THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 From the collection of 
 James Collins, 
 Drumcondra, Ireland. 
 Purchased, 1918. 
 
 M 1491 ml 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/lettersofmostrevOOmach 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
% 
 
 THE LETTERS 
 
 OF .THE 
 
 MOST REVEREND JOHN MAC HALE, D.D, 
 
 UNDER TIIEIR RESTECTIVE SIGNATURES 
 
 HIEROPHILOS ; JOHN, BISHOP OF MARONIA; BISHOP OF KILLALA ; 
 
 AND 
 
 ARCHBISHOP OF TUAM. 
 
 DUBLIN: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY JAMES DUFFY, 
 10, WELLIN' GTON- QU AY . 
 
 1847. 
 
DUBLIN: 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM HOLDEN, 
 
 10, Abbey-street. 
 
TK 
 
 Y3 
 
 hi\ l 4^ i *WV 1 
 
 % 
 
 TO THE HEADER 
 
 Of the following’ Letters, some have been already 
 diffused in previous editions, others have appeared in 
 the public journals, and a considerable number is now 
 published for the first time, forming; a larg’e portion of 
 the volume. Since the publication of the earlier letters 
 of u Hieropliilos,” nearly a quarter of a century has 
 passed over, carrying* with it, in the silent celerity of 
 its course, almost an entire g-eneration of readers. To 
 many of those who have since grown up, filling the 
 gradual void occasioned by those who have gone before 
 them, those letters will not altogether appear bereft 
 of novelty. But novelty itself has its countervailing 
 drawbacks, though one of the most charming sources 
 of attraction. Literary productions seem to he regulated 
 by the same laws, and liable to the same casualties as 
 the productions of nature or the human race ; and the 
 embrowned complexion, hearing evidence to the action 
 of time and labour, is often no less grateful than the 
 
 437992 
 
4 
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 more fresli and florid colours, which, in youthful 
 compositions, may be signs of a hectic, as well as of a 
 healthful constitution, and may, therefore, he equally 
 the harbingers of vigour, or of a premature decline. 
 
 It is, however, less to the artificial skill of composi- 
 tion, than to the value of the materials out of which 
 they have been wrought, the portion of the letters 
 already published, has been indebted for a large share 
 of adverse, as well as favourable attention. On the 
 hearts and understanding of the Irish people, the in- 
 teresting topics out of which they grew, are not soon 
 likely to lose their hold. The social, as well as moral 
 blessings that follow in the train of knowledge ; the 
 malignant influence of the tyranny that first strove to 
 seal, and of the treachery that is since labouring to 
 poison its salutary fountains ; the necessity of an educa- 
 tion entirely free and Catholic for the Catholic people — 
 Catholic in its conductors, in its books, in its living 
 instructions, — in short in its influences on the senses 
 and the hearts of the growing generation, with the like 
 free privilege to all others of adopting their own fa- 
 vourite systems; the bigotted monopoly of the Pro- 
 testant establishment, to which the freedom of education 
 has been hitherto, and yet continues to be sacrificed : 
 the necessity of a great reduction of that useless, nay, 
 noxious establishment, which encumbers the country, 
 standing in the way of statesmen in any effort to 
 achieve its regeneration; the miseries entailed on the 
 people of Ireland by the forcible and fraudulent ab- 
 straction of its legislature, growing with each succes- 
 
* 
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 sive year., until they at length broke forth in an awful 
 national famine, and likely to accumulate into a series 
 of similar disasters, until that fountain of public misery 
 is sealed, by the solemn restitution of its own Parlia- 
 ment; — these and subordinate subjects, of a similar 
 tendency and spirit, form the leading themes of this 
 series of letters. Of those grievances, some will soon, 
 I trust, be matters of history. Until then, they shall 
 not cease to interest, to engross, nay, to agitate, the 
 public mind. 
 
 t In the meantime, it will require the most incessant 
 vigilance, not to be surprised into the toils that are art- 
 fully laid, for perpetuating the miseries of the country, 
 by ensnaring the freedom of its religion. Among those 
 whose influence is chiefly aimed at, are the Catholic 
 Bishops and clergy of Ireland. Their vigilance alarmed 
 the enemies of the Catholic faith; their firmness filled 
 them with despair. They were ever found united with 
 their flocks, borrowing vigour and courage from that 
 Apostolic stem, whose root is at Borne, and on which 
 the Irish portion of the Catholic Church has been early 
 engrafted. The aim is now to sever them, if possible, 
 from their flocks, as well as from the rock of Peter. 
 The present destitution is deemed by those, whose God 
 is Mammon, an auspicious time to try the experiment ; 
 and whilst numbers of the people are starving without 
 relief, measures are in contemplation to make a cheap 
 purchase of the fidelity of their clergy. Instead of 
 leaving them, as heretofore, solely in connexion with 
 the people ; the policy is now to bring them into 
 
6 
 
 TO THE READER; 
 
 anomalous alliances with those of an alien creed, for 
 the purpose of standing* as useful outposts for its pro- 
 tection, and to place them in an isolated independence 
 on their beloved flocks, by endeavouring to make them 
 sharers in the patronage of the crown, and in the gold 
 of the treasury. Against the success of those schemes, 
 a portion of those letters is directed ; and, with the 
 primitive Fathers as my guides — the sacred Canons of 
 the Church as beacon lights to direct me — with the 
 successors of St. Peter proclaiming the sacred rights 
 of the episcopacy to he still intact — calling on them 
 to assert those rights against the violent rush or more 
 subtle insinuation of modern errors, and imparting to 
 every See in union with that rock, a portion of the 
 firmness and immobility of the Apostolical substruction 
 on which it reposes \ it has been, and ever shall be, my 
 untiring aim to lend my aid, in protecting from open 
 or ambushed aggression from any quarter, the rights 
 and virtue of the Hierarchy of Ireland. 
 
 The strong impression of the injustice with which We 
 have been treated, has been deepened by contemplating 
 the far happier lot of other countries, less favoured by 
 soil or climate. The letters written from some of the 
 principal places on the Continent, and occasionally 
 touching on this painful contrast, are now published 
 for the first time. The period in which they were 
 written, was during a respite from the harrassing 
 labours undergone in the year 1831, in endeavouring 
 to mitigate a calamity such as the present, but which 
 was far less awful in its range and its intensity. The 
 
TO THE READER. 
 
 7 
 
 smiling* fields^ the comfortable cottages, the contented; 
 nay; the cheerful countenances you generally meet in 
 those calumniated regions; soon convinced me that 
 some of their venal defamers only laboured to avert; 
 by their caricature of the miserable condition of other 
 countries; the execration which their oppression of the 
 people of Ireland; had earned. Not the least consoling- 
 circumstance in this visit to those countries; was the 
 practical knowledge it afforded of the authentic claims 
 of Ireland to its ancient fame; and of the veneration in 
 which the memory of its saints and sages is embalmed. 
 On either side of the Rhine; as well in France as all 
 over the German Mesopotamia; and along the Alps 
 and Apennines; there is scarcely a place of note that 
 is not redolent of Irish sanctity. The paths of our 
 countrymen you can track by the streaks of glory 
 that still linger on the lands which they traversed • 
 and in the sanctuaries of their most magnificent 
 cathedrals; as well as in the hearts of their present 
 inhabitants; their ashes or their memories are devoutly 
 enshrined. 
 
 But it was Rome; “ the eternal city/* of the u seven 
 hills” that chiefly attracted and fixed my contempla- 
 tions. It was not with a view of any attempt that 
 would he as vain as presumptuous, to describe the 
 countless monuments of its arts, its history, and its 
 profane and sacred empire. For such Herculean toils, 
 individuals of congenial constitution, appear to he horn 
 and to be trained. Such were Donatus, the learned 
 Jesuit of Sienna, and Grsevius, and Nardini, and 
 
8 
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 Pitisco, whose lexicon is one of the richest, as well 
 as readiest of the treasuries of Roman antiquities and 
 literature. Such, too, were Winkleman and Lipsius, 
 the one eminent for his rare collection of Roman 
 monuments, the other for his learned dissertations on 
 the military and political institutions, that contributed 
 to extend and consolidate the Roman power. To 
 collect the gleanings of such industrious and success- 
 ful workmen, would not be worth the toil, even were 
 one possessed of taste and leisure for such labours; and 
 to exhibit, as the result of one’s own research, those 
 masses of antiquarian wealth which were dug and 
 disinterred by their industry ; would be to incur the 
 reproach from which Lipsius himself was not free, of 
 appearing in his classical descriptions to be only a 
 personification of the ancients; so identically did he 
 appear clothed in the majesty, nay, the very form of 
 that ancient eloquence, which he literally, and, perhaps, 
 unconsciously, transferred to his own writings. Far, 
 then, from entertaining the ambitious project of de- 
 scribing Rome, and its pyramids, its aqueducts, its 
 triumphal arches, its churches, and its fountains ; mine 
 was only the humble task, or, rather, amusement, of 
 noting down the few reflections which occurred to me, 
 by way of coincidence or contrast, as I strayed over 
 its “seven hills,” so celebrated in classic, as well as in 
 mystic story. Seen in this way, the vast region of 
 of Rome, will present a variety of views to every ob- 
 server. In short, ardent as was my early enthusiasm 
 for visiting the “ eternal city” and its ancient hills, it 
 
TO THE READER. 
 
 9 
 
 was my devotion to the shrine of the Apostles in the 
 Vatican, on the other side of the Tiber, that chiefly 
 led me to this venerable spot ; and these brief and 
 simple letters are only intended as authentic memorials 
 of that devotion — in imitation of the ancient pilgrims, 
 who hoped, that their humble offerings would not be 
 disdained acceptance, among* the gorgeous votive gifts, 
 with which more favoured personages, had decorated 
 the walls of its temples. 
 
 JOHN, ARCHBISHOP OF TUAM. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of the Nativity 
 of our Blessed Lord, 184G. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LETTJ5E. 
 
 I — On the natural progress to infidelity, when one abandons the Catholic 
 
 Church 
 
 II — To the Catholic Clergy of Ireland, on the subject of the Kildare-street 
 Society. Their confidence in any system of education but a Catholic 
 one, misplaced 
 
 III — On the Kildare-street Society. However flourishing, it, and every 
 such association, must assuredly fall 
 
 IV — A reply to “ Bibliophilos” on the same subject ... 
 
 V. — In reply to “ Bibliophilos” 
 
 VI — In reply to “ Bibliophilos” 
 
 VII — On Intolerance and Exclusive Salvation. If a crime, the Sectaries 
 not free from the reproach 
 
 VIII — On the Kildare-street and similar anti- Catholic Societies 
 
 IX — To the Most Rev. Dr. Manners, Protestant Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, and Primate of all England, on the question of Divorce between 
 George IV. and his Queen. The Protestant Church the footstool of 
 the State 
 
 X— On the Kildare-street Society 
 
 XI — In reply to “Bibliophilos.” 
 
 XII — On the Conversion of a Protestant Lady to the Catholic Church ... 
 
 XIII — To the English People, on the state of Ireland, and the causes of 
 its discontent. Ireland less known and cared for in England, than the 
 distant Indies. 
 
 XIV — To the English People, on same subject Allegiance to the throne 
 faithfully fulfilled by the Irish people 
 
 XV — To the English People, on same subject. Zeal and labours of the 
 Catholic Clergy 
 
 XVI — To the English People, on same subject. The anti-Irish and anti- 
 Catholic prejudices, perpetuated from age to age, one of the most 
 prolific and active springs of the miseries of Ireland 
 
 XVII — To the English People, on same subject. A few are enabled, by 
 professing the favoured creed, to exercise an unjust and oppressive 
 ascendancy ... 
 
 XVIII — To the English People, on same subject 
 
 XIX — To the Most Rev. William Magee, D.D., &c., Protestant Arch- 
 bishop of Dublin, in reply to a Charge teeming with offence to 
 Catholics 
 
 TAGF. 
 
 9 
 
 1.3 
 
 17 
 
 22 
 
 29 
 
 36 
 
 42 
 
 47 
 
 51 
 
 57 
 
 61 
 
 66 
 
 68 
 
 71 
 
 75 
 
 78 
 
 85 
 
 88 
 
 92 
 
xn 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER. PAGE- 
 
 XX — To the Most Rev William Magee, D.D., &c., Protestant Archbishop 
 
 of Dublin, on the same subject ... ... ... ... ... 98' 
 
 XXI — To the Right Honourable George Canning, on the necessity of re- 
 pealing all the penal laws affecting Catholics ... ... ... 104 
 
 XXII — To the Right Honourable George Canning. Every people fashioned, 
 more or less, by the good or bad influence of the laws by which they 
 
 are governed ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 107 
 
 XXIII — To the Right Honourable George Canning. All other political 
 remedies delusive, as long as the vitiating gangrene of bad laws is 
 suffered to destroy society ... ... ... ... ... 110 
 
 XXIV — To the Right Honourable George Canning. Ireland an exception 
 
 to that civil liberty which is the boast of the British Constitution ... 114 
 
 XXY — To the Right Honourable George Canning. The Protestant Estab- 
 lishment fluctuating in its own creed, and yet intolerant of the settled 
 and sincere religious belief of others ... ... ... ... 119 
 
 XX YI — To the Right Honourable George Canning. Bigotted and intole- 
 rant exhortations of the Protestant Archbishops of Dublin and Tuam, 
 seconded by the Polemical Writings of Declan ... ... ... 123 
 
 XXYII — To the Right Honourable George Canning. The iniquitous 
 claims of the Protestant Establishment to Tithes, cruelly aggravated 
 by the harsh mode of their exaction ... ... ... ... 128 
 
 XXYIII — To the Right Honourable George Canning. Futility of the 
 comparison instituted between private property and that claimed by 
 the Protestant Church. The former connected with the public good — 
 the other only productive of public misery ... ... ... 132 
 
 XXIX — To the Right Honourable George Canning. The physical wants 
 of the people to be relieved before other public measures are discussed 
 
 or adopted ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 138 
 
 XXX — To the Right Honourable George Canning. The Catholic Church 
 
 the best friend of education — equally solicitous for those comforts of 
 the people, that are overlooked by those who affect such a zeal to edu- 
 cate them ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 144 
 
 XXXI — To the Right Honourable George Canning. The hypocrisy by 
 which those associations are swayed who talk so much about educa- 
 tion, whilst with the utmost Stoicism they can see the people starve 148 
 
 XXXII — To the Right Honourable George Canning. Not a shadow of an 
 
 argument for protracting the repeal of the odious penal code ... 151 
 
 XXXIII — To the Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, on a Charge delivered 
 
 by him in the Protestant Cathedral of Killala ... ... ... 156 
 
 XXXIV — On the new Reformation in Cavan ... ... ... 163 
 
 XXXV — A Reply to an Article in the Quarterly Review, relative to the 
 
 Letters of “Hierophilos.” ... ... ... ... ... 173 
 
 XXXVI — To Lord Bexley, in reply to his Lordship’s Letter in the 
 Morning Chronicle, on the College of Maynooth, and the Letters of 
 “ Hierophilos.” ... ... ... ... ... ... 180 
 
 XXXVII — To the Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, on his project of 
 
 carrying on a Mission among the Catholics ... ... ... 186 
 
 XXXVIII — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the grievous des- 
 titution of the people ... ... ... ... ... ... J 90 
 
 XXXIX — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the same subject, 
 and on th6 rapacity of Landed Proprietors, by whom it is caused or 
 aggravated ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 196 
 
 XL — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on same subject, and on the 
 
 necessity of legislative measures to prevent its recurrence ... 205 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 » 
 
 JLETTGlt. 
 
 XLI— To the Right ITonourahle the Earl Grey, on same subject, and on 
 the necessity of the use of Flour, and of exporting the Potato, in 
 order to escape the recurrence of famine 
 
 XLH To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle , on the bigotry that 
 
 laboured to withdraw the Grant from the College of Maynooth 
 
 XLIXI — The Coronation of William IV., King of England, the H’j 
 and St. Thomas of Canterbury 
 
 XLIV Fall of Warsaw — the servitude produced by the French Re- 
 
 volution, &c. Fontainbleau — the prison of the Pope— the tomb of the 
 power of Napoleon 
 
 XLV — A View of the Alps ; the Lake of Geneva ; the central point 
 from which Heresy and Infidelity strove to destroy the Catholic 
 Religion 
 
 XL VI — The Happy Valley ; Mont Blanc ; the pious and secluded Pastor 
 of Chamounie 
 
 XLVII — The Passage of the “ Tete noire,” and the Simplon; German 
 influence beyond the Alps, illustrated in the mixed architecture of 
 the Cathedral of Milan ; St. 4 Charles Borromeo; St. Francis of Sales... 
 
 XLVIII — Bologna ; its University, Museum, &c. ; Benedict XIV. ; Bobio 
 St. Columbanus 
 
 XLIX — Fiesole ; St Donatus, or Donagha, an Irishman, its Bishop ; his 
 eulogy of Ireland ; Florence ; its collections of the Works of Art ; its 
 General Council ; its celebrated men 
 
 L — Sienna ; its celebrated Popes ; distinguished as the birth-place of St. 
 Catherine, one of the most influential persons of her age ... 
 
 LI — The Palatine, the centre of the Seven Hills; its ruins 
 
 LII — The Capitoline, the next in renown of those composing the sur- 
 rounding circle 
 
 LIII — The Quirinal Hill, primitively, as well as. appropriately, called the 
 Hill of Contests 
 
 LIV — Mount Ccelius ; the Colosseum ; St. Gregory the Great ; St. John of 
 Lateran 
 
 LV — The kindred Hills of the Esquiline and Viminal ; the Baths of 
 Titus; St Mary Major; the Church of St. Lawrence 
 
 LVI — Mount Aventine, on the banks of the Tiber; Church of St. Paul ; 
 the Church of the same Apostle, called the Three Fountains 
 
 LVII — The Vatican ; Church of St. Peter ; High Mass sung by the Pope 
 on Christmas Day 
 
 LVIII — My first visit to the Pope ; a Manuscript Letter of Mary, Queen 
 of Scots; the Tombs of O’Neill and O’Donnell on the Janiculum; 
 excursions to Subiaco, &c. ; Holy Week and Easter Sunday at St. 
 Peter’s 
 
 LIX — Naples ; Mount Vesuvius ; Miracle of the Blood of St. Januarius ; 
 Pompeii ; Pestum ; Amalphi; Sorento; Salerno; Pope Gregory VII. 
 
 LX — Monastery of Monte Cassino ; Feast of Corpus Christi ; Feast of SS. 
 Peter and Paul ; my last visit to the Pope 
 
 LXI — To Earl Grey, on the contrast between the happiness of the people 
 on the Continent, and the misery of those of Ireland ... ... 
 
 LXII — The Holy House of Loretto ; its successive translations, first from 
 Nazareth to Dalmatia, and again over the Adriatic Sea into Italy ... 
 
 LXIII — Ravenna ; its decay and solitude ; Tomb of Dante ; Ferrara ; 
 Alphonso ; Tasso; Ariosto; Venice; its glory, its guilt, and its 
 decline; Paintings of Titian ; Monument of Canova 
 
 XUl 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 209 
 
 214 
 
 222 
 
 227 
 
 231 
 
 235 
 
 238 
 
 243 
 
 24G 
 
 251 
 
 253 
 
 258 
 
 262 
 
 265 
 
 270 
 
 273 
 
 275 
 
 280 
 
 285 
 
 291 
 
 295 
 
 298 
 
 300 
 
XIV 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LX TV — Padua; Verona; Trent; its celebrated General Council; a 
 
 Painting of the Fathers over the great Altar of the Church ... 304 
 
 LXV — Singular solicitude of the Scotch Reviewers about the fate of the 
 Portuguese, Spanish, and Italians, whilst they are utterly indifferent 
 to the successive persecutions inflicted on the Catholics of Ireland, in 
 order to maintain the ascendancy of the Parliamentary Church ... 307 
 
 LXVI — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the necessity of a 
 
 legislative measure to annihilate the Established Church in Ireland ... 313 
 
 LXVII — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the impolicy and 
 
 injustice of the threatened act of coercion ... .. ... 319 
 
 LXVIII — To the Lord Bishop of Exeter, on the noxious influence of the 
 
 Protestant Establishment ... ... ... ... ... 327 
 
 LXIX — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the Repeal of the 
 
 Legislative Union ... ... ... ... ... ... 335 
 
 LXX — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey, on the distress of the 
 
 poor, still aggravated by cruel scenes of eviction from their homes ... 342 
 
 LXXI — To the Right Honourable the Earl Grey. The Catholic Clergy 
 charged with Priestcraft, because they shield the people against their 
 oppressors ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 346 
 
 LXXII — Tobarnavian ; the Irish names of places all over Ireland singu- 
 larly expressive of their qualities ; legendary traditions of this foun- 
 tain, connected with the popular stories of Fion and his followers, &c. 357 
 
 LXXIII — To the Catholic Clergy of the Diocese of Killala, on my trans- 
 lation to the Metropolitan See of Tuam ... ... ... 362 
 
 LXXIV — To his Grace the Duke of Wellington, on the essential injustice 
 of paying Tithes, in any shape, for the support of the Protestant 
 Establishment ... ... ... ... ... ... 364 
 
 LXXV — To the Catholic Clergy of the Diocess of Tuam— a Pastoral 
 on the eve of an Election, cautioning the faithful against bribery and 
 perjury, and exhorting them to fulfil their duty as Christians ... 368 
 
 LXX VI — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the unheeded 
 destitution of the suffering people, whilst a noxious establishment is 
 the object of legislative solicitude ... ... ... ... 372 
 
 LXXVI1 — To the Right Reverend Dr. Bloomfield, Lord Bishop of Lon- 
 don, in reply to an unprovoked attack of his Lordship ; contrast 
 between his preaching, at the Coronation of William IV., and an 
 humble Capuchin, preaching before the Pope ... ... ... 381 
 
 LXXVTII — To the Editor of the Courier , in repy to some bigotted re- 
 marks of the Rev. Mr. Stanley, since become one of the Protestant 
 Bishops of England ... ... ... ... ... ... 388 
 
 LXXIX — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education. The disregard of its framers to the authority of 
 the Bishops ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 392 
 
 LXXX — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education — a preponderance of influence in its Board, vested 
 in rancorous, anti-Catholic bigots ... ... ... ... 394 
 
 LXXXI — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education, and Poor Laws, both the offspring of feelings hos- 
 tile to Catholicity ... ... ... ... ... ... 401 
 
 LXXXII — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education. Contrast between that system and the Catholic 
 education, sought in the petitions, &c., of the Catholic Bishops ... 407 
 
 LXXXIII — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education. Dr. Whateley’s offensive attacks on the Catholic 
 Church ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 415 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER. 1 
 
 LX XXIV— To the lliglit Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education Jealousy of the Protestant Prelates, lest the 
 titles of the Catholic Bishops should interfere with their temporali- 
 ties ; the series of the Archbishops of Tuam up to the last Catholic 
 Archbishop mentioned by Ware; the Cross erected by Hugh O’Hoissin, 
 first Archbishop of Tuam, and Turlogh O’Connor, Monarch of Ireland 
 
 LXXXV — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the National 
 or Government System of Education, a progeny of Boulter’s scheme 
 of Charter Schools. If innocuous, the praise is due to the zeal and 
 vigilance of the Catholic Clergy ... 
 
 LX XXVI — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the odious 
 measure of the rent-charge ; its mockery and delusion ; no hope for 
 freedom of education in Ireland, as long as the tithes, in any shape, 
 and the ascendancy of the Establishment, are maintained ... 
 
 LXXXVII — To the Roman Catholic Clergy and Faithful of the Diocese 
 of Tuam, on the subject of National Education — a Pastoral Instruction 
 
 LXXXV III — To his Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, on the inalienable 
 rights of every Bishop not to be interfered with by any Government 
 Board, or any of its functionaries, in the religious education of his flock 
 
 LXXXIX — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell. The Lutheran 
 Heresy propagated in England, by corrupting the teaching in the 
 Colleges and Universities. Analogy of this policy with that pursued 
 by modern statesmen ... 
 
 XC — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the same subject ... 
 
 XCI — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education, and the poisoning of the minds of youth through 
 alien teachers from Germany, as it is now sought, through alien Scotch 
 and English teachers ... 
 
 XCII — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the Canonical 
 Titles of the Catholic Bishops to their respective Sees, and the insult- 
 ing condescension of acknowledging the names of Priests and Bishops, 
 without acknowledging their rights and titles to their respective 
 Parishes and Sees 
 
 XC III — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the system of 
 National Education, and the corruption of the Universities and Colleges 
 
 XCIV — To the Venerable the Clergy and Faithful of the Archdiocese of 
 Tuam, on the Society for the Propagation of the Faith 
 
 XCV — To the Venerable the Clergy and Faithful of the Archdiocese of 
 Tuam — a Lenten Pastoral 
 
 XCVI — To his Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, on the arrangement 
 offered in vain by the assembled Bishops for a change in the National 
 system of Education, and rejected by the Lord Lieutenant 
 
 XCVII — To his Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, on the same subject, 
 and on the justice and necessity of each one confining himself to his 
 own jurisdiction, and the care of his own fold 
 
 XCVIII — To the Clergy and Faithful of the Diocese of Tuam, on the 
 calumnious reports of the Hibernian Bible Societies — recent allies of 
 the National Board 
 
 XCIX — To the Honourable Lord Clifford, on the unwarrantable inter- 
 ference of officious Englishmen, as well as Irishmen, at Rome, in the 
 concerns of the Irish Church 
 
 C — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the destitution of 
 the people ; their astonishing patience under such privations 
 
 Cl — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the uncanonical 
 Bequests Bill. Treacherous and atrocious, because, under the guise of 
 offering a boon, it surpasses preceding enactments, in some of its penal 
 inflictions 
 
 XV 
 
 ‘AGE. 
 
 423 
 
 435 
 
 444 
 
 452 
 
 468 
 
 481 
 
 484 
 
 492 
 
 497 
 
 503 
 
 510 
 
 515 
 
 521 
 
 530 
 
 537 
 
 542 
 
 557 
 
 561 
 
XY1 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER. PAGE 
 
 CII — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the Bequests 
 Bill. No change made in the obnoxious principles of the bill. The 
 only one is the recognition of Bishops by their surnames, instead of 
 their Sees ; a mode as offensive as it is attempted to be made fashionable 
 with court officials, and of which the obvious aim is to deny them 
 spiritual jurisdiction ... ... ... ... ... ... 565 
 
 CIII — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the Bequests 
 Act. This measure attacks the sovereign jurisdiction of the Almighty 
 over his creatures — unites with the disabling clauses of the Emanci- 
 pation Act to inflict injury on the religious orders — strives to transfer 
 to an uncanonical junta of various creeds the rights and jurisdiction 
 of the Catholic Hierarchy — is opposed by the greater number of that 
 body — will dry up the sources of charity... ... ... ... 574 
 
 Cl V— To the Very Rev. and Rev. the Clergy and Eaithful of theDiocess of 
 Tuam, on the various bad fruits of the Bequests Act springing from 
 principles opposed to the Catholic Religion — a Pastoral Instruction ..." 580 
 
 CY — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the Bequests 
 Act. The obvious tendency of the measure to reduce the Catholic 
 Hierarchy to the level of the Protestant Establishment, and make it a 
 subservient tool to the Minister of the day for the achievement of his 
 political projects. “Discreet Catholics” — no protection to their 
 religion. Some of the Members of the House of Commons would 
 support any measure, however injurious to religion, bringing them 
 wealth and patronage ... ... ... ... ... ... 585 
 
 CVI — To the Right Honourable Sft Robert Peel, Bart., on the Infidel 
 Colleges. The Maynooth endowment, a screen to hide from view and 
 from execration, the scheme of the Infidel Colleges ... ... 592 
 
 CVII — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the Infidel 
 Colleges. The analogy of the History of Ireland and the attachment 
 of the people to their Faith, shows the fatuity of the project. The 
 violence offered to religion and science, in striving to divorce such 
 kindred objects ... ... ... ... ... ... 598 
 
 CVIII — To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., on the Infidel 
 Colleges. The pretended amendments of the measure, only fresh and 
 more penal aggravations of its odious enactments ... ... 599 
 
 CX — To the Very Rev. and Rev. the Clergy and Eaithful of the Arch- 
 diocese of Tuam — a Pastoral Instruction on the punishments inflicted 
 by God ou those who abandon or compromise their faith ... ... 603 
 
 CIX — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the severe destitu- 
 tion caused by the failure of the Potato crop, and the necessity of timely 
 measures to meet the awful calamity ... ... ... ... 609 
 
 CXII — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the same subject. 
 
 The tardiness of our rulers in providing against the coming famine ... 612 
 
 CXIII — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the same subject. 
 
 The folly, as well as cruelty, of discussing theories on the causes of 
 the failure of the potato crop, instead of extending immediate relief 
 to the people, who are dying of starvation ... ... ... 615 
 
 CXIV — To the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, on the famine now 
 so fatally raging throughout the land. Ireland brought to this lament, 
 able crisis, of being unable to contend with the calamity, by a natu- 
 ral and successive series of causes and effects, springing from the 
 abstraction of her native legislature. Criminal apathy in the neglect 
 of providing food, and sacrificing to the cruel theories of political 
 economy, the valuable lives of a most patient people ... ... 616 
 
LETTERS, 
 
 < fc . 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 9 January 29, 1820. 
 
 ®v(Aochx.x.Yi<; ya,% p,u9of — O dyssey. 
 
 For slander stings the soul — P ope. 
 
 In a late number of the Dublin Journal , which came into my 
 hands, I observed some critical strictures on the lives and writings 
 of our celebrated historians, Hume and Gibbon. I cast my eye 
 over the article, rather with a view to amuse myself, than with 
 a hope of extracting much information from that writer’s criti- 
 cism. I considered it one of those tasteless articles which the 
 barrenness of his materials obliges him sometimes to insert : 
 such were his dull extracts on the feats of knight errantry, 
 in which he must have imagined that his readers had returned 
 to the days of boyhood, as the insipidity of the grotesque ad- 
 ventures, was not relieved by one particle of skill in the plan, 
 or elegance in the composition, of the story. If the writer had 
 contented himself with filling the chasms of his journal with 
 articles merely uninteresting, I should only smile at his imbecility ; 
 but when they have generally for object, the aspersion of a large 
 and respectable portion of society, then our pity for his weakness, 
 is warmed into indignation for his malevolence. Such is the 
 tendency of the article to which I have alluded. 
 
 After some flimsy observations on the writings of Hume and 
 Gibbon, he tells us in a very sapient tone, that if the process of 
 the latter’s religious changes had been reversed, by passing from 
 Paganism to Popery, and from Popery to Protestantism, there he 
 would finally have rested his conviction. — Wise and incontro- 
 
 B 
 
10 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 vertible conclusion ! The comprehensiveness of this writer dis- 
 dains the slow and gradual process of enquiry, and his sagacity 
 discovers inferences which would have escaped less discerning 
 intellects. I should wish to learn from what premises he has 
 deduced such a consequence. I know of no a priori principle 
 that could warrant its extravagance ; and if we recur to the less 
 fallacious criterion of experience, the history of the sectaries that 
 sprung from the bosom of Protestantism, should have pointed out 
 to him an opposite train of argument. 
 
 History furnishes us with numberless examples of persons — 
 nay, of nations — passing from Paganism to Popery, and reposing 
 there. It has preserved instances too, of many reconciled from 
 Protestantism to Popery, and enjoying all the tranquillity of a 
 settled conviction. As I must suppose that the writer of this 
 article has some acquaintance with biography, I will now spare 
 myself the necessity of swelling this letter by detailing a 
 variety of examples. But I have scarcely read of any passing 
 from the extreme of Infidelity to the opposite one of Popery ; 
 and gently returning to the well-poised mean of the Protestant 
 religion. Did the writer but advert a little, to the bent of 
 the human mind, he would discover, that after freeing itself 
 from the burden of authority, it proceeds by an easy and 
 natural consequence, to the extreme of licentiousness. Thus 
 we find Protestantism, soon after its establishment, producing 
 Socinianism ; Socinianism refined into the more philosophic name 
 of Unitarianism, until the private spirit, like fame, acquiring 
 strength in its progress, has closed its career in Deism and 
 irreligion. In this manner we can trace to the principles of 
 Protestantism all the errors that have, for three centuries, 
 assumed and disgraced the name of Christianity. 
 
 This truth is further exemplified in the life of Mr. Gibbon.* 
 He tells us himself that early in life he imbibed the spirit of 
 religious controversy ; that the eagerness of his curiosity prompted 
 his enquiries beyond the polemics of his own sect, and that the 
 result of his labours was a sincere conversion to the Catholic faith. 
 He tells us further, that his conversion was achieved by the 
 writings of Bossuet ; a compliment extorted from his prejudice 
 and his pride, by the genius of the illustrious prelate. But how 
 was this conviction conquered ? The youth, by following the 
 genuine principles ot the Protestant religion — thinking for him- 
 self — had abandoned the faith of his fathers, and incurred the 
 inexpiable guilt of apostacy. This was a crime which no integrity 
 of life could atone for, and no brilliancy of talent could redeem. 
 To cure him of his distemper he was sent to breathe the lighter 
 atmosphere of Lausanne. He could not be ignorant of the object 
 
 * See his own Memoir of his Life and Writings. 
 
LETTER I. 
 
 11 
 
 of his exile. He felt his father’s displeasure, and was threatened 
 to be disheired if he did not retrace his steps. Such is the boasted 
 freedom of the Protestant religion. 
 
 Whoever then reflects on the influence of temporal motives on 
 a mind young, sanguine, and aspiring, in which the principles of 
 religion were not suffered to ripen, will not be surprised at his 
 desertion of the Catholic communion — 
 
 For present joys are more to flesh and blood 
 
 Than a dull prospect of a distant good. 
 
