decreeing and ordaining the bells to be rung at noon, a custom observed to the present day in Catholic countries. What a curious commentary this doth afford on the “infallibility” which the Bishops of Rome dare arrogate to themselves!
Another of my brethren—the very one, in fact, whom you have been so anxiously expecting to reappear ever since February, 1848, but who, according to Bomme’s calculation, will only rejoice you sometime about 1860 by a sight of his splendid dimensions—terrified the Emperor Charles V., in 1556, into consummating the abdication of all his earthly crowns, and retirement to a monk’s cell in the cloister of St. Justus, in Spain, where he who, in the pride and arrogance of power, had sought, though vainly indeed, to make the millions who obeyed his sceptre conform to his own most narrow and bigoted religious creed, and in his presumptuous vanity had imagined that Heaven’s Great Lord had condescended to send a comet by way of special messenger to him, discovered, though unfortunately rather too late, that he could not even make two clocks strike alike and at the same time, and felt humbled to the dust thereat.
But enough of these instances of the presumption and folly of your kind,—which yet are, perhaps, less insulting, after all, to the dignity of our family than the notion that we occasionally take a delight in killing cats, as the splendid Comet of 1668 was accused of doing in Westphalia; or blinding flies,
