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THE PAPAL EXCOMMUNICATION: A DIALOGUE.

A. I HAVE been talking with our friend G▬▬, the Roman Catholic convert, about the Excommunication. It is all in vain. He will not see that the nineteenth century is different from the thirteenth.

B. In what respects do you think them different?

A. Looking at facts, not at theoriesnot determining which is worst or which is best-I should say that invisible terrors had a power for the one which they have not for the other.

B. On what facts would you rest that opinion?

A. They are obvious enough, I should suppose. That G- should be unable to see them causes me little surprise. Facts were always coloured for him by the fancy which looked at them. Whatever might be his prevailing notions at the time determined-not his judgment of the events which he read of, or which were passing before him,-but their very form and nature.

B. I am afraid G exceptional observer. is a rare gift. Let

is not a very is not a very The siccum lumen

us ask for it, but not be sure that we have attained it. What facts in the thirteenth century were you thinking of?

A. I know that, if I used any general phrase, such as "the medieval period," or "the dark ages," you would take me to task; so I tried to be definite.

B. Let us be a little more definite still. You would not complain of me, would you, if I fixed on the first sixteen years of that century for a comparison with our own?

A. Certainly not. I should have fancied that I was unfair in selecting the palmiest days of the Papacy, the glorious era of Innocent III., for the support of my position.

B. I willingly accept it. And, to make the trial fair, let the scene be laid in Italy. What say you of the relations between Innocent and Venice as illustrated by the story of the fourth Crusade ?

4. No doubt the great Republic, having fixed its eyes on its old Greek enemy, showed a strange indifference to the thunders of the Vatican, and preferred the spoils of Constantinople to those of Jerusalem. One must always make exceptions for commercial cupidity and ambition. There is, I confess, a link between the two ages. The same causes produce the same effects. England has inherited the Venetian scorn for the invisible.

B. The sea I should have thought was not exactly the school for learning that scorn. The mystery of invisible. force, its victory and its terrors, is sug gested to the sailor and the trader, almost as strikingly as to the landsman.

A. You are playing with the words "invisible force" and "invisible terrors." What have the winds and waves, what have men's triumphs over them, to do with Excommunication?

B. I might respond, What have cupidity and ambition to do with Excommunication? Those also are invisible forces. You may hold that they enable Nations to despise the vague and unreal. I think they cause Nations to tremble before the vague and unreal. On the other hand, whatever there is in the sailor or merchant which does not merely grasp at pelf and dominion; whatever shows him his subjection to eternal laws; whatever makes him conscious of human strength and weakness; whatever teaches him to recognise a fellowship which seas and difference of customs do not break; this lifts him above the mere show of invisible authority by giving him an apprehension of its reality.

A. The Merchant City, whatever may be the reason, was the one which could in that day defy the terrors of the Vatican, could compel the Latin Church to accept Constantinople as a boon from the very hands which she had pronounced accursed for touching it. What an opposite spectacle do King John and England present!

B. How, opposite? England in the thirteenth century trembled when graves were left unclosed, children unbaptized, couples unmarried. England in the nineteenth century could bear such spectacles no better. But if a majority of the Clergy yielded to the commands of him who issued the Interdict-if John with his weight of merited unpopularity shook with good reason before the decree which permitted any subject whose coffers he had robbed, or whose wife he had defiled, to strike him dead; was not Magna Charta won in defiance of the curse which was launched against those who touched the Pope's vassal? did not Stephen Langton teach the nobles to express their sacrilegious claims, and to word them so that serfs should afterwards be the better for them? Was there no mockery of Excommunication in the thirteenth century? Did the mockery only come from men enlightened by commerce? Did it not come from those who felt that they were called by God to assert their rights as members of a Nation? Did not the priests who had received their nomination from Innocent, bear their full part in it?

A. I do not know that G-— could be much better pleased with your reading of history than with mine. Goneril leaves poor Lear his fifty knights in the good old armour; Regan will not even allow him these.

