Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

in the past history of Ireland, from the first interference of the Pope, have formed the great embarrassment of England. Ask if the Romanists of Ireland-we mean their priests-have been in the slightest degree propitiated to the English connexion by all the concessions which have been made to them? Is the Sassenach at this moment held up to one iota the less abhorrence as an invader and a tyrant, than he was before the grand surrender of 1829? Have the franchise, the tithes, the bishoprics, the Church-rates, the corporations, yielded one after another, cemented the affection of Popery to the empire which yielded them? Or is it impossible that they, or any concession of privilege or power, should do this, so long as there is a secret oath of allegiance binding, by an obligation both virtually and formally feudal, the Romish bishops, and through them their priests, and through them the people, to the footstool of the Pope, or rather to the College of Jesuits, who rule for the Pope at Rome? Let the peace and harmony of a family be disturbed by an adulterous connexion on the part of one of the parents-how is it to be restored but by destroying the connexion? The peace and harmony of the empire are not disturbed, but destroyed, by the foreign allegiance of the Irish priests; and until this chain be broken, all appeals to their gratitude and fidelity are empty air.* There

* That perhaps good and sincere Roman Catholics, not acquainted with the real nature of this foreign allegiance, may be inclined to examine into it, the oath taken by Irish Prelates on their consecration is subjoined. Mr. Morrissy, himself a Roman Catholic priest, has given it in one of his publications; having been present at a consecration where it was taken. (Development, p. 21.) It is in Ireland, he adds, taken privately before the public ceremony. Why not in public? 'I. N., elect of such a church, from henceforth will be faithful and obedient to St. Peter the Apostle, and to the Holy Roman Church, and to our Lord Pope N., and to his successors. I shall never to their prejudice or detriment reveal to any man the counsel they shall entrust me with, either by themselves, their nuncios, or letters. The Roman Papacy, and the Regalities of St. Peter, I will help them to keep and maintain against all men. I shall take care to conserve, defend, increase, and promote the rights, honours, privileges, and authorities of the Holy Roman Church for our Lord the Pope and his successors. I will observe with all my power, and shall make others do the same, the rules of the Holy Fathers, the Apostolic (Papal) decrees, ordinations, dispositions, reservations, provisions, and mandates. I will persecute and fight against all Heretics, Schismatics, and Rebels to our Lord the Pope and his successors.' (This last clause, it seems, has subsequently been omitted, apparently for the same reason which induced Dr. Troy to deny the Rheimish notes.) I shall visit personally the shrine of the Apostles every third year, and render an account of all my pastoral office to the Pope and his successors, and of all the affairs of my church, and discipline of my clergy and people; and will receive the Apostolical or Papal mandates, and shall put them most diligently into execution; and if justly prevented, I shall make the necessary communication through some proper clergyman,' &c. &c.

What these Regalities are may be seen by turning to vol. i. p. 56, of Romanism as it rules in Ireland, or to Barrow on the Pope's Supremacy. They include a power of rendering void promises, vows, oaths, obligations to law,'-a right to dethrone heretical princes, absolve their subjects from their allegiance, and empower Roman Catholics to exterminate them and seize their lands'-to 'possess the spiritual and temporal sword, and to be superior to all sovereigns upon earth-and to have a pleni

tude

There is not one of the calamities of Ireland which may not be classed under one or another of these three heads. And each of the three is resolvable into a question of religion.

[ocr errors]

Thus far, perhaps, nothing here advanced will be disputed by either party; and it is something, in the midst of the conflict of opinions prevailing on the subject of Ireland, to have laid a foundation in which all are agreed. Ask a Dr. Doyle, if any amelioration in the condition of the poor in Ireland can take place until his Church has recovered its supremacy, and he answers as he answered before the Committee, I think, before God, it is utterly impossible.'* Ask a good and sincere member of our own Church, what is the great curse of Ireland, he will answerPopery. Ask the government, who by their position seem to stand neutral between both parties, what they would most covet, and what they propose to effect by the impartial distribution of their patronage, common education and associations, and scriptural texts recommending charity and love:-they will say the cessation of religious dissension. And with them will agree all those, a very numerous body, who, caring neither for Popery nor Protestantism, think Indifferentism the paradise of man, and cry only for peace, peace, whether blasphemy, or idolatry, or fanaticism, or unbelief are to be the price we pay for it. And turn then to the humble and faithful Christian, who thinks little of political parties, or national wealth, or social comfort, compared with the first commands laid on him by his Maker to proclaim God's truth in the world—and his first demand for Ireland will be the diffusion of that Truth.

