adulterate Christian virtue. Allow me, however, to submit to your consideration a few extracts from various parts of Mr. Blanco White's book, in corroboration of what I have formerly said of the Catholic religion.

"To begin with tradition: observe how wide a field is opened to the exercise of infallibility, by the supposition that an indefinite number of revealed truths were floating down the stream of ages, unconsigned to the inspired records of Christianity. The power of interpreting the word of God by a continual light from above might be confined to the Scriptures themselves, as it would be difficult to force doctrines on the belief of Christians of which the very name and subject seem to have been unknown to the inspired writers. Divine Tradition, the first born of Infallibility, removes this obstacle; and, so doing, increases the influence of Rome to an indefinite degree.

" By the combined influence of tradition and infallibility, the church of Rome established the doctrine of Transubstantiation, From the moment people are made to believe that a man has the power of working, at all times, the stupendous miracle of converting bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, that man is raised to a dignity above all that kings are able to confer. What, then, must be the honour due to a bishop who can bestow the power of performing the miracle of transubstantiation? What the rank of the Pope, who is the head of the bishops themselves? The world beheld for centuries the natural consequences of the surprising belief in the power of priests to convert bread and wine into the incarnate Deity. Kings and emperors were forced to kiss the Pope's feet, because their subjects were in the daily habit of kissing the hands of priests -those hands which were believed to come in daily contact with the body of Christ.

"The wealth which has flowed into the lap of Rome, in exchange for indulgences, is incalculable. My unfortunate native country shows the nature and extent of this influence in a striking light. It appears from an official document appended to the Report of the Ecclesiastical Committee, dated March 1821, that, from the year 1537 to 1820, a regular contribution of 350,000 reals had been annually remitted to Rome for bulls of indulgence by the government of Spain, independent of the annual

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sums paid by private individuals. Of the amount of the latter some estimate may be formed from the fact that in six years, viz. from 1814 to 1820, the payment for the Pope's bulls exceeded five millions of reals; and the cost of dispensations for marrying within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, affinity, and spiritual relationship, was more than four and twenty millions of the same money, p. 260.

"The belief in purgatory is inseparable from the sale of indulgences. The power of remitting canonical penance would have been useless on the cessation of penitential discipline; but TRADITION, having about the same time brought purgatory to light, offered an ample scope to the power of the Roman keys. The whole system, indeed, is surprisingly linked together; and the very connexion of its parts, tending to secure the influence and power of the source from whence it flows, gives it the ap pearance of an original invention, enlarged from the gradual suggestions of previous advantages.

"The worship of saints, relics, and images, might, when tradition began to spread it, have appeared less connected with the wealth and power of the church of Rome; yet none of its spiritual resources has proved more productive of both. Europe is covered with sanctuaries and churches, which owe their existence and revenues to some reported miraculous appearance of an image, or the presence, real or pretended, of some relic. To form a correct notion of the influence which such places have upon the people, it is necessary to have lived where they exist. But the house of Loretto alone would be sufficient to give some idea of the power and wealth which the church must have derived from similar sources, when the whole of Christendom was more ignorant and superstitious than the most degraded portions of it are at present. Of this fact, however, I am perfectly convinced, by long observation, that were it possible to abolish sanctuaries, and leave the same number of places of worship without the favourite virgin and saints, which give them both their peculiar denomination and their popular charm, more than half the blind deference which the multitude pay to the clergy, and through the clergy to Rome, would quickly disappear."

I shall now proceed to lay before you our author's view of the moral character of the church of Rome; and here the first thing he touches upon is that feature under which the Antichristian kingdom is presented to us by both prophets and apostles; viz. the spirit of persecution. "I will openly," says he, "before God and man, declare my conviction that the necessity of keeping up the appearance of infallibility makes the church of Rome essentially and invariably tyrannical; that it leads the church to hazard both the temporal and the eternal happiness of men, rather than alter what has once received the sanction of her authority; and that, in the prosecution of her object, she overlooks the rights of truth, and the improvement of the human understanding."

