INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

THE attention of the public has been, of late, much directed to the character and sufferings of the Albigensian Christians, and to the principles and conduct of the church of Rome, through whose instigation, and by whose authority, they were persecuted and destroyed. The outlines of those persecutions are sufficiently known, having been presented in the pages of general history; and even their particular details have been minutely depicted by those who have vindicated the cause of the sufferers, and by others who were the witnesses and agents of their sufferings. Yet a history was still wanted which should trace the rise and progress of these calamitous events with truth and precision, and at the same time give such a view of the shifting scenes by which they were attended, as to cause them to make an indelible impression upon the mind. This object has been accomplished by M. Simonde de Sismondi, who has, in his history of the French people, now in the course of publication at Paris, bestowed much b

pains and research on the subject of the crusades of the Roman church against the Albigenses, and has treated it with so much eloquence and beauty of style, and such a spirit of philosophic enquiry, as to render it a most interesting episode in that valuable work. The volume here offered to the English reader is an attempt to exhibit that part of M. Sismondi's narrative, with only so much of the general history as may serve for its connexion and illustration. Although, therefore, it is only an extract from a larger work, yet it nevertheless embraces an entire, and, to a considerable degree, an independent subject; giving a view of a series of interesting events, issuing in a catastrophe, of great importance to the cause of civil and religious liberty, and of lasting influence upon the future destinies of Europe and of the world. It commences with the thirteenth century, and comprises a period of about forty years, detailing the progress in civilization, liberty, and religion, of the fine countries in the south of France, and the destruction of that liberty and civilization, the devastation and ruin of those countries, and the extinction of those early efforts for religious reformation, through the power and policy of the church of Rome. It relates the establishment of the inquisition, and the provisions by which this merciless tribunal was adapted to become, for ages, the grand engine of domination to that ambitious and persecuting power. And

it marks the complete establishment of civil and ecclesiastical despotism, by the surrender of all those states, with their rights and liberties, to the dominion and controul of the French monarch, under the direction of the Roman pontiff. When therefore the curtain at last falls upon this sad tragedy, it seems as if the night of ignorance and tyranny had closed upon the nations for ever.

The attentive reader cannot fail to remark, that these events give a very different representation of the principles of the church of Rome, from that which is offered to us by its modern advocates, and especially by that respectable body the English catholics. It becomes, therefore, a proper, and even a necessary, subject of enquiry, whether these are the true interpreters of the principles of the church to which they belong, or whether we are to seek for their interpretation in the recorded acts and authentic documents of the church itself. They represent the authority of the church of Rome as merely spiritual, and extending only to its voluntary subjects, and assert that the natural rights of men, and the authority of civil governments, are equally beyond its controul: yet it must be remarked, on the one hand, that the church of Rome allows of no private interpretation of its dogmas, where the church has decided; and on the other, that the history of its proceedings by no means justifies their representations. The church may not indeed, in future, ever be able to

resume that authority by which it has heretofore trampled on the rights both of subjects and their rulers; but should it ever again be in a situation to act as its own interpreter of its own claims, it is scarcely to be supposed that it would then recognize the limits which either individuals or bodies in its communion had attempted to place to the exercise of its sovereign will. We are, therefore, under the necessity, as far as it may be desirable for us to become acquainted with the claims of the church of Rome, to seek them, not from private opinions, but from its own authoritative and deliberate acts.

We are also bound to consider, that the dogmas of the church of Rome are not subjects of mere speculation. She has always claimed a divine right of imposing them on the minds of men, and has, at different times, attained to a power of enforcing these claims, unexampled in the history of mankind. With those religious dogmas by which she still subjugates the souls of her votaries, we, who after two centuries of conflict have withdrawn from her domination, have no concern,

any further than she is amenable for them to the bar of reason and truth; but, besides the controul which she exercises over those of her own communion, she has ever maintained certain rights towards those whom she is pleased to designate as heretics, and has often exercised those rights with a severity, for which no authority is to be