ture, the offspring of their craft, that until very lately has vegetated unnoted by history."* In France, too, under Louis XIV. and XV., for a period of seventy years the Protestants were exposed to the severest punishments, and were persecuted by the Roman Catholic clergy with the utmost inveteracy. In proof of this, we shall quote Rippert de Monclar, Attorney-General of the Parlia ment of Aix, a Roman Catholic layman, but an advocate of toleration. He is writing in opposition to Monsieur de Montclus, Bishop of Alais, who was urging on the persecu tion of the Protestants. "If," says the Attorney-General, "an exact list were laid before Monsieur de Montclus, of all the Protestant ministers who have been put to death, of all the persons of every age and rank who have been sent to the galleys, of all the taxes, fines, and confiscations which have been exacted, and all the children who have been taken away from their parents; of all the marriages which have been annulled, of all the property which has in consequence been adjudged to collaterals, of all the persons who have been imprisoned and kept in a long and severe captivity, of all the decrees which have been carried out against an infinite number of others, of all the excesses and all the frightful murders committed on them by the king's troops, and against his majesty's intentions, this list, alas! would extend to volumes. All France resounds with the cries of these unfortunates. They attract the compassion of all those who glory in being, I will not say Christians, but men; and a bishop is insensible to all this! A bishop seeks to redouble this suffering! Would it not become him better, after having planted and watered in their favour, to groan for them, as saith the Scriptures, between the porch and the altar, and so endeavour himself to calm the wrath of the prince?" So much for Count Montalembert's assertion that, excepting in very rare instances, the Romish Church has never advocated nor practised force or constraint to support her creed or to punish heresy. We are sorry to find Count Montalembert, in a note to his second oration, defending the union of the temporal and spiritual powers in the person of the Roman Pontiff-which everywhere else he denounces as the "ideal of all tyrannies," -and founding his defence upon the stale and often-repeated rhetorical extravagance uttered by M. Odillon Barrot in the Legislative Assembly, "Il faut que les deux pouvoirs soient confondus dans l'Etat Romain, pour qu'ils soient séparés dans le reste du monde." We confess ourselves utterly at a loss * Menzel's “History of Germany." The Double Sovereignty of the Popes. 347 to perceive either the propriety or the necessity of what is maintained in this extraordinary proposition, which the partisans of the temporal power of the pope would willingly erect into a political axiom. If it be good for the rest of the world that the two powers should always be separate, why should it not also be good for the Roman States; and by what right or authority is it proposed to sacrifice the Romans for the benefit of the rest of mankind? We find it impossible to understand how the political slavery of the Romans, is necessary for the religious liberty of the remainder of the catholic world. The union of the temporal and spiritual powers is not an essential principle or dogma of religion. The church may renounce it without heresy; the state may repudiate it without sacrilege. The religious liberty of catholics is not bound up in it. The catholics beyond the Roman States have no connection with the pope as a temporal sovereign; they do not consider themselves as his subjects; they do not participate in the benefits of his paternal government. To them he is purely a spiritual Sovereign. Whether Rome, or some other town, be the seat of his authority, whether that authority be exercised by a simple or a crowned priest, may be more or less agreeable to them; but we cannot perceive how either the one or the other alternative can in any respect compromise their religious liberty, or can give them any pretext to insist that the Romans shall be condemned to perpetual slavery to that priestly rule, of whose paternal kindness they are so much enamoured, that 30,000 foreign bayonets are necessary to secure their submission. If Count Montalembert were to succeed in making the union of the spiritual and temporal powers in the person of the pope a dogma of the catholic faith, it would follow that no improvement could possibly take place in the government of the Romish see, which everyone knows to be the worst and most retrograde in Europethe most despotic, the most venal, the least public-spirited, the most productive of violent crimes. For the infallibility of the pontiff would communicate itself to the sovereign; and a government which believed itself to be the very truth, and the truth only, could not admit the possibility of error, or the necessity of reform. It would consider rebellion as blasphemy, and contradiction as sacrilege. As to liberty of conscience, infallibility cannot be tolerant; and oracles do not in general admit the right of free discussion. Towards the close of his second oration, Count Montalembert pronounces a glowing eulogium upon the monastic orders of the Romish Church, whose revival in our own times, after the passing away of the revolutionary hurricane, he affirms to be one of the marvels of modern history. He glories in there being at present in the little kingdom of Belgium no fewer than 12,000 professed monks and nunsa number equal to that which existed in the days of Maria Theresa, the most flourishing period of privilege and official patronage. We regret to find Count Montalembert congratulating himself and his hearers on the multiplication of these drones in the hive of humanity, bound down to an unnatural and dangerous celibacy, living in idleness, and wasting in religious formalities, and foolish and useless austerities, those energies which should have been devoted to honest labour and rational devotion. It is somewhat curious, however, that in this very Belgium, whose devotion to Romanism Count Montalembert so highly vaunts, there should just have appeared a work by a distinguished Romish ecclesiastic exposing the sufferings and grievances of the priest, and denouncing the false and unnatural system which makes him a slave and a tool in the hands of the church, and compels him to resist the impulses of his heart, and to stifle the voice of his conscience. In conclusion, we must avow our utter disbelief that the Church of Rome will ever be persuaded to adopt the reforms that Count Montalembert so eloquently advocates, and that she will ever voluntarily lend the sanction of her authority to religious toleration, liberty of the press, and those other liberties which she has hitherto uniformly opposed and denounced. Reforms have never come, nor are they now likely to come, from the bosom of the Romish Church. Especially will she struggle to the last against religious toleration. She may be compelled to submit to it, but she will never extend her hand to bid it welcome. Y. Le Maudit (The Accursed.) Roman par L'Abbé. Verboeckhoven, et Cie., Bruxelles. A. Lacroix, "Did Gerson, or Pierre d'Ailly, succeed in rendering corruption less rampant? Did the Councils of Constance or of Basle produce the slightest results? Were the depravity of the clergy and the brutality of the masses less apparent in 1515, than when, just one century previously, the flames that consumed Huss shone over the waters of the Boden See? The reform of the Romish Church is the very shallowest of Utopias; for abuses are never remedied by those who, through their continuance, attain to opulence and position." —(Switzerland the Pioneer of the Reformation, by the Countess Dora d'Istria.) Spanish Reminiscences. ART. VII.