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No walk in life no professional career no uniform of scarlet or of black no freemasonry of craft or calling can absolve him from this allegiance to his country. Yet, what do we see?

The Sovereign Pontiffs have claimed and exercised the right to deprive princes of their principality, and to absolve their subjects from the oath of fidelity.

There was a little letter of a few lines, to which he pointed, which said: My papa has ordered me to return to you these presents, which you made in happier days to me; and I am to write to you for the last time. I think, I know you feel as much as I do the blow which has come upon us. It is I that absolve you from an engagement which is impossible in our present misery.

He says that "the Pope is the only person whose feet are kissed by all princes"; that he may depose emperors and "absolve subjects from allegiance to an unjust ruler." No one shall dare to condemn one who appeals to the pope. No one may annul a decree of the pope, though the pope may declare null and void the decrees of all other earthly powers; and no one may pass judgment upon his acts.

That loftiness within us, from whose summit we venture to pass judgment on the totality of life, to absolve or condemn it, is doubtless the merest pin-prick, visible to our eye alone, on the illimitable sphere of life. It is wise to think and to act as though all that happened to man were all that man most required.

"What will you answer to the Pope's treatment," ran his letter to the Irish, "when he, bringing us the Pope's and other Catholic princes' aid, shall charge you with the crime and pain of heretics for maintaining an heretical pretensed Queen against the public sentence of Christ's vicar? Can she with her feigned supremacy absolve and acquit you from the Pope's excommunication and curse?"

The Dominican friar who served as parish priest in the village where she was an exile refused to absolve her unless she would comply with certain conditions, with which those fathers are wont to fetter and hinder souls. She was not minded to comply with these, or to make her confession to a religious of that order; and while a Franciscan who had been granted to her was on his way, she died.

The whole structure of legalism would collapse if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the letter of the Law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its spirit. To interpret a commandment, in the sense of providing for its application to the fresh cases that may arise for treatment, is the work, not of poets and prophets but of Doctors and Scribes.

"Anne de Bueil," murmured the wounded man. "Anne de Bueil!" cried the monk, standing up and lifting his hands to Heaven. "Anne de Bueil! You said Anne de Bueil, did you not?" "Yes, yes, that was her name; and now absolve me, for I am dying." "I, absolve you!" cried the priest, with a laugh which made the dying man's hair stand on end; "I, absolve you? I am not a priest."

He informed them that he could not absolve them unless they would swear obedience to the archbishop, which they must also render to his provisor, Juan Gonzalez, on their knees, asking his pardon for the injuries that they had done him, and making amends for the losses that he had suffered.