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 Nugent, George Nugent GrenvilIe,i:cbaron ,{^dl789 1850. 
 
 A plain statement in support of the political claims of the Roman Cath 
 olicsrhC microform]; 
 260 London, i^bl. Hookham,{:cl826. 
 300 1 p.l. , 84 p.rC22 cm. 
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 BY fiPPLIED IMRGE, INC. 
 
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 ^ 
 
 
 No.2 
 
 A PLAIN STATEMENT 
 
 IN SUPPORT OF THE 
 
 POLITICAL CLAIMS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE ROMAN CATHOLICS; 
 
 IN A LETTER 
 
 TO THE REV. SIR GEORGE LEE, BART. 
 
 BY 
 
 LORD NUGENT, 
 
 MEMBER OF PABUAMENT FOR AYLESBURY. 
 
 I 
 
 I; '1 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PRINTED FOR 
 
 T. HOOKHAM, OLD BOND STREET. 
 
 M.DCCC.XXVL 
 
 .J.!^ 
 
 Mi 
 
PLAIN STATEMENT, 
 
 Sfc. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR GEORGE, 
 
 m;; 
 
 l*rinled by J. and C. AUlard, 
 liaitholomew Close. 
 
 Some of my Electors have desired rae to put 
 through another edition, a Letter, which I ad- 
 dressed to them in 1820, on the Catholic Question. 
 To any such desire, so expressed, I am bound to 
 attend ; holding, as I do, from them and from you 
 all the means I possess, or am ever likely to 
 possess, of giving the support of a vote to any 
 measure of public concern. At the same time, I 
 know that it is not their wish that I should be 
 called upon to repeat, in a form which would in 
 some respects be disagreeable to me, mere opinions, 
 the repetition of which, if it would be irksome to 
 myself, I may well conckide would be much more 
 so to others. On looking at that publication, 
 which is little rnore than a very hasty vindication 
 of the course which I early adopted, and have 
 always maintained, on the subject of the Catholic 
 Claims, I see many reasons for wishing to put 
 
 a2 
 
 J* 
 
into a different shape whatever parts of it our 
 friends may think worth being repubHshed at this 
 time. I find, it is true, no opinions advanced in 
 it by which I am not still very wilHng that my con- 
 duct should be regulated and judged ; but I find 
 many things done carelessly, at least done in a 
 manner which I may be allowed, after six years, 
 to think might be better for reconsideration. But, 
 my dear Sir George, I will confess that I have 
 another motive for wishing to alter the form of that 
 Letter, and address my Constituents through you. 
 It is not on account of your profession as a clergy- 
 man, because, in my judgment, clergymen have, 
 as such, no business with this or any other purely 
 political question ; nor is it only on account of the 
 entire coincidence of opinion which I am happy to 
 believe exists between us on every matter of pub- 
 lic importance. It is because, recommended by 
 you to the notice of those who have elected me 
 to Parliament, I am accountable to you, among 
 the first of that body, for my opinions, and for the 
 grounds on which they have been formed ; and be- 
 cause, if I wished to put them on record with my 
 Constituents, for the first time or the last, there 
 is no man under whose patronage and sponsor- 
 ship I should be prouder to place them than 
 yourself. 
 
 The public and private regards of my Electors 
 have been proved towards me in a manner calcu- 
 lated to more than satisfy the proudest feelings 
 
 V'ft.-. 
 
 5 
 
 of a man jealous of their esteem. But I am not 
 satisfied with this alone. Invested with a public 
 trust, when I find my conduct or opinions misre- 
 presented before any portion of the body which has 
 conferred it, I vvjll do justice to both by fairly 
 stating, as 1 conceive it, the question at issue. 
 And this must be my apology, if, in some passages 
 adopting the very words of ray former Letter, I 
 may seem to address you in a language of remon- 
 strance, or to confound you with such as I believe 
 are inadequately informed on a subject on which 
 the liberality of your sentiments proceeds not only 
 from a love of truth and freedom, but from full and 
 familiar acquaintance with the different bearings 
 of the great Question at issue. 
 
 It is unfair towards the cause of Catholic 
 Emancipation that it should be represented, as it so 
 often is by both opponents and supporters, as a 
 matter exhausted in argument. Whatever it may 
 have gained or lost by the mode in which it has 
 been treated, and however trite the case may have 
 become, viewed as one of mere Justice, — consi- 
 dered as one of Policy, the arguments in its behalf 
 vary year after year, as they accumulate in amount 
 and rise in importance and urgency. As far as 
 relates to mere Justice, our case may be said to be 
 closed, and must now be left to the silent but sure 
 prevalence of right over violence and clamour, over 
 the dishonest arts of some Protestants, and the 
 natural prejudices of all. It is enough for that 
 
6 
 
 part of the case if it can be shewn that a certain 
 class of our fellow subjects are suffering penalties on 
 account of opinions which have no apparent in- 
 fluence on their conduct in the state. If the 
 enjoyment of certain common-law privileges be 
 the general Rule of the English Constitution, and 
 partial incapacitation be to be considered as the 
 Exception, (which position will not, I apprehend, 
 be denied at least by those who are in the enjoy- 
 ment of them,) I would only submit that we 
 Protestants are bound to justify the Exception, 
 before the Roman Catholics can be called upon 
 to make out their title under the general Rule. I 
 submit that we Protestants are bound to shew 
 that the offence and the danger for which the 
 Roman Catholics were first excluded remain, and 
 remain undiminished. For such exceptions to be 
 just must be absolutely necessary ; to be useful, 
 they must be entirely just. I may assume, then, 
 that unless a case can be established on which, if 
 these exclusive laws had never been enacted, it 
 would be necessary now for the first time to enact 
 them, the argument is closed, and in justice and 
 right the cause of Roman Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion is won. 
 
 But the friends of the measure may, I think, 
 safely leave this vantage ground, and take the 
 proof upon themselves. 1 think it can be 
 shewn, that neither from remote history, if re- 
 mote history could afford any just ground for 
 
 penal enactment, nor from recent example, 
 can any case be made out for these disabili- 
 ties ; but that the whole evidence of history 
 and example is the other way. I think it can be 
 shown that the principles of the English Constitu- 
 tion, and particularly those declared at the Revo- 
 lution, are not favourable to the continuance of 
 these disabilities, but the direct opposite. That 
 he who quotes against the Catholic Claims the 
 principles then declared, has fallen into what Mr. 
 Burke, in a tract which in my opinion contains 
 the whole spirit of this great Question, so well 
 exposes as the vulgar fallacy of ** confounding in 
 his mind all that was done at the Revolution with 
 the principles of the Revolution;''^ and that he 
 who describes the English Constitution as a code 
 essentially of exclusions defames that Constitution, 
 and is ignorant of the first principles on v/hich it 
 rests. I think it can be shewn that, even grant- 
 ing the charges of religious error against the 
 Roman Catholics not to be exaggerated, these 
 have nothing at all to do with the Question ; that 
 our charges against them of civil intolerance are 
 for the most part untrue, and might be more 
 colourably charged against ourselves ; and that all 
 that are truly chargeable against them are equally 
 so against us. That, even putting out of con- 
 sideration all claim founded on moral right, ws 
 
 * Letter to Sir Hercules Laiigrishe. 
 
8 
 
 are bound to repair the wrong we are doing them, 
 were it only by reason of the extreme hazard of 
 persisting in it; and, lastly, I think it may be 
 shewn that we are bound to do so by solemn 
 pledges, which nothing but superior power, and 
 clamour which confounds both fact and argument, 
 have enabled us hitherto dishonestly and shame- 
 fully to violate. It would be necessary for those 
 who are disposed to go through these proposi- 
 tions, to bear with a few facts and arguments often 
 before adduced. But this is not our fault ; for, if 
 our opponents hold a number of opinions, venera- 
 ble, as the saying is, from their antiquity, there 
 are likewise a few facts and aro:uments on our 
 side, not claiming, like those opinions of our adver- 
 saries, to be held venerable for their antiquity, but 
 only to be received as sound in spite of their 
 antiquity. It is not our fault if in their old age 
 these must sometimes be brought to take the field ; 
 I wish they had prevailed in their youth, and had 
 accordingly been entitled to an honourable and 
 lasting repose. But we cannot do without them. 
 
 I believe that there are few subjects on which 
 so many opponents are to be met with of that very 
 numerous class who think themselves justified in 
 feeling strongly without enquiring deeply, who 
 acquiesce in unexamined statements merely to 
 fortify their own preconceived sense of the case, 
 and who are ever recurring to defences a thousand 
 times overthrown, and now, by universal consent 
 
 \(i 
 
 
 I 
 
 !f 
 
 9 
 
 of all well informed persons, abandoned, merely 
 because the fact of the discomfiture and surrender 
 may have escaped their not very extensive research, 
 or may have lost its place in their not very im- 
 partial memory. This is a serious diflSculty, 
 because with such persons it is not easv to deter- 
 mme at what precise period of the controversy to 
 begin. There is, however, another class with 
 whom it is impossible to deal : the mere shouters 
 of ''No Popery;" those who, without the desire 
 of enquiry or the capacity of reasoning, think that 
 they see their interest or their honour bound up 
 in a determination never to doubt any early, or 
 accidental, or careless, impressions, to which by 
 habit they consider themselves pledged. Such 
 we can only leave to rejoice in their own conclu- 
 sions, unquestioned and undisturbed, vvithdravvino- 
 ourselves from all dispute with them as we should 
 from the attempt to go through a proposition in 
 mathematics with a person to whom the admission 
 of an axiom appears to be matter of too hazardous 
 generosity, and who accordingly, while expressing 
 his readiness to listen to proof, feels that he owes 
 it to his cause to refuse every preliminary con- 
 cession on which a proof can by possibility turn. 
 Until they shall have done what they never will do, 
 — until they shall have enlightened themselves on 
 the history, not of their own country onlv, but 
 of some other parts of modern Europe, — until 
 they shall have learned what the penal laws were, 
 
1 
 
 f 
 
 10 
 
 and what they are now, — until they shall know 
 the story and condition of the Roman Catholics 
 in this empire, and of Protestants in others, — they 
 must be content to be challenged as Jurors to 
 pass upon this Question. Nay, more, — they must, 
 till then, absolutely abstain from all customary 
 expressions of vituperation against the Papists, on 
 pain of convicting themselves of possessing less 
 than they ought of common honesty, or less than 
 most men would be thought to possess of common 
 discretion. 
 
 Never, probably, of late years has there been 
 any other topic, on some most material points of 
 which (although for near half a century so much 
 discussed and so deeply felt, and although the 
 prevailing sentiment of the country upon it has 
 of late so much, as you and 1 should term it, im- 
 proved,) so little is even yet generally understood. 
 First, as to what the constitutional advantages 
 are of which our Roman Catholic countrymen are 
 actually deprived ; and, secondly, as to what are 
 the particulars in which it is the object of the 
 friends, as they are called, of the Roman Catholics, 
 to liken their condition to that of others who 
 differ, some quite as widely, from the Established 
 Church of England and Ireland. The first obvious 
 and wide distinction between the political condition 
 of the Roman Catholics and that of the Protestant 
 dissenters is this. The disqualifying laws against 
 the Protestant dissenters have, by the wisdom of 
 
 / 
 
 11 
 
 Parliament and the necessity of the case, been ren- 
 dered of no effect; while the Roman Catholics are 
 practically disqualified, tvithout even the pretext of 
 any political tenet being urged against them, and 
 on account only of speculative doctrines of a purely 
 spiritual nature. Now, the latter part of this I 
 am aware Lord Liverpool denies; but am I not 
 justified in so stating it? Surely I am, if I find 
 these spiritual doctrines made the only instruments 
 of their disfranchisement. The Roman Catholics 
 implore you to substitute vvhat civil tests you will, 
 to satisfy yourselves of their allegiance ; and they 
 declare their readiness to subscribe to them. You 
 answer them with an enquiry on oath, not as to 
 how they stand affected towards the Constitution of 
 the realm, but as to how they believe of the essence 
 of a Sacrament and the mediation of Saints. 
 Your Test is not one to ascertain whether a 
 Catholic can be a good subject, but to ascertain 
 whether a man be a Catholic in his spiritual creed, 
 assuming that one who is a Catholic in his spiritual 
 creed cannot be a good subject. 
 
 Then your real objection must be held to centre 
 in the doctrines of this spiritual creed ; for, if not, 
 even though you should establish a just cause for 
 excluding those who profess it, you would still 
 convict yourselves of doing so on false pretences. 
 If you must punish, let the indictment at least 
 set forth the offence which, according to your 
 opinion, deserves the punishment. 
 
' ip|Hi. 
 
 12 
 
 The Test and Corporation Acts disqualify 
 Protestant dissenters. I think the absurdity of 
 those acts about equal to their injustice ; and so 
 thinks the Parliament ; and therefore it annually 
 passes an Indemnity Bill, which, though nominally 
 but an annual Bill, knows no end, and has been 
 for more than a century as essentially and per- 
 manently a law on behalf of the Protestant 
 Dissenters, as has been the annual Mutiny Bill on 
 behalf of the Crown and its army. Under it all 
 persons find shelter who, having neglected or 
 scrupled to qualify for office by receiving the 
 Sacrament according to the forms of the Church 
 of England, have become liable to heavy disa- 
 bilities and fine. Thus in practice and eifect the 
 good sense of the Legislature, by interposing this 
 shield, renders the Protestant Disseiiters eligible 
 to all civil oflSces under the Crown ; thereby en- 
 gaging many an honest and able servant to the 
 State, and withdrawing from these public honours 
 the foul imputation that they may be purchased 
 by the abandonment of a conscientious scruple, 
 aggravated by the proflination of a holy rite. From 
 Parliament they are not, and never were, excluded. 
 But the Roman Catholic is deprived of all these ad- 
 vantages, absolutely and literally ; and, if the dis- 
 qualifying oaths speak truth, not because he fails 
 in his duty as a subject, not because his sense 
 of duty is even suspected, but because he invokes 
 the intercession of Saiiits, because he recoirnises 
 
 .si*- J 
 
 18 
 
 the Pope in spiritualities, and because he believes 
 in the " real corporeal presence" (and not as the 
 Church of England does, only in *' the body and 
 blood of Christ, verily and indeed received,") in 
 the elements of the Last Supper.* 
 
 It has always appeared to me that, of all men, 
 Protestant dissenters ought to be the last to object 
 to Catholic Emancipation ; for religious liberty is 
 either an universal principle or no principle at all ; 
 nor can it with justice be extended to certain sects, 
 and withheld from others. I need hardly say, then, 
 how cheerfully I would vote, as I have voted, for 
 the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, but 
 only for the reasons which would equally move me 
 to vote for the repeal of all the other laws that 
 disqualify the Roman Catholics. 
 
