The Church of England cleared from the charge of Schism

But, it may be said, is the Catholic Church unanimous on the one hand, and the Anglican communion, restricted to one small province, left alone in her protest on the other? Did not she, whom they would call "the already decrepit rebel of three hundred years," submit from 596 to 1534 to that very authority which she now denies? It would be quite beyond my present limits to trace, as I had first purposed, the Roman Bishop's power from that point at which it stood when St. Gregory sent our Apostle Augustin into England, to that point which it had reached in the thirteenth century, and which it strove to maintain in the sixteenth. I can only now very briefly point out a few of the steps in that most wonderful rise. The two centuries, then, which succeeded St. Gregory, were even more favourable to this growth than those which went before. While the confusion and violence of secular governments by the breaking in and settlement of the various northern tribes were greater than ever, – while the ecclesiastical constitution was all that yet held together the scattered portions of the shattered Western empire – the single Apostolical See of the West, whose Bishop was in constant correspondence with the spiritual rulers of these various countries, whose voice was ever and anon heard striving to win and soften into mercy and justice those temporal rulers, would be, as it were, "a light shining in a dark place." The Bishops, everywhere miserably afflicted by their own sovereigns, found a stay and support in one beyond the reach of the feudal lord's violence. The benefit they thus derived from the Roman Patriarch was so great, that they would be disposed to overlook the gradual change which was ensuing in the relation between themselves and him, the deference which was deepening into subjection. Or, if here and there, what Leo would have called "a presumptuous spirit," such as Hincmar of Rheims, or our own Grossetête, in after times, set himself against the stream, it would all be in vain. However good his cause might be, if he did not yield, he would be beaten down like St. Hilary of Arles. Moreover, as the great heresy of Mahomet invaded and hemmed in three of the Patriarchal Sees of the East, their counterpoise to the originally great influence of the Roman See was removed. Political separation from the East, and the difficulty of communication, would of themselves greatly tend to this result. To this must be added the great increase of power which the house of Charlemagne, for their own political purposes, bestowed on the Roman See; it was worth while building up a popedom for an imperial crown. De Maistre says, "The Popes reign since the ninth century at least."[165 - Du Pape, liv. ii. ch. 6; and Discourse Préliminaire.] But it is a somewhat naïve confession, "The French had the singular honour, one of which they have not been at all sufficiently proud, of having set up, humanly, the Catholic Church in the world, by raising its august head to the rank indispensably due to his divine functions; and without which he would only have been a Patriarch of Constantinople, miserable puppet of Christian sultans, and Musulman autocrats." Just, too, when it was most difficult to detect imposture, and to refer to the acts of ancient Councils, that singular counterfeit of the false decretals made its appearance, which so wonderfully helped the Roman Patriarchs in consolidating the manifold structure of their authority. This, indeed, assailed the Bishops of the West by their most reverential feelings, and added to the force of a great present authority, almost always beneficially exercised, the weight of what seemed an Apostolical tradition. Besides these causes, the Popes found in the several monastic orders throughout Europe the most unceasing and energetic pioneers of their power. From the very first there appears to have existed a desire to exchange the present superintendence of the local Bishop for the distant authority of the Pope. The great orders, indeed, were themselves so many suspensions of the Episcopal system. With reason do the statues of their founders adorn the nave of St. Peter's, not only as witnesses of the Church's exuberant life, but as those whose hands, more than any others, have helped to rear that colossal central power, of which that fane is the visible symbol. Thus the Papal structure was so gradually built upon the Patriarchal, that no one age could accurately mark where the one ended and the other began, but all may see the finished work. It requires no microscopic eye to distinguish the authority of St. Leo or St. Gregory from that of St. Innocent the Third. The poet spake of a phantom what is true of a great reality: —

"Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo,

Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit."

