercised, without committing himself to an assertion that it would be good for the present: he considered the uncertainty of Scripture to be so great in matters of doctrine, that a visible infallible authority was absolutely necessary for its explanation: he instanced this in the interpretation given by the Church, in the Fourth Council of Lateran, of our Saviour's words, "Hoc est Corpus

Meum," by which Transubstantiation became an Article of Faith: he asserted that the Holy Spirit directed and inspired the decrees of the Council of Trent.

I have before noticed the extraordinary misconceptions which exist amongst the most learned men of France concerning the history and constitution of the Church of England. I have never met with one who dates the existence of a Church in England from an earlier period than the mission of St. Augustine of Canterbury from Rome at the end of the sixth century; they know, and care to know, nothing of the seven British Bishops whom Augustine found in England; and who assured him that they acknowledged the Bishop of Rome as a brother Bishop, but as nothing more, and that they owed allegiance to their own primate, the Bishop of Caerleon.

They know nothing of the discrepancies of discipline between the British and Roman Church, showing its non-Roman origin; they willingly know nothing of the British Bishops who were present at the earliest councils of the Church, as at Arles and Sardica; and with respect to the era of the Reformation, they assert that a new Church was then founded for the first time by Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Elizabeth, and by their Parliaments, and that whatever authority this Church possesses is due to their temporal acts and those of their successors.

They know nothing, at least they appear to know

nothing, of the distinct and repeated protests of English Sovereigns, that in bearing the title of Supreme Governor over all Persons and in all Causes in the Church, they do not pretend to exercise any spiritual authority or discharge any spiritual function; that they do not challenge to themselves—but expressly repudiate-any right to propound articles of faith, to ordain to spiritual offices, or to exercise any ministry of the Word, or of the Sacraments, or of Discipline in foro conscientiæ; and that the external, distributive, regulating, and coactive authority which they do claim in Church matters, is that which our own princes and all Christian princes exercised before the encroachments of the Papacy, and which was exercised also with Divine approval by the sovereigns of God's chosen people. And with regard to the separation of England from Rome, they lay the onus of it entirely on England; they forget the anti-scriptural corruptions of doctrine which Rome forces upon all, as necessary to salvation, and as indispensable terms of communion with her; they forget the papal bulls by which Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth were excommunicated, and by which their subjects were released from their allegiance and ordered to rise up in rebellion against them; and they are wilfully ignorant of the language of that fearful chapter of anathemas, the bull "In cœna Domini," which is and has been for more than five hundred years the language of Rome to all