 It is said that the Roman Catholics '^ enjoy 
 perfect toleration, because they are permitted to 
 worship God in the manner the most agreeable to 
 the dictates of their own conscience." I should 
 admit that this is '* perfect toleration," could we 
 conclude the sentence thus, '^ without thereby in- 
 curring penalty or privation." But here lies the 
 whole matter of complaint. A man is clearly not 
 left free to do that which if done subjects him to 
 punishment. The CathoHcs, then, are not free 
 to exercise their religion. No syllogism, as it ap- 
 pears to me, can be clearer than this. 
 
 * Catechism of the Church of England. 
 
14 
 
 15 
 
 But let us not be mistaken. It is not toleration 
 only that we ask for the Roman Catholics and for 
 Protestant Dissenters : we ask liberty. The very 
 term toleration implies that you possess a power 
 which no human creature ought to claim over the 
 mode in which another worships that Being, *'in 
 whom," according to the words of the Church of 
 England Liturgy, than which man never devised 
 better, "in whom standeth our eternal life," and 
 " whose service is perfect freedom.*' Toleration is 
 but as a scabbard to cloathe the sword of perse- 
 cution : whilst it covers the keenness of the edge, 
 it preserves for use the weapon within, and retains 
 its form. That weapon it is which a government, 
 conforming to the spirit of Christianity or of 
 Liberty, must cast away and renounce for ever. 
 
 We are told that the relieving the Roman 
 Catholics from the penalties and privations which, 
 by being Roman Catholics, they now incur, would 
 be the giving them political power. Now this 
 is not so: there can hardly be a grosser misuse of 
 terms, or mistake in reality, than to confound 
 Power with Privilege. Privilege is not Power : it 
 is protection from Power. What the Church of 
 England possesses, and what the opponents of 
 religious liberty would retain, is exclusive Power. 
 What we desire for dissenters, Protestant and 
 Catholic, is community of Privilege. Mere eligi- 
 bility to civil office is not Power ; it is Privilege. 
 Mere eligribilitv to Parliament is not Power ; it is 
 
 1 
 
 J 
 
 Privilege. Privilege is what belongs to a member 
 of the State ; Power is what belongs to the State 
 itself. These two things, as Mr. Burke expresses 
 it, ''I conceive to be as different as a part is from 
 the whole, that is, just as different as po<^sihle."* 
 But we are sometimes told that, to give full effect 
 to our principle, the Throne itself must be left open 
 to them, or that we are inconsistent. This is 
 by no means a necessary consequence, nor has it 
 the remotest connexion with the premises. I 
 might admit the Roman Catholic to all the rights 
 and privileges of all other British subjects^ and 
 might continue to exclude him from the Throne; 
 and yet I think I could shew that I am not incon- 
 sistent in principle. We have a right to confer 
 Sovereignty, or any other trust, on what terms 
 we please: we have no right to deprive of a 
 franchise but for some proved crime. The Act of 
 Settlement provides that the Crown shall descend 
 to the heirs general of a certain line being Protes- 
 tants. The King of England is supreme head of 
 the Church : the Church of England is Protestant. 
 I think it would be an inconsistency to place a 
 Roman Catholic sovereign at the head of a Protes- 
 tant Church. But, again, is eligibility to the 
 Throne among the ''rights and privileges of other 
 British subjects?'' While there is such a thing as 
 
 * Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. 
 
 \ 
 
16 
 
 constructive treason, I will not say so within 
 hearing of His Majesty's Attorney General. 
 
 But, with respect to the dangers to be apprehended 
 from their eligibility to office and representation. 
 Parliament, I have heard it said, might be filled 
 with Catholics ; all places of trust and honour 
 might be filled with Catholics ; and England 
 might by degrees become again a Catholic country. 
 Indeed ! — If the House of Commons were to be 
 filled with Catholics, whose fault would it be ? The 
 fault of the electors. I have known the having 
 voted for the Catholics urged with some success 
 as an objection to a candidate at an election. I do 
 not think that the being a Catholic would in many 
 places be a successful recommendation of one. 
 What power is it apprehended is to deprive the 
 people, after Catholic Emancipation shall have 
 passed, of the means of returning Protestants to 
 the House of Commons if they choose it? And if 
 any where the people should prefer the electing a 
 Catholic, I only ask a free choice for the people. 
 But it appears to me that the answer to the whole 
 objection is simpler yet. A religion can prevail in 
 a State only from one or more of these three causes, 
 — its own intrinsic truth and excellence, or the 
 property and talents of its professors, or a si- 
 multaneous inclination and consent of the majority 
 of the people. If, then, we say that by the removal 
 of the present restrictive laws, the Roman Catholic 
 
 17 
 
 Religion would, in any natural, or probable, or 
 even possible, event, ultimately prevail, we must 
 admit that oiir alarms are founded on one at least 
 of these three premises ; either that we are now 
 by penal power oppressing the cause of Truth ; or 
 that we are excluding the majority of the property 
 and talents of our country ; or that we are coun- 
 teracting the general wish of the people. Now, 
 in fact, I do not believe, nor would our antagonists 
 admit, any one of these positions ; and therefore I 
 do not apprehend the prevalence of the Roman 
 Catholic religion. Indeed, it is a supposition which 
 I should reluctantly adopt, because insulting to 
 Protestantism itself, that there is any danger that a 
 form of Church Government, which the spirit and 
 energy of the people overthrew at the beginning of 
 the sixteenth century, should be re-established by 
 common consent in the nineteenth. It would, in 
 other w^ords, be to suppose that the advances of ci- 
 vilization, learning, and liberty, have impaired the 
 popularity, and therefore endangered the security 
 of the Protestant faith. When we argue the right 
 to exclude the Roman Catholics, we represent 
 them as a contemptible Minority ; but when we 
 ar^rue the danoer of admitting them, we suppose 
 them a formidable Majority. Both cannot be true. 
 But then it is said, ''What is now a minority, 
 contemptible for the smallness of its numbers, and 
 contemptible for the bigotry and folly of its pro- 
 fessors, may in process of time become a majority." 
 
 \ 
 
18 
 
 No high compliment this to the zeal, talents, virtue, 
 or popularity, of the Established Church. 
 
 "If, then," says a Minister of our own Church, 
 the Rev. John Fisher, rector of Wavenden, in 
 this county, in a sermon published some years ago, 
 and entitled, " The Utility of the Church Estab- 
 lishment, and its Safety consistent with Religious 
 Freedom,"* *'If, then, the Protestant religion 
 "could have originally worked its way in this 
 " country against numbers, prejudices, bigotry, 
 " and interest ; if, in times of its infancy, the power 
 " of the Prince could not prevail against it ; surely, 
 " when confirmed by age, and rooted in the affec- 
 " tions of the people, — when invested with authority, 
 " and in full enjoyment of wealth and power, — when 
 " cherished by a Sovereign who holds his very 
 "throne by this sacred tenure, and whose con- 
 " scientious attachment to it well warrants the title 
 " of Defender of the Faith,— surely any attack upon 
 " it must be contemptible, any alarm of danger 
 " must be imaginary." 
 
 Well do I remember the warm and lasting 
 impression in favour of religious freedom made 
 upon my boyish mind by that excellent discourse 
 preached at Buckingham m 1807, and then pub- 
 lished and presented to my father by its eloquent 
 author ; and happy do I esteem myself that a copy 
 of it is still retained by me ; and happier still should 
 
 * Sermon of Ihc Rev. J. l-isber, page 14. 
 
 19 
 
 I be if any persuasions of mine could induce that 
 Reverend Gentleman to re-publish, in times when 
 the avowal of such sentiments comes from our 
 clergy with peculiar grace, a Sermon so full of 
 Christian unction, of social charity, and political 
 wisdom. But I said at the beginning that in 
 my judgement clergymen as such had nothing to do 
 with a purely political question ; I must, therefore, 
 if I cannot refrain from quoting another passage, 
 cite it merely as giving a faithful summary of my 
 own opinion, but expressed in terms admirable 
 for their boldness, and how much more forcible 
 than any that I could employ. 
 
 *^'But though" (says Mr. Fisher again,*) "it 
 " has happily proved that the cry of danger was 
 " unfounded, /ar otherwise was the danger of the 
 " cry. The beginning of strife, says an experienced 
 " ruler of a people, is as the letting out of waters ; 
 " and when the waters of strife are thus let out, 
 " the dirty torrent sweeps all before it ; and a most 
 " awful responsibility rests on those who would 
 "have employed such an ungovernable instrument, 
 ''even allowing the sincerity of their apprehen- 
 "sions.'f' Let it be duly reflected upon, that the 
 " three divisions of this United Realm have each a 
 " widely diflerent profession of faith, and that in 
 
 * Sermon of the Rev. J. Fisher, page 15. 
 
 t Alluding to the cry of " No Popery" raised at the General 
 Election which had just then taken place. 
 
 b2 
 
20 
 
 <* each there are numerous subdivisions of sects, 
 '* dready sufficiently irritated by religious niceties ; 
 '' and then let it be asked if this be an age and a 
 '' country in which to ^ciden religious differences, or 
 " to sport with religious prejudices?'' 
 
 And now one word respecting the principles 
 sometimes very loosely, sometimes very disinge- 
 nuously, and always very injuriously, imputed to 
 the Roman Catholics as a political party. For it 
 is not too much to require a strong prima facie 
 case against the political character of those whom, 
 by certain statutory exceptions, we bar from the 
 exercise of common law rights. In examining the 
 reasons for their exclusion founded on their former 
 conduct and character as a sect in power, it is 
 somewhat in favour of a re-consideration of their 
 case, that the most generally received illustrations 
 from domestic history bear date somewhere about 
 two hundred and seventy years ago. But I agree 
 that it is ridit first to look to their character in 
 power ; and therefore our opponents, with perfect 
 justice, though with a somewhat too passionate 
 alacrity, always direct our attention to the reign of 
 bloody Queen Mary. But they generally, (which 
 is not quite so just,) having begun with bloody 
 Queen Mary, end with her also. Now, this is an 
 unfair partiality ; unfair upon her religion, unfair 
 upon her family, and unfair upon others who were 
 neither of her religion nor her family. It is true 
 that the details of obsolete barbarities, '' cloathed," 
 
 6 
 
 21 
 
 (as It has been well expressed,) '' in the stolen gar- 
 ments of religion,"* and perpetrated amidst the 
 darkness and fury of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries, abound in the history of almost every 
 country of Europe. That age may be termed 
 eminently the age of Ecclesiastical Persecution, 
 among all churches and all sects, as circumstances 
 furnished them with the means ; the succeedino- 
 age may be termed eminently that of controversial 
 Vexation. The same year had given birth to 
 Luther and Loyola. The one, as a monk in an 
 obscure German convent, began a system which 
 he lived to see triumph in a considerable part 
 of northern Europe over that papal influence which, 
 from times coeval with the first general prevalence 
 of Christianity itself, had maintained uudisputed an 
 empire claiming to extend beyond the limits of 
 this world. The other was the founder of the 
 mighty order of the Jesuits ; that fierce spiritual 
 aristocracy, which, rapidly spreading itself from 
 Spain throughout the four quarters of the globe, 
 became the dispenser alike, though not in an equal 
 degree, of great good and great evil. If the Jesuits 
 bowed nations to their secular yoke, they taucrht 
 kings also to tremble before the political authority 
 of powerful associations of their subjects. They 
 lorded it over crowns, but gave not liberty to the 
 people ; they guarded letters, and perpetuated by 
 
 * Ardiur O'Lcary's '' Pica for Libedy of Conscience." 
 
■i I 
 
 4 
 
 22 
 
 education the lights of learning ; they cultivated 
 for the use of man those arts which tend to peace 
 and humanity, yet kindled throughout all the great 
 monarchies of Christendom the flames of what are 
 strangely called religions war and religious perse- 
 cution, and have rendered their name hateful to all 
 posterity as the authors of the Holy Inquisition. 
 Yet if, where Popery kept its ground, it was not 
 by gentle or warrantable means, neither was the 
 march of the Reformed Religion at all more re- 
 markable for that mild and sober spirit which 
 should ever accompany the advances of Truth 
 ao-ainst Error and Corruption. The conflict, which, 
 during the earlier period of its success, was a con- 
 flict of force and of blood, began, as its footing 
 in England, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland 
 became more secure, to affect the softer character 
 of a war of disputation. The infant energies of 
 the Reformation had prevailed, and Protestantism 
 had established itself too firmly to require the 
 assistance of very active or wholesale persecution 
 for its advancement. In this country, a more 
 silent, though not less effectual, and scarcely less 
 cruel, system of persecution prevailed, liy statutes 
 well framed for the purpose and duly executed. 
 At the former period, the mischiefs of a civil war, 
 and a long disputed succession, had scarcely been 
 allayed in this country, the sanguinary habits of 
 our countrymen had scarcely had time to subside, 
 all the recollections and many of the jealousies of 
 
 ( f 
 
 23 
 
 the families which had taken opposite sides under 
 the two Roses were still fresh, — when England 
 suddenly became a principal stage on which the 
 great quarrel which divided the Christian Church 
 was to be decided. Queen Mary, weak, bigotted, 
 and cruel, found at her accession the basis but 
 newly laid of the Protestant religion in England. 
 The heresy, still young, was gradually hardening 
 into a formidable maturity. It had been reared 
 in a royal cradle, and not by guiltless means. 
 By royal hands its destruction was menaced, 
 and by means bearing the strongest family re- 
 semblance to those that had protected its infancy, 
 and fostered its growing power. Devoted as 
 Queen Mary was to a husband, who ruled abso« 
 lutely over a country, in arms, in arts, and in 
 commerce, the rival of England, she added to her 
 naturally arbitrary temper other feelings which 
 made her a willing agent in the hands of Spain ; 
 and her reign has been deservedly stigmatised as 
 one of fire and blood. Yet we Protestants have 
 since had the story a little too much our own way, 
 and have argued the matter somewhat after the 
 fashion in which King Henry the Eighth argued the 
 matter of transubstantiation with the unfortunate 
 Lambert; holding, like him, our disputation in 
 our own court, upon evidence exclusively of our 
 own choosing, before our own audience ; and, like 
 him, denouncing severe penalties upon our adver- 
 sary, if judgment should be so given against him. 
 