 Even this apostacy is honourable to the Catholic faith. His first 
 enquiry, and consequent conversion, the fruits of an unfettered 
 freedom of judgment, prove the insecurity under which he 
 laboured in the Protestant faith. But on being compelled to 
 desert the pale of the Catholic church, he was far from taking 
 shelter in the communion which he first abandoned. He had too 
 much discernment not to be disgusted with the half faith and 
 half philosophy of the Protestant religion; and, therefore, the 
 same insecurity of mind that first prompted him to abjure its 
 tenets, made him now push them to the farthest verge of their 
 application, until at last he sought repose in absolute infidelity. 
 The writer of the article tells us that Mr. Gibbon was armed with 
 as much logic and general argument when he abjured the 
 Catholic religion, as the defenders of that religion generally 
 possess. Waving that point, Mr. Gibbon’s logic and criticism 
 cannot be a cause of alarm to the Catholic, or of triumph to the 
 Protestant, when we reflect that he rejected the Pope’s su- 
 premacy because he believed, though contrary to the evidence 
 of history, and the admission of Protestants, that St. Peter never 
 came to Rome ; and disbelieved the real presence, because 
 mysteries are not capable of physical demonstration. 
 
 Such was the revolution of Mr. Gibbon’s religious opinions — 
 a revolution naturally arising f; rom the genius of the reformation, 
 and exemplified in the character of many eminent men. If any 
 one can rest his conviction in the Protestant religion, he can rest 
 it in what is unsettled and undefined. For what is the Protestant 
 religion but a negative system, fashioned to the genius of every 
 clime, and bending to the caprice of every teacher — incorporating 
 in its creed, doctrines the most discordant — and concealing, by a 
 community of name, sectaries the most irreconcilable. — Epis- 
 copalian in England — rejecting Episcopacy as anti-Christian in 
 Scotland and Geneva — in the expositions of Drs. Marsh and 
 Burnet making the thirty-nine articles the standard of ortho- 
 doxy — in the moderation of Dr. Hoadly enlarging the terms of 
 communion — but in the unbounded liberality of Dr. Watson, 
 admitting the human race, by adopting the phrase of Tacitus as 
 its maxim, “sentire quae velis, et quae sentias , dicer e” No wonder 
 
12 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 that a system so loose and arbitrary should conduct its votaries 
 to downright scepticism. It has been well remarked by Rousseau, 
 that the philosopher who rejects Revelation, and the Catholic 
 who admits it without reserve, are both consistent. But the 
 Protestant, who attempts to steer a middle course, by adopting 
 for his religion an unnatural mixture of faith and freedom, ex- 
 poses himself to the just ridicule of either. 
 
 To take up half on trust, and half to try, 
 
 Call it not faith, but bungling bigotry. 
 
 I dread, that my letter has extended beyond its just limits. 
 From the copiousness of the matter, it has swelled to a size greater 
 than was first intended. In conclusion, I would advise the Dublin 
 Journal to spare his oblique reflections on the Catholic religion. 
 For the work of abuse, indeed, he may be fitted, as it requires 
 not much capacity ; but for wielding the weighty weapons of 
 controversy, nature never destined him. He may occasionally 
 fling his objurgations at the errors of Popery, of which he 
 probably knows as little as of the mythology of the Zendavesta.* 
 As well might the lowly workman cast an artist’s glance over 
 the vastness of St. Peter’s, and rise to its sublimity, as the 
 Dublin Journal attempt to comprehend the grandeur of Christ’s 
 spiritual edifice, and feel the beauties of its proportions. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * The Zendavesta, also known by the name of Zend, is the code of laws and 
 religion which the Persians are supposed to have received from Zoroaster. See 
 D. Herbelot, Bibliotheq. Orient ., p. 917. 
 
LETTER II. 
 
 13 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 TO THE CATHOLIC CLERGY OF IRELAND.* 
 
 Feb. 12, 1820. 
 
 Aifrut; y ctv veov scvfya. yegoaregov z^zi^zc^cn Odyssey. 
 
 Awful th’ approach, and hard the task appears, 
 
 T’ address with wisdom men of riper years. — Pope. 
 
 To persons whose breasts are burning with zeal, and whose 
 minds are the repositories of knowledge — whose virtues have 
 been proved in the most trying period of our history, and who 
 have gathered wisdom from experience — admonition may seem 
 unseasonable and obtrusive. However, as all are not equally 
 sensible of the danger which menaces the religion, of which 
 they are naturally the guardians, it may not be useless to ad- 
 dress the great body of the Catholic priests ; and if the prelates 
 should be respectfully reminded of their trust, they will pardon a 
 freedom which will be always tempered with reverence for so 
 venerable a body. 
 
 During the short period which has passed before my observa- 
 tion, revolutions have arisen that have had no parallel in history. 
 Among those, I have watched the progress of a society the most 
 singular in its composition, and yet the most systematic in its 
 operation, of any that hitherto appeared — a society that is 
 spreading with rapid increase, and profusely scattering its colo- 
 nies over different quarters of the globe. Of the object and ten- 
 dency of these societies (for now they are multiplied), no one 
 needs information who has glanced over the reports that inveigh 
 with such holy warmth against the superstitions of Popery. 
 Although I have not been unobservant of their movements, I was 
 hitherto silent, either because I saw the danger too distant to 
 excite alarm, or from a consciousness of my own inability to 
 arrest its progress. I knew that ere they reached the firm 
 array of the Catholic Church, they had a warfare to carry on 
 with those who were attached to no particular creed, and those 
 of the Established Church, on whom its faith sits so loosely, as to 
 become an easy prey to every adventurous enthusiast. 
 
 That great numbers are now detached from the Established 
 Church, and ranged under the standard of one or other of those 
 societies, the complaints of our Protestant ministers bear ample 
 
 * It is singular that the very subject of anti-Catholic education, which twenty- 
 five years ago almost opened the series of those letters, is that which still most 
 excites the hope of the enemies, or the fears of the friends, of Ireland. 
 
14 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 testimony. Flushed with the confidence inspired by such a de- 
 fection, they are now making redoubled efforts to carry their 
 system into the heart of the Catholic population. But, thank 
 God, they have met with a firm and decided resistance. Mor- 
 tified by defeat, they have not resigned the hope of conquest ; 
 and while they seem to suspend their hostility, they have only 
 changed their method of attack. It is true, that now their tone 
 is altered : their professions are become more liberal ; but you 
 may rest assured that it is only for the purpose of stealing into 
 your confidence, and disarming that opposition which harsher 
 methods could not subdue. 
 
 If the men of rank, and weight, and character in the country, 
 are sincere in their endeavours to diffuse education, unembittered 
 by religious bigotry, it is not difficult to put that sincerity to the 
 test. If I could offer an advice, I would suggest that you should 
 avail yourselves of the favourable moment of the accession of 
 his present Majesty. Convey to the throne the sincere expres- 
 sion of your condolence and congratulation, and to parliament 
 a petition for a portion of those grants that are given for the 
 purposes of education. If but a small sum of money were put 
 into the hands of each of the Catholic bishops, schools could be 
 established for educating the Catholic children ; and a few tracts, 
 containing a simple summary of religious and moral principles, 
 might be circulated among them. This would be a method less 
 expensive to the subscribers, less derogatory to the dignity of 
 the sacred volume, than that which is now pursued, and still less 
 prejudicial to the peasantry, as it would save them from the 
 danger of extracting from its contents a dark and desperate 
 fanaticism. If the legislature should acquiesce in the prayer of 
 such a petition, I am sure they would find it to their account, in 
 the growing attachment of the people for so liberal and concili- 
 ating a system. If you should be disappointed in that appeal, 
 make still an experiment on those who are loudest in the praise 
 of education. But if they should refuse their aid to any plan 
 that will not be regulated by the principle of these societies, is 
 it not then clear, that whatever may be their pretensions, their 
 purpose is proselytism ? 
 
 It is to be regretted that some uniform system of defence has 
 not been hitherto adopted. If some have evinced a steady zeal 
 in opposing the designs of the Gospellers, others have aspired to 
 the merit of a more prudent line of conduct. Thus the activity 
 of some is neutralized by the passiveness of their colleagues, and 
 the enemy is strengthened by the evidence of indecision in your 
 councils.* It is not by desultory efforts, however ably conducted, 
 
 * It would appear as if those lines were prophetic of the present position of 
 the Catholic body, when the adverse movements of a few weaken that force 
 which union would render irresistible in securing the blessings of free education. 
 
LETTER II. 
 
 15 
 
 that the enemy is to be defeated, but by a compact well-regulated 
 plan, originating with the bishops, and adopted by the great body 
 of the clergy. The exertions of the societies cannot be any 
 longer contemplated with indifference. It is then the duty of 
 these whom the Holy Ghost has placed as bishops, to rule the 
 Church of God,* to provide for its defence. Let the more humble 
 labourers in the ministry be assiduous in instructing their flocks, 
 and dispensing to them the truths of Christianity, in language 
 adapted to their simple comprehensions. Let them, in the words 
 of St. Paul to Timothy, “ Preach the word, be instant in season, 
 out of season, reprove, intreat, rebuke with all patience and doc- 
 trine.” Thus you will remove these causes of complaint, on 
 which our enemies dwell with rapture, and refute the insidious 
 slander, that the people are consigned to a studied and systematic 
 ignorance. Hitherto some irresolution might be excusable, from 
 an anxiety to discover the sentiments of Pome. Now that plea 
 is removed, her accredited document is before you, deploring the 
 delusion practised on the people, and cautioning the pastors from 
 suffering the growth of weeds in the vineyard confided to their 
 care. Do not then suffer yourselves to be over-reached by the 
 arts of the designing. Let not too confiding a disposition betray 
 you into a security which you may have afterwards cause to 
 deplore. Recollect how the unsuspecting simplicity of many was 
 duped, in the reign of Constantius, by those who were practised 
 in the intrigues of the Arian faction. Judging of the sincerity 
 of others by the singleness of their own minds, they were se- 
 duced into measures at which they afterwards startled. 
 
 Far be from me the wish to impede the current of information 
 that is now working its way through the humble classes of 
 society. Far be it from me to endeavour to embitter it by the 
 infusion of religious acrimony. I should, if possible, give it a 
 wider and more rapid diffusion, and purify it from every ingre- 
 dient that could infect its salutary qualities. But as this cannot 
 be done while there exists a suspicion, that, under the mask of 
 educating, there lurks a design of proselytizing the people, let 
 the abettors of the Bible-system remove the cause of such well- 
 grounded distrust : let them not insist on the introduction of the 
 Bible, and our prelates in their wisdom will determine what 
 books may be substituted. With regard to the latitude allowed 
 to private families, that, too, may be safely entrusted to the same 
 discretion. I may be permitted to add, with Mr. Lingard, that 
 it is not the spirit of the Catholic Church to lock up the Scrip- 
 tures from the laity, unless compelled by necessity. 
 
 How often must it be asserted that the Bible, the most sublime 
 of all compositions, is not a book fitted for the unripe under- 
 
 * Acts xx. 
 
16 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 standing of a school-boy ? Written in a language which has 
 ceased to be the vehicle of familiar intercourse, its truths are 
 often veiled in the necessary obscurity of an obsolete idiom. 
 Imparted to a people of ardent feeling and warm fancy, its lan- 
 guage is enlivened by all the animation of oriental metaphor, 
 and obscured by allusions to now unknown customs. Yet this is 
 the book which, it is confidently asserted, is adapted to persons 
 of every age and condition. Nay more, it is not only to be 
 indiscriminately circulated, but put into the hands of the pea- 
 santry, without notes to illustrate its meaning, or pastors to 
 enforce its authority. The simplifying process that pervades 
 natural philosophy is now reaching religion itself, and the elixir 
 of life has been discovered in the all-healing qualities of the 
 Bible. If people are discontented, give them the Bible, and it 
 will appease them — if they are hungry, the Bible will satisfy 
 them — if they are out of employment, the Bible will give them 
 occupation — in short, the Bible will remove every discontent, 
 and assuage every suffering. But it must be the pure simple 
 Bible, without the admixture of such abominations as notes, or 
 creeds, or commentaries ; because these spiritual alchymists have 
 discovered that the least particle of human authority infects the 
 blessedness of the inspired volume. I will not now draw out the 
 dark catalogue of errors to which an undisciplined perusal of the 
 Scriptures gave rise. But I must say, that while I read the evi- 
 dence of their obscurity in the comment which the finger of his- 
 tory has traced, in the dire disorders of fanatics of every age, 
 I cannot resign my conviction of the danger of their indiscrimi- 
 nate diffusion. Men of warm and benevolent feeling are often 
 caught by delusive theories for promoting the happiness of the 
 human race. That such men are engaged in the Bible-system, 
 in justice to human nature, I must admit. It were to be wished, 
 however, that they listened to the sober lessons of experience. 
 But that there are others, actuated more by a deadly hostility to 
 the religion, than by compassion for the ignorance of the people, 
 I am equally convinced. Hence, their unyielding perseverance 
 in their own plan, in opposition to any improvement that may be 
 proposed. Education coming from such men I should receive 
 with the most timid and scrupulous caution. Better listen in 
 time to the admonition — 
 
 Aut ulla putatis 
 
 Dona carere dolis Danaum ? * 
 
 than afterwards to deplore, in the language of the same poet, 
 the blindness which made you insensible to your danger. 
 
 * Somewhat is sure designed, by fraud or force ; — 
 Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse. 
 
LETTER III. 
 
 17 
 
 Captique dolis lachrymisque coacti 
 Quos neque Tydides nec Larisseus Achilles ; 
 
 Non anni domuere decern, non mille carinae.* 
 
 But I hope better things. The zeal which supported your pre- 
 decessors in an open contest, will now arm you with vigilance 
 against a more covert hostility. To conclude : to you religion 
 looks for support against fanaticism — to you the repose of the 
 country against those who would shake it with a religious war- 
 fare — to you the peasantry, already too irritable, look for aid 
 against those who would enflame them with a biblical frenzy — 
 and to you the growing generation, who hunger for instruction, 
 turn with fervent hopes, that while food is administered to their 
 minds, you will not suffer their faith to be poisoned. I cannot 
 more appropriately close this address than in the words of the 
 dying Mathathias to his children — “ Now, therefore, 0 ! my 
 sons, be ye zealous for the law, and give your lives for the cove- 
 nant of your fathers ; and call to remembrance the work of the 
 Fathers, which they have done in their generations, and you 
 shall gain great glory and an everlasting name.”f 
 
 IIlEROPHILOS. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 Mavnooth College, 
 March 4, 1820. 
 
 Turn Vero Manifesta Jides , Danaumque patescunt, 
 
 Insidice. — Virgil. 
 
 And now his faith was manifestly clear’d, 
 
 And Grecian frauds in open light appear’d Dryden. 
 
 Yes, the designs of the Bible Society are at length unmasked — 
 the visor which bigotry has worn is now torn oft*, and her object 
 is held up without disguise to the observation of an impartial 
 public. In my last I ventured to assert that the abettors of that 
 system, were animated by a secret hostility to the Catholic 
 religion. The assertion may have been deemed hazardous; 
 
 * What Diomede, nor Thetis greater son, 
 
 A thousand ships, nor ten years’ siege had done, 
 
 False tears, and fawning words, the city won Dryden. 
 
 f I. Machabees, ii, 50, 51 . 
 
18 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 however, it has been justified by the result of the last meeting — 
 a result which has imposed on the Gospellers the necessity of 
 coming to a fair and open contest. Thanks to the intrepidity of 
 Mr. O’Connell, who was not to be appalled by the frightful array 
 which bigotry had drawn up against him. I look upon the last 
 meeting as auspicious, because it brings the principles of the Society, 
 uncoloured by specious pretences, before the tribunal of public 
 opinion. I should hope there is an end to all suspicions on the 
 one hand, and to all palliatives on the other ; and now that every 
 subterfuge is removed, the system must stand or fall by its own 
 intrinsic merit. For eight years and more, have the Catholics 
 been assailed by the emissaries of this Society ; and if they 
 were incredulous enough to distrust its object, they were sure to 
 be taxed with bigotry and superstition. 
 
 Doubtless, the consequences of the last meeting will furnish a 
 rich theme for pathetic declamation. The young aspirants 
 after literary fame will soon take occasion to pour out their 
 pity or indignation at the incurable folly and stubborness of the 
 Irish. But while they deplore our perverseness, we shall be 
 content with the arguments furnished by the names of Leinster 
 and Cloncurry, to justify our distrust. While these benevolent 
 noblemen thought, that to circulate knowledge was the object of 
 the Kildare-street Society, they cordially lent it their support ; 
 but, on learning that a proselytizing principle was its treacherous 
 purpose, they indignantly disclaimed any alliance with so unholy 
 a project. Well might Mr. O’Connell make them a present of 
 their majority; when the corner-stone is removed, it is easy to 
 predict the fate of the edifice. The generosity of such conduct 
 will not be unappreciated ; and, while I dwell with pleasure on 
 the virtues of the Duke of Leinster, I should not withhold the 
 meed of gratitude from the son of Curran, who emulates the spirit 
 of his illustrious father, and breathes a portion of that eloquence 
 which often struck dumb the advocates of illiberality. 
 
 To Mr. North, the advocate of the Bible Society, I beg leave 
 now to address myself. In your eloquent address to the Society, 
 I have no doubt, Sir, but you imagined you w r ere asserting 
 knowledge against ignorance, and religion against superstition. 
 It would be derogatory to the known benevolence of your 
 character to make any other supposition. But I regret, Sir, that 
 your zeal for a favourite opinion has led you to underrate the 
 powers of your own mind. You assert that the Scriptures are 
 obvious to every capacity ; for you never discovered any diffi- 
 culties in them, nor were you ever enlightened by commentators. 
 It might be an incalculable loss to mankind, were you to divert your 
 attention from the study of the law, which you may be destined to 
 illustrate, to the heavy pages of Polus or of Lightfoot : and hence, 
 it is not surprising that you were not enlightened by their labours. 
 
LETTER III, 
 
 19 
 
 You have discovered no difficulties in the Scriptures ! ! I will not 
 suppose that you have not read them ; it would be injurious to 
 your piety ; though it must be confessed that the genius of your 
 eloquence is fonder of lingering on Parnassus than on Sion; 
 nor does it breathe those deep inspirations from Siloa’s brook that 
 are found in our immortal countrymen, Burke and Curran. 
 But as you have discovered no difficulties in the entire of the 
 Scriptures, I congratulate the public on the important truth. 
 Perhaps you would favour us with an antidote against the 
 Apocalyptic mania that has, for near three centuries, diseased 
 the intellect of the sister country. You, Sir, have discovered no 
 difficulties in the Scriptures ; they, therefore, are obvious to every 
 capacity. Admirable conclusion ! — Were I to assure you that 
 I discovered no difficulties in the law, and hence it was obvious to 
 every individual, you might be inclined to bend the gravity of . 
 your muscles. If, however, you have been enabled to sound the 
 depths of the Scripture, imagine not that all are equally gifted. 
 What may be clear to some, may be comparatively obscure to 
 others ; and, while the mind of Mr. North sheds a train of glory 
 over the path of its enquiry, others must grope their way by the 
 feeble lights of criticism and conjecture. I will not, Sir, dispute 
 the supremacy of your intellect, but without meaning disrespect, 
 
 I must assert, that after some attention to the inspired volume, 
 
 I have been led to embrace a different opinion. It is but right 
 to respect each other’s honest conviction. 
 
 Hanc veniam petimusque damusque vicissim 
 
 To the Bible Association I would now direct myself, in the 
 name of the people of Ireland, in language which, if all could not 
 be supposed to utter, all would understand. 
 
 If you had tendered to us the blessings of education solely, 
 we would have accepted the boon with hearts full of thankfulness, 
 we would have gladly hailed the dawning of a spirit which 
 mitigated the rigour of former times, and our gratitude would 
 consecrate the remembrance of our benefactors. But, alas ! we 
 have been duped by hollow professions ; and while persuasion 
 sleeked the tongues of our deceivers, we were not aware of the 
 “ venom that was under their bps.” You give us the Bible, but 
 we, whose lot is labour, have not time to peruse its contents. 
 Why withhold from us the Catechism, a regular system of faith 
 and morals, compiled from the Scriptures by the zeal of our 
 pastors, and best fitted to our necessities ? But still, if you give 
 us the Bible, why take away the spirit that enlivens and informs 
 it. In reading over its mysteries, like the Eunuch of Ethiopia,* 
 who was bewildered by the visions of Isaiah, we would be obliged 
 
 * Acts, viii, 26„ 
 
20 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 to cry out, How can we understand, unless some one point out the 
 meaning ? Take not then from us the anchor of our faith, lest, 
 loosened from its hold, we be drifted to and fro by every wind 
 of doctrine. Talk not to us of the illuminations of the spirit ; 
 uninformed as we are, we have heard of its extravagancies. 
 Leave us the simple uniformity of our creed, and we will not 
 envy you the diversity of your Babel dialects. Spare your 
 invectives against the despotism of our pastors. Under circum- 
 stances the most discouraging, they have ministered to our 
 spiritual wants, and explained the truths of the Gospel to those 
 to whom they were inaccessible. Loosen not the firm hold they 
 have on our gratitude; our fortunes have been bound by a 
 kindred sympathy, and, when every other hope was dashed, the 
 accents of the pastor were the sweetest solace of our afflictions. 
 Our religion is said to be superstitious ; still we are able to un- 
 derstand that it -is the only one that ascends to Christ. While 
 you then may boast of the charms of novelty, we feel that a 
 religion, hoary with the honours of eighteen centuries, has the 
 strongest claims on our veneration. Do not ask us, how do we 
 know its antiquity ? It is as easy to trace back the series of our 
 pontiffs as the succession of our kings ; and it is as easy to date 
 the era of a spiritual rebellion, as the epoch of a revolution and 
 the establishment of a new dynasty. If our religion be super- 
 stitious, it is a superstition we share with the most enlightened 
 nations, and the purest ages of the Church : unreasoning then 
 as our faculty is, it is not difficult for us to discover the supe- 
 riority of our faith to a religion fanciful in its creed, confined in 
 its extent, and recent in its origin. These are the arguments 
 that have been pressed upon our attention ; they are obvious to 
 our capacity, they are analogous to the plan of Providence in 
 enlightening the poor as well as the rich, and, as we are conscious 
 of our weakness, that very consciousness gives them force irre- 
 sistible. We cannot pretend to half the lights of those who 
 disagree among themselves ; we would therefore tell you, in the 
 language of one of your own members, “ do not pull down one 
 system until you establish another — endeavour to adjust your 
 own differences before you can lay claim to our confidence.” 
 Too long has our country been torn by religious discord; we 
 hoped that the spirit of charity had hushed it to repose. Suffer 
 us, then, to enjoy the quiet convictions of our religion, and do 
 not blow up all the bad passions by the unhallowed breath of 
 fanaticism. If, under an influence that preaches patience and 
 respect to the constituted authorities, some of our brethren are 
 unfortunately turbulent, you ought to tremble for the conse- 
 quences when a fanatic might point to every man in power, as 
 one of the odious characters denounced by the Hebrew prophets. 
 As you value, then, the peace of the country, leave us in the 
 
LETTER III. 
 
 21 
 
 enjoyment of the only legacy that has been left us. You may 
 enlighten our minds without insulting our religion. 
 
 Such is the language which the Irish people would now address 
 to you ; and, give me leave to add, in reply to the sciolists who 
 associate our religion with ignorance, that it is the religion which 
 inspired the muse of Yida, and sublimed the eloquence of Bossuet. 
 It has satisfied the inquisitive mind of Pascal, and has been illus- 
 trated by the labours of the early Fathers. If, then, the Catho- 
 lics are reproached with superstition, they will be consoled by 
 treading in the path which Leo and Chrysostom have trodden. 
 I hope that the prelates will not be inattentive to the appeal that 
 has been made to them. If there be a disposition manifested to 
 contribute to the progress of education, they will surely encou- 
 rage so liberal a proposal ; by training up the youth of Ireland 
 to reading and learning the Christian doctrine, their minds would 
 be prepared to benefit by the instruction of the clergy. 
 
 A word at parting to the Dublin Journal. It must, I suppose, 
 be his impartiality that made him withhold from the public the 
 proceedings of the last meeting. Although I deplore, perhaps, 
 more than the Journal the excesses of the peasantry, I cannot but 
 admire the ingenuity that could compare them with the treason 
 of Thistlewood. He has disclaimed a wish to attack the Catho- 
 lics ; if he confines himself to this negative merit, we will dispense 
 with his advocacy. I may have occasionally an eye to the 
 columns of that paper, and, if he should be disposed to forget 
 his apology, he may rest assured that he may have occasion to 
 favour the public with another specimen of the delicacy of his 
 ideas, and the politeness of his language. 
 
 IIlEROPHILOS. 
 
22 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 April 1, 1820. 
 
 To; rot iTrtrXviru (AvSotatv tpoTatv. 
 
 Ai-^/ci re tyvhoTrtfrog ‘vyeKercct xogog u^^uTroifftv., — Iliad. 
 
 Then hear my counsel, and to reason yield ; 
 
 The bravest soon are satiate of the field — Pope. 
 
 My last letter has been honoured, it seems, with the perusal 
 and attention of one of the Evangelical Association. As I 
 presume that my readers cannot feel much interested in the 
 personal merits of two rival writers, I will not waste my time, 
 nor their patience, in returning the compliments which “ Biblio- 
 philos” has been pleased to bestow upon me. I shall not, there- 
 fore, stop to analyse his composition, although it has strong 
 claims to praise; nor shall I enquire after what model of the 
 ancients or moderns it has been fashioned. For aught that 
 regards the present controversy, it is to me a matter of indiffer- 
 ence, whether my adversary chooses to stray on the banks of 
 the Peneus or “ the flood of Chobar,”* and crop the flowers of 
 his diction in the vale of Tempe or of Hebron. 
 
 But there is another species of literature which he seems to 
 have cultivated with success, and which seems to have given a 
 dignified cast to his style. That he is deeply read in the cere- 
 monial of chivalry, his manner bears striking evidence : while 
 the bucklers, and lists, and lances, that figure in his letter, reveal 
 the breathings of a mind burning for the combat, the measured 
 tone of his language shows that he is not more anxious to distin- 
 guish himself by his prowess than his politeness. I would 
 recommend a portion of his civility to those who sour the most 
 sacred subject by the most offensive acrimony. To engage with 
 such a champion cannot be an ungracious task. Although it 
 may be a loss of time, there is little danger of a loss of temper ; 
 and, though the justness of his cause, or the temper of his 
 weapon, should fail to secure success, he is sure to enlist the 
 public sympathy by the courtesy of his demeanour. After this 
 salutation, it may be necessary to proceed to try the strength or 
 weakness of my adversary. I must remark, however, with 
 regard to his unmerited attack on the Weekly Register , that I 
 will be content to make so respectable a paper the vehicle of my 
 thoughts, while I cannot imagine that the elegance of “ Biblio- 
 
 * A river in Chaldea, frequently mentioned in Ezekiel. See i, ii, x, chapters, &c. 
 
LETTER IV. 
 
 23 
 
 philos” will ever borrow a richer tinge from the medium of the 
 Dublin Journal .* 
 
 As his first observations may be considered as feeble outposts 
 to guard the citadel, they shall not detain me long. However, 
 they exhibit a specimen of his skilful disposition ; calculating, no 
 doubt, that though his cause was not staked on their strength, 
 they might exhaust the patience of his opponent. How does he 
 acquit the Education Society of the charge of bigotry and into- 
 lerance ? By the most unheard-of mode of justification. Little 
 did I imagine that I should find a writer, jealous of the nicest 
 civilities of life, the panegyrist of the most outrageous violation 
 of decorum. Little did I imagine that the advocate of liberality 
 and freedom would applaud that monopoly of mind which 
 laboured to wrest from others the invaluable privilege of discus- 
 sion, which itself exclusively arrogated. “By the unqualified 
 disapprobation and dismissal of Mr. O’Connell’s motion, they 
 asserted the purity of their views, they vindicated their honour, 
 and confirmed the confidence of their country.” A novel way of 
 winning confidence, indeed ! 
 
 If any circumstance could rivet still more closely the distrust 
 of the country, it is the proceedings of the last meeting. If 
 their conduct was as blameless as they boasted — if the principles 
 and practice of the society were in unison — why not fearlessly 
 court investigation ? Surely, such solicitude to dismiss Mr. 
 O’Connell’s motion, betrays a consciousness that there was some- 
 thing within too tender to sustain a public scrutiny. It is in 
 vain that he may reason on the virtues and benevolence of the 
 members. No, not all the speculations of “ Bibliophilos,” how- 
 ever ingeniously clothed, and pointedly expressed, can resist the 
 stubborn testimony of the facts that are on record ; and, “ though 
 they should multiply to themselves the herb borith,” it will not 
 blot out the deep impression. If he should ask, what could 
 induce persons to devote their time, “ gratuitously,” to such an 
 object, I will refer him to the speech of Lord Cloncurry, who 
 had an opportunity of drawing aside the veil that covered the 
 mystery of their proceedings. 
 
 From his Lordship has transpired the important secret, that 
 some of the members of the society were drawn within its magic 
 circle, not more by the invitations of the spirit, than by the 
 attractions of the treasury. But as this part of the letter 
 furnishes a finer specimen of the rhetoric than the reasoning of 
 
 * The three letters of “Bibliophilos” appeared in the columns of the Dublin 
 Journal. It is long since defunct ; but the spirit of bigotry by which it was 
 animated appears to have transmigrated to some of its successors. It is but 
 justice, however, to that journal to state that it made congruous atonement for 
 its offensive attacks on the Catholic religion, as well as on the first letters of 
 “ Hierophilos.” 
 
24 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 my adversary, I envy not the society the aid of his declamation. 
 I am myself unwilling to confound all its members — I have 
 before acknowledged that it is patronised by some whose motives 
 are above impeachment — but even the great and the good may 
 be deceived by splendid projects, and the worthless endeavour to 
 hide their own littleness under the shadow of their virtues. 
 
 Fallit enim vitium specie virtutis et umbra. 
 
 As to Mr. North, if he is not cased in the panoply of “ Biblio- 
 philos,” he would probably dispense with the officious advocacy 
 of his friend. Surely, I have no enmity to that gentleman. 
 That he is an excellent pleader, I am ready to acknowledge; 
 but though I might bow to his opinion on a point of law, I 
 might consider him an unsafe guide in concerns of religion. I 
 will bear willing testimony to the eloquence of his panegyric of 
 the Scripture at the late meeting ; yet I have read still more 
 fervid eulogies from persons who believed not a tittle of their 
 inspiration. But, really, the subject is too important to hinge 
 on the opinions of any individuals ; I will, therefore, beg leave 
 to allow Messrs. North and O’Connell, as they are perfectly 
 competent to the task, to defend their own cause. 
 
 I know not how my supposed address to the Irish people, 
 which he has been pleased to call eloquent, but fanciful, is 
 affected by his observations. I have not violated the congruity 
 of character, by putting reasoning into their mouths too abstruse 
 for their simplicity ; nor have I paid the dangerous compliment 
 to their ignorance of erecting it into a tribunal of religious 
 truth. Although they might be capable of comprehending the 
 few arguments with which I furnished them, still might they 
 require the aid of the good and benevolent. It is rather strange 
 to deny to the people the apprehension of a few obvious prin- 
 ciples, who, if we believe our adversaries, are capable of ranging 
 with safety through the inspired volume, and understanding with 
 ease the visions of Ezekiel. 
 
 As to his picture of the turbulence and immorality of the Irish 
 people — a picture which, “ by its dark colouring and distorted 
 features, betrays the hand of an enemy” — I must remark that I 
 was not the apologist of their innocence ; but, until he shows 
 that they are below the level of their neighbours, who are 
 amply provided with Bibles, and that the Bible is a panacea 
 for the evils which he exaggerates, it is quite unnecessary to 
 dwell upon the subject. To whom does he refer me for informa- 
 tion ? — to vague and nameless authorities, or the more suspicious 
 reports of the Bible Societies ! I question whether he has ever 
 waded through the shapeless mass ; he seems to have shown 
 more anxiety for the improvement of his time and talents, than 
 to have wasted his attention on such whining compositions. 
 
LETTER IV. 
 
 25 
 
 When he introduces the Catholic prelates, and forcibly classes 
 them with these “errant saints,” to depose in favour of his 
 system, they must surely appreciate the compliment of being 
 put in such good company. I did expect from the sobriety of 
 “ Bibiiophilos,” a more temperate allusion to Scripture than to 
 apply the words of Daniel to persons, of whom some might be 
 more strongly marked by the denunciation of another prophet.* 
 But as I would tremble to introduce lightly the words of the 
 inspired writings, perhaps, they would find themselves appro- 
 priately habited in the costume of an English poet : — 
 
 In gospel-phrase their chapmen they betray. 
 
 Their shops are dens, their buyers are their prey ; 
 
 All hands unite, of every jarring sect, 
 
 They cheat the country first, and then infect. 
 
 We now come to the last and greatest point of “ Bibiiophilos,” 
 for which he seems to have reserved all the resources of his 
 skill and dexterity. To this part, as it is one of vital import- 
 ance, I invite my reader to come with a severe, unbiassed, and 
 discriminating judgment. 
 
 As I would not expect, from the ingenuousness of my oppo- 
 nent, that he would recur to the subterfuges of little polemics, I 
 am willing to believe that he has rather mistaken than misrepre- 
 sented my meaning. He says, I have appealed to the practice 
 of the Church; and after coming up with a heavy phalanx of 
 the Fathers, triumphantly concludes that I had no claim to their 
 support. I know not how this is reconcileable with the anxiety 
 he feels to know my opinion on the diffusion of the Scriptures — 
 an opinion which, according to him, I have studiously disguised. 
 Lest, however, I should fall into a similar mistake, of mis-stating 
 his letter, I subjoin his own words : — “ On the circulation and 
 perusal of the Scriptures, and their introduction into schools, the 
 only question at issue, ‘ Hierophilos’ has judged it unnecessary 
 or unadvisable to hazard an opinion.” 
 
