ding the reception of any of the pope's bulls in Spain. This was purely a temporal matter, yet the pope issued a bull against the King of Arragon declaring him an enemy of religion, a supporter of schism, and as such deprived him of his dignity and kingdom; not, it will be observed, for any sin against God and the Church, but for daring to rebuke him, au infallible pope, for his perfidy and want of truth.

The pope now gathered an army of Italian, French, Ger man, and English soldiers, and sent them into Bohemia, under the command of one of his cardinals, to exterminate all who embraced the doctrines of Huss. The Bohemians were not easily overcome, and drove the papal troops out of their country. But the pope, although thus defeated, was gratified that he had succeeded in stirring up a civil war in Ger many, from which he hoped great gains to the papal cause. Therefore he wrote to his defeated legate:

"You will immediately recruit new troops to recommence hostilities, and to wash out, in the blood of the Huss ites, the opprobrium with which your name is covered. Let no consideration arrest you; spare neither money nor men. Believe that we are acting for religion, and that God has no more agreeable holocaust than the blood of his enemies! Strike with the sword, and when your arm can not reach the guilty, employ poison, burn all the towns of Bohemia, that fire may purify this accursed land; transform the country into arid steppes, and let the dead bodies of the heretics hang from the trees in greater number than the leaves of the forest." (3)

Benedict XIII. having died, and Clement VIII. having resigned his claims to the pontificate, Martin V. became the sole possessor of the tiara, in 1429, thus ending the great Western schism, which had for more than fifty years ena bled the chief actors to exhibit themselves as "ambitious, avaricious, vindictive, debauched, and cruel; solely occupied with duping men, and changing the holy water into a stream of gold." This gave to Martin V. more leisure to prosecute his war of extermination of the Hussites; and we have still further insight into the character of this war, and the policy

(30) Cormenin, vol. ii., pp. 115, 116.

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of this infallible pope, by the following letter, addressed by him to the King of Poland, endeavoring to procure his aid in bringing back the Bohemians to the true faith:

"Know that the interests of the Holy See, and those of your crown, make it a duty to exterminate the Hussites. Remember that these impious persons dare proclaim principles of equality; they maintain that all Christians are brethren, and that God has not given to privileged men the right. of ruling the nations; they hold that Christ came on earth to abolish slavery; they call the people to liberty, that is, to the annihilation of kings and priests. While there is still time, then, turn your forces against Bohemia; burn, massacre, make deserts everywhere, for nothing could be more agreeable to God, or more useful to the cause of kings, than the extermination of the Hussites." ("1)

Martin V. did not live long enough, after issuing this bloody edict, to witness its desolating effect upon the Bohemians. The gallant Hussites, invigorated by the consciousness that they were defending an inalienable right which God had given them, rallied, like true soldiers, to the defense of their principles and their homes, and cut the papal army to pieces, driving it back in dismay and disgrace. At their hands liberty won another triumph over imperialism, and the cause of free conscience was, under the protecting providence of God, still preserved. The shock which the pope sustained when this sad news reached the Vatican was too great for him. Finding himself thus defied, and with an army routed and dispirited, he was seized with a fit of apoplexy, and died, disappointed in his hopes, and despised by all except those who were united with him in the effort to keep the people in degradation and perpetuate the reign of papal and imperial absolutism. But he lived long enough to show the world that the canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, which commanded the extermination of heresy by force, was still the law of the Church, and that from it the papacy derived the leading and governing principle of its action. With a view to the enforcement of this law, he proclaimed his infallibility, that he might the more readily

(") Cormenin, vol. ii., pp. 116, 117.

grasp sufficient temporal power to unsheath the swords of princes, and send forth their armies, with torch and fagot, to murder, to destroy, and to desolate some of the fairest portions of Europe. What impious blasphemy it is to say that God was on the side of the fiendish and infernal work prescribed by this pope for the defenders of papal sovereignty!