^ 
 
 24 
 
 Our histories have not, I believe, stated what 
 is untrue of Queen Mary, nor perhaps liave they 
 very much exaggerated what is true of her ; but our 
 arguers, whose only talk is of Smithfield, are 
 generally very uncandid in what they conceal. 
 It would appear to be little known that the statutes 
 which enabled Mary to burn those who had con- 
 formed to the Church of her father and brother, 
 w^ere Protestant statutes, declaring the common 
 law against heresy, and framed by her father 
 Henry the Eighth, and confirmed and acted upon 
 by Order of Council of her brother Edward the 
 Sixth, enabling that mild and temperate young 
 sovereign to burn divers misbelievers, by sentence 
 of commissioners, (little better, says Neale, than 
 a Protestant Inquisition,) appointed to *^ examine 
 "and search after all Anabaptists, Heretics, or 
 "contemners of the Book of Common Prayer."^- 
 It would appear to be seldom considered that her 
 zeal might very possibly have been warmed by the 
 circumstance of both her chaplains having been 
 imprisoned for their religion, and herself arbi- 
 trarily detained, and her safety threatened, durino- 
 the short but persecuting reign of her brother.^ 
 The sad evidences of the violence of those days are 
 by no means confined to her acts. The faggots 
 of persecution were not kindled by Papists only, 
 
 • Burnet's History of the Reformation, vol. ii. page 111; Rymer 
 vol. XV. page 181 . Neale's History of the Puritans, vol. i. p. 49. 
 t Strype, vol. ii. p. 249; Heyward, p. 315. 
 
 -affl*--; 
 
 i^Wf*. 
 
 25 
 
 nor did they cease to blaze when the power of using 
 them as instruments of conversion ceased to be 
 in Popish hands. Cranmer himself, in his dreadful 
 death, met with but equal measure for the flames 
 to which he had doomed several who denied the 
 spiritual supremacy of Henry the Eighth ; to 
 which he had doomed also a Dutch Arian, in 
 Edward the Sixth's reign ; and to which, with 
 great pains and difficulty, he had persuaded that 
 prince to doom another miserable enthusiast, Joan 
 Bocher, for some metaphysical notions of her own 
 on the divine incarnation.* '^ So that on both 
 *' sides" (says Lord Herbert, of Cherbury,) ^^ it 
 " grew a bloody timc'^f Calvin burned Servetus 
 at Geneva, for "discoursing concerning the Trinity, 
 " contrary to the sense of the whole Church, and 
 " thereupon set forth a book wherein he giveth an 
 '^ account of his doctrine, and of whatever else had 
 " passed in this affair, and teacheth that the sword 
 *' may be lawfully employed against heretics. "X 
 Yet Calvin was no Papist. John Knox extolled in 
 his w-ritings, as '' the godly fact of James Melvil,''§ 
 the savage murder by which Cardinal Beaton was 
 
 ♦ Burnetts Reformation, vol. ii. p. 111. Neale's History of the 
 Puritans, vol. i. p. 48, et seq, 
 
 t Life of Henry VIII. p. 420 ; Burnet, vol. ii. Coll. 35; Strype's 
 Memoirs of Cranmer, p. 181. 
 
 t Sleidan's History of the Reformation, translated by Bohun, 
 p. 594. 
 
 § Hume, Edvpard VI. ; Keith's History of the Reformation of 
 Scotland, p. 43. 
 
26 
 
 made to expiate his many and cruel persecutions ; 
 a murder to which, by the great popular eloquence 
 of Knox, his fellow labourers in the vineyard of 
 reformation, Lesly and Melvil, had been excited : 
 and yet John Knox, and Lesly, and Melvil, were 
 no Papists. Henry the Eighth, whose one virtue 
 was impartiahty in these matters, (if an impartial 
 and evenly balanced persecution of all sects be a 
 virtue,) beheaded a Chancellor and a Bishop, 
 because, having admitted his civil supremacy, they 
 doubted his spiritual. Of the latter of them Lord 
 Herbert says, ^'The Pope, who suspected not, 
 " perchance, that the Bishop's end w as so near, 
 *' had, for more testimony of his favour to him as 
 " disaffection to our King, sent him a cardinal's 
 ''hat; but unseasonably, his head being off."* He 
 beheaded the Countess of Salisbury, because at 
 upwards of eighty years old she wrote a letter to 
 Cardinal Pole, her own son ; and he burned 
 Barton, the '^ Holy Maid of Kent," for a prophecy 
 of his death. He burned four Anabaptists in one 
 day for opposing the doctrine of infant baptism ; 
 and he burned Lambert, and Anne Ascue, and 
 Belerican, and Lassells, and Adams, on another 
 day, for opposing that of transubstantiation ; with 
 many others, of lesser note, who refused to sub- 
 scribe to his Six Bloody Articles, as they were 
 called, or whose opinions fell short of his, or 
 exceeded them, or who abided by opinions after 
 
 * Life ol Henry Vlll. p 420. 
 
 27 
 
 he had abandoned them :*= and all this after the 
 Reformation. And yet Henry the Eighth was the 
 sovereign who first delivered us from the yoke of 
 
 Rome. 
 
 In later times, thousands of Protestant dissenters 
 
 of the four great sects were made to languish in 
 loathsome prisons, and hundreds to perish miser- 
 ably, during the reign of Charles the Second,t 
 under a Protestant High Church Government, 
 who then first applied, in the prayer for the Parlia- 
 ment, the epithets of " most religious and gracious" 
 to a sovereign whom they knew to be profligate 
 and unprincipled beyond example, and, had reason 
 to suspect to be a concealed Papist. 
 
 Later still. Archbishop Sharpe was sacrificed 
 by the murderous enthusiasm of certain Scotch 
 Covenanters, who yet appear to have sincerely 
 believed themselves inspired by Heaven to thi§ 
 act of cold-blooded barbarous assassination. 
 
 On subjects like these, silence on all sides, and 
 a mutual interchange of repentance, forgiveness, 
 and oblivion, is wisdom. But to quote grievances 
 on one side only is not honesty. Nor should 
 we, if we eagerly read the story of the massacres 
 of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, turn our eyes 
 
 • Hume^s History of England, Henry VIII. ; Lord Herbert, 
 id. pages 404, 419, 420, 528, and 530. Sec also for the Six Articles, 
 
 id, pajifC 508. 
 
 f Neal's History of the Puritans, vol. iv. page 320 ^< ser/. to 
 
 page 447. 
 
 
 
28 
 
 from that of the massacres of the Catholics from 
 the time of James the First to that of King William 
 inclusively. We there find -and, alas ! much later 
 than King William's time we find,— the details 
 of many a dreadful and savage execution (to the 
 very letter of that dreadful and savage law till of 
 late in force against treason,) upo^^i the persons 
 of Roman Catholic priests, the aged, the unoffend- 
 ing, and the pious ;— hanged, but not till they 
 
 were dead, and then (but those who are 
 
 curious for such details may be abundantly grati- 
 fied by consulting the Statute Book,) for no other 
 crime than the having administered to the sick 
 and dying the last comforts of their persecuted 
 communion. It was not until the reign of Georcre 
 the Third that the laws were repealed by which it 
 was death to ofl^ciate at the Mass. Under these 
 dreadful laws many hundreds of priests have been 
 put to a cruel and ignominious death. 
 
 The history of massacres on both sides have 
 however, as might have been expected, been 
 strangely exaggerated. For example :— Borlace 
 (a writer very zealously quoted by some who are 
 eager to revive the remembrance of outrages 
 long past, and feuds that ought to have been long 
 ago reconciled,) states that in 1641 no less than 
 one hundred thousand Protestants were murdered 
 in the course of a few days in Ireland. Sir John 
 Temple, another historian equally in repute with 
 the same party, and whose authority, in spight 
 
 29 
 
 of consanguinity, I am constrained to doubt, calcu- 
 lates the proportion of Catholics to Protestants in 
 Ireland as thirty to one. Now let us suppose that 
 only five Protestants escaped for every one who was 
 murdered, man, woman, and child, throughout the 
 land, (which is the very smallest allowance we can 
 make, considering that the whole massacre lasted but 
 afewdays,)and this givesus,on the joint authority of 
 these contemporary historians, a gross population of 
 
 at \eastsix hundred thousandProtestants and eighteen 
 millions of Catholics \n Ireland in 1641. Hume, 
 more moderately, estimates the Catholics as only 
 in the proportion of six to one to the Protestants, 
 but says that by some computations those who 
 perished are supposed to be 150 or 200,000 ; and 
 yet, with all the powers of multiplication of that 
 fruitful island, I believe that the highest estimate of 
 its population now does not far exceed seven mil- 
 lions. But, leaving what may be termed the fabu- 
 lous and heroic ages of Protestant and Popish Nar- 
 rative, what are we to learn from the uncontested 
 facts that remain 1 Why that Persecution and Mur- 
 der do not belong to the tenets of any sect of Chris- 
 tians. That these histories are the histories of bad 
 times and of bad men, such as all ages and all 
 large sects have produced ; but that the laws of 
 the present age, and that manners more powerful 
 than laws, (such as enable the stranger now to 
 approach the fortresses of Arundel, or Wardour, or 
 Stafford, witliout fear of sling or bow-shot,) may 
 
( 
 
 30 
 
 be trusted to restrain the subjects of this realm of 
 whatever sects, in the nineteenth century, from re- 
 viving the theological labours of those two ancient 
 co-missionaries, Fire and Sword. 
 
 " I tcill be attacked (says O'Leary,) with the 
 '' council of Lateran, the wars of the Albigenses, the 
 " massacre of St. Bartholomew, &c. I am a Chris- 
 ** tian, and deny the transmigration of souls. I am 
 " no wise concerned in past transactions ; or, if my 
 ** relio-ion be charo:ed with them, I have in my hands 
 ''the cruel arms of retaliation."* Then let us be 
 just. Let us remember, whilst we accuse the 
 Roman Catholic religion of the atrocities of Queen 
 Mary, that we should not relish the hearing our 
 own charged with the murderous acts of her father 
 and brother. Henry the Eighth was the first 
 Protestant King of England ; yet what Papist is 
 there so wicked or so mad as to maintain that it is 
 a practice sanctioned by our religion to marry six 
 wives, divorce three, and behead two. And yet 
 this would be a mode of reasoning nearly as liberal, 
 as wise, and as true. Far different, however, from 
 the reigns of the three sovereigns of her house 
 immediately preceding her, was, with all its 
 
 * O'Leary's Remarks on Mr. Wesley's Letter. In quoting 
 from the works of this eloquent and patriotic Irishman, of course 
 I am not guilty of the arrogance of changing a word. I would 
 \enture, however, to suggest, that by the term of volition printed 
 in italics at the beginning of the sentence is meant only the sign of 
 the future tense. 
 
 31 
 
 violencies, that of Queen Elizabeth. She was 
 seldom a persecutor for mere religion ; and she 
 loved her country too well, and was too proud of it, 
 to content herself with being the Queen of only 
 one party in it, in order to become the oppressor of 
 the rest. She was arbitrary by the acclamation of 
 her people ; she was cruel from the dangers that 
 surrounded her. Her Parliament, it is true, de- 
 clared the corresponding with the see of Rome to 
 be high treason. But the proof that this was not 
 a law against the religion simply was that this law 
 was not extended to Ireland. She burned Papists, 
 it is true, in numbers sufficient, if not to balance, 
 at least to countenance, the persecutions of her 
 sister. But it appears that she seldom burned 
 them from a mere controversial impulse; it was 
 usually when she found one who favoured the 
 political views of the Queen of Scots, or the poli- 
 tical doctrines of the Jesuits of Spain, that she 
 took the short road to Justice, and destroyed him 
 as a Papist. But the Catholics of England were 
 not even in those days justly chargeable as a body 
 with joining either of these parties, or with being 
 disposed to obey the deposing bull of Pius V. 
 And the Spanish admiral Medina Sidonia knew 
 it, when he said that '' if he had landed he would 
 " have made no more distinction between Catholics 
 "and Protestants than what the point of his sword 
 ''would have made between their flesh." And 
 Queen Elizabeth knew it, and acted as one who 
 
 I 
 
32 
 
 38 
 
 knew it. For Catholics sat indiscriminately with 
 Protestants in her Parliaments; and she admitted 
 persons of all religious persuasions to her councils 
 and to the highest offices of the state. Lord 
 Pembroke, her Governor of Dover Castle and 
 Keeper of her Great Seal, was a Roman Catholic. 
 Lord Clifford, her Warden of the Scottish Marches, 
 was a Roman Catholic. And there is every reason 
 to believe that Lord Effingham, tvho commanded 
 her fleet against the Spanish armada, whose ban- 
 ners the Pope himself had blessed, was a Roman 
 Catholic. The history of the causes that led to 
 the severities she practised should be more fully 
 studied than it generally is, before Justice can, I 
 think, be done to the memory of this glorious 
 Princess. It tends, however, to establish this fact, 
 that generally these were '' acts of signal severity 
 " against those who were privily practising for 
 ^' Rome and Spain, and who, to attach the 
 '^ unlearned and meaner sort to their party in the 
 *' state, made religion a pretence^* 
 
 But if we acquit the Roman Catholic religion 
 of being essentially and uniformly a religion of 
 blood, what remains? That it disturbs the undi- 
 vided allegiance due to the sovereign, and intro- 
 
 ♦ See Sir Francis VValsingham's Letter; William Lord Bur- 
 leigh's " Execution of Justice in England j" also Dr. Birch's 
 *'View of the Negociations between England, France, and Brus- 
 sels;" also Lord Bolinbroke's ♦* Essays on English History,'* 
 Reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 1 
 
 duces a foreign and superior jurisdiction. This is 
 at least a milder charge, and one bearing a fairer 
 character of probability ; yet, if English history 
 be evidence, a charge equally untenable and un- 
 true. If I am told that there were treasonable 
 negociations between English Catholics and foreign 
 countries whilst their reliction was sufferins: under 
 active and fiery persecution in their own, I protest 
 against the nature of the evidence. It does not 
 touch the charge. While, by the penal system, 
 which lasted for more than a century and a half, the 
 English government pursued them as enemies, of 
 course they were enemies of the English govern- 
 ment. The extirpation of the Roman Catholic 
 religion was the avowed object of the Protestant 
 government; the overthrow, then, of the Pro- 
 testant government I take it for granted was 
 the first, and dearest, and deepest, as it was the 
 most natural, among the secret wishes of the 
 Roman Catholics. But I appeal to their conduct 
 since the mitigation of that system, and I stake the 
 cause upon the issue of that appeal. Nay, throuoh- 
 out the early history of this country, in the high 
 and palmy days of Popery, in the days when 
 emperors held the stirrup of a Pope, and kings did 
 homage to him for their crowns, from the time 
 when our Roman Catholic ancestors, in defiance 
 of the Pope, gave us Magna Charta, and the 
 Statutes of Mortmain and Provisors, and, in re- 
 jection of his Canon Law, recorded their immortal 
 
 c 
 
 *. 
 