That power, for which the heroic and saintly Hildebrand died in exile,[166 - See the account of his death in Bowden's Life.] if exile there could be to him who received the heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession; for which our own St. Anselm, forced against his will to the Primacy, stood unquailing in the path of the Red King, most furious, if not the worst, of that savage race, whose demon wrath seemed to justify the fable of their origin; for which St. Bernard, the last of the Fathers in age, but equal to the first in glory, wrote and laboured, and wore himself out with vigils, and wrought miracles; for which our own St. Thomas shed that noble blood, which sanctifies yet our primatial Church, an earnest of restoration and freedom to come; that power, for which St. Francis, the spouse of holy poverty, so long neglected since her First Husband ascended up on high, and St. Dominic —

l' amoroso drudo

Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta,

Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo;[167 - Dante, Paradiso, xii. 55.]

and one greater yet, the warrior saint, Ignatius, raised their myriads of every age and of both sexes, armed in that triple mail of poverty, chastity, and obedience, "of whom the world was not worthy;" – that power, to which have borne witness so many saintly Bishops, poor in the midst of poverty, and humble in the exercise of more than royal power, – so many scholars, marvellously learned, – so many, prodigal of labour and blood, who are now counted among the noble army of martyrs, – so many holy women, who have hidden themselves under the robe of the first of all saints, and followed the Virgin of virgins in their degree; – that power is, indeed, the most wondrous creation which history can record, and one to which I am not ashamed to confess that I should bow with unmingled reverence, had not truth a yet stronger claim upon me, and did not the voice of the early Church, its Fathers, Councils, and Martyrs, sound distinctly in my ears another language. Still, human and divine, ambition and Providence, are so mingled there, that I would not utter a word more than truth requires. I should even be compelled to give up the strongest individual conviction, acknowledging the weakness and liability to err of any private judgment; acknowledging, moreover, that a single province of the Church, if opposed to all the rest, is certain to be in error, were it not that, besides the voice of antiquity, we have witnesses the most legitimate, the most time-honoured, the most unswerving in their testimony, – witnesses who take away from our opponents their proudest claim, – nay, a claim which, if real, would be irresistible, – that of being, by themselves, the Catholic Church.

