The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1808-26 Volume 5, No. 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1814 Excerpt: ...with regard to their ecclesiastical opinions, they are different from those of his majesty's protestant subjects; and when I apply this principle, I would ask, can it be safe, in a protestant country, to place upon your bench of justice, judges to decide upon the state of property, who hold the law of the country to be directly at variance with that of their own religion, . who believe that your law is adverse to the law of God? " Now, my lords, let us follow out this principle--The Roman catholic is not an elective church. It is an hierarchy. It has the same gradation of rank with the established church. It has also the same principle of ambition and desire for temporal power as the established church. But in whom is that mass of patronage to be placed to which such an institution would naturally give rise?--Why, in the pope himself;--a foreign power--a foreign potentate. Why then, the question is, whether a jurisdiction of the kind in all the appointments, in all the ecclesiastical gradations of the catholic hierarchy, --a power which has the same influence in the jurisdiction of the Roman catholic church, as the king of England has over the protestant, may not be made a formidable instrument in such hand? And may it not be a fair subject of jealousy in a protestant country? Then, my lords, apply this to other principles; apply it even to what may appear purely spiritual; namely, to excommunication and all its consequences. Are noble lords aware of the consequences of excommunication to individuals who incur the penalty of that sentence? They may see in their courts of law, one trial which has lately taken place, where the most important temporal effects have arisen out of offences, which, in a fair sense of the word, were of a mere spiritual nature, a...