extinguished. Through the organisation which God gave, His miraculous presence was to be seen in the Church, in giving light to the heads and rulers through living prophets; in healing diseases through other members; in casting out devils, &c.; and also in punishing rebels against His Holy will and commandments. When the due organisation ceased, the power to punish the wicked and disobedient could not be put forth, for the instruments requisite for its developement were wanting. As, however, no community of any kind can exist without the power of punishing the refractory, the rulers of the Church borrowed the civil sword from the emperor, and used secular punishments to enforce spiritual censures. The civil power thus became from that time the real ruler in the Church; emperors and kings summoned councils, and determined on doctrines; doctrines were considered to be orthodox or heterodox according to the decisions of the civil authority; and whilst popes, and bishops, and priests, have successfully struggled to usurp rule over the temporal sovereigns, in order to increase their own temporal consequence or wealth, still secular power has defiled and oppressed the Church at one time as much as the priests have oppressed the kings at other times.

It has been already observed that the employ

ment of secular power for repressing spiritual evil, for punishing rebels, and for enforcing proper conduct, is not merely a wicked thing in itself, but comes in direct contrast with, and opposition to, the power of Christ exercised by the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost. When the secular power usurped the place of spiritual power in the Church, the sentences of Church Courts were followed up by the secular sword, and not by the chastisements of God. The rule over men in civil society is necessarily like the rule over brute beasts, and that is mere brute force there all disobedience is followed by stripes, and it cannot be otherwise. The amount of brute force may be moderated by the disposition of the sovereign who administers it, or it may be regulated by the laws which control the whole society; but still it is brute force, and brute force alone: it is mechanical violence applied to the body, and neither moral suasion addressed to the reason, nor spiritual influence operating upon the consciences of men. Thus it is that the Spirit of God through all the prophets, in describing the condition into which Christendom should fall, speaks of it under the figure of a violent and cruel beast, full of eyes and horns, the symbols of spiritual intelligence, and of worldly power; for the true characteristics of the Church are so com

pletely obscured as to be no longer visible. An invisible election, purified by the working of the Holy Spirit, has indeed been preserved, but in the outward manifested act of the Church as one body all the qualities of love, gentleness, meekness, tender-heartedness, &c., have been supplanted by hatred, fierceness, violence, cruelty, &c. The history of the Christian Church, from the earliest period since the death of St. John down to the present time, is just such a history as that of any secular state; the same principles, the same practices, the same good, and the same evil, modified only by the personal characters of the different individuals who have ruled her.

Whatever was the amount of power claimed by one party and granted by the other, it is certain that its effects were to make priests rival the pomp and luxury and vices of secular princes. The cruelty of kings towards those who rebelled against their authority, was exceeded by the cruelty of the clergy towards those who disputed their dogmas; to which they added the hypocrisy of pretending that they delivered the offender over to the temporal power, which alone punished them. They fomented wars, or took part with either side of the belligerents. They connived at, and tolerated without rebuke, and still more without excommunication, the greatest profligacy

in kings and nobles. The avarice of kings, shewn in the taxing and plundering of their subjects, was surpassed by that of the priests in exacting wealth from the piety or weakness of the laity in short, in every particular, the ecclesiastical body called the Church, resembled any political body called a Kingdom. The clergy being in possession of secular power, are ever in their line tyrants as cruel as other men who wield the same in temporal states. They have trampled on the laity, just as kings and nobles have trampled upon the peasants and others under them. They will not condescend to reason with, nor to instruct the laity, but command them to receive on the authority of the priests, and as the infallible word of God, every syllable they tell them. The laity have not been taught, nor allowed, to distinguish between the grounds on which they are required to receive the great doctrines of Christianity, and those on on which trivial practices and opinions rest. All are to be believed alike on the authority of the Church : the doctrine of the Trinity; the Incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection, and ascension of the Son of God; the giving of the Holy Ghost, &c. &c., in one category; the return of the Virgin Mary to a state of virginity after the birth of her Son; her being without original sin;

the miraculous flowing of the blood of St. Januarius in a bottle at Naples; the repeated coats, pretended to have been preserved, of Jesus of Nazareth; the blessed images at Einsiedeln, and a thousand other fooleries equally equivocal, or, if possible, more notoriously false, in another category; are all required to be received on the same testimony, namely, the command of the Church, which, being interpreted, means the assertion of the clergy and it is accounted to be equally dishonouring to God, and perilous to the souls of men, to doubt either the one or the other. Hence it is useless, for any spiritual ends, to teach the laity. Whether they understand or whether they do not, they are equally required to believe: they have no power to discriminate, and have no exercise of judgment permitted to them; they are not suffered to sift evidence for facts, or to analyse arguments deduced from them: so that the ignorance on religious subjects in which the laity have been kept by the clergy is owing partly to the entire uselessness to them of any such knowledge, and partly because this ignorance could be turned to the pecuniary interest and power of the clergy.

This insolent assumption of superiority by the clergy is much fostered by the way in which they use the word "Church." As an example, let us take the words of the "Dublin Review," the organ

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