Execution of the inportant office annexed to it. I grant also, that there have been rival Popes and unhappy schisms in the church, particularly one great schism, at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century: still the true Pope was always clearly discernible at the times we are speaking o, and in the end was acknowledged even by his opponents. Lastly, I grant that a few of the Popes, perhaps a tenth part of the whole number, swerving from the example of the rest, have, by their personal vices, disgraced their holy station: but even these Popes always fulfilled their public duties to the church by maintaining the apostolical doctrine, moral as well as speculative, the apostolical orders, and the upostolical mission; so that their misconduct chiefly injured their own souls, and did not essentially affect the church. But if what the Homilies affirm were true, that the whole church had been "drowned in idolatry for eight hundred years," she must have taught and commissioned all those, whom she ordained to teach this horrible apostasy, which she never could have done, and at the same time retained Christ's commission and authority to teach all nations the Gospel. This demonstrates the inconsistency of those clergymen of the establishment, who accuse the Catholic church of apostasy and idolatry, and at the same time boast of having received, through her, a spiritual jurisdiction and ministry from Jesus Christ.

Your visiter next expatiates, in triumphant strains, on the exploded fable of Pope Joan; for exploded it certainly may be termed, when such men as the Calvinist minister Blondel, and the infidel Bayle, have abandoned and refuted it. But the circumstances of the fable themselves sufficiently refute it. According to these, in the middle of the ninth century, an English woman, born at Mentz, in Germany,* studied philosophy at Athens, where there was no school of philosophy in the ninth century, more than there is now, and taught divinity at Rome. It is pretended that, being elected Pope, on the death of Leo IV in 855, she was delivered of a child, as she was walking in a solemn procession near the Colliseum, and died on the spot; and moreover, that a statute of her was there erected in memory of the disgraceful event! There have been great debates among the learned concerning the first author of this absurd tale, and concerning the interpolations in the copies of the first chronicles which mention it. At all events, it was never heard of for more than two hundred years after the period ir question and

Ita Pseudo Martinus Folor.us, &c

:

+ See Breviarium Historico-Chronologico-criticum Pontif. Rɔinen. tudio R. F. Pagi, tom, ii. p. 72.

in the mean time, we are assured, from the genuine works of contemporary writers and distinguished prelates, some of whom then resided at Rome, such as Anastasius the librarian, Luitprand, Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, Photius of C. P. Lupis Ferrar, &c. that Benedict III. was canonically elected Pope in the said year 855, ony three days after the death of Leo IV, which evidently leaves no interval for the pontificate of the fab lous Joan.

From the warfare of attack, my Reverend antagonist passes to that of defence, as he terms it. In this he heavily complains of my not having done justice to the Protestants, particularly in the article of foreign missions. On this head, he enumerates the different societies, existing in this conntry, for carrying them on. and the large sums of money which they annually raise for this purpose. The societies, I learn from him, are the following. 1st, the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, called the Bartlet Building Society, which, though strictly of the Establishment, employs missionaries in India to the number of six, all Germans, and it should seem, all Lutherans. 2dly, There is the Society for propagating Christianity in the English colonies; but I hear nothing of its doings. 3dly, There is another for the conversion of negro slaves, of which I can only say, ditto. 4thly, There is another for sending missionaries to Africa and the East, concerning which we are equally left in the dark. 5thly, There is the London Missionary Society, which sent out the ship Duff, with certain preachers and their wives, to Otaheite, Tongabatoo, and the Marquesas, and published a journal of the voyage, by which it appears that they are strict Calvinists, and Independents. 6thly, The Edinburgh Missionary Society franternizes with the last mentioned. 7thly, There is an Arminian Mission ary Society under Dr. Coke, the head of the Wesleyan Methodists. 8thly, There is a Moravian Missionary Society, which appears more active than any others, particularly at the Cape, and in Greenland and Surinam. To these, your visiter says, must be added, the Hibernian Society for diffusing Christian knowledge in Ireland; as also, and still more particularly, the Bible Society, with all its numerous ramifications. Of this last named, he speaks glorious things, foretelling that it will, in its progress, purify the world from infidelity and wickedness.

In answer to what has been stated, I have to mention several marked differences between the Protestant and the Catholic missionaries. The former preached various discordant religions; for what religions can be more opposite than the Calvinistic and the Arminian? An how indiguant would a churchman feel, it

I were to charge him with the impiety and obscenity of Zinzen. dorf and his Moravians? The very preachers of the same sect, on board of the Duff, had not agreed upon the creed they were to teach, when they were within a few days sail of Otaheite.* Whereas the Catholic missionaries, whether Italians, French, Portuguese, or Spaniards, taught and planted precisely the same religion in the opposite extremities of the globe. Secondly, the envoys of those societies had no commission or authority to preach, but what they derived from the men and women, who contributed money to pay for their voyages and accommodations. I have not sent these prophets, says the Lord, yet they run; 1 have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied, Jer. xxiii. 21. On the other hand, the apostolical men, who, in ancient and in modern times, have converted the nations of the earth, all derived their mission and authority from the centre of the apostolic tree, the See of Peter. Thirdly, I cannot but remark the striking difference between the Protestant and the Catholic missionaries, with respect to their qualifications and method of proceeding. The former were, for the most part, mechanics and laymen, of the lowest order, without any learning infused or acquired, beyond what they could pick up from the English translation of the Bible; they were frequently incumbered with wives and children, and armed with muskets and bayonets, to kill those whom they could not convert.† Whereas the Catholic missionaries have always been priests, or ascetics, trained to literature and religious exercises, men of continency and self-denial, who have had no other defence than their breviary and crucifix, no other weapon than the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, Ephes. vi. 17. Fourthly, I do not find any portion of that lively faith and heroical constancy, in braving poverty, torments, and death, for the Gospel, among the few Protestant converts, or even among their preachers, which have so frequently illustrated the different Catholic missions. Indeed, I have not heard of a single martyr of any kind, in Asia, Africa, or America, who can be considered as the fruit of the above-named societies, or of any other Protestant mission whatsoever. On the other hand,

"By the middle of January, the Committee of eight (among the 30 missionaries) had nearly finished the articles of faith. Two of the number dissented, but gave in."-Journal of the Duff

The eighteen preachers who remained at Otaheite "took up arms by way of precaution."-Ibid. It appears, from subsequent accounts, that the preachers made use of their arms, to protect their wives from the men whom they came to convert. Of the nine preachers destined for Tonga fire arms on shore, and three against it.