 I am, therefore, opposed by the authority of the Fathers on a 
 point on which he says I have not expressed my sentiments. 
 My expressions were, that the religion of the Catholics was the 
 religion which was illustrated by the early Fathers, and that 
 they would be consoled in treading the path which Leo and 
 Chrysostom had trodden. I would wish to know, will he under- 
 take to combat this assertion ? If not, his long array of Fathers 
 will not bear on my position. The Fathers have said nothing 
 which, if understood in the spirit it was spoken, the most rigid 
 Catholic would not subscribe to, without any impeachment of his 
 orthodoxy. Fortunately, I have answered him by anticipation. 
 
 * Jeremias, chap, xxiii, v. 31, &c. : — Behold, I am against the prophets , saith 
 the Lord, who use their tongues, and say, “ the Lord saith it.” 
 
 C 
 
26 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 From the attention he bestowed on the last, I may presume he 
 has read my other letters. In one of them I have unequivocally 
 asserted, that it never was the spirit of the Catholic Church to 
 withhold the Scripture from the people, unless compelled by 
 necessity. As my sentiments are in perfect accordance with this 
 spirit, he may be induced to think, that “ Hierophilos” and 
 “ Bibliophilos,” though evidently assumed for the purpose of 
 invidious contrast, are not irreconcileable characters. So far, 
 then, we agree. But, to allay the triumph he may feel on this 
 admission, I must add, that I have too much respect for the 
 sacred volume to make it the play -thing of every school-boy; 
 and too strong a conviction of man’s weakness, to allow him to 
 wander through it without a guide. He, as an abettor of the 
 Bible system, will controvert either position. Here, then, we 
 are at issue. As the question is stripped of every circumstance 
 that could perplex its simplicity, let us examine who is most 
 likely to be supported by the authority of the Fathers. 
 
 According to his reasoning, the Fathers have recommended 
 the reading of the Scriptures to the faithful : therefore, the 
 system of the Education Society is sanctioned by the practice of 
 the purest ages of Christianity. This is a conclusion that 
 stretches beyond the extent of his premises. If he does not see 
 a wide disparity in the cases, perhaps I could furnish him with a 
 supposition more analogous to the present circumstances. 
 
 If, after the Catholics began to breathe from the persecution 
 of Yalens, a society had been formed to circulate the Scriptures 
 among the Catholics, composed of Arians and Donatists, and 
 Nestorians, and Eutychians of a later period, and, to complete 
 the aggregate, of a few Catholics, whose guileless simplicity 
 betrayed them into a support of the system. The more exalted 
 members of the society, probably sincere, profess they have no 
 wish to disturb the religious scruples of the Catholics, and hence 
 retire to a secure distance from the din of the fanatics ; while 
 the more busy agents push on the god-like work of distributing 
 the Scriptures, accompanying them with the most exasperating 
 comments on the tyranny of the priests, and the most sarcastic 
 commisseration of the ignorance of the people. They tell them 
 that hitherto they have been detained in the most degrading 
 ignorance ; and that now, by seeing the light with their own 
 eyes, they will renounce the guilt of exalting to the honours of 
 the divinity one who was clothed in the infirmities of man. If 
 the first fervour of the zealots should occasionally subside, let 
 us suppose that a seasonable contact with the Imperial Exche- 
 quer restores their languid energy — 
 
 For gain has wonderful effects, 
 
 T* improve the factory of sects. 
 
LETTER IV. 
 
 27 
 
 Will “ Bibliophilos” say that such a system would have been 
 sanctioned by the Fathers ? Ignorant he musf be of the stern- 
 ness of their principles, if he could entertain a supposition so 
 revolting to the tenor of their lives. Had St. Augustine been so 
 yielding, he would not have waged an alternate and unremitting 
 war with the Pelagians and Donatists of his day ; and had St. 
 Chrysostom courted the favour, he never would have fallen a 
 victim to the revenge of Eudoxia. Really the Fathers were not 
 sufficiently enlightened for the enlarged liberality of the present 
 times ; and though they knew and practised Christian charity, 
 perhaps, as well as our modern orators, they never could 
 “ extend their view to the expansive circle of universal religion.” 
 This, or similar language, now so familiar with all who aspire to 
 the praise of eloquence and evangelism, is what Persius would 
 call — 
 
 Grande aliquid quod pulmo animae praelargus anhelet.* 
 
 This general view of the subject must, I am sure, convince 
 every reader of the inconclusiveness of the reasoning of my 
 opponent. Lest, however, it should be imagined that I shrink 
 from the Fathers, I intreat his attention to the continuance of 
 this very weighty subject. As the ground is of my adversary’s 
 choosing, I will track him in his own path ; and I must, there- 
 fore, be excused if the reader finds no grateful pauses to solace 
 the weariness of the way. It may not be unnecessary to direct 
 the attention of “Bibliophilos” to a canon of criticism which 
 reason and candour will approve. When the Fathers wrote 
 against the Pagans, who despised the authority of Scripture, or 
 preached against the faithful, who were regardless of its pre- 
 cepts, we are naturally to expect from them the most animated 
 language, in enforcing the utility, or arraigning the neglect of 
 the inspired writings. But, again, when they pointed their 
 reproofs against the rashness of the sectaries, who perverted 
 their meaning, they dwell with serious solemnity on the necessity 
 of treading over the sacred ground with a trembling and respect- 
 ful caution. The contrast between his quotations and mine, from 
 the same Fathers, will illustrate the truth and justness of this 
 principle : — 
 
 “ They abandon the rule of truth, who interpret the Scrip- 
 tures contrary to ecclesiastical tradition.” — Clement of Alex- 
 andria, 7th Book of Sentences. 
 
 * All noise and empty pomp, a storm of words, 
 
 Labouring with sound, that little sense affords. — Dryden. 
 
 Lines truly characteristic of some of our much admired oratory ; which, by 
 losing sight of the chaste and simple models of antiquity, has adopted a vitiated 
 style, in which the most ordinary thought struggles under the cumbrous weight 
 of unnecessary ornament. 
 
28 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 44 As often as the heretics (the reader will pardon the offen- 
 siveness of the expression, for it is not mine) produce the 
 canonical Scriptures, which every Christian believes, they seem 
 to say, 4 Behold, the word of God is made the inmate of your 
 houses.’ But we ought not to believe them, nor to stray from 
 the older ecclesiastical tradition, nor to believe otherwise than 
 according to what has been delivered to us by the succession of 
 the Church of God.” — Origen, Homily on St. Matthew, 29. 
 
 44 Will every one who pleases be the judge of those books, 
 although he is not able to point out his master, nor the time he 
 spent learning them, nor exhibit any of those qualities necessary 
 to form a judgment of books. But I know that it is not lawful 
 for every individual to subject to his own private judgment the 
 things that are spoken in the oracles of the spirit.” — St. Bazil’s 
 7 5th Epistle to the Inhabitants of Neoaccesaria. 
 
 44 In expounding the Scriptures, we ought to feel the same 
 alarm as persons putting to sea ; not so much from the dangers 
 of the deep, as because we are unskilful navigators.” — St. Chry- 
 sostom, Homily on Mathusalem. 
 
 44 Without being previously instructed in poetry, you would 
 not attempt Terence without a master. Asper, Cornutus, Dona- 
 tus, and numberless others, are necessary for interpreting each 
 of the poets ; and do you rush into the sacred books without a 
 guide, and dare to explain them without a master ? And, again, 
 if every art, in order to be attained, requires a master, what 
 can argue a prouder temerity, than not to learn the sacred books 
 from their lawful interpreters ?” — St. Augustine, On the Utility 
 of Believing — the 7th and 17 th chapters. 
 
 I have reserved this Father for the last place, both because he 
 is last in the order of time, and, also, because he affords me an 
 opportunity of taking my adversary on his own ground, and 
 giving a triumphant answer to his interrogatory, where he 
 undertakes the task of interpreting Mr. North’s opinion. With 
 Saint Augustine on my side — for, I confess, I revere the un- 
 fashionable epithet — I need not fear the formidable union of Mr. 
 North and his interpreter. As I do not mean to fatigue his, nor 
 my own, patience with further quotations, I would recommend 
 the above-mentioned treatise to the perusal of 44 Bibliophilos,” as 
 it was addressed to Honoratus, whose opinions on the plainness 
 of the Scriptures seem to have been cast in the same mould as 
 his own. 
 
 I have now taken a patient review of the Fathers, and fur- 
 nished a simple method of disengaging the different passages 
 which might perplex an illiterate mind. I, too, then, may con- 
 fidently appeal to the judgment of the severe and the impartial, 
 whether the Fathers are favourable to the uncontrolled perusal 
 of the Scriptures, on the principles of the Education Society. 
 
LETTER V. 
 
 29 
 
 I hail the spirit of wholesome curiosity that has directed “ Bib- 
 liophilos” to those venerable guides, and that has given me an 
 opportunity of introducing them to my readers. They may, on 
 the first appearance, make an unfavourable impression ; but, like 
 many other characters of solid, though unostentatious, merit, 
 they will improve on a more familiar acquaintance. However I 
 may rejoice, I fear that his indiscretion will not be much ap- 
 plauded by his Biblical brethren. The aid of the Fathers has 
 been long since despaired of, as they were found uniformly 
 enlisted on the side of the Catholics ; nor will all the ingenuity 
 of “ Bibliophilos” be able to reduce them to the flexible fidelity 
 of Swiss auxiliaries. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 April 29* 1820. 
 
 Acetone, <p§iatv at to aov [/.tv o(. — I liad. 
 
 Thy dauntless heart, (which I foresee too late,) 
 
 Too daring man, will urge thee to thy fate Dryden. 
 
 It has been often remarked, nor has the frequency of the 
 observation deterred from the repetition of the practice, that to 
 divert attention from the principal point of debate, by detaining 
 it on other topics, has been one of the usual artifices of contro- 
 versy. To avoid such an imputation, I endeavoured, in my last 
 letter, to give the present subject the simplest form it could 
 assume. I was sparing of the introduction of every topic which 
 might amuse the imagination, without satisfying the judgment of 
 my readers. I fancied that I had thus narrowed the scene of 
 contest, and that my adversary and I might meet, by gradual 
 and nearer approaches. But what was my surprise, when, after 
 the perusal of a letter, which, if I am to judge by the time con- 
 sumed in its composition, is more entitled to the ambiguous com- 
 pliment of elaborate than mine, I could scarcely discover a 
 sentence that could deserve the name of argument. After 
 travelling over the dark legends of Gothic mythology, and 
 
30 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 exhausting much mirth and facetiousness on his favourite subject, 
 he seems to forget or fear his former opponent, and turns on the 
 other correspondents of the Register , to discharge on them the 
 vial of a sportful and merciless irony. 
 
 Of the labours of these gentlemen, whom, after all, it cannot 
 be reproachful to call associates, I am induced to abstain equally 
 from praise or censure, lest the one should be ascribed to the 
 partiality of an ally, or the other imputed to the jealousy of a 
 rival. With their merits or demerits my cause is totally uncon- 
 nected. I beg leave, therefore, to pass quickly over the barren 
 ground ; but, in passing over, I may be permitted to drop a tear 
 over the fate of my fallen brothers of the war ; or rather to 
 hope that if the sleep of death is not come upon them, they will 
 again start to arms and revenge, at the call of “ Bibliophilos.” 
 
 I thought I had already divested the subject of every personal 
 complexion, by resigning to my adversary the uncensured privi- 
 lege of collecting his materials from any quarter. Again, how- 
 ever, he takes occasion to fasten on my unsparing use of poets 
 and profane writers. He is not the first, indeed, that has felt, 
 that truth is not the less caustic by being conveyed in the golden 
 cadence of numbers. If, instead of concealing my obligations by 
 melting them into the mass, I have broken the current of my 
 composition by their insertion, he may exult that his own, like 
 the sullen stream ^of Arethusa, refuses the taint or refinement of 
 the exotic mixture. I have, indeed, complimented him on the 
 complaisance of his manner. Without meaning to retract it, I 
 must observe that his language, which before was cold and cere- 
 monious, has risen in the course of the contest to a due tempera- 
 ture of heat and animation. I should be sorry to inflict a 
 willing pang on any individual ; but, alas ! it is one of the una- 
 voidable results of arms. If, then, the weakness of his cause 
 has not been able to resist the thrust of the enemy, I may soothe 
 his troubled spirit by reminding him, that the stately politeness 
 of the most courteous of the sons of chivalry, did not always 
 protect him against the rude shock of his assailants. 
 
 I should be unreasonable, indeed, if I did not make allowance 
 for the warmth inspired in the combat ; I even give him credit 
 for the ingenuity with which he endeavoured to disguise it. He 
 recommends to me a cool and dispassionate tone ; and, conscious 
 that he has himself been betrayed into a slight immoderation, he 
 is earnest in his censure of all asperity, like the valorous Falstaff, 
 who, by the repetition of “ plague upon all cowards,” laboured 
 to cover the shame of his own recreancy. As to his reflections 
 on my vanity, it is through the mirror of his own mind that he 
 must view that of his opponent. He may hear with rapture the 
 music of his own praise, while he may rest assured that a similar 
 feeling is not the motive of the labours of “ Hierophilos.” His 
 
LETTER V. 
 
 31 
 
 secrecy happily secures him against the false flattery of any dis- 
 cerning friends ; but, were he disposed to be vain, the praise 
 bestowed by an acute foe, who was not in the mood of compli- 
 ment, in spite of the censure with which it is mingled, he should 
 not look upon as the least equivocal approbation. While “ Bib- 
 liophilos” then deplores the fate of those who have committed 
 their fame to the frail memorial of the Register, posterity may 
 regret that he has not chosen a more durable mausoleum for the 
 preservation of his own. 
 
 I am almost ashamed to have detained my readers so long 
 from the main question. Such, however, would be the tenor of 
 my whole letter, were I to follow the footsteps of my opponent. 
 As to the Education Society, in mercy to its character, let us 
 bury it in profound silence. Waving any discussion on the 
 genuineness of Lord Cloncurry’s speech, “ Bibliophilos” has 
 himself revealed the indiscreet secret. If the sensitiveness of 
 conscious guilt, discovered in my gentle insinuation the charge of 
 embezzlement, the public will undoubtedly thank him for the 
 justness of the commentary. 
 
 When first I engaged in this important discussion, I was 
 unwilling to give it the features of a religious controversy. But 
 viewing it in its connexion with the peace of my country, I was 
 anxious to direct those who might be interested in its welfare to 
 unrol the volume of history, and to contemplate, according to the 
 maxims of the Roman historian, the danger of the present system 
 registered in its records. I might marshal texts of Scripture to 
 prove its obscurity, and array a host of Protestant polemics, 
 who have acquiesced in the same truth ; but conscious of the 
 general insipidity and occasional harshness of religious discus- 
 sion ; aware that it was too weighty a subject for the vehicle of a 
 journal ; and unwilling to treat it with the dryness of a special 
 pleader, I gladly declined the irksome and uninviting task. 
 
 But now that it is pretended, by one of the ablest advocates of 
 the Bible system, that the question turns on the respective autho- 
 rities of the Church and the Scripture ; and that I am reluctantly 
 drawn to the discussion, I may be allowed to ask “ Bibliophilos,” 
 does he seriously imagine that a book so comprehensive in its 
 matter, so elliptical in its language, and so dark in its mysteries, 
 was ever intended to be the sole guide of the bulk of mankind, 
 who, notwithstanding every effort, must be ignorant from the 
 necessity of their condition ? Does he imagine that Christ, who 
 came to dissipate the errors into which the fancies of philosophers 
 had plunged the world, would have abandoned his own revelation 
 to the licentiousness of man’s caprices ? Does he imagine that 
 he would have instituted a church without a ruler — a sacrifice 
 without a priesthood — and sacraments without a ministry ? Or, 
 that the naked Scriptures supply the place of church, and 
 
32 
 
 LEPTER V. 
 
 priests, and sacraments, and penance, and all the ordinances of 
 religion? For, mark, such is the consequence of a system that 
 releases man from every external control. Does he imagine 
 that Christ, abandoning the example of every wise legislator, 
 would have left laws that have neither eyes to see, nor ears to 
 hear, nor tongue to speak, without the informing spirit of a 
 living authority, to illustrate their difficulties, enforce their 
 observance, or avenge their violation ? No — the paradox is too 
 revolting to human reason. It is only fit for the raised imagina- 
 tions of the saints who are sighing for the approaching millenium. 
 Never did a sect practically adopt the tenet. Like every topic 
 of popular delusion, it favours, for a time, the purposes of the 
 designing. In the struggles of contending parties, the Scrip- 
 tures become the theme of the religious, as liberty of the political 
 fanatic. But, when the work is done, it is dispensed with, as a 
 superfluous, or dreaded, as a dangerous engine, and the revolu- 
 tionary conventicle guards its ephemeral existence, by wielding 
 the stolen thunders of the Catholic hierarchy. 
 
 For how can she constrain them to obey, 
 
 Who has herself cast off the lawful sway ? 
 
 If she reform by text, ev’n that’s as plain, 
 
 For her own rebels to reform again. 
 
 He may call this Catholic declamation ; but it is the declama- 
 tion of truth and feeling. He may gravely tell us, that we are 
 not to enquire into the line of conduct that Christ should have 
 adopted, but regulate our views by what he has revealed. He 
 may then repeat the solemn and frigid observation, that the 
 Scriptures are clear. Yes, they are clear ; and, confining myself 
 to what Christ has taught, they clearly tell us, that, “ as Christ 
 was sent by his Father, so he sent his apostles, promising to be 
 with them to the end of the world,” * that, “ he that despiseth 
 them despiseth Christ :”f that, “ he that hears not the Church is 
 to be a heathen and a publican ;”J that, “ to Peter were given 
 the keys of the kingdom of heaven ;”§ and the power to “ feed 
 the lambs and sheep — the people, and the pastors of the 
 Church ;”|| and that Christ “ gave some to be apostles, and some 
 prophets, and others evangelists, and others pastors and teachers, 
 for the work of the ministry, that we may not be carried away 
 with every wind of doctrine, by the wickedness of men, by cun- 
 ning craftiness, with which they lie in wait to deceive.”1[ With 
 the evidence of these texts flashing on his eyes, how can he deny 
 the actual existence of a teaching order of men, rising in regular 
 
 * St. Matt., xxviii, 18, 19, 20. § St. Matthew, xvi, 19. 
 
 f St. Luke, x, 16. II St. John, xxi, 16, 17. 
 
 t St. Matt., xviii, 17. ■f Ephesians, iv, 11, 12, &c. 
 
LETTER V. 
 
 33 
 
 gradation, to guard the faith of the people against the contagion 
 of impostors. But, if the meaning of these passages is still con- 
 troverted, as he will not, in the fulness of his modesty, deny to 
 the Catholics the common privilege of interpretation, he must 
 adopt the alternative of the obscurity of the Scriptures, or the 
 pertinacity of the disputants. He may choose what conclusion 
 best suits his purpose. Either inference equally establishes the 
 necessisty of an unerring arbiter, by whose decision all should 
 abide. 
 
 “ Bibliophiles” is not ignorant that the Christian religion is not 
 the discovery of human reason. It has been imparted by 
 heaven, in compassion for its weakness. It is, then, a subject 
 on which the powers of the human mind can throw no light ; its 
 labours must, therefore, be confined to the examination of the 
 purity of the medium that preserved it. This single remark 
 exposes the fallacy of the current observations on the progress 
 of liberality. There are many departments of philosophy as 
 yet unexplored. Over these the human mind may range unre- 
 strained, pushing her conquests with the ardour inspired by her 
 triumphs, until every science is led captive in her train. But, 
 religion has its fixed boundaries; the Almighty has said, “ hitherto 
 thou shalt come, and no farther and he that disregards the 
 divine prohibition must pay the forfeit of his own temerity. The 
 liberality, then, which would outstep the boundaries fixed by our 
 Fathers is licentiousness. Any improvement in religion is cor- 
 ruption. As revealed religion, then, is a sacred deposit, it must 
 be preserved by a series of unimpeachable witnesses, who trans- 
 mit it to their successors with a religious fidelity. Without this 
 traditionary authority, what certainty have the faithful of the 
 inspiration of the mysterious volume, or how can they have a 
 tranquil assurance of the divinity of their religion ? Thus, by 
 discarding authority, you sunder the intermediate link that con- 
 nects the Scripture with a divine origin. I could cite numberless 
 Protestant writers in proof of this assertion ; however, I shall 
 content myself with two, and clothe myself for a moment in their 
 armour. 
 
 Mutemus clypeos, Danaumque insignia nobis 
 
 Aptemus. 
 
 As the comprehensive orthodoxy of “ Bibliophilos” will, undoubt- 
 edly, rank those writers within the pale of the Church, he will 
 not surely reproach me with “ trusting to Assyria for succour, 
 or fighting the battles of the Lord with the profane weapons of 
 the Gentiles though, really, it matters little whether the man 
 of Gath be slain by the sling of his opponent, or the falchion 
 drawn from his own scabbard. 
 
 “He that will not submit to the concurrent evidence of the 
 
34 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 Fathers and Councils, may bring into controversy the divine 
 authority of the inspired writings, Infant Baptism, Episcopacy, 
 the Lord’s day. and so blow up at once the Catholic faith and 
 Church.” — Dr. Hickes’ Christian Priesthood , Yol. I., page 145. 
 
 “ It remains that we affirm whatever the whole Church from 
 the beginning hath received and practised for the rule of faith 
 and manners, all that to be evidently true, by the same reason 
 for which we believe the Scriptures.” — Thorndyke’s Epilogus, 
 B. I., c. vi, p. 35. 
 
 But why quote authorities, or why close our eyes on the 
 melancholy evidence of history ? Is it not to the opposite prin- 
 ciple that we can trace the clouds of sectaries that have floated 
 in dark succession over the fair face of Christianity, dimming its 
 divine lustre in their transient obscuration. 
 
 These few arguments, from the necessity of an authority, the 
 evidence of its actual existence, the admission of Protestants, and 
 the analogy which is furnished by experience, may afford some 
 exercise to the controversial talents of “ Bibliophilos.” Unless 
 he disproves its existence, it is unnecessary to justify its exer- 
 cise, or dwell more fully on the ill-understood and much-abused 
 tenet of Catholic intolerance. He may call the doctrine anti- 
 quated ; for aught I know, he may qualify some other solemn 
 tenets with the same name. For the present, then, I will only 
 observe, that I am ignorant of the scale by which he has measured 
 his theological creed. But I beg leave to assure him, that if it 
 has not risen to the highest point of scepticism, others, of larger 
 liberality, will equally deplore the narrowness of his mind, and 
 the intolerance of his system. 
 
 As my letter is already sufficiently long, little remains to be 
 said with regard to the spirit of the Catholic Church and Clergy 
 concerning the diffusion of the Scripture. Happily, however, it 
 requires not much labour to disentangle the question from the 
 perplexity in which the narrow and discordant views of some 
 have involved it, and to show that the spirit and practice of both 
 are in the most perfect unison. Her uniform conduct, then, is 
 to extend the perusal of the Scriptures to the people. In sup- 
 port of the assertion, I might adduce the authority of the present 
 Pontiff ; nor will “ Bibliophilos” be able to produce any example 
 of a prohibition, unless when the divine volume is offered by the 
 insidious for the purpose of perversion. In such circumstances 
 the church, conscious of the awful trust reposed in her, cannot 
 resign the assertion of her own rights. Thus, when the minds 
 of Europe became fevered with the immedicable mania of Re- 
 formation, no wonder that the Church should labour to arrest its 
 progress. If, then, we find a temporary and qualified prohibition 
 of the Scriptures, such prohibitions are to be considered as 
 exceptions to the general rule ; but, if the danger should continue 
 
LETTER V. 
 
 35 
 
 or revive, the clergy are only the faithful organs of the Church, 
 in cautioning the people against the seduction. When, therefore, 
 in a period of religious frenzy, the Church prohibits the sacred 
 volume, she is actuated by the same wise policy that directs the 
 vigilance of government to the movements of the seditious, lest 
 the arms which are given the citizens for the defence of their 
 lives, should be pointed against the bosom of the state by the 
 fury of radical reformers. Had her views been seconded, we 
 should have been spared many a tale at which modesty would 
 blush, and humanity would shudder. Had my adversary studied 
 with more attention the history of the Church, or even read the 
 short treatise of St. Augustine which I recommended, I might 
 have been saved the trouble of this vindication. But why speak 
 of St. Augustine ? He has given up the Fathers, as hard work, 
 and, as if tired with the toil of his former researches, he seems 
 to have since sought repose by holding high converse with the 
 mighty shades of Montalvo and Lobeira.* 
 
 After this view of the motives that guided the councils of the 
 Church, it is superfluous to defend the Irish clergy against his 
 dark insinuation. A generous foe should not thus covertly 
 attack an order of men who are shielded from reproach by the 
 blameless tenor of their lives. I am unworthy to be their eulo- 
 gist ; but if any one is still ignorant of the heroic virtues of the 
 clergy of Ireland, let him but pause over the scenes of most 
 tragic interest in her story, and he will find that when Catholic 
 education was a crime, and the Catholic priesthood was felony — 
 when war had wasted her fields, and her children sought shelter 
 in her mountains, they walked forth, like the Baptist, robed in 
 the weeds of lowliness and penance, pouring the consolations of 
 the pastor’s voice across the wilderness of their country. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Though to exclusively English readers those names must appear strange, it 
 requires no lengthened or elaborate notes to explain them to those who are 
 familiar with Spanish literature. 
 
36 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 
 June 17, 1820. 
 
 Tle^u) ptv yct,(> b veictg, sgw uvrrfvrivti ' — Phocyclides. 
 
 Strife kindles strife, inflicts a deadly smart, 
 
 Wliile soft persuasion steals upon the heart. 
 
 The public has been favoured, at length, with another epistle of 
 “ Bibliophiles.” After the candid and pacific temper which he 
 displays, together with an intention of retiring from the contest, 
 it would be ungenerous to treat him with hostility. Still, the 
 interest of truth may require that I should rectify his misappre- 
 hensions. 
 
 Having bestowed very high compliments on the superior 
 excellence of my last letter, he ascribes, with evident complacency, 
 much of the real, or fancied improvement, to the influence of his 
 own admonition. I should be sorry to deprive him of such an 
 innocent source of vanity. But, perhaps, on reflection, he might 
 be induced to ascribe the imaginary amendment to a calmness 
 which was not to be disturbed by his provocation. On finding 
 that the intemperance of his opponent was not likely to furnish a 
 theme for ridicule; and dreading, perhaps, that his favourite 
 weapons might be successfully pointed against himself, he has 
 been induced to resume the former dignity of his style. Without, 
 however, wasting time on a subject comparatively uninteresting, 
 it is impossible not to admire the playful versatility of this writer ; 
 who, after drawing me into an extensive field of discussion, 
 dexterously eludes the arguments with which he was unwilling 
 to grapple, and shifts the last scene of the controversy to the 
 sixteenth century, for the purpose of pronouncing a fervid pane- 
 gyric on the labours of the reformers. 
 
 Similar is the artifice, by which he endeavours to turn the 
 arms of his adversaries against each other. After failing by open 
 force, he has had recourse to stratagem, and flings the torch of 
 discord among his opponents, by insinuating that “ Hierophilos” is 
 their secret foe, or that he shows his friendship like the elephants 
 of Pyrrhus, whose undistinguishing rage had trodden upon their 
 friends as well as on their enemies. Surely they will not listen 
 to the insidious suggestion. He frankly confesses that the Fathers 
 have deserted his standard. Yet, I know not why he should 
 complain that I have not pressed his retreating steps, unless he 
 
LETTER VI. 
 
 37 
 
 were conscious of being formidable, even in his flight, by display- 
 ing the dangerous dexterity of the Parthian.* 
 
 To illustrate the advantage of the perusal of the Scriptures, 
 he directs my attention to the sixteenth century, and exhorts me 
 to contrast its splendour with the darkness of the preceding 
 period. My curiosity is then solicited to some of the writers of 
 my own creed, who have confessed the magnitude of the abuses 
 that oppressed the Catholic Church. Without mentioning the 
 names of those from whom he has probably drawn his information, 
 it must be confessed that there have been some writers, who, 
 affecting to rise above the tameness of their cotemporaries, 
 abjured the spirit of the religion, of which they retained the 
 profession, and fancied they were displaying a superiority of 
 intellect by the freedom of their censures on the Church which 
 they dishonoured. Yet, they have generally distinguished 
 between the faults of men, and the abuses incorporated with 
 religion. They have not justified the temerity that would deny 
 the doctrine of indulgences, on account of the ignorant exagge- 
 rations of some of its abettors ; nor applauded the insubordination 
 that would annihilate the Pope’s spiritual supremacy, on account 
 of the rapacity of some of his ministers. 
 
 In return, I beg leave to refer him to the candid, as well as 
 illiberal Protestant writers, f who have shown how little of the 
 light of the sixteenth century is to be traced to the Reformation. 
 It sprung from other causes, over which the reformers had no 
 control ; — the invention of printing — the impulse given to the 
 human mind by the spirit of commercial enterprize, and the 
 discovery of new nations — but chiefly, to the fall of Constantinople 
 in the preceding century, from which the seeds of science were 
 scattered over Europe, and reared in the Italian soil, by the 
 cultivation of the Bishops of Rome. Hence, Bolingbroke, speak- 
 ing of the liberality with which learning was encouraged by the 
 Fifth Nicholas, and the other Pontiffs of the illustrious house of 
 the Medici, makes an observation more deserving of the gratitude 
 than the irony of a generous mind, that the “ Popes were the 
 
 * Parthumque fidentem fuga versisque sagittis. — Virgil, Georg. III. 
 
 Terga conversi metuenda Parthi. — Seneca, CEdip. 
 
 f Of the latter class, see Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, 12th Vol., 66th Chapter. 
 Of the former class, see Roscoe’s life of Leo X. 1st and 4th Vols. octavo edition. 
 
 It is with pleasure I introduce the name of this learned and candid author, 
 who, in a work embracing much of these invidious topics, so warmly agitated 
 between Catholics and Protestants, has kept the balance with a firmer hand than 
 writers of much more pompous pretensions to neutrality. In the fourth volume 
 he shows what little effect the reformation had upon literature, if we except the 
 polemical tracts, which were calculated to exasperate, rather than humanize the 
 temper of the times. In the first, he gives a narrative of the learned men who 
 formed societies in Rome and Naples in the 15th century, and shows that 
 learning was already shedding a strong and steady light over Europe, before its 
 peace was disturbed by the sound of the reformation. 
 
38 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 first to touch the talisman that dissolved the fabric of their own 
 greatness/' To those, then, who have not examined their 
 characters, and scrutinized their motives, he may extol the merit 
 of the worthies of the Reformation. He will, however, excuse me 
 if, on the faith of history, I should represent them as men whose 
 religion was profaneness, whose politics were anarchy, and whose 
 morality was licentiousness* — men, whose renowned chief re- 
 formed the discipline of the cloister by a double violation of its 
 most solemn engagements, and, like his predecessor of Mecca, of 
 still more daring impiety, 
 
 Then beckons some kind Angel, from above, 
 
 With a new text to consecrate their love. 
 
 Indeed, it is unfortunate for the advocates of the Bible to have 
 the merits of the first abettors of the system, the subject of such 
 frequent animadversion. It is unwise in them to impose on 
 their adversaries the hard necessity of offending some of their 
 dearest prejudices, by exhibiting the true characters of the re- 
 formers to the gaze of the world. Better let them sleep in peace, 
 until the lurid glare of their vices is lost in time ; and when, like 
 the predatory founders of ancient cities, their memory recedes 
 into legendary dimness, then may they exalt them to the honours 
 of an apotheosis. 
 
 But what are the advantages that resulted from an in- 
 discriminate perusal of the Scriptures ? History has recorded 
 them in all the wild varieties of error. When Luther first arose, 
 he preached to the people the widest latitude of religious faith, 
 adjuring them to appeal to the Bible only, as their creed, and 
 their conscience as its interpreter. For a while he was heard as 
 an oracle, and enjoyed a monopoly of apostleship. Soon, how- 
 ever, the success of the reformer diffused among his disciples the 
 spirit of a dangerous rivalship. They, too, erected the standard 
 of revolt, and divided with the patriarch the allegiance of his 
 followers. His haughty soul was mortified by the partition of his 
 empire. In vain did he threaten to rivet the chains which he 
 struck off ; in vain did he appeal to the evidence of the divine 
 word ; the divine word was mute, and its fragments were idly 
 brandished against each other, by the adverse fury of the sec- 
 taries. All who addressed the people confidently appealed to 
 the Scripture, to give a sanction to their own pretensions, and 
 inveighed against the despotism of any church which could not 
 sustain the test of enquiry. 
 
 * I could illustrate every member of this sentence, by a peculiar reference to 
 each of the reformers. Without drawing on my fancy, I could exhibit the 
 edifying pictures they drew of each other. But I should dread to offend the 
 delicacy of my readers, by such disgusting representations, for, such is the 
 coarseness of their expressions, that it could not be endured by the decency of 
 modern manners, or the dignity of modern language. 
 
LETTER VI. 
 
 39 
 
 The artifice was not novel ; it has been practised in every age, 
 and once betrayed into the errors of the Manicheans the inquisitive 
 mind of St. Augustine. I will take occasion to quote the affecting 
 passage at a future period. Still the artifice succeeded ; the 
 people were loosened from the holding of the ancient faith, and 
 have been drifted for three hundred years on the tide of human 
 opinion, without being able to find resting place. 
 
