riable, and not alterable at the will of its ministers. It is open, public, and taught to children before even any illdisposed priest can think of availing himself of his office of teacher to mould the young mind to his selfish or ambitious purposes. The influence which the clergy are able through their office to exert could become dangerous only on condition that they could control the faith they teach, and form the Catholic conscience at their will, as is, to a great extent, the case with Protestant ministers. If, per impossibile, all Protestant sects could unite in one body, in a single organization, the world would see a despotism far more rigid and oppressive than was exercised even by the old heathen sacerdocies, for these ministers would be restrained by no Protestant conscience, and would have the sole control over their own teaching. The principles applicable to such an organization cannot, even humanly, apply to the Church, because her pastors can only teach what they and the laity also have been taught from the beginning, and are bound by the same law that binds the body of the faithful.

This reasoning applies to the question before us. The rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects are in Catholic teaching clearly defined. Nothing in regard to either is left to arbitrary will or caprice. Those rights and duties as the Church in her public teaching has always defined them are sacred and inviolable for all Catholics, for the Pope and clergy no less than for the laity. Whatever power of intervention the Pope may be assumed to have, he can intervene in no case not foreseen, and in no respect except in accordance with the principles always publicly recognized and always publicly taught. He cannot impose a new political duty on sovereign or subject, or exact from either what has not always been exacted by the law under which the authority holds. What will sustain his intervention? What can he rely on to give his intervention success? Catholic faith and conscience. Nothing else. But these he does not and cannot form, and these he does not control, for they were formed before he was Pope, and therefore could not be relied on in case of the contravention of either. Suppose the Pope, as we and many Catholics hold, has power to depose a temporal sovereign, or to declare him fallen from his dignity, and his subjects absolved from their oath of fidelity to him, he can

do so only in case such sovereign has, according to Catholic morality, publicly taught and presumed to be well known by everybody, abused and forfeited his trusts, and has already ceased de jure to reign. Now that morality, which no Pope makes or can alter, and which binds the Pope as well as the prince, teaches that power is amissible indeed, but that no temporal sovereign forfeits his trusts, committed to him by God through the people, except by abusing them, by using his power iniquitously, contrary to the common good, and in grievous oppression of his subjects. And what man, worthy to be a freeman, and not imbued with the spirit of an Oriental slave, will not acknowledge, nay, will not maintain, that, when a prince so abuses his powers, he ought to be deposed? The old Puritans of England, under Cromwell, went further, and not only deposed their sovereign, but beheaded him; and the doctrine of those at the present day who are most inveterate in their hostility to the Papacy is, that it is lawful to depose a sovereign even because he is a sovereign, and solely for the sake of changing the form of government. Ultramontanism, in what its enemies may regard as its most odious form, goes by no means so far, and they who take the highest views of the Papal prerogative hold that the Pope can depose a temporal prince, holding under the law of nature, only in case he so abuses his power as to forfeit his right to reign. He is deposed for his crimes, his iniquity, his tyranny, his oppression of his subjects, for nothing else.

The difficulties which honest and fair-minded non-Catholics feel on the subject arise from supposing that, because we admit the plenary authority of the Pope as vicar of Jesus Christ on earth, we necessarily admit that he has the sovereign authority over our faith and morals, and can make them what he pleases. They do not see how it is that we can recognize such an authority without subjecting ourselves to the will or caprice of him who holds it. They do not see this, because they do not understand that Catholic faith and morals are in themselves entirely independent of the Papal will, and that the Pope has no more power to impose an article of faith or a precept of morality than the humblest layman. He as head of the Church is the guardian and interpreter of the faith once delivered to the saints, and he can define what is of faith and morals,