 , I 
 
34 
 
 protest, '' Nolunuis leges," &c. down to the period of 
 the Reformation itself, shew me the time or the in- 
 stance in which the Roman Catholics of England 
 ever admitted or recognized the interference of the 
 Pope in matters of state between them and their 
 sovereign, and I give up the argument. 
 
 The history of Catholic England for centuries is 
 one of almost unceasing attempts on the part of 
 Popes, sometimes supported by the king, some- 
 times in opposition to the king, to obtain a temporal 
 ascendancy here ; but it is also the history of un- 
 ceasing, firm, and successful resistance on the part 
 of Catholic England. Again, J say, shew me 
 that I am wrong in this fact, and I give up the 
 argument. 
 
 But it is said, and from high authority too, that to 
 a king who is not a Roman Catholic, they cannot 
 bear other than a divided allegiance. I say the 
 charge is unsupported by fact, and, if it were true, 
 would not be a very discreet charge to make against 
 more than seven millions of people, now livino* 
 within the allegiance of the king of this empire. 
 I say, further, that it is disproved wherever Roman 
 Catholics are admitted (and that is every where 
 but here,) to a full enjoyment of civil rights under 
 sovereigns not of their creed. I say that it is 
 disproved in Prussia, disproved in Denmark, 
 disproved in Sweden, disproved in Hanover, dis- 
 proved in the Netherlands, disproved throughout 
 the Russian Empire, and proved nowhere. 
 
 
 Vi 
 
 B 
 
 35 
 
 It is a charge not imputed by the laws of 
 England, nor by the oaths which exclude the 
 Catholics; for those oaths impute only spiritual 
 errors. But it is imputed, which is more to the 
 purpose, by those persons who approve of the ex- 
 cluding oaths, and wish them retained. But, to 
 the whole of this imputation ; even if no other 
 instance could be adduced ; as far as a strong and 
 remarkable example can prove the negative of an 
 assumption which there is not a single example to 
 support,— the full, and sufficient, and incontestible 
 answer is Canada. Canada, which, until you can 
 destroy the memory of all that now remains to 
 you of your sovereignty on the North American 
 continent, is an answer practical, memorable, 
 difficult to be accounted for, but blazing as the 
 sun itself in sight of the whole world, to the whole 
 charge of divided allegiance. At your conquest of 
 Canada, you found it Roman Catholic ; you had 
 to choose for her a constitution in Church and 
 State. You were wise enough not to thwart 
 public opinion. Your ow^n conduct towards 
 Presbyterianism in Scotland was an example for 
 imitation ; your own conduct towards Catholicism 
 in Ireland was a beacon for avoidance; and in 
 Canada you established and endowed the relio-ion 
 of the people. Canada was your only Roman 
 Catholic colony. Your other colonies revolted ; 
 they called on a Catholic power to support them, 
 and they achieved their independence. Catholic 
 
 c2 
 
 /ft 
 
i '. ' -. 
 
 36 
 
 Canada, with what Lord Liverpool would call her 
 half-allegiance, alone stood by you. She fought 
 by your side against the interference of Catholic 
 France. To reward and encourage her loyalty, 
 you endowed in Canada bishops to say mass, 
 and to ordain others to say mass, whom, at that 
 very time, your laws would have hanged for say- 
 ing mass in England; and Canada is still yours, 
 in spight of Catholic France, in spight of her 
 spiritual obedience to the Pope, in spight of Lord 
 Liverpool's argument, and in spight of the inde- 
 pendence of all the states that surround her. 
 This is the only trial you have made. Where 
 you allow to the Roman Catholics their religion 
 undisturbed, it has proved itself to be compatible 
 with the most faithful allegiance. It is only where 
 you have placed allegiance and religion before them 
 as a dilemma, that they have preferred (as who will 
 say they ought not?) their religion to their alle- 
 giance. How then stands the imputation? Dis- 
 proved by history, disproved in all states where 
 both relio:ions co-exist, and in both hemispheres, 
 and asserted in an exposition by Lord Liverpool, 
 solemnly and repeatedly abjured by all Catholics, 
 of the discipline of their church. 
 
 That their religion is one that tends to civil 
 slavery, is a position difficult to maintain by proof. 
 Take the small but free states of Italy and Dalmatia 
 as an instance, which for ages preserved their 
 national independence, till abolished, some by that 
 
 •j-<.. 
 
 (»,i. 
 ,->»-'. 
 
 37 
 
 power before which all the large states of the 
 continent bowed, and others by that subsequent 
 fury of partition and annexation which has changed 
 the relation of almost all the small ones. Take, as 
 an instance, among those " monuments of the 
 justice of Europe, the asylum of peace, of industry, 
 and of literature, the organs of public reason, the re- 
 fuge of oppressed innocence and persecuted truth,"* 
 among the republics of Switzerland, take the seven 
 Catholic Cantons, who were the first in arms for 
 liberty against the invader, and the last to be 
 subdued. Let the sad and bloody tragedy of 
 Poland shew that their religion, although main- 
 taining as essential the duty of spiritual subjection, 
 is not incompatible with the purest and most 
 gallant love of political freedom. Let our own 
 constitution, founded, declared, and preserved, by 
 our Catholic ancestors, speak for their children, 
 who are excluded from some of its most important 
 benefits. Public liberty, though it may depend on 
 some abstract and remote principles for support, 
 and though many are the passions and prejudices 
 that may be excited to endanger it, is not, in 
 England at least, to be put to hazard by mere 
 tenets of spiritual belief. But our systems and 
 habits, and the difficulties and risks through 
 which our liberty has been reared, have made 
 our love of it a very jealous love, and it is not 
 
 * Mackiulosirs Defence of M. Peltier, p. 88. 
 
38 
 
 much to be wondered at that, in searching our 
 stores for weapons of vituperation against the 
 Roman Catholic religion, we should sometimes be 
 tempted by a climax as untrue as this, ''Popery 
 every where, and at all times, the code of Civil 
 Slavery." 
 
 But neither the tyranny endured throughout the 
 reigns of the Plantagenets, nor the slavish doctrines 
 acquiesced in during the reigns of the first of 
 the Tudor or the last of the Stuart kings, can be 
 justly attributed to the influence of the religion 
 which then prevailed. The courtly Protestants of 
 the days of James the First were as lavish in 
 blasphemously assigning to a weak and detestable 
 man the attribute of divine delegation, as were 
 the courtlv Catholics of other davs. It was not a 
 Popish parliament which told James the First that 
 *' they were but as the breath of his nostrils ;" nor 
 w as it a Popish bishop who said of him, " he verily 
 believed he spake with the spirit of God." Such 
 were excesses of arbitrary and corrupt courts in all 
 ao*es. In 1683, the decree and address of our two 
 universities, the former published on the very 
 mornins: of Lord Russel's execution, not only 
 asserted the divine right of kings, and the duty of 
 non-resistance in subjects, as doctrines maintained 
 by themselves, and taught to the youth placed 
 under their care, but declared the contrary position 
 to be ''impious and heretical."* This extra- 
 
 * See Oxford Decree and Caf>.bridji;L' Atldress, lGb>5. 
 
 39 
 
 ordinary display of principles appearing, by a 
 singular coincidence of dates, just five years after 
 the enactment of the oaths excluding Roman 
 Catholics, and just five years before the revolution. 
 Nor is this fact less singular, that, still nearer that 
 event, on the bill for the exclusion of the Duke of 
 York, the whole bench of Protestant Bishops 
 voted according to the wishes of the sovereign and 
 the heir presumptive ; albeit, for the admitting a 
 notorious and avowed Papist to the throne of these 
 realms.* " And the clergy," says Burnet, " set 
 " up a higher note, with such zeal for the duke's 
 " succession, as if a Popish king had been a special 
 " blessing from heaven, to be much longed for by 
 "a Protestant church. "t Now, would it not be 
 most untrue if a Catholic, using the " cruel 
 arms of retaliation," were to declare that such 
 instances of profligate baseness proceeded from 
 some time-serving spirit inherent in Protestantism, 
 or that it was owing to the genius of our religion 
 that Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, which were 
 limited monarchies in their Catholic times, became 
 absolute when they became Protestant. 
 
 It is said that their religion is intolerant wherever 
 it is the religion of the state. Not only this is not 
 true, but, if by this is meant that in by far the 
 greater part of Catholic Europe the governments 
 
 * Burnet. Own Times, vol. 2, page 482. 
 t Own Times, vol. 2, page 501. 
 
40 
 
 do not freely tolerate the professors of other creeds, 
 I say the direct contrary is the truth ; and I appeal 
 to facts to which those who have not industry and 
 fairness to look, and still hold this language, 
 impeach both their candour and their wisdom. 
 In very much the greater part of Popish Europe, 
 (and I say "Popish,'' in order to deal fairly and 
 exclude all Russia, of which, however, the same 
 thing is true, and where transubstantiation is 
 potently believed, and a prodigious number of 
 saints worshipped,) throughout the whole Austrian 
 Empire, and French monarchy, Protestants are 
 not onlv bv law tolerated in their worship, but 
 admitted in common with Catholics to all the 
 privileges in the state to which Catholics are now 
 petitioning to be admitted in England, But, with 
 reo-ard to France, how much am I understating 
 the fact ! A complete establishment, beneficed by 
 the state, is at this hour enjoyed by the Protestant 
 clergy in France. Equal to that enjoyed by the 
 established Roman Catholic clergy of that country? 
 No ! For their salaries are much larger. By the 
 law of France, every clergyman is salaried by the 
 government, the amount being regulated by the 
 extent of his cure, and by the comparative expence 
 of living in the part of the country where it is 
 situated ; so as to secure to each a decent and 
 liberal maintenance. The clergy of their national 
 church being by its discipline forbidden to marry, 
 are provided for as single men. The Protestant 
 
 M 
 
 V 
 
 
 41 
 
 clergy, being by their discipline permitted to marry, 
 and being therefore presumed by the government 
 to be married men, receive each a salary nearly 
 one third larger than what is given to a priest of 
 the established church. Now if this be untrue, let 
 me be convicted. But if it be true, I call on every 
 Protestant brawler for shame to be cautious in 
 what he says upon the comparative liberalitv of 
 Catholic and Protestant States to their Dissenters. 
 With the exception of the Pope himself, there are 
 but three sovereigns now in Europe in whose do- 
 minions a difference in religion is held to be an 
 objection in law to the filling all civil functions ; — 
 Ferdinand of Spain, Sultan Selim of Turkey, and 
 the King of England. 
 
 Av, but there is a oreat difference between 
 tolerating Protestants and tolerating Papists. 
 What is justice and right for the one is not neces- 
 sarily justice and right for the other. On these 
 points *' your shop (as Mr. Burke says) is full of 
 *' false weights and measures ; and tlie adding or 
 *' taking away the name of Protestant or Papist 
 alters all the principles of equity, policy, and 
 prudence ; and leaves no common data on which 
 
 u 
 
 (( 
 
 '* we can reason." 
 
 Let it not, then, be said that I aiu wantonly 
 contrasting the narrowness of our own policy with 
 the comparative liberality of Roman Catholic go- 
 vernments, if I give an outline of the condition of 
 persons of their communion with us. I wish the 
 
42 
 
 contrast did not exist, and 1 wish that I could now 
 witness the astonishment with which every man 
 in EnHand will, I am convinced, in a very few 
 years hence, look back upon the disgraceful ano- 
 maly which our Popery Code has so long exhi- 
 bited ; standing, like the " tall bully" of the city 
 of London, a monument of senseless calumny and 
 injustice, eminent and alone in its shame amidst 
 all the surrounding institutions of our national 
 prosperity, strength, and glory. 
 
 I believe that what remains of that code 
 is not generally known. It should be known 
 universally. Look at home,— to England. The 
 Roman Catholics are not only precluded from sit- 
 ting and voting in either House of Parliament, 
 they cannot in England or Scotland fill any office, 
 the lowest, of civil trust, under the crown. A 
 Catholic cannot in this island act as a magistrate. 
 The Duke of Norfolk at the coronation tendered 
 to the Kinjr his fealty in the name of all the peers 
 of the realm, of whom he is the first. As such, he 
 takes his stand nearest to the throne. But, though 
 first by the side of his sovereign, and highest 
 among the nobles of the land, he is disqualified 
 from the more select honours of a seat at petty 
 session. Of the names that are attached to Magna 
 Charta, every one that still survives the lapse of 
 time survives in the person of a Roman Catholic. 
 But the names that attested and ratified the first 
 title-deed of Englisii liberty cannot now authorise 
 
 1 
 
 43 
 
 i 
 
 the relief of a parish pauper. In this island a Catho- 
 lic cannot act as an exciseman. The excise and 
 customs of Great Britain and Ireland are now con- 
 solidated. In Ireland it is not held necessary to 
 ascertain the dogmatical tenets of a man, in order 
 to qualify him for collecting the revenue ; but let 
 him be removed to England, and not a bale can be 
 landed or barrel gauged unless transubstantiation 
 shall have been previously renounced, and invoca- 
 tion of saints declared idolatrous, on the corporal 
 oath of both tide-waiter and ganger. 
 
 The Roman Catholics of Great Britain have no 
 vote at an election. They live under laws made 
 and taxes imposed by a body in which they are 
 not represented. In this respect, and in every 
 other except the inheritance of land, they are as 
 aliens. Well then, if they suffer under the disqua- 
 lifications of foreigners, have they the privileges 
 of foreigners ? I have always considered the sum^ 
 mary of Esiglish freedom to consist in the protec- 
 tion given to our rights, — 1st, by the being repre- 
 sented in Parliament ; — and 2dly, by the being able 
 to claim, in cases of life, liberty, or property, a trial 
 by our peers. Having, then, by our laws deprived 
 the foreigner of some of the higher benefits of 
 English citizenship, we have felt it just to give 
 him a special protection in compensation : the 
 power to claim a jury half of foreigners, his fellows 
 in rcvspect of privilege. A French Catholic, a 
 Spaniard, an Italian, may claim a jury half of 
 
44 
 
 Catholic foreigners. A Catholic, born a citizen, 
 but by your laws disclairaed as a fellow citizen, is 
 amenable in property, liberty, and life, to a tribunal 
 before which he alone cannot claim to be tried by 
 Ills fellows. This grievance he sufll'ers, then, not 
 because he happens to be a Catholic, but because 
 he happens to be an Englishman too. And is this 
 not a grievance? Is it no grievance in the pre- 
 sent state of Ireland for a Catholic to be in 
 peril of being put on his trial for his life before an 
 Orange Jury, whose deep and unmixed hate he 
 cannot claim to neutralize by the introduction of 
 one fellow Catholic? But, even here in England, 
 if you believe of the Roman Catholic what you say 
 of him, he is not safe in your hands on his deliver- 
 ance for life or death. Branded as he is with your 
 suspicion and contempt, as a persecutor in his 
 faith, and as a traitor to his allegiance and to 
 his oath, how can you enter the jury-box with 
 the unprejudiced feelings of his peer legally com- 
 petent to pass upon his case ? 
 