 As if aware of the inevitable consequences of such a system, 
 my antagonist gives up the hope of union, and enquires in a 
 tone of despondence, where a directing authority is to be found ? 
 He may recollect that I have already shown its necessity and 
 existence. He may recollect that Christ commands acquiescence 
 in its decisions, under the most awful denunciations. I will, 
 therefore, content myself now with observing, that a tribunal, to 
 which Christ commanded all to appeal, cannot be inaccessible ; 
 and that a Church, of which he requires all to be members, can- 
 not be obscure in its characters, or difficult in its approaches. 
 The sincere enquirer after truth may soon discover a large 
 society, invested with the splendid characters of the true Church, 
 and justly likened, by Christ himself, to a city on the mountain 
 top, lighting, by the blaze of its watch-tower, the steps of the 
 wanderer. Really the conclusion of his own letter should furnish, 
 in my mind, the strongest proof of this authority. Unable to 
 extricate himself from the difficulties resulting from its rejection, 
 he is obliged to extend salvation indiscriminately to the professors 
 of every creed ; and, by one dash of his pen, to efface every 
 feature between a Christian and an Infidel. 
 
 Such are the lamentable lengths to which modern liberality 
 conducts its votaries ; and hence their severity against the stern 
 intolerance of the Catholic Church. As the length of my present 
 letter prevents me from pressing the subject, I may soon take 
 occasion of giving a fair and accurate view of this appalling 
 tenet. It may be useful to correct the mistakes, not only of the 
 Protestants, but of some of my Catholic brethren, to show that 
 the interests of truth are not incompatible with true liberality ; 
 and that the strong conviction of its possession, instead of relax- 
 ing the charities of the human heart, has given, in every age, 
 the strongest spring to its benevolence. I would exhort 4 4 Bibli- 
 ophilos” to consider well the boundaries between science and 
 religion ; and to reflect that great improvement in the one, is 
 often associated with great errors in the other. Hence, when I 
 reflect that the country on which Tacitus bestowed the epithet of 
 despectissima pars generis humani, (“ the most despised portion 
 of the human race,”) was the sole repository of Heaven’s reve- 
 lation, while Rome sat in darkness, I can listen with pity to 
 the invectives of a neighbouring nation against the religious 
 ignorance of our own. Nay, when I contemplate the singular 
 
40 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 lot of that nation, poised in the happy mean between demo- 
 cracy and despotism, — enriched with the treasures of every 
 art, and ennobled by the conquest of every science — her chief 
 city 4 4 the mart of the nations, and her traders, the nobles of the 
 earth,” — still more agitated by religious factions than the waves 
 that are breaking round her cliffs, I am obliged to characterise 
 her in the language of one of the divinest of our own bards, 
 
 A wand’ring bark, upon whose path-way shone 
 
 All stars of Heav’n, except the guiding one. 
 
 And now that my adversary, on retiring, has been pleased to 
 express a desire of a more unreserved correspondence : if he 
 means a private interview, I should gladly meet his wishes, if I 
 thought it would lead to any satisfactory results. If he means, 
 however, that I should give my name to the public, I beg leave 
 to decline the proposal, though I purpose to give expression to 
 no sentiment which I would be ashamed to avow. While I must 
 consider his conjectures highly flattering, he may rest assured, 
 that whatever be the station of 44 Hierophilos,” he has written 
 with the impression, that, where there is argument, it wants not 
 the aid of the magic of a great title ; and where there is none, 
 no title can supply its deficiency. He feels that, in other con- 
 tests, the actors may well exhibit themselves to the admiration 
 or ridicule of the public ; but that religious controversy is too 
 sacred a subject, for vanity to presume to thrust her little figure 
 into the fore-ground. Unwilling, then, to dissipate the conjec- 
 tures that are collecting around any individual, he is content 
 with the soft obscurity of a private character, and smiles at the 
 competition of his cotemporaries, to jostle into fame. If my 
 adversary has determined to take his final leave, it is only justice 
 to his merit to acknowledge that he has written, in defence of his 
 cause, with elegance and ingenuity. He may be convinced, that 
 I will always respect the honest convictions of a liberal mind ; 
 and, perhaps, derive some satisfaction from the assurance, that I 
 have given to the candour and acquirements of 44 Bibliophilos,” a 
 notice, which, on harsher provocation, I refused to the graduated 
 sons of the University. 
 
 I may be permitted, however, to pursue my original purpose, 
 of denouncing the designs of the Bible Societies, and cautioning 
 my Catholic countrymen against the treachery of their friend- 
 ship. To throw some light upon the subject, it may be neces- 
 sary to inform the public, that a meeting of the Sunday School 
 Societies took place at the Rotunda, on the 19th of April last. 
 It would naturally be expected, that the proceedings of men, 
 who pretend to act upon the most honourable principles, would 
 be accessible to my curiosity. But, strange to say, I was denied 
 admittance, on pretence of having no ticket ; but to show that 
 
LETTER VI. 
 
 41 
 
 by this was meant a positive exclusion, where I was directed to 
 for a ticket, none could be procured. This is the boasted pub- 
 licity of their proceedings. But, I suppose, they profited by the 
 indiscretion of the Kildar e-street meeting ; and, finding it made 
 the subject of discussion by the profane pen of “ Hierophilos,’ , 
 they were resolved to protect their own against any sacrilegious 
 intrusions. Hence, the mysteries of Eleusis were never guarded 
 with a more jealous vigilance. But they may rest assured that 
 no secrecy will secure their designs against detection and ex- 
 posure. In the hope that some gifted writer would rise, to assert 
 the majesty of the Catholic discipline and doctrine, against the 
 dreams of these speculatists, I have listened in silence to their 
 clamorous egotism ringing in my ears. The day, I trust, is not 
 distant, when my hopes will be realized ; but, in the meantime, 
 they may be convinced, that I will occasionally watch their con- 
 duct, concluding, in the words of the pious Bishop of Alba, to 
 whom literature is more indebted than to the whole group of 
 cotemporary reformers — 
 
 Induat in facies centum, centum ille figuras 
 
 Ipse adero retegamque dolos fcecundaque fraudis 
 
 Agmina disjiciam et magna virtute resistam.* 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Let them, like Proteus, all their arts display. 
 
 And shift their fraudful forms night and day ; 
 
 Their toils are vain, for mine shall be th’ employ, 
 
 Their wiles to baffle and their force destroy. — Vida’s Christiad. 
 
 An epic poem, which rivals the Eneid in the sweetness of its versification, as it 
 immeasurably surpasses it in the sacredness and majesty of its theme. When 
 the above passage, prophetic of its destruction, was applied to the Kildare-street 
 Society, its advocates fancied it had taken such root in the country, that they 
 could smile at the harmless menace. Yet ten years did not elapse, when it was 
 obliged to yield to the united zeal and energy of the Catholic people. Such, 
 too, will, assuredly, be the fate of all other systems of education not based on 
 Catholic principles. They may amuse or deceive for a time; but, after the 
 lapse of a few years, there will not be a trace of their existence. 
 
 D 
 
42 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 ON INTOLEEANCE AND EXCLUSIVE SALVATION. 
 
 Island of Arran, 
 Aug. 13, 1820. 
 
 Loiige aliud studium atque alios adcincta labores 
 Non tamen absistam coeptum detexere munus — Virgil. 
 
 Though other labours destined to pursue, 
 
 My promis’d purpose I shall keep in view. 
 
 Before I can be prevailed upon to return the salutations of the 
 other personages who have condescended to solicit the corres- 
 pondence of “ Hierophilos,” it may be expected that I should 
 conclude my observations on the letter of my late more talented, 
 though, perhaps, less titled, opponent. 
 
 I am willing to believe that his remarks on the Catholic 
 Church were less the misrepresentations of an angry polemic, 
 than the effusions of a heart teeming with benevolence to man- 
 kind. It is painful, then, to combat principles which, from their 
 amiability, must have many admirers; and the writer who 
 undertakes their refutation, must often array against himself 
 the kindest feelings of the human heart. Though there is no 
 objection more frequently urged against the Catholic Church 
 than its intolerance, yet there is none more destitute of argu- 
 ment, when stripped of the exaggerations with which it has been 
 generally invested. The argument is generally addressed to the 
 feeling or the fancy, rather than to the judgment of the reader ; 
 and as readers blessed with a slender shade of judgment may 
 possess an abundant stock of either, it is not difficult to bring 
 conviction to such understandings. Provided the writer possesses 
 a peremptory tone of assertion — that he is capable of animating 
 his composition with some eloquence, and sharpening it with 
 some ridicule, and of infusing into the whole a seasonable portion 
 of sensibility — he is sure, without one particle of argument, to 
 lead captive the understandings of his readers. Hence, the 
 hollow declamations of some modern speakers about universal 
 charity — a charity which, it is to be feared, evaporates, through 
 its extent, and burns with little intensity for any individual; 
 and hence their unsparing invectives against the principle of 
 exclusive salvation. More intolerant than the church they con- 
 demn, they arrogate the right of exacting exclusive acquiescence 
 
LETTER VII. 
 
 43 
 
 to their opinions, and treat with a contemptuous compassion all 
 those who would refuse to bow to the supremacy of their under- 
 standings. 
 
 Much of the misapprehension which exists on this subject has 
 arisen from confounding two principles that ought ever to be 
 separated — theological and civil intolerance; and as Catholics 
 are known invariably to hold the one, the disingenuity of their 
 enemies has connected with it the imputation of the other. The 
 principle of civil intolerance, either as it regards sovereigns or 
 citizens, forms no part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church ; 
 and that it is not practically illustrated in the lives of its mem- 
 bers, their conduct in the interchanges of every social duty, with 
 persons of every communion, bears ample and decisive evidence. 
 It would be superfluous, then, to rebut a charge, which the 
 evidence of their lives has more triumphantly refuted. The 
 other consists in this, that while Catholics are under the con- 
 viction that their church is the true one, they must necessarily 
 hold that all who reject it are in error, and, of course, if it be 
 wilful, liable to the awful consequences with which Christ has 
 threatened such contumacy. Such is the tenet which has roused 
 so much hostility against the Catholic Church; such are the 
 grounds on which we are reproached with impiously usurping 
 the prerogatives of the Deity, and presumptuously deciding on 
 the destinies of man. A few reflections will show how unjust 
 and inconsequent is the accusation. 
 
 It is remarkable in this discussion, that our adversaries begin 
 at the wrong end of the argument, and reverse every principle 
 by which they establish the truth of Revelation. In discussing 
 the evidences of Christianity, the Protestant as well as Catholic 
 apologists forcibly expose the absurdity of rejecting Revelation 
 from its repugnance to our prejudices.* Whatever may be our 
 feelings, we are taught even by the soundest principles of the 
 inductive philosophy to distrust them when a doctrine, impressed 
 with the character of a divine origin, is offered to our accept- 
 ance. Yet this method, so consonant to reason, is abandoned by 
 Protestants in their controversies about the church, and instead 
 of judging of its doctrine, by the natural method of first ascer- 
 taining its authority, they preposterously condemn that autho- 
 rity, because they cannot relish the severity of its tenets. 
 Hence, their usual method is to exhibit the amiable toleration of 
 their own church in terms of the most fervent admiration, and, 
 
 * Besides eminent Catholic divines, whom I might cite on this subject, Doctor 
 Chalmers, Presbyterian minister at Glasgow, has, in his “Evidences of Chris- 
 tianity, ably reasoned on this subject. How strange, how hidden, the charm 
 that could give force to his arguments, when applied to some mysteries, and 
 render them feeble when extended to others! Alas! the force of prejudice 
 which recurs to different weights and measures. 
 
44 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 after comparing it with the Catholic Church, to condemn the 
 latter for its unfeeling austerity. 
 
 Were we to institute a comparison between political institu- 
 tions, which human wisdom had contrived, or human power had 
 erected, then we might be allowed to weigh their respective 
 merits on the same principle, and praise the wisdom, or arraign 
 the folly of either institution. But the criterion that should 
 direct us in our estimate of civil institutions, will be inadequate 
 when applied to religious societies that lay claims to a divine 
 origin. Whatever our notions of perfection may be, surely that 
 form of society is entitled to the praise of superior excellence, 
 which approximates nearest to the model which has been traced 
 by divine wisdom. From this principle it clearly follows, that 
 our adversaries should check the freedom of their abuse, until 
 they had enquired and ascertained what was the form of govern- 
 ment which Christ had instituted for his church — what were to 
 be the leading features of its character — and what the nature of 
 that authority, which was to guard the purity of the faith 
 against the contagion of error. For in the supposition (doubt- 
 less a possible one) that Christ had established his church, as the 
 unerring arbiter to which private judgment should ultimately 
 appeal — that he commanded all to obey it, under pain of sharing 
 the fate of the Heathen — and that he had invested it with ample 
 powers to inflict its denunciations on the rebellious children who 
 should refuse acquiescence to its authority — then the boasted 
 system of religious liberty would be the open way to death, 
 while the stern intolerance of the Catholic Church would directly 
 lead to happiness and life. But to avoid being misunderstood or 
 misrepresented, religious liberty I take in opposition to theo- 
 logical, not to civil, intolerance. Though it be true, that no 
 human power can coerce the convictions of the human mind — 
 which is beyond the reach of its penal sanctions — this principle 
 is often pushed to an erroneous and dangerous conclusion. For 
 here there is no question of the application of physical force or 
 civil enactments, but of the existence of a moral obligation. 
 Hence, should it appear, that God has imparted to his Church a 
 delegated authority; as the existence of authority imports the 
 co-relative obligation of obedience, it follows, that a contempt of 
 her ordinances involves, by implication, an infraction of the law 
 of God. 
 
 But is it not unfair to level, exclusively, against the Catholics 
 a weapon with which Protestants are equally assailable ? Nay, 
 does not the principle of theological intolerance enter into the 
 nature of every religious system ? The Church of England, 
 which embodies with its liturgy the Athanasian symbol, cannot 
 admit within the pale of the Church, or of salvation, the 
 Socinians, who deny the Trinity. Although the principles of 
 
LETTER VII. 
 
 45 
 
 the latter are still more comprehensive, yet there is a boundary 
 which oven their liberality would not presume to pass, and they 
 scruple not to refuse the hope of pardon to all who deny the 
 divine mission of the Messiah. Even the Deist — whose prin- 
 ciples are scarcely characterized by any religious peculiarity — 
 would tremble for the safety of the Atheist ; and thus it is 
 evident, that intolerance marks with stronger or fainter colours 
 the tenets of every creed. The only difference, then, between 
 the intolerance of Protestants and Catholics is this, that while 
 the former is occasionally relaxed, and gently accommodated to 
 the varieties of human opinion, the latter is always stretched to 
 an invariable and uniform tension. 
 
 Surely a respect for truth, which cannot equally exist amidst 
 discordant systems, must sanction this principle. A respect for 
 the wisdom of Christ must authorize its adoption, unless we 
 suppose him indifferent about the religion which he came on 
 earth to establish. If the feeling of every individual is to be 
 the standard of his faith, every distinction between truth and 
 error will be confounded, and it will become a matter of equal 
 indifference whether one believes or blasphemes the Divinity of 
 the Redeemer. But the principle would not stop at the destruc- 
 tion of revealed religion; even the most sacred principles of 
 morality would not escape its desolating influence. Our ideas of 
 charity and intolerance are relative ; and hence, the whining 
 sensibility of novelists may be shocked at the uncharitableness 
 of the apostle, who excludes from the kingdom of heaven the 
 votaries of those crimes, to which their courtesy gives the softer 
 name of fashionable follies.* Nay, the doctrine of eternal tor- 
 ments itself, the profligate will not fail to rank among the dreams 
 of superstition, which, while they alarm the fears of children and 
 females, according to the language of the French satirist, his 
 superior courage may safely deride — 
 
 Un libertin d’aiUeurs qui sans ame et sans foi 
 Se fait de son plaisir une supreme loi, 
 
 Tient que ces vieux propos de demons et de flammes 
 Sont bons pour etonner des enfans et des femmes. f 
 
 Having shown that the principle of theological intolerance 
 must attach to all religions that admit of any limit to their 
 belief, and that the system which admits of none, must lead to 
 their destruction ; having shown, by striking contrast, the incon- 
 
 * I. Corinthians, vi, 9, 10. 
 
 t The creedless libertine, whose sensual soul 
 Is steep’d in pleasure, awed by no control, 
 
 Fit topics deems those tales of fiends and flames, 
 
 To frighten children and their nursing dames. — Boileau. 
 
46 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 * 
 
 sistency of the charges that are preferred against the Catholic 
 Church, and vindicated on the genuine principles of Christianity, 
 the justice of her general intolerant character, it is only fair to 
 exhibit its mitigating features. 
 
 The Catholic Church is far from condemning, by a sweeping 
 anathema, all who are not members of its visible body. She 
 rationally considers that some may be secretly connected with the 
 soul or nobler part of the Church, who are not within the visible 
 pale of her communion. Hence, without condemning those who 
 are shut out from her fold, by circumstances over which they 
 have, apparently, no control, and whose lot is left to the mercy 
 of heaven, she includes among her children all who are baptized, 
 and prevented by a premature death from wilfully embracing 
 error. Adopting the doctrine of Saint Augustine, she absolves 
 from the guilt of heresy, those who unconsciously inherit the 
 errors of their fathers, and investigate the truth with a cautious 
 solicitude, sincerely disposed to embrace it, however revolting to 
 their prejudices. But though she acquits them of the crime 
 of heresy, she does not indiscriminately extend to them the 
 assurance of salvation. Who the persons are that may be com- 
 prehended in the class of this pious Father, it is beyond the 
 reach of human sagacity to ascertain. That there are many, I 
 should gladly hope, in compassion for human error. Yet it is 
 much to be feared, that a mistaken liberality exaggerates their 
 number. However, as this principle may be sometimes abused 
 by a licentious interpretation, it is the duty of all to ascertain 
 whether they have fulfilled the condition it requires, of investi- 
 gating the truth with a sincere and cautious solicitude , before 
 they can hope to shield themselves by its application. 
 
 Such, if I am rightly instructed, is the doctrine of the 
 Catholic Church, wisely tempering its salutary severity with 
 a reasonable indulgence. Surely such a doctrine is not calcu- 
 lated to infuse or to nourish the poison of religious rancour. 
 The persuasion that it is necessary to belong to the true Church, 
 in order to obtain salvation, instead of rousing the resentment of 
 the Catholic against his brother, is calculated to awaken feelings 
 of an active and benevolent compassion. 
 
 The inaccurate notions not only of “ Bibliophilos,” but num- 
 berless others, have reluctantly induced me to dwell on this 
 unpalatable subject. If I have succeeded in correcting any of 
 the prejudices, and soothing any of the hostility, so frequently 
 manifested against our religion, I should rejoice at the prospect 
 of reconciliation. If, on the contrary, I should have excited any 
 hostile feelings — an effect which I sincerely deprecate — I must 
 only remark, that truth is too sacred to be sacrificed to the hope 
 of unanimity. In conclusion — though I deplore the existence of 
 any angry recriminations on the subject of religion — I cannot 
 
LETTER VIII. 
 
 47 
 
 help observing, that I know not a greater solecism in language 
 or morals, than to call those uncharitable, who denounce errors 
 which they know to be dangerous ; while the epithet of chari- 
 table is bestowed upon those, who, under the specious name, are 
 propagating a system of indifference, and betraying their fellow- 
 men into a treacherous security. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 Nov. 11, 1820. 
 
 Discite justitiam moniti. — Virgil. 
 
 Warned, learn righteousness — Dryden. 
 
 It is high time to redeem my promise of occasionally coim. 
 municating my thoughts on the interesting subject which has 
 already occupied so large a portion of the public attention. In 
 deference to the momentous interest which hitherto absorbed 
 every other feeling, I suspended my correspondence. I fancied 
 that the spirit of bigotry would have been abashed by a decent 
 respect for more exalted sorrows, and that its murmurs would 
 have been hushed in the stillness of the fear that had come upon 
 the nation. But, alas ! while the land may be rocked by an 
 earthquake, it disturbs not the vexatious insects that are playing 
 their little gambols upon its surface. 
 
 When first I ventured to offer my observations on the Bible 
 Societies, I was aware that it was a hazardous undertaking to 
 combat a system which had engaged in its support much of the 
 rank and opulence of the kingdom. The blessings of the Bible 
 became the theme of every tongue — its diffusion was hailed as 
 the purest emanation of benevolence — and opposition to its pro- 
 gress was denounced as a sacrilegious encroachment on the evan- 
 gelical liberties of man. Hence, I was not allowed to proceed 
 far when an attempt was made to arrest my progress, and my 
 attention was turned to an opponent of the school of a noble 
 writer,* whose playful nature seemed more at ease, when disport- 
 
 * Lord Shaftesbury, the celebrated author of “ The Characteristics,” who 
 would fain substitute ridicule for argument. 
 
48 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 ing itself with the lighter shafts of ridicule, than when cumbered 
 by the weighty armour of reason. The arrogance of triumph 
 must ever be offensive. It is a sure indication of an ungenerous 
 mind. But, as the result of the controversy is before the public, 
 all have an opportunity of judging of the fairness of the charge, 
 which imputes to a sinister policy the well-judged opposition of 
 the Catholic priesthood. None are more sincerely anxious than 
 they are to extend the facilities of education to the poor. But, 
 they should prove unfaithful to the trust reposed in them, were 
 they to suffer the faith to be perverted, under the pretence of 
 education. 
 
 Let it not be imagined that this is one of those speculative 
 topics, which may be solely abandoned to the discussion of the 
 curious, without affecting, in its issue, the vital interests of the 
 community. It has already excited the attention of men, high 
 in station and character, in the country ; and such is become the 
 magnitude of the subject, that it has formed a prominent figure 
 in a charge which lately issued from the bench. I gladly hail 
 the introduction of a spirit that dictated, from the judgment 
 seat, an address so pregnant with deep observation, and enlight- 
 ened benevolence. Though too long to be here inserted, it is 
 too valuable to be entirely withheld; nor shall I weaken the 
 following passage, by exhibiting it through the medium of a 
 commentary : — 
 
 “ Whilst the leading men of the country laid their hands 
 upon transgressors, and introduced them to condign punishment, 
 he (Baron Smith) was satisfied they would endeavour to do away 
 the causes of transgression , by promoting the education, the 
 morals, the comforts, and the well-being of their lower orders, 
 and removing, in the same degree, those temptations and irri- 
 tating provocatives to crime, which want, and ignorance, and 
 wretchedness, and their attendant discontents, involve. As a 
 main and sacred engine for the accomplishment of these ends, he 
 agreed with the laudable impressions of the present day, that 
 the dissemination of religious instruction is of vast importance. 
 But this instruction ought, in his opinion, to be dispensed in a 
 way conformable to the tenets of those who were to receive it, 
 without any attempt at making proselytes, especially without any 
 attempts of an indirect description. We are not to do evil that 
 good might come of it ; and, least of all, ought we, by the 
 admixture of ingenious contrivance, to poison the streams of 
 Christianity at the source, or taint, with anything like imposture, 
 the pure sincerity of religious truth.” 
 
 Such is the language in which one of the most enlightened 
 ornaments of the bench addressed the jury of the county Mayo. 
 It is the sober language of a mind placed above the prejudices 
 that obscure, and the passions that pervert, the understandings 
 
LETTER VIII. 
 
 49 
 
 of little individuals. May the gentry of that county profit by 
 his lordship’s lecture ; for it cannot be supposed that, with the 
 accurate knowledge which he possessed of the state of the 
 country, his lordship would have so trifled with the jury on that 
 solemn occasion, as to have addressed to them a supererogatory 
 caution. 
 
 Hitherto, indeed, these gentlemen might plead a reasonable 
 apology, as they were probably anxious to atone for the tardi- 
 ness of their zeal by the superior vigour of their exertions. 
 They might have felt that the Biblical spirit was nearly spent 
 ere it reached that remote province; and as it did not come 
 upon them until the eleventh hour, they aspired to the merit and 
 reward of those who were early engaged in the contest. Such 
 an ardent effort of piety, however unseasonable, may be entitled 
 to commendation. Yet it were to be wished that they were wise 
 unto sobriety. They may now learn that, to prove their love of 
 religion, or of country, it is not necessary to force the Bible 
 upon the people. They may learn, that tranquillity may be 
 preserved among the humbler classes without offering violence to 
 their consciences. They may learn, that attention to their com- 
 forts, together with education conformable to their tenets, is a 
 surer way to promote their welfare, than any indirect attempts 
 at proselytism. Indeed, the fierce effervescence of religious zeal 
 is gradually subsiding among all who have any pretensions to 
 refinement or liberality. It had its passing day among the 
 revolving fashions that attract the public gaze and command the 
 public homage ; but now it is consigned to the fate of many a 
 waning custom, that lingers long in the extremities, after it is 
 banished from the centre of polished society. Such, it is said, is 
 the high-spiritedness of the gentry of Connaught, that they 
 would indignantly repel the imputation of being behind in the 
 improvements of the age. I should, therefore, recommend to 
 them the speedy adoption of his lordship’s lessons, lest they 
 should be found to imitate those who provoke the public ridicule, 
 by displaying in remoter districts the faded finery of the 
 metropolis. 
 
 It is remarked that evils, of which the existence is unquestion- 
 able, are often capriciously traced to a strange diversity of 
 causes. The justness of this remark is strongly exemplified in 
 the question under consideration. Although there are more 
 obvious and palpable sources of the misery of our people, yet it 
 is the policy of some to lay it to the account of ignorance, and 
 then, by an easy consequence, to transfer it to the clergy. Yet 
 it requires but little knowledge to perceive the disingenuous 
 fallacy of such a representation. I will not, by any high- 
 wrought picture of their distress, or the development of its 
 causes, attempt to make them more sensitive to their wretched- 
 
50 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 ness, and, consequently, more miserable. It is the duty of every 
 good man, by holding up hopes of a better world, to soothe into 
 resignation the fretfulness of their discontent. But I must con- 
 fess, that while I reflect on the numberless petty vexations which 
 the Irish peasant endures — vexations, some of which, from their 
 local nature, are beyond the reach of the legislature, and within 
 the influence of those who profess such an anxiety for improving 
 their condition — and compare them with the mock remedies 
 which are ostentatiously offered for their removal, I am reminded 
 of the lines, in which the feeling poet* of a neighbouring country 
 describes another cast of mankind — 
 
 Trade, wealth, and fashion, ask you still to bleed ; 
 
 And holy men give Bibles for the deed. 
 
 Let the lay gentlemen, then, labour to dispense these comforts 
 of which they are the stewards, consigning the spiritual wants of 
 the people to their legitimate pastors. Let the evils that are 
 within the sphere of their benevolence be removed or mitigated. 
 Let them administer education in a way conformable to the tenets 
 of those who are to receive it ; and, instead of alienating the 
 people, by giving encouragement to illiterate apostates, let them 
 generously co-operate with the clergy, who, from station, and 
 from influence among the people, which has grown with ages, are 
 the most competent to direct the course of instruction which will 
 be most efficient and beneficial in its consequences. Should these 
 lenitives fail to assauge the soreness of those evils which afflict 
 our peasantry, it will then be high time to make an experiment 
 on the latent efficacy of the Bible. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 The Author of “ The Pleasures of Hope.’ 
 
LETTER IX. 
 
 51 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 TO THE MOST REV. DR, MANNERS, PROTESTANT ARCHBISHOP 
 OF CANTERBURY, AND PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF THE DIVORCE BETWEEN GEORGE IV. AND HIS QUEEN. 
 
 Maynooth College, 
 Dec. 2, 1820. 
 
 Fcecunda culpce secula, nuptias 
 Primum inquinavere, et genus , et domus. 
 
 Hoc fonte derivata clades 
 
 In patriam populumque flux it. — Horace. 
 
 Fruitful of crimes, this age first stained 
 Their hapless offspring, and profaned 
 The nuptial bed ; from whence the woes. 
 
 Which various and unnumbered rose ; 
 
 From this polluted fountain head 
 
 O’er Rome, and o’er the nation spread — Francis. 
 
 My Lord — During the late portentous proceedings which have 
 awed public curiosity, your Grace and episcopal colleagues 
 stood out in too prominent an attitude, not to attract and fix 
 observation. As the question of divorce embraced much of eccle- 
 siastical polity, it was naturally expected that the faithful would 
 be enlightened by the wisdom and confirmed by the accordance 
 of the hierarchy. But, alas ! these anticipations have been 
 sadly frustrated, and the surprise and disedification that were 
 feebly murmured among the Lords have been long since loudly 
 re-echoed through the empire.* It has been a subject of regret 
 to some, of triumph to others, and of wonder to all, to see the 
 heads of a religion which hinges on the principle of the universal 
 intelligibility of the Scripture, arrayed in adverse ranks on a 
 momentous question, involving in its general tendency the best 
 interests of mankind, and in this particular instance, the safety 
 and the honour of the empire ; disputing every inch of ground 
 with Scripture authority, and thereby demonstrating to the 
 world the obscurity of the sacred volume. For I will not — I 
 cannot, my Lord, suppose that any unworthy bias or flexibility to 
 power could warp the judgment of men of such exalted station 
 and sanctity. And hence, one cannot sufficiently express his 
 indignation against those rash advocates of the Bible, who cannot 
 
 * Witness among others the speech of my Lord King, who sported a good deal 
 of mirth and raillery at the expense of the premier, until his seriousness was re- 
 stored by the shock which Ms faith had sustained in the collision of the prelacy. 
 
52 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 defend its perspicuity without impeaching the integrity of its 
 expounders. Hitherto, whatever might be the opinion of the 
 prelates, they uniformly affected the language of orthodoxy and 
 concord, and like the ancient philosophers, though they might 
 inwardly disbelieve, they exteriorly reverenced the doctrines of 
 the Church. But on this occasion they scandalized the faithful, 
 and edified the sectary, by sincerely revealing the mysteries of 
 their own disunion. 
 
 I have heard, my Lord, of the distinction of essentials, by 
 which the lovers of subtlety, more than of truth, have thought 
 to elude the arguments of their adversaries. It will not, doubt- 
 less, be recurred to on this occasion, nor will it be deemed pre- 
 sumption to assert, that there is nothing essential in Scripture, if 
 the doctrine of marriage does not form an essential point of 
 Christian morality. It is not a speculative article, on which one 
 could be supposed to err without danger, and propagate his 
 errors, without affecting the public repose. It is a duty of every 
 day’s occurrence, connected with the happiness of almost every 
 individual ; nor have the ministers of the establishment them- 
 selves aspired to such unearthly sanctity, as to be exempt from 
 its obligations. It is, therefore, of vast importance to know 
 whether the marringe contract lasts for life, or only during the 
 discretion of the parties ; and whether we are to believe, with his 
 Lordship of Chester, that its ties are indissoluble, or, with your 
 Grace of Canterbury, that adultery annuls its engagements. 
 
 On reading the report of your Grace’s speech, I was not a 
 little surprised to find a minister of Christ principally resting on 
 the obsolete laws of Moses. However, it may appear consistent 
 enough, that they who have abjured the living authority of the 
 Church should appeal to the fallen power of the synagogue. 
 Still, I would expect from your Grace, that connected and en- 
 lightened view of legislation which mounts to the origin, and 
 catches the spirit of the law, flinging aside its exceptions, and 
 not the heavy drudgery of a darkling critic, who fastens on a 
 detached part, without comparing its effect with the symmetry 
 of the whole. It is true, as appears from Deuteronomy,* that 
 divorce was tolerated by the law of Moses. But did this permis- 
 sion originally enter into the views of the legislator ; or was it 
 not rather extorted by the stubbornness of a people, whom it 
 was necessary to conciliate by indulgence to a compliance with 
 the law ? Hence the practice of divorce was not so frequent 
 among the Jews as it is generally, but erroneously imagined. 
 Hence it was uniformly marked as a licentious advantage which 
 was taken of the letter against the spirit of the law, and de- 
 nounced by those who were raised up by the ilmighty, to enforce 
 its observance or punish its infraction. I might illustrate the 
 
 * Chap. xxiv. 
 
LETTER IX. 
 
 53 
 
 truth of these assertions by a reference to the purest period of 
 the Jewish history. However, I shall content myself with citing 
 the following passage of Malachy, which marks the indignation 
 of the Almighty against this odious practice : — “ And this again 
 have you done; you have covered the altar of the Lord with 
 tears, with weeping, and bellowing, so that I have no more a 
 regard to sacrifice ; neither do I accept any atonement at your 
 hands. Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and 
 the wife of thy youth, whom thou hast despised ; yet she was 
 thy partner, and the wife of thy covenant.”* It is true, indeed, 
 that towards the decline of the Hebrew republic the permission 
 given by Moses had grown into a pernicious practice. But this 
 relaxation may be traced to another cause. When we consider 
 that the dispersion of the Jews introduced to their acquaintance 
 the profane wisdom of the East; and that hence they mingled 
 more freely with the nations, it will not be surprising if the purity 
 of the law should have been adulterated by a mixture of exotic 
 commentary. Then arose the celebrated schools of Hillel and 
 Samaiah, of whom the latter confined the privilege of divorce to 
 adultery, while the former abused the flexibility of the text to an 
 indefinite latitude of passion or caprice. The Sandhedrim was 
 divided by the credit of these doctors ;f and we are told that 
 until the time of our Redeemer, the controversy still trembled 
 between the alternations of either party. 
 
 I have asserted that the liberty of divorce granted by Moses 
 was rather the effect of necessity, than the spontaneous dictate 
 of his wisdom. Such is the interpretation of Christ, who, while 
 he explains the law of Moses, unfolds and propagates his own. 
 And the Pharisees coming to him, asked him : “ Is it lawful for 
 a man to put away his wife ? tempting him. But he answering, 
 saith to them, what did Moses command you ? And they said : 
 Moses permitted to write a bill of divorce and to put her away. 
 And Jesus answering, said to them : because of the hardness of 
 the heart, he wrote you that precept. But from the beginning 
 of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause, 
 a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his 
 wife. And they shall be in one flesh. Therefore, now, they are 
 not two but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined toge- 
 ther, let not man put asunder I should now appeal to the 
 candour of the unprejudiced, and ask what is the doctrine clearly 
 conveyed in this language. The Pharisees ask Christ whether it 
 is lawful for one to send away his wife. To obviate cavil, and to 
 defeat that hostile spirit, which so often lurked under a pretended 
 reverence for the law, he asks what did Moses command. Then, 
 
 * Malachy, ii, 13, 14. f Selden Uxor Ebraica, Lib. Ill, ch. xviii, xx, xxii. 
 f Saint Mark, x. 
 
