set their seal to the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvinism. Nay, so far from there being anything anti-Christian or anti-social in the Popedom as a form of Church government, we may safely say that in ages of general turmoil, confusion, and violence, the admitted supremacy of the visible head of a church founded on principles of peace and conciliation could not act otherwise than beneficially. But when the person in whom this moral supremacy was vested became the acknowledged head of a secular princedom, the case was altered. It was an unhappy day for the Christian Church, the most unhappy day perhaps in its whole eventful history, when Pepin, the ambitious minister of the last of the Merovingian kings, in the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope Zachary a spiritual sanction for his usurption of his master's throne. From that moment the Church was doomed to a blazing and brilliant, but a sure career of downfall. The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had to be rewarded for his pious subserviency: he received the exarchate of Ravenna, and became a temporal prince. From that time forward the head of the Christian Church, who ought to have stood before the world as a model of all purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and ethical nobility, was condemned to serve two masters, God and Mammon, unworldly morality and worldly power, which was impossible. From this time forward there was not a single court intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any knot of conspirators, into whose counsels the supreme bishop of the gospel of peace might not be dragged, or, what is worse, into whose lawless and ungodly machinations he might not be officially thrusting himself, in order to preserve some accessory interest or gain some paltry advantage altogether unconnected with his spiritual function. If there is any one element, always of course excepting the element of gross sensuality and absolute villainy, which more than another is adverse to the spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, political contention, and party feuds. In this region love, which is the life of the regenerate soul, cannot breathe; truth is put under ban; lies flourish; conscience is smothered; and low expediency everywhere takes the place of lofty principle. So it fared not seldom with the Popes; and much worse in the last degree; for wickedness, like everything that lives, must live by growing, and the seed of secular ambition which was sown in lies, will grow to robbery, blossom in lust, and ripen into murder. This anywhere, but specially in Italy, where from the time of the patrician Scipio, who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the hot contenders for absolute power, in the eager pursuit of their object, have never shrank from the free use of the assassin's dagger and the poisoner's bowl. In fact, if the love of mere animal pleasure makes a man a beast, it is the love of power that translates him into a