But the healing of the schism to which the pontificate of Martin V. led did not put an end to the corruptions of popes, prelates, or priests. God seems to have permitted these to continue during the remainder of the fifteenth century, and into the sixteenth, in order that the Christian world might realize how far the papacy had departed from the teachings and practices of the apostolic age, and be prepared for the ushering-in of the Protestant Reformation. Notwithstanding that torrents of blood were shed, and the fires of the terrible Inquisition were kindled, and gibbets and scaffolds were erected wherever the papacy had power, God did not design that the world should be longer ruled by depraved popes and priests; and, therefore, by the consummation of that great event, he marked out for it new roads to happiness and prosperity, and to Christianity fresh triumphs in more peaceful fields. And thousands who had before felt the crushing weight of papal oppression, and groaned under the burden, enlisted under the banner of religious freedom, which has been borne onward and upward, through terrible trials, until at last it floats in front of the Vatican at Rome, despite the curses and anathemas of Pope Pius IX., who, that it might again be trailed in the dust before him, invites another crusade, revives the canon of the Lateran Council, and gnashes his teeth in desperate rage, because there is no king upon any throne to do his bidding, and because mankind will not tamely submit to the pressure of his heel upon their necks. By the proclamation of his sovereignty, his infallibility, and his omnipotence, he leaves no room to doubt. that he desires to turn the Christian world back from its progressive advancement into the terrible condition from which the Reformation raised it, and by the substitution of terror, hatred, and intolerance, for love, charity, and toleration, to win again universal supremacy for the papacy. To

CONSEQUENCE OF PAPAL SUPREMACY.

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do this, he would enslave all peoples who will not obey him, destroy all governments wherein the people have power, abrogate every law in conflict with papal enactments, restore the universal reign of kings, and establish a Holy Empire, with ecclesiastical supremacy, upon the ruins of all popular government.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

Adrian IV., and the Grant of Ireland to England.—Ireland brought within Jurisdiction of Rome in the Twelfth Century.-Enlargement of the Papal Power. Secular Power administered by Commission from the Pope.— Gregory VII. and Innocent III.-The Fourth Lateran Council establishes the Faith that Institutions prejudicial to the Church should not be observed.-Papal Doctrine in Regard to Oaths.-Urban VI., Eugenius IV., and Innocent III. — Nature of the Oath exacted by Innocent III. from King John.-Subjects all Governments to the Pope.-Effect in the United States. Constitutional Oath of Allegiance.-Its Obligation.-The Papal Theory on that Subject.-Oaths opposed to the Welfare of the Church not binding.-Unlawful Oaths not binding.-What are Lawful, and what are Unlawful.-The Papal Principle applied to the Government of the United States. The Papal Argument by Balmes. Resistance to Civil Power usurped. When it is usurped.—When Legal, and when Illegal.-Governments de jure and de facto.-Obedience to the Last not Obligatory.-May be recognized from Prudential Motives.-Government of the United States is de facto.-The Monarchies of Europe, when Obedient to the Pope, are de jure.-The Doctrine of Consummated Facts denied. -Illegitimate Authority can not become Legitimate by Time. - Rendering to Cæsar the Things that are Cæsar's only requires Obedience to Legitimate Govern- Legitimate Governments are only such as are based on the Law of God. That of the United States is not Legitimate.

ments.

THE dignity and power acquired by the Roman Church by means of the exercise of its spiritual jurisdiction, however great, was not sufficient to answer the ends and gratify the ambition of the medieval popes. The frequent ef forts of the Italian people to establish republican institutions, which were often attended with the expulsion of the popes from Rome, were not intended as a denial of that jurisdic tion, in the proper sense, but as the means of limiting it to its own ecclesiastical sphere. But the popes were not satisfied with this. With them republicanism was synonymous with heresy, which they resolved to uproot with all the power necessary to that end. They denied, totally, the right of any people to make the laws or mold the institutions under which they were to live. Therefore, when Arnold of