Here then we arrive at three distinct measures to be adopted, one or the other, as the first step to the cure of the ills of Irelandeither convert Popery to the Church-or give up the Church to Popery-or let both continue as they are at present, and prohibit any rivalry, any conversion, any attempt at mutual instruction, any jealousy, any bitterness of feeling, or condemnation of Chain up the combatants, and place them both in one cell, till they have unlearnt their lesson of hostility.

error.

Of the three plans before us, the last is evidently the one contemplated by what are called the liberal politicians of the day.

Perhaps a better synopsis of its maxims cannot be given than

tude of power by which he can infringe any law, and act according to his sovereign will.' Now as every oath, according to Dr. Dens, implies necessarily the reservation 'salvo jure superioris,' is it worth while to take the trouble to transcribe the oath of allegiance to the British Sovereign, which is taken side by side with this oath to the Pope? If the Romish Bishops in Ireland do admit the regalities, their oath to the Crown is so much waste paper. If they do not, their oath to the Pope is perjury-they must take their choice.

Lords Report, April 1825, p. 512.

in a series of resolutions passed at a meeting at Ballinasloe in 1825, and which, in an extract from the letters of a M. Duvergier, to which Mr. Wyse attaches great weight, are described as the general principles of Romanists in Ireland, from Dublin to Galway, and from Derry to Bantry Bay.'

[ocr errors]

1. The State should have no established religion. It should preserve its neutrality between them all.

2. Salvation is possible in all religions, provided you believe honestly and sincerely the religion you profess to be the best.

3. To attempt seizing on public education, with a view of converting it into a monopoly for any particular class or sect, is to disturb in a direct manner the order of society.

4. The spirit of proselytism is deserving of censure. or sect ought to remain quiet within its respective limits.

Each creed 5. To keep the clergy virtuous, it is requisite to keep them poor; make them rich, and you corrupt them.'*

Now we do not intend to ask what would be the effect upon society of putting these maxims into execution. M. Duvergier, who is evidently not illiberal, ventures to call them abominable,' 'most injurious and atheistical,' and 'more pernicious than any philosophism.' For us there is a previous question-their possibility! Who are the parties, we ask, from whom this spirit of proselytism is to be thus extirpated?

In the first place, there is the Church of Rome. We should scarcely be allowed by the age to appeal to history to show that the very essence of Romanism is this spirit of proselytismthat it commenced with a desire to rule men's souls to good, instead of simply setting good before men's souls-that its first step was to claim a dominion over other co-equal churches— that its power arose from an organised system of missionary operations that its first abuses were suggested by the fear of losing subjects-that its first great battles were battles for the acquirement of temporal power-that the sin which caused its temporary fall in the sixteenth century was the lust of empire and of rulethat proselytism was the motive which re-organised it under the form of those spiritual janissaries, the mendicant orders, and especially the Jesuits-that these also were driven from Europe on account of their intrigues for domination-and that the hopes now raised of the revival of Popery are founded on the resuscitated energies of these same conspiracies of Jesuits. Before a spirit which has pervaded all its movements from the beginning of its course can be expelled from it now, some mighty change must be wrought either in the body of Romanism, or in the power which pretends to exorcise it. But history is an old almanac. Romanism,

Appendix to Wyse's History of the Catholic Association, vol. ii. p. 51.

we

[ocr errors]

