staff will be wholly disappointed.

[Footnote 309: See Nos. 30, 39, 138.]

No. 187. [STEELE.

From _Saturday, June 17_, to _Tuesday, June 20, 1710_.

----Pudet haec opprobria nobis
Et dici potuisse et non potuisse refelli.
OVID, Met. i. 758.

* * * * *

_From my own Apartment, June 19._

_Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff of London._[310]

"His Holiness is gone to Castel Gandolpho, much discomposed at some
late accounts from the missionaries in your island: for a committee
of cardinals, which lately sat for the reviving the force of some
obsolete doctrines, and drawing up amendments to certain points of
faith, have represented the Church of Rome to be in great danger,
from a treatise written by a learned Englishman, which carries
spiritual power much higher than we could have dared to have
attempted even here. His book is called, 'An Epistolary Discourse,
proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is
a Principle naturally Mortal: wherein is proved, that none have the
Power of giving this Divine immortalising Spirit since the
Apostles, but the Bishops.' By Henry Dodwell, A.M.[311] The
assertion appeared to our _literati_ so short and effectual method
of subjecting the laity, that it is feared auricular confession and
absolution will not be capable of keeping the clergy of Rome in any
degree of greatness, in competition with such teachers whose flocks
shall receive this opinion. What gives the greater jealousy here
is, that in the catalogue of treatises which have been lately burnt
within the British territories, there is no mention made of this
learned work; which circumstance is a sort of implication, that the
tenet is not held erroneous, but that the doctrine is received
amongst you as orthodox. The youth of this place are very much
divided in opinion, whether a very memorable quotation which the
author repeats out of Tertullian, be not rather of the style and
manner of Meursius? _In illo ipso voluptatis aestu quo genitale
virus expellitur, nonne aliquid de anima quoque, sentimus exire,
atque, adeo marcessimus et devigescimus cum lucis detrimento?_ This
piece of Latin goes no further than to tell us how our fa