Tillotson. These, however, as Protestants writing upon religion, might expect this treatment; but Protestants who write on other and very different subjects, can claim no exception, Salmasius, and Vossius, and Scaligernay even Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis, and Puffendorff. Jews are also proscribed-Maimonides and Menasseh ben Israel. Nor, in the judgment of the Pope, can the Koran be left in the Christian world without a risk of its making converts. But how-as we asked before-how has the Church of Rome treated some of the great writers belonging to herself-or said-for political purposes -to have been her loving and beloved children? Why, Fenelon, when alive, was condemned and persecuted when dead, one of his most devotional works was placed in the Index of "Abominations." Mr North (not Christopher) had, it seems, referred in the House to the solemn and saint she is represented; and it is in the meekness and piety of these menso renounced by that communionnot only in their own times, but in the present day-that weare told to see the spirit and temper of the very Church which disowned and abandoned them! But Sir Robert passes from these old facts," which look amaist as weil's the new," and presents Mr North— Mr Brownlow-and all between and after-with some "contemporary evidence and fair reasoning.” "Even after all which I have already adduced, (to prove that the reigning spirit of the Church of Rome is as hostile as mankind,) the House will still be scarceever to the freedom and intelligence of ly prepared to believe, that the Bible itself is at this day consigned by the profane touch of that Church to the same condemnation, in which some of the best human works (I am willing to admit some very bad works also) are already by her sentence intermingled and engulfed. The House will observe, that one of the rules promulgated by the Council of Trent, begins with the preamble: 'Since it is manifest by experience, that if the Holy Bible in the vulgar tongue be everywhere indiscriminately permitted, more evil than good will thence arise, in consequence of the rashness of men,'-the House will also observe, that the same rule (proceeding in consequence to provide, that for the reading of the Bible a license be granted by certain authorities) closes thus: He who, without such license, shall presume to read or to possess the Bible, cannot, unless he shall first give it up to the ordinary, receive absolution of his sins.' If I had been compelled to look for this rule in a contemporary work of the Council of Trent, I should not here have referred to it: I will have no more of history than the Honourable Gentlemen who are so averse ly morality of a Nicole, the severe and intellectual Pascal, the devout and affectionate religion of Fenelon, and asked whether the Church which these men represented could be fairly an object of the aversion with which we regard it? Now we admire Mr Northhis fine talents and fine scholarshiphe being worth a gross of Shiels-but how came it that he was not better read in the history of these illustrious men? How could he believe that such men could be favourites with the Church of Rome? Or how could he throw out an argument of that shadowy and unsubstantial kind-even if they had been such favourites-to prove-what he well knows never can be proved, any more than that black is white that the Church of Rome is a noble and a rational Church? A man of Mr North's abilities must, we say, know that the character of that Church could to it, and so much in favour of the claims not be vindicated by the virtues, piety, of the present Roman Catholics, are pleagenius, or knowledge of a few of its sed to allow me; but this is not history: members. Buthow stands the case with it is the journal of to-day; it is re-printNicole, Pascal, and Fenelon? Why-ed, re-enacted, re-enforced by the Papal the Church of Rome will have none of See in 1819. them. She "proscribed them living, and condemned them dead." Of the fate of Fenelon we have already spoken-Pascal too shares the same fate -and so does Quesnal-yet it is by these men that the Church of Rome is most advantageously known in this country-it is by these names that, it is alleged by her Protestant friends, "But I may be told, in reference to this distrust of Scripture, as in reference to many other charges against the Church of Rome, that it is fair to argue, that because, in compliment to her own infallibility, she reprints in the present century the anathemas thundered by the Papai See in the sixteenth century, she really believes in their validity, or in her right to enforce them:- You must not expect,' I am to be told, that a church, which has once claimed to be infallible, can ever admit, totidem verbis, that she has erred: you must make allowances; you must be candid; you must take the opinions, the spirit of the Church of Rome, not from her mere diplomatic recognition to-day of the decrees of the Council of Trent, (a recognition which is formal and technical only, and inoperative,) but from her own recent conduct in these matters: you will find how much she has softened all these rigours, how entirely she has relaxed these restrictions, how different the Church of Rome now is from the Church of Rome three or four centuries ago.'