Let it never, then, be forgotten, that any argument which would prove the Church of England to be in schism would condemn likewise the Eastern and Russian Church. It is not the Catholic Church against a revolted province, as our adversaries would have us believe; it is the one Patriarch of the West, with his Bishops, against the four Patriarchs of the East, with theirs, and that great and, as yet, unbroken phalanx of the North, which Constantinople won to the faith of old, and which now promises to beat back the tide of heresy and infidelity from the beleaguered Sees of the East. On this point of schism, at least, they bear witness with us. The causes, adverted to above, which were so influential in exalting the great fabric of Roman power in the West, did not act upon the East, – nay, acted in the inverse direction. The See of Constantinople still remains where the Council of Chalcedon placed it, where the Emperor Justinian recognised it to be, the second See of the world: and it has ever since refused to admit that Rome was first in any sense in which itself was not second. This may serve to set in a clear light the vast difference between the legitimate power of the First See, and the claim to give jurisdiction to all Bishops. The systems, of which these are expressions, are in truth antagonistic. Constantinople maintains still that constitution of the whole Church which St. Gregory accused its Bishops of undermining. The evil which he foresaw has come from his own successors: "the cause of Almighty God, the cause of the Universal Church," the privileges and rights of Bishops and Priests, as against one "Universal Pope," are borne witness to now, as they have ever been, by the immutable East. Here, at least, are no sympathies with the heresiarchs of the sixteenth century: the Synod of Bethlehem has anathematised Luther and Calvin as decidedly as the Council of Trent. Here was no Henry the Eighth fixing his supremacy on a reluctant Church by the axe, the gibbet, the stake, and laws of premunire and forfeiture: no State using that Church as a cat's-paw for three hundred years, and ready now to offer it up a holocaust to the demon of liberalism. Here is the ancient Patriarchal system, the thrones of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, subsisting still. Here is the same body of doctrine, the same seven sacraments, the same Real Presence, the same mighty sacramental and sacerdotal system, which Latitudinarian and Evangelical, statesman and heretic, dread while they hate, as being indeed the visible presence of Christ in a fallen world, – the residence of a spiritual power which controls and torments the worldling, while it disproves and falsifies the heretic. Here is all that the Roman Catholic claims as tokens of the truth for himself: but there is one thing more, the same protest that we make against the monarchical, as distinct from the patriarchal, power, the same appeal back to early Councils, and the unambiguous voice of those who cannot be silenced or corrupted, the Fathers of the Church. In the Fathers of the undivided Church, the East and the North and the West, so long severed, meet: we are not alone, who have with us, on the very point which divides us from our Mother Church, the still unbroken line of successors from St. Athanasius and St. Chrysostom. There is no break in the descent or in the doctrine of the Eastern Churches. There is the same dogmatic, the same hierarchical fabric, subsisting now as when St. Gregory addressed Anastasius of Antioch, and Eulogius of Alexandria. It may suit the purposes of unfair Roman controversialists to brand them as schismatics, and overcome, by calling them a name, their own most formidable opponents: but history cannot be so overcome. They have never admitted the Papal sway, any more than the Fathers who passed the 28th Canon of Chalcedon: they have, indeed, admitted the Roman Primacy, as those same Fathers admitted it; for the very system, for which they are witnesses, is not complete without the Bishop of Rome stands at the head of it: the due honour of Rome is involved in the due honour of Constantinople; and, we may add, the due honour of Canterbury: the same temper, the same persons, who reject the one, hate the other. What we say they never have admitted is, that which has really worked the disunion of the Universal Church, as St. Gregory foretold it would, the doctrine which is the centre of the present Papal system, which alone makes all its parts cohere, and justifies all its acts, and triumphs over all appeal to argument, and all testimonies of antiquity, viz., that, "the Pope is set over the whole Christian world, and possesses in its completeness and plenitude that power which Christ left on earth for the good of the Church."[168 - Bellarmine, quoted above.] They have never for a moment admitted that the Bishops of the Universal Church were the Pope's delegates, and received their jurisdiction from him. We fight, it must be admitted, at some disadvantage with our opponents. The long subjection which our Church yielded to Rome, the manifold obligations under which we lie to her, the complete unsettling of the ecclesiastical and doctrinal system in the sixteenth century, the horrible vices of those who effected the change, the connection with those whose doctrine has now worked itself out into Socinianism, infidelity, and anarchy, the inability we have ever since been under of shaking ourselves completely clear of them, the thoroughly unsatisfactory position of the state towards us, as a Church, at present, – all these things are against us, – all these things tell on the mind which really lives and dwells on antiquity, and looks to the pure Apostolic Church. Still, though they weaken, they do not overcome our cause. But from all these objections the witness of the Eastern Churches is free. They were never subject to Rome, but to their own Patriarchs; they derived not their Christianity from her: the Priesthood, and the pure unbloody sacrifice, and the power to bind and to loose, remain undisputed among them: the Eastern mind cannot conceive a Church without them. They have received no reformation from those whose lives were a scandal to all Christian men: they are not mixed up with the Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy: nor has Erastianism eaten out their life. Yet, if we are schismatics, so are they, and on the same ground. Moreover the Roman Church has again and again treated with them as parts of the true Church. It is only in comparatively modern times, that as the hope of re-union became fainter, the line of denying their being members of the One Body has been taken up. I have seen even so late as the time of Clement the Eighth a letter of that Pope to the Czar, in which he treats him as already belonging to the Church. Moreover the Eastern Church has put forth the best and most convincing sign of Catholicity, life: to her, since her separation from Rome, and to this particular attention must be claimed, is due the most remarkable conversion of a great nation to the Faith which has taken place in the last eight hundred years – Russia with her Bishops, her clergy, her monasteries, her convents, her Christian people, her ancient discipline, her completely organised Church system, her whole country won from Paganism by the preaching of Monks and Missionary Bishops, is a witness to the Greek Church (which who shall gainsay?) that she is a true member of the One Body. The Patriarch of Constantinople exercised that charge which the Council of Chalcedon gave him, and ordained Bishops among the barbarians, and the Spirit of God blessed their labours, and the whole North became his spiritual offspring. Rome cannot show, since she has been divided from the East, a conversion on so large a scale, so complete, so permanent. And on that great mass she has hitherto made no impression. It is a complete refutation of her claim to be by herself Catholic, that there exists out of her communion a Body of Apostolic descent and government, with the same doctrinal system as her own, with the ascetic principle as strongly developed, with the same claim to miracles, – with all, in fact, which characterises a Church; a Body, moreover, so large, that, supposing the non-existence of the Roman Communion, the promises of God in Scripture to His Church might be supposed to be fulfilled in that Body.[169 - I owe this observation to a friend who has had great opportunities of judging about the state of the Russian Church.] And this Body, like ourselves, denies that particular Roman claim, for which Rome would have us and them to be schismatic. And it has denied it not merely for three hundred years, but from the time that it has been advanced. Truly all that was deficient on our side seems made up by the Greek Church. And this living and continuous witness of a thousand years is to be added to that most decisive and unambiguous voice of the whole undivided ancient Church.