 Many of those who declaim, and some of those 
 who think they reason, on these subjects, believe 
 that there is some law which enacts in so many 
 words that no Roman Catholic shall sit in either 
 House of Parliament, &c. Now there is no such 
 law. There are, indeed, declarations concerning 
 matters of spiritual belief, which every Member 
 must make when he takes his seat, and to which we 
 know that no sincere Roman Catholic can sub- 
 
 
 li 
 
 45 
 
 scribe. Why, then, do I say that there is no law 
 that enacts that he shall not sit in Parliament, 
 if these declarations have, in fact, the same 
 effect? Simply to shew that these declarations 
 can disqualify him only so long as he shall have 
 virtue enough to sacrifice every temporal advan- 
 tage to his honesty and his reverence for the obli- 
 gations of an oath and an affirmation. And yet it 
 has been advanced, and in our recollection too, 
 (although I must say for our opponents in Parlia- 
 ment, that 1 believe there has not been a man there 
 for many years that would hazard such an opinion 
 in public,) that Roman Catholics keep no faith 
 with Protestants, and that their priests will ab- 
 solve them from all guilt of perjury for a false oath 
 taken to advance the interests of their church. 
 Then let such objectors state their own mode of 
 reasoning fairly and intelligibly. Thus : We 
 would exclude the Papists as unworthy of trust, 
 and given to perjury. We therefore desire to be 
 enabled to exclude them by tests which can 
 exclude only those who are incapable of deceiving 
 us or forswearing therr selves. 
 
 We make treaties with Austria, Spain, France, 
 Italy, and the young republics of South America; 
 we toast " No Popery," as long as we can stammer, 
 in wine, (ungrateful as we are,) the very creature 
 of a treaty with Portugal ; and thus we admit that 
 engagements are binding upon them. In our own 
 country we act upon the testimony of Catholics in 
 
46 
 
 47 
 
 f 1 
 
 cases affecting even life ; and thus we admit that 
 oaths are binding upon them. We established 
 and endowed the Roman Catholic religion in 
 Canada, and equality of privilege has been given to 
 it in Hanover by the same August Personage that 
 sways the sceptre of these realms; and thus it is 
 admitted that there is nothing in that religion to 
 interfere with the allegiance of subjects to His 
 Majesty's person and government. 
 
 But a Roman Catholic is an idolater ! In what- 
 ever terms a direct and total denial of a fact can 
 be the most distinctly expressed, in those will I as 
 a Protestant deny and repel this outrageous impu- 
 tation upon my fellow Christians of the Roman 
 Catholic persuasion. In one sense, indeed, I do hold 
 the adoration of the Consecrated Elements in the 
 sacriGce of the Mass to be idolatrous. That is, 
 disbelieving as I do the doctrine of Transubstan- 
 tiation, and not being able to discover authority for 
 addressing the throne of God through the interces- 
 sion of Saints, in me such acts would be idolatrous. 
 But in Catholics, who believe in the efficacy of 
 such intercession, it is the more reverential ap- 
 proach to the Deity through those means, and 
 therefore not idolatry ;— in Catholics, who believe 
 in the actual bodily presence of the Deity in the 
 bread and wine, it is the worship of the Deity in 
 those elements, and therefore not idolatry. But, 
 as a specimen of the tone and temper in which 
 some persons permit themselves to indulge on 
 
 > 1^ 1 
 t 
 
 these subjects, here is a monstrous creed of three 
 parts, to which both you and I have in our time 
 heard it roundly asserted that every Roman Catho- 
 lic in Christendom subscribes: — A creed that en- 
 joins idolatry ; a creed that annuls all bond of good 
 faith entered into with heretics ; a creed that justi- 
 fies the deposal or assassination of heretic princes. 
 Suppose such a charge were published against 
 any individual of that persuasion. Let us suppose 
 a libel published, not against the Duke of Norfolk, 
 nor Lord Shrewsbury, nor Lord Arundell, nor any 
 of those great historical names the very mention of 
 which has too much the sound of declamation, but 
 published against the poorest, meanest, most un- 
 known man in England. That he is an idolater ; 
 which, if believed, would subject him to contempt 
 and reprobation from all who worship an eternal 
 invisible God. That he regards not the obligation 
 of his word or his oath ; which, if believed, would 
 banish him from all trust and communion with his 
 fellow creatures. That he onlv waits the occasion 
 for treason or murder ; the greatest of crimes 
 against society, and the only crimes against which 
 our law pronounces a sentence extending beyond 
 death itself. Is there any doubt that in the Court 
 of King's Bench any jury would inflict on such a 
 libeller the severest penalty by which the law of 
 England protects the fortunes and fame of those 
 who live within its influence? The libeller, then, 
 whose fate this would inevitablv be if he were so 
 
'™^ 
 
 48 
 
 to malign any one human being, is unpunished 
 only when he proclaims the slander against seven 
 millions and more of British subjects. Idolatry 
 is the breach of the first and second Command- 
 ments ; murder is the breach of the sixth ; injustice 
 and fraud of the eighth. The wilful, deliberate, 
 habitual, rejection of four Commandments is a 
 serious imputation to cast upon about nineteen- 
 twentieths of the Christian world. We should do 
 well to remember, that on the same Divine Autho- 
 rity, and in the same Decalogue, there is another 
 Commandment, " Thou shalt not bear false wit- 
 ness against thy neighbour." 
 
 But we are invited to look at certain ancient 
 Bulls of Popes, and Canons of Councils, and 
 Apophthegmsof Popish doctors. I have occasionally 
 so done ; very superficially, certainly ; but, if I had 
 never seen one, I should esteem myself, with re- 
 gard to the question we are considering, to have 
 made by so much a more profitable use of my 
 time; and, with respect to any practical inference, 
 I say it not carelessly nor flippantly, but very much 
 in sober earnest, that I think it matter of very un- 
 necessary solicitude what they may contain, [t 
 appears to me more reasonable to judge men by 
 the evidence of their conduct than by that of im- 
 puted tenets of discipline, adopted, if ever adopted 
 ^ at all, in times of much fury, retained, perhaps, in 
 a spirit of some obstinacy aggravated by persecu- 
 tion, and construed by us without much allowance 
 
 ■4,- 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 49 
 
 for the spirit of the times, or even for the idiom of 
 the lan«^uage in which they were delivered. Let 
 us make it our own case. The Church of England 
 would repel with anger and scorn, and most justly, 
 any attempt to fix upon her the doctrine of Exclusive 
 Salvation ; although the accusing party were to refer 
 to a declaration which we are enjoined to make 
 publicly fourteen times in the year, pronouncing 
 that all who differ from us in our human definition 
 of a divine mystery, " without doubt shall perish 
 "everlastingly.'* The Church of England would 
 repel with anger and scorn, and most justly, any 
 attempt to fix upon her the doctrine of a power of 
 Unconditional Absolution in her priests ; although 
 the accusing party were to refer to the wording of 
 an absolution which she originally derived from the 
 Romish Church, but which she uses with this sin- 
 irular difference, that in the Romish service there is a 
 material condition expressed, which, in the service 
 of the Churchof England, has been omitted.* Do I 
 say thisin reproach of our Church? Indeed I do not. 
 1 hope I am as firm in my attachment to the re- 
 formed religion, as those whose protestantism is of 
 a more exclusive character. But I believe that 
 
 * Form of Ahsohition in the service for the Visitalionof tl;e Sick. 
 After exhortation to confession, and scltiiig forth God's mercy to 
 tliose who rrpcnl, it proceeds, "■ And by his authority romniitted io 
 •' me, I absolve tl.ee from all thy sins, in the name, &c." In the 
 Romish service, throngiiout, there is no fi)rm of Absolution to which, 
 in the body of the absolving clause itself, this condition is not 
 annexed ; "as far as I have power, and tiiou hast need." 
 
 D 
 
50 
 
 there never was a code of Church discipline esta- 
 blished and upheld by human institution, however 
 purified by the efforts of good men, that can bear 
 to have every part of its history, nay of its written 
 law, critically and hostUely commented upon. 
 
 I wish to direct protestant attention particularly to 
 the following vow, to be found, doubtless toourgreat 
 scandal and peril, on the books of an order which has 
 long subsisted, and still subsists, in this land. It is 
 taken by each member upon his admission : ''That 
 *' well and truly he shall accomplish and entertain 
 "all the statutes, points, and ordinances; and of all 
 '* this shall make a general oath, all and so as if 
 •' they were read to him from point to pointy and 
 ^^from article to article, swearing and promising 
 " upon the Holy Gospels for to keep and entertain 
 *' them, tcithout any fraud or delusion, and upon 
 '*this he shall touch the book, and kiss the Cross.'' 
 Among these ordinances, so deeply sworn to, I find 
 that, having duly kept, by processions, &c. the 
 feasts and vigils of certain saints (unless such feasts, 
 &c " should fall out on any fish-day or fasting-day," 
 or interfere with ''divine service ordained by the 
 " Holy Church for the double feasts of St. Mark, 
 ^' Philip, or Jacob, or the invention of the Holy 
 " Cross,") every member is bound, on the feast of 
 the patron saint of the order, to "go and hear 
 "divine service solemnly sung for the souls of all 
 " the members of the order tchich be departed and 
 ^^ deceased, and for all Christian souls."' Also, 
 
 ji 
 
 5J 
 
 that thirteen clerks and thirteen choristers are now^ 
 maintained, in this protestant land, and in a county 
 adjoining to our own, and fearfully near to the 
 person of his most sacred Majesty himself, at the 
 charge of the same order, "for to sing and to pray 
 " unto God for the prosperity of the order, and also 
 "for the souls of all the order departed^ and for all 
 " Christian souls.'' To these Popish observances, 
 a o-reat number of the first men of this country, 
 (some of whose names would be thought a suflfi- 
 cient security against such encroachments,) are 
 bound by solemn and stringent oath " for to keep 
 "and entertain them without fraud or delusion," 
 except in such, from which, by a later provision, 
 they " shall have received a dispensation" ivom the 
 supreme head of the order. And no dispensation 
 from these observances, as I find upon anxious en- 
 quiry, is ever given, although (what makes it 
 worse) dispensations are regularly given upon other 
 minor points, by no means affecting any of these 
 religious duties, under the whole weight of which, 
 therefore, the members of this order are left.* This 
 is not the society of Jesuits at Stoneyhurst, nor, 
 as I am credibly informed, are the principal obliga- 
 tions of this oath observed. But why are they not? 
 and why are the illustrious members of this order 
 not therefore held perjured? Why, because we do 
 
 * See the oath of the Knights Companions of the Order of 
 the Garter. Statute 12, et seq. 
 
 I 
 
62 
 
 not judge men by words only, but by the fair, 
 honest, customary meaning of an engagement, as 
 explained by the genius of the times, and ex- 
 plained by the known interpretation put upon it by 
 the parties who undertake, and by those who 
 impose it. I only ask the same liberal interpreta- 
 tion of the obsolete obligations of all other Popish 
 ordinances. 
 
 fn stating opinions upon a general and elemen- 
 tary view of so large a subject as this, it is difficult 
 to keep within the limits of a few of the principal 
 objections popularly urged by our adversaries. To 
 take, one by one, all that, at different times, have 
 been grounded upon irrelevant apprehensions, upon 
 inconclusive premises, or upon imperfect or untrue 
 information, is a task to which, fortunately for the 
 patience of readers, the memory of the writer 
 cannot extend. Am I desired to say one word 
 upon that strangest of all grounds of hesitation, 
 the wording of the Coronation Oath? I should 
 think not ; plainly because the Coronation Oath 
 cannot be tortured into bearing any reference 
 to this, or to any other question that can 
 ever become matter of legislative interference. It 
 is among those observations which no man can be 
 found to make, who has the slightest recollection 
 gf what the station is that the sovereign of England 
 bears in the constitution, as one of the three legis- 
 lative powers of the realm, or who has ever read 
 
 53 
 
 that Oath itself, and the debates upon its framing 
 and enactment. I will say, then, on this subject, 
 one word only, and it shall be one of reference. I 
 refer to the debates of those who framed 
 the Oath, to show that, though such a cavil was 
 not unforeseen by them, it was dismissed as too 
 flimsy to call for even a proviso, and that Mr. 
 Somers, Mr. Finch, Mr. Treby, Sir Robert Sawyer, 
 Mr. Hampden, and your own ancestor. Sir Thomas 
 Lee, and all the others who took a part in that great 
 discussion,although differing as to the mode of word- 
 ing the oath, yet were unanimous in their opinion of 
 the absurdity of supposing that any one of the three 
 branches of the le2:islature could binditself b\ oath 
 against passing any bill that might hereafter at any 
 time appear to be just or expedient to the Common- 
 wealth.* The Coronation Oath merely obliges the 
 sovereign, as the first magistrate in the state, to 
 observe and execute the laws ; and an amendment 
 and proviso were rejected by those to whom we 
 must look as y?r5/ authority to expound, — namely 
 the framers of it, — distinctly upon this ground, 
 that '^ii cannot be imagined that any bill from 
 ''parliament can ever go to destroy the legislative 
 ** power." 
 
 And here I take leave of the subject of the 
 
 * Debates on going into Committee of tlie House of Commons on 
 the Coronation Oath, and on the third reading of the same, 1693. 
 — Cobbctt's Parliamentary History, vol. 5, page 199 c< 5C7. and 
 page 208, et seq. 
 
