The reader may start, and may hesitate to acquiesce in a conclusion that appears to conflict with all his previous ideas respecting Popery. He has been accustomed to hear it spoken of, and he himself has always thought of it, as a sort of corrupt Christianityas not belonging to the family of the idolatries at all-as standing separate and apart from Paganism, as much so nearly as Christianity itself. Yet, no: it is the lineal descendant of old Paganism. It has Pagan blood in its veins, and is itself a genuine Pagan. Popery is the matured Paganism of early times. The stripling of eastern lands has grown to manhood in the Popery of European kingdoms, and, like other full-grown persons, it is the rightful heir of all the possessions of its ancestors. It inherits their fraud, their deceit, their truculence, their insufferable pride, their insatiable ambition, their love for the mysterious, their hatred of light—nay, their very crimes, with the vengeance due to these crimes-all have descended as a hoarded inheritance to the Papacy.

The thoroughly Pagan lineage of the Papacy it were not difficult to trace; but to do so at any length would lead us away from our subject proper. Nevertheless, we may devote a few minutes to the matter. A few rapid strokes will suggest, though they cannot trace the line. In Chaldea, then, beside the original seat of the human family, idolatry arose. There it was the worship of the GRAND and the SUBLIME. Lifting his eyes to heaven, yet fearing to enter it and appear before the Eternal Majesty, man saw outside of it no unmeet representative of His glory; "his heart was secretly enticed" to pay homage to the sun as he looked down from his noontide height or the moon, as she walked in brightness through the midnight firmament. Idolatry next travelled westward into Greece, and there it became the worship of BEAUTY and PASSION. All lovely things in nature, and all the passions of the human soul, were deified. By this step idolatry, as it were, came down from heaven to earth-from the celestial bodies to earthly forms; and the sensuous clime, which suggested this form of idolatry, supplied in abundance the fitting deities. The landscape abounded in forms of loveliness; its hills and valleys were perfect in their contour and voluptuous in their grace, and the race that inhabited them was ardent, susceptible, and passionate. Principles became persons-impulses appeared divinities: wherever the Greek saw a lovely form, or a powerful emotion, there he saw a god, and knelt in fervent worship. They became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. The subtlety and creative power of their genius misled them, seducing them into the worship of the creature rather than the Creator, "who is blessed for evermore."

But empire moved westward, and idolatry accompanied it for

it has ever been fain to entwine itself around power. Idolatry has ever planted its seat near to where authority had planted hers. An alliance founded on reciprocal benefits has ever existed betwixt the two; the throne reflecting addititional prestige on the altar, and the altar lending additional sanctions to the commands of the throne. Quiting Olympus, idolatry now fixed its abode on the Capitol, and there it became the worship of ORDER and GOVERNMENT-but an order and government that took the form of conquest and subjugation. The race was getting older, and therefore soberer and more practical. Dismissing the idealistic creations of the Greek, the Roman betook himself to the more substantial acquisition of dominion. His gods were like himself (as ever happens to fallen and unrenewed man), they were martial, ferocious, sanguinary. They revelled, in the heavens, in the same battles and contests for dominion, which man, after their example, carried on, in a very diminutive scale as compared with theirs, on earth. But in Rome idolatry had lost the poetic colouring, the garb of beauty and grace which it wore in Greece; it had become a grosser thing, it tended more earthwards: in due time it embruted and demoralized the Roman, as it had previously emasculated the Greek, and then the Roman empire fell. The Goths rushed in; and these hardy sons of the North, fresh from their native forests, wrested from hands now palsied with superstition and vice, the sceptre of the world. But though the empire of Rome fell, the empire of idolatry did not fall. On the ruins

of Pagan Rome, stood up Papal Rome. It was the body only, the political frame-work, which the swords of the Goths had slain the spirit still lived. The same idolatrous spirit which had possessed old Rome crept back again into the new political organization. The Roman empire was never thoroughly christianized. It is, indeed, true that there existed in it numerous churches which held the faith in sincerity and truth, and it is also true that genuine believers, sound in knowledge and holy in life, were scattered here in little companies, there in large bodies, all over the empire, but Christianity seems never to have universally or thoroughly pervaded the masses of the people. And when the Goths overspread the empire matters became worse. The new comers were received into the church without instruction, or any adequate initiation into the truths of the gospel. They were baptized in the majority of cases, though retaining their Pagan beliefs and their Pagan practices. Here was a soil favourable in the highest degree for the revival of the old idolatry. It did revive: the same earthly, groveling, debasing worship of the creature, the same sensuous and polluting worship whose cradle had been rocked by the astrologers and star-gazers of Chaldea, whose youth

had been passed amid the olive groves, and the temples of voluptuous Greece, and whose manhood had been reached amid the stern contests and martial sounds of Imperial Rome revived anew. Only the sorceress, no longer young-like her prototype Jezebel, strove to hide her withered charms, by decking herself with Christian ornaments. Her Pagan lineage, however, could not be concealed; her instincts and propensities, which could not be changed, broke forth and betrayed her. Hating Christianity, as Paganism hated the one true religion of old, she expelled it to the extremities of the empire. The old rites were restored; the old festivals were re-enacted; the flowers, the incensings, the lustral water, the very gods but with new names; in short, everything down to the very vestments returned, and had an old Pagan risen from the tomb, he would not once have suspected that any change had taken place. And now the identity of modern Popery and ancient Paganism has been completed and openly proclaimed in the decree of the "Immaculate Conception." That dogma is the proof-plain, manifest, and unanswerable that the worship of Rome is a system of creature-worship-an idolatry which, though associated with the Christian name, wears it only as a mask. It invests Mary with the attributes of divinity, and it places her as the supreme, and almost the sole object of worship on the altars of Romanism.

