ANSWER TO A QUERY, And the Lord spake unto Moses, face to face.-Exod. xxxiii. 11. THE apparent difficulty will vanish, if we take the first of these texts figuratively, and the latter literally. By the first is expressed the familiar manner in which the Lord made known his mind to Moses,' face to face;' that is (as it is explained in the words immediately following) as a man speaketh to his friend,' in a familiar manner; and with greater clearness than other prophets were indulged with: in a superior manner also, not by dreams and visions, but, probably, with an audible voice. The other text is to be interpreted more literally. Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live.' . God is a Spirit, - an Infinite Spirit; and, therefore, invisible to human eyes. In this sense, 'no man hath seen God at any time;' and were God to display his glory in such a way as might be visible to man, it would overpower his faculties, and destroy, his life. Therefore, when God so far complied with the wish of Moses (ver. 18) as to make all his goodness pass before him' (ver. 19), he provided against the danger of such a discovery (ver. 22)' I will cover thee with my hand while I pats by. The manifestation of the glory of the GOD-MAN to the beloved disciple John (Rev. i. 17) was such, that‘he fell at his feet as one dead.' There appears to me, therefore, no contradiction between the two passages. The 11th verse refers to the familiarity of the divine communications to Moses; the 20th verse to the impossibility of beholding the Divine Essence by human eyes. B. * A Correspondent prudently asks, Whether the introduction of such curious epquiries as this is beneficial or injurious to the cause of real religion? Is it adviseable, because to an individual something may appear obscure, that the minds of many others should be perplexed with difficu!ties, which would never have occurred to them? Would it not be better. to ask the opinion of a serious minister, or an intelligent brother?' We beg leave to add, that, for the reason suggested, we do not insert one-tenth of the Queries we receive. There are, however, other Questions of no small importance; Answers to which may be very useful. To these due attention will be paid. The Excommunication of the French Emperor and his Adherents, by the Pope. The following curious Paper is translated from the Latin Original, which was sent over by M.. Hill, the British Minister in Sardinia. A Translation in French has been circulated by the British Government, for the information of the Catholic World.-We copy the present Translation, which we believe to be correct, from the Literary Panorama for March. ་ Apostolic Letters, in Form of Brief, Whereby are declared excommunicated, and de novo are excommunicated, the Authors, the active Agents, and the Partisaus of the Usurpation on the State of Rome, and on the other States appertaining to the Holy See. PIUS PP. VII. Ad Perpetuam rei Memoriam: WHEN, on the memorable 2d of February, 1808, the French troops, after having invaded the other and the richest provinces of the Pontifical State, with a sudden and hostile impetus entered Rome itself, it was in possible that we could bring our mind to attribute that outrage simply to political or to military reasons, reported among the people by the invaders, that is to say, to defend themselves in this city, and to exclude their ene mies from the territories of the Holy Roman Church; neither did we see in it merely the desire of the chief of the French nation to take vengeance on our firmness and constancy, in refusing to acquiesce in his requests. We saw instantly that this proceeding had a much more extensive view than a temporary occupation, a military precaution, or a simple demonstration of anger against ourselves. We saw revive, and again glow, and again burst out on all sides, those fraudulent and impious plots, which appeared to be, if not subdued, at least repressed; which originated among those men deceived and deceiving by philosophy and vain deceit, introducing damnable heresies,' and who had long planned, and formed parties to accomplish the destruction of our holy religion. We saw that, in our humble personage, they insulted, they circumvented, they attacked the Holy See of the most blessed Prince of the Apostles, in order that they might by any meaus overthrow it, from its very foundation; and with it the Catholic Church, although established on the most solid rock, by its divine Founder, in this Holy See. - We had thought, we had also hoped, that the French government, taught by experience the evils in which that most powerful nation had involved itself by unreined impiety and schism, and convinced by the unanimous declarations of by far the greater part of its citizens, was truly and heartily persuaded, that its own security, as well as the public happiness, was deeply interested in the free and sincere restoration of the exercise of the Catholic religion, and in its defence against all assailants. Moved by this opinion, and excited by this hope, we, unworthy as we are, who upon earth represent the God of Peace, scarcely perceived any prospect of repairing the disasters of the Gallican, church, when the whole world is Our witness! with what alacrity we listened to proposals of peace, and how much it cost us, and the church itself, to conduct those treaties to such a conglusion as it was possible to obtain: but, immortal God! in what did our hopes terminate! What has been the fruit of our so great indulgence and liberality! From the very promulgation of that agreement, we have been constrained to complain with the prophet,' Behold, in peace my bitterpess becomes most bitter.' This bitterness we have not concealed from the church, nor from our brethren the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, in our allocution to them in consistory, May 24, 1802. We then informed them, That, to the convention we had made, were added several articles unknown to us, and disapproved by us the instant we knew them. Ia reality, by these articles, not only was the free exercise of the Catholic religion withheld, in points of the greatest consequence and interest to the