54 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 after showing that divorce was an imperfection which originated 
 in temporary circumstances, he ascends to the origin, and deve- 
 lopes the primitive institution of matrimony, showing its indis- 
 soluble connexion from the creation of only one of either sex — 
 a connexion, if we are to believe the apostle,* which shadowed 
 his own mystic union with his Church ; and concludes by pro- 
 posing this original compact, instead of the permission of Moses, 
 as the positive standard of his own law. 
 
 I should now ask, if the solitary text of St. Matthew f be 
 sufficient to weaken the force of this reasoning ? “ But I say 
 
 to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting the 
 cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery : And he 
 that shall marry her that is put away committeth adultery.” St. 
 Lukeif agrees with St. Mark, and what determines the contro- 
 versy, the apostle, § expressly in the name of Christ, prohibits 
 marriage, even in case of separation. What canon of criti- 
 cism, then, can warrant us to bend the evidence of three clear 
 and consistent testimonies, mutually supporting and illustrating 
 each other, to an interpretation of an ambiguous passage which 
 is at war with the express principles of the legislator ? But if 
 there is an apparent ambiguity, the Catholic interpretation makes 
 it accord with the tenor of the other evangelists. The Catholic 
 Church authorizes divorce, or rather repudiation, in case of 
 adultery — a practice evidently warranted by the first part of the 
 text of St. Matthew. Yet she teaches the indissolubility of 
 marriage, a doctrine clearly deduced from the second part, com- 
 pared with the other evangelists ; nor shall I exhaust the patience 
 nor insult the understanding of my reader, by showing the vio- 
 lence that is offered to language in qualifying an absolute mem- 
 ber of a sentence with a forced or fancied exception. 
 
 However, as if to satisfy the scruples and appease the pruriency 
 of the grammarian, we are told that after this discourse with the 
 Pharisees, Christ was again consulted on the same point by his 
 disciples, to whom he was in the habit of clearly explaining what 
 he denied to the treacherous curiosity of his enemies, or only 
 darkly delivered in mystery and parable. To them he thus 
 solemnly addresses himself : “ Whosoever shall put away his 
 wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And 
 if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married to ano- 
 ther, she committeth adultery.”|| Such, my Lord, is the conclu- 
 sion of Christ himself upon that important occasion, when he under- 
 took to instruct the future teachers of his Church. And hence 
 I am justified in expressing my surprise, that the exception of an 
 imperfect and abrogated law should be converted, by a Christian 
 prelate, into the rule and practice of a perfect dispensation. 
 
 And now, my Lord, permit me to lay before you another 
 
 * Ephes. v. f St. Matt. v. % St. Luke, xvi. § Cor. vii. || St. Mark, x. 
 
LETTER IX. 
 
 55 
 
 proof of the truth of Catholic interpretation, in the demoralizing 
 elfects of the contrary doctrine. How different the idea of 
 marriage in the Catholic and Protestant religion. In the one, 
 we behold a contract exposed to all the waywardness of inclina- 
 tion and caprice ; and in the other, a sacred connexion subsisting 
 for life, exalted by religion, and, instead of being at the mercy 
 of the passions, subduing and chastening their violence by its 
 salutary control. The facility of divorce weakens the mutual 
 desire of pleasing ; a neglect of reciprocal attention soon creates 
 indifference ; indifference may ripen into disgust, and rankle into 
 enmity, until the unhappy couple see no hope of release from a 
 cruel bondage, except in mutual separation, and the prospect of 
 new nuptials. Behold, then, the consequence ; — a divorce must 
 be effected ; adultery is a necessary step ; morality is sacrificed, 
 the nature of law is reversed, and the apprehension, or rather 
 the hope of punishment, operates as an incentive to the commis- 
 sion of the crime. What an unnatural state of society ! in which, 
 according to the strong language of Seneca,* people marry for 
 the sake of divorce, and divorce for the sake of marriage. 
 
 Witness the daily contracts, in which regular provision is made 
 for these disgraceful contingencies. I shall not speak of the 
 wound that is inflicted on national morals by the frequency of 
 their recurrence. For such is now the facility of communication, 
 that the tide of immorality flows through a thousand channels, 
 and soon penetrates from the highest region into the remotest 
 creeks of society. If we were to judge from observation, we 
 could not believe that we lived in a Christian country. In the 
 days of schoolboy innocence, our belief and our delicacy are 
 equally shocked at the pictures of the Homan satirist-! Soon, 
 however, the experience of age subdues the virtuous scepticism 
 of youth : we see, in the licentiousness of the times, the most 
 faithful comment on his writings, and are taught to absolve the 
 heaviest strokes of his pencil from the charge of exaggeration. 
 We behold the same shameful vicissitudes of marriage and 
 divorce which marked the degeneracy of Home, and may confirm 
 our opinion of the baneful influence of the Protestant doctrine, 
 in the words of an eminent Protestant historian : — “ A specious 
 theory is confuted by this free and perfect experiment, which 
 demonstrates that the liberty of divorce does not contribute to 
 happiness and virtue.” 
 
 * Exeunt matrimonii causa, nubunt divortii. Seneca de benef. L. 3. 
 
 f As an instance of our retrocession to the good old times of Seneca and 
 Juvenal, I might mention the fantastic plan of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, 
 who recommended a bill in Parliament, septennial in its operation, for the 
 benefit of married persons. Your Grace will surely smile at the ludicrous 
 licentiousness of the project. However, I have no doubt but it would be as 
 acceptable to many individuals of the present day, as the law of Moses. See 
 Spence’s Anecdotes of Books and Men : London, 1820. 
 
56 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 What is then, my Lord, the prolific source of these abuses ? 
 
 Unde hffic monstra tamen vel quo de fonte requiris?* 
 
 or what can stay the progress of immorality, while the doctrine 
 of divorce is unsettled, and abandoned to the licentiousness of 
 every interpreter ? The Catholic doctrine on the indissolubility 
 of marriage is the only remedy — a doctrine that is already in- 
 corporated with the common law of England. Startle not, my 
 Lord, at such a proposition. Some of the ministers of the 
 Establishment have gone farther, and recommended a reconcilia- 
 tion with the Catholic Church. Alarmed at the defection that is 
 daily thinning the ranks of the Establishment, they have seen 
 no hopes of subordination except in such an alliance. Nay, the 
 union of the Churches occupied much of the attention of your 
 predecessor, Archbishop Wake, who, had he lived to witness the 
 dreadful progress of sectarianism, would doubtless have pushed 
 his overtures with greater zeal, and perhaps with greater success. 
 You may dread that the archiepiscopal throne of Canterbury 
 would be overshadowed by the amplitude of St. Peter’s, and 
 gradually shorn of its splendours. No, my Lord, it would bor- 
 row fresh lustre from such a junction. Such were heretofore the 
 fears of some aspiring prelates, whose ambition made them 
 impatient of the supremacy of Rome. But scarcely did they 
 try the fatal experiment of separation, when they found that 
 the effulgence of their thrones was only reflected. This train of 
 thought naturally reminds me of Bishop Butler, another orna- 
 ment of the Establishment. You know with what ingenuity he 
 traced the analogy between natural and revealed religion, and 
 discovered resemblances between physical and moral truth. 
 However, had not his prejudices arrested his speculations, he 
 might have discovered in the condition of his own Church 
 another illustration of this striking analogy. Loosened from 
 the centre of unity, her motions are capricious and irregular : 
 unfed by any accession of light from the fountain, her original 
 stock is constantly diminishing ; and like a distant star, still 
 receding from the centre, she casts her lone and waning splen- 
 dour, gradually deepening into that sort of twilight which teems 
 with wayward phantoms more than utter obscurity, and which, 
 though too feeble to light the way, is still sufficient to make the 
 darkness visible.f 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Whence those grim monsters ? from what source they spring ? 
 
 f It is consoling to witness the effect of this truth on the men of Oxford, who 
 have courage enough to quit the regions of those spectral shadows which they 
 encounter in their enquiries, and are again returning to enjoy the light of the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
LETTER X. 
 
 57 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 LI e'/xfirra? (F £%a.}ea,$cti, Inst yoChmaX te xoa aiveci, 
 
 Ev 7T£/x7rrv? ya.^ (pour'!v E^lvvmac aj uQmohvtiv, 
 
 *'0 %xov r^vvvfji.evua- Tov*Egt$ rexs irrip ETtibgxo)$ Hesiod. 
 
 Tlie fifth of every week thy care require, 
 
 Days full of trouble and afflictions dire. 
 
 For then the Furies take their round, ’tis said, 
 
 And heap their vengeance on the perjur’d head. 
 
 It may be a fanciful, yet it is a remarkable coincidence, that 
 the day which the superstition of Hesiod denounced as ominous 
 of discord should be singled out for the revival of similar scenes 
 by the pretended followers of the Gospel. Before I take my 
 leave of a subject to which the little time I have devoted I can 
 still recal without regret, I shall take the liberty of directing 
 once more the curiosity of the public to the last meeting of the 
 Kildare-street Association. 
 
 The last year has been to them the most eventful one since 
 the origin of their institution. From its infancy to that period 
 they went on rejoicing in their way, and enriched by the accu- 
 mulated offerings of their converts. At length, however, a fatal 
 check was given to their career ; a spirit of wholesome inquiry 
 was directed to their proceedings ; the extent of the benefits they 
 conferred was compared with the extent of their specious pro- 
 mises ; and when the opposition between both was laid open to 
 the public, they were earnestly conjured to adopt a line of con- 
 duct more conformable to the spirit of their primitive regulations. 
 Deaf to remonstrance, they sullenly persevered, in opposition to 
 all that was elevated and enlightened in their assembly. And 
 what has been the consequence of their rash and inconsiderate 
 measures ? The alienation of many who are still of their num- 
 ber, and the actual desertion of some of the most dignified 
 members, who have given their cordial support to the establish- 
 ment of a new society. Of schemes of improvement of which 
 experience does not afford means of ascertaining the utility, I 
 must confess I am not an enthusiastic admirer. Of the new 
 society I know but little, nor does that little knowledge furnish 
 sufficient data to warrant censure or commendation. Without 
 discussing, then, the merit of the other, it will not be deemed 
 
58 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 rashness to predict that should each returning year witness a 
 similar defection with the past, the existence of the parent 
 institution must soon become a tale. 
 
 The expectation that was raised, and the distrust that was 
 excited, by the recent discussions, drew to the place of meeting a 
 full and fashionable assembly. It was imagined that the chosen 
 champions of its fame would clear it of the charges of prose- 
 lytism and mis-government, or that the more moderate would 
 recommend an union with the schismatics. But some of the 
 leading orators of last year, either ashamed of its bigotry, or 
 content with the celebrity which they obtained in the cause of 
 the Gospel, resigned the theatre to a crowd of less efficient, but 
 equally zealous advocates. The uniformity of talent displayed 
 by the successive speakers happily spares me the necessity of 
 irritating the jealousy of some, or distressing the modesty of 
 others, by any invidious selection. I must except, however, one 
 of the Fellows of Trinity College, on whose mind a strong light 
 seems to have broken through some secret crevices, which has not 
 yet penetrated the dull medium, nor reached the other members 
 of the University. With the buoyancy of genius he has risen 
 above the pressure, and resisted the contagion of its atmosphere ; 
 for 
 
 His delights 
 
 Are dolphin like, they show his back above 
 
 The element they live in. 
 
 Yet neither his wisdom, nor that of Lord Cloncurry, could 
 overcome the inveterate prejudices of the members ; and when 
 their overtures for conciliation were rejected, like Camillus, 
 they retired, perhaps, murmuring an indignant prophecy that 
 the society would soon solicit, in the wisdom of its reverse, the 
 councils which it rejected in the infatuation of its prosperity. 
 
 Why the members of this society adhere with such stubborn 
 pertinacity to their system, it is difficult to conjecture. They 
 know that the society was founded for the education of the poor ; 
 they know that the majority of that class is composed of Catho- 
 lics ; and yet with the most insulting mockery they proffer them 
 education, on conditions which they well know cannot be accepted. 
 Why refuse to entrust the education of the Catholics to those 
 who convey to them the morality of the Gospel, without any 
 mixture of fanaticism, teaching them a patient endurance of 
 their sufferings, and inculcating an allegiance — not the calcu- 
 lating and conditional allegiance, which rests on no secure prin- 
 ciple, but an allegiance founded on conscience and enforced by 
 the apostle. Circumstances are daily arising which demand some 
 alterations in their code of laws, and still they refuse to yield to 
 them. Really such perverse opposition to the dictates of sound 
 
LETTER X. 
 
 59 
 
 policy cannot be explained, unless by supposing that, its author, 
 like the legislator of Sparta, had bound the members by oath to 
 the observance of his laws, and that then by an heroic artifice he 
 sacrificed himself to the perpetuity of his institutions. Else how 
 could they in the face of the world, with all the affectation of 
 sincerity and solemnity of declamation, applaud their own exer- 
 tions, which, it is well known, must be confined to a limited 
 sphere, or idly wasted in unproductive activity? They may 
 ascribe the reluctance of Catholics to prejudice or superstition. 
 I have in my former letters sufficiently vindicated on that head 
 their tenets and their practice. And those who amuse them- 
 selves at the expense of their piety, would doubtless laugh at 
 the timid scruples of Eleazar, who refused life when it could not 
 be preserved without a violation of the law. * 
 
 There was one, too, who declaimed long and loud on the 
 absurdity of withholding the Scriptures in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury ! The old maxim of laudator temporis acti is reversed, 
 and instead of the silly prattle which the dignity of age might 
 render tolerable, however tedious, we are stunned with an inces- 
 sant panegyric on our own times. The progress of mind in the 
 nineteenth century is indeed a favourite theme ; nor is it difficult 
 to perceive, in the complacency of the orators, that they fancy 
 they have had a large share in producing the general illumina- 
 tion. Full of their Utopian theories, it is in vain that the picture 
 of history is placed before them. Occupied in the contemplation 
 of a group, in which themselves form, doubtless, prominent 
 figures, the most colossal forms of the past retire into diminutive 
 and almost indiscernible perspective. Had they bestowed, how- 
 ever, a little attention on the comparison, they would discover 
 that the sickly tapers of the present century would wink before 
 the broad effulgence of the ages that are gone by. To reason 
 with such minds, incurably seized with the love of system, is a 
 hopeless task. You may convince them by argument of the 
 inutility of their plan; but still, on account of some secret 
 interest, you cannot persuade them to its rejection. 
 
 For when disputes are worn out, 
 
 ’Tis interest still resolves the doubt. 
 
 Yet it is consistent enough that Protestants should talk of the 
 improvements of their religion. The Catholics do not claim any 
 such merits ; and while every other system is corrected or dis- 
 figured by time, it is their glory that the faith of their Church is 
 independent of its contributions. Those who pretend to be so 
 familiar with the Scripture, cannot but recollect the earnest 
 solicitude with which St. Paul exhorts Timothyf to avoid any 
 
 * Machabees, vi. 
 
 t II. Timothy, iii, 4, 5, 6. 
 
60 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 communion witli those whose discourse creepeth like a cancer, 
 tainting whatever it touches, until it spreads a general infection. 
 Now it will be readily conceded, that the world daily teems with 
 men designated by the character of St. Paul, however people 
 may differ about its application. Hence the Catholics only act 
 in obedience to the injunction of the apostle, in reprobating a 
 system of education which, by confounding every sect, would 
 conceal from them the contagious poison which he cautions them 
 to avoid ; and thus lead them into deadly errors, under the sem- 
 blance of an undefinable Christianity. Those who have heard 
 the smooth, and flattering, and plausible language that was 
 spoken at the Kildare-street meeting, may be surprised at the 
 severity with which I have animadverted on their conduct. 
 With no small share of confidence in the sincerity of my 
 species, I am warranted in applying to that society the maxim — 
 
 Fronti nulla fides. 
 
 Their conduct, not their language, is the safest criterion of 
 ascertaining their object. Whoever, then, wishes to know the 
 moderation of the Bible-men, let him learn it in the vexatious 
 tyranny to which some of the peasanty are subjected, rather 
 than at a public meeting, where every thing is calculated to pro- 
 duce a transient illusion. On witnessing how the concord, to 
 which the jarring members of such meetings are attuned by the 
 sounds of eloquence and charity, is almost dissolved on their 
 dispersion, I am reminded of the fabled theatre of Orpheus, 
 where beasts and birds, wild and tame, soothed by the charms 
 of music, forgot their savage instincts ; but as soon as the magic 
 of song had ceased, they suddenly awoke to discord, and resumed 
 the ferocity of their natures.* 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Otia sopitis ageret cum cantibus Orpheus 
 Sova feris natura redit Claudian. 
 
LETTER XI. 
 
 61 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 Turnus ut infractos adverso marte Latinos 
 Defecisse videt, sua nunc promissa reposci, 
 
 Se signari oculis : ultrb implacabilis ardct 
 Atollitque animos. — Virgil. 
 
 When Turnus saw the Latins quit the field, 
 Their armies broken, and their courage quelled, 
 
 He roused his vigour for the late debate, 
 
 And raised his haughty soul to meet his fate. — Dryden. 
 
 If it should excite surprise that I have listened so long to the 
 haughty complacency of my former antagonist,* my silence is a 
 proof that the desire of writing never engaged “ Ilierophilos” in 
 controversy. While the work of discord was going forward 
 among the preachers of charity and peace, I looked on with 
 silent satisfaction, resolved to await the issue of their intestine 
 divisions. Though challenged to the contest, I saw in the 
 defiance an insidious design to create a diversion among the 
 pious combatants ; and was, therefore, determined that no pro- 
 vocation should shake my resolution of maintaining a cautious 
 neutrality. I could, therefore, forgive “ Bibliophilos” the in- 
 dulgence of an illusion, which mistook his retreat for a victory. 
 I had some toleration in store for his high commendation of his 
 own prowess ; nor would I refuse to swell the testimony of his 
 worth, by the praise which the sage of Ithaca bestowed on the 
 sinewy Ajax : — 
 
 Famed be thy tutor ; and thy parts of nature 
 Thrice famed, beyond, beyond all erudition ; 
 
 But he that disciplined thy arms to fight. 
 
 Let Mars divide eternity in twain, 
 
 And give him half : 
 
 The sacred warriors have, at length, disappeared ; and, to be 
 serious, I must acknowledge the justness of the claims of “Bib- 
 
 * The letters of “Bibliophilos,” to which reference is made in this place, were 
 published in the Dublin Journal of the 14th and 26th of November, and of the 
 19th of December, respectively. The two first are addressed to the Protestant 
 Primate of Armagh, on the subject of his Grace’s secession from the Hibernian 
 Bible Society ; and, from the vigour with which they are conceived, the force of 
 the reasoning, the nature of Protestant principles, and the silence of his Lord- 
 ship and his friends, may be justly deemed unanswerable. The third, “Biblio- 
 philos” terms “A Review of some of the Catholic Writers,” who took a share 
 in the contention of the sectaries. The ridicule it contains bespeaks a rich, 
 playful, though a cruel mind. As I have not authority, I cannot, of course, 
 present them to the English reader. 
 
62 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 liophilos,” who ascribes to himself the merit of their dispersion. 
 While I regret that the public has not been edified a little 
 longer by the pious secrets* of the Society, I cannot but applaud 
 the talents of the man, whose criticism has brushed away those 
 dark productions, which spread the spirit of discord, and dis- 
 coloured the face of literature. But, after all, “ Bibliophiles” 
 is, perhaps, too fastidious. With a taste sensitive to the most 
 delicate beauties, and an ear attuned to the finest cadences, of 
 language, he cannot endure any composition that has not been 
 cast in classic mould. Why, however, refuse to any individual 
 the right of using the sort of weapons with which nature has 
 furnished him ? The caustic severity of “ Bibliophilos” against 
 the writers of the Patriot may then be softened by the 
 reflection, that necessity called for their interference. And to 
 withhold one’s aid when his cause is attacked, because his 
 writings cannot minister to the luxury of learning, would be 
 betraying the folly of him who would refuse to repulse the 
 assaults of an enemy, because he had not studied the tactics of 
 Yegetius, nor learned to draw up his forces in the classic disposi- 
 tion of the Homan column or the Macedonian phalanx. 
 
 While the minds of the advocates of the Bible Societies seemed 
 pervious to persuasion, I undertook to demonstrate the folly and 
 danger of their projects. But the disease has since grown so 
 inveterate, that argument would seem now but a feeble remedy ; 
 and the change which time has wrought in the tone of their 
 members, furnishes a practical illustration of the truth of my 
 predictions. I should, therefore, hail the appearance of a 
 writer, who, in the face of the Established Church, has put 
 forth, in such a strong point of view, the principles by which 
 
 * Those who have read the Patriot during the last two months, need not he 
 informed of the covert designs and pious frauds of the Societies. One of its 
 correspondents has supplied us with the valuable information, that many of the 
 members have, at the public expense, supplied their families with the Scriptures 
 in gilt morocco, in order, I suppose, that the young and thoughtless, who could 
 not relish the dullness of the book, might be attracted to its perusal by the 
 decorations of the binding. He has also pointed out other circuitous little 
 channels, into which the stream of lucrative devotion is diverted, before it 
 reaches its destined object — the instruction of the poor. I shall not dwell on 
 the indecency of females abandoning the duties and privacy of domestic life, 
 carried away amidst the stir and bustle of enthusiasm, and drawing over the 
 faithful into the conventicles of the elect, by offering their profound com- 
 mentaries on the epistles of Saint Paul. But, though it may not rank among 
 their secrets, yet every thinking man must perceive how dangerous it is to the 
 interests of society, to suffer its peace to be scared away by those itinerant ap- 
 paritions, who, with the most sepulchral hollowness of tone, and the most doleful 
 longitude of aspect, are stalking in mid-day through our streets and highways, 
 shrieking out the apostrophes of Isaias on the guilt and fall of Babylon, and 
 piously applying them to the Protestant establishment. Ashamed of the 
 disclosure of these tales, their authors have at length retired to secrecy — but in 
 vain ; no artifice can conceal the deformity of a system, which the indiscretion 
 of its own advocates has bared to public view. 
 
LETTER XI. 
 
 63 
 
 the Bible Societies are supported, if I did not tremble for their 
 consequences. Unable to oppose the force of his arguments, the 
 champions of the Church have retreated to the secure hold of 
 authority ; but the irresistible reasoning of “ Bibliophilos” has 
 followed them there, resolved not to spare even the bulwarks of 
 the Establishment, should they be opposed to the impetuous 
 current of his opinions. Such is the obvious drift of his own 
 language. In his second letter to the Primate of Armagh, after 
 other passages, too plain to be mistaken, he writes — “ In the 
 controversies which have arisen on the subject, far more anxiety 
 has been expressed by the champions of the Church for the pre- 
 servation of the Establishment than the Bible. It is to be hoped 
 that both may be secured ; but should their separate interest be 
 found, at any time, incompatible, what honest man could hesitate 
 upon the choice of evils ?” 
 
 I may be allowed to congratulate the writer and the public 
 upon this candid avowal of his sentiments. The spirit of fana- 
 ticism must have been fermented to a high degree, when it could 
 have worked up to the effusion of such ardent language, the 
 cool and philosophic mind of “ Bibliophilos.” Lest, however, it 
 should be imagined that these opinions are peculiar to him, I 
 could cite passages of similar import from the writers of the 
 Patriot , did I not dread to disgrace my letter by their insertion. 
 Is it not, therefore, evident that the Bible distributors, secure of 
 their own strength, disdain to disguise any longer the hostility 
 of their purpose ? Panting for the riches, they are rushing 
 forward to hasten the downfal, of the Establishment, and to 
 proclaim, in the numbness that has seized its members, the 
 approach of its dissolution. Their designs, now that they are 
 revealed to the world, must be met, on the part of the Church, 
 by a temperate, yet vigorous, exercise of authority. The Pro- 
 testant Bishops of Armagh and Dublin have given an example 
 befitting the dignity and responsibility of their station. It is to 
 be hoped that others will soon be awakened to a similar sense of 
 the danger, and to an imitation of their example. The con- 
 sistency of the conduct of their lordships, or of the authority 
 which they exercise, it is surely not incumbent on me to vindi- 
 cate. But the question is now a question of policy, and not of 
 religious controversy ; and there is no friend of peace who would 
 not rather witness the inconsistencies of quiet and good order, 
 than the tragic, however consistent, consequences of an unbridled 
 license of opinion. The Bible Societies are become deaf as adders’ 
 ears to the whispers of persuasion ; the voice of argument would 
 no longer be heard in the noise of their fanaticism; and hence 
 the necessity of some more powerful agent, to calm the roar, and 
 stay the fury, of the agitated sectaries. 
 
 It is, then, high time to desist from unmeaning panegyric on 
 
64 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 the inestimable advantages of the Bible. Let experience answer 
 whether these societies have realized the prophetic visions of 
 their first and most fervent eulogists. Have they plucked a 
 single evil out of the mass of human misery ? No. The mem- 
 bers may continue to meet at stated periods, and feed the 
 credulity of the public with the marvellous history of their 
 spiritual exploits. Their orators may then come forward, and 
 pour out their cold and vapid ecstacies before an assembly pre- 
 pared to second the pious labourings of the spirit, by seasonable 
 interruptions of tumultuous applause. What is the amount of 
 all this declamation ? Why, that they have, in the progress of 
 a few years, distributed so many hundred thousand copies of the 
 Scriptures. Can a greater deceit be practised on the public 
 mind, than to persuade it that the spirit of God has been 
 diffused, because numberless copies of the lifeless volume have 
 been circulated? Let all the rhetorical exaggerations of the 
 speakers be mathematically true — it only proves the melancholy 
 conclusion of such a waste of public money. A portion of that 
 money would do much to alleviate the misery now felt by the 
 humbler classes of our people, and, perhaps, prevent some of 
 those excesses over which piety must weep. But what benefits 
 have the Bible Societies conferred on our wretched peasantry ? 
 They may distribute their Bibles until doom’s-day ; their efforts 
 will toe still as unprofitable as the labours of Sysiphus. One 
 solitary reflection ought to cure the fever of fanaticism, or, at 
 least, guard the public against the further progress of its con- 
 tagion. Though the Associations have toiled for years at the 
 godly work, and flung millions of Bibles through the mass of 
 society, have they not shared the fate of the book flung by the 
 Prophet* into the Euphrates, and sunk like useless lumber to the 
 bottom, while not a portion of their spirit has rested on its sur- 
 face, to move over the waters and still the troubled elements ? 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * “And when thou shalt have made an end of reading this book, thou shalt 
 tie a stone to it, and shalt throw it into the midst of the Euphrates.” — Jeremias, 
 li, 63. 
 
LETTER XII. 
 
 65 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 Sed hoc non concedo , ut quibus rebus gloriemini in vobis, easdem in aliis repre- 
 hendatis Cicero pro Ligario. 
 
 It cannot be allowed that men should censure in others a line of conduct 
 which receives a sanction from their own practice and panegyric. 
 
 In concluding the subject to which these letters have been 
 devoted, it may not be useless to direct the public attention to 
 an occurrence which has lately called forth some invidious obser- 
 vations on the spirit of religious proselytism. 
 
 The conversion of Miss Loveday* to the Catholic faith has 
 provoked the zeal of some of our modern journalists, who vie 
 with each other in their animadversions on a daughter who 
 seemed dead to every impulse of filial affection. Any inter- 
 ference with the faith which Protestants have inherited from 
 their fathers, they qualify with the harsh epithet of seduction ; 
 and the profession of the Catholic creed they stigmatize as a 
 dissolution of the tenderest ties of nature, and an undutiful 
 renunciation of the parental authority. 
 
 The Catholic religion is immediately characterized with the 
 polite epithet of superstitious, and the conviction it engenders is 
 converted into the terrors of a weak and gloomy imagination. 
 Even these establishments which piety has erected for the pro- 
 tection of female virtue, are not safe against their harsh insinua- 
 tions. Instead of inveighing against these holy institutions, our 
 gratitude should applaud that benevolence which founded those 
 asylums, where virtue may be shielded against the dangerous 
 seductions of life, or where the feelings experienced by sensitive 
 minds, on a sudden reverse of fortune, may be soothed into 
 resignation by the consolations of religion. All these advantages 
 are overlooked, when balanced against the interest of the Pro- 
 testant religion. The example of Miss Loveday is held up as a 
 salutary warning against the dangers of perversion; and so 
 intense is the sympathy felt for the misfortunes of the father 
 and the child, that I doubt not but the pious sisters of the Bible 
 Societies will celebrate an annual festival to bewail the virginity 
 of the daughter of Jephte. 
 
 Yet these people, whom the conversion of one individual has 
 
 * This Protestant lady became a convert to the Catholic religion in France, 
 greatly moved by the piety and cheerfulness of the inmates of those convents, 
 which the world foolishly mistakes for the abodes of melancholy. 
 
66 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 filled with such alarm, can behold with indifference or satisfaction 
 the efforts that are daily making to pervert the young minds of 
 Catholic children. The exertions of the Bible Societies are a 
 topic of unwearied commendation ; nor do the unworthy means 
 to which they resort ever draw forth an expression of resent- 
 ment. Fathers have in this country been literally turned out of 
 their little cot-acres, because they refused to expose their children 
 to the peril of apostacy ; and not a word of sympathy for the 
 lot of these creatures, whose consciences are exposed to such 
 violent trials, escaped the lips of those who express such pious 
 horror at the seduction of Miss Loveday. Such conduct is 
 surely not equitable, and I know no reason for its justification, 
 unless by supposing it more criminal to retain people in the 
 ancient faith, than to draw them over from that faith to the con- 
 venticles of modern sectaries. 
 
 Their conduct reminds me of the facetious fable of La Fon- 
 taine, in which the beasts assembled before Jupiter, blind to their 
 own, expose each other’s deformities with malignant penetration : 
 
 Mais parmi les plus faus 
 
 Notre espece excella ; car tout ce que nous sommes, 
 
 Lynx envers nos pareils et taupes envers nous, 
 
 Nous nous pardonnons tout, et rien aux autres hommes.* 
 
 Of all the charges preferred by the advocates of the Bible, 
 there is none that has been more insidiously put forward, than 
 that its indiscriminate perusal is prohibited by the Catholic 
 clergy, lest it should weaken their own influence, and unmask 
 their imposture. Experience sufficiently exposes the weakness 
 of the charge ; for surely there is little danger to be apprehended 
 in trying any system of Christianity by the Bible, from which, 
 if we are to judge by the different creeds of its advocates, the 
 most opposite systems may be extracted. The objection, how- 
 ever ingenious, is not new ; it has been pressed by the sectaries 
 of every age, and its futility cannot be more forcibly exposed 
 than in the language of St. Augustine : — 
 
 “ You know,” says this holy and enlightened man, writing to 
 Honoratus, “ that the sole cause which engaged me in the party 
 of the Manicheans, was their boastful promise not to check their 
 followers by the restraint of a severe authority ; but to free 
 them from error, and lead them to God by the simple method of 
 reason. For what other motive could have prompted me to 
 despise the religion of my education, and to listen to those men 
 with such avidity, but their having charged the Catholics with 
 
 * Amidst the vast assemblage, every beast 
 Deem’d his own kind with folly touch’d the least : 
 
 To others’ faults our lynx eyes are confined, 
 
 While to our own we are, as moles, all blind. 
 
LETTER XII. 
 
 67 
 
 frightening, by superstition, the members of their religion, and 
 exacting the acquiescence of faith unfortified by argument. 
 They, however, required none to believe until the understanding 
 was gradually enlightened by the knowledge of truth. Who 
 should not have been vanquished by such specious promises? 
 and will any one be astonished that they made a deep impression 
 on the mind of a young man fond of truth, whom his disputes 
 and conferences with the learned had rendered inquisitive and 
 presumptuous ?” And again (for there is a sad interest in tran- 
 scribing his ingenuous and pathetic description of the weakness 
 and vanity of man), “the soul is naturally flattered with the 
 promises which heretics make of pointing out clearly the truth. 
 It reflects not on its own weakness, nor on the sad state into 
 which it has been plunged by its own infirmity. Hence, while 
 she hungers for wholesome food, which can only be profitable to 
 the healthy, she perishes by the poisoned doctrine of her 
 deceivers.” 
 
 It requires no extraordinary stretch of ingenuity to apply the 
 words of St. Augustine to the circumstances of our own times. 
 The boastful promises of the advocates of the Bible are the 
 same by which his young and unsuspecting mind was betrayed. 
 Similar is their tone of triumph — similar their pretensions to the 
 exclusive possession of the truth, and similar the insulting pity 
 with which they affect to treat the religion of Catholics. The 
 proud are flattered by the compliment paid to their understand- 
 ing, and the profligate hail the introduction of a spirit which 
 releases them from an inconvenient yoke. 
 
 Free in the choice of their teachers, they attach themselves to 
 one until he is supplanted by another, who yields in his turn to 
 the bolder pretensions of a more artful and accommodating rival, 
 and thus to escape the despotism of authority, they pass under 
 the successive dominion of a crowd of enthusiasts, who rise and 
 disappear, until in their endeavours to realize the progressive 
 perfectibility of our nature, they drink the deadliest errors that 
 ever poisoned the human mind. 
 
 We are frequently told, by way of triumphant contrast, that 
 the Bible is the religion of Protestants. By such frequent 
 appeals to Scripture, they would fain insinuate that they have 
 an exclusive veneration for the sacred volume. They seldom 
 reflect that it is revered by the Catholic Church as the sacred 
 charter of her privileges. But though it be originally her pos- 
 session, it is one of those possessions which may be plundered by 
 every apostate who deserts her communion. It is one of those 
 badges by which the true Church is ludicrously personified, in 
 the mimic exhibitions of the sectaries. 
 