This amazing vitality with which idolatry is endowed, may well seem strange. It lives on through all changes. Dynasties go down to dust; kingdoms and nations pass away; but this system appears to defy death. Entombed, as men believe, it returns from the grave to occupy its old place, and assert its old dominion over the world. In one sense, this is strange; in another, it is not: for has it not as its parent one who never dies, even "the dragon, that old serpent"?

This terrible system, exiled for a while by the blessed Reformation, has come back again to Britain, and is clamouring for restoration to its ancient place and power. From Italy, now a land of dungeons; from Spain, now a land of brigands and beggars; from France, where a grim tyranny sits watching a sullen and infidel anarchy, the Papacy comes seeking permission to tread our free shore. As it has ever done, so now, it veils its hostile and criminal designs under the most plausible and innocent professions the demon strives to transform itself into an angel of light. "From me," it says, "your liberty, your literature, your commerce, your property have nothing to fear. All will I leave untouched. Only let me pitch my tent and dwell among you after the old fashion. I come not as the enemy, but as the friend of your constitution. I come not as the enemy, but as the friend of your sovereign. I protest I will not encroach, no not by a

hair's breadth, upon your rights, civil or religious. I will defend liberty not less resolutely than yourselves." So speaks the deceiver, and the rulers of our land have guilelessly listened.

eye

Since the year 1829, the era of Catholic emancipation, Romanism has been making steady and great progress in Britain. Since that period everything that has transpired has helped it onward-the even poise of political parties, the rise and the fall of ministries, revolutions abroad,-events the most opposite-have all worked together as if fate had decreed that this system should rise once more to its old ascendancy among us. At the same time it becomes us to remember that this progress of Romanism is far indeed from being the result of mere desultory efforts on the part of its friends, or of intermittent and random sallies on Protestantism. It has been pushed forward according to a settled plan, contrived with a skill as masterly as it has been steadily and successfully prosecuted. The first and initial step was to select a little band of young devotees, of whom Cardinal Wiseman was one, and to send them to Rome to be thoroughly trained for their glorious work, as they accounted it, of bringing the British isles once more within the sacred enclosure of the true fold. Cardinal Wiseman has confessed as much in his "Recollections of the Four Last Popes." Completing their studies under the keen and skilful hand of the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, they returned to Britain, and became the pioneers in the work of Romanizing our country. Measures were taken to prepare a larger band of workmen. Maynooth and other popish colleges were erected, and ultimately endowed. The great fountain-heads of influence in England were next laid hold upon the Colleges and the Church. Certain chairs in the university of Oxford were filled with Romanizing priests, who thus enjoyed admirable opportunities of infusing their poisonous tenets into the minds of the youth who were to fill in after life the parliament, the Church, the army. Other embryo Romanists found admission into the pulpits of the Anglican Establishment, and originated the same movement inside the ecclesiastical pale which others were carrying on outside. Next the Press was worked. The "Tracts for the Times" began to appear, in which, under a fair guise of candour, unction, and spirituality, the seminal principals of Popery were advocated with great plausibility, with not a little literary power, and much logical acumen. The poison was imbibed unconsciously by vast numbers, and did its work. Perversions began to take place in the ranks of the Anglican Clergy; and the list of clerical seceders to Rome was speedily swelled to hundreds. Not a few of the nobility, large numbers of the aristocracy, and even the middle classes, followed the clergy in the abandonment of their

faith. The consequence has been a transference of no little social prestige, and great political power, and vast pecuniary resources to the Church of Rome in Britain. It is not the wont of that Church to leave advantages unimproved. These acquisitions were made the stepping-stones to higher. The Romanists demanded that the Statute-Book should be purged of all laws inimical to the dominancy of their sect. The Statute-Book was purged. The Church of Rome next demanded grants for her schools and reformatories. They were given. She demanded paid chaplaincies for her priests in the army. The chaplaincies were conceded. She demanded the same thing in jails. It was granted. Her clamour grew louder with every new concession. The more that men strove to gratify her, though at the expense of their own rights and liberties, the louder grew her outcry of oppression and wrong, and in exact proportion as Protestant submissiveness increased and Protestant grants were multiplied, Romish arrogance grew the more intolerable, and Romish demands the more numerous. And now what is the position of matters? Her priests, chapels, and flocks are rapidly multiplying in every part of the land. Monasteries, nunneries, and reformatories are springing up. A network of confraternities is being spread over the country. The ties betwixt the Catholics in Britain and their co-religionists on the Continent of Europe are being drawn closer. The Papal aggression, which found them insulated in a sort, and so far simply a British sect, constituted them a compact and marshaled body, and recognized their standing as a distinct politico-ecclesiastical community, by placing them under a foreign code, the Canon Law, and subjecting them to a foreign prince, Cardinal Wiseman. Henceforward the Church of Rome in Britain knows no authority, obeys no impulse, and prosecutes no enterprise, save the authority that resides in the Vatican, and the impulses that are propagated from thence. To crown all, this body, so separate and distinct in its character, its organization and its aims from all around it, this body which tells us that it knows no king but the Pope, and that it obeys no law but Canon Law, which forms one body with Papists abroad, and whose train-bands are spread over all the kingdom, under the name of bishops, priests, brothers of St. Vincent de Paul, sisters, of mercy, friars, nuns, schoolmasters, this body, we say, is now replenished from the British Treasury, with an annual endowment in the shape of grants, which of late have been steadily rising, and now amount to a prodigious sum. The least reflective, if he but give himself to the consideration of the matter, must see that the Church of Rome in Britain has attained a position of solid power; that the danger thence