Popes have since done over the Bishops of
the whole world. We have no need to consider what is the amount of this
difficulty to Roman Catholics themselves: the same Providence which has
placed them under that obedience, has placed us outside of it. Our cause,
indeed, cannot be different now from what it was at the commencement of the
separation. If inherently indefensible then, it is so now. But if then
'severe but just,' the lapse of three centuries in our separate state may
materially affect our relative duties. I affirm my conviction, that it is
better to endure almost any degree of usurpation, provided only it be not
anti-Christian, than to make a schism: for the state of schism is a
frustration of the purposes of the Lord's Incarnation; and through this,
not only the English, and the Eastern Church, but the Roman also, lies
fettered and powerless before the might of the world, and bleeding
internally at every pore. How shall a divided Church meet and overcome the
philosophical unbelief of these last times? or, the one condition to which
victory is attached being broken, crush the deadliest attack of the old
enemy? But the schism is made; let those answer for it before Christ's
tribunal who made it. Now that it is made, I see not how a system, which is
not a true development of the ancient Patriarchal constitution, but its
antagonist, according to St. Gregory's words, can be forced upon us, on
pain of our salvation, who have the original succession of the ancient
Bishops of this realm, if any such there be, and the old Patriarchal
constitution, 'sua tantum si bona norint.' I ground our present position
simply on the appeal to tradition and the first six centuries.

Not that there is any abrupt break in the testimony of history there; but
it is necessary to put a limit somewhere. Otherwise the seventh century
supplies us with the remarkable fact of Pope Honorius condemned, by the
sixth Ecumenical Council in 681, as having connived at and favoured the
Monothelite heresy, condemned more than forty years after his death; a fact
which utterly destroys the new dogma of the infallibility of the one Roman
Pontiff by himself; and which Bellarmine and Baronius can only meet by
attempting to prove that the acts of the sixth Council have been falsified,
though they had been received for genuine by the seventh and eighth
Councils, and for nine hundred years; and the letter of St. Leo,
immediately after that Council, falsified als