3
one side ofher mouth to one audience, what she sanctions and promotes with the other side to another audience. Tacitus somewhere says, factum esse scelus loquuntur faciuntque. This church has not been set upon her hills so short a time as to be unseen and unknown. This flexible and accommodating entity has prudence if she has not shame; and it is not for her most valued interests that she should herself appear in all her transactions, and bear the occasional infamy of instruments, which her inclination prompts, and her conscience does not forbid, her to employ.
It is rather amusing to find Mr. G. p. 37, resorting to the condition expressed pro forma in the billets of Indulgences, and in other documents, "truly contrite and confessed," or to the same effect, as proof that the condition was literally enforced or required; when by the application of his technical explanations, and his annexation of the terms "not properly," at pleasure, he has completely emasculated his own argument. I am quite satisfied, that his "ingenious device" is far more applicable to these conditions than to the spiritual graces granted by the author or authors of the Indulgences. These Indulgences, by those who issued them, were well enough known to be base coin; they were nevertheless put into circulation as true and legal. The church, from whose mint they came, did mean to deceive; but she did not mean to be detected in the attempt, and exposed. Such abuses do not now exist — why? — because they cannot. The trade of the Great Impostor is up; "for no man buyeth her merchandise any more." — Rev. xviii. 2.
At p. 46, in order to gain some advantage to his cause, the present champion makes a scape-goat of poor Tetzel. This is, indeed, only the way in which his brethren treat their own most sacred Breviary, and its stupendous miracles — one grand mark of the true church. But poor Tetzel! what a return, as he himself feelingly complained, for all his honest and laborious efforts for the catholic church, and even for her tenderest part, her purse! His "Puffs" in the virtuous indignation of the rather ungrateful censor so called, were good orthodox pleadings at the time, and would never have been esteemed otherwise by the rulers of Rome had not their effectual exposure thrown back disgrace upon the zealous official, which threatened to go on and terminate in the disgrace of the church and its head which employed him, unless prompt measures were used to avert it. Tetzel is no favourite with protestants of course; but to be abandoned by those, who pretend to be true sons of that church, which he devoted his great, approved, and for a time, rewarded la-