either side-and that the debate should be regulated by four presidents, to be chosen two and two by the respective parties.

In conformity with this arrangement, the discussion came off on the evening of Friday, the 9th February, in the hall of the Palazzo dei Sabini The room was lighted and decorated at the expense of the Society of the Catholic Interests, and is described as having presented a very animated appearance throughout the proceedings. Admission was by ticket, and shortly after the doors were opened every available corner was filled with an eager and attentive audience. The Catholic portion of the Assembly was seated on the left side of the hall, the Protestants in equal numbers occupying the right. On the presidents' bench at the lower end there appeared, for the Catholics, Prince Chigi, a name well-known in the annals of the Papacy, and Commendator Domenicis-Tosti, a Roman advocate; for the Protestants, the Rev. Henry Pigott, an Englishman settled in Italy as superintendent of the Methodist Mission, and the Rev. Dr. Philip, missionary to the Italian Jews. The Catholic speakers were the secular priests, Fabiani, Cipolla, and Guidi— all men of chosen ability and skill; on the Protestant side Sciarelli was supported by two of the ablest controversial speakers in the Peninsula-Ribetti, for many years Waldensian minister at Leghorn, and now of Rome, and Gavazzi. The proceedings were characterized by the most perfect order, moderation, and good feeling; the presidential commission discharging its functions with a dignified courtesy and fairness which won for it the highest praise. At the commencement of the discussion a somewhat singular incident occurred. One of the presidents having formally introduced the subject to the meeting, Signor Gavazzi rose to suggest, as a fitting prelude to a debate upon a religious question, that the audience should join him in repeating the Lord's Prayer. Unfortunately, however, this was refused by the opposite party; and the presidents having ruled that those who desired to pray should do so in silence, a few minutes were granted for that pur

pose.

Sciarelli opened the case with a full and clear exposition of the grounds on which Protestants and others refuse to admit the tradition of St.

Peter's visit to Rome, and his twenty-five years pontificate there-from A.D. 42 to 67. His first argument he based on the evidence furnished by the Acts of the Apostles. Adhering to the most widely-received view of the New Testament chronology, he showed that St. Peter was still at Jerusalem in the year 42; that in 43 he preached at Joppa, Lydda, and other places in the neighbourhood; and in 45 was imprisoned by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem. Thus three years of nonresidence in Rome were fairly accounted for. Passing over a period of about ten years, it was shown that the apostle's speech at the Council of Jerusalem, which was convened about the year 56, and his absolute silence on that occasion regarding his alleged mission to the Jews in Rome, rendered it necessary to strike off some ten or eleven years more from the duration of the pontificate. But was it, in the nature of things, likely that the sacred writer, after giving prominence in his record to the apostle's visits to certain obscure villages in Palestine, should pass by in silence his transcendently more important journey to the capital of the world?

Sciarelli's second argument was drawn from the silence of Scripture. If the Bible was divinely inspired, it would hardly have neglected to mention a fact fraught with such consequence to the Catholic faith. But the silence of the Acts of the Apostles is of the most absolute and inexorable kind, and is equalled in weight and significance only by that of the Epistles. St. Paul writes to the Romans in A.D. 58, and fills a whole chapter with the names of Christians to whom he sends salutations; yet there is not the faintest whisper of the name of St. Peter. Besides, if the latter had been in Rome at that time, what need was there for any one sending instructions in Christian doctrine to those who already enjoyed the benefit of another apostle's teaching? Would not St. Paul have been the very first to stigmatize such a course as an uncalled-for intrusion into the province of another unjustifiable building upon another man's foundation, which of all things he most abhorred ? Hence we see the pontificate reduced by a period of sixteen years. Further, when St. Paul arrived in Rome as a prisoner three years later-in A.D. 61-it turned out that the Jews of the

- as an

metropolis were so completely ignorant of Christianity that they called it a sect, and desired the apostle to enlighten them on the nature of its claims. But is it credible, is it reasonable to suppose, that the Jews could have remained all this time totally unacquainted with the new doctrines had the Apostle of the Circumcision really lived and taught at their doors? This line of argument was shown to be confirmed in quite a marvellous way by the unbroken silence of St. Paul in the epistles written by him during his imprisonment in the city of the Cæsars. From Rome he dates several letters, in which the names of comparatively unknown and unimportant individuals are mentioned, while not the most distant allusion is ever made in any of these communications to the presence of St. Peter in that city. Lastly, writing to Timothy in A.D. 66, a year before his death, he makes use of language at once so pathetic and explicit as to exclude the barest possibility of any one of apostolic rank being with him in Rome at the time he wrote: "Only Luke is with me. At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge." The third consideration advanced in support of the non-Catholic view was, the grand division of the early Christian mission field into two broad and distinctly defined departments, in consequence of which St. Peter assumes the position par excellence of the Apostle of the Circumcision, and forthwith vanishes out of sight after the Council of Jerusalem, into the distant East, to minister to the Jews of the dispersion; while St. Paul, forced almost against his will by the mysterious monitions of the Spirit to set his face westward, henceforth labours chiefly in Europe as the apostle of the Gentiles. Thus St. Peter travels to Babylon, which at that time was a great Jewish centre, dates his first epistle from that city, and is never again mentioned; St. Paul, on the other hand, arrives, lives, preaches, writes, and dies in Rome, as if to show that he, and not St. Peter at all, was the real founder of Roman Christianity.