B. I do not think the solemn lessons of the past must be expanded or contracted to suit the convenience of Protestant or Romanist commentators, to flatter the prejudices of the idolator of the Middle Ages or of the Victorian Age. We want these lessons for our warning and our encouragement. Woe to us if we twist them so that they shall be useless for either purpose! If I think you conceded too much to your ultramontane friend in admitting that an Excommunication was sure to be effectual six centuries I think you ago, were unjust to him in saying that it must be ineffectual now.

4. You do not mean that you think the present one will be effectual in Romagna, in Tuscany, in Piedmont?

B. I hope and trust not. But my trust and hope rest upon another ground than the notion that Italians or Englishmen of this day are made of different stuff from their forefathers. I want them both to believe that they are made of the same stuff. I can look for no good to one or the other if they lose that faith.

A. And you honestly hold that men living amidst the noise of spinning-jennies and the endless movement of printing-presses can be affected by invisible terrors as those were who lived when women were thrown into the water to see whether their floating would convict them of witchcraft?

B. I should have thought the printing-press had brought us much more within the scope and sense of invisible agencies than the ordeal ever could have brought our ancestors.

A. How?

B. The woman is visible; the water or hot iron is visible; the sentence of death is visible. From Printing House Square there issues a power which goes through the length and breadth of the land. No one can tell whence it proceeds or what it is. But it is felt in every limb of the English body politic; whether it is an energy for health or for destruction, it is surely invisible, indefinable, mysterious.

4. Again I must ask you, what has this to do with Excommunication?

B. Again I must answer you; it has everything to do with Excommunication. It is Excommunication which all people in all circles, little and great, dread. They fear the awful sentence which may go forth from their circle, or from the dictator of it, cutting them off from its privileges and its fellowship. The fear of public opinion, the fear of newspapers, is nothing else than the fear that from them should issue the decree of Excommunication. Your niste nth century is not rid of this tear in the very least degree. No one of your English classes is free from it. Read any United States newspaper, and see whether you will escape from it by flying into that more ad

vanced state of civilization. De Tocqueville explained nearly thirty years ago that that was the very region in which social Excommunication was most tremendous.

A. But the Papal Excommunication is different in kind from this Social Excommunication. One belongs to the present only; the other to the unknown future.

B. I do not admit a difference in kind. The Social Excommunication is altogether uncertain, indefinite. Those who utter it do not know exactly how much they intend by it. They admit degrees of exclusion, in some cases a possibility of restoration; in some utter, irremediable banishment. How much is involved in that depends upon the nature and permanence of the society itself.

A. And, therefore, the Papacy, assuming the Church to be a permanent society existing in both worlds-binding all ages, past, present, and future together of necessity regards utter exclusion from its society as the loss of every blessing that men or nations can inherit. Such an exclusion past ages thought it possible for a man to pronounce; what I maintained in my conversation with G——— was that our age does not hold it to be possible. Do you demur to that proposition?

B. I remember reading a pamphlet by a more eminent convert than your friend G, written whilst he was a clergyman in the English Church. it he told those who were attacking him for his opinions, that he despised their threats. But he added

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"Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis." His minor gods were the twenty-four bishops of the English Church; Jupiter was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He learnt to think that the cardinals more properly represented the former; that there was a thunderer in the Vatican more terrible than the thunderer of Lambeth. In his heart of hearts he confessed another power higher than any of these; he feared them because he identified them with that power.

Whenever Nations in the old time confessed the might of the Papal Excommunication, it was because they identified the power which went forth in it with that higher Power; whenever they resisted the Papal Excommunication it was because they could not identify one with the other. The Jupiter in the Vatican might be their enemy. But He who sat above the water-flood was not their enemy: would only show Himself their enemy, would only exclude them from his fellowship and from the fellowship of the good and true in all ages, if they shrunk from the duty which He called them to do; would uphold them against all visible and invisible foes if they stood forth like brave, earnest, faithful men, and utterly defied and set at nought those who bade them be cowardly and untrue. My hope and belief is that Tuscany, Parma, Romagna, Piedmont, have learnt and are learning more and more deeply this lesson. It is not that they disbelieve in the invisible Power which their fathers believed. They have been disbelieving in invisible Power; they have been worshipping visible Power. shipping visible Power. Now they are awakening to a sense of the invisible; now they are conscious that the invisible is fighting for them against the visible; now they are sure that the Jupiter whom they may trust as a friend, whom they must fear as an enemy, is a God of Righteousness; the Deliverer of man and nations out of the house of bondage; always the enemy of the oppressor. To grasp this faith is to feel themselves a nation. To grasp this faith is to become one with the Italians of other times. They dare not tremble at the Excommunication of a visible ruler, because they do tremble at the Excommunication which may proceed from another Judge, and which may cut them off from fellowship with those that groaned and bled for righteousness and freedom in their own and every land.

