course would not be difficult to take; but it is not so; and the pretence that would make it so is notoriously
false. Cardinal Wiseman's Appeal proceeds wholly on the separability of the spiritual from the
temporal authority of Rome; and every one who has read history knows that they are inseparable. The
one has always proceeded in direct sequence from the other, just as the temporal persecutions of the Roman
church have been but the natural expression of her spiritual infallibility. An absolute right to Persecute
only ceases when a church no longer claims an absolute right to Know. This is what the Cardinal
means by his sneer at the absence of "clear, definite, and accordant teaching" from the English establishment;
and this is what now suggests to all men the necessity of defining the amount of religious concession
which shall not be allowed to frustrate the ends of temporal legislation. It would have been thought
intolerable in England, even six centuries ago, that the country should have been mapped out into
ecclesiastical districts, and subjected to ecclesiastical governors, by the sole voice of a foreign potentate;
and most certainly the Emancipation Act of the nineteenth century did not contemplate any such
thing. So far, the existence of Roman Catholicism is quite distinct from the uses and powers which the
toleration of its existence is now sought to subserve. Nor can we admit that the clause by which the
authors of the Emancipation Act expressly prohibited Romanist prelates from assuming the titles of
sees of the Established Church, is by any means an argument for the assumption of titles from places
contained within those sees, and the pretence to authority over them. Even if the law shall declare
that the letter of the Emancipation Act has in that respect been kept, most assuredly its spirit has been
violated.

But wonderful is the coolness with which the Cardinal throughout his Appeal treats the records
of times past, as well as of our own. We have but to listen to him, and believe that wherever
a religious house existed in old Roman Catholic days, a paradise of comfort and happiness spread itself
around, taking and giving blessings. A pretty picture! and a pity that any rude hand should deface
it! But did it never occur to his Eminence that some one might have time and patience to call
History itself into court? Here it is, within reach, and in tones undistorted by prejudice or faction. We
have but to open, no particular or party record, but the statute book of the reign preceding that of the
Reformation—while Luther was still but a poor Franciscan school-boy at Magdeburg, singing songs in the
street for bread—to find what a crying evil and grossness the lives of the Romish clergy had become. In one
enactment, passed by our English parliament, it is expressly declared to be lawful for bishops and other ordinaries
to punish priests, clerks, and religious men for incontinence; for which offence, so flagrant and unceasing its
occurrence, they might commit them to prison at discretion, and should be liable to no action for so doing.
Nay, in the reign preceding, some ten years before the accession of Henry VII., we have the direct authority
of a great dignitary of the Roman Church for the profligacy prevailing among its members. Archbishop
Bourchier, in a commission empowering his commissary-general to take measures for the establishment of
an improved discipline, refers to numbers of the clergy both secular and regular as persons wholly destitute
both of literature and capacity, profligate as they were ignorant, neglecting their cures, spending their time
in strolling about the country in the company of loose women, and their incomes in feasting, drinking, and
other excesses. It is to be observed, too, that in the popular outcry against the church which these
excesses raised, the storm fell as heavily on the regular clergy or monks, as on their secular brethren,
the parish priests. The increase of wealth had done its evil work in all directions; and an affectation
of concealment, which for a time preserved the shows of decency, had long been put aside. Pope
Innocent VIII. issued a bull soon after Henry VII.'s accession, wherein, after stating the intelligence he had
received of the reprobate lives led by all the monastic orders in England, he ordered Archbishop
Morton to admonish the heads of convents of the necessity of reform, and to threaten compulsory
proceedings if the admonition appeared to be neglected. Morton sent letters in consequence, and that
which he addressed to the Abbot of St. Alban's has been preserved. It describes the monks of his
abbey as notoriously guilty, not only of libertinism in all its forms, but of almost every other kind of
enormity. The abbot individually is reproached with having filled two neighbouring nunneries, over which
he pretended to have a jurisdiction, with women of infamous character, after having turned out their proper
inmates; and he and his monks, besides openly keeping concubines, are accused of being in the habit of
frequenting these convenient establishments in the most shameless manner. Specific instances are mentioned
not fit to be recorded here, but within easy reach of all who wish to consult them. Was it such a Moslem
"paradise" as this to which his Eminence referred? Or, was he momentarily confusing past and present,
and thinking of the little paradise of comfort, knowledge, and happiness, left behind him as he quitted "the
Flaminian gate." Under the very shadow of the Papal Palace at this moment there is a papist population,
of which the proportion of priests is little less than one in eighteen, more ignorant, depraved, and criminal
than anywhere else on the face of the civilised world. Nor does any man know better than Doctor Wiseman
that the tendency of his religion, as at present professed, is to continue large masses of its population in that
state; for, all genuine power having departed from it when its power of inspiring genuine belief passed away,
the strength of his church now mainly depends upon this, and this alone.

The English people know it, and it is too late now to persuade them otherwise. They know that wherever
knowledge, freedom, and the arts of life have made advance during the last three centuries, the advance has been
in the teeth of the Roman Catholic Church, and in the inverse ratio to her power. Where she has been, they
know that the richest lands on earth have become sterile; where she has not been, they know that the blessings
of abundance have replaced sterility. They have but to look at Spain; or think of Holland; or, sending a
glance across the waters of the wide Atlantic, to compare the career of the respective populations in the New
World who have continued or escaped that thraldom. The plain and simple truth therefore is that the
English people won't have it. They spurn it for every reason that has most weight with man. Spiritually
it jars with all that is most dear to them—its principles with their love of religious truth, its practice with
their love of religious liberty: driving them to shows of persecution that they may vindicate their hatred
of its reality, and forcing them into the ranks of intolerants to fight the fight of toleration. Nor is it less
opposed materially, than spiritually, to all that has made them what they now are. What Father Newman
said the other day in Birmingham is true, though in a sense different from that in which he said it.
English people had had enough of blessings and absolutions, and quite enough of the intercession of
saints, when, "preferring the heathen virtues of their original nature," they fell back with closed affections