finds many to listen to him. The great mass of the Irish who have migrated hither from their own loved Ireland have come determined to make this country their home, and the home of their children, and here they will remain, Americans in thought, feeling, and action, whatever their imprudent and ill-advised would-be leaders may attempt to the contrary.

The present storm will soon pass over, without doing us any substantial injury. Foolish and vexatious laws may be made, but they will either be repealed on the returning good-sense of the people, or suffered to fall into desuetude. The great body of the Catholic community have felt, and feel, no alarm. They have been and are perfectly at their ease. Let them remain so. American non-Catholics come, and will come, to their defence. There is yet a sense of justice in the American people, and the country is by no means prepared to make an exception even against Catholics to the great doctrines of equal rights and religious liberty which it has hitherto so loudly and energetically professed. This very pamphlet by Mr. Hale, which we have referred to, and the reception it has met in our nonCatholic community, would prove it, if we had no other evidence. For our part, we have placed, and we intend still to place, a generous confidence in our countrymen, and we will not readily believe that they will suffer their Protestant prejudices to carry them so far as to deprive us of our rights as a citizen, because we have exercised our natural and constitutional right to embrace the Catholic religion. We do not believe, and we will not believe, that this Know-Nothing party represents the real sentiment of the American people.

We have spoken of the anti-Catholic proceedings of our Massachusetts Legislature, not as illustrative of the popular sentiment of the State or of the country, but as illustrative of the character of this new party, which has the impudence to call itself American. If we know our countrymen, it is as anti-American as The American Celt, or The Irish American, or its late organ, The New York Herald, and the Massachusetts Legislature, elected by a stupendous fraud on the people, shows what havoc it would make with all Americans hold most dear, if it should once attain to power. It behoves every loyal citizen, every lover of his country, every advocate of republican institutions,

every man who believes that popular government is a blessing, and that the people are more trustworthy than absolute monarchs, to set his face against it.

ART. VII. LITERARY NOTICES AND CRITICISMS.

1. The Primacy of the Apostolic See Vindicated. By FRANCIS PATRICK KENRICK, Archbishop of Baltimore. Fourth Edition. Baltimore Murphy & Co. 1855. 8vo.

pp. 440.

THIS is a revised and enlarged edition of a well-known and in general highly appreciated work. We have not compared it throughout with the third edition, nor with the edition in German, but we recognize in it several improvements. It is altogether superfluous for us to praise this popular work, and to find fault with it might be regarded as indecorous, to say the least. The author is by general confession the most learned of our theologians, and his opinions on any point of theology, or ecclesiastical history even, must always have great weight, at least with mere laymen like ourselves. Yet he will permit us to say, and we do so with the profoundest respect, that his work would please us personally far better if it was marked by greater firmness and decision. Lest he should be accused of overstating his case, he seems to us not unfrequently to understate it, and on several points of no little importance, which he takes up and discusses, we regret a certain vagueness and indecision, a certain non-committalism, which leaves the reader sometimes in doubt as to his real opinions. We refer more particularly to the third and fourth parts of his work. The majority of readers will understand him, we apprehend, to discard the doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez, which we have endeavored to defend, as to the mutual relations of the spiritual and temporal orders; and yet the careful student of his pages is well aware that this would be to do him great injustice. It is clear to us that he does not in reality differ from Bellarmine and Suarez as to the prerogatives of the Papacy, and that his doctrine, when fairly and distinctly drawn out, is substantially that of our Review, and by no means that of the Hon. Joseph R. Chandler's speech on the temporal power of the Pope, delivered last January in the Congress of the United States. Of course he disclaims for the Pope all civil or temporal power or jurisdiction, strictly so called, out of the States of the Church, and so do we; but he asserts, if we are to give his lan

guage its proper sense, the power of the Pope, as representative of the spiritual order on earth, to loose the Catholic subject from the religious obligation of fealty to the temporal sovereign, when that sovereign by the law under which he holds has forfeited his powers by his abuse of them, or lost his right to reign by his tyranny and oppression; and this is all that we have ever asserted.

To understand this, it must be borne in mind that for Catholics what is called civil allegiance is a religious duty. The Church binds the subject to submission to the prince, under pain of damnation. "Let every soul be subject to higher powers; for there is no power but from God, and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they who resist purchase to themselves damnation."✯ Civil allegiance being a religious duty, binding in conscience, it is elevated from the purely temporal order to the spiritual, and therefore necessarily comes under the jurisdiction of the spiritual order. In that it is purely temporal, the Church has nothing to say in regard to it; but in that it is spiritual, a relig ious obligation, and pertaining to eternal salvation, it is for all Catholics under her authority. We cannot deny the religious character of civil allegiance without going against the express declaration of Scripture, and leaving every man free in conscience to obey or not to obey, as seems to him good, which were to assert political atheism, or modern revolutionism in its most offensive form, and to undermine all political and social order.