4. You believe that Italy, after all, has learnt something from intercourse with us Protestants and Englishmen.

B. From us? From the fine ladies and gentlemen who mock at their worship,

or indulge in dilettante admiration of it at Rome? From our diplomatists at Florence? From those who have bribed and corrupted them? No; they have had a better teacher. In Austrian, or Papal, or Neapolitan prisons He has been educating them. There He has been nerving them not to fear Papal Excommunication, but to be in great terror of His. Rather let us learn of those whom we might have helped, and have failed to

help. Let them instruct us that there is an invisible Power which is more to be dreaded than the invisible power of the Press or of the Stock Exchange! Let them remind us what an Excommunication that is which says to Nations, "They have cut themselves off from"truth and righteousness! They have "sold themselves to Mammon ! Let "them alone!"

THE FUSILIERS' DOG.

(LATELY RUN OVER, AFTER HAVING GONE THROUGH THE CRIMEAN CAMPAIGN.)

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And right throughout the snow and There, with brave names and deeds en

frost

He faced both shot and shell;

Though unrelieved, he kept his post, And did his duty well.

twined,

Which Time may not forget,

Young Fusiliers unborn shall find The legend of our pet.

Whilst o'er fresh years, and other life

Yet in God's mystic urn,

The picture of the mighty strife
Arises sad and stern-

Blood all in front, behind far shrines
With women weeping low,

For whom each lost one's fame but shines,
As shines the moon on snow-

Marked by the medal, his of right,

And by his kind keen face, Under that visionary light

Poor Bob shall keep his place; And never may our honoured Queen For love and service pay,

Less brave, less patient, or more mean Than his we mourn to-day!

THE QUESTION OF THE AGE-IS IT PEACE?

BY T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE.

HAS Europe, at the point of civilization which it has reached, passed beyond the military stage of social progress, so that a disappearance of war is already before us in political prospect? This question raises, as will be seen, some collateral inquiries of practical and immediate moment; but, apart from the temporary interest and light which they may afford, the investigation is, at bottom, one of a philosophical character.

There is a matter of fact to be decided at the beginning. For an obvious, if not altogether conclusive, indication of the exorcism of the ancient combative spirit, and of the pacific structure and temper of modern civilization, would be a comparative infrequency in our own times of international quarrels and intestine conflicts and disquietude. A great predominance of peaceful interests and tendencies might naturally be expected to bear fruit and witness both in the foreign relations and in the internal condition of the states of Europe. And it is in fact asserted that there has been, beyond all controversy, a steady decline in the frequency of war in each successive century of modern history; a signal example of which is, as it is alleged, afforded by the repose of Europe, and of this country in particular,' during the

1 "That this barbarous pursuit is in the progress of society steadily declining, must be evident even to the most superficial reader of European history. If we compare one century with another we shall find that wars have been becoming less frequent; and now so clearly is the movement marked, that until the late commencement of hostilities (with Russia) we had remained at peace for nearly forty years; a circumstance unparal

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War in India.
British troops
tinue to
France.
Assistance to the re-
volted colonies of
Spain.

War between Spain and her revolte l American colonies. Army of occupation in France. Revolutionary movements in several Continental States.

War between Spain and her American colonies. Invasion of Monte Video by Portugal. Insurrections in Spain.

leled not only in the history of our own country, but also in the history of every other country which has been important enough to play a leading part in the history of the world. In the middle ages there was never a week without war. At the present moment war is deemed a rare and singular occurrence."-Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i. p. 173.

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