 Behold, however, the awful consequences of this principle. 
 When I am told that the Bible is the religion of Protestants, 
 
68 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 the word Protestant presents an idea of such unbounded and 
 intricate meaning, that I must confess it is difficult to comprehend 
 its extent, or unravel its perplexity. The Protestant religion 
 must be true, as the Bible is its sole rule of faith. A member 
 of the Church of England must, therefore, be right, because 
 the Bible is his rule of faith, and he is a Protestant. The Pres- 
 byterian must be right, because the Bible is his rule of faith, 
 and he is a Protestant. The Socinian, who shakes the pillars of 
 Revelation, must be right, because the Bible is his rule of faith, 
 and he is a Protestant. The Antinomian, who piously absolves 
 his followers from the obligation of the Evangelical law, must, of 
 course, be right, because the Bible is his rule of faith, and he is 
 a Protestant. And thus while infidelity and Popery lie at the 
 opposite extremes, inaccessible to her influence, truth, with the 
 variety of a cameleon and the velocity of lightning, beams on 
 each chequered and deformed system that fills up the immense 
 interval. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 Simul veritas plurimis modis infracta : primum inscitia reipublicoe ut alienee, 
 mox libidine assentandi , aut rursus odio adversus dominantes. — Tacitus. 
 
 Various were the influences by which truth was impaired ; such as ignorance 
 of the state in the first instance; and next the flattery and hatred of its rulers. 
 
 Whilst the character of our country and the religion of her 
 people are assailed with unsparing enmity by some interested 
 defamers, who are continually pouring their calumnies into the 
 English press ; and whilst unfortunately some local outrages of 
 a savage nature give a specious colour to their misrepresenta- 
 tions, your attention is solicited to the statement of a writer, 
 who, with ample opportunities of information, has no interest to 
 mislead ; and who, while he exposes the wrongs, and denounces 
 the traducers of his conntry, is equally ready to acknowledge 
 the extent of her misdeeds, and the indiscretion of her pane- 
 gyrists. Perhaps in the history of the world no two countries 
 have exhibited such an anomaly as England and Ireland. Not- 
 
LETTER XIII. 
 
 69 
 
 withstanding the proximity of their situations, which naturally 
 seemed to invite to a cultivation of mutual intimacy, a spirit of 
 sullen distrust has kept them ignorant of each other ; and while 
 the genius of knowledge and of enterprise has annihilated the 
 vast space between England and the Indies, the Irish Channel 
 has been like an impassable gulph, which, from a dread of the 
 enemies on the opposite coast, the spirit of a benevolent curiosity 
 has seldom ventured to explore. 
 
 Has autem terras Italique hanc littoris oram 
 Proxima quae nostri perfunditur aequoris aestu 
 Effuge : cuncta malis habitantur maenia Gratis.* 
 
 We have been occasionally visited by some travellers or 
 tourists, whose pictures, with few exceptions, are the best 
 evidence of their unwillingness, or their inability to convey a 
 just delineation of our country or its inhabitants.! Nay, as 
 often as the English nation, animated by a laudable curiosity, 
 sent some individuals to ascertain our characters and our re- 
 sources, have they not generally returned, like the twelve spies 
 of Israel, poisoning the public mind by a false representation of 
 the land they had visited, and whose hospitality they had 
 abused, whilst few have been found to possess the honest 
 intrepidity of Caleb and Josue, to brave the public prejudice by 
 a fair and fearless exposure of the truth ? 
 
 This tone of vehement antipathy has been productive of the 
 worst consequences. The injustice or ingratitude of English 
 writers has produced a spirit of reaction equally injurious to our 
 interests; and our ardent countrymen, stung with the sense of 
 the unmerited aspersions that have been cast upon their native 
 soil, have drawn on their fervid fancies in pourtraying the 
 
 * Let not thy course to that ill coast he bent, 
 
 Which fronts from far the Epirian continent ; 
 
 Those parts are all by Grecian foes possessed, 
 
 The savage Locrians here the shores infest. — Dryden. 
 
 f The present age furnishes us with many instances of travellers who, with 
 superficial information, affect to pass the most deliberate judgment on the 
 character, politics, and religion of the countries through winch they happen to 
 pass. They generalize every thing ; they imagine themselves qualified to judge 
 of a nation by some trait which they have observed in the streets ; they do not 
 give themselves the trouble to obtain information ; or, if they do, they are not 
 successful in procuring it ; yet they consider themselves competent to assign 
 motives and causes for every peculiar custom which they observe. The following 
 anecdote will illustrate the truth of these observations: — “An ambasssador in 
 Italy, who had spent a few days in London, was dining one day at the house of 
 the British minister at Naples, when he introduced a discussion upon the sub- 
 ject of the British constitution — a branch of knowledge very difficult to be 
 understood even by Englishmen who have not made it an object of particular 
 study. The British minister was about to explain the subject to the company, 
 when the French ambassador interrupted him by saying : ‘ Give me leave, Sir, 
 
 I was twelve days in London, and can explain to you the whole affair .”’. — See 
 Memoirs of a Traveller, Vol. I, London, 1806. 
 
70 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 reproachless character of her sons. The descriptions were gene- 
 rally read with distrust ; facts of too stubborn a nature seemed 
 to contradict the representation of the impassioned or interested 
 advocate ; and thus the whole picture forfeited its claims to 
 fidelity, on account of some exaggerated features. Between 
 these extremes of overcharged eulogy and censure, there is 
 doubtless a large interval ; and seldom, it must be confessed, have 
 any been found possessing sufficient candour and discernment to 
 enquire and ascertain the point of their mutual approaches. 
 
 To unravel the causes of Ireland’s discontent and disturbances, 
 and to resolve the complex subject into the just proportion that 
 each cause may have in their production, would require the 
 intuitive sagacity and painting eloquence of Tacitus. Such a 
 view of the subject would be as foreign to the purpose, as it 
 would be disproportioned to the talents of the present writer : 
 he therefore will content himself with demonstrating that, in the 
 present unhappy disturbances that distract some parts of Ireland, 
 there is nothing of disloyalty to the government ; and that the 
 influence of the Catholic religion, instead of fomenting the evil, 
 has been uniformly exercised in mitigating its malignity, and 
 arresting its diffusion. 
 
 Besides the opposite descriptions of writers just mentioned, 
 there is another class, if the dignity of literature would not be 
 degraded by their assumption of the name, who, instead of 
 labouring to soften, are perpetually exasperating the causes of 
 national alienation. These unnatural children, wishing to see the 
 country of their birth a prey to intestine discord, because they 
 thrive on its continuance, fling into the dying embers of disunion 
 their ephemeral productions, which perish in the flame of their 
 own creation. 
 
 The agitated state of Ireland has been propitious to the pro- 
 duction of these extraordinary beings, who have regularly 
 appeared on our stage, transmitting the original spirit with 
 undecayed energy to their lineal successors. The race is not 
 yet extinct : we have still among us some candidates, whose 
 superior claims to the possession of the mantle of their progeni- 
 tors arise from a rivalry in the work of defamation. Instead of 
 being daunted by the detection of their calumnies, they only 
 gather effrontery from refutation. 
 
 Iram atque animos a crimine sumunt. 
 
 Happily, however, their malignity is generally neutralized by 
 their folly or their weakness. They may occasionally excite a 
 smile, but never a more dignified sentiment : their names have 
 passed into terms of scorn and reproach ; and they have earned, 
 by their slanders, the just retribution of an infamous celebrity. 
 
 IIierophilos. 
 
LETTER XIV. 
 
 71 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 Non equidem hoc duhites , amhorum fcedere certo 
 Consentire dies, et ab uno sidere duci. — Persius. 
 
 Sure on both nations the same star has shone, 
 
 Joint are their fates, their destinies are one. 
 
 Whatever may be the visions of some romantic lovers of 
 country, it is one of the soundest and most incontestible maxims 
 of political science, that there are some countries whose fortunes 
 must ever be dependent on the destinies of others.* This prin- 
 ciple, which experience has confirmed in the example of other 
 countries, seems peculiarly applicable to the condition of Ireland. 
 To the strength and abundance of her natural resources, I feel 
 proud in bearing ample testimony ; but as these must be esti- 
 mated in relation to surrounding states, it must be confessed that 
 she seems to have been destined to be connected in some measure 
 with the English nation. Though this reflection may be mortify- 
 ing to our national vanity, we should still be consoled by the con- 
 sciousness that we could securely repose under the protection of 
 the British empire, instead of being placed in the doubtful position 
 of Anactorium, which, if we are to credit the account of Thucy- 
 dides, was disputed by the contending claims of Corinth and 
 Corcyra. 
 
 This obvious principle has taken deep root in the Irish mind. 
 The people are too sensible of the advantage of British con- 
 nexion to wish for a separation. They would consider as their 
 worst enemies, those who would entertain the chimerical project 
 of divorcing that connexion ; and the only object they sigh for 
 is, to draw closer its relations, by a fuller participation of its 
 benefits. We know that it is the dispensation of Providence, 
 that one kingdom should share the adverse or prosperous 
 fortunes of another. We know that our fate is connected 
 with that of England, and that in “ the peace thereof shall 
 our peace be;” and, therefore, that he who would attempt 
 to seduce the people from their allegiance, would be realizing 
 the language which Jeremias held to the false prophet Hananias : 
 
 * See Grotius, Des differentes sortes de Guerre, et de la Souverainete, L. I, 
 chap, iii ; with the notes of his interpreter, Barbeyrac. 
 
72 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 “Thou hast broken chains of wood, and thou shalt make for 
 them chains of iron.”* 
 
 The principle of connexion with the English government, f 
 which nature seems to suggest, and which a sense of self-interest 
 must confirm, derives from the Catholic faith a still stronger 
 influence. The attachment of the Catholic to the person of his 
 Sovereign is derived from a nobler source than those yet alluded 
 to, and the loyalty he must feel, in common with every other 
 subject, is hallowed by the peculiar instructions of his religion. 
 It is a well-known truth, that the relative duties of sovereigns 
 and of subjects have been discussed in the sister country with a 
 bold and, perhaps, dangerous freedom of opinion. We know 
 that some of its most eminent political writers have ventured to 
 fix the boundaries where obedience would cease to be an obliga- 
 tion, and resistance would become a duty. These are discussions 
 which, in the Catholic Church, are considered as questions of a 
 delicate and dangerous tendency. Nay, they have even startled 
 the impiety of Hume.f Seldom are these extreme cases agitated 
 
 * Jeremias, xxviii, 13. 
 
 f Within those late years, some English writers have been contrasting this 
 letter with my sentiments on the repeal of the legislative union, with the view 
 of impressing on the public that I now entertain opinions different from those 
 which I advocated in the letters of “Hierophilos.” Among those writers, two 
 Catholic peers hold a prominent place, who, utterly forgetful of the obvious 
 drift of my argument, have expended much superfluous writing in endeavouring 
 to show that I was once an advocate of the legislative union. Now, there is no 
 questfon of the legislative union in the entire of this letter. The argument 
 turns on the connexion between its Irish subjects and the British crown, and the 
 necessity of the allegiance which is due to the British monarch. On the reli- 
 gious obligations of that allegiance my sentiments have undergone no change. 
 
 It is true that from the relative size and proximity of Ireland, a probable 
 argument is drawn in favour of a connexion with England. Now, the advan- 
 tages of such a connexion, under the same monarch, who would rule both 
 countries with an impartial sway, are not controverted by the advocates of the 
 repeal of the legislative union. Lest, however, the observations on the relative 
 size and position of Ireland should be mistaken by the English as an argument 
 in favour of any ascendancy on their part, I may be allowed to remind them, 
 that they prove quite the reverse. The insignificant size of England, compared 
 to Continental states, as well as its nearness to Ireland, prove equally the advan- 
 tages of an imperial union with Ireland, in order to be able to cope successfully 
 against the encroachments of greater powers. The union, then, which nature 
 and their geographical position suggest, is one of mutual justice and protection. 
 But as those and the union of two legislatures are found to be incompatible, it 
 follows that a disruption of the legislative union must take place ; for in the 
 harmony of nations, as well as in the system of the world, the smaller, as well 
 as the larger bodies, exercise their just influence ; so that were the influence of 
 the smallest to be destroyed or diminished from any cause, the consequence 
 would be a severance of the mutual dependence. The jealousy of England forbids 
 justice — the same jealousy must forbid the continuance of the legislative union. 
 
 % “Besides, we must consider that as obedience is our duty, in the common 
 course of things, it ought chiefly to be inculcated ; nor can anything be more 
 preposterous than an anxious care and solicitude in stating all the cases in which 
 resistance may be allowed. In like manner, though a philosopher reasonably 
 acknowledges, in the course of an argument, that the rules of justice may be 
 dispensed with in cases of urgent necessity, what should we think of a preacher 
 
LETTER XIV. 
 
 73 
 
 by its professors, and never proposed to its followers as maxims 
 of practical adoption. We hold with Mr. Burke, “that the specu- 
 lative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and 
 resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable ; 
 and that, with or without a right, a revolution will be the very 
 last resource of the thinking and the good.” Far, therefore, 
 from entertaining the dangerous theory that would fix those 
 bounds of suffering, which would justify resistance, we are re- 
 proached with extending our doctrine of obedience beyond what 
 human nature can endure. Through the vicissitudes of eighteen 
 centuries, the doctrine of the Catholic has remained the same 
 that was preached by Saint Paul,* and illustrated by the com- 
 mentaries of Tertullian ; and it will ever be the reproach or the 
 glory of our religion, that it will ever be inaccessible to the 
 wisdom or the folly of modern maxims of allegiance. For 
 loyalty which rests on so firm a basis, there is little room for 
 apprehension. It is not that fluctuating loyalty which may shift 
 with times and circumstances, and which is measured by the 
 calculating standard of interest or convenience ; ours is a loyalty 
 depending on an eternal principle — the dispensation of a ruling 
 Providence ; and of which the calls of a capricious self-interest 
 can never annul the obligation. 
 
 To any who soberly reflect on the conduct of the Catholics, 
 through the sad vicissitudes of our national history, it must be a 
 matter of surprise, how that conduct could ever have furnished 
 grounds for impeaching their loyalty. With a fidelity which no 
 temptation could shake, they clung to the fallen fortunes of one 
 Prince, until dire necessity had severed every obligation; and 
 
 or casuist, who should make it his chief study to find out such cases, and enforce 
 them with all the vehemence of argument and eloquence ? Would he not be 
 better employed in inculcating the general doctrine, than in displaying the par- 
 ticular exceptions, which we are, perhaps, but too much inclined of ourselves to 
 embrace and to extend !” — Hume, Essay 13 th, on Passive Obedience. 
 
 * “Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but 
 from God ; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore, he that re- 
 sisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, pur- 
 chase to themselves damnation. Wherefore, be subject of necessity, not only 
 for wrath, but also for conscience sake.” — Romans , chap. xiii. 
 
 “ Christians are aware who has conferred their power on the Emperors — they 
 know it is God ; after whom they are first in rank, and second to none other. 
 From the same source which imparts life, they also derive their power. We, 
 Christians, invoke on all the Emperors, the blessings of a long life, a prosperous 
 reign, domestic security, a brave army, a faithful senate, and a moral people.” — 
 Tertullian, Apolegeticus adversus Genies , chap. xxx. 
 
 Such was the practical commentary of Tertullian on the words of St. Paul, 
 when the Christians suffered from the cruelty of Severus. I know that Paley 
 applies a more accommodating interpretation to the doctrine of the Apostle. — 
 See Moral Philosophy, B. VI, chap. iv. 
 
 I must confess, however, that we are so incapable to keep pace with the pro- 
 gress of mind, as to prefer the simple exposition of the African Presbyter, to the 
 adoption of the subtle ingenuity of the English Archdeacon, by which the force 
 of the most rigid obligation would be soon refined away. 
 
 F 
 
74 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 surely such heroic constancy, instead of justifying the foul im- 
 peachment of disloyalty, ought to be considered a pledge of 
 sincere fidelity to every future Sovereign. The frequent and 
 invidious reference is made to the insurrections which occasion- 
 ally disgraced our country ; they have never sprung from the 
 influence of Catholic principles. Thus, in the instance of the 
 Rebellion of Ninety-Eight, of which the memory is industriously 
 transmitted in every anti-Catholic publication, the leaders of the 
 Irish Directory declared, on examination before the Irish parlia- 
 ment, that so far from being actuated by the desire of establish- 
 ing the Catholic religion, they would have as soon exchanged the 
 cross for the crescent. On this subject much adverse learning 
 has been expended ; and notwithstanding the many able vindica- 
 tions of our conduct that have been occasionally offered to the 
 public, yet there are some drivelling writers, who are ever 
 pouring upon the English ear the obsolete calumnies of men 
 deservedly forgotten ; and who in the dull round of slander 
 exhibit all the dexterity of the Athenian charioteer, who could 
 perpetually revolve round the same goal, without deviating from 
 the former track or marking a new impression. 
 
 Metaphysicians have displayed much idle cavil in attempting 
 to prove the impossibility of civil allegiance, when spiritual 
 obedience was exacted by the Roman Pontiff. Our feelings and 
 our conduct refuted their subtle speculations. To put an end, 
 however, to the interminable contest, the King graciously became 
 our advocate, and a single ray of royal benevolence has dissolved 
 the rusty prejudices, which have resisted the weight and vigour 
 of arguments an hundred times repeated. In spite of the calum- 
 nies of ages, and the misgivings of some individuals, who dis- 
 trusted, or affected to distrust, our allegiance, he resolves to come 
 among us : the most distant parts of the kingdom pour in their 
 thronging multitudes to greet his approach. With unhesitating 
 confidence, he generously flung himself on the fidelity of his Irish 
 people ; and surely it was a glorious spectacle to have seen him 
 borne aloft on the buoyancy of their uncalculating devotion. 
 
 We shall, therefore, be content that a host of noxious writers 
 tax us with disloyalty, while we are conscious that the royal 
 mind has received a different impression. If, therefore, when 
 the Government was known to the Catholics only through the 
 severities it inflicted, they cherished a strong and steady loyalty, 
 which no force could pluck out of their breasts, they cannot be 
 disaffected to a Government which cherishes and protects them, 
 unless we suppose their loyalty to be like the famous tree* in 
 Switzerland, which thrives on the barren rock, exposed to the 
 tempest, but withers and dies under a kindlier cultivation. 
 
 IIierophilos. 
 
 Tanim. 
 
LETTER XV. 
 
 75 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 We are reviled, and we bless : — we are ill spoken of, and we intreat 
 
 St. Paul. 
 
 To the readers of this letter, on our side of the Irish Channel, 
 it will undoubtedly be a subject of astonishment that I should 
 devote any labour, which to them must appear superfluous, to a 
 vindication of the conduct of persons whose eminent services are 
 justly entitled to the public approbation. As the nature of an 
 apology may possibly imply the suspicion of guilt, some will, 
 perhaps, feel indignant at the indiscretion of an advocate, who 
 attempts to justify a body of men, whose characters are equally 
 beyond the reach of reproach, or the necessity of justification. 
 However, it must be recollected that I write for an English 
 public — a public, whose honest minds have been misled by con- 
 tinued calumnies acting on their religious prejudices ; and that a 
 vindication of our clergy, offered to a Protestant public, can no 
 more be an imputation on their merits, than the apologies of 
 Justin or Athenagoras could justify the impeachment of the con- 
 duct of the first Christians. 
 
 It is only by fairly estimating the different causes of discontent 
 which operate on the minds of the Irish peasantry, that we shall 
 be able to appreciate the merits of the Catholic priesthood. 
 Although the advocacy of the people is generally considered an 
 invidious topic, it must be confessed that the Irish peasant is 
 subject to privations, which are not felt by the lower classes of 
 any other country in Europe. This is a matter of notoriety ; 
 and the extreme wretchedness of his condition has often fur- 
 nished a pathetic theme for exciting barren commisseration. I 
 shall not speak of his exclusion from the benefits of the constitu- 
 tion, nor of the mode in which his prospects are clouded by the 
 influence of the penal laws; these may be grievances of too 
 refined a nature to affect the feelings of a people too depressed 
 to be mortified by exclusion from such exalted honours : I shall 
 merely confine myself to the privation of those more immediate 
 necessaries — food and clothing, which is sometimes associated 
 with demoralizing habits. But as an entire letter will be devoted 
 
76 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 to this ungrateful subject, I shall immediately pass to the vindi- 
 cation of the clergy. 
 
 In the discharge of the sacred duties of their profession, the 
 Catholic priesthood are assiduous and unremitting : their ministry 
 brings consolation to the sick and the indigent ; the administra- 
 tion of the sacraments occupies a large portion of their attention, 
 and the remainder of their time is devoted to the instruction of 
 those whose humble condition in life has debarred them from 
 every other source of moral and religious improvement. When 
 we reflect on the wide extent of the spiritual jurisdiction of the 
 Catholic priest, and the large mass of ignorance and misery to 
 be controlled almost solely by his influence — though we may 
 deplore the occasional outrages that disgrace our country, yet 
 candour will acknowledge that, were it not for his exertions, 
 they would still be more frequent and atrocious. If I did not 
 dread to fatigue my readers’ patience by frequent and minute 
 references to facts, I could illustrate every sentence of this letter 
 by cogent examples. 
 
 Men of rank and station in the country have borne repeated 
 and honourable testimony to the meritorious services of the 
 Catholic clergy. When the English public read the reports of 
 speeches pronounced in the senate by Irish members, expressing 
 alarm at the progress, and denouncing the dangers of the 
 Catholic religion, they are naturally persuaded that the lively 
 apprehensions betrayed by these speakers are caught from a 
 closer contact with the clergy of that persuasion ; but their mis- 
 take would be corrected, were they to learn that some of these 
 gentlemen are, in private life, the attached friends and best 
 benefactors of the very men whom they traduce as the worst 
 enemies of the state! I could name individuals among the 
 opponents of Catholic claims, who have given donations to 
 Catholic clergymen, as a grateful testimony of their salutary 
 influence ; thus evincing an anxiety to expiate their public oppo- 
 sition by acts of private benevolence. 
 
 Of their indefatigable exertions in softening the evils that 
 afflicted Ireland during the progress of the epidemic of 1817, 
 I could quote abundant testimonies. I shall content myself, 
 however, with citing the approving attestation of Mr. C. Grant, 
 our late secretary. In his speech before the British senate he 
 paid a just and well-earned tribute to their worth, in which there 
 was little danger that the vigorous fancy and warm feelings of 
 this enlightened statesman could have been hurried beyond the 
 boundaries of truth. Though his memory teemed with facts of 
 heroic devotion, yet, like the venerable father of poetry, he 
 singles out a solitary example where a clergyman, unable to re- 
 ceive the confession of two dying people without the evident peril 
 of his life, generously threw himself into the very focus of con- 
 
LETTER XV. 
 
 77 
 
 tagion, content to inhale the poison of death, provided he admi- 
 nistered to the wretched sufferers the medicine of immortality.* 
 
 The unfortunate individuals who disgrace their religion, and 
 disturb the peace of the public, by the spirit of outrage and 
 violence, are sure to release themselves first from the dread of 
 the authority of the clergy. While the priest holds the ascend- 
 ant over their minds, they are amenable to law and order ; and 
 never do they trample on the civil authority, until they first 
 learn to disregard his spiritual denunciations. Do those who 
 take a lead in the disturbances that unhappily disturb the south 
 of Ireland, endeavour to enlist in their support the authority of 
 the priesthood ? No. Their exhortations to peace and patience 
 are sometimes repaid with menaces of the same harsh treatment 
 which is indiscriminately inflicted on the Protestant and Catholic 
 laity ; nor can it be supposed that those who would wantonly 
 outrage the sacred person of the minister of God, would kneel 
 at his tribunal to invoke his benediction. 
 
 Among the other instances of clerical zeal recorded in our 
 public journals, it is mentioned that some of those turbulent 
 individuals, irritated by the severe but wholesome admonitions 
 of their pastor, endeavoured to intimidate him into a dereliction 
 of his duty. But he, like the venerable Eleazar, “ began to 
 consider the dignity of his age, and his ancient years, and the 
 inbred honour of his grey head, and his good fife and conversa- 
 tion from a child ; and he answered without delay, according 
 to the ordinances of the holy law made by God, saying that 
 he would rather be sent into the other world.” Thus the 
 priests preach peace, and they are accused of sedition ; they are 
 taxed with apathy in repressing outrages, of which, because they 
 are zealous to check them, they are threatened to be made the 
 victims. 
 
 Were their precepts listened to with respect, and followed up 
 by a corresponding line of conduct, the country would soon 
 assume another aspect, and the spirit of discord would disappear. 
 They still continue to be the preachers of that doctrine, whose 
 salutary influence on the peace and happiness of society is con- 
 veyed in the feeling apostrophe of St. Augustin to the Catholic 
 Church : — “ By thee the young, the adult, and the old are taught 
 the respective duties of their age and condition. By thee the 
 wife is connected with the husband in the bond of affection, chas- 
 tened by virtue, and subjected to his person by a control miti- 
 gated by religion. Through thee the father and the child 
 exercise the reciprocal relations of filial obedience exalted into 
 
 * Had this gentleman been better acquainted with the painful duties which 
 the Catholic clergy have daily to discharge, neither he or such other persons 
 could be much surprised at the above instance of devotedness, forming as it does 
 only one of their frequently recurring occupations. 
 
78 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 piety, and paternal authority softened into love. Through thee 
 the ties of kindred and of blood are more closely knitted together 
 by the hallowed influence of charity. Through thee the servant 
 forgets the hardships of his condition, and converts into a willing 
 duty the servitude which necessity first imposed. Through thee 
 the master relaxes his dominion, while he is taught to conciliate 
 by kindness those whom nature has subjected to his controul. It 
 is thou that connectest citizens in the bonds of concord, spreading 
 the affections of consanguinity over the different families of the 
 human race, by the recollection of a common origin. Thou 
 teachest kings to watch over the welfare of the people, and the 
 people to bow to the majesty of kings. And through all the 
 gradations in society, it is thou that teachest who are the objects 
 of fear, of affection, of respect, of punishment, of consolation, 
 of reproof, and of correction; impressing on our minds, that 
 while these must be apportioned to different individuals, all are 
 to be the objects of our charity, and none of our resentment.” 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821. 
 
 My virtue is weakened through poverty. I am become a reproach among 
 all my enemies, and very much to my neighbours ; and a fear to my acquaint- 
 ance . — Psalm xxx. 
 
 Having vindicated the people from the charge of disloyalty, and 
 the clergy from the imputation of supineness, or connivance at 
 their excesses, I shall undertake briefly to explain the most pro- 
 minent causes of the discontent and outrages of the peasantry. 
 The principal sources from which these evils spring are wretch- 
 edness — often destitute of the necessaries of life — and a spirit of 
 discord engendered by the political situation of the country, and 
 aggravated by the insidious designs of individuals interested in 
 perpetuating disunion. 
 
 That the lower orders of our people are wretched beyond the 
 condition of any other peasantry, is confessed by the testimony 
 
LETTER XVI. 
 
 79 
 
 of every intelligent traveller.* The causes of this extreme 
 misery it is unnecessary to explore ; but it must be acknowledged 
 that it has been considerably heightened by the late political 
 changes, which have affected the condition of the other classes 
 of society throughout the empire. 
 
 Many estates were out of lease during the fervor of war 
 prices; the increase of his rent-roll multiplied the expensive 
 habits of the landlord ; and, notwithstanding the depression 
 which renders it impossible for the tenant to meet the demands 
 of his landlord, yet the latter insists on the full payment of his 
 rents with inexorable severity. To satisfy these rigorous claims, 
 industry is often strained to a painful yet unprofitable exertion. 
 The farmer finds that the stimulus which he gives to his industry, 
 in order to acquit his obligations to his landlord, has the opposite 
 effect. of increasing the demand upon his tithes. 
 
 This is a delicate subject, which has long continued a topic of 
 angry discussion in this country. As it is still considered a sore 
 and sensitive evil, both as it affects the clergy and the people, 
 and which cannot be touched but with a trembling hand, I shall 
 leave this important question to the wisdom of professed poli- 
 ticians.! One thing, however, is certain, that the multiplicity of 
 pecuniary demands upon his labour, which, after having ex- 
 hausted every expedient of ingenuity, he is unable to meet, has 
 the effect of relaxing the industry of the farmer,! and throwing 
 him into a gloomy despondence. 
 
 This is an obvious source of discontent : for how can he view 
 his landlord with feelings of kindness, who, after bringing to the 
 market all the produce of his land not necessary for his own 
 consumption, beholds the rest seized for arrears of rent and 
 tithes; and himself and his family cast out as aliens on the 
 world, depending on the precarious bounty of persons almost 
 reduced to the same level as himself. When the fruit of labour 
 is not equivalent to the demands on the produce of the soil, the 
 people must necessarily be discontented. Though I have spoken 
 
 * Kohl, in his recent travels through this country, assures his readers, that in 
 no part of the Continent did he witness such wretchedness as in Ireland, and 
 that the privations of its peasantry are far more intolerable than those of the 
 serfs of Hungary. 
 
 t See, on this subject, the judicious observations of Sir John Sinclair . — Code of 
 Agriculture, p. 64, Third Edition, London. 
 
 After some pertinent reflections .on the subject of tithes, the Scotch Baronet 
 quotes the expressions of Mr. Burrowes, a gentleman to whom the Irish public 
 is indebted for many valuable communications on agricultural subjects. 
 
 For further information on this subject, see the celebrated speech of Grattan, 
 on tithes, in the Irish House of Commons, 14th July, 1788 ; a speech that will 
 retain its interest, even though the grievances that called it forth should pass 
 away. 
 
 t As the same word is susceptible of a variety of meanings, it will appear that 
 a different meaning is ascribed to the word Farmer here from what it assumes in 
 England. 
 
80 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 of persons bringing to market what is not necessary for home 
 consumption, it may be expedient to inform the English reader 
 what is the idea which the Irish peasant attaches to necessaries. 
 By that word he neither understands bread, nor beef, nor warm 
 clothing, nor comfortable lodging. These he must exclude from 
 his ideas of contentment. They seldom enter into his specu- 
 lations on taking his little farm ; happy if, after discharging the 
 accumulated demands of rents, and taxes of every description, 
 he is able to furnish his wretched family with the humble fare, 
 proverbially Irish — the Potato.* 
 
 Should the extensive proprietors of land, influenced by bene- 
 volence or policy, make some abatement, the benefit seldom 
 reaches the immediate cultivators of the soil. In Ireland, the 
 great landholders seldom come in contact with the humble 
 tenantry ; both are kept at a sullen and distrustful distance 
 from each other by a series of individuals, who have obtained 
 from their intermediate situation the appropriate name of middle- 
 men. These gentlemen, too, must be supported out of the pro- 
 duce of the land, thus weighing down the peasantry with the 
 burthen of rank, without imparting to them any of its benefits. 
 Too proud to exercise any industry, yet too far removed from 
 refined intercourse to possess the influence which generally 
 attaches to exalted station, they are known to the people only in 
 displaying a vulgar insolence, imitating the vices of the great 
 without any of their correctives ; thus proving themselves noxious 
 members of society, by keeping the higher and lower orders at 
 an inapproachable distance, and intercepting the complaints of 
 the one and the bounty of the other. These larger weeds, which 
 absorb so much of its nutriment, should be suffered silently to 
 decay, in order to restore health and vigour to the humbler and 
 more useful plants of the soil.f 
 
 Even those who possess large estates, experience at last the 
 effects of the general poverty that overspreads the country. 
 
 Non sibi sed Domino gravis est quae servit, egestas. J 
 
 The continued absence of the men of property from the 
 country, is also an acknowledged grievance, which has not 
 
 * That the Irish peasantry deem themselves comparatively happy if they have 
 abundance of this esculent, is now too forcibly proved by the fears of famine 
 that have sprung from its diseased condition this season. 
 
 f From the general censure conveyed in the text against middlemen, I must 
 exempt many individuals who deserve well of society, by their kind attention to 
 the poor, when visited by sickness. But it is not with the individuals that I 
 quarrel ; it is the system I condemn — a system, which must be owned was the 
 natural and necessary result of the contemptuous and cruel indifference with 
 which the great proprietors habitually treated and still treat the mass of the 
 people. 
 
 J The poverty which is inflicted on the slave recoils upon his cruel master. 
 
LETTER XVI. 
 
 81 
 
 escaped the attention of some of the wisest legislators. The 
 constant residence of the rich in Ireland is, under existing 
 circumstances, a hopeless wish. The seat of empire must be 
 the centre which will ever attract the confluence of opulence 
 and fashion ; and we cannot, therefore, be surprised at the 
 comparative solitude of the Irish capital, when we reflect that 
 neither the magic of the name of Rome, nor the dignity which 
 age and conquest had thrown around her, could arrest the tide 
 of emigration which followed Constantine to Byzantium, leaving 
 the parent city of the Seven Hills to deplore her desolation. 
 
 A continued absence cannot, however, be excused, as it is 
 reasonable to expect that, in return for their ample incomes, 
 men of rank and fortune would occasionally diffuse through the 
 extremities some of the improvements and elegance of the 
 capital. Their absence has a positive and negative effect in 
 deteriorating the condition of the people. 
 
 A negative effect — as their occasional residence might tend to 
 civilize the habits, and cement the attachment, of the lower 
 orders. A positive effect — as the desertion of their mansions, 
 and the neglect of their domains, are the causes of consigning 
 to indolence the numerous hands that would procure labour and 
 subsistence from their -improvement. As no large capitals are 
 embarked in manufactures through the country, there is no 
 common centre to guide the erring intellects, which, if fixed to 
 steady habits of industry, would contribute to augment the 
 national prosperity. Thus, the great mass of the peasantry is 
 exposed, without any corrective but that of religion, to the com- 
 plicated evils which must spring from extreme indigence. 
 