 I 
 
54 
 
 objections the most generally urged, on which if I 
 have been tedious I cannot consent to take more 
 than one half of the bhime, dividing it with those 
 by whom such objections are generally put forward. 
 We may, I think, collect from what we know of 
 the ordinary feelings of men, that, by admitting all 
 to a community of political benefits, we should re- 
 move a material impediment that now presents 
 itself to the advances of proselytism to our esta- 
 blished mode of worship ; particularly assuming, 
 as we do, that it is the purest, and tliat the dis- 
 franchised mode is supported only by superstition 
 and priestcraft. By external pressure and restraint 
 things are compacted as well in the moral as in the 
 physical world. Where a sect is at spiritual 
 variance with the Established Church, it only re- 
 quires an abridgment of civil privileges to render 
 it at once a political faction. Its members become 
 instantly pledged, some from enthusiasm, some 
 from resentment, and many from honourable 
 shame, to cleave w Ith desperate fondness to the suf- 
 fering fortunes of an hereditary religion. Is this 
 human nature, or is it not? Is it a natural or 
 an unnatural feeling for the representative of 
 an ancient Roman Catholic family, even if in his 
 heart he rejected the controverted tenets of his 
 early faith, to scorn an open conformity to our's, 
 so long as such conformity brings with it the irre- 
 moveable suspicion that faith and conscience may 
 have bowed to the base hope of temporal advantage. 
 
 65 
 
 Every man must feel and act for himself: but, in 
 my opinion, a good man might be put to difficulty 
 to determine whether more harm is not done by 
 the example of one changing his religion to his 
 worldly advantage, than good by his openly pro- 
 fessing conformity from what we think error to 
 what we think truth. Whether, with no advan- 
 tages of superior privilege, the Reformed Church 
 would attract converts from that of Rome, it is not 
 my purpose to dispute : we must hope that she 
 would. But, in this respect, she has not now a fair 
 chance in the mind of any Catholic who feels 
 what is due to his public reputation. To be useful 
 to the state, he must not only respect his own 
 motives in conforming, but must teach others to 
 respect them also. All, then, who give proof of 
 their virtue by resisting temptation, we, as 
 far as we can, render useless to the state 
 by disfranchisement. All who conform we 
 render suspicious, if not criminal, and thus 
 useless the other way. Add to this, that we 
 employ the very means the most likely to place 
 them under the absolute dominion of their priests. 
 We take from them every object of honourable 
 ambition ; we doom them to the martyrdom, as 
 far as our laws have power to inflict it, of popular 
 scorn from the cradle to tlie grave ; we leave them 
 a separate class, without one public occupation, or 
 one aspiring hope, in the midst of a busy and 
 
56 
 
 ardent-spirited people, and then we are astonished 
 if they make a proud display of what, failing to bo 
 a stigma of reprobation, has become to them a 
 badge of honourable suffering, and, if tiiey submit 
 themselves with peculiar devotedness to those 
 teachers who suffer with tliem for conscience sake. 
 Depend upon it, that although great persecution, 
 "coming down like the wolf on the fold," may 
 scatter and destroy the flock, little persecution is 
 the surest watch-dog to keep them together. We 
 bark round them, and scare and hem them in from 
 that association of feelings and pursuits, which 
 would naturally blend them into one people and 
 kindred with ourselves. It was thus with the 
 Huguenots in France ; it was thus with the Pro- 
 testants in Holland under the Spanish government, 
 and afterwards with the Catholics in Holland, 
 under the Stadtholders. It w^as thus with the Cove- 
 nanters in Scotland ; and thus it has ever been 
 with a people, whom, in our fear and distress, we 
 have flattered, — in our security, we have insulted 
 and oppressed, — in our adversity, we have told to 
 hope, — in our prosperity, wc have left to despair, 
 — our own unhappy and much-injured people of 
 Ireland. 
 
 The Huguenots were long a persecuted body in 
 France. When they were many and strong, they 
 strove to regain their rights by the sword; when 
 they were few and weak, by secret and patient 
 
 57 
 
 machination. Thus they were whilst excluded ; 
 they ceased to be so when restored to their natural 
 station and functions as citizens. They were 
 twice excluded and twice restored, and at each 
 trial the result was the same ; until, finally, a just 
 and healing policy gave to their great men, to 
 their Conde, Catinat, and Turenne, the pri- 
 vilege of employing their talents for their country's 
 glory, and in part repaired the mischiefs which the 
 revocation of the Edict of Nantes had caused her, 
 by dooming her protestant subjects, soldiers, arti- 
 sans, and statesmen, to exile, or to disgust and 
 alienation at home. 
 
 Nearly the same was the history of the Pro- 
 testants of Hungary before the decrees of the 
 Empress Maria Theresa and of the Emperor Joseph 
 the Second in their behalf; while the history of 
 Scotland and the Covenant is unprofitably indeed 
 read by those who fail to learn from it Viow fearful 
 is the policy that would govern by exacting ob- 
 servances repugnant to popular prejudice or re- 
 ligious scruple. Archbishop Laud attempted by 
 force the overthrow of the Kirk : he made religion 
 a state engine : he failed to produce conformity : 
 he did produce civil war. He kindled a torch in 
 Scotland, which he lived to see spread a confla- 
 gration through the empire, and involve in utter 
 destruction the hierarchy and monarchy of this 
 country. It was near half a century before, by 
 
 r 
 
 *i;lj 
 
58 
 
 establishing Presbyterianism in Scotland, that 
 
 tranquillity was restored, which might have been 
 
 preserved by allowing to the Presbyterians their 
 
 civil rights and privileges untouched by the tests 
 of our own Church. 
 
 But Ireland, — poor Ireland ! — that melancholy 
 monument of centuries of misgovernment ! From 
 the earliest times of her connexion with England, 
 her character has been mistaken, her affections 
 outraged, and her hopes cruelly and foully betrayed. 
 By the treaty of Limerick, 1693, it was stipulated 
 that their Majesties should endeavour to procure 
 from parliament the re-admission of the Irish 
 Catholics to all the privileges they enjoyed under 
 Charles II.; that they should have their property 
 restored ; and should have liberty to keep arms in 
 their houses for their defence. On the faith of 
 this, and other conditions, Limerick surrendered to 
 a general who had received instructions from 
 government to grant any terms, that so the war 
 might be ended. And though the French fleet 
 appeared off the mouth of the Shannon before the 
 city was taken possession of, the brave garrison re- 
 fused to tarnish their honour by breaking the Ca- 
 pitulation which their governor had signed. Alas, 
 for our part in that history ! No endeavours were 
 ever used, such as kings sometimes use with par- 
 liaments; no property was restored ; but further con- 
 fiscations were the same year made, in behalf of the 
 
 k 
 
 59 
 
 
 very officers in the conquering army who were 
 parties to the treaty ; and, in 1703. an act was 
 passed, enabling any man, by conformity, to rob 
 his Catholic father, brother, or most distant kins- 
 man, of his whole property; and oaths were im- 
 posed, against w^hich the Irish had been expressly 
 protected by the Ninth Article of the^ Treaty.* 
 And are we surprised that the Irish are firmly 
 Roman Catholics, or firmly anything which we are 
 not, and which it has been the object of our in- 
 effectual violence for centuries to make them ? A 
 country which has ever been ruled as a conquered 
 province ; which we never indulged with a hope, 
 but when we had some temporary advantage to 
 secure ; which we never gratified with a boon, but 
 when we had some temporary danger to fear. Is 
 this over-stated ? If our concessions do not always 
 stand in the relation to our necessities of effect to 
 cause, at least the coincidence has always been such 
 as to impress the Irish with an opinion, the most 
 perilous which a nation can well conceive, that all 
 which has hitherto been gained for them, has 
 been gained by alarm, and nothing from sympathy, 
 grace, or sense of justice.*!* And the union ! Foully 
 
 ♦ For the History and Articles of the Treaty of Limerick, see 
 Parnell's Hist, of the Penal Laws, page 4, et seq. And the several 
 arguments of Sir T. Butler, Counsellor Malone, and Sir Stephen 
 Rice, before ihe parliament of Ireland, Id. Appendix, No. 1. 
 
 t Four great acts have passed for relieving them from active per- 
 secution : the first in 1778, during the struggle with America, when 
 the cause of the United States was becoming formidably popular in 
 
i 
 
 60 
 
 was Ireland cheated of the one great benefit licld 
 out to her as the price of that Act, which, whatever 
 may have been its merits as a measure of imperial 
 policy, deprived her of the last jewel of her ancient 
 crown, deprived her of the pride of separate 
 legislation, and effaced her name from the catalogue 
 of nations. The Irish parliament bargained with 
 Eno"land to surrender its own existence and the in- 
 dependence of its country for advantages of no 
 fanciful sort, which were duly paid to the majority 
 
 Ireland, and imniedialely after the news of General lUirgoyne's 
 defeat at Saratoga. The sc«^on<l, in 1783, shortly after the recog- 
 nition of American independence, and when deputies from sixty 
 thousand men in arms, — the volunteers of Ireland,— had held their 
 memorable convention at Diingannon, to petition for a redress of 
 grievances. The third, in 1791, soon after the formation of the 
 National Convention in France, and when corresponding societies 
 were widely established in England and Ireland. The fourth, in 1793, 
 immediately after theFrenchDecree of Fraternization,and the bloody 
 tragedy of tlie Freach King's death, which had taken place in the 
 preceding January. In 1792, a petition for onh/ a limited Elective 
 Franchise was rejected by a large majority of the Irish parliament, 
 every corporation in Ireland exi)ressing a desire for the perpetunl 
 exclusion of the Roman Catholic body. The ses.sion of 1793 opened 
 with a speech from the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Westmoreland, re- 
 commending the concession of the Elective Franchise, cn/iV^, which 
 was accordingly carried. In 1795, Lord Fitzwilliam was sent over 
 as Lord Lieutenant, to grant further concessions, and settle public 
 discontents; on the strength of which the largest supply was voted 
 that ever passed an Irish parliament. The supply being granted. 
 Lord Fitzwilliam was recalled, and the subject of further concessions 
 not revived, until it became desirable to urge with efl'ect the question 
 of a Legislative Union. See Lord Fitzwilliam's Letter to Lord 
 Carlile, published 1795, and his Protest in the English House oC 
 Lords the same year. 
 
 61 
 
 of that assembly, before the majority voted for the 
 union. But Cathoh'c Emancipation was the con- 
 sideration held out to the people, and the people 
 were cajoled. The sale was completed, the transfer 
 made; and we have not fulfilled our part of the 
 engagement. In honour and in good faith, we owe 
 Catholic Emancipation to Ireland.* 
 
 ♦ Catholic Emancipation was not directli/ promised to the Irish as 
 a condition of the union j but they were encouraged in the belief ih^i 
 it was a condition. By many of the supporters of the government 
 in Ireland at that time it was so described ; and, by government itself, 
 the Union and Emancipation were always spoken of to the Catholics 
 as parts together of one great policy. In 1797, while the question of 
 Union was in agitation, Dr. Duigenan published his '' Letter to 
 Mr. Grattaii," from which the following passage is an extract : *' If 
 •* we were one people with the British Nation, the preponderance of 
 ** tiie Protestant interest in the whole state would be so great, that 
 ''it would be no longer necessary to curb the Roman Catholics bij any 
 ''restraint whatever:' And yet after the Union, the Doctor con- 
 tinued to the year of his death an eager opponent in Parliament of 
 every measure of concession to the Roman Catholics. What said 
 Mr, Put of Catholic Emancipation, when explaining the causes of his 
 resignation in 1801 ? ** A measure on the part of government which, 
 " under the circumstances of the Union so happily effected between 
 ** the two countries, we thought of great public importance, and 
 " necessary to complete the benefits likely to result from that mea- 
 sure. We felt this opinion so strongly that, when we met with 
 " circumstances that rendered it impossible for us to propose it as 
 '*H measure of government, we felt it equally inconsistent with our 
 " duty and our honour any longer to remain a part of that govern- 
 " ment. What may be the opinion of others I know not, but I hto- 
 '■' to have it understood to be a measure which, if I had remained in go- 
 " verrunent, I must have proposed/' Among the written declarations 
 from Mr. Pitt to the Lord Lieutenant, (Lord CornwaJlis,) and from 
 him to Lord Fingal, and the principal Catholics, in 1801, are these. 
 "* They may be assured that Mr. Pitt will do hig utmost to establish 
 
 2 
 
 <( 
 
 *i 
 
 
I' 
 
 62 
 
 How stands it in Policy ? We find a people 
 strongly attached to a creed to which we impute 
 much bigotry and superstition. We have entirely 
 subdued the country. And now, as if the recollec- 
 tion of national independence destroyed were not 
 sufficiently galling, we add to it the whole fury of 
 religious zeal, in behalf of a creed insulted and 
 rendered the mark of hopeless degradation. But 
 though we have deprived three-fourths of the Irish 
 people of their privileges as citizens, they cherish 
 unimpaired, and strong to an extentwhich wein this 
 country very imperfectly conceive, the memorials 
 of their warm affections and their deep resentment. 
 Their mouldering churches, the rude and shapeless 
 sepulchres of their fathers, their traditionary rites 
 and customs, the very hills of their romantic land, 
 consecrated as they are by the wild traces of their 
 ancient worship, are so many links that bind a 
 warm-hearted people to a persecuted faith. And 
 while the remembrance of country, parents, and 
 early days, is dear and sacred, woe to the power 
 
 '* their cause in the public favor, and prepare the way for their 
 "finally attaining their object. On the other hand, should 
 "the Catholics be sensible of the benefit they possess by having so 
 ** many characters of eminence pledged not to embark in the sei-vice of 
 *' government f except on the terms of the Catholic privileges being 
 " obtained, \i is to be hoped that, on balancing the advantages and 
 ** disailvantages of their situation, they would prefer a quiet and 
 '* peaceable demeanour to any line of conduct of an opposite de- 
 scription." See Debrett's Debates, vol. 14, page 161, and Parnell's 
 History of the Penal Laws, page 1.56. 
 
 63 
 
 that would sever them. Providence, wiser than 
 man in his jealousy and pride, has decreed that 
 they cannot be severed ; they are drawn closer, and 
 rivetted by persecution. 
 
 Till lately the great majority of the population 
 of Ireland, separated from their own clergy, and 
 restrained by a severe code from practising their 
 own religion, were practically deprived of all 
 means of religious observance, unless where, at 
 the hazard of their lives, they assembled in caverns 
 and fastnesses to worship God in all the secresy 
 and all the peril that could belong to an act of the 
 blackest guilt. And, to perfect this monstrous 
 system, they were, by the same enactments, (unless 
 they w ould conform to that creed which they could 
 know only as the symbol of grinding oppression,) 
 excluded even from the benefits of education in 
 their own country. And what was the result 1 
 That, unable to obtain education in their own 
 country, they sought and found it under the pro- 
 tection of foreign courts ; and then you wondered 
 that foreio^n courts should obtain an influence amons* 
 Irish Catholics. That, precluded from serving as 
 officers in the armies of their own country, they 
 sought renown, and found it under foreign banners ; 
 and then you wondered at the disloyalty of the 
 Irish who bore arms for France, for Austria, and 
 for Spain. But it was not wonder that was ex- 
 pressed in the memorable exclamation which is 
 attributed to George the Second, when the valour 
 

 G4 
 
 of the Irish brigade in the service of France, at 
 Fontenoy, had turned the fortunes of the day in 
 favour of the enemy, ''Cursed be the laws which 
 
 « 
 
 have deprived me of such subjects !" 
 