-Be it so; I will look, then, not to the mere republication of the Regula, which, so republished, I thought I might have quoted as an act of the present day, but to some subsequent modification of it:-let it then be observed, that the Regula in question conveyed to certain authorities the faculty of granting a license to read any versions of the Scriptures. How stands the matter now? To the eye of Clement VIII. this meaning conveyed to subordinate functionaries too dangerous a trust: the trust was therefore practically withdrawn by his mode of interpreting the rule. This, however, is of less consequence since the original faculty was by Benedict IV. restored in 1757, with this saving clause, that the versions, the reading of which was to be licensed, should have been approved by the Holy See; and, accordingly, the Italian translation of the New Testament, made by Martini, Archbishop of Florence, was not only approved at the time by Pope Pius VI. but actually came forth with a recommendatory letter from him; a letter which has very frequently since been reprinted by Protestants. But how soon was this gleam overcast; how little has the day risen; how much darker rather has it not become! for not only at this time are all the versions of the Scriptures, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, in any and every spoken language, prohibited, (this indeed is consistent with the clause to which I have referred, for those versions at least never had the required sanction,) but in one of the latest additions to that Index, a single sheet printed in 1820, and containing the works prohibited since the publication of the volume in 1819, are two editions of that very translation of the New Testament, by Martini, both printed in Italy, both having the identical letter of Pius VI. prefixed; and neither of them stated to have a single heretical note or addition. The prohibitory clause is as follows:the Pope having recited the condemnation of the Italian editions of the New Testament in question, of an English impression of the same translation, and of seven other works, one on Medical Jurisprudence, one on Physiology, proceeds: Therefore let no one, of any rank or condition whatsoever, read or possess the said work; but give them up at once to the Ordinary, or to the Inquisition, under pain of mortal sin.' "From the tyranny over the human mind, thus exercised by the Church of Rome, wherever it has power, I draw this conclusion, that to give it new power anywhere would be most unsafe: and if it were on the ground that the Church of Rome has changed its character, would be most contrary to the evidence of facts. It has still the same grasping, dominant, exclusive, and intolerant character: it is weaker indeed than it was; but it carries with it everywhere the same mind. You have indeed shorn and bound the strong man; but the secret of his strength is still upon him; and if, from whatever motive, you admit him into the sanctuary of your temple, beware, lest the place and the opportunity should call that strength into action; and with all the original energies of his might restored for the occasion, he should pull down the temple of the constitution upon you, and bury you, and your idols, and himself, in one common ruin." Pray, what sort of an old gentleman was the last Pope-he whom Bonaparte carried off a prisoner into France? As worthy a Pope as ever issued a Bull. Had he any " old prejudices?" A few. When Bonaparte was meditating that outrage on his liberty, he still felt it right to submit, for the sanction of his own dear Papa, certain articles relating, not to the Universal Church, but to the internal administration of France itself, as it related to religion. One of these questions was, that all religions should be free-" Que tous les cultes soient libres, et publiquement exercés."-The Pope, says Sir Robert Inglis, answered as if he had been Julius the Second, or Sextus the Fifth. turns round to his Cardinals, and tells to them in words which no Protestant should ever forget:-" We have rejected this article as contrary to the Canons, to the Councils, to the Catholic religion, to the tranquillity of life, and to the welfare of the state." He "In another rescript to the Bishops, in the same work, he refers to the toleration of all sects actually granted in France under Bonaparte; and says that such alliance can no more consist with the Catholic Church, than a concord between Christ and Belial. Let it always be recollected that this was in reference to an application from a sovereign on his throne, in the plenitude of his power, to a poor decrepit old man, whom he was about to carry off as a prisoner into the centre of France; that Bonaparte felt the spiritual power of the Pope, when he asked the exercise of it to confirm his own regulations for the internal government of France; and that the Pope shewed the unchanging character of his church in refusing, even under such extremities, to yield one jot of its intolerant assumptions." Mr Brownlow has, we know, a wide swallow, and can gulp-bolt much— yet his stomach must have sickenedhis gorge risen-at such a sudden and heaped-up trencher of unexpected, though demanded, "contemporary evidence and fair reasoning." But, says Sir Robert, it may be urged that this was all in the effete and worn-out soil of Europe. Take then, quoth he, the seedling to another world, and see what a different fruit it will produce. But see -first of all-what fruit it did produce, when the ground was newly turned up in Spain. "By the constitution of the Cortes, it was enacted in respect to spiritual liberty as follows:-The religion of the Spanish nation is, and shall be perpetually, the Roman Catholic, the only true religion. The nation protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other.' The oath of the members of the Cortes was this- I swear to de fend and preserve the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, without admitting any other into the kingdom.' Is the Church of Rome here changed? Go across the Atlantic; what is the fundamental article in the constitution of the newest of the Roman Catholic states of the New World? I will not trust my recollection, but I will read a passage from the constitution of Mexico; it is nearly the same as that of the Cortes: The religion of the state shall be the holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. The