w one-half of
Europe into heresy, was it to increase the number of Christians, or to
give a dowry to a young lady?

When, during the Thirty Years' War, he made an alliance with the
Protestants of Sweden, was it to prove the disinterestedness of the
Church, or to humble the House of Austria?

When he excommunicated Venice in 1806, was it to attach the Republic
more firmly to the Church, or to serve the rancour of Spain against
the first allies of Henry IV.?

When he suppressed the Order of the Jesuits, was it to reinforce the
army of the Church, or to please his master in France?

When he terminated his relations with the Spanish American provinces
upon their proclaiming their independence, was it in the interest of
the Church, or of Spain?

When he held excommunication suspended over the heads of such Romans
as took their money to foreign lotteries, was it to attach their
hearts to the Church, or to draw their crown-pieces into his own
treasury?

M. Thiers knows all this better than I do; but he possibly thought
that when the spiritual sovereign of the Church and the temporal
sovereign of a little country, wear the same cap, the one is naturally
condemned to minister to the ambition or the necessities of the other.

We wish the chief of the Catholic religion to be independent, and we
make him pay slavish obedience to a petty Italian prince; thus
rendering the future of that religion subordinate to miserable local
interests and petty parish squabbles.

But this union of powers, which would gain by separation, compromises
not only the independence, but the dignity of the Pope. The melancholy
obligation to govern men obliges him to touch many things which he had
better leave alone. Is it not deplorable that bailiffs must seize a
debtor's property in the Pope's name?--that judges must condemn a
murderer to death in the name of the Head of the Church?--that the
executioner must cut off heads in the name of the Vicar of Christ?
There is to me something truly scandalous in the association of those
two words, _Pontifical lottery_! And what can the hundred and
thirty-nine millions of Catholics think, when they hear their
spiritual sovereign expressing, through his finance minister, his
satisfaction at the progress of vice as proved by the success of the
lotteries?

The subjects of the Pope are not scandalized at these contradictions,
simply because they are accustomed to them. They strike a foreigner, a
Catholic, a