As to the plan of pensioning the clergy, Monsignore Brancadoro points out the dangers to which its adoption would expose them. If they accept a pension from government, the offerings of the faithful will be undoubtedly withdrawn, and the priesthood will be left quite dependent on the caprice of those in power. He recalls to Father Concanen’s memory, that in his previous letter of the 7th of August, 1801, he had announced to him the Pope’s wish that the Irish clergy should decline all pensions from the government, and mentions that the Irish Bishops, in reply, had stated that they willingly renounced all temporal advantages in order to preserve religion uninjured. The secretary of the Propaganda next reminds his correspondent that Pius VI., in a brief of 20th March, 1791, had condemned a decree of the National Assembly of France, by which the clergy of that country were made pensioners of the state; and he adds that the Holy See had resisted a similar attempt of the English government in regard to the clergy of Corsica, when that island had fallen into their hands. Examining the various vetoistical plans mentioned by Dr. Milner, Monsignore Brancadoro quotes the authority of the great and learned Pontiff, Benedict XIV., to show how decidedly opposed the Holy See has always been to every project directed to vest Catholic ecclesiastical appointments in the hands of a Protestant sovereign. This question is discussed in a brief of that Pope addressed to the Bishop of Breslau on the 15th of May, 1748, and his words are as follows: “There is not recorded in the whole history of the Church a single example in which the appointment of a bishop or abbot was conceded to a sovereign of a different religion”. He adds “that he would not, and could not, introduce a practice calculated to scandalize the Catholic world, and which, besides bringing on him a dreadful judgment in another world, would render his name odious and accursed during life, and much more so after death”. 2. The learned writer then proceeds to examine the various plans of granting to government certain powers in regard to the nomination of bishops, and explodes them all as replete with danger to religion, and well calculated to enslave the Church. The plans proposed to lessen the Pope’s unwillingness to grant to the sovereign the right of nomination were the following:—Some thought that the nomination should be limited to a certain class of persons who should have been approved of by the episcopal body after an examination and trial. Such a body might be the vicars-general, of whom two should be appointed for each diocese. The government was to be bound to choose the bishops out of this body. This plan was rejected, first, because it would really amount to vesting the nomination of bishops in a non-Catholic sovereign; and secondly, on account of difficulties created by the circumstances of the time and place.