'90, six were for carrying ; urnal.

few are the countries in which the Christian rcligion has been planted by Catholic priests, without being watered with some of their own blood and of that of their converts. To say nothing of the martyrs of a late date in the Catholic missions of Turkey, Abyssinia, Siam, Tonquin, Cochinchina, &c, there has been an almost continual persecution of the Catholics in the empire of China, for about a hundred years past, which, besides confessors of the faith, who have endured various tortures, has produced a very great number of martyrs, native Chinese as well as Europeans; laity as well as priests and bishops.* Within these two years, the wonderful apostle of the great Peninsula of Corea, to the east of China, James Ly, with as many as one hundred of his converts, has suffered death for the faith. In the islands of Japan, the anti-christian persecution, excited by the envy and avarice of the Dutch, raged with a fury unexampled in the records of Pagan Rome. It began with the crucifixion of wenty-six martyrs, most of them missionaries. It then proceeded to other more horrible martydoms, and it concluded with putting to death as many as eleven hundred thousand Chris tians. Nor were those numerous and splendid victories of the Gospel in the provinces of South America achieved without torrents of Catholic blood. Many of the first preachers were slaugh tered by the savages to whom they announced the Gospel, and not unfrequently devoured by them, as was the case with the first bishop of Brazil. In the last place, the Protestant missions have never been attended with any great success. Those heretofore carried on by the Dutch, French, and American Calvinists, seemed to have been more levelled at the destruction of the Catholic missions, than at the conversion of the Pagans.

* Hist. de l'Eglise par Berault Bercastel, tom. 22, 23. the Saints, Feb. 5. Mem. Eccles. pour le 18 Sièc.

In later times,

Butler's Lives of

Namely, in 1801. While this work is in the press, we receive an ac count of the martyrdom of Mgr. Dufresse, bishop of Tabraca, and Vicar apostolic of Sutchuen, in China, who was beheaded there Sept. 14, 1815, and of F. J de Frior, inissionary in Chiensi, who, after various torments, was strangled, Feb. 13, 1816.

Berault Bercastel says two millions, tom. 20.

§ It is generally known, and not denied by Mosheim himself, that the exterinination of the flourishing missions in Japan is to be ascribed to the Dutch. When they became masters of the Portuguese settlements in India, they endeavoured, by persecution as well as by other means, to make the Christian natives abandon the Catholic religion to which St. Xavier and his companions had converted them The Calvinist preachers having failed in their attempt to proselyte the Brazilians, it happened that one of their party, James Sourie, took a merchant vessel at sea with forty Jesuit missionaries, under F Azevedo, on board of it, bound to Brazil, when, in batred in them and their destination, he put them all to death. The yea

the zealous Wesley went on a mission to convert the savages of Georgia, but returned without making one proselyte. His com panion Whitfield afterwards went to the same country on the same errand, but returned without any greater success. Of the missionaries who went out in the Duff, those who were left at the Friendly Islands and the Marquesas abandoned their posts in despair, as did eleven of the eighteen left at Otaheite. The remaining seven had not, in the course of six years, baptized a single Islander. In the mean time, the depravity of the natives in killing their infants and other abominations increased so fast, as to threaten their total extinction. In the Bengal government, extending over from thirty to forty millions of people, with all its influence and encouragement, not more than eighty converts have been made by the Protestant missionaries in seven years, and those were almost all Chandalas or outcasts from the Hindoo religion, who were glad to get a pittance for their support,* "for the perseverance of several of whom," their instructors say, "they thremble." How different a scene do the Catholic missions present! To say nothing of ancient Christendom, all the kingdoms and states of which were reclaimed from Paganism and converted to Christianity by Catholic preachers, and not one of them by preachers of any other description: what extensive and populous islands, provinces and states, were wholly, or in a great part reclaimed from idolatry, in the East and in the West, soon after Luther's revolt, by Catholic missionaries! But to come still nearer to our own time: F. Bouchet, alone, in the course of his twelve years labours in Madura, instructed and baptized twenty thousand Indians, while F. Britto, within fifteen months only, converted and regenerated eight thousand, when he sealed his mission with his blood. By the latest returns which I have seen from the Eastern missionaries to the directors of the French Missions Etrangeres, it appears that in the western district of Tonquin, during the five years preceding the beginning of this century, four thousand one hundred and one adults, and twenty-six thousand nine hundred and fifteen children, were received into the church by baptism, and that in the following, F. Diaz, with eleven companions, bound on the same mission, and falling into the hands of the Calvinists, met with the same fate. credible pains were taken by the ministers of New England to induce the Hurons, Iroquois, and other converted savages, to abandon the Catholic religion, when the latter answered them: "You never preached the word to us while we were Pagans; and now that we are Christians, you try to de prive us of it."

In

Extract of a Speech of C Marsh, Esq. in a committee of the H. of C July 1, 1815. See also Major Waring's reinarks on Oxford Sermons. + Transact of Prot Miss. quoted in Edinb Review, April, 180s