But if it is a religious duty, binding in conscience, the Catholic is held to unqualified submission to the powers that be, till released by his Church. No matter what the tyranny and oppression of the rulers, he is bound to submit, and under pain of damnation to resist, "for they who resist purchase to themselves damnation." We cannot suppose the illustrious author of the Primacy stops there, for that would be to bind the subject, and to leave the prince free to tyrannize at will, to make the Church the accomplice of the civil despot, and to confirm the standing charge of the Liberalists against her. Nothing is more certain than that power is a trust held from God for the common good, and may be forfeited by abuse; or that the people are not bound to obey the tyrant and oppressor, but may lawfully resist him, rid themselves of him, and choose a new sovereign. This is the common doctrine of our theologians, confirmed by the practice of the Church for ages. But the Catholic, it is equally certain, cannot act on this doctrine till the Church through the Sovereign Pontiff has loosed his conscience. from the religious bond, and declared that under the circumstances he is no longer held to obedience, but may rightfully resist. That

*Romans xiii. 1, 2.

is, the subject, if a Catholic, cannot lawfully resist even the tyrant till the Church has declared the prince for his crimes and cruel oppressions fallen from his dignity, and his subjects released from their oath of allegiance. From this oath or religious bond the illustrious author asserts that Popes have absolved and may absolve subjects, and to deny it would be to place the Catholic at the mercy of Cæsar, and give, so far as religion is concerned, free scope to the civil despot. The Archbishop of Baltimore has not placed and never will place himself so unequivocally on the side of civil despotism, has not sanctioned and never will sanction by his high authority such a low and degrading Cæsarism, worthy only of the eunuchs and courtiers of a Byzantine Emperor in the worst days of the Low Empire. God, in giving the Church power to bind, gave her also power to loose, and we need not prove that he gave her power to protect the just liberty of the subject, as he did to protect the rights of the prince. If not, how could we maintain that our Church favors freedom?

On this point, the indirect temporal authority of the Pope, we are confident that the illustrious Archbishop has been misunderstood, and misrepresented, not less so than we ourselves have been on the same subject. He as well as we asserts the Papal authority in so far as relates to the religious sanction, and we no more than he assert it in relation to the civil bond as indifferent to conscience. But we wish the learned author had in the ninth chapter of the Fourth Part of his work more energetically vindicated the memory of those great Popes who have been so grossly calumniated by their enemies. We do not think Catholics are called upon to perpetuate calumnies against the successors of St. Peter. The author, in our opinion, might have gone further in vindicating the memory of Alexander the Sixth. That Alexander, while he was simply a soldier, lived in sin, nobody denies; but there is no evidence that he ever violated his vows of chastity after entering the ecclesiastical state, and his conduct as Pope was irreproachable, and his death peaceful and edifying. He was a great and good Pontiff, and in no sense can we look upon his pontificate as "disastrous." On this point, as on the conduct of the Pontiffs generally, we commend to our readers an excellent article in the last number of the Dublin Review, entitled "Bad Popes."

2. A Statement of the Trinitarian Principle, or Law of TriPersonality. Boston: Jewett & Co. 1853.

THIS book has been lying by us for a couple of years, and we have all along been intending to take some notice of it, more out

of personal regard for the author, however, than for its own intrinsic interest or merits. The work bears the marks of a good deal of speculative ability, and of much painful study, but a total ignorance of the sacred mystery of the Trinity as set forth in Catholic theology. As a psychological study, or as another proof of the sad wanderings of the human reason divorced from the light of revelation, it has a certain value; but in any other respect it is worse than valueless. We have read it with care, and perhaps may avail ourselves of an early opportunity to point out to the author, who regards his work as unanswerable, some of his mistakes.

3. A Vindication of the Catholic Church, in a Series of Letters addressed to the Rt. Rev. John Henry Hopkins, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Vermont. By FRANCIS PATRICK KENRICK, Archbishop of Baltimore. Baltimore: Murphy & Co. 12mo. pp. 332.

1855.

WE are promised from a competent hand a review of this work for our next number. We have only partially examined it, but, like all the works of its eminent author, it is erudite and scholarlike. We thank the author for doing us the justice to state that, in our doctrine on the mutual relations of the temporal and spiritual powers, we follow Bellarmine and Pope St. Gregory the Seventh, and for saying that he does not believe that we claim for "the Pope any right to interfere with our civil allegiance." Of course we do not, in so far as it is only civil. We claim for the Pope no civil or temporal authority or jurisdiction out of the States of the Church, but we do claim for him plenary spiritual authority to govern Catholics in all things that pertain to salvation. Moreover, we are not an advocate for political atheism, nor do we think ourselves called upon, because a clamor is raised against us just now, to abate one jot or tittle of the power we have heretofore asserted for the spiritual order. It is when and where truth is most strenuously opposed, that we believe it our duty most strenuously to insist on it. Dr. McClintock's letters to Mr. Chandler show what utility there is in shrinking from high-toned Ultramontanism, and in attempting to make those outside believe that Gallicanism is Catholicity. The illustrious author speaks of a letter which he says he addressed to us in 1846, two years after our conversion. The letter to which he refers was addressed to us in 1849, three years later, and five years after our conversion.