ly by
the lovers of abandoned women, who made and deposed Popes at their will?
Our cause being good, all that we have to deplore of actual evil should
lead to more earnest intercession, more continued striving after that love
which breathes itself forth in unity, but should not shake the confidence
of any obedient heart in our mother's title. When the Donatists made the
crimes of individuals an excuse for breaking unity, St. Augustin reminded
them, that the crimes of the chaff do not prejudice the wheat, but that
both must grow together till the Lord of the harvest send forth his angels
to make the separation.

The writer will not conceal that he took up this inquiry for the purpose of
satisfying his own mind. Had he found the Councils and Fathers of the first
six centuries bearing witness _to_ the Roman supremacy, as at present
claimed, instead of _against_ it, he should have felt bound to obey them.
As a Priest of the Church Catholic in England, he desires to hold, and to
the best of his ability will teach, all doctrine which the undivided Church
always held. He finds by reference to those authorities which could not be
deceived, and cannot be adulterated, that while they unanimously held the
Roman primacy, and the patriarchal system, of which the Roman pontiff stood
at the head, they as unanimously did not hold, nor even contemplate, that
supremacy or monarchy which alone Rome will now accept as the price of her
communion. They not only do not recognise it, but their words and their
actions most manifestly contradict it. This is, in one word, his
justification of his mother from the sin of Schism. If true, it is
sufficient: if untrue, he knows of no other.

But should any opponent think these pages worthy of a reply, the writer
warns him, at the outset, that he must in fairness discard that old
disingenuous trick of using testimonies of the Fathers to the primacy of
the Roman See in the episcopal and patriarchal system, in order to prove
the full papal supremacy, as now claimed, in a system which is nearly come
to pure monarchy. By this method, because the Fathers recognise the Bishop
of Rome as successor of St. Peter, they are counted witnesses to that
absolute power now claimed by the Roman pontiff, though they recognise
other Bishops, in just the same sense, to be successors of the holy
Apostles; or though they call every Bishop's see the see of Peter, as the
great type and example of the episcopate. What such an