Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1834 by

D. APPLETON & CO.,

In the clerk's office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

WM. VAN NORDEN, PRINT.

944.5 RICCI

NOTICE.

THE ensuing disclosures respecting Monachism and Popery are selected from the "Memoirs of Scipio de Ricci, late Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, Reformer of Catholicism in Tuscany, during the reign of Leopold. Compiled from the autograph manuscripts of that Prelate. Edited from the original of Mr. de Potter, by Thomas Roscoe." London, 1829.

Almost one half of the two original volumes are filled with the history of Italy during the period subsequent to the French revolution in 1789, and with incidental notices of Ricci's private life, and that of his numerous friends and correspondents. Nearly all those political and military details are omitted; because the sole objects designed by the present publication are these; to unfold the genuine and unvarying practices of male and female convents; and to demonstrate, that the claims of the Papacy are totally incompatible with civil and religious liberty, and equally destructive of individual dignity, social decorum, and national intelligence and enjoyments.

As the present work is reprinted from the "Memoirs of Scipio de Ricci," with those alterations only which were indispensable to preserve the continuity of the narrative; the English editor's preface imparts all requisite information concerning this most valuable and interesting development of the character of nunneries, the motives and arts of the Papal priesthood, and the immutable and universally mischievous and detestable policy of the Pontiffs and ecclesiastical Court of Rome.

PREFACE BY THOMAS ROSCOE.

SCIPIO DE RICCI deservedly ranks among the sincere and venerable defenders of religious truth and liberty and Mr. de Potter, in collecting these materials, has performed a task very acceptable to the students of contemporary history.

During the agitating and fearful drama of the eighteenth century, when liberty herself was desecrated by being allied with Atheism, and made the enemy of outraged humanity, the Bishop of Prato and Pistoia planned a system of reform which would have established the freedom of his countrymen on true moral, intellectual, and religious improvement. The most zealous enemy of injustice in states and governments was not more opposed to oppression, nor more fervent in his desire of seeing mankind emancipated from every species of tyrannous thraldom; but he was superior in his design to the spirit of the age. He desired reform civil and ecclesiastic; and endeavored to pursue a line of action, which, if successful, would have led to the establishment of religious and moral improvement in the Italian States.

The narrative of the struggles, of the hardships and afflictions, which this prelate had to encounter in carrying on his reforms, is a most interesting biography. Emancipating himself from the trammels of falsehood and superstition, he appears to have been carried forward by the purity and moral correctness of his feelings, and by the exercise of an ingenuous mind in the defence of truth and right. But Ricci, though possessing all the virtues of humanity, and all the sincerity which should form the character of a reformner, was wanting in those sterner elements which are requisite to a man standing in the situation that he occupied. His good sense and his love of truth excited his hatred of the base and enslaving