The history of the first ages of Christianity would, perhaps, point out other preservatives against the pontifical ambition. It should be the endeavour to substitute the ancient laws of the church, in place of those of the middle age, framed to give a separate interest to the clerical body, and render it devoted to the court of Rome, in loosing it from all domestic and patriotic ties. We must avow that these delicate reformations should be matured by time, and carried into effect with circumspection: it is requisite that, induced by publish wish, and as it were enacted by public opinion, they should be previously agreed upon, and looked for with hope before being established. But, to submit to a regime purely civil all the circumstances which determine the personal state, to tolerate the various modes of worship which may desire peaceably to exist around the established one; to render to the articles of 1682 the most sacred authority; and, above all, to abolish for ever the temporal power of the popes; these four steps, as easy as they were salutary, have been but too long deferred: no obstacle, no fear, no anticipation, can advise to defer them; and without doubt they will for a long period be sufficient to prevent the principal abuses of the spiritual office. Among these abuses, however, there are two that we conceive it our duty to point out more particularly: the one consists in excommunications, the other in the refusal of canonical investiture. Although the Christian churches were only individual associations, they ought to possess the right of excluding from their bosom vicious or dissentient members, who, by their scandalous conduct or discord, disturbed the sacred harmony of those assemblies. From this so natural right, the exercise of which had for a long period been as gentle as it was secret, sprung up, in the middle ages those thundering anathemas, which shook thrones and overturned empires. It was no longer either vice or error which was excommunicated: the sacred thunder served only to avenge the temporal interests of the clergy and of the sovereign pontiff. Who can particularize the number of emperors, kings, and other princes who, from the eighth century to the eighteenth, have been struck by this, often formidable, arm? To confine ourselves to the very-christian kings of France, we may count, between Charlemagne and Louis the Just, twelve sovereigns who have suffered ecclesiastical censures: in the ninth century, Louis-le-Debonnaire and Charles the Bold; in the tenth, Robert; in the eleventh, Philip I.; in the twelfth, Louis VII. and Philip Augustus; in the sixteenth, Louis XII. Henry II. Henry III. and Henry IV. Now of all these excommunicated kings Henry the IV. alone could have been accused of heresy: the orthodoxy of the others was without reproach; there was no question but that of their political relations with Rome, and the independence claimed for their crown. But,