which it lies buried from the sight of vulgar eyes, and exhibited in the nakedness of a modern European dialect, involuntarily reminds us of Macbeth's words-"a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Only the misfortune is that although totally destitute of all rational signification the tale with its sound and fury, sanctioned as it now is by the solemn authority of an Ecumenical Council (an authority more solemn than we Protestants can form an adequate conception of) is full of the gravest significance. For it has not only irrevocably committed an immense portion of mankind to an inconceivably degrading form of Pagan Cæsar-worship,' and once for all poisoned those living waters of the Christian faith which the stanchest Roman Catholics had hitherto held to be the common inheritance of Christendom and incapable of being tampered with-but has, wherever two or three

ited

1 If this expression should appear too strong to any of our readers, we would invite them to procure the photograph (publicly exhibited for sale in Roman shop windows) of a picture painted in 1870 in commemoration of the Vatican decrees. It represents Pius IX. seated on a throne which rests upon a rock, at a considerable elevation from the ground. Round this rock are five female figures, in somewhat operatic costumes, representing Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia, all of them in attitudes of prostrate or ecstatic adoration, and one of them burning incense. Immediately over the Pope's head is the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, as in the pictures of the Baptism in Jordan. A little way above, in the clouds, but totally hidden by the intercepting figure of the Pope from the sight of the worshippers, are three figures representing God the Father supported on the right by the Virgin Mary, and on the left by St. Peter!

Now we cannot believe that any picture which should, in the first century of our era, have been painted to represent the sacrificial rites performed before the altars of the divine Augustus, could have conveyed in a cruder and more realistic form the idea of idolatrous worship than this careful masterpiece of Jesuit art. The absence of the Second Person of the Trinity from the picture, with the evident intention of heightening the intercessory character of the Pope, and of keeping the Vicarious character of his office out of sight, is perhaps the most remarkable feature of a composition which, if sold in Holywell Street, would probably be indicted by the police as a

Roman Catholics are gathered together, sown the seeds of a conflict between the Spiritual Power and the Temporal Power which sooner or later will have to be fought out to the bitter end.

We can, however, leave the decree respecting the Pope's infallibility, to take care of itself. It is more necessary for us to examine the one "de vi et ratione primatus Romani pontificis" defining the infallible Pope's powers and prerogatives, because for practical purposes, and in regard to its immediate consequences, it is of far greater importance than the former. For it is evident that after the Pope had been infallibilized the question of paramount interest arose as to the use to which he would put his infallibility. He might, like his "good brother" the Mikado of Japan, use his spiritual authority to extend the franchises of his people and to confer upon them constitutional rights and privileges which they had not before possessed, and which could not be conferred without divine sanction of an extraordinary kind; or, on the contrary, he might infallibly deprive them of all such franchises and rights as they had hitherto possessed. The third chapter in the "Constitutio Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesia" answers this question. By it the entire structure and constitution of the Roman Catholic Church is changed from the foundations upwards; and there is substituted, for a Monarchy founded on law, in which some attempt at least is made to separate the legislative from the executive functions, and to respect corporate rights and privileges, an autocracy based on the personal servitude of every individual, and the unconditional submission of every corporation, from the national synod down to the village vestry throughout the length and breadth of the "Orbis" and the "Urbs."

"We teach and declare," thus runs this marvellous Bill of Papal rights, "that the Roman Church (i.e., the Pope), God having so ordained it, wields a potestas ordinaria over all other Churches, and that this jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff over the Churches is (within each Church and

copal jurisdiction in its nature immediate': further, that the clergy and laity (pastores atque fideles) of every rite and every dignity (i.e., as regards the Churches, inclusive of the United Greek and other Oriental Churches, which till 1870 had enjoyed very large and well-defined privileges and exemptions, and as regards the laity, inclusive of emperors and kings and men of all degrees) are one and all severally and corporatively riveted by the duty of hierarchic subordination and true obedience to the jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff aforesaid, not only in all matters appertaining to faith and morals, but also in regard to such matters as have reference to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world."

