it of their understandings and their senses, their consciences and their souls;-an ecclesiastical juggle, the cunning knave's mask, the silly bigot's creed; Jacob's ladder reversed, or the debauchee's ensign, which he doubts not but, if well oiled, will at last carry him to Heaven; for it is a project that offers at saving men and their sins together, nay, in many cases, to make their sins meritorious of salvation; a blendure of ambition and covetousness, dressed up in a long mantle of hypocrisy, called S. Peter's cloak; a false bait, managed by a crafty sort of fishermen, that pretend to angle souls for Heaven, but design only to catch gudgeons, and grasp earth and its advantages; jingling the keys of Paradise, on purpose to amuse the crowd, and to get opportunities to pick their pockets. It is a strange farrago of errors and impostures; a gallimawfrey, composed of contrary ingredients; the highest superstition, and yet the highest profaneness; subtleties of the finest spinning, and the most gross absurdities. It makes its God, and then eats Him. It teaches all its votaries to pray, without either understanding the words, or yet devout attention of mind; to fast with a luxurious dinner of fish, wine, and sweetmeats, that Heliogabalus, and other choicest heathen gluttons, would lick their lips at. It cries up marriage for a sacrament, and yet, at the same time, bars its sacred clergy from it; because it will defile them. It boasts itself to be the sole keeper and interpreter of the Scriptures, and yet avows, that they are corrupted and unintelligible; and so at once proclaims her own perfidious negligence, in not preferring the sacred oracles, and her monstrous uncharitableness, in not giving us an authentic explication. It pretends an infallible knack in deciding all controversies, yet cruelly suffers her brats to spend their time in endless quarrels; witness the brawls between her Franciscans and her Dominicans, her Jesuits and her Jansenists, her most Christian and most Catholic doctors.

We may therefore call it a rope of sand, held together merely by interest and force: a Babel-building, erected by diligent Fraud, and aspiring Pride, upon the plains of drowsy Ignorance and easy Credulity; and cemented not only with the tears but with the blood of thousands of innocents; begot in the dark, by an incestuous, mixture of Impudence the son, with Ignorance the mother; suckled by Phocas, with the milk of rebellion and blood-royal, and rocked to sleep by Pope Boniface in the cradle of an universal bishopric; where doting monks sung lullabies to it, with a multitude of lying legends and feigned miracles. The French usurper

King Pepin and his son, gave it a new coat; and Pope Hildebrand taught it to go high-lone and trample on the necks of emperors and kings. It was always very fond of babies to play with; and cried and scratched most filthily, till it had got pictures and images to set up in churches, which, from laymen's books, quickly became their gods. The schoolmen provided it rattles of distinction, and abundance of elder pop-guns, to divert itself, and amuse the world with. The conventicle of Trent found it sick of the rickets, but, applying altogether the Italian Physic, set it again upon its legs, though with a head swelled bigger than before: yet, ever since, it hath been languishing in a consumption; to palliate which, 50,000 fathers of the society are always busy, with cordials and paint, to keep up its spirits and complexion. The diet it delights in is aurum potabile, and the blood of martyrs; the Inquisition is its right leg and sophistry its left; and, with these two supporters, it bestrides the world.

To express its essence and full latitude in one word, you must call it Anti-Christianism, (whether you take Anti to signify against, for, or instead of, as the Greek tongue hath it; or whether you take Christ to denote peculiarly our blessed Saviour, or more generally, his vicegerents, or, more largely, his faints or catholic church, who all enjoy the unction of the Holy One): for, as this mock religion most impudently pretends its Pope (the greatest rebel and enemy to God and Christ under heaven) to be ViceGod or Christ's vicar or lieutenant upon earth; and, that he has a plentitude of power, in Christ's stead, to rule the universal church; under which forged commission, and kind semblance, nothing can tend more against the person, honour, merits, offices, and whole gospel of Christ—nothing be more derogatory to their just rights, and veneration due to sovereign earthly princes-nor yet any thing be more pernicious to, or destructive of sincere Christians, than this triple-crowned traitor's doctrines and practices.-For Popery, by its doctrine of transubstantiation, will have the body of Christ to be without the properties of a true body; and consequently, taking away the human nature, it denies the person of our Mediator. It invades His royal office, by assuming His incommunicable titles, by undertaking to rescind and make void His laws; absolving man from his duty to God, by dispensations, and from the penalty which sin hath made his due, by indulgences; so Bellarmine tells us, "That the Pope hath a power to make sin to be no sin;" and the council of Lateran, "That the Pope has all power over all

powers, as well of heaven as of earth." It blasphemes the priestly office of Christ, whereby, at one oblation of himself, he satisfied for all sin; Heb. x. ii. 1 John, i, vii; for, as if the fame was insufficient, Popery appoints an innumerable company of shaveling priests, whose daily business is pretended to offer up Christ afresh, as a propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and the dead, in their wicked and idolatrous mass. It also undertakes to purge away sins by other medicines, besides his precious blood; and sets up a multitude of other mediators and intercessors. It opposes Christ's prophetic office, by adding a multitude of traditions and inventions, as necessary to salvation, to be received with the same reverence as the word of God. It exalts itself above all that is called God in the world; for its Pope crowns and uncrowns emperors with his feet, and treads upon them as one would do upon a viper; takes upon him to depose kings and princes, to give away their kingdoms, to discharge subjects of their allegiance and oaths, and to justify their rebellion against, and assassination of their sovereigns.