He then refers to one of the decrees of the council of Trent, which, after declaring the lawfulness of infant baptism, thus proceeds:-" If any one should say that these baptized children, when they grow up, are to be asked whether they will confirm what their godfathers promised in their name; and that, if they say they will not, they are to be left to their own discretion, and not to be forced in the mean time into the observance of the Christian life, by any other punishment than that of keeping them from the reception of the eucharist and other sacraments till they repent, LET HIM BE ACCURSED." Canon viii. and xiv. De Baptismo. On this awful anathema, Mr. White thus comments:-" The council of Trent has thus converted the sacrament of Baptism into an indelible bond of slavery; whoever has received the waters of regeneration is the thrall of her who declares that there is no other church of Christ. She claims her slaves wherever they may be found, declares them subject to her laws, both written and traditional, and by her infallible sanction dooms them to indefinite punishment, till they shall acknowledge her authority, and bend their necks to her yoke. Such is, has been, and ever will be, the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church;-such is the belief of her true and sincere members ;such the spirit that actuates her views, and which, by every possible means, she has always spread among her children. Him that denies this doctrine, Rome devotes to perdition. The principle of religious tyranny, supported by persecution, is a necessary condition of Roman Catholicism: he who revolts at the idea of compelling belief by punishment is severed at once from the communion of Rome."

From our author's observations on the subject of the laws which bind the Catholic clergy to perpetual celibacy, and her

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monastic vows, I would gladly make a few quotations; though the subject is a delicate one. The world rings with the praises of the unmarried state, which the writers of the Roman Catholic church, her fathers, Popes, and councils, have sounded from age to age. Our author, however, tells a somewhat different tale, and he speaks from observation and experience! His letter on this subject is deeply affecting. "My feelings," says he,

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are painfully vehement when I dwell upon this subject-the remembrance of the victims which I have seen, still wrings tears from my eyes; and these are proofs that my views arise from a real, painful, and protracted experience. The intimacy of friendship, the undisguised converse of sacramental confession, opened to me the hearts of many, whose exterior conduct might have deceived a common observer. The coarse frankness of associate dissoluteness left, indeed, no secrets among the spiritual slaves, who, unable to separate the laws of God from those of their tyrannical church, trampled both under foot in riotous despair. "Such," says he, "are the sources of knowledge I possess-God, sorrow, and remorse, are my witnesses." The instances which he records of the friends of his youth, "not one of whom was tainted by the breath of gross vice, till the church had doomed them to a life of celibacy, and turned the best affections of their hearts into crime," are awfully appalling.

And yet, when he comes to touch the picture of female convents, his language rises in interest and animation. "I cannot find tints," says he, "sufficiently dark and gloomy to pourtray the miseries which I have witnessed in their inmates; crime, indeed, makes its way into those recesses, in spite of the spiked walls and prison gates, which protect the inmates. This I know with all the certainty which the self-accusation of the guilty can give! The great poet (Cowper), who boasted that, "slaves cannot live in England," forgot that superstition may baffle the most sacred laws of freedom: slaves do live in England, and, I fear, do multiply daily by the same arts which fill the convents abroad. In vain does the law of the land stretch a friendly hand to the repentant victim: the unhappy slave may be dying to break her fetters; yet death would be preferable to the shame and reproach that await her among relatives and friends. It will not avail her to keep the vow which dooms her to live single : she has renounced her will, and made herself a passive mass of clay in the hands of a superior. Perhaps she has promised to practise austerities which cannot be performed out of the convent-never to taste meat if her life depended on the use of substantial food-to wear no linen-to go unhosed and unshod for life; all these, and many other hardships, make part of the various rules which Rome has confirmed with her sanction." But I must not proceed further with this extract. A Protestant naturally enquires, "Has the New Testament recommended vows of this description-perpetual vows?" Certainly not; and yet the church of Rome encourages and sanctions them in the most shocking manner. "They are laid on almost infants of both sexes! Innocent girls of sixteen are lured by the image of heroic virtue, and a pretended call of their Saviour, to promise they know not what, and make engagements for a whole life of which they have seen but the dawn." In his exposition of this appalling enormity, Mr. White is led to mention the case of two of his own sisters who fell victims to this fanatical phrensy, and both of whom died when they had been a few years under the discipline of the convent! Oh, the picture which he has drawn of the case of these two amiable and accomplished females is most heart-rending! I shall take my leave of the volume by a short extract, in which our author relates the miserable fate of his youngest sister.

"At the age of twenty she left an infirm mother to the care of servants and strangers, and shut herself up in a convent, where she was not allowed to see even her nearest relations. With a delicate frame, requiring every indulgence to support it in health, she embraced a rule which denied her the comforts of the lowest class of society. A coarse woollen frock fretted her skin; her feet had no covering but that of shoes open at the toes, that they might expose them to the cold of a brick floor; a couch of bare planks was her bed, and an unfurnished cell her dwelling. Disease soon filled her conscience with fears; and I had often to endure the torture of witnessing her agonies at the confessional. I left her, when I quitted Spain, dying much too slowly for her only chance of relief. I wept bitterly for her loss two years after: yet I could not be so cruel as to wish her alive." p. 145, 6.