We have no space to do more than just point to the portentous change brought about in the constitution of the Church by these few adamantine sentences, premising that the terms “ordinary authority (ordinaria potestas) and "immediate authority" are opposed, in ecclesiastical phraseology, to delegated authority and mediate, or, as we should say, indirect authority. According to the universal theory of the Apostolic Church, the unit of ecclesiastical authority is the Bishop. Even the papal Doctors, undoubtedly fertile as their imagination has proved itself to be, have been unable to get beyond this conception; and in their endeavours in pre-Vatican times to lift the Roman See to a meteoric position between heaven and earth, they could do no more than imagine a Bishop of superhuman proportions and cyclopean size, a potentialized bishop as it were, or a Bishop of bishops. For, according to the theory aforesaid, the episcopal office is not a mechanical structure of human invention, but a living organism divinely conceived. The Bishop, by the laying on of hands, receives his sacred powers, not as a delegation, but as a germ endued with the principles of its own proper life, directly and in uninterrupted succession from the apostolic founders of the Church. It follows as a necessary consequence that his authority and jurisdiction over the Christian

to the exclusion of any other ordinaria or immediata potestas. They are as the flower and the fruit spiritually developed out of the office itself. The bishop therefore can delegate his functions to another, he cannot co-ordinate another in his bishopric. A plant may be made to feed with its sap the flower and the fruit of another plant engraffed upon it, but it cannot be made to alter its own structural conditions or the laws of its own nature; this nature is one and indivisible; and so with the episcopal office it is one and indivisible. As well imagine two souls inhabiting one body as two bishops co-ordinated in one bishopric.

:

Now it is with this episcopal authority in its fullest sense, as a potestas ordinaria, and therefore not delagata, immediata, and therefore not mediata, that the Roman Pontiff has been invested by the Vatican decrees in every diocese of Christendom, and thus, in Dr. Manning's "chiesa tutta nuova," the difficulty of the two souls in one body has been got rid of by the simple process of expunging all lives save one. The universal bishopric of one supreme Pontiff has been substituted for those which for eighteen centuries have been distributed throughout the world. The Roman See, like Aaron's rod, has swallowed up all other Sees, and the Bishops, whilst retaining their names "honoris causa," and as titles of dignity, have been degraded to Pontifical Delegates, bound by the chains of a blind and implicit obedience to the will of an absolute master. In a far truer sense than Louis XIV. could say it of the State, the Pope may boast that "L'église c'est moi."

Once before in history a corporation, holding in trust the government and the liberties of a whole world, surrendered of its own free will this government and these liberties into the keeping of one man, and immediately afterwards deified him as if, in the fumes of the rising incense, to stifle the thought that it was even to such a one as themselves that they had sacri

which it lies buried from the sight of vulgar eyes, and exhibited in the nakedness of a modern European dialect, involuntarily reminds us of Macbeth's words-"a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Only the misfortune is that although totally destitute of all rational signification the tale with its sound and fury, sanctioned as it now is by the solemn authority of an Ecumenical Council (an authority more solemn than we Protestants can form an adequate conception of) is full of the gravest significance. For it has not only irrevocably committed an immense portion of mankind to an inconceivably degrading form of Pagan Cæsar-worship,' and once for all poisoned those living waters of the Christian faith which the stanchest Roman Catholics had hitherto held to be the common inheritance of Christendom and incapable of being tampered with-but has, wherever two or three

1 If this expression should appear too strong to any of our readers, we would invite them to procure the photograph (publicly exhibited for sale in Roman shop windows) of a picture painted in 1870 in commemoration of the Vatican decrees. It represents Pius IX. seated on a throne which rests upon a rock, at a considerable elevation from the ground. Round this rock are five female figures, in somewhat operatic costumes, representing Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia, all of them in attitudes of prostrate or ecstatic adoration, and one of them burning incense. Immediately over the Pope's head is the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, as in the pictures of the Baptism in Jordan. A little way above, in the clouds, but totally hidden by the intercepting figure of the Pope from the sight of the worshippers, are three figures representing God the Father supported on the right by the Virgin Mary, and on the left by St. Peter!