liberty which had been verbally assured, stipulated, and solemnly promised, as introductory to the convention, and as its basis; but also, in several of these articles, the doctrine of the gospel was closely attacked... Nearly the same was the result of the convention concluded by us with the government of the Italian Republic. Those very articles were interpreted in a manner altogether arbitrary, with highly perverse and peculiar fraud, as well as injury; against which arbitrary and perverse interpretation we had guarded with the utmost solicitude. Both these conventions being violated in this manner, and disfigured in whatever had been stipulated in favour of the church, the spiritual power also being subjected to the will of the laic; so far were the salutary effects that we had proposed to ourselves following these conventions, that other and still greater evils and injuries to the church of Jesus Christ, we saw growing and spreading daily. We shall not here enumerate particularly those evils, because they are sufficiently known in the world, and depiored with tears by all good men.: they are bes des sufficiently declared in the two consistorial allocutions, which we made March 16 and July 11, 1808; which we caused to be made public, as much as our state of restraint admitted, From those all may know, and all posterity will see, what at that time were our sentiments on so many and great injuries suffered from the government of France, in things appertaining to the church: they will know with what long suffering and patience we were so long silent, with what cons'ancy we maintained the love of peace; and how firmly we retained the hope, that a remedy adequate to such great evils might be found, and thai an end might be put to them; for which cause we have deferred from day to day the lifting up of our apostolic voice. They will see what were our labours and anxieties, what our endeavours, deprecations, protestations, sighings (incessant have they been!) that the wounds of the church might be healed, while we have intreated that new sufferings might not be inflicted upon her: but, in vain have been exhausted all the powers of humility, of moderation, of mildness, by which hitherto we naye studied to shield the rights and interests of the church from him, who had associated himself with the devices of the impious to destroy it utterly, who, with that spirit had affected friendship for her, that he might more ready bel tray her, - who had feigned to protect her, that he might more securely oppress her. Much and often, even daily, have we been bid to hope, especially when our journey into France was wished for and solicited; but from that period our expostulations have been eluded by bold tergiversations and cavillings; and by answers given purposely to prolong the matter, or to mislead by fallacy. At length they could obtain no attention. As the time appointed for maturing the councils already taken against this Holy See, and the church of Christ approached, we were sailed, we were har rassed perpetually, and perpetually were demands, either exorbitant or captious, made; the nature of which shewed clearly enough, and more than enough, that two objects, equally destructive and ruinous to this Holy See and church, were kept in view; that is to say, either that by assenting to them we should be guilty of betraying our office, or that if we refused, occasion might from thence be taken of declaring against us an open war. As we could in nowise comply with those demands made upon us, they being contrary to conscience, from thence a pretext was formed to send, in a hostile manner, military forces into this holy city: they seized Fort Saint Angelo; they occupied stations in the streets, in the squares; the palace itself, in which we resided, the Quirinal Palace, was threatened with all the horrors of war and siege, by a great body of infantry and cavalry: but we, being strengthened by God, through whom we can do all things, and sustained by a conscientious sense of our duty, were nothing alarmed, nor dejected in our mind by this sudden terror, and this display of the apparatus of war. With a peaceful, an equable miad, as we ought, we performed the sacred ceremonies, and the divine mysteries appropriated to that most holy day, with all becoming solemnity; and neither thro' fear, nor through forgetfulness, nor by negligence, were any of them omitted, which were appointed as our duty in such a situation of things. We recollected with Saint Ambrose (de Basilic. tradend. No. 17) that the holy man Naboth, the possessor of his vineyard, when called by demand of the king to surrender his vineyard, in which the king, after having rooted up the vines, might plant a vile garden of herbs, he answered him, The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to thee! Much less could we suppose it was lawful for us to deliver up so ancient and sacred a heritage (i. e. the temporal sovereignty of this Holy See, not without the evident appointment of Divine Providence, possessed by the Roman Pontiffs, our predecessors, for so long a series of ages) or even by silence to seem to consent, that any should obtain this city, the metropolis of the Catholic world, where, after disturbing and destroying the most holy form of discipline, which was left by Jesus Christ to his holy church, and ordained by the sacred canons under the guidance of the Spirit of God, he should in its stead substitute a code, not only contrary to the holy canons, but in opposition and even repugnant to the precepts of the Gospels, according to his custom, and to the new order of things of the present day, which manifestly tends to confound by consociation all superstitions, and every sect with the Catholic Church. Naboth defended his vineyard, even with his own blood' (St. Amb. ibid.) Could we, therefore (whatever in the issue might befall us) decline from defending the rights and possessions of the Holy Roman Church, which, to promote as far as in us lay, we had bound ourselves by the most solemn of religious obligations? or, Could we refrain from vindicating the liberty of the Apostolic See, which is so intimately combined with the