The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

—120 FOUND ATIOxV AND EXTENT OF THE SUPREMACY.through her organs, bids Europe again crouch down beneaththe infallibility. How strikingly also do these documentsteach that Popery is as unchangeable in her character as inher creed. Amid the liberal ideas and constitutional governmentsof Germany she retains her exclusive and intolerantspirit, not less than amid the mediaeval opinions andbarbaric despotism of Spain. The glacier in the heart ofthe Swiss valley lies eternally congealed in the midst of fruit,and flowers, and sunshine. In like manner, an eternal congelationholds fast the Papacy, lot the world advance as itmay.In the middle of the nineteenth century it starts upgrizzly, ferocious, and blood-thirsty, as in the fifteenth.a murderer from his grave, or a wild beast from his lair, sohas it come back upon the world. The compilers of thesedocuments breathe the very spirit of the men who, in formerages, covered Spain with inquisitions and Germany withstakes. They lack simply opportunity to revive, and evenoutdo, the worst tragedies of their predecessors. In Germanythey attempt by a single stroke of the pen to sweepaway all the guarantees which flowed from the treaty ofWestphalia ; and in southern Europe they strike down withthe sabre the rights of conscience and the liberties of states.How long will princes and statesmen permit themselves tobe misled by the wretched pretext that theseAsmen have adivine right to commit all these enormities and crimes,that heaven has committed the human race into their hands,—and that neither the rights of man nor the prerogatives cfGod must come into competition with their sacerdotal will ?How long is the world to be oppressed by a confederacy offanatics and ruffians, who are only the abler to play theknave, that they rob under the mask of devotion, and tyrannizein the awful name of God ?But we have no need to go so far from home as to Spainand Germany, for an instance of " a purely spiritual jurisdiction"transmuting itselfimmediately and directly into temporalsupremacy. Let us look across St George's Channel.The British government, pitying the deep ignorance of the