 To the sober-minded Englishman, this picture may seem to be 
 drawn by an ardent apologist, who has industriously exaggerated 
 the misery of the Irish people. In the delineation, I have not 
 brought to my aid any colouring of fancy ; but, subdued and 
 dispassionate in my tone, I have not gone as far as I might be 
 authorized by facts. The instances of extreme wretchedness 
 which might be collected among the body of our peasantry, are 
 such as no description could exaggerate, and no fancy over- 
 charge.* 
 
 When Cicero pleaded the cause of the injured Sicilians, and 
 denounced the crimes of those who were the authors of their 
 wrongs, he did not waste his time in idle declamation, nor in the 
 vague description of injuries which could convey no distinct idea 
 of their extent or their magnitude ; but, like a true master of 
 eloquence, he flings away the subordinate draperies of fancy, and 
 
 * The various commissions of inquiry into the state of the poor which have 
 been issued since the publication of these letters, reveal a state of destitution too 
 hideous to contemplate. It must be confessed that our rulers are more solicitous 
 about commissions of inquiry than about measures of relief. 
 
82 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 interests the sympathy of the Roman people for his clients, by 
 exhibiting to their view the naked victims of that misrule on 
 which he invoked the retribution of their justice. 
 
 And could not I exhibit to the indignant compassion of the 
 English people, evidence equally affecting of the miseries I 
 describe? Could I not exhibit to the view of the English 
 people many an unfeeling little ruler, through the periodical 
 crowds of Irish labourers who cross the Irish Channel, stowed 
 almost to suffocation, in order to procure subsistence by hard 
 labour, and to restore that life which, for want of wholesome 
 nutriment at home, had almost expired in their emaciated 
 frames ? To uphold in a foreign land a style of living dispro- 
 portioned to their incomes, some scruple not to sacrifice the 
 comfort and enjoyment of thousands ; and when these unfeeling- 
 men happen to meet these living spectres gliding through the 
 streets of London, like Ulysses, on encountering the indignant 
 shade of Ajax, they must sustain the reproachful glances of the 
 wretched beings whose happiness they have murdered. The 
 apology often pleaded by the absentees is, the danger of residing 
 in a country where their persons and properties would be con- 
 tinually exposed. They ought, however, to consider that fear, 
 like affection, is generally reflective; that, perhaps, they are 
 the first to inspire the terror which they feel, and that within 
 their miniature dominion, they might apply to themselves the 
 observation of the Roman sage — 
 
 Qui sceptra soevus imperio regit 
 
 Timet timentes, metus in auctorem redit.* 
 
 This reflection is justified by the pleasing contrast of some 
 noblemen who have resisted the contagion of vanity and fashion, 
 and reside in tranquil security on their estates, diffusing among 
 their tenantry the blessings of their wealth and example. The 
 traveller, in passing through the country, finds occasional relief 
 amidst the contemplation of uniform wretchedness. On ap- 
 proaching the residence of those individuals, you immediately 
 perceive the influence of intellect and benevolence that reigns 
 within the happy circle; and your feelings, sickened by the 
 surrounding scene, here find a grateful repose. From within 
 the sphere of their beneficial sway discontent is banished ; and 
 should disaffection attempt to cross the forbidden boundary, it 
 dies in the unpropitious atmosphere. Among those whom I 
 could name on the present occasion, I shall content myself with 
 adverting to one individual, who measures his superiority in 
 rank by the superiority of his public virtue ; diffusing his wealth 
 
 * Who fills with terror, and with vengeance fires, 
 
 Must share the fears his cruelty inspires. 
 
LETTER XVI. 
 
 83 
 
 over a contented and tranquil neighbourhood ; enjoying the hap- 
 piness which he communicates, and standing the foremost in his 
 country, as much by the unostentatious display of a practical 
 patriotism, as he does by the splendour of his title, and the 
 “ thick honours” of a long and illustrious ancestry. 
 
 Whilst I expose the causes of the discontent of our peasantry, 
 let it not be imagined that I am the advocate of that discontent, 
 or the apologist of their crimes. Were I to address the people, 
 instead of irritating their sense of suffering, I should endeavour 
 to soothe them to patience in the meek and Christian language 
 of St. Peter : — “ Be ye subject, therefore, to every human crea- 
 ture for God’s sake : whether it be to the king, as excelling ; or 
 to governors, as sent by him for the punishment of evil doers, 
 and for the praise of the good : For so is the will of God, that 
 by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish 
 
 men For this is thanks-worthy, if for conscience 
 
 towards God a man endure sorrow, suffering wrongfully. For 
 what glory is it, if committing sin, and buffeted for it , you 
 endure ? But if doing well you suffer patiently, this is thanks- 
 worthy before God.”* 
 
 However I may lament the extreme poverty of our people, I 
 must confess that language would not sustain my efforts to con- 
 vey my abhorrence of some atrocities that have been committed.! 
 
 * I Peter, chap. ii. 
 
 f While I express a just horror at the outrages of some of the peasantry, it 
 is only justice to the public to state, that the odium might be divided with some, 
 who affect a zeal for the public interest. These outrages, cruel as they are, are 
 much exaggerated. The English people may form a proper estimate of some 
 of our Irish journals, when they learn that I have now before me one which 
 heads a paragraph by the appalling title of “ Dreadful Murder committed by the 
 Insurgents and, strange to say, not a vestige of a murder is discoverable 
 through the entire paragraph. This gazette is, by way of lucus a non lucendo, 
 called The Patriot. That I may not be reproached with vague reference, the 
 article to which I allude is found in the paper of the 31st of January. The arti- 
 fice is not without its object. Conscious that few would enter into the penetralia 
 of his composition, he wished to produce a powerful effect by a dreadful frontis- 
 piece. In looking for these murderers, you only discover the breaking down 
 of a bridge, which to the imagination of this gazetteer was transformed into 
 murder, as the windmills were metamorphosed into giants by the Prince of 
 Chivalry ! ! 
 
 For a similar purpose, this same journalist inserted a story about some 
 persons being murdered for refusing to comply with a certain ceremony, which, 
 of course, he was afterwards obliged to contradict. These insertions and 
 retractions are not, however, without their end, as the editors well know that 
 the first story will be circulated, and make a due impression, where the contra- 
 diction will never reach. 
 
 Ex uno disce omnes. 
 
 To convey to the English reader an idea of the humanity of some of our 
 Irish gentry, it will be sufficient to observe, that there are individuals who asso- 
 ciate their exertions in preserving the peace with their sportful amusements. It 
 is a literal fact, that on the evenings of some of the most tragic days that dis- 
 grace our country, these individuals express their horror of shedding human 
 
84 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 No provocation could extenuate these outrages; they were 
 inspired by a more malignant principle than the mere impor- 
 tunity of distress. Their authors, if you will, were monsters 
 whom human nature indignantly disowns ; but, for God’s sake, 
 let not the misdeeds of these miscreants, by a constructive 
 imputation, be visited on the whole people. 
 
 At all events, it is acknowledged, even by those who are not 
 favourable to the national character, that there is in the Irish 
 people an easy susceptibility of kindness or of resentment : it is, 
 therefore, policy as well as wisdom to refine the ductile materials. 
 They are ardent, enthusiastic, and impetuous ; they possess those 
 qualities of nature which, if improved, are the greatest orna- 
 ments of a people, and which, when neglected, are capable of 
 producing the worst effects. 
 
 Instead, then, of aggravating the defects of the national 
 character by harsh treatment, is it not the duty of those who 
 value the interest of the country to correct them, by a kind and 
 conciliatory demeanour? The face of the country would soon 
 be changed, and all would soon feel the happy effects resulting 
 from mddness towards a peasantry who, under kind treatment, 
 are capable of the most lasting and faithful attachment, and who 
 rush into such lamentable excesses when outraged by cruelty, 
 and stimulated by the direful impulse of revenge. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 blood by the savage facetiousness of “a fine day’s grousing.” In the absence 
 of men of rank, and influence, and integrity, the preservation of the peace is 
 necessarily entrusted to men who are unfit organs to convey the spirit of the 
 laws, and who often trade on their violation. 
 
 The dispatches of our viceroy show that the people may be the dupes of 
 systems, of which the origin is not ascertained. He mentions that illegal oaths 
 are now administered in the county of Down, which proceed from a committee 
 in Dublin. Would to God that all the illegal associations were traced to their 
 source ; it would then be discovered that the people are often actuated by an 
 impulse of which they know not the cause ; and that their acts, however irre- 
 gular, might converge to one common centre. 
 
LETTER XVII. 
 
 85 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821 . 
 
 Inter fiintimos vetus atque antiqua simultas 
 lmmortale odium et numquam sanabile vulnus 
 Ardet adhuc : Juvenal. 
 
 With us still burns the old undying rage 
 Of direful discord, unsubdued by age. 
 
 To the other causes of irritation which work upon the feelings 
 of the Irish peasantry, is unfortunately added the influence of 
 religious bigotry. Religion has been often made a pretext for 
 the worst purposes ; and, under the sanction of her name, deeds 
 have been perpetrated which would dishonour human nature. 
 Her sacred character has been thus exposed to the derision of 
 her enemies ; and the infidel triumphed in detailing the ludicrous 
 or tragic story of her follies or of her crimes. 
 
 In no country have the bad effects of this religious bigotry 
 been more visible than in Ireland ; and in no country has 
 hypocrisy oftener worn the sacred mask of zeal for religion. 
 The severe laws that have been enacted with fresh rigor under 
 every succeeding branch of the House of Stuart, have drawn a 
 sharp and sullen line of demarcation between the inhabitants of 
 the same country. Some saw themselves stripped of their for- 
 tunes, because they inherited the faith of their ancestors ; and 
 others found that the profession of a new creed smoothed the 
 access to emolument and honour. 
 
 Where difference of religion was productive of such an in- 
 equality of condition, there must have been some symptoms of 
 discontent, and some angry collisions between both parties, 
 embittered by the sense of unmerited humiliation on the one 
 hand, and by the insolence of the ascendant party on the other. 
 As religion was the distinctive mark that separated these two 
 castes of people, it was thus unfortunately mixed up with poli- 
 tics ; and every aggression, however originating in other motives, 
 was traced to the spirit, and embittered by the feelings, of reli- 
 gious rancour. 
 
 The memory of ancient wrongs was industriously kept alive, 
 and members of the same community unfortunately visited on 
 each other the crimes and follies of their ancestors, to the third 
 
86 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 and fourth generation. Such an unnatural state of society must 
 necessarily have arrested the progress of civilization and im- 
 provement. The inhabitants of this kingdom, instead of being 
 blended into one harmonious mass, by the all-pervading influence 
 of equal laws, were kept in a state of reciprocal repulsion ; and 
 all the evils of clanship and of the feudal system, aggravated by 
 the policy that was adopted, operated with a powerful and de- 
 structive energy. 
 
 There is not a country under heaven that has not been occa- 
 sionally visited by war, and that has not passed under the 
 dominion of successive masters ; yet in the lapse of a few years 
 every vestige of the revolution is effaced, the memory of ancient 
 feuds is forgotten, and the shattered frame of society is soon 
 restored to its former vigour. But here, alas ! it would seem as 
 if some malignant spirit were bent on perpetuating our woes, by 
 refreshing the memory of the obsolete crimes of the old inha- 
 bitants. 
 
 The existence of party associations in this country has been a 
 subject of just and strong reprobation. They have tended to 
 retard the national prosperity, and to insult the national feeling. 
 It is a melancholy truth that the exhibition of any colours, how- 
 ever harmless in themselves, is calculated to produce irritation, 
 when these colours are displayed as symbols of the triumph of 
 one party and the degradation of the other. 
 
 When a band of men, inflamed with wine and insolence, 
 disgrace the nightly revel with sentiments mortifying to the 
 pride of the people, and exhibit in wanton triumph the badges 
 of their defeat, they arouse to a dangerous activity feelings 
 which would have slept in forgetfulness. Often has the peace of 
 the community been troubled by the insulting display of these 
 symbols of discord, and a passive population stimulated by ag- 
 gression to a dreadful retaliation. Happy, were these accursed 
 distinctions for ever banished from the land. We should then be 
 spared the recital of many a tale which is a blot on the page of 
 our history.* 
 
 Let us only figure to ourselves (and the picture is only a 
 feeble transcript of the sad reality) a knot of men of rough and 
 ferocious manners, breathing a spirit of rancour against those 
 who differ from them in religious opinions — swelled with the 
 insolence natural to the favoured caste — flushed with intoxicating 
 liquors, and almost maddened with martial music — parading 
 through an unarmed multitude, irritating their feelings by party 
 tunes, accompanied with appropriate gesticulations, and panting 
 for the slightest opportunity of insult and of vengeance. Is it 
 
 * Thanks to the cool and steady firmness of our viceroy, and the energy dis- 
 played by our first municipal magistrate, the offensive decoration of the symbol of 
 discord in College-green has been prevented on the last November anniversary. 
 
LETTER XVII. 
 
 87 
 
 not morally impossible, that amidst the numerous mass there 
 would not bo found some fiery materials, to kindle at such 
 repeated provocations ? A fray ensues — the murderous weapons 
 are unsheathed — and the innocent and the guilty are the indis- 
 criminate victims. 
 
 Sed jurgia prima sonare 
 
 Incipiunt animis ardentibus ; haec tuba rixse. 
 
 Ludere se credunt ipsi tamen, et pueriles 
 Exercere acies, quod nulla cadavera calcent.* 
 
 The friends of the fallen brood over their wrongs, che- 
 rishing in gloomy silence an unconquerable resentment. A 
 secret enmity thus rankles in the breast; the deadly pur- 
 pose is, perhaps, entrusted to some confidential bosom — the 
 infliction of revenge only provokes to fresh retaliation — and a 
 spirit of hostility, incessantly reverberating, is kept up between 
 the contending factions. What a pity that the causes of so 
 demoralizing a system should not for ever be eradicated from 
 the bosom of the country? The sources of her disunion and 
 weakness would be removed, and all the members of the state 
 would be united in one effective body. 
 
 In concluding this painful topic, I am cheered by the con- 
 trast which presents itself in the recollection of the parting in- 
 junction of the Sovereign. He came among us — he witnessed 
 our ardent and instinctive generosity — and, conscious that the 
 spirit of discord alone could poison such precious qualities, his 
 farewell admonition breathed peace and conciliation. The im- 
 pulse was felt and circulated, and every string that was suscep- 
 tible of a fine movement was immediately attuned to harmony. 
 
 There have been, however, some individuals who have endea- 
 voured to frustrate his Majesty’s mandate, and to perpetuate 
 dissension, because they thrive by the monopoly of the few and 
 the exclusion of the many, f However strong the impulse, and 
 however general the diffusion of the spirit of conciliation, there 
 are still some minds which it has not yet approached. This, 
 however, ought not to excite our wonder ; for, though the sun of 
 liberality may traverse the earth, it requires a certain elevation, 
 to be visited by its fight and warmed by its influence. 
 
 * From angry breasts the strife of words arose, 
 
 A fearful prelude to succeeding blows, 
 
 Deemed but a mimic combat, if the plain 
 Were not defiled with corpses of the slain. 
 
 f It was the indignant saying of Dr. Johnson, who was neither partial to Ire- 
 land nor hostile to the Government : — “ The Irish are in a most unnatural state, 
 for there we see the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no in- 
 stance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as that which has been 
 exercised over the Catholics of Ireland.” 
 
88 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 Notwithstanding these exceptions, the royal example has had 
 a strong influence in cementing those ties which before were but 
 loosely held together.* The system of conciliation will, it is to 
 be hoped, be followed up ; and it only requires its completion to 
 give full play to the energies of Ireland, and to enlist in support 
 of the national strength those talents, which are either wasted in 
 indolence or neutralized by distraction. 
 
 IIierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1821 . 
 
 Mutato nomine , de te 
 
 Fabula narrator Horace. 
 
 Change but the name, of thee the tale is told. 
 
 The existence of much misery in Ireland has been universally 
 acknowledged. The wretched condition of its population has 
 almost passed into a phrase of compassion or reproach, and has 
 exercised, of late, the speculations of benevolence. It was the 
 interest of those who were aware of their genuine cause, to 
 ascribe all the calamities of the people to religious ignorance. 
 Religious blindness, it was said, was the prolific source of all 
 their crimes ; the complaint was re-echoed in the sister country 
 with sincere or affected commisseration ; and so contagious was 
 the sensibility, that a pathetic description of our spiritual woes 
 was considered the surest indication of piety and eloquence. 
 
 The infection was not confined to the professed advocates of 
 the Bible ; it seized the colder breasts of the literary censors of 
 the age ; and they, too, occasionally condescended to swell the 
 chorus of lamentations that were pathetically poured over the 
 superstitions of Ireland. The generous minds of the English 
 
 * This union did not last long. It is no wonder ; it had no foundation of 
 justice to sustain it. The minds of Irishmen are, at length, sufficiently open to 
 such delusions as those that were fostered by the royal visit. Justice, such as a 
 native Parliament alone can establish, will be the only means of ensuring lasting 
 reconciliation. 
 
LETTER XVIII. 
 
 89 
 
 people were filled with compassion for our lot ; the wealth of the 
 opulent and the zeal of the religious were immediately put in 
 requisition, and a vast importation of Bibles was conveyed into 
 the country, to satisfy the hunger of Scriptural knowledge under 
 which Ireland laboured for centuries. The people, unprepared 
 for this vast collection of spiritual light, were overpowered by its 
 intense and sudden influence. The Bible* proved to be an exotic, 
 which could not thrive in the Irish soil ; and hence, perhaps, the 
 tame and uniform appearance of the kingdom, not chequered by 
 the agreeable variety of sects, which diversify with all the fan- 
 tastic shades of colour the prospect of the sister country. 
 
 The reluctance and distrust with which the boon was received, 
 and the disdain with vhich it was generally rejected, served only 
 to inflame the indignation of the societies, and aggravate the 
 charges against the incurable depravity of the Irish character. 
 In the gradations of its climax, their eloquence soon rose from 
 the people to the Catholic clergy ; and to their perverse desire 
 of perpetuating their own reign, which cannot be separated from 
 ignorance, they failed not to ascribe the degradation of the 
 people. It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the arro- 
 gance of invective, in which the pious missionaries generally 
 indulged. The press teemed with their complaints ; their meet- 
 ings rung with their noisy declamation ; and little tracts, brought 
 down to the purchase of the poorest, fraught with the most Godly 
 denunciations against the domination of our priests, were circu- 
 lated with a mischievous activity. 
 
 To check the career of the Gospellers — to vindicate our clergy 
 against unmerited aspersion — and to justify the line of conduct 
 adopted by them, was the first object of “ Hierophilos.” On the 
 sincere believers of Christianity I wished to impress the irreli- 
 gious consequences with which the system was pregnant ; and to 
 those who felt a zeal for the public welfare I was anxious to point 
 out the impolicy of irritating a whole people, who feel the 
 strongest suspicions that some treacherous hostility was medi- 
 tated against their religion. 
 
 Our long silence was abused by their presumption ; and a 
 forbearance, dictated by discretion, they failed not to attribute 
 to the weakness of our cause. 
 
 I had not thought to have unlocked my lips 
 In this unhallowed cause, but that these jugglers 
 Would think to charm our judgment as our eyes ; 
 
 Obtruding false rules frank’d in reason’s garb. 
 
 I hate when vice can bolt her arguments, 
 
 And virtue has no tongue to check her pride. 
 
 * As distributed by knaves and fanatics. For the knowledge of its faith and 
 precepts, and for the fulfilment of the duties it inculcates, the people of Ireland 
 are not surpassed by any people on earth. 
 
 G 
 
90 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 A candid and necessary defence, after such long silence, dis- 
 concerted the plan of the societies. The exposure of their 
 designs alarmed their apprehensions, and I was accordingly 
 saluted with the courteous, but bold defiance of an adversary, 
 who laboured to enlist in their support the combined authorities 
 of the Scriptures and the Fathers. In the necessity I was under 
 of following his footsteps, and of replying to his arguments, or 
 unmasking his sophistry, the controversy expanded beyond my 
 original intention, by embracing those general principles of 
 Church government, and the exercise of private judgment, which 
 are applicable alike to all times and countries. 
 
 The preceding letters, then, though distinguished by some 
 national peculiarities, have an equal reference to the Bible Socie- 
 ties of England; and these societies cannot be proved noxious 
 here, without showing that they are no less prejudicial to the 
 interests of the whole empire. Since the publication of the 
 letters of “ Hierophilos” in Ireland, a silent reformation has 
 been working in the Bible Societies. If their emissaries are still 
 active, their activity is less ostentatious ; if they are warm in 
 their invectives, they are less ambitious to court notoriety ; their 
 appeals to the public are more temperate and subdued, and the 
 puritanical moroseness of their zeal has been gradually softened 
 by a gentle mixture of the language of polished life.* 
 
 They are still continuing to apply the remedy of the Bible to 
 our distempered country, but in vain ; her malady has little of 
 a spiritual nature ; and, therefore, requires a different process to 
 restore her to healthy habits. Too long have our people been 
 doomed to drink of the waters of bitterness; and though it 
 might have been imagined by some honest enthusiasts that the 
 Bible, like the mystic tree of Moses, f would sweeten their ascer- 
 bity, experience has attested that it has only served to render 
 them still more acrid and corrosive. 
 
 Having brought the subject of the preceding letters to a con- 
 
 * The meeting of the Kildare-street Society, which was long since advertised, 
 without its adjournment being equally known, was held, at length, after a 
 tedious prorogation. After going through the usual round of its former resolu- 
 tions, unmitigated by the least infusion of liberality, the anniversary oration 
 was repeated by one of its former advocates. I shall not quote the celebrated 
 passage of Junius, to weaken the effect of a defence made by an individual, the 
 happy pliancy of whose profession might retain him with equal indifference on 
 the opposite side of the question. But as he seems to love the Bible, I will beg 
 leave to remind him, that it is impossible to serve two masters. Those whose 
 services are seldom solicited at the bar, may well turn over to the more lucrative 
 advocacy of the Bible. But for Mr. North, whose eye is doubtless fixed on the 
 highest honours of his profession ; he ought to reflect that such is the keen com- 
 petition of the age, that even genius is doomed to labour, and that, therefore, 
 should he continue to distract his studies between the law and the prophets, by 
 risking the dignities of the one, he will surely diminish the lustre of his fame, 
 though by his attention to the other, he may be securing an accession to his 
 fortune. 
 
 f Exodus, xv, 25. 
 
LETTER XVIII. 
 
 91 
 
 elusion, I shall now resign the further discussion of the interesting 
 topics they involve. I trust I have contributed something to the 
 vindication of our country and our religion against the libellers 
 of both ; and if I have, I shall reflect with some satisfaction on 
 those hours which have been devoted to a subject that has cheered 
 the labour, and relieved the uniformity of stated duties. 
 
 On a topic in which the name of Ireland had so frequently 
 occurred, it was difficult, perhaps, to forbear from the introduc- 
 tion of sad and irritating recollections. Seldom is the state of 
 Ireland discussed with calmness ; and of her we may truly say, 
 that her annals, instead of presenting the uniform dignity of 
 historical narrative, partake of all the irregular alternations of 
 poetry, now depressed into the saddest strains of its elegy, and 
 again exalted into the high-toned tension of its most tragic 
 numbers. 
 
 I have, therefore, cautiously abstained from reviving these 
 disagreeable topics, which, as it is the duty, it should be the 
 endeavour, of all to bury in forgetfulness. History, though one 
 of the noblest sources of moral and political wisdom, may yet be 
 abused to the worst of purposes. I have, therefore, endeavoured 
 to keep in view the maxims of a great statesman, conveyed in 
 the following eloquent language, and which I might recommend 
 as a useful guide in the study and application of history : — 
 
 “ In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, 
 drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and 
 infirmities of mankind. History, one of the richest sources of 
 wisdom, may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing 
 offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, 
 and supplying the means of keeping alive or reviving dissensions 
 and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. Wise men will 
 apply the remedies to vices, not to names — to the causes of evil 
 which are permanent — not to the occasional organs by which 
 they act, and to the transitory modes in which they appear; 
 otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Dif- 
 ferent ages have different fashions in their pretexts and modes of 
 mischief. Wickedness is inventive, and always adopts the most 
 popular and pleasing form, to hide its own deformity. Some- 
 times religion becomes its agent, and sometimes liberty ; but it 
 always associates itself with that which is in highest estimation. 
 And thus the spirit of mischief transmigrates through successive 
 ages, and far from losing its principle of life by the change of 
 its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh 
 vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad, it continues its 
 ravages, while you are gibbetting the carcass or demolishing the 
 tomb. It is thus with those who, attending only to the shell and 
 husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, 
 pride, and cruelty ; whilst under colour of altering the principles 
 
92 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 of antiquated parties, they are feeding the same vices in different 
 factions, and, perhaps, worse.” 
 
 Such is the language of Edmund Burke, whose name will 
 always be pronounced with reverence by the virtuous and the 
 wise — whom Ireland will ever number among the most gifted of 
 her sons — the vastness of whose political wisdom, not content 
 with shielding the hearths, and throne, and altars of his country, 
 against a demoralizing and revolutionary infidelity, compre- 
 hended within its grasp the cliency of the opposite hemispheres, 
 and whose eloquence, which shook the appalling phalanx of 
 domestic faction, was heard to roll its distant thunder across the 
 Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 TO THE MOST REV. WILLIAM MAGEE, D.D., &c., PROTESTANT 
 ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823 . 
 
 Diligite homines , interficite errores. — St. Augustin. 
 
 Love the man, destroy his errors. 
 
 My Lord — The name and title of the Archbishop of Dublin 
 necessarily give a circulation and authority to your Grace’s 
 Charge, to which, from its own intrinsic merit, it could never 
 have been entitled. The weight and influence of the body 
 against which its principal force was directed must still augment 
 its interest, and add to its claims on public attention. While you 
 meditated so severe an attack against the Catholic religion, you 
 must doubtless have calculated its probable consequences. Had 
 your Grace been content with the quiet enjoyment of the dignity 
 to which your merit or good fortune had exalted you, you might 
 have enjoyed the reputation of learning and liberality. But by 
 your late intrepid aggression, you submitted to have both impar- 
 tially canvassed ; and though you probably imagined you were 
 strengthening your claims to the one, you must have consented 
 to risk every pretension to the other. Your Charge is calculated 
 to excite a sensation through the country, which, though you 
 
LETTER XIX. 
 
 93 
 
 may regret, you will not be able to control ; and whatever may 
 be its influence on the repose of your Lordship’s mind, it re- 
 quires not the spirit of prophecy to predict that your address 
 will not contribute much to your reputation with the public. 
 
 It has been foretold, that in latter times charity would grow 
 cold, and faith would not be found among men. As the first 
 part of the prophecy has been pretty clearly fulfilled, your 
 Grace evinces a becoming zeal to shield yourself against the 
 application of the other ; and it is remarkable, that the slightest 
 sound of danger to the faith has aroused the slumbering warders 
 of the gates of the holy places, whose hearts could never yearn 
 to the tenderest cries of charity. Yet we are told in Scripture, 
 that to “ visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation is 
 religion undefiled before God,” unless with the apostolic reformer 
 of your church, you rank the Epistle of St. James among the 
 apocryphal writings. 
 
 Some individuals felt, or affected to feel surprise at the tenour 
 of your late Charge, as if it had been at variance with those 
 principles which you early professed. Imagining they could dis- 
 cover something of liberality in your former writings, they would 
 fain lament your apostacy, by characterizing it in the language 
 of the poet : — 
 
 Lowliness is young Ambition’s ladder, 
 
 Whereto the climber upward turns his face ; 
 
 But when he once attains the upmost round. 
 
 He then unto the ladder turns his back ; 
 
 Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
 By which he did ascend. 
 
 Yet, the charge of inconsistency could only arise from ignorance 
 of your recorded principles ; for had the work on Atonement 
 been read by those who are loud in its commendation, they 
 would have discovered there occasionally the same superficial 
 sophistry, and the same intolerant tone, that have so strongly 
 marked your late production. I shall, therefore, give your 
 Lordship full credit for consistency, rather than expose you to 
 the invidious charge of turning your back upon those principles 
 by which you were conducted, and on those persons by whom 
 you were cheered in your ascent to elevation. 
 
 In alluding to the work which, I am told, is the pillar on which 
 you would fain rest your reputation as a scholar, I mean not to 
 contest your claims to erudition. But there is an erudition 
 which bespeaks more of a passive than an active mind, display- 
 ing a laudable industry in the collection of its materials, without 
 any of that quality by which they are transmuted into a new 
 form. Even among those who have obtained the reputation of 
 scholars, there are some who are indebted to the force of contrast 
 
94 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 for their fame — whose learning is thought solid, because it is 
 clumsy and inelegant — whose stock of knowledge is deemed 
 ample, because there is a carelessness in the manner of expend- 
 ing it — who are estimated as profound, because a single ray of 
 genius never lit their lucubrations ; and who, to use a metaphor, 
 with which your Grace cannot be offended, are covered with the 
 “ slough” of learning, without ever shining with its brilliancy. 
 
 That the Archbishop of Dublin should have been under the 
 influence of the corporate spirit of his order, cannot excite our 
 wonder. But that in the exercise of your zeal you should have 
 forgotten the dictates of prudence, is a circumstance that has 
 given rise to conjectures as different as some of them are injuri- 
 ous to your Lordship’s candour. But I shall not entertain for a 
 moment such unworthy suspicions, but submit to all the difficul- 
 ties involved in the conviction of your sincerity, rather than 
 suppose it could have been your Grace’s intention, by the vehe- 
 mence of your charge, to multiply the enemies and thicken the 
 embarrassments of the Establishment. 
 
 No ; whatever of acrimony there was in your Grace’s Charge, 
 I am willing to attribute to the difficulty of your Grace’s 
 situation. The generous ambition of illustrating in your own 
 example the wisdom of preferring personal merit to the dull pre- 
 tensions of superior age or dignity, could alone have induced 
 you to hazard those dangerous topics of controversy, which it 
 were the interest of the Establishment never to see revived. 
 Else, how could you in the face of a Catholic country put forth 
 such claims to continuity of succession, while the inanimate 
 objects by which you were surrounded spoke your refutation ? 
 
 That in England, where the ancient religion has been almost 
 extinguished with the abolition of those monuments that could 
 still preserve its memory, some prelates might work themselves 
 up to an illusion that they are the heirs of the apostles, is a cir- 
 cumstance which cannot excite our astonishment. And hence we 
 only smile at the harmless effusions of those contented prelates, 
 whom family influence has seated upon their episcopal thrones, 
 and who disturb not the placid tenour of their lives by any labo- 
 rious and painful inquiries. But that in a country whose very 
 soil is interspersed with the traces of the ancient worship, and 
 whose ancient hierarchy still exists in pure and apostolic splen- 
 dour, the bishop of a new church should put forth such high 
 pretensions to apostolicity, bespeaks a hardihood of mind in 
 which humility had no share. 
 
 I fancied that the time had long since gone by, when the 
 claims of “ Catholic and Jpostolic” were abandoned to Catholic 
 theologians. Like the doctrine of legitimacy, which is exploded, 
 while there are any old claimants to the throne, the doctrine of 
 Apostolicity was derided by your predecessors, while the rights 
 
LETTER XIX. 
 
 95 
 
 of the old succession were fresh in every mind. But in propor- 
 tion as they are forgotten, the claims of those who were substi- 
 tuted in their stead are gradually ripening, and their arguments 
 shifting their ground, until at length you would fain represent 
 in your own person the fulness of that apostolic authority, on the 
 extinction of which whatever you possess was originally founded. 
 
 This position might be clearly established. But without 
 entering on any tedious theological discussion, we know enough 
 of history to ascertain what little value was set by your prede- 
 cessors on episcopal consecration. We are informed by Burnet, 
 and Burnet was a Protestant bishop, that the versatile Cranmer 
 and his associates regarded the episcopacy as a mere municipal 
 function, to be exercised, or resigned, or resumed, according to 
 the extent of the royal pleasure. And surely the anecdote of 
 Elizabeth threatening to unfrock one of her prelates, and the 
 edifying meekness with which he bore the royal indignity, 
 affords no strong instance of those claims to apostolicity, so 
 haughtily put forth by our modern prelates. 
 
 Let us ascend to that period when the apostolical series 
 began to diverge into two branches. So far the most illiterate 
 can be the companion of our way. Here, however, we must 
 separate ; for thus far thou canst go, and no farther, appalled 
 by the hideous avulsion of your ancestors from the parent 
 trunk, which, like the crime of the unfortunate son of Adam, 
 has descended in visible characters to their posterity, and which, 
 though they may be softened in the descending series, are yet 
 too inveterate to be obliterated by time. And hence, no length 
 of possession can consecrate the title of a bishop defective in its 
 origin, or invest a schismatical church with the authority of 
 prescription. 
 
 The claims of your church to catholicity are still more untena- 
 ble. While it was yet in its infancy, the prophetic reformers 
 might well have amused the credulity of their followers, by 
 predicting the future glories of the establishment. And when 
 their hearts were depressed by the sad contrast between the 
 vast extent of the empire of Babylon and the narrow limits to 
 which the elect were confined, the preachers might still have re- 
 assured their drooping hopes by pointing to the gradual expansion 
 of the spiritual conquests of Sion. But since time has laid open 
 the fallacy of their predictions, I fancied that the pretensions to 
 catholicity would have been modestly resigned. The want of 
 catholicity is a consequence of the defect of apostolicity. Severed 
 from the parent tree, from which she drew nutriment and life, 
 she is consigned to decay, and barrenness has come upon her. 
 Unable, therefore, to propagate her reign, she is doomed to a 
 limited extent ; nor will she ever be able “ to enlarge her tent, or 
 lengthen the cords, or strengthen the stakes of her tabernacle.” 
 
96 
 
 LETTER XIX. 
 
 It would have been prudence, therefore, to pause before yon 
 insulted the religious feelings of those to whom you are in- 
 debted for your splendid revenues. Disclaiming any connexion 
 with the Catholic Church, from which you derive whatever 
 there is of dignity in your own, and spurning any connexion 
 with your brethren of the Reformation, do you imagine you can 
 support their mutual opposition ? Whatever may be thought of 
 the religion of Catholics, the fidelity with which they clung to it, 
 through the heat of persecution, which would have dissolved less 
 hardy virtue, should entitle them to respect. And whatever may 
 be the form of the church of the sectaries, they are entitled to 
 the praise of consistency in their reformation, by having emanci- 
 pated human reason from every secular control. 
 