Signor Sciarelli did not allude, nor indeed, so far as we have observed from the reports of the debate, did any of the Protestant speakers refer, to what, in this connection, may well be regarded as one of the most beautiful and striking of the

numerous probable arguments supplied by Scripture on this subject. We mean the argument from design found in the structure and contents of the Acts of the Apostles. The most cursory inspection of the subject-matter of that book shows a broad, general division into two very nearly equal portions; the first dealing almost exclusively with the planting of Christianity among the Jews, and giving St. Peter the place of honour among the apostles, the second treating generally of the spread of the gospel among the heathen, and while it throws St. Peter into the background, devoting its pages almost exclusively to the life and labours of St. Paul. Now, if the Romanists are right in believing St. Peter to be the founder of Western Christianity, we should naturally have expected the very reverse of all this. We should, according to their views, have been prepared to see the latter portion of the Acts occupied with the labours of St. Peter among the nations of the West, while the former might have been conveniently filled with the doings of St. Paul or some other apostle. But this disappearance of St. Peter from the pages of the Sacred History at the very moment when the Gentile missions began to assume greater prominence in the purposes of the apostles, and the emergence of another leader on the scene of action, could hardly have been accidental On the contrary, nothing can be clearer to any unbiassed judgment than this, that if by this sudden change of agencies the finger of inspiration had intended to set forth St. Paul's claims to be the first Christian minister of Rome, and so exclude by implication St. Peter's title, no more effectual method could have been well devised. If historical evidence is to be regarded as really of some value, and if its plain, broad meaning is not to be perverted into a huge caricature, the silent but significant testimony of the only official history of the Christian religion must be interpreted to mean that in the evangelization of the West, St. Paul's place was as conspicuous as St. Peter's was obscure.

The fourth argument adduced by the evangelical pleader was founded on the explicit mention of Babylon as the place of St. Peter's abode at the period of his writing his First Epistle. Roman theologians assert that St. Peter meant Rome,

when he wrote Babylon. "But why should he have recourse to such a fiction as this?" asked Sciarelli. "To protect himself during a time of persecution," they reply. "But surely," he rejoined, "surely it is rather too bad of the professed champions of St. Peter to tax the apostle with cowardice, even after the Holy Spirit had descended upon him with power, and made a new man of him." The speaker then showed that the most competent commentators of early times entirely repudiated the idea of a metaphorical meaning being put upon what was really a plain statement of fact. The Arabian and Syrian writers all agreed in understanding by the name Babylon the city actually so called, and nothing either more or less. Signor Sciarelli also took occasion to point out, under this head of the argument, the purely gratuitous assumption of the Romanists in supposing that Babylon, in the first century, had become a heap of ruins unfit for human habitation. Abundance of historical evidence could be adduced to prove that the city, though shorn of much of its former splendour, was then not merely itself largely inhabited, but was the centre of a population of several millions of Jews, who had not returned after the Captivity to their own land.

In conclusion, Signor Sciarelli sifted and criticized the arguments taken by the Roman Catholics from Tradition. The only fragments of anything like contemporary evidence having reference to the apostle were shown to be derived from two sources-viz., Clemens Romanus, and Papias as reported by Eusebius. I. Clemens Romanus in his letter to the Corinthians, A.D. 70, after giving a long and minute account of St. Paul, merely says of St. Peter, that "he had many labours 'to endure, and so, having suffered martyrdom, he went to the place of glory." Nothing, however, is said of his being martyred in Rome. II. It is confessed (1) that no writing of Papias now exists; (2) that Eusebius, who quotes him, describes him as a man of small understanding; and (3) that all the evidence obtainable from this doubtful fountain of tradition amounts to this: that Eusebius, in a work of his now lost, said that Papias related, how Clement had declared, that St. Peter had been in Rome. "Such," said the orator in closing, "is the kind of his

| torical foundation with which the Roman theologians give the lie to Holy Writ."

From this brief outline the reader may obtain some idea of the strength of the non-Catholic position on the one hand; and on the other, of the learning and ability displayed by the gentleman entrusted with the task of maintaining it. The great length of the subsequent speeches, extending over two sittings of four hours each, and filling upwards of twenty columns of a daily newspaper, precludes the possibility of conveying any adequate conception of the dialectic skill, eloquence, and erudition shown by the various speakers. We cannot, therefore, do more than characterize them in a general way, and give one or two extracts.