Now we cannot believe that any picture which should, in the first century of our era, have been painted to represent the sacrificial rites performed before the altars of the divine Augustus, could have conveyed in a cruder and more realistic form the idea of idolatrous worship than this careful masterpiece of Jesuit art. The absence of the Second Person of the Trinity from the picture, with the evident intention of heightening the intercessory character of the Pope, and of keeping the Vicarious character of his office out of sight, is perhaps the most remarkable feature of a composition which, if sold in Holywell Street, would probably be indicted by the police as a

Roman Catholics are gathered together, sown the seeds of a conflict between the Spiritual Power and the Temporal Power which sooner or later will have to be fought out to the bitter end.

We can, however, leave the decree respecting the Pope's infallibility, to take care of itself. It is more necessary for us to examine the one "de vi et ratione primatus Romani pontificis" defining the infallible Pope's powers and prerogatives, because for practical purposes, and in regard to its immediate consequences, it is of far greater importance than the former. For it is evident that after the Pope had been infallibilized the question of paramount interest arose as to the use to which he would put his infallibility. He might, like his "good brother" the Mikado of Japan, use his spiritual authority to extend the franchises of his people and to confer upon them constitutional rights and privileges which they had not before possessed, and which could not be conferred without divine sanction of an extraordinary kind; or, on the contrary, he might infallibly deprive them of all such franchises and rights as they had hitherto possessed. The third chapter in the "Constitutio Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesia

answers

this question. By it the entire structure and constitution of the Roman Catholic Church is changed from the foundations upwards; and there is substituted, for a Monarchy founded on law, in which some attempt at least is made to separate the legislative from the executive functions, and to respect corporate rights and privileges, an autocracy based on the personal servitude of every individual, and the unconditional submission of every corporation, from the national synod down to the village vestry throughout the length and breadth of the "Orbis" and the "Urbs."

"We teach and declare," thus runs this marvellous Bill of Papal rights, "that the Roman Church (i.e., the Pope), God having so ordained it, wields a potestas ordinaria over all other Churches, and that this jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff over the Churches is (within each Church and

copal jurisdiction in its nature immediate': further, that the clergy and laity (pastores atque fideles) of every rite and every dignity (i.e., as regards the Churches, inclusive of the United Greek and other Oriental Churches, which till 1870 had enjoyed very large and well-defined privileges and exemptions, and as regards the laity, inclusive of emperors and kings and men of all degrees) are one and all severally and corporatively riveted by the duty of hierarchic subordination and true obedience to the jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff aforesaid, not only in all matters appertaining to faith and morals, but also in regard to such matters as have reference to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world."

We have no space to do more than just point to the portentous change brought about in the constitution of the Church by these few adamantine sentences, premising that the terms “ordinary authority" (ordinaria potestas) and "immediate authority" are opposed, in ecclesiastical phraseology, to delegated authority and mediate, or, as we should say, indirect authority. According to the universal theory of the Apostolic Church, the unit of ecclesiastical authority is the Bishop. Even the papal Doctors, undoubtedly fertile as their imagination has proved itself to be, have been unable to get beyond this conception; and in their endeavours in pre-Vatican times to lift the Roman See to a meteoric position between heaven and earth, they could do no more than imagine a Bishop of superhuman proportions and cyclopean size, a potentialized bishop as it were, or a Bishop of bishops. For, according to the theory aforesaid, the episcopal office is not a mechanical structure of human invention, but a living organism divinely conceived. The Bishop, by the laying on of hands, receives his sacred powers, not as a delegation, but as a germ endued with the principles of its own proper life, directly and in uninterrupted succession from the apostolic founders of the Church. It follows as a necessary consequence that his authority and jurisdiction over the Christian

to the exclusion of any other ordinaria or immediata potestas. They are as the flower and the fruit spiritually developed out of the office itself. The bishop therefore can delegate his functions to another, he cannot co-ordinate another in his bishopric. A plant may be made to feed with its sap the flower and the fruit of another plant engraffed upon it, but it cannot be made to alter its own structural conditions or the laws of its own nature; this nature is one and indivisible; and so with the episcopal office it is one and indivisible. As well imagine two souls inhabiting one body as two bishops co-ordinated in one bishopric.

