deposed by the Council of Constance after conviction of every offence of which a depraved imagination could conceive. The infallibility of his mission was thus impugned both by his irregular appointment and by the intervention of his spiritual subordinates who effected his deposition. It was an axiom of the canon law, inevitably resulting from the original spurious grant of pontifical authority, that no guilt or heresy of the Pope could divest him of his spiritual powers or of the sanctity which enveloped his person as the Vicar of God. A dire necessity alone could impel a council to violate this fundamental principle upon which depended the prestige of the Papacy. The impiety of the Holy Fathers was not less prominent than their defiance of the rules of morality. Boniface VIII. openly blasphemed the name of Christ. John XXII. ridiculed the sacraments. At the banquets of John XII., Venus and Bacchus were in turn toasted by noisy revellers of both sexes, the favorite associates of that Pontiff. The admissions of Pius II., in his correspondence preserved in the Vatican, indicate without concealment the practice of the grossest libertinage. From the orgies of Benedict XII. dates the famous proverb, “Bibere papaliter,” “To drink like a Pope.” Sixtus IV., who inaugurated the custom of licensing the brothels of Rome, derived annually from this horrible traffic the enormous sum of thirty thousand ducats. Innocent X. sold to the starving peasantry, at an advance of a hundred per cent., the grain he had purchased at the price he himself had fixed. Sixtus IV. gravely decreed that the illegitimate children of the Popes should, by reason of their birth alone, be placed on an equality with the descendants of the princely houses of Italy. The scandals of the court of Avignon under Clement VI. and his successors surpassed even those which had for ages made the Eternal City a reproach to civilization and Christianity. Of the latter, Benedict XII. has been conspicuously held up to the execration of posterity as the violator of the sister of Petrarch, whose connivance he attempted to purchase with a cardinal’s hat and a purse of a thousand florins of gold. The bull of Alexander VI., which countenanced the slaughter of fifteen million inoffensive natives of the New World, is a fitting climax to this revolting chronicle of crime and infamy. Well might the indignant Cardinal Baronius exclaim, that “the Popes were monsters who installed themselves on the throne of Christendom by simony and murder.” Few indeed there were of the Holy Fathers who tolerated even the suspicion of profane learning in their jurisdiction. Most of them were the implacable enemies of every kind of knowledge. Gregory I. burned all the copies of Livy that the most rigorous search could disclose. Gregory VIII., scandalized by the “superstitious tales” contained in the work of the great Roman historian, completed, as far as human energy and malignity could effect, the destructive task of