nated. Parliament passed a law vesting the entire land of six counties in the Crown, the property of Irishmen, and the King immediately distributed upwards of 385,000 acres to his followers. There were three divisions made of the spoils-first, to English and Scotch, who were to plant their portions of territory with English and Scotch tenants; secondly, to servitors in Ireland-that is, to persons employed under the Government, who might take English or Irish tenants at their choice; thirdly, to the natives of those countries, who were to be freeholders. Catholics and persons of Irish descent, who were known by the name of "mere Irish," were altogether excluded from this part of the country.

Such was the Plantation of Ulster, and, to show the spirit in which it was made, we give the following "Articles," extracted from the orders and conditions of the Plantation of Ulster :

(7.) "The said undertakers, their heirs and assigns, shall not alien or demise their portions, or any part thereof, to the mere Irish, or to such persons as will not take the oath which the said undertakers are bound to take by the said article, and to that end a proviso shall be inserted in the letters patent."

(8.) "The said undertakers shall not alien their portions during five years next after the date of their letters patent, but in this

1 Leland, book iv. chap. 8.

manner-viz., one third part in fee farm," &c.

"But after the said

five years they shall be at liberty to alien to all persons except the mere Irish." (Harris's "Hibernica,” p. 66.)

The documents here cited give but a faint idea of the extreme misery created by this plantation. The administration of the law was quite consistent with the temper of the times, and the Protestant Bishop Burnet does not hesitate to denounce the partiality and injustice that were exhibited.1

Scotland furnishes us with an example of a country entirely given up to the spirit of intolerance. Lord Clarendon, speaking of the Scotch in 1660, says: "Their whole religion consists in hatred of popery." Few" apostles of tolerance" pushed a hatred of truth to such a pitch as John Knox, who declared that it rightly appertained to the civil power to regulate everything connected with religion. He issued a warrant of death against anyone who should celebrate the holy sacrifice of the Mass twice. An ecclesiastical tyranny was established under his direction. of which it is now hardly possible to form a conception. In Chambers's "Domestic Annals" we find the statement that the private life of each individual was subjected to investigation like that exercised in the East.

The despotism exercised by the ruling authorities in Scotland exceeded that in Geneva, the birthplace of Calvinism and centre of revolutionary intrigue.

In 1713, Parliament, aided by the Crown, compelled the Scotch Calvinists to tolerate the introduction of an Episcopal Church. The year 1735 marks the first approach to any kind of liberty in Scotland, and then for the first time the poor Highlanders who had remained steadfast to the Catholic Church obtained permission to come down from their mountainous abodes in order to practise the religion of their ancestors, and to teach England the spiritual power of the faith of Edward the Confessor.

The anarchy of the various Protestant denominations of the United States of America is well known, but we will recall for some of our readers the memorable fact that since the era of Luther the only sincere attempt to establish a system of religious liberty previous to Washington was made by the Catholics.

As we have mentioned in a previous chapter, Maryland was founded by Lord Baltimore as a refuge for persons of every religious belief, and the fundamental principle was laid down that there should be perfect liberty for all.

S

The Puritan party, the descendants of those who loudly preached the right of private judgment and liberty of conscience, devastated this noble territory and destroyed every trace of its former freedom.

In a study so brief as this we cannot do more than point out what is most important, but we think that what we have pointed out is amply sufficient to prove the correctness of our original propositions-viz., that Protestantism has destroyed civil liberty wherever it has gained the ascendency, and that politically it has produced a retrograde movement in the nations who have been subjected to its influence. In Catholic nations, on the contrary, liberty is of old standing, and absolutism is completely modern.

England is a living witness of this statement, and England is the country which in the present day gives the clearest idea of what the nations of Europe would have been if Protestantism and the Pagan liberalism of the Renaissance had not stifled in them the growth of institutions dating from the thirteenth century.

Every civil liberty except that of worship, which dates only from our own time, existed in Great Britain previous to the Reformation, and Great Britain alone of European nations may be said to have escaped the effects of the Renaissance. Although Great Britain

severed itself from the outward unity of the Church, she did it apparently in a manner not sufficiently complete to satisfy the Neo-Protestant school of modern liberals.

The English episcopal system is in its present form the denial of the fundamental principle of Protestantism.

Nearly all the fruitful undertakings of Englishmen date from Catholic times, and are essentially Catholic, and every danger that England carries within her bosom arises from the convulsions of the religious revolution brought about by Henry VIII. France, Spain, Austria, Portugal, and Italy escaped the consequences of the Reformation to fall into the generative errors of the Renaissance which produced Cæsarism, or its modern form of irreligious radicalism and infidelity. Their misfortune was not so great as that of the nations that became Protestant, but their suffering has nevertheless been long and serious.

Catholic nations, to become free again, require "the liberty of the children of God," the liberty that permits them the free and unrestrained exercise of their religion, and the civil right to put forth publicly its worship and its doctrines.

Protestant nations can only become free by ceasing