Now it is with this episcopal authority in its fullest sense, as a potestas ordinaria, and therefore not delagata, immediata, and therefore not mediata, that the Roman Pontiff has been invested by the Vatican decrees in every diocese of Christendom, and thus, in Dr. Manning's "chiesa tutta nuova," the difficulty of the two souls in one body has been got rid of by the simple process of expunging all lives save one. The universal bishopric of one supreme Pontiff has been substituted for those which for eighteen centuries have been distributed throughout the world. The Roman See, like Aaron's rod, has swallowed up all other Sees, and the Bishops, whilst retaining their names "honoris causa," and as titles of dignity, have been degraded to Pontifical Delegates, bound by the chains of a blind and implicit obedience to the will of an absolute master. In a far truer sense than Louis XIV. could say it of the State, the Pope may boast that "L'église c'est moi."

Once before in history a corporation, holding in trust the government and the liberties of a whole world, surrendered of its own free will this government and these liberties into the keeping of one man, and immediately afterwards deified him as if, in the fumes of the rising incense, to stifle the thought that it was even to such a one as themselves that they had sacri

which it lies buried from the sight of vulgar eyes, and exhibited in the nakedness of a modern European dialect, involuntarily reminds us of Macbeth's words-"a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Only the misfortune is that although totally destitute of all rational signification the tale with its sound and fury, sanctioned as it now is by the solemn authority of an Ecumenical Council (an authority more solemn than we Protestants can form an adequate conception of) is full of the gravest significance. For it has not only irrevocably committed an immense portion of mankind to an inconceivably degrading form of Pagan Cæsar-worship,' and once for all poisoned those living waters of the Christian faith which the stanchest Roman Catholics had hitherto held to be the common inheritance of Christendom and incapable of being tampered with-but has, wherever two or three

1 If this expression should appear too strong to any of our readers, we would invite them to procure the photograph (publicly exhibited for sale in Roman shop windows) of a picture painted in 1870 in commemoration of the Vatican decrees. It represents Pius IX. seated on a throne which rests upon a rock, at a considerable elevation from the ground. Round this rock are five female figures, in somewhat operatic costumes, representing Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia, all of them in attitudes of prostrate or ecstatic adoration, and one of them burning incense. Immediately over the Pope's head is the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, as in the pictures of the Baptism in Jordan. A little way above, in the clouds, but totally hidden by the intercepting figure of the Pope from the sight of the worshippers, are three figures representing God the Father supported on the right by the Virgin Mary, and on the left by St. Peter!

Now we cannot believe that any picture which should, in the first century of our era, have been painted to represent the sacrificial rites performed before the altars of the divine Augustus, could have conveyed in a cruder and more realistic form the idea of idolatrous worship than this careful masterpiece of Jesuit art. The absence of the Second Person of the Trinity from the picture, with the evident intention of heightening the intercessory character of the Pope, and of keeping the Vicarious character of his office out of sight, is perhaps the most remarkable feature of a composition which, if sold in Holywell Street, would probably be indicted by the police as a

Roman Catholics are gathered together, sown the seeds of a conflict between the Spiritual Power and the Temporal Power which sooner or later will have to be fought out to the bitter end.

We can, however, leave the decree respecting the Pope's infallibility, to take care of itself. It is more necessary for us to examine the one "de vi et ratione primatus Romani pontificis" defining the infallible Pope's powers and prerogatives, because for practical purposes, and in regard to its immediate consequences, it is of far greater importance than the former. For it is evident that after the Pope had been infallibilized the question of paramount interest arose as to the use to which he would put his infallibility. He might, like his "good brother" the Mikado of Japan, use his spiritual authority to extend the franchises of his people and to confer upon them constitutional rights and privileges which they had not before possessed, and which could not be conferred without divine sanction of an extraordinary kind; or, on the contrary, he might infallibly deprive them of all such franchises and rights as they had hitherto possessed. The third chapter in the "Constitutio Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesia" answers this question. By it the entire structure and constitution of the Roman Catholic Church is changed from the foundations upwards; and there is substituted, for a Monarchy founded on law, in which some attempt at least is made to separate the legislative from the executive functions, and to respect corporate rights and privileges, an autocracy based on the personal servitude of every individual, and the unconditional submission of every corporation, from the national synod down to the village vestry throughout the length and breadth of the "Orbis" and the "Urbs."

"We teach and declare," thus runs this marvellous Bill of Papal rights, "that the Roman Church (i.e., the Pope), God having so ordained it, wields a potestas ordinaria over all other Churches, and that this jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff over the Churches is (within each Church and