I have, throughout these remarks, considered the Church of Christ to be what, at the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, she so manifestly appeared, one organic whole; a Body, with One Head, and many members; as St. Gregory says, Peter, and Paul, and Andrew, and John; a kingdom with One Sovereign, and rulers, an Apostolic College appointed by that Head, with a direct commission from Himself. I believe that no other idea about the Church prevailed up to St. Gregory's time. It follows that all so-called national churches, unless they be subordinate to the law of this kingdom, are so many infringements of the great primary law of unity, in that they set up a member instead of the Body. St. Paul, in the 12th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, has clearly set forth such, and no less, to be the unity of Christ's Body. Certainly it is a difficulty, that we must admit this essential law to be at present broken. But I do not think it fair to argue against a provisional and temporary state, such as that of the Church of England is confessed to be – which, too, has been forced upon her – as if it were a normal state, one that we have chosen, a theory of unity that we put forth over against the ancient theory, or the present Roman one. Nay, thousands and ten thousands feel, the whole rising mind of the Church feels, that we are torn "from Faith's ancient home," that we groan within ourselves, waiting until God in his good time restore a visible unity to His Church, till the East and the West and the South be one again in the mind of Christ. Who but must view it as a token of that future blessing, that public prayers have been offered up in France and Italy for such a consummation? Let us begin to pray for each other, and we must end by being one. Let us, too, pray that the clouds of error and prejudice, the intense blind jealousy on one side, the cruel and disingenuous temper on the other, may be subdued by the Spirit of God, who in some great and blessed Pentecost shall draw long alienated hearts together, and mould them into a union closer than has ever been, against an attack the last and most terrible of the foretold enemy, the tokens of whose coming are at hand.

But the Roman Catholic, who seems to escape this difficulty, and points to his communion as one organic whole, falls into another. Grant that it is one, but it is at the expense of ceasing to be Catholic: it has lost all the East and the North, and part of the West. Thus, in this choice between difficulties, it seems the least to suppose that the unity of Christendom may be for a time suspended, during which the several parts of Christ's Body retain communion with the one Head, and thence derive life, though active communion with each other is suspended. A less difficulty, I say, than to cut off, not merely our own Church, but the seventy millions of the Eastern Church, having a complete inward identity with the Roman, from the covenant of salvation, merely because that intercommunion is prevented by a claim to spiritual monarchy, which was unknown in the best ages of the Church, and has been resisted ever since it was set up. If this view be true, we should expect that the several parts, though living, would yet be languishing, and far from that healthy vigour which they ought to possess; that the Great Head would give manifold warnings of the injury done to His Body. Now, it is very remarkable that the circumstances, no less of the Latin than of the Eastern and the Anglican Church, exactly agree to this expectation. I need not speak on this point of the second and third; but I cannot help thinking that they who have suffered themselves to be driven by fearful scandals out of our bosom, who have brooded over acknowledged but unrelieved wants, till the duty of patient long-suffering has been forgotten, close their eyes to the state of France, Spain, and Italy, under what they have now learnt to call by itself the "Catholic" Church. Yet are there tokens abroad which men of less spiritual discernment might lay to heart. Does the "obscene rout" of Ronge and Czerski, bursting forth from the bosom of the Roman Church, awake no misgiving? Fearful, when viewed by Scripture and antiquity, as the state of England is, (an argument which is now being used against our communion with such effect on tender and loving minds,) he must be bold who would venture to say that the relation of the French Church to the French nation in the last century, or its relation even now, greatly as the present French Church is to be admired and sympathised with, does not offer as much ground for fearful apprehension, as much reason to dread, lest the terms on which victory is promised to the Church over the world have been essentially broken. I fear there is no doubt that two-thirds of the French capital are not Christian, in any sense of the word; and probably the proportion is as great in the larger towns. How did this state of things arise? How has nearly the whole intellect of that country become infidel? From the French Revolution, it will be answered. But how could that great Satanical outburst have ever taken place, had the Church of Christ, free from corruption, as those who have left us believe, and throned in the possession of sixteen hundred years, with its numberless religious houses, its unmarried clergy, and great episcopate, been discharging its functions, I do not say aright, but with any moderate efficiency? Surely the acts of the States General were as bad as those of Henry the Eighth; yet its members were Catholics, in full communion with the Roman See. Surely the ecclesiastical legislation of Napoleon was as uncatholic as that of a House of Commons; yet it was sanctioned by Concordat with the Pope. But if manifold corruptions did not unchurch the Gallican communion in the last century, – if the mass of a great nation, which the Church once completely possessed, but has now surrendered to active unbelief, does not invalidate her claim to be a pure communion at present, why are such things alleged as so fatal a mark against us? God forbid that one should mention such things without the deepest sorrow; but when our troubles, and difficulties, and relations with the state, and the alienated hearts of our people, and the absence of external discipline and inward guidance, and the misery of our divisions, are alleged to prove that we are out of the pale of the Church, these things ought to be weighed on the other side. There ought not to be different measures on different sides of the Channel. I forbear to speak of the state of Spain, Portugal, and much of Italy; but I imagine that the worst deeds of the Reformation were at least paralleled by what the Church has had to endure there from the hands of her own children. I believe that our own most sad corruptions have, too, their counterpart among Churches in communion with the Apostolic See.