 It is in the following terms that one whom I 
 have before quoted, an ornament of his time, a 
 writer wMth a learned and eloquent pen, and a 
 truly British heart, although an Irishman, a Roman 
 Catholic, and a priest, has deplored the condition 
 of his brethren in a letter which I wish that many, 
 who now determine on these matters without seeing 
 - or reading, and without mvch thinking, would first 
 read and then think over. It is by Arthur O'Leary, 
 and entitled '' Loyalty asserted." *' Incapable and 
 " unwilling to hurt the public, — willing and inca- 
 '•' pable to serve it, — equally destitute of property, 
 "and arms to defend it, our duty is confined to 
 " passive loyalty enforced by religion. Let interest, 
 " let liberty, step in as an active principle, and you 
 " will not find one Catholic in the kingdom but 
 " will be as sanguine as yourself in the defence of 
 " his substance and the common cause against 
 "Pope or Pretender." And, even now, knowing 
 our church only as an establishment by whose tests 
 political incapacity is imposed on them, knowing its 
 clergy only ashmen who, rarely seen by them, are 
 yet supported by very unequal and heavy tythes, 
 the poor Irish are subjects of an unhappy country, 
 infuriated by party spirit, and disunited by the 
 very principles of its government, where the pri- 
 
 V 
 
 65 
 
 vileged few maintain a precarious rule over a 
 proscribed and offended majority of millions, by 
 division and by violence. " The people of Con- 
 " stantinople," says Montesquieu, in a passage too 
 closely applicable to the state of parties in the 
 capital of our little Western Empire, " were from 
 *'all times divided into two factions ; that of the 
 "Blues, and that of the Greens. They went to 
 "the annihilating the authority of the magis- 
 "trates. The Blues did not fear the laws, be- 
 " cause the Emperor sheltered them from the 
 " law s. The Greens ceased to respect the laws, 
 " because the laws could no longer protect them. 
 "All ties of friendship, kindred, duty, gratitude, 
 "were loosed. A government so senseless was 
 " still more cruel."* 
 
 " But what you ask for the Catholic," say some 
 objectors, " is of no value to him. Is the poor 
 " Irish peasant to be benefited by what can reach 
 " only a few of their nobility and gentry? Their 
 " priests and demagogues use it only as a topic of 
 ''irritation. They would lose their importance by 
 
 • 
 
 * ** Le peuple de Constantinople etoit de tout temps divise en 
 
 '* deux factions, celle des bleus, et celle des verts Elles allerent 
 
 *' jusqu'k aneantir l*autorite des magistrats. L^s bleus ne ciaig^noient 
 "point les lois, parceque TEmpereur les protegoit contre elles. 
 ** Les verts cesserent de les respecter parcequ'ellcs ne pouvoient 
 
 " pas lesdefendre Tons les liens d'amitie, de parente, de devoir, 
 
 " de reconnoisance, furent otes. Un governement si peu sense etoit 
 •* encore plus cruel." — Moniesquuu^ Grandeur et Decadence des 
 Homains, 
 
 £ 
 
66 
 
 *^ the success of the measure, and, therefore, in their 
 " hearts deprecate it." First observe that these 
 objectors are bound in honour never again to open 
 their lips on the subject of danger. But lives there 
 a man who does not feel the difference between the 
 knowing that there are stations for which he per- 
 sonally is unfit, and the being told that he belongs 
 to a class declared unworthy to fill these stations? 
 If there be any one so ignorant of all the springs 
 that govern human action and feeling, I despair of 
 making him understand any one of the real re- 
 maining grievances of Catholic disability. 
 
 We are told by others that the demands of the 
 Catholics increase upon us ; that they are insatiable. 
 If I have succeeded in shewing that their condition 
 is an unjust one, inasmuch as you cannot make out a 
 case of absolute necessity to justify it, I submit that 
 you have no more right to delay the doing them 
 justice than you would have to refuse to pay a just 
 debt because your creditor happens to complain 
 in a tone which you do not approve, or because 
 you believe that, after you shall have paid him 
 what you owe him, he may set up a further claim 
 which he will not be able to make good. We are 
 told, above all, of the power which their priests 
 possess, and of the use they have made of it, by 
 their influence over the small life-holders at the 
 late elections in Ireland. It not being within my 
 present purpose to give any opinion between the 
 priest and the landlord, or in other words 
 
 67 
 
 to determine, (although I have an opinion on 
 that matter,) whether fanaticism or corruption 
 be the greater fault in an elector^ (which is the 
 real question with respect to the AOs. voters 
 in Ireland,) I will content myself with saying this, 
 that it shews that Ireland has now arrived at a 
 state in which she cannot remain. You must re- 
 enact the penal laws, or emancipate. 
 
 I am desired to look at whatever passages our 
 adversaries please to select for animadversion from 
 certain speeches of Mr. O'Connel or Mr.Shiel, and 
 to judge by these of the general temper of the Catho- 
 lic body. If the Irish are very violent, and do not 
 express themselves as we could vyish, touching the 
 advantages of English connexion, I can only say that 
 it is what the friends of this healing measure have 
 been prophesying for full twenty years of my own 
 recollection, and had, I understand, prophesied for 
 about fourteen or fifteen years before that. We 
 are bound to express our sorrow at the circum- 
 stance, but it is hard to call upon us to express 
 surprize also, at the accomplishment of our own 
 predictions. But if these gentlemen have occa- 
 sionally spoken in terms which I cannot approve, 
 I will not judge, for I am not warranted in judging, 
 by them of the general temper of the Catholic body. 
 I rejoice that the oppressed Catholics have bold 
 and eloquent men to plead for their rights. But I 
 know of no right that I have to try the Catholic 
 community by the expressions of those gentlemen, 
 
 e2 
 
I 
 
 68 
 
 which those gentlemen would not equally have to 
 try the Protestant community by mine ; against 
 which I suspect that many Protestants would very 
 loudly and very justly protest. But I will not 
 judge of the temper even of Mr. O'Connel or Mr. 
 Shiel, by Mr. O'Connel's or Mr. Shiel's effu- 
 sions. They are members of a body which is per- 
 secuted and misrepresented ; and it is hard to be 
 extreme with the words of a man under persecution 
 and misrepresentation. We have heard that it 
 was a practice of the inquisition to put Jews to the 
 torture, till, by reason of pain, they openly blas- 
 phemed, and then to punish them for the blasphemy ; 
 but neither the institution nor the practice is in ray 
 mind one of laudable example. 
 
 Our adversaries are the first to proclaim that it is 
 high time that this question were settled one way or 
 the other. Now there can be but one way of settling 
 it. If they were to tell me that it is expedient that 
 this question shall continue a question of eternal 
 bickering, eternal expence, and eternal disaffection, 
 that it is convenient that Ireland shall continue to 
 be alienated, and England taxed to pay for holding 
 Ireland by force instead of by affection ; I should 
 not agree with them in their opinion ; but T should 
 at least comprehend it. But when they say '^ settle 
 **it one way or the other," it is a truly Irish alter- 
 native that they propose, with only one side to it, 
 and that the side directly opposed to their own de- 
 clared wishes. 
 
 69 
 
 Does any man seriously and soberly hold the 
 opinion that the measure will not be carried before 
 he, or Mr. O'Connel, or Mr. Shiel, shall be manv 
 years older ? I believe few men will say so. 
 Then, to feel assured of the probability of its 
 being granted in our day, and still to do all that is 
 possible to keep alive by insult those heated feelings 
 on both sides, which can but aggravate difficulties, 
 I must say appears to me little short of madness. 
 We shout '' No Pope," and " No Popery," as if the 
 question really were whether we should or should 
 not endure the existence of such a being as a Pope, 
 or of such a profession as that which we call Popery. 
 That there is a Pope, whom it is not, I apprehend, 
 our immediate purpose to depose, is matter of 
 fact ; it is also fact that there are near 6,000,000 
 persons in Ireland, who are very willing to call 
 themselves and their religion Roman Catholic, 
 but whom we insist, not very wisely as it appears 
 to me, upon calling Papists, and their religion 
 Popery ;* and whom I apprehend we have no imme- 
 diate prospect of either exterminating: by force, or 
 converting by abuse. Their numbers increase; their 
 obstinacy holds out against persecution ; and their 
 fecundity is in no wise checked by occasional 
 starvation, by frequent battle and murder, and by 
 
 * I have used the terms " Roman Catholic Religion" and 
 " Roman Catholics" generally in preference to Ihe terms *' Popery" 
 and " Papist," because 1 dislike nicknames. The Roman Catho- 
 lics are recognised as such by Act of Parliament, and have there- 
 fore a right to the name. The use of nicknames seems to me to be 
 neither good in reasoning nor in manners. 
 
70 
 
 constant Orange Ascendancy. The question then 
 is, there being Roman Catholics, what are we to do 
 with them ? We have already done two very foolish 
 things. We have told them that they cannot keep 
 faith with us, which is unjust and unwise. We 
 have not kept faith with them, which is more 
 unjust and more unwise still. I hope and believe 
 thai we are yet in time to repair all this ; but there 
 is no doubt that it may be delayed until we be 
 reduced to the granting it without grace and 
 almost without condition ; no thanks to be reasonably 
 claimed on the one side, nor felt on the other. 
 We talk about not being intimidated, and we feel 
 our valour rise, without allowing ourselves, at the 
 same time, to ask whether there is any question of 
 personal danger to us who live in Buckinghamshire, 
 and consequently any demand upon that personal 
 prowess, which, when there is danger, is very 
 commendable. The question is not whether we 
 are to ground arms before Counsellor O'Connel 
 or Bishop Doyle, but whether, the first time that 
 our tree is shaken, Ireland is to drop off into the lap 
 of France or America. We talk of their dema- 
 gogues, and of their want of gratitude for all that 
 w^e have done, and of their offering no securities in 
 exchange for what they ask us to do ; I deprecate 
 the waiting until we may be obliged to grant all that 
 thev ask to dema2:oo:ues, and without obtaining 
 any gratitude or security in return. Like the proud 
 American s:irl instanced bv Dr. Franklin in his Cor- 
 respondence, '* who wished and resolved never to 
 
 71 
 
 *' have anything to do with a Parson, or a Presby- 
 ** terian, or an Irishman, and at length found 
 " herself married to an Irish Presbyterian Parson." 
 I believe that no securities are necessary, or 
 desirable, except that which the measure, if spon- 
 taneously granted, would afford of itself. But to 
 those who attach any virtue to what are usually 
 called securities, I should observe that two occa- 
 sions have already been lost of granting these 
 claims, coupled with what were called securities, 
 such as never can return. In 1808, the late Duke 
 of Norfolk and Lord Grenville, in the one house, 
 and Mr. Ponsonby and Mr. Grattan, in the other, 
 were authorized by the Irish Catholic body to 
 propose a negative to be vested in the Crown 
 upon the appointment of their bishops. Mr. Per- 
 ceval, the Chancellor, and the Spiritual Bench, did 
 not see the importance of this opportunity. It was 
 rejected ; the Irish were driven to despair ; and, 
 in the same tomb with the question of 1808, lies 
 for ever buried the Veto. The same was the fate 
 with what were called the " winos" attached to Sir 
 Francis Burdett's bill of last year. I voted for 
 them, not for the sake certainly of extending the 
 patronage of the Crown over a nevv body of clergy, 
 nor yet for the sake of diminishing the popular 
 character of elections in Ireland ; but because Mr. 
 OConnel, and because some of the Protestant 
 friends of the measure who knew Ireland the best, 
 recommended them ; and because I believed, from 
 
72 
 
 the language of some who supported it only on these 
 conditions, that they offered the fairest chance for 
 the measure being carried. 1 voted for them as 
 the price of Catholic emancipation, for which I 
 can scarcely contemplate any Irish price that I 
 would not pay. With the same object, I would 
 vote for them again ; but J shall never again have 
 the opportunity. For these also, if they were 
 thought of any value as securities, the events of 
 this year in Ireland, have shewn you that you have 
 lost for ever. And the necessity of the great 
 measure becomes every day more urgent and un- 
 avoidable. 
 
 But I leave the vast, and awful, and melancholy 
 consideration of Ireland (infinitely too vast to form 
 a mere incidental topic), with only one remark. 
 It requires not much observation to see that a 
 country so disorganised, and so unhappy, has 
 been rendered thus by some overmastering error 
 in the mode of ruling it ; and it requires not much 
 argument to shew that, where civil rights are 
 unequally distributed between two great parties, 
 they cannot together form either a free or an united 
 empire. It would be a solecism in language : it 
 is an anomaly in government. 
 
 I now hasten to the close of a statement which 
 has already led me to much greater length than I 
 at first intended ; and would, if pursued, lead to 
 details far exceeding the utmost limits which can 
 give to a letter any reasonable chance of its beino- 
 
 6 
 
 
 73 
 
 read by those to whose judgment, under the pro- 
 tection of your name, it is addressed. If I am 
 deceived in the view I have taken, it is not for 
 want of consideration : I trust it is not for want of 
 candour. I may have unnecessarily stated facts 
 and arguments which most persons have before 
 duly considered ; but I have wished to place the 
 question, and my view of it, on true grounds, even 
 with those who have read but little on the subject, 
 and paid but little attention to what are really but 
 its first elements. Many points I have very super- 
 ficially noticed, and perhaps too abruptly dis- 
 missed : many I have left entirely untouched. 
 When I have referred to authorities, it will be 
 found that I have applied them with fidelity. I have 
 not generally quoted, because one of my first 
 objects was to compress. If I have left any mate- 
 rial part of the case untouched, or in any part not 
 succeeded in making myself understood, to any 
 questions stated, or objections urged, by those to 
 whom my observations are addressed it is my 
 duty to give my best attention. To questioners or 
 objectors without a name, it is no man's duty to 
 reply. 
 
