From 1682 to the present time, the four articles have been regularly signed in the manner prescribed by the edict of Louis XIV. The popes have never ceased to regard them with an evil eye. Out of France, many treatises against all the articles have been published. Roccaberti, a general of the Dominican order, published a collection of them in thirty-one volumes in folio. Bossuet justified the articles by his "Defence of the Declaration of the Clergy of France," in two quarto volumes, a work of uncommon learning, power of argument, and eloquence. An abridgment of it in a thin octavo volume was published in London, by the Abbé Coulon during his emigration.

In the negotiations between pope Pius VII, and Napoléon, then chief consul, the latter made the greatest efforts to prevail on his holiness to sanction the four articles, but without success. The Concordat signed by the pope and Napoléon on the 15th of July 1801, is silent upon the articles. In the negotiations which afterwards took place, the pope was repeatedly pressed in the strongest manner to sanction them; this he absolutely refused; but the archbishop of Tours, who was deputed to his holiness by Napoléon, and who was one of the most intelligent of the French prelates, has informed the public, in the account which he published of these negotiations,* that "his holiness, repeated frequently to the commissioners by whom the negotiations were carried on, that it was not his intention to do any thing contrary to the Declaration; that if the disputes turned on the first article only, and which was the only article in which in his opinion the tranquillity of the states was concerned, he would subscribe that article without difficulty."

These historical minutes will be closed, by observing that on the 11th day of June 1817, a concordat was entered into between pope Pius VII. and Louis XVIII.; that soon after its signature, the pope announced it by an approving bull, and that it conforms, in all respects, to the concordat signed by pope Leo X. and Francis I.

What has been written will be found to be an accurate account of the doctrine of the Gallican church on the points that have been noticed, as those doctrines were understood by Bossuet, Fleuri, D'Aguessau, and other writers of that temper. From the middle of the last century till the present time, they have been carried far beyond the intentions of the first propounders and advocates of them, by several French, Italian, and German writers. The system adopted by these is termed on the continent, the New Discipline, Nova Disciplina. The

* Fragment relatif à l' Histoire Ecclésiastique du XIX Siècle.

object of its favourers is, according to their own statements, to simplify the Catholic religion; to effect a general reduction of religious orders, to abolish exemptions from the jurisdiction of bishops, to diminish the intercourse, even in ecclesiastical concerns, with the see of Rome, and, speaking generally, to divide the Catholic church into a multitude of ecclesiastical republics, with a subordination little more than nominal, to the supreme pontiff. Many attempts to effect an economy of this kind were made in Austria, Tuscany, and Naples. The best account of them which has appeared, is that in the first of the works mentioned in the title to this article, and that given in the life of Scipio de Ricci, bishop of Pistoia.

We have noticed the expression of Fleuri, in which he compliments his country for having resisted more successfully than any other, the encroachments of the see of Rome. There certainly is ground to controvert the accuracy of this assertion.— Before the Reformation, to which period Fleuri must be considered to refer, none had opposed so strong or so successful checks to the undue pretensions of the papal court as the parliaments of England had done by the statutes of Præmunire and Provisors, the statutes prohibiting the exportation of ecclesiastical revenues out of the kingdom, and the statutes of Mortmain. In respect to investitures, the charter of king John, afterwards recognized and confirmed by his great charter, and the 25 of Edward III. St. 6 § 3, gave up to the chapters the free use of electing their prelates. This statute was not, like the French Pragmatic Sanction, repealed by a concordat, or any other arrangement while England acknowledged the supremacy of the pope but the majestic lord who burst the bonds of Rome, to use Mr. Gray's expression, by a statute of the 25th year of his reign enjoined the chapters to elect the nominee of the crown, under the penalties of a præmunire. This made the whole episcopal order, and all aspirants to it, dependants on the crown. Till then, the prelacy was a check on its enormities, and in some degree a safeguard of the constitution. In Spain, the sovereigns, by immemorial prescription always allowed by the popes, have uninterruptedly presented to episcopal sees, and to the higher dignities of the church." Brown's Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum," contains a multitude of documents, which shew the resistance of the German states and churches to the attempts of the popes to infringe their civil or religious rights. Three deserve particular notice; the Catalogue printed by Wieclius of one hundred and fifty ancient writers, who had published treatises in defence of the liberties of the German church: the Concordat of Mentz,