But to conclude. As our defence against the charge of Schism rests upon the witness of the ancient Church, thus fully corroborated by the Eastern Communion, so our whole safety lies in maintaining the clear indubitable doctrine of that Church. I have avoided the whole question of doctrine in these remarks, both as leading me into a wider field than that which I am obliged to traverse so cursorily at present, and as distinct from the question of Schism, though very closely connected with it. No one can deny that it is not sufficient for our safety to repel one single charge: but this charge was the most pressing, the most specious, and one which requires to be disposed of before the mind can with equanimity enter upon any other. My conclusion is, that upon the strictest Church principles, – in other words, upon those principles which all Christendom, in its undivided state, recognised for six hundred years, which may be seen in the Canons and Decrees of Ecumenical Councils, our present position is tenable at least till the convocation of a really Ecumenical Council. The Church of England has never rejected the communion of the Western, and still less that of the Eastern Church: neither has the Eastern Church pronounced against her. She has only exercised the right of being governed by her own Bishops and Metropolitans. There is, indeed, much peril of her being forced from this, her true position, – a peril lately pointed out by the author of "The real Danger of the Church of England." I need say little where he has said so much, in language so well-timed, so moderate, and from a position which cannot be misrepresented. I will only add, that I cannot conceive any course which would so thoroughly quench the awakened hopes of the Church's most faithful children, as that her rulers, which I am loth even to imagine, at a crisis like the present, should seek support, not in the rock of the ancient Church, in which Andrewes, Laud, and Ken, took refuge of old, – not in the unbroken tradition of the East and West, by which, if at all, the Church of Christ must be restored, – not in that great system which first subdued and then impregnated with fresh life the old Roman Empire, delaying a fall which nothing could avert, and which lastly built up out of these misshapen ruins all the Christian polities of Europe, – not in that time-honoured and universal fabric of doctrine to which our own Prayer-book bears witness, but in the wild, inconsistent, treacherous sympathies of a Protestantism, which the history of three hundred years in many various countries has proved to be dead to the heart's core. Farewell, indeed, to any true defence of the Church of England, any hope of her being built up once more to an Apostolical beauty and glory, of recovering her lost discipline and intercommunion with Christendom, if she is by any act of her rulers, or any decree of her own, to be mixed up with the followers of Luther, Calvin, or Zuingle: with those who have neither love, nor unity, nor dogmatic truth, nor sacraments, nor a visible Church among themselves: who, never consistent but in the depth of error, and the secret instinct of heresy, deny regeneration in Baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation and Orders, and the power of the keys in absolution, and the Lord's Body in the Eucharist. That is the way of death: who is so mad as to enter on it? When Protestantism lies throughout Europe and America a great disjointed mass, in all the putridity of dissolution,