-Spanish Reminiscences.* 349 Góngora; an Historical and Critical Essay on the Times of Philip III. aná IV. of Spain. With Translations by EDWARD CHURTON. London: J. Murray, Albemarle Street. 1862. Elia, ó la Espana treinta anos ha. Por FERNAN CABALLERO. Leipzig. 1864. It is somewhat remarkable that a country so romantic as Spain, one also so intimately connected with our own during a most eventful period of European history, a country whose annals of discovery, conquest, and power are so incontestably great and interesting, and whose inhabitants possess superior endowments, both physical and intellectual, should excite comparatively so little attention, and should be also so generally misapprehended by the great mass of the English nation. We say misapprehended, because, although there occasionally appear in scattered publications, or books of too hasty travel, notices both apposite and just of Spain and Spaniards, yet it would almost seem as if exceedingly little were popularly known of the present social state of Spain, and exceedingly little remembered of her glorious past. Doubtless, unless in the case of individuals gifted at once with imagination to depict and judgment to select, the ordinary traveller or resident in a foreign country will naturally reproduce his impressions with the partial colouring bestowed by his own character, education, and prejudices, reflecting also those of the persons who chiefly compose his circle of observation. With the most sincere desire to be impartial, as well as carefully observant, he will fall into many errors, and some blunders, not a little ridiculous. We all know this to be the case when foreigners write about ourselves, and give their compatriots descriptive experiences of travel or sojourn in England. We may therefore readily imagine how travellers, essayists, or romancers have contributed not a little to give us a conventional type of social Spain, not always in accordance with more exact knowledge. With the present improved means of access, and complete safety in *The following article, from the pen of a lady who has been long familiar with the scenes which she describes, we willingly admit, in the hope that, though it may have too much of the couleur de rose, it may serve to awaken a warmer interest in the spiritual welfare of benighted Spain. It must have been often remarked that none are so affectionately desirous for the evangelisation of any land, papal or pagan, as those Christian men and women who have been on the spot, and mingled with the people; and next to personal experience must be the influence of such "Reminiscences" as those supplied in this paper, which bring us face to face with Spain and the Spaniards. For this reason, we have often regretted that our foreign missionaries, instead of attempting to interest us in particular cases of conversion, do not aim more at interesting us in the people whom they have been sent to convert.-ED. B. & F. E. R. VOL. XIII.-NO. XLVIII. Ꮓ travelling by the "beaten paths," perhaps also the "unfrequented ways," though of this we can speak with less certainty, doubtless there will shortly pour into the Iberian peninsula, as in other well-known countries, not isolated travellers or occasional families, but hordes of people, who will return to enlighten their brethren. And then, the popular notion of the Spaniard, as proud, morose, poor, and fanatically devout, with the never-failing "navaja" treacherously ready for the unguarded bosom of his foe, the slouched "sombrero," the voluminous folds of the "capa," concealing the destitution or deshabille of the wearer, with a like sombre exterior, will be somewhat modified when we reluctantly comprehend that the modern Spaniard, in the great towns at least, is adopting exaggerated Parisian fashions with a deplorable rapidity, and that the veritable lover of the antique and the picturesque is wofully sighing over the transformation. Still the Spaniard has a national character of his own, in many respects great and noble. He remembers the glories of his past history, and lifts his crest proudly as he does so; he is awakening from his long lethargic dream, he is shaking off the vices of misgovernment, he is devout still, but his devotion is tempered with a reasonable ambition to regain his lost place in the van of civilisation and cultivated thought. Deplorable as is the well known and too true story of Spain's decadence, all who know and love her are gratefully aware how wonderful has been her progress for some years past. Suffice it to advert to this, as it is not our present purpose to dilate on the great and important questions connected with her religion or politics. To ignore these entirely, even in the slightest sketch of social manners relating to any people, would be alike unfair and impossible. From facts we draw our best conclusions, and Protestants at least must deplore that the bigotry of her rulers should have struck to the heart of a noble nation those fatal blows which have been draining her life blood during the long years of European progress, from which, by suicidal acts, Spain alone seemed to be excluded. Speaking one of the noblest and most harmonious of the European languages, a tongue which, in the words of their great monarch, Charles V., would be "no unworthy channel were God to condescend once more to converse with men," or rather the fittest vehicle for man to converse with heaven, with an imperishable possession in the past, of a glorious, if brief, Augustan age, that of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Calderon, boasting too of lesser luminaries in modern times, not unworthy to lead a nation's thought, it is not matter of surprise that a now awakening interest should be in some quarters felt for Spain. Her politics, her religion, and her powerful intrigues, once overshadowing Europe, occupy a |