fiend; and of this sort of human fiends Italian history presents as appalling a register as can be found anywhere in the annals of our race; and at the top of this register stand some of the Popes, whose names are as prominent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome as those of Nero, Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the story of the imperial decadence. When we cast a rapid glance--for it deserves nothing more--on the revolting record of the Roman Popes in the age immediately preceding the Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of history repeating again the maxim above quoted--_corruptio optimi pessima_: when priests are bad, they are very bad; when the salt of the gospel, which was meant to preserve the moral life of society from putrescence, has lost its savour, if not cast out, it is worse than useless--it becomes a poison. Before proceeding to the modern history of the Church, we ought to emphasise in a special paragraph the fact that one unfortunate result of the incorporation of the Church with the State was that the Church was now in a position to request the State to lend its potent aid in establishing the true doctrine of the gospel and suppressing all heresies. That the State had a right to do so no man doubted; even in democratic Greece free-thinking philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Diogenes, and Socrates, were banished or suffered death on charges of impiety; and though, no doubt, political elements, as in the case of the Arminians in Holland, worked along with the strictly religious feeling to set the brand of atheism on those men, there cannot be any doubt that where the State and the Church were so essentially one, persecutions for unauthorised religious observances were perfectly legitimate, as indeed the memorable case of the forcible suppression of the Dionysiac mysteries, more than two hundred years before the earliest of the Christian martyrdoms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But there was a double horror in the religious persecution, after the establishment of Christianity, now inaugurated for the first time--the horror of a conduct so diametrically opposed to the spirit and the express injunction of the Founder of the Gospel, in whose defence it was practised, and the horror also that what was now violently suppressed was not, as in the case of the Dionysiac mysteries, rather immoral practices than erroneous beliefs, but simply and nakedly metaphysical objections against metaphysical propositions in theology, which, whether true or false, could not be made the subject of State action, or, in my opinion at least, of ecclesiastical censure, without a flagrant violation of that law of charity which a large philosophy and a catholic Christianity equally enjoin. The banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the civil consequence of the formal signature of the Trinitarian creed by the decision of the Council of Nice in the year 325, though it made no small noise in the world in those days, was a very innocent overture to