since edited by Koch, by which, in 1447, the decrees of the council of Basil, in favour of the superiority of a general council to the pope, were adopted in Germany; and the celebrated "Centum Gravamina," or list of the hundred grievances, of the German churches; was presented, at the diet of Nuremburg in 1522 to the pope's nuncio. The last attracted so much notice, that Pope Paul III. caused an abridgement of it to be made, and to be publicly read before a consistory of cardinals. It has been frequently remarked that a much earlier date than is usually fixed, should be assigned to the revival of letters : it is in the same manner possible that a much earlier than the common era should be assigned to the resistance of the states of Europe to the exorbitant pretensions of the Roman court. It is singular that no persons were so actively opposed to the popes as the Fratricelli, or the Friars who rebelled against them. To these, as Mr. Gibbon justly observes, from Wetstein, the discovery that the Pope is antichrist is justly due. Father Dolcino seems to have been their leader Occam walked in his steps, and these were both accompanied and followed by many others; the Germans have greatly exceeded, in modern times, the French. We have noticed the Pistoian projects: they made little way in France. In fact the re-action in France was beyond the boundaries of Christianity. The Pistoian notions prevailed for a time in some parts of Germany; but, long before their arrival in it, large portions of that territory had been occupied by the Syncretists, or those who thought that the articles of Faith, the belief of which is necessary to salvation, were very few. The germ of this system may be traced to the writings of Arminius and his first disciples. But the Syncretists soon divaricated into the rationalists and mystics. The former system banishes mystery from religion, and subjects the truth of scriptural narrative and the soundness of its doctrines to the test of reason; while mysticism but solves many of the difficulties which reason suggests, by feeling and allegory. The attention of our countrymen has been recently called to the German controversy by Mr. Rose's discourses at Cambridge; but he has not informed us, with sufficient precision, in what rationalism consists. Does he or does he not avow the only genuine principle of all consistent Protestant churches, that they acknowledge no law but the scriptures, no interpreter of the scriptures but the understanding and conscience of the individual? If Mr. Rose avows this principle, he is a true Protestant and must admit a rationalist to be one. He is not a true Protestant, and the authority of the church to which he belongs, is his Pope. The discussion, like all discussions, will serve the cause of truth,

The constant struggle to increase the temporal authority of the popedom on one side, and to diminish it on the other, is evidently the agent which has reduced the power of the holy see to its present comparatively innocuous form. The popes had the misfortune to acquire in the dark ages, more than it was essentially possible that they should preserve in more enlightened ones. The consequence has been, that whatever external acknowledgment may have been yielded to their claims, almost the whole of the lay talent in Europe has always run in an under-current of opposition. The effects of this have been good in every way; in none happier, than in removing those bars to the equal enjoyment of religious liberty, which our ancestors, judging from what lay before them, had determined to be insuperable.

ART. XII.-The Address of the London Radical Reform Association to the People of the United Kingdom. Oct. 19, 1829. London. W. E. Andrews,

THERE are three kinds of men that profess to shoot a wood

cock. The first are those who see their game, and fire at it as directly as they can. The second are they who fire without seeing their game at all. These are supposed to be considerably less successful than the others. The third kind are those who see the game, and make a point of firing the other way. And as these last were never known to kill a woodcock yet, the direct inference with many people is, that they never meant to do it from the first; and that if they bring home a list of killed of their neighbours hogs, dogs, or poultry, it is because they really went out to bag this kind of prey, and not the other. In short there is a considerable and increasing sect who conceive, that one way of judging of the object of any man or set of men, is to observe the way they go about to compass it. It would be wrong to conceal, that this philosophy is not without opponents; there are many individuals of good estate who lean the other way. The sect therefore cannot claim authority on the ground of unanimous assent; or demand to have it set down like an axiom in Euclid, that the way to shoot woodcocks is to aim at them. It makes part of the debateable ground of natural science; and, in England at least, must be noted as one of those points, on which a prudent man should confine himself to observing that a great deal may be said on both sides.

Precisely the same kind of obscurity hangs over certain parts of the subject of politics. For example, it is pretty

generally professed to be acknowledged, that the people ought to be represented; but nobody has ever been able to determine, whether this is best done by their having voices in the election of their representatives, or by their having none. Some persons, for instance, think that it would promote the intended object, if large towns like Manchester and Leeds had a chance for chusing at least one representative. Others, on the contrary, believe, that the way to accomplish the end, is to cause two representatives to be elected by nine drunken men in Cornwall.

In this unsettled state of public opinion, the subject is clearly open to debate; and no man can be offended at any course his neighbour's judgment may pursue, seeing that his own must be equally hostile to the conclusions of somebody else. It is demonstrably unjust, that the man who determines on shooting with the butt-end, should put himself into a passion with his friends who prefer another way. It goes beyond the limits of social liberty and is not to be tolerated even in the squire of the parish. Nobody wants him to shoot his birds but as he pleases; they only want to shoot their own.

If the people are to be represented at all, they ought to chuse their representatives. If they do not chuse their representatives, they are not represented at all. If some do and some do not, then some are represented and some not represented at all. And the grand query is, why some are to be not represented

at all.

If a number of men were invited to form a joint-stock company for some common purpose, it would be an odd species of invitation which should begin by stating, that nine-tenths of the subscribers were to have no voice either in directing or inquiring into the application of the common stock. It would be tantamount to the advertisement, Wanted, a number of gulls, who having no other way of losing their money, may be accommodated here." It would bear fraud and fallacy upon the face of it; and scarcely any man would be found hardy enough to put forward such a scheme, and assuredly none foolish enough to enter into it. Now if nobody would voluntarily enter into such a scheme, those who habitually live under the operation of such a one must do it involuntarily. It must be because they cannot help themselves; or in other words, because force is put upon them by those who have the luck to play the winning game.

If it was urged that in such an association it was necessary that those who held the larger stakes should have the larger share of direction, and that the way to compass this, was that those who held the smaller stakes should have no share at all; it is