The Roman Catholic orators had an extremely difficult position to defend, and with the deplorably scanty materials at their disposal, fell very far short of their antagonists in the solidity and convincing power of their arguments. They sometimes made fatal admissions, which their adversaries were not slow to claim, and threw the strength of their case upon false and dangerous lines of defence, the weakness and sophistry of which were repeatedly unmasked. Still, in spite of the inherent poverty of their cause, what with the grandeur of their assumptions, what with their subtlety and persistency in raising objections, and their charges of irrelevancy, they made upon the whole a pretty tough fight, and succeeded in lending a tolerable colour of plausibility to their position.

The Protestants, on the other hand, well and ably as they managed their case in general, did not altogether escape the snare of endeavouring, in their exuberant sense of superiority, to prove too much, but were tempted once or twice to make use of arguments which, whatever merit they might possess in the judgments of men already convinced, could tell but feebly on the minds of Roman Catholics. Such, for example, was the nature of Gavazzi's reply to the Romanist challenge to produce positive arguments in support of his plea. This demand he attempted to satisfy by quoting Christ's prophecy regarding the fate of some of his disciples in Matthew xxiii. 34:-"Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify." From the fact of these words being addressed to Jews, and

from the traditional belief that only two of the apostles-i.e., Peter and Andrew-met death by crucifixion, he argued that as the Jews in Rome had no authority to inflict capital punishment, but possessed it in Babylon, where the local authority was in their hands, Peter was crucified by Jews in that city in fulfilment of the Saviour's prediction. But what, we may ask, is all this save an ingenious knotting together of several probabilities into one? Little short of the actual mention of St. Peter's name in the prophecy referred to, or something equivalent to such a reference, could amount to a positive proof. But positive proof was what was called for, and what, indeed, every one must see is the one thing which cannot by any possibility be obtained. Gavazzi, on the whole, would have done better, had he taken occasion to show that the question was purely one of probabilities, and not of positive evidence at all.

As a result of the Protestants failing to apprehend the intrinsic bearings of the debate as a balance of probabilities, they permitted what was certainly a fundamental element of weakness to pervade their case, and so of necessity exposed themselves to the cry of "Not proven," so frequently, yet, looking to the strict wording of the debate, so quite legitimately, raised by the Roman Catholic party. For, from the very nature of things, it was really impossible, in a rigorous literal sense, for any human being at the present day to prove that St. Peter was never at Rome. To show this, it would have been requisite to follow the apostle through every year and month of the whole quarter of a century which his pontificate is said to have covered. This, of course, is now out of the question. Yet, in undertaking to prove that St. Peter was never at Rome, this was really the extraordinary brief in behalf of which the Protestant advocates volunteered to plead; and so far it is to be regretted that they should have consented to stake the form of their case on such an issue. No doubt the magnificent accumulation of presumptive proofs advanced in its favour establishes as high and strong a probability as could well be desired by impartial minds; but massive as it was, it could not altogether stop the mouths of Roman Catholics, or prevent them pointing to the large gaps in the

apostle's career upon which Sacred History and Tradition are alike silent. Hence Cipolla, the second speaker on the Catholic side, was perfectly entitled to taunt his opponents with the famous ten years' blank in Peter's history between A.D. 45 and 56. Certainly none but drowning men would clutch so desperately at such a straw; still, in strict accordance with the terms of the question, we cannot deny him his right. At the same time we have to say, in passing, that if he insist in this way on his pound of flesh, he cannot be allowed to take it unclogged with the terrible difficulties which such a rigorous assertion of rights carries with it. He must remember that he will have to account for St. Peter's total silence regarding Roman affairs at the Council of Jerusalem, which was held at the close of the ten years which he claims; and if, trammelled with this drawback, he imagines that the space of time in question will afford him any consolation, he is welcome to it on these terms.

The chief speaker on the Roman Catholic side was Canon Fabiani, a man of high repute in his own communion for his great learning and capacity. His dexterity in discovering loopholes of escape in difficulty, coupled with his skill in raising objections, furnished those who followed on the other side with abundance of work; but the hollow ring of many of his defences threw a tinge of suspicion over his whole case, and must have suggested unpleasant doubts in the minds of many who were interested in the success of his argument. His opening statement, in which he gave up the twenty-five years' pontificate at the outset, gave rise to much astonishment on the part of the public; but such candour was not only warranted by the terms of the debate, but was just what might have been expected from any man who had given attention to the literature of the subject, and had discovered the untenable character of such a position. The simple-minded Romans would have received the announcement of this admission with comparative calmness had they been aware of the long list of Roman Catholic writers who had abandoned the twenty-five years' pontificate as impossible and absurd. They would have perhaps rubbed their eyes still harder, had they been informed that this concession was made nearly two centuries ago by Antonio Pagi, the