charges have been made against the Catholics of England." Bishop Clifford, in a pastoral letter of which I gladly acknowledge the equitable, restrained, and Christian spirit, says I have proclaimed that since the Vatican Decrees were published "it is no longer possible for English Catholics to pay to their temporal sovereign a full and undivided allegiance" (p. 5).
I am obliged to assert that not one of the writers against me has apprehended or stated with accuracy my principal charge. Except a prospective reference to "converts," the subject (to speak technically) of all my propositions is the word "Rome"; and with reference to these "converts," I speak of what they suffer, not of what they do. It is an entire, and even a gross, error to treat all affirmations about Home as equivalent to affirmations about British subjects of the Roman communion. They may adopt the acts of Rome: the question was and is, whether they do. I have done nothing to leave this question open to doubt; for I have paraphrased my monosyllable "Rome" by the words "the Papal Chair, and its advisers and abettors" {p. 9). Unable as I am to attenuate the charges, on the contrary bound rather to plead guilty to the fault of having understated them, I am on that account the more -anxious that their aim shall be clearly understood. First, then, I must again speak plainly, and I fear hardly, of that system, political rather than religious, which in •Germany is well termed Vaticanism. It would be affectation to exclude from my language and meaning its contrivers and conscious promoters. But here in my mind, as well as in my page, anything approaching to censure stops. The Vatican Decrees do, in the strictest sense, establish for the Pope a supreme command over loyalty and civil duty. To the vast majority of Roman Catholics
