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licet, femperque licebit dignitatem tueri, mortem contemnere. In the Treatise on Moral Duties which he wrote for his fon's instruction, he talks in the fame exalted strain.- Nemo juftus cffe poteft qui dolorem, Qui exilium, qui egeftatem, qui mortem timet, aut qui ea, quæ bis funt contraria, æquitati anteponit. I could multiply quotations without end from the writings of other Pagan moralists, on whose page the light, that has been fent from Heaven, never shed a ray, inculcating the same sentiments. Pagan history abounds in examples of heroes who greatly practifed what their moralists thus fublimely taught. What then had we not a right to expect from a Christian Bishop? the head of the Chriftian Hierarchy ? the representative, the adjunct of the great Bishop of fouls, wbo before Pontius Pilate witneffed a good confeffion, and braving the contradiction of finners against bim, endured the Grofs, and despised its shame, and its torments, to do the will of his Fa ther? What had we not a right to expect from the fucceffor of that Apostle. from the inheritor of all the divine gifts and privileges of that Apostle, nay, as the representative of St. Peter. a chofen vessel, raised in dignity above that Apostle, who tells us that with all boldness Christ should be ever ever magnified in his body, whether by life, or by death; for to him to live was Christ, and to die was gain; who counted all things but loss for the sake of Jesus Christ, for whom he fuffered the loss of all things?-What had we not to expect from him who claims the privilege of decreeing divine honours, and erecting altars to

that glorious company of Martyrs, who come out of great tribulation; who wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb; who have trial of cruel mockings and Scourgings, of bonds and imprisonments; who are Stoned, who are flain by the fword, who are fawn afunder, who are tortured in every shape the cruelty of tyrants can devife, rather than renounce the prize of the high calling of God, by compliances unworthy of that calling; by betraying their duty, or fawningly and hypocritically falling down before the idol of power, who had their destiny in his hands? In God's name, Sir, let the advocates of his Holinefs fpeak out at once the language of the school in which they have been bred. Let them brush off the dust from the pages of the Bellarmines, the Mariana's, the Valentias, the Vasques, the Parfons's, their early preceptors in Ethics. From them let them select their arguments from state-neceffity, to palliate a conduct, which would have been deemed thameful and degrading even by those who had only the light of Nature to guide, and the encouragements of Natural Religion to support them; but, let them not trample on the little of Christian feeling that has furvived the apostacy of this age, by pleading fuch a palliative on Christian grounds, or by any arguments drawn from the writings of the Evangelifts or Apostles, or even from the ancient Fathers, or the traditions derived from their times.

They may be emboldened by the experience of centuries, to make the attempt on numbers of my infatuated countrymen (unhappily they are the

greater number), who, in all the blaze of light diffused around them by the general dissemination of the Holy Scriptures, continue to delight in darkness, having no religion but that of their teachers, qualified or unqualified, and submissively laying down their reason aud their faith at the door of the confeffional; but I trust and I know that there are those amongst the most confcientious and fincere Catholics, whose understanding cannot be so grofsly imposed on; I know that there are many confcientious and fincere Catholics, who are better able to give an account of the faith that is in them, as the Disciples of Christ, than to acknowledge these spurious doctrines, these foundlings of the schools, fwaddled in all the tunics, and cowls, and coifs, and cinctures of their monkish fosterers, which you would obtrude upon them, as the genuine and legi timate offspring of the holy religion they profess.

Here again I have the Allocution of the Holy Father to the facred Confiftory before me; I read it over and over, and I do not find one word in it of this plea of Neceffity. If his Holiness urged fuch a plea to these his confidential advifers, he has not ventured to publish it to the world. It has not been offered, under any special authority from him to the faithful at large, to reconcile them to the indignities to which he fubmitted, or to the facrifices he has made. We hear of it only in whifpers. The chief ground of defence his Holiness has chofen has been long familiar to his predeceffors. He could not stifle the voice of his confcience,

or drown its cries, notwithstanding all he tells us of his having fatisfied his doubts. He foresaw the attacks to which he must be exposed from every quarter of the Christian world, and the war he would have to encounter from the universal sense and feeling of mankind. He, therefore, took refuge within the ancient fortress, the old castle of St. Angelo, in which all his predecessors have shut up and entrenched themselves, on every fuch defperate attack. To every affault he presents the interests of Christianity, infeparable from the interests of the Holy See; the degradation of the Cross manifested in the degradation of the Pontifical Crozier, and its triumphs in the triumph of the triple Crown; the name of God and of his Son profaned by the indignities offered to their Vicegerent, and respected and reverenced in the homage paid to him; the veneration and obedience due from all Christians to St. Peter, renounced in the plunder, or evinced by the protection and security of the patrimony of St. Peter.

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This is the defence which his Holiness sends into the world to meet the universal indignation which he foresaw, and not an imperious Neceffity operating on his fears. On this ground he represents the miseries which the Holy See had fuffered from the tyranny and oppression of the Corsican, as overwhelming the religion which that apostate had renounced; and in the minatory adulation, the insulting fubmiffion paid by him to his Holiness, with a view to the farce that has been fince acted,

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he rejoices as in the conversion of this august Prince to the Catholic Religion, and the restoration of the true worship of God throughout the extenfive regions of the French empire.

It must be confessed that in all this his Holiness has done no more than follow the precedents fet him by his predecessors, from the days of Pope Zachary in 752, to his own. The reign of that Pontiff in particular takes away from Pius the 7th every other merit or demerit but that of imitation; and if the draft that was sketched with fo masterly a hand by Zachary has been but rudely and faintly copied by his worthy successor, we must ascribe it to the changes that have been produced by so long a succession of ages, and to the difference of fiuation and character in the two ufurpers, Pepin and Napoleon.

The events which the mention of those times brings to my recollection throw confiderable light on our fubject. It cannot, therefore, be foreign to it, to enter into them with fome minuteness.

The Popes owed no great obligations to the first race of the Kings of France; Clovis* their great founder had been converted to the Christian faith; he built Churches, he founded Monastries, he affembled Councils; but it does not appear that he had any intercourse with the Holy Father, if we except a letter to him from Pope Anaftafius, congratulating the Church, as almost every other wef

* Began his reign in 481, A. D.

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