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

—THE BULLARIUM. £G1its many hundred bulls must these seven tests be applied.Now, if, as we have seen, it is so difficult, or indeed so impossible,to apply these tests to the bulls of the day, theidea of applying them to the bulls of a thousand years agois immeasurably absurd.Would any man in his five sensestake up the bulls of Pope Hildebrand, or of Pope Innocent,and proceed to test, by these seven requisites, whether theyare or are not infallible ? No man ever did so,—no man everthought of doing so ; and we may affirm with the utmostconfidence, that while the world stands, no man who is notutterly bereft of understanding and sense will ever undertakeso chimerical and hopeless a task. The twelve laboursof Hercules were as nothing compared with these sevenlabours of the infallibility. And then we have to think whata monument of folly and inconsistency, as well as of arroganceand blasphemy, is the Bullarium. Not only is it ina dead language, and has never been translated into anyliving tongue, and therefore is utterly unfit to form theguide of any living Church, but it is wanting even in agreementwith itself. We find that one bull contradicts another,or rescinds that other, or expressly condemns it.Wefind that these bulls are the source of endless disputes, andthe subject of varied and conflicting interpretations, on thepart of the Romish doctors. What a contrast does thesimplicity, the harmony, and the conciseness of the Bibleform to the twenty or thirty volumes of the Bullarium,the Bible of the Papist, but which few if any living Papistshave ever read, and the authority and infallibility of whichno living Papist certainly has ever verified according to thorules of his Church ! And yet we are asked to renounce theone, and to submit ourselves to the guidance of the other,to abandon the straight and even path of holy Scripture,and to commit ourselves to the endless mazes and the inextricablelabyrinths of the Bullarium. A modest request,doubtless, but one which it will be time enough to considerwhen Papists agree among themselves as to where this infallibilityisplaced, and how it may be turned to any practi-