6

we are told again and again, is changed by the civilization of the age. It is no longer covetous, or ambitious, anxious for spiritual rule, or troubled at the loss of it. This is the constant consolation of the liberals of the day-a consolation which fails only in one point, that Romanism itself steadily denies the fact. It asserts, as energetically as ever, that the dogma' on which Christianity is founded* is the supremacy of the Pope-that he is the vicar of Christ upon earth, qui vicariâ potestate apostolici chori princeps existeret '-that the whole flock is to be fed by him, totius gregis pascendi,'—that the power of binding and loosing over the whole world belongs to him and his successors for ever, 'toto orbe ligandi ac solvendi summam curam auctoritatemque in successores omni ævo prorogandam ;'-that this dogma has been retained and confirmed again and again in opposition to these new teachers or reformers, sanctissime retinet, sæpiusque adversus Novatorum errores comprobavit,'—and that it is the one great bond of the unity of the Church, by which that Church is to be propagated throughout the whole world, unitatis vinculum quo ecclesia per universum mundum propaganda. . . in unam corporis compagem coalesceret.' This, remember, is no ancient obsolete absurdity. It is in the Condemnation by Pope Pius VI. of a German book, professing to answer the question 'What is the Pope?' and was published at Vienna in 1782, and recommended as part of an appendix to The Standard Theological Book of the Romish Priests of Ireland,' with the sanction and approbation of the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, in 1832. With this fundamental doctrine of the necessity of unity of faith, and unity under one head, the bishop of Rome-how the bishop of Rome will be prevailed on to recede from his claim to universal dominion, it is hard to say. The heathen cannot be abandoned by him, for the first command of our Saviour to his Church is, to go out and teach all nations. And the Protestants he cannot yield up, for though they are, in one sense, out of the Church, as having been excommunicated, it is solemnly adjudged by the Standard Theological Work,' recommended by the bishops of Ireland in 1832, that they are within the Church still, so far at least as being subject to its punishments and judgments. Ecclesia judicat et punit hæreticos'-among whom, it is needless to say, the Church of England and Ireland is necessarily included; quamvis enim hæretici sunt extra ecclesiam, manent tamen, ratione baptismi, ecclesiæ subjecti; unde merito illos sumit tanquam transfugas ex ecclesiæ castris, adeoque redeundi obligationem habent.' †

[ocr errors]

Now we have no intention of discussing at present the sound

*See Dens's Theolog. vol. viii. p. 226,

† Dens's Theolog., vol. ii. p. 114.

ness

ness or propriety of such doctrines; but we must venture to suggest them to the persons who talk with so much facility of extinguishing religious dissension by suppressing the tendency to proselytise, first of all, in the Church of Rome. That these ideas and feelings of proselytism are not wholly buried and hid from light in the dark recesses of Dr. Dens's disquisitions, but are very practically acted on, might be inferred from the number of new Romish chapels erecting at this time in England, where there are no congregations to fill them; from the revival of the order of the Jesuits; from the zeal with which Romanism is planting her missionaries in our colonies, and extending her conversions among our own countrymen abroad, especially at Tours and Rome; from the fact, as Dr. Doyle confessed before the House of Lords, that the Romish Church in Ireland is considered partly as a mission, and is therefore chiefly under the control of the Propaganda; from the number of converts which, till our Church began to exert herself, used to be brought over annually by the operation of mixed marriages; by the anxiety shown by the Romish priests to claim dying Protestants as their own; by their forcing on them the rite of extreme unction; by the call of their bishops to be zealous in extirpating heresy; and by the very reasons which Romanists assign for adopting the very opposite profession, and assuming the cant of liberality, that it will make their system popular, and pave the way for magnifying their Church.

With these facts before him, a man of ordinary habit of thought would probably little hope to superinduce upon Romanism in Ireland any of that narcotic influence which is so much desired; and a man of piety would go farther, and admit that a body believing, as the Romanists profess to do, that all without the pale of their Church are incapable of salvation, and yet neglecting the means of saving them, by bringing them back to her bosom, must be unworthy of the name not only of Christians but of men.

But if there is such reason to despair of quieting Romanism, there is still more to despair of the quiescence of the Church. For a time, indeed, the Church was quiet: from the Reformation to the Revolution it could do little, on account of the convulsions of the times: from the Revolution to 1824 it did as little, through the worldly, secular, political spirit which had been infused into it by the mismanagement and false principles of governments, principally Whig; but in 1824,* the energy of the Church revived as it was revived in England by Wesley and Whitfield -irregularly, violently at times-injudiciously, perhaps-certainly without adequate learning, but with a spirit of pure, sin

See Dr. Doyle's Evidence, and Report of Committee on Tithes, p. 336. VOL. LXVII. NO. CXXXIII.

K

cere,

« НазадПродовжити »