liberty and utility of the universal church? How extremely fit, and even necessary these temporal principalities are to secure to the Supreme lead of the Church the safe and free exercise of his spiritual functions, which, by the divine will, are committed to him over all the world, may be from the present occurrences (were other arguments wanting) already too clearly demonstrated. On this account, although we affected not this temporal sovereignty, neither for grandeur, nor for wealth, nor for dominion, an unwarrantable desire, equally distant from our natural disposition and our most holy character, which from our earliest years, we have always regarded, yet we have strongly felt that it was due to the indispensable duty of our office, from the very day of the 2d of February, 1808, to the utmost of our power amidst such constraints, to issue by our Cardinal, Secretary of State, a solemn protestation, by which to render public the cause of the tribulation under which we suffered, and to declare our resolution to maintain whole and entire the rights of the Apostolic See. When, in the mean while, the invaders obtained no advantage by threats, they determined to act towards us on another system. By a cer tain slow, but most vexatious and even most cruel kind of persecution, they attacked, with intention to weaken, by little and little, our constancy, which they had not been able to shake by sudden terror. Therefore, while they held us in custody in our palace, there passed scarcely a single day from the said second day of February, which was not marked by some new injury to this Holy See, or by some new vexation to our very soul. All the troops, which had been employed by us to preserve civil order and discipline, were taken from us, and mixed with the French bands. Our very body guards, men the most select and most noble, were imprisoned in XVIII. The the Castle of St. Angelo; there they were detained many days, then they were dispersed, and their companies dissolved. At the gates, and in other places of this most celebrated city, corps de garde were posted. post-office, and all printing-offices, especially that of our Apostolic Chamber, and that of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, were subjected to military force and orders; by which we were deprived of the liberty of printing, or of directing others to print what we desired. The regulations for administering public justice were disturbed and hindered. Solicited by fraud, by deceit, by every kind of evil artifice, to swell the mass of what they called National Guards, our subjects became rebels against their lawful prince. The most audacious and most abandoned of them accepting the tri-coloured French and Italian cockade, and proected by that as by a shield, with impunity spread themselves everywhere, - now in bodies, now single; and, either by command or by permission, broke out into every enormity against the ministers of the church, against the government, agaiust good men. Journals, or, as they call them, Feuilles Periodiques, in defiance of our complaints, were printed at Rome, and circulated among the populace and in foreign parts, filled with injuries, sarcasms, and calumnies, decrying either the pontifica! power or dignity. Sundry of our declarations. which were of great moment, and signed with our own hand, or by that of our first minister, and by our order affixed in the customary places, these, by the hands of the vilest satellites (amid the greatest indignation and lamentation of all good men) were torn down, torn in pieces, and trod under foot. Ill-advised youth, and other citizens, were invited, elected, and inscribed in suspicious conventicles, although such were most strictly prohibited, under the penalty even of anathema, by laws, both civil and ecclesiastic, enacted by our predecessors, Clement XII. and Benedict XIV. Many of our administrators and official agents, as well of the city as of the provinces, men of the greatest integrity and fidelity, were insulted, were thrown into prison, were exiled to great distances. Searches after papers and writings of every kind, in the private repositories of the magistrates of the pontificate, not even excepting those of the first minister of our cabinet, were made with violence. Three of our first ministers, secretaries of state, whom we had been obliged to employ one after the other, were carried off from our own residence; and at last, the majority of the mosi holy Cardinals of the sacred Roman Church, our fellows and fellow-labourers, were torn from our side, and transported afar off by military force. These facts, and others not less contrary to every right, human and divine, wickedly attempted and hardily perpetrated, are so well known by the public, that there is no necessity to recount them numerically, or to expatiate on them at large. Neither have we omitted, that (we might not so much as seem to connive at them, or in any manner to assent to them) to expostulate sharply and strongly according to the duty of our place. Despoiled in such a manner, as it were, of all the ornaments of dignity and supports of authority, deprived of all the accessaries to the fulfilment of our office, and especially of those in which all the churches were interested, suffering injuries of every description, vexed by all kinds of terrors and excruciations, oppressed so extremely, that even the exercise of both our powers was daily further impeded, - after the singular and evident providence of God, the best and greatest which has supported our fortitude, we are beholden to the prudence of such of our ministers as remained, to the fidelity of our subjects, and to the piety of the faithful, that any semblance of those powers is yet remaining. But, if our temporal power were reduced to a vain and empty appearance, in this city and in the adjoining provinces, it was in the most flourish. ing province of Urbino, of March, and of Camerin, at the same time absolutely taken away. Wherefore, we did not fail to issue a solemn protest against this manifest and sacrilegious usurpation of so many states of the church; as also to admonish our beloved against the seductions of an un |