"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum,"

judicially blinded, so that it cannot perceive Christ dwelling in his Church, while she grows to the measure of the stature of the perfect man, and making her members and ministers His organs – who would think of joining to it a living Church? Have we gone through so much experience in vain? Have we seen it develop into Socinianism at Geneva, and utter unbelief in Germany, and a host of sects in England and America, whose name is Legion, and who seem to be agreed in nothing else but in the denial of sacramental grace, and visible unity; and all this at the last hour, in the very turning point of our destiny, to seek alliance with those who have no other point of union but common resistance to the tabernacle of God among men? A persuasion that nothing short of the very existence of the Church of England is at stake, that one step into the wrong will fix her character and her prospects for ever, compels one to say that certain acts and tendencies of late have struck dismay into those who desire above all things to love and respect their spiritual mother. If the Jerusalem Bishopric, promoted, (at the instance of a foreign minister, not in communion with our Church,[170 - "Introduction to Die Zukunft Kirche. The work advocates the introduction of Episcopacy into the German Church, but not the Apostolical Episcopacy of the English Church, which M. Bunsen condemns in terms as strong as any which have been used by any opponent of the Bishopric. 'If ever and at any time the Episcopate, in the sense of Anglicanism, should be raised into a distinctive mark of Churchdom among us, not constitutionally and nationally (?) it would, in my opinion, be striking the death-blow to the innermost germ of life in the Church.' He will exert every energy, and shed the last drop of his blood in order to preserve the Church of the German nation against such an Episcopacy," —English Churchman, April 30, 1846. There are solemn words, which have found an echo in many hearts, "May that measure utterly fail, and come to nought, and be as though it had never been!"] and who has recorded in the strongest terms his objection to her apostolical episcopacy,) by two Bishops on their private responsibility, without any authority from the Church of which they are indeed most honoured, but only individual rulers, be the commencement of a course of amalgamation with the Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy, who that values the authority of the ancient undivided Church, will not feel his allegiance to our own branch fearfully shaken? The time for silence is past. There is such a thing as "propter vitam vivendi perdere causas." It must be said publicly that such a course will lead infallibly to a schism, which will bury the Church of England in its ruins. If she is to become a mere lurking-place for omnigenous latitudinarianism; if first principles of the faith, such as baptismal regeneration, and priestly absolution, may be indifferently held or denied within her pale, – though, if not God's very truths, they are most fearful blasphemies, – the sooner she is swept away the better. There is no mean between her being "a wall daubed with untempered mortar," or the city of the living God. I speak as one who has every thing commonly valuable to man depending on this decision; moreover, as a Priest in that communion, whose constitution, violently suspended by an enemy for one hundred and thirty years, yet requires that every one of her acts, which bind her as a whole, should be assented to by her Priesthood in representation, as well as by her Episcopacy. If the grace of the sacraments may be publicly denied by ministers of the Church, nay, by a Bishop ex cathedrâ, with impunity, in direct violation of the most solemn forms to which they have sworn obedience, while the assertion of Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist draws down censure on the most devoted head, the communion which endures such iniquity requires the constant uninterrupted intercession of her worthier children, that she be not finally forsaken of God, and perish at the first attack of antichrist.

notes

1

Bellarmin. de Rom. Pont. Lib. iv. 25; iv. 24; i. 9.

2

De Maistre, du Pape. Liv. i. ch. i.

3

S. Cyprian de Unit. Ecc. 12.

4

"Development," &c. p. 22.

5

Thomassin, Part i. lib. i. ch. 4. De l'ancienne discipline de l'Eglise.

6

St. Cypr. de Unit. 4. Oxford Tr.

7

Quoted by Thomassin, ut sup.

8

Ibid.

9

S. Aug. Tom. v. 706, B.

10

S. Chrys. Tom. ii. 594, B.

11

St. Jerome, tom. ii. 279, Vallarsi.

12

Development, p. 279.

13

The words in italics are left out by Mr. N.

14

Thomassin, Part i. liv. i. ch. iii.

15

Of a passage in this letter, De Maistre says (Du Pape, liv. i. ch. 6): "Resuming the order of the most marked testimonies which present themselves to me on the general question, I find, first, St. Cyprian declare, in the middle of the third century, that heresies and schisms only existed in the Church because all eyes were not turned towards the Priest of God, towards the Pontiff who judges in the Church in the place of Jesus Christ." A pretty strong testimony, indeed, and one which would go far to convince me of the fact. Pity it is, that when one refers to the original, one finds that St. Cyprian is actually speaking of himself, and of the consequences of any where setting up in a see a schismatical Bishop against the true one. After this, who will trust De Maistre's facts without testing them? The truth is, he had taken the quotation at second hand, and never looked to see to whom it was applied. It suited the Pope so admirably that it must have been meant for him. But I recommend no one to change their faith upon the authority of quotations which they do not test.

16

Epist. 67. De Marciano Arelatensi.

17

S. Cyp. Ep. 29.

18