State protects it by just and salutary laws; and prohibits the exercise of any other.' This is the act not of imperial, but of republican Mexico; it is the newest specimen of that kind of religious freedom which the members of the Church of Rome will admit,, even when taking the greatest care of their own civil rights. "I might quote much about the Protestants in France, and the spirit of the Roman Catholic religion even there; still more about the Vaudois, against whom the King of Sardinia, on his restoration, re-enacted many of the oppressive decrees which had been repealed during their subjection to France. I might quote not less as to the spirit of the Belgian Church: but I trust, that I have already said enough to prove that the semper eadem of the Romish Church is no vain boast; that that Church is at this day as grasping, as despotic, as exclusive, as in those ages, which, by an unnecessary courtesy to the present, so far as Rome is concerned, we call the Dark Ages." Sir Robert then goes on to shewwhich he does as clear as the daythat the evidence on which the alle ged change in the Church of Rome is supposed to rest, upon the proof of which change, we are told to relax all our securities against its former character, is itself so little trust-worthy on many other points, that no vital alteration in the constitution can safe ly or consistently be made on the testimony of such witnesses. He acutely exposes-though indeed that was an easy task-some of the unprincipled contradictions and inconsistencies of Dr James Doyle, Titular Bishop and Arch-Hypocrite of Kildare and Loughlin-and of Dan O'Connell-but we pass over this part of the speech, as we intend, ere long, to give Dr Doyle a flagellation which will keep his back warm during the succeeding winter. But we cannot choose but quote one admirable passage, alluding to some of O'Connell's threatenings-calm, or outrageous, or sullen-as suits the season-against the Church Establishment of Ireland "Is not this warning enough to us? Are these the men to whom it would be safe to intrust the care of our Protestant interests? Are these the men whom we would place in this House to legislate for the Church of England? It is said that these passages all refer to the Church of Ireland; that Dr Doyle, in his evidence, has expressly limited his observations to the Church of Ireland. Sir, there is no Church of Ireland: the Church of Ireland ceased to exist at the Union; it is now for ever one with the Church of England: they form one undivided Establishment: any attack on the one is an attack on the other: and that part which is in Ireland cannot be pulled down or undermined, without shaking the English part to its foundation. Let not the Establishment in England fondly believe that the Church in Ireland cannot be destroyed, or even weakened, without a mortal injury to their own nearer interests: let not the people of England believe that a successful attack can be made upon the property of the Church, whether in England or in Ireland, without endangering the security of all other property. The injury to the Establishment in England, the danger to all other property, may be more or less remote; but whether near or distant, it is alike inevitable from the day when power is once in any quarter familiarized with spoliation. Let neither the Establishment nor the people of England believe that the Church of Rome has changed, or can change, her policy or her principles; that she is, or ever can be, favourable, or even indifferent, to our institutions; and that she may now at length be safely entrusted with the legislative care of our religion. Unless the evidence, even of our own contemporary experience, be fallacious (I have pledged myself not to appeal to history), the See of Rome is at this day hostile, not merely to the dignity and supremacy of the Protestant Church in this empire, but to the toleration of any other Church anywhere else: and the testimony before the Committee upon which a change to the contrary is assumed, and upon which this great innovation in our constitution is demanded, is utterly insufficient to justify us in incurring even the slightest of those hazards, with which. in my judgment, that innovation would be followed." Sir Robert then proceeds to prove, that the object which is to be purchased with so much hazard-that object, which has been so long and so clamorously sought, under the name of Catholic Emancipation-is of no value-comparatively to the mass of those in whose name it is claimedThe Seven Millions! This he proves, both from the nature of their condition itself-and from the open avowal of many of the "Friends of the People." While he contends, with much ability, that Catholic Emancipation will still leave discontented and dissatisfied the Few, to whom it will nevertheless have been of real benefit. VOL. XXIV. "It will have opened to them some roads to honour as yet untrod; but you still leave enough to violate your own principle; you only remove the difficulty one or two steps further. You allow Mr O'Connell to have a silk gown; you allow Mr Charles Butler to sit upon the bench; but you will still exclude both of them from that which constitutes to a young and ardent mind the great hope and stimulus of the profession; you still for ever exclude him, and every one of his class in religion, from the chance of ever being lord chancellor; and when my honourable and learned friend the member for Plympton (Mr North) talked of the damp and chill in which generous ambition was left, by the exclusion of the rising talents of the law from its higher elevations, I felt that, even by the bill of which he was, at the moment, the eloquent advocate, that exclusion is rendered only just so much the more marked, as it is perpetuated by the very friends of the Roman Catholics in