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reader." To this piece of flippancy it would be sufficient to answer, that particulars in the documents concerned may vary with times, places, and persons, and not be discordant; and if they were, there may be good reasons for preferring one to another. And as for valid authentication, I believe I have displayed more than the priest resident in Tixall quite relishes, and more than is usually found in such dark cases as those in which papal iniquity abounds. Let me add, that I apprehend the fearless writer will on reflexion feel that he has committed somewhat of an oversight in bringing, as he has done, to the acquaintance of his own people, so large a portion of the contents of my volume — thinking rather fondly, that he is doing no more than helping forward his own object, forgetting, at the same time, their very suspicious character, and exciting the almost irrepressible inquiry — what can all this mean? — can such things have originated in nothing? — in what point do the converging lines unite?
But I must tell the reader what Mr. G. has not done. I do pot say that he has altogether omitted, but he has done what perhaps is quite the same thing for effect, he has deprived of their prominence, he has thrown into the back ground, the main supports of the charge against his church — the copy of the Penitentiary Taxes which I have reprinted — the most authentic recognition which they have received by their being reprinted repeatedly in the body of law, the Oceanus Juxis, published in Venice, the volume in which it is found being dedicated to the reigning pope — and the celebrated passage in Claude d'Espense, fixing upon the document the awful and indelible character, which not all the ingenious processes of the most expert of Rome's artizans can erase or expunge. No, no: whatever postern doors may have been provided as an escape from detection, Rome is openly convicted of having carried on a profligate trade in the souls of men, their crimes and their pardons, for many long centuries. The respectable Richer, Historian of the General Councils, knew what he said, when he charged her with "making the sins of men her golden harvest;" and Pius II. before he was Pope, and saw better, than when at the last year of his life he was made to recant, felt himself secure against contradiction when he wrote, that at Rome "not even the pardon of sin could be obtained without being paid for in solid cash.
Mr. G., however, is disposed to nibble and quibble a little, and complains, pp. 88, &c. of the words "of sinning" being added to the word licentia in d'Espense. They were added, because they ap. peared necessary; and so, from the current of thought and argument in the author, and the following context, I still think — un-
