Romish clergy, however unjustifiable their rancour, and blameable their malignity, the language which God has used respecting a body of men who, in His Name, have revelled in blood as the Romish Clergy have in their inquisition, is much stronger still. Protestants should have addressed words of tender and affectionate warning, and pointed to the fearful retribution which would one day take place. On the last generation must be heaped the wrath which has been accumulating upon the whole class, from the days when they first seized the temporal sword whereby to rule the Church of God; for they have made the Church not only a den of thieves, but a charnel house for His Saints, and, as Dante expressed it, a common sewer for their blood. LECTURE II. ON THE STATE OF THE LAITY IN PROTESTANT EPISCOPALIAN CHURCHES. THE observations which have been already made upon the oppression of the laity by the clergy of the Church of Rome, have necessarily included what is applicable to the same classes, where the same evil is found in other communions. But the leading characteristics of the two ecclesiastical bodies, the Roman and the anti-Roman, are the opposite of each other, and both equally wrong. The characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church is the ecclesiastical ruling over the civil power; to which, however, there are some exceptions, as in Bavaria, &c.; whilst, in all other churches, it is exactly the reverse. This rule, by the civil power, assumes its most offensive form in the Russian part of the Greek Church, merely because it is there more absolute than elsewhere; and it is modified ecclesiastically in other places in proportion as it is modified by civil law and custom also. Thus it is, in fact, and for all practical purposes, as oppressive in the German Protestant States, Prussia, Baden, Sweden, &c., and in Britain, as in Russia, but not in so flagrant a manner. Hence, whilst one part of Christendom is exhibiting one feature of tyranny and oppression, another part is exhibiting another feature of the same; and the true Church of God suffers equally under the one as under the other. The spirit of Christ in the Psalms is every where crying out as beneath a heavy load, and in no other way can individual Christians sympathise with the Spirit of Christ, save in proportion as they see, enter into the understanding of, and feel this oppression. It is useless to attempt to flee from one section of Christendom to another, with a view to get rid of the spiritual and ecclesiastical evil; for the further any one recedes from the Papacy, where the priest lords it over laymen until he has annihilated them, and joins himself to the system the most opposed to that, the deeper he will find himself in one where all semblance of a Church is obliterated, the essence of sacraments denied, priesthood derided, and every thing that is essentially ecclesiastical destroyed by the fleshly hand of a domineering laity. Thus, although Christendom, as a whole, is in an evil condition, yet there is a diversity in the form of evil in the several parts, and he only is a real Catholic who is enabled to see the nature as well as the extent of the evil by the light of the true doctrine of the Church. In so doing, he may be a faithful witness for God without becoming the accuser of, or railer at, his brethren; and he may intelligently cry to God to establish His way on the earth, and shew His saving health to all nations; that the false systems may be destroyed, whilst the individuals in them are delivered, by fleeing to places of refuge provided for the faithful, who, like Lot of old, are dwelling in the mystic Sodom. At the time when Henry VIII. quarrelled with the Pope, because the latter very properly refused to authorise the iniquitous divorce which he desired, the notorious vices of the clergy afforded a plausible pretext for suppressing many monasteries, and the wealth of the religious houses presented a bait too alluring to be resisted by the king, and by his equally avaricious followers. Whatever may have been the corruptions previously introduced into the Church, however much erroneous doctrines may have been added to the true, and how many soever may have been the useless ceremonies enjoined, not one nor all of these things together were the true causes of the disruption of England from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. If such separation were or could ever be justifiable, there were abundant reasons at that period to produce it. The claim of a foreign bishop to dispose of the crown of these realms, to absolve the people from their allegiance, to change the succession to private property, to dispose of the inheritances of the nobles, and to set aside their heirs; the encouraging a hostile power to invade the country; the avowed intention of punishing by torture and by death all who refused their assent to any of the monstrous absurdities promulgated by the Romish Clergy, with many other similar provocations, afforded obvious grounds for rejecting the authority of that Bishop in all matters whatsoever.* Since the Pope had so bound up civil with ecclesiastical things, it was not possible to reject his claim to temporal authority without rejecting his spiritual * Papa de plenitudine potestatis, potest declarare, limitare, et dispensare contra jus divinum et contra apostolum: potest tollere jus positivum sine causâ.— Est super omnia concilia quæ interpretatur, tollit, colligit, et alterat. Potest omnes res ecclesiæ alienæ etiam si jurasset non alienare, quia sibi non potest imponere legem etiam jurejurando. Potest ultimas voluntates morientium alterare et commutare sine causâ.-Papa est judex ordinarius omnium hominum totius mundi et potest citare et judicare quemlibet ubicumque existentem. Papa omnia potest de plenitudine potestatis quam solus habet, cæterorum principum nullus; ejus sententio est standum, etiamsi contradiceret |