To speak truth, Popery is the debauchment of all religion; for, by substituting itself under the Christian name, it hath subverted the innate sense and worship of the Deity, and maintains tenets, and imposes practises, which the wiser sort of heathens always blushed at; and, at the same time, it hath suppressed, and depraved, and counterfeited divine revelations; so that, the principles both of natural and revealed religion being thus corrupted, it makes its proselytes but so much the more the children of wrath than they were by nature; for she hoodwinks their understandings, degenerates and sears their consciences, and lays waste all morality.

Her design is not the promoting of Christ's interest, (for that is apparently prostituted), but the securing and aggrandizing of a faction, which, under the profession of Christianity, might be false to all its realities. Her rule is the corrupt inclination of depraved nature, to which they have thoroughly conformed their practical divinity, which easeth men of duty, for which they have an aversion; and clears the way to those sins to which they are disposed, as though there were no need to avoid them. Thus their principles are more pernicious, because more taking; because men will quickly like that religion, because he loves his sin, and will, it is to be feared, follow both, though he perish for it eternally.

She hath by various methods destroyed (as much as in her lies) the credibility of the Christian religion; as if, by making men to

neglect and slight those sacred oracles, which contains firm demonstrations of its verity, and to rely upon the vain sandy pretence of her infallibility for the certainty of faith. 2dly, By intruding upon the world her fabulous legends, and lying miracles, which to every rational man appear to have been only delusions, and rank impostures. 3dly, By rendering the gospel itself unworthy of acceptation, as she hath modelled and depraved it, through her absurd, superadded principles, idolatrous worship, gross superstitious rites, and innumerable ceremonies, no less various in themselves, than burdensome to the observers. 4thly, By reducing our whole duty (upon the matter) to certain, unreasonable, servile submissions to her haughty avaricious clergy; and by resolving the terms of eternal happiness, finally, into the benediction or good pleasure of her vile fulsome priests.

So that take her system together, and I see not how either Jew, Pagan, Turk, or other infidel, can honestly entertain the Christian religion as she teacheth it; or, if they should so embrace it, how far they would be gainers by the bargain.

In the homilies of the church of England for Whit-sunday you have this character given of her, "That the church of Rome is an "idolatrous church, not only an harlot, as the Scripture calls her, "but also a foul, filthy, old, withered harlot, and the mother of "whoredom; guilty of the same idolatry, and worse than was among the Gentiles."

Popery in itself is the vilest tyranny that ever fleaven in judgment suffered, or earth in patience groaned under; that of Dionysius and Nero were but flea bitings to it: they only challenged a despotical power over people's persons; this assumes an incontrollable dominion over their very consciences and souls; and is framed entirely for the befooling, enslaving, despoiling, and corrupting of the laity, and the enriching and aggrandizing her priesthood, who, with the supple hams of a flattering hypocrisy, first seem to adore and deify, but, as soon as they have gained their point, do really spurn at, and trample upon all secular dignity, and authority; for she assumes an arbitrary power to pluck up and destroy all governments, when it is for her purpose.

But still, a fine conveniency or umbrage of Religion she is to those who live by the rules of none; and an admirable colour for ambitious princes to enlarge their empire to the prejudice of their neighbours, and pretence of advancing the Catholic faith, and to destroy their own people for God's sake, whenever they shall have

oppressed them so far as to fear them; and as ready an engine to excite subjects to rebellion against their lawful sovereigns, as oft as they will not dance to the measures of the Vatican.

To conclude; as every religion consists of doctrine, worship, and discipline, so the doctrine of Popery is ignorance and error; its worship, idolatry and superstition; its discipline rage and cruelty; whence fitly doth the Holy Spirit, in sacred Writ, describe her by those three titles, the False Prophet, the Whore, and the Beast; false prophet, for her teaching, and enforcing errors; whore, for her idolatry, gaudy dress, and meritricious paintings; and beast, for her ravenous and savage cruelty.

To conclude further; she is the disgrace and grand impediment of the gospel, the overthrow of morals, the perpetual disquieter of nations, the destroyer of Christians, the scandal of infidels, and the pest of the world; which, therefore, all mankind are obliged, both in honour, and conscience, and interest, by all lawful ways to oppose, and wish and heartily pray for its extirpation from the face of the earth; which for the comfort of all that suffer by and under it, and to the terror of its abettors, (notwithstanding their subtleties, or violence, to support what Providence has doomed to destruction), shall assuredly, in God's due time, be accomplished, and the kings of the earth shall burn her with fire. Amen.

REFORMATION IN DUBLIN.-On the 20th July, four persons renounced the errors of popery, under the instruction of a reformed priest of the "Priests' Protection Society," and made and signed the usual declaration in such cases. One of them had been a noviciate in the Priests' College at Rome, for the last six years, and was intended for a priest of that order.

The following beautiful climax on Baptism is by S. Chrysostom, (Homil-ad Neophyt):-You are herein made not only free but holy; not only holy, but just likewise; not barely just, but children also; not children only but heirs; nor co-heirs only, but members also; nor members only, but His Temple; nor Temple only, but Organs of the Holy Spirit.

Out of the waters God produced every living creature; and when at first the Spirit moved upon the waters,' and gave life, it was the type of what was designed in the renovation. Every thing that lives now, is born of water and the Spirit; and Christ, who is our Creator and Redeemer in the new birth, opened the fountains and hallowed the Stream.-Jeremy Taylor.