taken place, had the Church of Christ, free from corruption, as those who have left us believe, and throned in the possession of sixteen hundred years, with its numberless religious houses, its unmarried clergy, and great episcopate, been discharging its functions, I do not say aright, but with any moderate efficiency? Surely the acts of the States General were as bad as those of Henry the Eighth; yet its members were Catholics, in full communion with the Roman See. Surely the ecclesiastical legislation of Napoleon was as uncatholic as that of a House of Commons; yet it was sanctioned by Concordat with the Pope. But if manifold corruptions did not unchurch the Gallican communion in the last century,--if the mass of a great nation, which the Church once completely possessed, but has now surrendered to active unbelief, does not invalidate her claim to be a pure communion at present, why are such things alleged as so fatal a mark against us? God forbid that one should mention such things without the deepest sorrow; but when our troubles, and difficulties, and relations with the state, and the alienated hearts of our people, and the absence of external discipline and inward guidance, and the misery of our divisions, are alleged to prove that we are out of the pale of the Church, these things ought to be weighed on the other side. There ought not to be different measures on different sides of the Channel. I forbear to speak of the state of Spain, Portugal, and much of Italy; but I imagine that the worst deeds of the Reformation were at least paralleled by what the Church has had to endure there from the hands of her own children. I believe that our own most sad corruptions have, too, their counterpart among Churches in communion with the Apostolic See.