Beaten down in field and council three centuries and a half since--baffled in every attempt to domineer over England from the Reformation--in every instance sinking from depth to depth--wholly excluded from legislative power by the greatest of British kings, William III., for a hundred years of the most memorable triumphs of the constitution--Popery has now, before our eyes, to the astonishment of our understandings, and to the resistless evidence of its own passion for power, returned to all its old demands, and to more than its old demands; and, as if to make the evidence more glaring, returned at the moment when England is at the height of power, and Rome in the depth of debasement; when England is in her meridian of intelligence, and Rome in her midnight; when England is the great influential power of peace and war to all nations, and when Rome is a garrison of foreign hirelings, and her monarch the menial of their master's will. If those demands are made, with Popery living in an actual paralysis of all the functions of sovereignty, what would be their execution with Popery lording it over the land? If Popery can issue these proclamations from the floor of its dungeon, what would be the sway of its sword when it strode over the neck of the empire? If, stript and manacled, it can thus rage against Protestantism, what would be its fury when, with new strength and unrestrained daring, its march headed by treachery in the higher orders, and followed by fanaticism in the lower, it should take possession of the Constitution? While England was in a state of drowsy tranquillity, a Papal Bull appeared, under the signature of Cardinal Lambruschini, the Papal Secretary. A more daring document never was fabricated in the haughtiest days of Papal tyranny. It divided England into twelve Dioceses of the _Popedom_; it appointed twelve bishops, and appropriated to them all the rights and privileges of Episcopacy in England; and it called on all the Papists to contribute to the new pomp of the Popish worship, and the subsistence of the Diocesans. This document is long and desultory; but as it is of importance to lay the case authentically before the reader, it shall be given in its own words, abbreviating only the formalities of the verbiage. "Pius P. P. IX.--The power of ruling the _Universal Church_, committed by our Lord Jesus Christ to the Roman Pontiff in the person of St Peter, _Prince of the Apostles_, hath preserved through every age in the Apostolic See this remarkable solicitude, by which it consulteth for the advantage of the Catholic religion in all parts of the world, and studiously provideth for its _extension_. And this correspondeth with the design of its Divine founder, who, when he ordained a _head_ to the Church, looked forward to the consummation of the world. Among other nations, the famous realm of England hath experienced the effects of this solicitude on the part of the Sovereign Pontiff."