rhodomontades of, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, and stupidly believing it possible to reduce a Pope by fear, joined in the duet and cried for a General Council. Indeed, he placed more confidence in the virtue of this threat than in his army; for he definitely threatened the Lord Alexander P.P. VI with deposition and deprivation of the Apostolic dignity, not by force of arms, but by canonical proof of His simoniacal election—unless He would concede to France the crown of Naples. (Corio, Storie di Milano. III 525) It is very difficult to understand these shouters for a General Council. They were so clever, so logical, in other matters, that it is perfectly impossible for them to have been unaware of the extreme futility of their cry. They could not have been ignorant: then they must have been malignant. Suppose that an assemblage calling itself a General Council had been convened by the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and the Majesty of France, and had proved to its own satisfaction that Cardinal Rodrigo de Lançol y Borja had bought, by bribery, the votes of his brother-cardinals, raising himself by these means to the throne of God’s Vicegerent; what end would have been served? There was a moral but no legal prohibition then, as already has been shewn, to prevent a cardinal from buying votes, if he could find cardinals criminal enough to sell. The money-changers were, as now, in possession of the Temple; and the whip of small cords still on the Knees of God. Suppose that a self-called General Council had decreed the deposition of the Pope on the ground of simony; the decrees of a General Council are ineffective until they have been promulgated with the expressed sanction of the Roman Pontiff. Is it probable that the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, that the sanctimonious Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, that any human man, would sanction the promulgation of the decree that ordained his own deposition? If he did so declare himself to be no Pope, what would be the value of such a declaration? If he were Pope, he would not; if he were not Pope he could not, depose himself. Then what would have been the good, (if the Sokratic method be so far permitted,) of a self-called General Council which only could compile ineffectual decrees?