acknowledging and retracting errors he discovers himself to have committed.
We are therefore disposed to great tolerance toward Roman Catholics who believe in the divine origin of the Papal prerogatives; for we know that this prejudgment is communicated to all of them with the first elements of religious instruction, and that every thing in the Roman Church tends to strengthen it in their souls. But the more deeply this delusion is rooted in the Roman Church, and generally in all the West, the more are we bound to combat it with vigor.
To this pursuit have we for several years perseveringly devoted ourselves, and, thanks to God, our labors have not been useless. We hope the new work we now send forth will also bear its fruits, and will come to the help of those religious men, daily increasing in number, who, in the presence of the abuses and excesses of every kind committed by the Papacy, can no longer be blinded respecting it by old delusions.
Accustomed to see in it the divine centre of the Church, they can no longer recognize such a centre in this hotbed of innovations and of sacrilegious usurpations; they ask, therefore, where is the Church of Jesus Christ? We need only divest the Papacy of the glory it has usurped, that the Church Catholic may at once appear in her majestic perpetuity, in her universality. The Papacy has narrowed it to the point of presuming to comprehend the whole Church in itself. Tear away these glittering pretensions, and the Christian society will appear marching with unbroken progress through ages, preserving inviolate the deposit of