what has been delivered, what the law of which he is the guardian enjoins; but he cannot, even if we could conceive. him to wish to do so, mould either faith or morality to suit any passion or selfish purpose of his own. In this sense he has no power over our faith or conscience. There is not a Protestant minister in the land that has not in this respect more power over the faith and conscience of his congregation, providing he gains their confidence, than the Pope has over the faith and conscience of Catholics. The minister to a great extent forms the doctrine he teaches out of his own brain, and imposes upon his followers his own private opinions; he can insist on a new and peculiar morality, and impose on the Protestant conscience a law of his own enacting, as we every day witness. The Pope cannot. By the nature of the case, as well as by divine grace, he is restricted in his teaching to what he has received, and in his government of the Church to the law imposed from the first. His legislative authority is limited to matters of discipline and administration, and in these is bound by the fundamental law. He can introduce no new principle, or change or reject no principle hitherto recognized and acted upon. This, if considered, would satisfy, we should think, any honest and serious mind, that the Pope really has no power of his own over faith and conscience, and that in regard to them he is the simple organ of the law, or of the authority that originally enacted it. The law for the Catholic conscience is not that I shall believe and do whatever the Pope commands me, but that I shall believe and do whatever God commands me through the Pope, or in the law of which the Pope is the divinely instituted guardian and interpreter. The divine command or this law binds the Pope as much as it does me, and he cannot give it an arbitrary interpretation, because its interpretation an interpretation that is fixed and unalterable has been given and known to the Church from the first, and is not left to be discovered or invented by any individual Pope. New questions come up indeed for decision, but these are not decided by a new and previously unknown interpretation of the law, but by the application of the law as always interpreted, or in the sense in which the Church has always understood it. I as an individual Catholic may not know in this or that case what God commands, or what is the true sense of the law, and I apply to 34

THIRD SERIES. -VOL. III. NO. II.

the Holy Father to be informed. He answers me, not by a new command or a new interpretation, but by telling me what in the sense of the Church has always been the law or the Divine command on the subject. He enlightens my conscience, but he does not form it. The law which he proclaims as the law of my conscience is equally the law of his, and he can no more make it what he will than I can what I will. I am as free, therefore, in my faith and conscience as he is in his. The Protestant notion, that the Catholic has no faith or conscience but what the Pope wills, is wholly unfounded.

We insist so strenuously on this point, because we are confident that it is the point on which Protestants most frequently and most seriously misunderstand Catholicity. They really think that we are deprived of all freedom, and are mere slaves to our priests, or if not the priests, at least to the Pope. Nothing is further from the truth. Priests are the ministers of the law to us, not the law itself. Catholic faith and morals are not private or arbitrary things. They are catholic, public, and taught openly to all the faithful. We have them all in our Catechism, and we know there can be no departure from them, nothing varied in them, nothing added to them, nothing taken from them. The Church knew her work in the beginning, and sprung into life with the full possession of all her faculties. She had her credo to start with; she had her doctrines fully formed, in the outset; and there were for her no new discoveries to make, no new interpretations to give. These doctrines may not be equally well known by all the faithful, but the Church has always equally possessed and known them, and they have always and everywhere been taught to her children, and in their substance known and believed by them all. Having been so known and believed, they have formed alike in the Church teaching and in the Church believing the law of the Catholic conscience, to which the pastors are as subject as their flocks, and which teachers no more than believers can alter, for teachers must be believers before being teachers. For Catholics there is and can be no slavery to persons, whatever their rank or dignity. There is no power in pope or bishop to enslave our consciences, or to reduce us to that spiritual thraldom Protestants in their folly speak of; for neither, if they would, could make us believe that we

are bound in good conscience to do what is repugnant to the faith and morals they have uniformly taught us, and which they have assured us had been taught them also. All you can say against us is that in your opinion the faith and morals taught us are false and mischievous, but you cannot call us spiritual slaves because we believe them, and feel ourselves bound in conscience to conform to them. We believe them because we believe that God has taught them and commands us to conform to them, and it is not slavery to be bound to believe and obey God. The most you can say is that we labor under a mistake, but in so saying you are at least as liable to labor under a mistake as we. At the worst we can judge of that question as well as you, fallible as you certainly are, and confess yourselves. If Protestants would bear in mind that Catholic faith and morality are always the same, and are taught to all Catholics, and form for all the law of conscience, the spring of action, and the guide of the understanding, they would be able to explain, in a much more simple way than is usual with them, many things they observe among Catholics, and see that they can interpret them more rationally in a good than in a bad sense. They would see that much of that which they attribute to the direct and positive orders of the clergy, or to a secret and well-concerted scheme of action, is the spontaneous expression of our Catholic life. Unity of life begets unity of action. Uniform faith and morals produce uniform private and public effects. We act freely as Catholics from the faith we have received and the life that is in us, and the conduct which is often supposed to result from Papal orders, clerical influence, or subtle policy is nothing but the open and frank expression of the interior life common to all the faithful. The Papal orders are much rarer than is commonly supposed; and much less is to be attributed to the personal influence of the clergy than is commonly imagined. There is a Catholic common sense, that counts for something, and Protestants would be surprised to know how much of that which they charge to conspiracy is perfectly free and spontaneous with us.

Resolved to understand everything among us in a bad sense, Protestants attribute the introduction and spread of Catholicity in this country to a Papal conspiracy. They sometimes go so far as to attribute the Irish migration