"The political power of the Papacy lies hid under its spiritual pretensions, like a venomous serpent lurking under lovely foliage and flowers. A leading object of this Letter, is to explain and illustrate that truth, in its practical application to the great question now before the country, challenging its best energies of thought and will. It would be fatally fallacious to regard the late act of the Pope as exhibiting only the spasms of weakness. The more it is considered, the greater cause will be developed for anxious but resolute action. As a pretender to the exercise of direct temporal power, the Pope seems quite impotent; but he is the visible exponent of a spiritual despotism, founded (so we Protestants believe, or have no right to be such) as clearly on falsehood and impiety, as its pretensions and purpose are at once sublime and execrable; that purpose being to extinguish, and in the name of Heaven, the liberties of mankind. "The question then--'_The Queen or the Pope?_'--is a momentous one, which we have been very insolently challenged to answer. The whole matter, social, political, and religious, is gathered up into those few words; and posterity will sit in judgment on our mode of answering that question." Mr Warren, in taking a lawyer's general view of the subject, strikingly adverts to the _impudence_ of the Papist assertions. It is true that these assertions have now shrunk into a very small compass; that the bravado of "my Lord Cardinal" has dwindled down into a sort of supplication to be suffered to remain here on any terms; and that the "prince" has stooped into the pilgrim, gliding through the filth, vice, and poverty of the Irish colony in Westminster, or, as he terms it, the _slums_--an expression of extreme vulgarity, which, Mr Warren justly observes, does not belong to the English language, and which, we may as justly observe, belongs only to the meanest of the rabble. But the organs of Popery abroad have not submitted to circumstances so demurely, and they let out the Popish objects with all the easy insolence of the foreigner. Thus Count le Maistre, in a work translated and published in London, says, "What shall we say of Protestantism, and of those who defend it, _when it will no longer exist_? Let them rather aid us in making it disappear. In order to re-establish a religion and a morality in Europe, in order to give to truth the strength which it requires for the _conquest it meditates_, it is an indispensable preliminary to _efface_ from the European dictionary that fatal word, _Protestantism_." _L'Univers_, the journal of Popery in France, has no hesitation in pronouncing the Protestant faith in England to be totally undone, and that Popery is only taking its time to make the operation complete.