 I hope I have not used any expressions, as I am 
 sure I entertain no feelings, of offence to those 
 persons who considerately and conscientiously 
 maintain opposite opinions to our own. We may 
 be permitted to regard them with some sur- 
 prise, as we should their conclusions with regard 
 
74 
 
 fj 
 
 75 
 
 to natural objects, if they viewed forms and 
 colours through a different medium with ourselves. 
 But opinions so formed are entitled to respect, 
 whatever may be the end to which they lead. Nor 
 can I better express my own dispositions towards 
 those with whom I differ on this great subject, 
 than by saying that I fervently hope they are 
 widely different from those reported to have been 
 expressed not long ago, on a public occasion, in 
 this county, by a Minister of our Church. His 
 name I forbear from mentioning, because, where 
 it is possible I may have been misinformed, I will 
 not lay to the charge of one. who may be guiltless 
 and incapable of it, an effusion equally incompa- 
 tible with that mild spirit which it is the duty of 
 his office to inculcate, and with the manners of 
 that station in society, in which language is ex- 
 pected to be regulated by the terms of good breeding. 
 I am informed by many witnesses that, on an occa- 
 sion which any man, with the advantages of taste or 
 feeling, would have perceived rendered a disre- 
 spectful allusion to the conduct of any one of the 
 family to which 1 belong peculiarly improper, a 
 clergyman permitted himself to stigmatize the sup- 
 port which some of its members had always given 
 to this question, as a '' blot upon their scutcheon." 
 It might have occurred to a person of education 
 not only that the phrase was grossly unbecoming, 
 but that a//of whom he then spoke should, by their 
 absence, have been piolecled from unmannerly in- 
 
 / 
 
 \t 
 
 < , 
 
 
 vective. A minister of a Christian church might 
 have done well to pause, when he remembered that 
 one had to claim the more sacred protection of the 
 tomb. But why, I have a right to ask, why a 
 blot ? Have they, have we, ever given violent ex- 
 pression to feelings which, at different times, and 
 under different^circumstances, we allowed it by 
 our silence to be supposed that we disclaimed? for 
 that would have been a blot. Have we ever given 
 that violent expression to our feelings under cir- 
 cumstances that might render us suspected of 
 having so sacrificed delicacy and propriety to any 
 views of local interest or favour? for that might have 
 been a blot. Or have we ever dishonoured our 
 cause and ourselves by the use of phrases, not 
 uttered in the unguardedness of haste, or under 
 the excitement of self-defence, but cooHy se- 
 lected for the wicked purpose of slandering the 
 absent and the dead? for that would indeed 
 have been a blot. I will avail myself of the 
 privilege, which something more than a mere 
 attack upon myself now affords me, to tell that 
 reverend person that men may give their best 
 support to opinions opposite to his with a scutcheon 
 pure and unblotted, and of which no kinsman or 
 descendant, although so desired by a minister of 
 religion, need feel ashamed. I will also tell him 
 that though the shame of base adulation may be 
 forgotten or repaired, the stain of premeditated 
 slander is ineffaceable, and blots the surplice of the 
 
 M 
 
'**», 
 
 \l 
 
 76 
 
 priesthood, from the throat to the very skirt and 
 nethermost hem. Oh, that his reverend brother, 
 Mr. Fisher, had been present when he was en- 
 deavouring, if I am rightly informed, to awaken, 
 by such means, a languid, and disgraced, and ob- 
 solete cry ! He, doubtless, would have told him 
 that " however some well-affected but timid minds 
 " may have been agitated by this outrage on the 
 ''common sense of the people, it has appeared that 
 "the metropolis, the country in general, and this 
 " district particularly, and much to its credit, have 
 "treated it with deserved indifference.*" He 
 would have told him that one, as much his superior 
 in clerical rank, as in gentleness, modesty, and 
 Christian charity, thought otherwise. He might 
 have said, in the words of his own eloquent and 
 well-deserved eulogy on the venerable Bishop of 
 Norwich: "It is the highest praise of a right 
 "reverend divine of the present day, that he has 
 " set an example of charity and moderation, in an 
 " address to his brethren replete with sentiments 
 " worthy of a liberal mind in an enlightened age ; 
 forming a happy contrast," &c.t But I leave "the 
 person I have alluded to, if innocent, unattacked, 
 because unnamed ;— if otherwise, the memory of 
 my father >an withstand and beat back such a 
 maligner, and I have endeavoured to shew that 
 
 * Rev. J. Fisher's Sermon, page 14. 
 t Id. page 16. 
 
 4 
 
 1 1 
 
 ^i^ 
 
 77 
 
 the absent may yet discover means of answering 
 for themselves. 
 
 I have endeavoured to represent what is called 
 Catholic Emancipation, on the grounds on which it 
 first claimed my earnest wishes for its success. As 
 a boon doubly blessed, but shedding benefits far 
 more important on the giver than on the receiver. 
 And here I ask nothing from generous sympathy, 
 I ask only from an ordinary sense of interest, 
 whether it be better to maintain for a few years 
 longer an anxious, costly, and precarious system 
 of party police over a people mortified, discon- 
 tented, perhaps '' wrung into undutifulness" by 
 your trifling and cruel jealousies, or to rally round 
 your throne, and your standards, and your laws, 
 the undisturbed and unqualified affections of many 
 millions, now unnaturally thrust aside from among 
 the free subjects of your empire. 
 
 There is but one description of persons, — I trust 
 they are but few, — to whom I early alluded, but 
 to whom I have not addressed myself. Those 
 who, when they do read the history of mankind, 
 read with the most cautious partiality such pas- 
 sages only as they may confidently hope will assist 
 their already steadfast judgment ; who look always 
 back, instead of sometimes looking forward and 
 around them, and look back only to distort both 
 precedent and example ; and, inverting the whole 
 course of speculation on human character and 
 events, would illustrate the art of government in 
 
78 
 
 the nineteenth century by pompous reference to 
 some thousand-times-told tale of feudal manners 
 and of barbarous men. Such persons are ever 
 ready to be the instruments, in any hands, of that 
 intolerance, against the imputation of which they 
 are the first to declaim, because they are the first 
 to feel that the imputation is deserved ; ever ready to 
 justify the oppressing their fellow-subjects in the 
 name of a free constitution, and the persecuting their 
 fellow Christians in the name of a mild and merciful 
 religion. Such are they, who, on a great subject 
 involving, like this, questions of the deepest im- 
 portance, of the nicest deliberation, perhaps of the 
 sublimest morality, simplify their objections into 
 one senseless, heartless, cry, calculated only to in- 
 flame every passion which ought to be soothed and 
 repressed, and to arouse, — what sometimes the most 
 foolish man may arouse, and the wisest cannot 
 afterwards allay or control, — a raging spirit of 
 political and spiritual animosity. Of such persons, 
 if I were constrained to address myself to them, I 
 would ask, ^' Are you Protestants? The Protest- 
 "antism you profess, is the religion of Spiritual 
 ^' Liberty ; for it claims for its origin the right of 
 " private judgment, while the Roman Catholic 
 " church claims what, she says, is the unerring au- 
 "thority of her Councils. When our Church, 
 ** then, endeavours to control entire liberty of 
 "conscience, she puts on the garments of popery, 
 *^but without its armour of assumed infallibility. 
 
 79 
 
 " You belong to a Churcli whose ' duty' it is 
 " (in the excellent words of an Address, within 
 '* these few days presented to his Majesty by her 
 ^'clergy in convocation,) to vindicate the establish-' 
 " ment in the spirit by which it professes to be 
 " governed^ with temper^ moderation^ and firmness^ 
 *' seeking to conciliate those who may be opposed to 
 " MS, not to exasperate them; to convince, not 
 " boastfidly to triumph over them,* And when 
 " you shall have read through and through the 
 " history of ecclesiastical wars and persecutions, 
 ''and (going beyond the doctrines of the Atheist, 
 ''Hobbes, who pronounced contention to be only 
 *' the natural state of man,) shall have almost suc- 
 " ceeded in representing to yourselves Christianity 
 *' as the promoter of discord and violence, not as 
 " the teacher of union and brotherly love, ask 
 " yourselves what it is that is the subject at issue 
 " between you and those whom you revile and 
 ''proscribe. Learn that your difference from the 
 " Roman Catholic is on matters, on which, if there 
 " be freedom to be enjoyed in this world, or hap- 
 "piness to be hoped for in the next, it is not only 
 " a man's privilege, but his duty, to feel and act 
 for himself; that the difference is a difference to 
 be settled on the other side the grave, w4ien all 
 "the jargon of controversy sliall be no more, and 
 
 * See Address of the Archbishop, Bishops, and Clergy, of the 
 Province of Canterbury, in Convocation assembled, presented to 
 His Majesty on Monday, the 28th of last month. 
 
 1 
 
 (( 
 
 a 
 
 !i * $ m 
 
80 
 
 ** establishment and privilege shall have melted 
 '' away before a tribunal in the sight of which 
 '^ kings, popes, and subjects, shall one day stand, 
 *' not as conflicting sectaries, not claiming to be 
 " dealt with according to their merits or their 
 "wisdom, but suppliants to be judged with mercy, 
 " even as they have judged. 
 
 ''And, when you shall have a little humbled the 
 *' pride of the Pharisee within you, look over again 
 " the grounds you have taken, historical, political, 
 " and moral. Believe me, the subjects of your ge- 
 '* nerahties against popery, (and by no very logical 
 "connexion in favour of intolerance,) are not 
 
 ** Green and fresh in this old world :" 
 
 u 
 « 
 
 a 
 
 a 
 « 
 a 
 it 
 
 <c 
 
 a 
 
 You are not the first whom it hath delighted to 
 expatiate on the undisputed but irrelevant 
 horrors of Smithfield and St. Bartholomew's Day, 
 or to exhibit the hideous memory of the fiery 
 Mary, (by strange perversion of example !) in 
 recommendation of a system of religious bigotry 
 and persecution . In all this you are not alone 
 or original : Lord George Gordon was before 
 you. 
 
 *' But yet wise and good men have differed from 
 you ; and, when we see Sir George Saville, Mr. 
 Burke, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, Mr. Windham, Mr. 
 Grattan, and one of whom, laying nearer consi- 
 derations aside, I may be allowed to speak as of a 
 sincere patriot and an enlightened statesman, when 
 
 81 
 
 " (with only one distinguished exception in talents, 
 " station, and integrity, Mr. Peel,) we see all the 
 " most considerable pemons of all parties united on 
 " this subject^ you must observe that the balance of 
 " authority is somewhat remarkably against you. 
 " Authority,though not conclusive in our judgment, 
 " is sufficient at least to make us pause before we 
 " condemn as fools, or as worse, all those who have 
 ^* taken the most eager part in behalf of this great 
 *' measure. It does not appear to me advisable 
 " hastily to conclude that the easy softness of Mr. 
 ** Canning, Mr. Brougham, and Mr. Plunkett, has 
 *' been duped by the arts of designing Papists; that 
 " Sir Francis Burdett has become enamoured of a 
 *' system manifestly incompatible with popular 
 '* liberty ; that Sir James Mackintosh might be more 
 " upon his guard, if he were a little further 
 *' acquainted with the modern history of the world ; 
 " or Sir John Newport, if he attached greater im- 
 " portance to the particular interests of Ireland ; 
 " that Lord Grenville is a rash visionary innovator; 
 " and Mr.Wilberforce no better than he should be." 
 But 1 cannot resist the conviction which I feel 
 that prejudice itself, at least the worst sort of it, 
 is rapidly giving way ; and, with it, by degrees, 
 the objections which some of the best men have 
 felt, and the clamour which some of the worst have 
 been able to excite, against a great and glorious 
 measure of policy, generosity, and justice. The 
 generation has but lately passed away which 
 
82 
 
 O 
 
 \ 
 
 might liave remembered when all those who in 
 1753 supported the bill for the Naturalization of 
 Jews were themselves represented as enemies of 
 Christianity ; nor can we forget in much later 
 times the obloquy so long encountered, and at 
 length triumphed over, by the adventurous and 
 unwearied benevolence of Mr. Wilberforce, in that 
 immortal work in which he bore so large a part, 
 the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. 
 
 In one respect, if I knew no more of them, I 
 should be encouraged to place confidence in the 
 Roman Catholics. I find that thev have a re- 
 ligion. Discover that a man has a religion, and 
 you have then an additional and a powerful tie by 
 which his conscience may be bound. And whether 
 he be a Jew who swears upon the law of Moses, 
 or a Turk who swears upon the Koran, or a Hindoo 
 who stretches out his hand to the East, or whether 
 he be a Catholic who, like ourselves, kisses the 
 volume of our common redemption ; or whether he 
 be one of that moral and well-ordered sect of 
 Christians whose simple affirmation is taken by 
 our courts as equivalent to an oath ; we have, 
 politically speaking ^ the self same bond. In my 
 opinion it is not wise so to have framed your tests 
 as, admitting those who do not believe at all, to 
 exclude those who only believe a little differently 
 from ourselves. It is untrue to say that these 
 are securities in favour of the connexion between 
 church and state ; because thev are not tests of 
 
 ^'^., 
 
 83 
 
 conformity to the church. They are only tests of 
 dissent from two special tenets of another religion. 
 Tests, not of belief, but of disbelief. If we are 
 right in this policy, so would other countries be 
 in pursuing the same ; and then the only universal 
 qualification would be universal unbelief. 
 
 Thus I have endeavoured to set forth all the 
 grounds I desire to have for the practical view I 
 take of this question. 1. Policy. 2. Justice. 
 3. Unredeemed Pledge. I have endeavoured, by 
 appealing to the understandings of my constituents, 
 to justify my own conclusions ; and I w ish to give 
 them these as the reasons for which I always have 
 supported, and, until convinced of their fallacy, 
 shall continue to support, the Catholic claims. 
 
 Believe me ever, my dear Sir George, 
 
 With the greatest truth, your attached friend, 
 
 December 1826. 
 
 NUGENT. 
 
 t 
 
 P.S. — I cannot close a letter necessarily so supei*ficial 
 as this, without feeling that I owe it ^to those to whose 
 j udgment it is addressed, to refer them to two or three works 
 in which those who wish to make themselves masters of the 
 historical cases will find it stated ably and in full. In 
 truth, a competent judgment can hardly be formed upon 
 it by those who are unacquainted with these works : Mr. 
 Charles Butler's History of the Laws affecting the Roman 
 Catholics; SirH.Parncli's History of the Penal Laws; and 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
S4 
 
 our friend Archdeacon Glover's two most able pamphlets, 
 ' published by Ridgeway. I must also take the liberty of 
 recommending the perusal of the short but most important 
 declaration made this year by the Roman Catholic titular 
 Bishops of Ireland, and by the Vicars Apostolic of Great 
 'Britain, on the subject of divided allegiance, and the 
 other tenets ordinarily object^ to them; also the declaration 
 of the Roman Catholic nobility and gentry of England 
 and Scotland on the same subject; both published by 
 Keating. To those who have had the opportunity of 
 reading these works, the foregoing letter is indeed 
 superfluous. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
 f 
 
 i 
 
 J. Mtid C. Adlard, Prmtera, Barth^lomtw Chte.