of the romish persuasion are not content to share the name of CATHOLIC with the members of other Churches which are quite as independent as the Church of Rome can be: they, on all occasions, affect to assume it, as being, what in truth it is not, their own proper distinguishing appellation; they claim it, in short, as being their own, not in joint tenancy, but absolutely and specially and exclusively.

3. Now this most absurd and arrogant assumption, which puts them in a posture of schismatical hostility against every other branch of Christ's Universal Church, can never be allowed by any Christian, who for a single moment gives himself the trouble to consider its obvious and inevitable tendency.

(1.) If he concede to the Latin the title of CATHOLIC as his own proper exclusive and distinguishing appellation: he of course virtually excommunicates himself and commits a sort of ecclesiastical suicide, by acknowledging, that he has no right to the name of CATHOLIC, and consequently that he is not a member of the Catholic or Universal Church of Christ our common Lord and Saviour.

(2.) Such being evidently the case, it follows:

that, while the spiritual subject of the Pope is a Catholic, precisely as, and not an atom more than, a Greek or a Syrian or an Anglican or a Scot is a Catholic; the distinctive appellation of that papal subject, whereby we mark him out among the general collective body of Catholics, must plainly be some other appellation which he can vindicate to himself exclusively.

4. On this principle, the papal subject in question may be fitly called (for I am no way curious about the precise name of distinction, provided only, for convenience sake, we have a name of distinction), either a Romanist as a member of the Roman Church taken in its largest sense, or a Papist as one who acknowledges the duty of spiritual submission to the Pope, or a Latin as one who is in communion with the Latin Church of the Western Patriarchate of the Roman Empire.

5. Our Legislature has, I believe, conceded to religionists of this description the name of RomanCatholics

In this compound title there is nothing to censure, save its manifest and prolix superfluity. No doubt, a Roman is a Catholic: whence, by a palpable truism, every Roman is a Roman-Catholic; for, while he is a Roman as a member of the

Roman or Latin Church in particular, he is a Catholic as a member of Christ's Catholic Church in general'. But, why, on all occasions, we

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I have, in the course of my reading, seen instances of a formal denegation of the name of CATHOLIC to a member of the Church of England, on the grave plea gravely propounded by a Latin Priest, that the word Catholic means Universal, and that the particular national Church of England is not universal but limited.

That any thing so utterly childish should, even ad captum vulgi, have ever been brought forward, will, by the sober reader, be scarcely credited: yet, unless my memory absolutely fails me, I have really encountered a solemn denegation constructed on that precise avowed principle.

If the member of no particular national Church can claim the name of CATHOLIC, unless his particular national Church be itself the entire Universal Church: that name must forthwith be consigned to the owls and to the bats, on the score of its being altogether useless and unmeaning. According to such a gloss, the Romanist is no more a Catholic than the Anglican : for, by mere matter of fact presented openly to our very eyesight, the particular Church of the one is evinced to be no more the Universal Church in every part of the world, than the particular Church of the other.

The simple truth is, that the appellations of Romanist and Anglican are specific, while the appellation of Catholic is generic. Consequently, as being members of the Catholic Church of Christ, the Anglican and the Romanist are alike Catholics but, as being severally members of the two distinct national Churches of England and Rome, they are distinctively an Anglican and a Romanist.

I am ashamed to notice such egregious trifling: my sole, though perhaps insufficient, apology must be its actual and

active existence.

should be inconvenienced with the voluminous title of Roman-Catholic, rather than with the equally voluminous title of Greek-Catholic or Syrian-Catholic or Anglo-Catholic or Scoto-Catholic, I do not possess skill sufficient to discover.

6. Mr. Husenbeth, in his charitable love of exclusiveness out-heroding even Herod himself, actually goes the preposterous length of declaring, that the application of the merely distinctive names of Romanist or Papist or Latin must be considered as a studied insult: in other words, he pronounces (and I understand, that many of his brethren absolutely agree with him in the strangely unaccountable phantasy), that, unless we will suicidically consent to acknowledge that we are NOT members of the Catholic Church of Christ, we deliberately insult those who happen to be in communion with the particular Church of Rome!

The truth of the matter is the very reverse.

Whenever Mr. Husenbeth or any other Romanist arrogantly assumes to himself, as a distinctive and not as a common appellation, the name of CATHOLIC: he is guilty of a gross and wanton and offensive insult to every member of every Church, that is unable to discover either from Scripture or

from History the necessity of subjection to one special Italian Bishop; a Bishop, who in reality is nothing more than the head of one of those mutually independent Patriarchates, into which, by mere secular authority, the converted Roman Empire was in point of geography ecclesiastically partitioned.

7. I may add, that this is in no wise a vain litigious contention for a mere unimportant title.

(1.) The thoughtless folly of misdeemed polite concession, which too often has marked even members of the Reformed Churches within these Realms, has, by the Roman Priesthood, been eagerly laid hold of, for the avowed purpose of perplexing the ignorant vulgar, whether high or low, with an unblushing assumption of apparently acknowledged CATHOLIC EXCLUSIVENESS.

Every time; says Dr. Milner, speaking of the members of the Anglican Church: Every time they address the God of truth, either in solemn worship or in private devotion, they are forced each of them to repeat: I believe in THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. And yet, if I ask any of them the question; Are you A CATHOLIC: he is sure to answer me; No, I Was there ever a more glaring

am A PROTESTANT.