The policy of the enemies of the Roman See is, to accumulate all possible instances of resistance to her authority, disputes to regard to its exercise, ambiguous expressions concerning its nature and origin, intricate questions of law, special pleadings of every kind, gathered from the first eight centuries of Christianity. In this way they file a bill of exceptions against the supremacy of the Holy See. These disconnected, accidental shreds are patched together into a theory, that the supremacy of the Holy See has been established by a gradual usurpation. Starting on this _à priori_ assumption, the advocates of the claims of Rome are required to prove categorically from the monuments of the first, second, third, and other early centuries the full and complete doctrine of the supremacy, with all its consequences, as now held and taught by theologians. Whatever is clearer, stronger, more minutely explicated at a later period than at an earlier, is made out to be a proof of this preconceived usurpation. In this way, these shallow and sophistical writers endeavor to bewilder, and confute the minds of their readers amid a maze of documents, so that they may give up the hope of a clear and plain solution, and stay where they are, because they are there. A book of this kind has just been translated and republished in this country, from the French of M. Guettée, a priest who had left the Catholic Church for the Russian schism, under the auspices of the American Mark of Ephesus, Bishop Coxe. From a cursory examination of the French original, we judge it to be as specious and plausible a resumé of the materials furnished by Jansenists and Orientals--whose skirts the Anglicans are making violent efforts to seize hold of just now--as any that has appeared. Wherefore we trust that it may be soon and effectually refuted. It is plain to every fair mind and honest heart, that this method of argument is, in the first place, false and unsound, and, in the second place, unsuited for the mass of readers. Greeks and Anglicans use it against the papacy, intending to hold on to the trunk of their headless Catholicism. It can be applied, however, just as well to ecumenical councils, and all of the rest of the hierarchical system. So, also, to the Liturgy, to the canon of Scripture, then to dogma, and finally to the doctrines of natural religion. The real order of both natural and supernatural truth is one in which positive, indestructible, eternal principles are implanted as germs, which explicate successively their living power. With all their sophistry, the enemies of Rome can never banish from Scripture and tradition the evidence of the perpetual existence and living force of the primacy of St. Peter. {141}