a bill which they call the Relief Bill; so little would this measure in the course of nature satisfy those for whom it is more immediately intended. They would still be marked and branded; their religion would still be a religion not to be trusted; and if this measure be carried, I have no doubt, but that, three years hence, we shall have the same associations; perhaps not the same orators, a Lawless instead of an O'Connell, at the head of the Irish Roman Catholics, and the same tales of grievances about Catholic millions being still excluded from being lord chancellor, and still being compelled to pay tythe to Protestant rectors, and rent to Protestant landlords." Sir Robert then shortly shews, that the whole of our constitution is a system of securities and exclusions. But we need not touch on this point-for, in a paper in this Magazine, two months ago-it was illustrated with distinguished ability by one whose political writings in our work have been felt, and that deeply, in the very heart of Britain-and the same ground has since been gone over in the Quarterly Review, with his usual talent, by Mr Southey. So much for the substance of Sir Robert Inglis's First Speech-now for that of his Second. In his second speech, the excellent Baronet discusses with great ability and perfect knowledge of his subjects, the specific conventions of the Treaty of Limerick-the pledge assumed to 5 M have been given at the time of the Union with Ireland-the Coronation Oath-and the conduct of the Roman Catholics of former times, before their existing measure of political power was conceded to them, compared with their later language-from which Sir Robert argues, that it may be seen whether concession be conciliation, and whether peace and harmony have or have not been promoted, by granting political power to the Roman Catholics of Ireland. Let us follow him through his discussion of these topics. In the debate, in which Sir Robert Inglis so greatly distinguished himself, Sir Francis Burdett, after a slight and passing allusion to the natural rights and general demands of the Roman Catholics, proceeded to argue in favour of the claims, on nearer and surer authorities; namely, on the specific conventions of the Treaty of Limerick, and the pledge assumed to have been given at the time of the Union with Ireland. And he added an argument ad verecundiam, on the different treatment which Roman Catholics receive from all the other Protest ant states of Europe. Sir Francis boldly said, "that the whole people of Ireland were entitled to the fullest participation in all the rights and privileges, civil and political, of the British constitution, by the treaty of Limerick." On this treaty of Limerick, too, had the orators harangued in the Catholic Association, and in their petitions to the House. The argument founded on it, Sir Robert has utterly demolished-broken it into so many fragments, that no ingenuity will ever again be able to repiece it into a "tangible shape." foolish argument it indeed was-but the more foolish an argument is, not unfrequently the more difficult is it to put an end to it; and foolish as it was, it required an answer on this account, that it involved the dearest of all national interests, the Public Faith. A Sir Robert, therefore, undertakes to prove, as Mr Peel had done on a former occasion, that no advantage ever withheld from the Roman Catholics, can be claimed under the terms of the treaty of Limerick. In the first place, he remarks, that this treaty, of late occupying so prominent a place in front of the Roman Ca tholics, was never brought forward at all till the year 1793, in any petition reciting the present object--never used as an argument of right in respect to the matters now at issue, till more than 100 years after the date of it. The intentions of the contracting parties to this treaty, can be discovered only by such considerations as the following the nature of the Procla mation addressed by the Lords Justices, as a rule to themselves, to the army, to the enemy, and to the people, in respect to the pacification of Ireland, when the last campaign was opening;-the nature of the terms granted to other cities in the progress of that campaign;-the nature of the terms at first refused to Limerick, and the grammatical meaning of those actually granted;-to which must be added, the understanding at the time of the Parliament of England, and of the Parliament of Ireland,--and finally, the understanding of King James himself. Limerick, every body knows, was the last city that, towards the close of the campaign of 1691, remained to the cause of James II. What, then, were the general terms intended to be granted by the government of Ireland, to those who, in the progress of the war, might voluntarily submit? The forfeited estates were to be restored; there was to be no prosecution for exercising their religion; and securities were, if possible, to be found against all such prosecution, and for the "rest and quiet" of the Catholics of Ireland. Such are the terms to be found in the declaration of the Lords Justices, July 17, 1691, recited by Story two years afterwards, himself a party in the war, as those "upon which the articles of Galway and Limerick, and all the Irish capitulations were afterwards founded." held out to the Roman Catholics as the in"This, then, was the general boon ducement to them to submit to William and Mary: that is to say, their Majesties would not invoke the penal laws against them; would, as far as they had the means, give them rest and quiet in the exercise of their religion; and (as neither a dispensing nor a legislating power existed in the crown singly) would endeavour to procure from the supreme authority of Parliament such further security in these particulars as might preserve the Roman Catholics from any disturbance |
