competitors; and before the close of that schism three more appeared whose title to the triple crown was equally valid; so that for some years there were four, five, and six popes at the same period, all equally entitled to the popedom, and every one of them the practical illustration of a demon incarnate. In the year 975, and also in 1045, there were three popes striving for the triple crown and pontifical throne, so that the popish annalists called the papacy of that period" the tripleheaded Cerberus!" Which of all those pretenders was the legitimate infallible? They each contradicted and they each excommunicated all the others. Unless, therefore, flat contradictions are oracular identities, and infallible truth is the most perverse falsehood, those contradictions destroy all the impious claim to perfect exemption from error. To which must be subjoined the fact, that popes, upon an incalculable number of subjects of doctrine, discipline, ceremonies, and morals, have differed to the very extremities of the intellectual universe. Popes themselves have confessed their own liability to err. So did Alexander IV and Innocent IV and Clement VI and Urban V, and the annals of the papacy are replete with instances of the most absolute and direct contradictions between the decisions of the pontiffs upon all questions of faith, ceremonies, discipline, and morals. Pope Adrian VI exhibits the most convincing demonstration of the general proposition that the boasted infallibility is an imposture. Cardinal Pole, one of the papal legates to the Council of Trent, in a work published by order of Pope Pius IV, and Andrasus, who was a member of that assembly, in his Defens. Conc. Trident., Lib. 1, both have demonstrated that the Council of Trent was fallible. Stapfer de Papismo, Num. 341. The pope with a council cannot be an infallible judge of articles of faith. The pope is fallible, and a council is fallible, but two fallibles cannot make one infallible. Either, therefore, the pope must communicate his infallibility to the council, or the council must bestow theirs upon the pope, but as neither of them possess that attribute so neither of them can impart it. One of the most inexplicable of all the inquiries connected with this subject is this: how men so scandalously outrageous and vile as were a large majority of the popes, such proverbially profligate, profane, impious, lewd murderers, that they have no counterpart in society except among the cardinals and the chief retainers of the apostacy, could have been supported during so long a period. One solution only can be adduced the universal degeneracy inclined all orders of the people "to embrace evil doctrines, and to engage in false worship"; while the easy commutation for their transgressions by means of auricular confession, penance, and the tax for absolution united their energies to maintain a system, which indulged their vicious propensities to the widest range and quieted their consciences by the guarantee of pardon, security, and peace. A condensed summary of the principal objections against the Romish anti-Christian system will properly close this concise review. The papal hierarchy has no sanction or authority for its existence in the sacred oracles, except in the awful condemnatory denunciations with which it is always delineated. It expunges the right of private examination and judgment on all literary, moral, and religious topics. It "prohibits liberty of mind, speech, writing, and printing; it debases the soul and character of man, and is the unceasing, implacable foe of education, science, improvement, and reason." An accurate idea may be formed of the immense sums of money which were constantly flowing towards Rome when we consider that there was a constant traffic in images, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, indulgences, jubilees, canonizations, miracles, masses, tithes, annats, Peter's pence, investitures, appeals, reservations, bulls, and expectatives, which ever drained the impoverished people. The manufacture of a new saint costs one hundred thousand crowns. An archbishop's pall, a small white woolen rag not worth five cents, costs about fifty-five hundred dollars, but in the year 1250 the Archbishop of York paid one thousand pounds for the pall; which, reckoning the difference in the value of money, would amount to nearly five hundred thousand dollars. In reference to that foolery the poet Baptist Mantuan said: "Si quid Roma dabit, nugas dabit, accipit aurum, The money thus drained from the various nations by the papal robbers, called priests and friars, amounted to almost double all the other national expenditures. The harvest at Rome was in exact proportion to the credulity, superstition, and wickedness of mankind. It is therefore easily understood how much those profitable delinquencies would be encouraged, and how eagerly such capital stock would be improved by those who traded in the popish merchandise of 66 the souls of men." *Rome gives trifles and words and receives gold. Money alone rules at Rome. THE PAPAL INTERDICTS Of all the extraordinary and gratuitous injustice and cruelty with which the papacy is chargeable, probably the interdict is the most atrocious. England, during the time of King John, because he would not submit to the papal usurpations and plunders, was under the papal interdict during six years, and suffered indescribable anguish. After he had reluctantly submitted to the pope, he was poisoned by a monk who had been specially absolved by his abbot to perpetrate that regicide. Henry II, king of England, in consequence of his dispute with that Traitor Saint Thomas Becket, to save his people from an interdict, was obliged to ratify the most degrading conditions imposed by the pope's legate, and afterwards to walk barefooted above three miles in penance over sharp stones. He also received eighty strokes for a scourging from the hands of several priests and monks, before the tomb and image of the ecclesiastical rebel, as an expiation for his atrocious sin in opposing the universal civil supremacy of the Roman pontiff and his hierarchy. Sleidan's Key to History, p. 289, Hist. of England, Henry II. One of the British earls had imprisoned a prelate. He was eventually surprised and captured. Pope Sylvester II ordered the earl to be tied to two wild horses, and his mangled corpse was afterwards exposed on the public road without sepulture. Innet's Origines Anglicanæ, Vol. 2. These facts are fully confirmed by the declaration of a famous popish author, Augustus Triumphus, who in his Pref. Sum. to John XXII used these words: "The pope's power is infinite; for great is the Lord, and great is his power, and of his greatness there is no end." The Romish parasite could not thus blasphemously have magnified the pontifical beneficence. PRIESTLY CELIBACY Puffendorf, in his Introduction to the History of Europe, Cap. 12, sect. 32, illustrates the prohibition of marriage to priests in this forcible language. "The ecclesiastics being freed from the care of wives and children, are more devoted to the interest of the papacy. By their celibacy they are not tempted to attach themselves to the sovereigns in whose dominions they reside; they have no excuse for appropriating any part of the ecclesiastical spoils for the subsistence of their families; and they are better qualified, and always ready to execute the orders of the pope, particularly against their own sovereigns, whose displeasure they dread not, when they can so easily remove from their jurisdiction. Thus having no care but for themselves and their order, the pope has taught them to abandon all the associations of life without feeling, and has released them from all secular power and jurisdiction, that he might more securely retain them as his own vassals.” The law of priestly celibacy, we are assured by the Apostle Paul, 1 Tim. iv. 1-3, is" the doctrine of devils," which never was enforced until the hierarchy became too powerful to be resisted. That unholy machination, which has always and universally been the source of the most scandalous disorders and turpitude, has ever been held as the most inviolable and essential part of the papal system. John Pye Smith thus writes: "The forced celibacy of the priesthood grows immediately out of ecclesiastical usurpation. This, in combination with private confession, proves the occasion of criminalities which poison the very springs of domestic virtue, and which the degraded state of public morals in the countries where they prevail scarcely urges |