 But what has your Church to challenge admiration ? “ The 
 
 Catholics have a Church without a religion, and the sectaries 
 have a religion without a Church.” This, no doubt, was, in your 
 Lordship’s opinion, one of those happy discoveries that could 
 settle the controversy of ages, and save posterity from the repe- 
 tition of these angry discussions. I have been struck with a 
 wonderful idea of your strength, in witnessing those solemn 
 gambols of the archiepiscopal character, gravely disporting itself 
 amidst the very depths of religion, poising between a puerile 
 play of language those mysteries which our ancestors could 
 scarcely wield, and amusing the ears with sound, instead of con- 
 veying sense to the understanding. However, as this is one of 
 those mysteries which ordinary minds cannot sound, I will not 
 attempt to approach it, unless it is rendered more accessible to 
 my intellect. 
 
 But as you are fond of defining your church by its relation to 
 what you are politely pleased to call the church of the Roman- 
 ists and the religion of the sectaries, allow me to tell your Grace 
 what it is, defining it by the same criterion. It is a mock 
 church, having all the supposed inconveniences of both, without 
 the excellence of either ; exercising all the severity of the one, 
 without the security by which it is mitigated ; and shaken by all 
 the discord of the other, without the enjoyment of its freedom. 
 
 As the vial of your invective was too full for the Catholic 
 religion, you have spared a portion for those children, who by 
 their rebellion to your church, are only avenging that dis- 
 obedience of which she first gave the example. “For thou hast 
 taught them against thee, and instructed them against thy own 
 head.”* Yet, it is among those we could discover, in their full 
 perfection, those principles which ushered in the Reformation. 
 Among them we discover none of the vices accompanying sloth- 
 ful splendour, which were the theme of the invectives of the 
 
 * Jeremias, xiii, 21. 
 
LETTER XIX. 
 
 97 
 
 reformers, and which, if then existing, have rather transmi- 
 grated than disappeared. Placed in that mediocrity of condition 
 which exempts them not from the necessity of exertion, and 
 completely depurated from the fiery spirit of the reformers, the 
 Presbyterians have exploded the lessons of intolerance with which 
 their infant church has been reproached, and exhibit to the world 
 the examples of decorous and valuable citizens. 
 
 Is it wise, then, to provoke the hostility of such a body, 
 and to throw out imputations which must recoil upon their 
 author, charged with the additional weight of inconsistency? 
 Rather than force people to the manifestation of those distinc- 
 tions, which must eventually show how few are attached to your 
 Lordship’s cause, it is wiser to suffer them to wear the general 
 uniform of Protestantism. Better imitate the wise policy of the 
 Romans, which forbade the slaves to adopt a distinct habit, lest 
 by becoming confident of their strength, they might endanger 
 the peace of the empire. For if all who disbelieve the doctrines 
 of the Establishment would wear the peculiar colours, and range 
 under the respective standards of their creeds, the strength and 
 number of the host of the ungodly would smite you to the heart ; 
 and, like the ancient prophet, you would be left to weep over the 
 apostacy of the people. 
 
 But, while your Grace possesses your ample revenues, they 
 will, I trust, solace your griefs for the spiritual ravages com- 
 mitted in the fold. There is something in the dignity of the 
 Establishment which throws so much light around its evidence, 
 and something in its wealth that adds so much weight to its ar- 
 guments, that they can scarcely be resisted by ordinary minds. 
 While you are the dispenser of the favours of that Establish- 
 ment, it is unnecessary for you to fatigue your own mind, or 
 those of your hearers, with laborious argumentation. They will, 
 doubtless, gratefully acknowledge themselves subdued by your 
 arguments, and charmed by your eloquence ; and should any 
 symptoms of breaking off from the union of the Establishment 
 be occasionally exhibited, its wealth will have silent but strong 
 attractions, towards which their yielding minds will gently gra- 
 vitate. 
 
 It is in vain, then, that naked and unassisted reasoning should 
 contend against such powerful auxiliaries of truth. Let but the 
 controversy be stript of these incumbrances ; let but your argu- 
 ments and mine be weighed in an equal balance, and the judg- 
 ment left to its own native powers ; and I pledge myself that the 
 beam shall not tremble for a moment ; but as soon as the weight 
 by which one scale is depressed shall be removed, it shall instantly 
 yield to the preponderance of the other. 
 
 IIierophilos. 
 
98 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 TO THE MOST REV. WILLIAM MAGEE, D.D., &c., PROTESTANT 
 ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 A deceitful balance is an abomination before the Lord, and a just weight is 
 his will. — Proverbs. 
 
 My Lord — Your Charge to your clergy has excited a becoming 
 interest ; and if you were ambitious of celebrity, your labours 
 are amply repaid, and your hopes are realized. My former 
 letter was a reply to your address, such as it was delivered or 
 published ; this will embrace your authorized edition, improved 
 by the slow re-touchings of time, and enriched by further illus- 
 trations. Though your Charge provoked the just resentment of 
 those whose feelings were insulted, I still entertained hopes that 
 your Grace would explain what was liable to misconstruction, 
 and soften what was offensive. You had it still in your power to 
 retrace your steps with dignity ; and the forgiving generosity of 
 your country would have put the obnoxious passages to the 
 account of hasty and inaccurate publication, or to the zeal of an 
 ardent mind, hurried by its own strength beyond the boundaries 
 of discretion. But no : the heaviness of the Charge is still 
 aggravated by the severer harshness of the commentary ; and 
 deeming it weakness to recede, with the exception of a solitary 
 word, you glory in being consistent. Had you been content 
 with publishing the Charge, such as it was delivered, you would 
 have been spared the second notice of “ Hierophilos.” But since 
 you have presented yourself to the public in another form, we 
 will now examine whether the hasty zeal of the preacher has 
 been corrected and improved by the cautious labours of the com- 
 mentator. 
 
 In delaying my reply to this stage of the controversy, I have 
 obviated the plea put forth by your Graee, of the necessity of 
 “ consulting for a name and station that should be respected, by 
 refusing to come into familiar association” with what you are 
 pleased to call the “ scurrilities of a degenerate press.” On the 
 style and temper of your Grace’s production 1 shall make no 
 remark ; but on a comparison, the public will pronounce whether 
 “ Hierophilos” has not deprived you of that convenient subter- 
 fuge, by which exalted churchmen have often contrived to hide 
 their weakness under the mask of their dignity. 
 
 Your Grace’s attempt to strip us of the ancient and envied 
 name of Catholic , and to share in its honours, are almost un- 
 worthy of serious refutation. Never in so short a compass have 
 
LETTER XX. 
 
 99 
 
 I witnessed so much of that happy ingenuity which labours to 
 reconcile contradictions. In one page you speak as a “ sincere 
 Protestant, and glory in giving utterance to those sentiments 
 which a Protestant bishop should never compromise and in the 
 next, with wonderful versatility, you would fain transform your- 
 self into a Catholic ! Thus your Grace becomes at once a Pro- 
 testant and a Catholic — blending in your own person those attri- 
 butes which were hitherto deemed irreconcilable. On one 
 occasion, your style rises to a tone of indignation against those 
 politicians who have of late years appropriated the name of 
 Catholics to a certain class of his Majesty’s subjects, and 
 familiarized the public ear to its injurious misapplication. In 
 your next address I would respectfully caution you to speak in 
 more measured language of the religion of politicians, lest, 
 irritated by such ingratitude, they might be disposed to prove 
 how much you are indebted to their services for the establish- 
 ment of your own. 
 
 It is not to the courtesy of parliamentary language that 
 we are beholden for the name and honours of Catholic : it 
 is derived to us from a higher source, and rests on more perma- 
 nent authority. It is a name that is inscribed on the Creed of 
 the Apostles, and which attached Saint Augustine to the faith 
 which we profess — a name which, in every age, marked the 
 rights of primogeniture, distinguishing the lawful heirs from 
 those who were excluded from the divine inheritance — a name 
 which has survived the ravages of time, and has never been lost 
 by the true believers, nor usurped by the sectaries. Those who 
 were conscious of the invalidity of their claims, have often 
 attempted to impose on the credulity of mankind by the assump- 
 tion of the genuine appellation, and by affixing on the rightful 
 heirs some opprobrious epithet. Thus it was that we were 
 branded in this country with names which were intended to 
 obscure our title. They, however, last no longer than the force 
 in which they originate ; and as soon as the laws that imposed 
 the obnoxious epithets are relaxed, the most bigotted acquiesce 
 in the justice of our pretensions. To deny us, therefore, the 
 title of Catholics, is to deny the just connexion between the 
 name and nature of things, and to resist the current of thought 
 and language by which each one is unconsciously borne along, as 
 soon as the prejudice which resisted it subsides. 
 
 Non aliter quam qui adverso vix flumine cymbam 
 Remigiis subigiit : si brachia forte remisit 
 Atque ilium in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni.* 
 
 * So the boat’s brawny crew the current stem, 
 
 And slow advancing struggle with the stream ; 
 
 But if they slack their hands or cease to strive, 
 
 Then down the flood with headlong haste they drive. 
 
100 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 You acknowledge that the Roman Catholics are a branch 
 of the Catholic Church, but that their religion is so incrusted 
 with rust, that Protestants are obliged to exclude them from 
 their communion ! ! While we admire your scrupulous piety, 
 we must feel grateful for the charity of your concession. If 
 the Roman Catholics are only a branch, I should wish to learn 
 where is the trunk. Not, surely, the Protestant Church, since 
 it would be an unnatural metaphor to convert a recent and 
 divided religion into the trunk, and to characterize the most 
 ancient one that professes Christianity as one of the branches. 
 Unable, however, to deny its antiquity, you associate it with rust 
 to depreciate its value. It is, my Lord, an old religion ; nor 
 shall it ever boast of any ornament to its simplicity, by courting 
 any connexion with the fashionable doctrines of modern times. 
 The value of the genuine coin was sufficient to keep alive in 
 every age the vigilance of those to whose care it was entrusted ; 
 and if they were inclined to suffer it to rust, it has been kept 
 polished by continual agitation. Like other precious jewels,* it is 
 gathering richness from time ; and it will always preserve suf- 
 ficient value to provoke the hostility of those who are excluded 
 from its possession. Its antiquity then is its protection ; and 
 what would have rusted baser metals, has, in reality, only 
 brightened its splendour. 
 
 Do not attempt, then, to separate the Catholic Church and the 
 Catholic religion ; they are really inseparable terms. If we are 
 a branch of the former, we are in possession of the latter ; and 
 if you are excluded from the pale of the one, you are likewise 
 shut out from the inheritance of the other. How precious is the 
 title of Catholic, when it is sought even by those who have 
 abjured the Catholic faith ! How fondly do you cling to its 
 relics, and with what complacency do you repeat its venerable 
 name ! But it is only the name ; and while you are amused 
 with the unsubstantial shadow of the Establishment, you remind 
 me of the Trojan chief, who solaced his exile by feasting his eyes 
 with the image of which the reality was gone. 
 
 Atque animum pictura pascit inani.* 
 
 Content yourself, then, with the name and dignity of a Pro- 
 testant bishop, nor associate with it a name which will only 
 expose the absurdity of your pretensions. Do not attempt at 
 the same time to be a Catholic and a Protestant bishop ; for they 
 are two things so different in substance, as well as in name, that 
 no chemistry can combine qualities so repulsive in their nature, 
 nor logic associate terms of such different signification. Should 
 you, however, persist in your pretensions to the name and pre- 
 
 * And with the shadowy portrait feasts his mind. 
 
LETTER XX. 
 
 101 
 
 rogatives of Catholic, I would beg leave to remind you of the 
 fate of the wit, who affected the dress and manners of the lord 
 of the forest. But nature spoke through the disguise, and the 
 ill grace with which he wore his new dignity quickly revealed 
 the deceit to the ridicule of his companions, and earned for the 
 cheat the just retribution of his imposture. The apologue was, 
 doubtless, familiar to your earlier years, and your memory will 
 readily catch the recollection ; nor shall “ Hierophilos” descend 
 to expound the moral. 
 
 To support your arguments in favour of the right of Catholic, 
 you quote the authorities of Cranmcr and Cromwell. It is 
 really surprising that Protestants can speak of Cranmer with 
 respect, whose name and character, in mercy to their cause, they 
 ought to consign to oblivion — a man whose pliant faith, ever 
 obedient to his interests, successively yielded to the most oppo- 
 site impressions — who shamefully practised incontinence while he 
 professed celibacy — who would sanction a system of morality 
 that once excited* the virtuous indignation of a Pagan audience, 
 while his heart abjured the vows his lips had uttered — and who, 
 like the two-faced Janus, presented opposite characters to the 
 Protestants and Catholics of his time. As for Cromwell, most 
 willingly do I make him over to your Grace ; nor do I envy you 
 all the support you can derive from the name of the licentious 
 favourite of Henry, whose disgrace and death were attested 
 by the joy of the whole nation as the just punishment of his 
 crimes. 
 
 I cannot dismiss this subject without adverting to the note in 
 which your Grace insinuates two heavy charges against the 
 Catholic Church, by stating, that “ that cannot be a true religion 
 which prohibits the free use of the Scripture, and subjects the 
 word of God to the authority of man.” I shall not stop my 
 reader with any complaints against the usual artifices of pole- 
 mical disingenuity. The ignorance of others might be endured, 
 and their misrepresentation disregarded ; but the qualifications 
 of a bishop should place him equally above the influence of both. 
 If I were not determined to give a full refutation of every part 
 of your Grace’s Charge, I would refer you to the former letters 
 of “ Hierophilos,” in which the calumnies against the Catholic 
 Church regarding the use of the Scriptures, were refuted to the 
 satisfaction, or, at least, to the silence, of one of the most 
 
 * n y'Kua of/.ui/.ofo i) (pghv oto?. 
 
 The poet who put this language into the mouth of Hippolytus incurred the 
 just resentment of the Athenian people. What a pity they had not the benefit 
 of the lessons of the reforming archbishop, whose life would have furnished the 
 best illustration of the text of Euripides ! Every member of the sentence in 
 which I have sketched the character of Cranmer is founded on Protestant tes- 
 timony. 
 
102 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 strenuous and talented advocates of the Bible. But as you will 
 doubtless feel more pleasure in being referred to your own than 
 to any other productions, allow me to place before your eyes the 
 following sentence, taken from your Grace’s Charge : — “We, my 
 brethren, are to keep clear of both extremes ; and holding the 
 Scriptures as our great charter, whilst we maintain the liberty 
 with which Christ has made us free, we are to submit ourselves 
 to the authority to which he has made us subject.”* After this 
 sentence what becomes of the free use of the Scripture, which 
 you hold essential to the true religion ? If by the “ free use ” of 
 the Scripture you only mean a “ tempered freedom ,” regulated 
 by the authority of the Church in the use and interpretation of 
 Scripture, then you adopt the doctrine of the Catholic Church, 
 and we will hail your conversion. But if by “ free use ” you 
 mean an uncontrolled license of regulating one’s belief by the 
 Scripture and his own caprices — and, mark, there is no other 
 alternative — why, in the name of consistency, inveigh against 
 the sectaries for asserting that “ liberty with which Christ has 
 made them free ?” If the authority with which you endeavour 
 to recal the Dissenters, subjects not the word of God to the 
 authority of man, why has the more consistent authority of the 
 Catholic Church a different effect ? If the judge who expounds 
 the law, and corrects the abuse of its licentious application, can 
 justly spurn the imputation of invading the authority of the 
 legislature, why will the Church, not claiming more than the 
 authority of a judge, be said to usurp the rights of the legisla- 
 ture of heaven ? 
 
 The truth is, my Lord, you stand not in need of argument. 
 The sentence I have just quoted, of which the want of sense 
 breaks out through the clumsy artifice of a laboured and per- 
 plexed construction, is the best evidence that you are conscious 
 of your own embarrassment. Knowing that you could not 
 maintain your station without the exercise of an authority, of 
 whose inconsistency you are convinced, you endeavour to soften 
 it, by keeping up the language of the Reformation, like the 
 crafty Augustus, who, whilst he exercised a silent despotism over 
 the Roman people, still affected the language of freedom, to 
 amuse the prejudices of those who cherished the memory of the 
 ancient commonwealth. 
 
 You tell us that the Scriptures are the boasted charter of the 
 faith of Protestants, until we are wearied with the repetition ; 
 nor is the ludicrous spectacle of the shattered fragments of that 
 faith which the sectaries hurl against each other, sufficient to 
 cure their infatuation. We, too, appeal to the Scripture as the 
 great charter of our faith, but we appeal to it with reverence. 
 
 * Charge, page 22. 
 
LETTER XX. 
 
 103 
 
 We grasp no detached passages, which might appear more 
 striking to our contracted view ; but we reverence the whole as 
 the dictates of divine inspiration ; and lest we should err in 
 adjusting the complex system of our duties by its standard, we 
 listen with respectful docility to that guide, which after minutely 
 surveying the whole, can best reconcile its apparent inconsisten- 
 cies, and construct a balanced system of morality, by regulating 
 the proper limits of our obligations, and assigning to the different 
 virtues their respective proportions. 
 
 To conclude — and I intreat the attention of every thinking 
 Protestant to the reflection, as it obviates that delusion which 
 has taken strongest possession of their minds. The Scriptures 
 were never intended to be made the instrument of every blas- 
 phemer, who would fain conceal his extravagance and impiety 
 under the mask of respect for religion. The indecent levity 
 with which the awful concerns of religion are often treated by 
 polemics, and the flippancy with which they abuse the Scripture, 
 would almost make one think that the Scriptures were written 
 for the vain and irreligious, as a matter of idle disputation. But 
 the Scriptures are too sacred for familiarity ; nor ought the 
 mysteries of heaven be profanely agitated between the vain 
 contentions of men. Placed in the sanctuary of the Catholic 
 Church, the Scripture is the monument of God’s covenant with 
 his people : it affords a proof of his presence, and a pledge of 
 his protection. But when it is dragged out of that sanctuary by 
 the impiety of the sectaries, and sacrilegiously carried out to 
 battle, it becomes like the same ark of the covenant in the hands 
 of the hypocritical sons of Heli: it provokes the vengeance of 
 heaven — it becomes the signal of their shame — and the instru- 
 ment of their discomfiture.* 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * And the ark of God was taken ; and the two sons of Heli, Ophni and 
 Phinees, were slain I. Kings , iv, 11, 
 
104 
 
 LETTER XXL 
 
 LETTER XXL 
 
 THE FOLLOWING LETTERS WERE WRITTEN TO ENFORCE THE NECESSITY OF 
 CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1824 . 
 
 Dedimus profecto grande patientice documentum : et sicut vetus (Etas vidit 
 quid ultimum in libertate esset, ita nos quid in servitude. Adempto per inqui- 
 sitiones et loquendi audiendique commercio memoriam quoque cum voce perdidesse- 
 mus si tarn in nostra potestate esset oblivisci quam tacere Tacitus. 
 
 We have, unquestionably, given extraordinary proofs of patience ; for, as 
 remoter times have witnessed the extremes of licentiousness, so have ours 
 endured the worst of servitude. Eor, the channels of receiving and communi- 
 cating intelligence being cut off, through spies and informers, we should have at 
 once lost our recollection and our voice, if we had been as much masters of our 
 memory as of the use of language. 
 
 Sir — In soliciting the attention of the British legislature to the 
 present posture of Ireland, it cannot excite surprise if I should 
 address myself to a statesman whose fame has been intimately 
 blended with her fortunes. It will be readily perceived that I 
 allude to the exertions of those splendid talents which have been 
 early enlisted in her service, and to that uniform devotion to her 
 cause which has hitherto marked your political career. You 
 cannot. Sir, be indifferent to the interests of a country with 
 whose misfortunes your youngest sympathies were associated, 
 and which often awaked that pathetic and commanding eloquence 
 which charmed a listening senate into still and admiring atten- 
 tion. Your talents, it is true, may now embrace a wider range ; 
 but still your efforts in the cause of Ireland will not cease to be 
 remembered ; and while we are struck with the loftier inspira- 
 tions of his genius, by which the master of Roman eloquence 
 averted the threatened destruction of the empire, we read with 
 an intense interest his indignant denunciations against the mis- 
 government of the Sicilian Island, resembling in so many respects 
 the condition of our own, being at once the granary of Rome, 
 and the most wretched of her provinces. 
 
 While we looked on your appointment to your present ele- 
 vated office, as the reward of your honorable toils in the public 
 service, we hailed it too as the harbinger of better prospects to 
 our country. We hoped that the talents which were so often 
 devoted to our cause would not desert us when a wider scope was 
 
LETTER XXI. 
 
 10 5 
 
 opened for their exertion. When hopes are most ardent, disap- 
 pointment is most deeply felt ; and hence some have not failed 
 to view, in your connexion with your present associates, some 
 symptoms of alienation. However, in spite of appearances, 
 there is still in the public mind a confiding disposition, which 
 clings with strong reliance to the promise of your earlier exer- 
 tions, and which has derived fresh strength from the solemn 
 assurance of a persevering zeal for the Catholic interests, which 
 you have made at the opening of the present session of Parlia- 
 ment. The frequency of disappointment has created in us a 
 suspicion of the faith of statesmen ; but though there are some few 
 who have ventured to give expression to their distrust in all the 
 warmth of confidence so often misused, there are more who still 
 give you credit for sincerity, and regard your present policy as 
 the result of Fabrician wisdom, maturing by wise delay those 
 measures for the public weal which might be defeated by rash 
 and precipitate councils. 
 
 After a melancholy succession of hopes, as capriciously de- 
 feated as perhaps they were too warmly indulged, we cannot 
 dissemble that on the present occasion we feel more than ordinary 
 disappointment. While the evils of Ireland were acknowledged 
 and lamented, we might look forward with some confidence to 
 the prospect of their removal. But now we are assured by the 
 speech from the throne, that there has been a progressive 
 amendment in her condition. Some further measures are recom- 
 mended for her improvement, too vague to enable us to ascertain 
 their precise nature. But if we are to take the opinions of those 
 who seconded the address as a commentary on the speech, instead 
 of directing our hopes to any great measure of national relief, it 
 is rather calculated to deepen our despondence. If I rightly 
 understand the opinions of my Lord Lorton, and others who 
 spoke with him, the whole sum of Ireland’s misery is to be 
 resolved into the ignorance of the Irish people ; and the only 
 measure for their relief to be found in education.* Conscious of 
 the deceit that is thus practised on the public mind by the solemn 
 mockery of those who, under the guise of zeal for her welfare, 
 conceal a treacherous hostility to the real interests of her people, 
 I shall undertake to trace these evils to their source, and in 
 exposing the fallacy of the half measures that are recommended, 
 satisfactorily show the necessity of Catholic Emancipation. 
 
 In entering on the discussion of this interesting topic, which 
 involves much of contradictory opinion and adverse feeling, I am 
 sensible how difficult it is to conciliate the views of contending 
 parties. But since in the zeal of ministering to the appetites of 
 
 * After a lapse of more than twenty years, the opinions regarding the nature 
 of our evils, seem to be stationary. Infidel colleges are now deemed the only 
 cure for our misfortunes. 
 
 H 
 
106 
 
 LETTER XXI. 
 
 a party, truth itself does not escape distortion, I shall in the 
 present view of the state of Ireland give impartial expression to 
 those reflections that have been suggested by the contemplation 
 of her history ; nor shall I dissemble the close connexion that 
 exists between the nature of her laws and the character of her 
 inhabitants. 
 
 Although in the conduct of the Irish people there is much to 
 compassionate, it will not be denied that there is also something 
 to condemn. But the more I would acknowledge the extent of 
 the degradation of the inhabitants, the more I should be demon- 
 strating the necessity of legislative interference to improve our 
 condition. To solicit a remedy for evils which do not exist 
 would be preposterous, and to demand to be placed on a level 
 with our fellow-citizens would be absurd, without acknowledging 
 our degradation as far as we could be degraded by mischievous 
 laws. If there is, then, in the Irish character something of the 
 evil ingredients with which it is reproached, to what source is it 
 to be traced? Our revilers continually repeat that there is 
 much ignorance, much indolence, united to great cunning and 
 occasional ferocity among the lower, and a sullen discontent 
 among the higher orders of our people. Yet, while they prefer 
 those charges, they labour to continue the causes from which they 
 proceed. We acknowledge the existence of evils which spring 
 from the system by which we are governed, and are anxious for 
 their removal. Who are most solicitous for the peace and pros- 
 perity of the empire I shall leave to your wisdom to determine. 
 
 If it were true that our people are ignorant to the degree 
 they are misrepresented, is it not because the access to knowledge 
 has been closed against them ? If they are indolent, is it not 
 because they have long felt the influence of those laws that 
 abandoned the accumulations of their industry to every informer? 
 If some of the lower orders of our peasantry ever resort to 
 cunning and deceit, is it not because the aegis of the law was not 
 interposed between them and the baronial or village despot, 
 whose passions, as they were unable to resist, they strove to 
 appease by a fawning adulation.* 
 
 And if they have exhibited instances of cruelty, is it not 
 because they were goaded by contumely and harsh usage some- 
 times to retort on their oppressors their own barbarity, by 
 endeavouring to get rid of those whose violence their usual arti- 
 fices of deceit could not subdue. If the letters which “ Hiero- 
 philos” has already addressed to the English people have, 
 
 * An important case of late occurrence is an illustration of the system of 
 chastisement beyond the law which our peasantry often endured from the 
 cruelty of their task-masters. If, therefore, at the present day, when the influ- 
 ence of the British law is extending to the remotest districts of Ireland, some 
 men are found hardy enough to resort to such barbarous practices, we may pre- 
 sume what was its extent when they were unawed by the dread of punishment. 
 
LETTER XXII. 
 
 107 
 
 perchance, met your eye, you will not suspect that he is the 
 apologist of crime, or the advocate of disaffection. But while I 
 acknowledge and deplore those crimes which are exaggerated by 
 our enemies, I wish to trace them to their origin — bad laws ; and 
 instead of wondering that their effects have been so melancholy, 
 there must have been some noble elements in the composition of 
 a people that could have so powerfully resisted their deteriorat- 
 ing influence. 
 
 If then, it be shown that the laws have been productive of 
 those malignant effects that have darkened the character and 
 aggravated the misery of the Irish nation, nothing but the repeal 
 of the same laws can efface the odious impression. If it be con- 
 fessed that those evils and those laws are connected in the relation 
 of cause and effect, it is a waste of the expedients which the 
 government can command, to attempt the healing of the one, 
 without the abolition of the other. Hence, though I shall offer 
 some reflections on the question of Tithes, Education, the Protes- 
 tant Establishment, and other topics which have excited much 
 interesting discussion, the total repeal of the Penal Laws, or the 
 unqualified Emancipation of the Catholics, will be the theme to 
 which I shall particularly solicit your attention. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XXII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823 . 
 
 The customs of an enslaved people are a part of their servitude, and those of 
 a free people a part of their liberty Montesquieu. 
 
 Sir — Of the justness of this profound remark, England is, 
 perhaps, one of the happiest illustrations. Though soil and 
 climate may have some influence in the formation of character, 
 yet it is little compared to laws and education, by which all the 
 natural obstructions arising from climate have been subdued. 
 To what are we to trace the vast difference between the inhabi- 
 tants of the same country, in different epochs of their history, 
 if not to the difference of their moral and political institutions. 
 Carthage, whose commerce once covered every sea, and whose 
 
108 
 
 LETTER XXII. 
 
 resources enabled her to grapple with the Roman strength, now 
 languishes under the despotic sway of the Dey of Algiers — its 
 site almost a problem, and its inhabitants exhibiting the last 
 symptoms of human degeneracy. Athens and Sparta still enjoy 
 the same mild and temperate climate which preserved their 
 inhabitants equally free from the elfeminacy of the eastern, or 
 the ferocity of the northern nations, to which their sages* 
 ascribed their superior civilization. Yet, if we except some 
 transient gleams of their ancient glory, which are occasionally 
 seen to cross over the melancholy condition of Greece, in vain do 
 you look among its inhabitants for those sublime models of the 
 human character which were formed by the laws of Solon and 
 the lessons of Socrates. While those nations exemplified in the 
 salutary influence of their laws whatever was elegant in the arts 
 or abstruse in the sciences, Britain was yet unknown or despised. 
 Yet, when the corruption of the principles to which those states 
 were indebted for their greatness, gradually produced their dis- 
 solution, the vigorous seeds of jurisprudence that were first 
 transplanted from the forests of Germany, have thriven in the 
 British soil,f and spread into such majestic growth, that arts and 
 science, and peace and freedom, securely repose under its pro- 
 tection. 
 
 There is not, I should think, anything in the soil or atmos- 
 phere of Ireland unpropitious to their cultivation. Let but the 
 experiment be tried: give us the laws that have fostered, and 
 the liberty that has guarded, the energies of the British people ; 
 and then it will appear if our degeneracy is owing to our climate 
 or to our religion. Whatever our natural capacities may have 
 been, we were never yet afforded an opportunity for their deve- 
 lopement. If we are reproached with the early provincial feuds 
 that grew out of our pentarchy, let it be recollected that it was 
 when England was ruled by the sway, and distracted by the 
 competition, of a greater number of kings. If the ferocity of 
 the northern invaders subsequently retarded our advancement to 
 union and civilization, it was a calamity we shared in common 
 with our more distinguished neighbours. The personal obliga- 
 tions imposed by the laws of tanistry on the retainers of our 
 chieftains, afforded, it is true, no exalted specimen of our juris- 
 prudence. But though not precisely of the same character, it 
 had some affinity with the feudal system of the Continent, and 
 was less liable to any change on account of our insular situation. 
 Before the union of our provinces could have been cemented by 
 the vigour of a national monarchy, our feuds were embittered 
 still more by the disunion of the pale which conferred all that 
 
 * Aristot. Politic., lib. vii, cap. vii. 
 
 f Ce beau systeme a ete trouve dans les bois Montesquieu, Esprit de 
 
 Lois, lib. xi, cliap. vi. 
 
LETTER XXII. 
 
 109 
 
 was revolting in British rule, without the benefits of its legisla- 
 tion. This is not gratuitous assertion, since we have the un- 
 biassed testimony of Sir John Davis,* who assures us that the 
 English settlers, instead of abolishing the odious impositions of 
 coin and livery, retained those remnants of our ancient laws, and 
 aggravated still more the servitude of the people. And, finally, 
 ere the narrow boundary of the pale could have moved to the 
 extremities of the kingdom, and confounded the odious distinc- 
 tion of the settlers and the aborigines, it was guarded by the 
 deeper and more inaccessible fence of religious bigotry, which 
 repulsed mutual approach and perpetuated national enmity. 
 
 Hence, no country on the earth has been placed in circum- 
 stances more unfavourable to its improvement. Other nations 
 might have laboured under temporary evils which yielded to the 
 influence of time and salutary laws. But it has been the pecu- 
 liar misfortune of Ireland, that, instead of profiting by any 
 change, every new regimen was calculated to protract her weak- 
 ness and aggravate her distemper. The rigorous laws that were 
 enacted under the successive reigns of the daughters of James, 
 who repaid the attachment of this country to the declining for- 
 tunes of their house with the proverbial ingratitude of that 
 family, are as familiar to every memory as they are revolting to 
 every feeling. The maxim of the unprincipled Shaftesbury — of 
 neglecting his friends, and securing, by kindness, the support of 
 his enemies — was adopted, not only by Charles, but improved, as 
 it descended to the last member of his race who occupied the 
 English throne. The deplorable effects of that cursed policy are 
 yet too deeply felt to be easily forgotten ; and, if we except the 
 last unfortunate monarch of the line of Stuart, whose memory is 
 protected from reproach by the reverence or pity due to fallen 
 greatness, I know not which is most calculated to excite our 
 wonder — the generous and gratuitous fidelity of the Irish people, 
 or the worthlessness of the objects on whom it was bestowed. 
 
 If the object of laws be to impose a restraint on the worst 
 propensities of our nature, calamitous must be their effect, when 
 our very passions are stimulated by their authority. What, 
 then, must have been the malignant influence of that sanguinary 
 code which passed towards the commencement of the last cen- 
 tury, of which the avowed object was, to whet all the hateful 
 feelings of man, and thus dissolve the most sacred ties by which 
 society is held together ? If their tendency had been confined 
 to the separation of our people into two distinct bodies, then, 
 like the cantons of Switzerland, each might have endeavoured to 
 enjoy within its own sphere all the kind intercourse of society. 
 But no : the object of those laws was to generate division, and 
 
 * The English, when they had learned it, used it with more severity, and made 
 it more intolerable. — Sir John Davis. 
 
110 
 
 LETTER XXIII. 
 
 by division, annihilation— violating the sacred rights of con- 
 science as well as the security of property — poisoning every 
 spring of social and religious feeling — nay, invading the repose of 
 the domestic circle — until society was thrown into a hideous and 
 confused mass, and the virtues by which it was cemented, were 
 exiled to the solitude of the mountains. Thus every engine 
 which the malignant ingenuity of man could devise was em- 
 ployed for the destruction of our people. It is acknowledged, 
 even by their enemies, that the peasantry are a noble ruin. 
 What, then, can be more worthy of the labours of a statesman 
 than to collect the scattered materials, to refit the social edifice, 
 and to restore it to that symmetry and form to which the 
 massive qualities of the broken fragments show they were 
 originally destined ; unless it be intended that Ireland should 
 remain an eternal theme to excite speculative admiration for her 
 virtues, and barren sensibility for her wrongs. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XXIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING, 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Natura lamen infirmitatis humance, tardiora sunt remedia quam mala, ei ut cor- 
 pora lente augescunt, cito extinguuntur, sic ingenia studiaque oppresseris facilus 
 quam revocaveris. — Tacitus. 
 
 But the work of destruction and decay is rapid — that of regeneration slow 
 and progressive. 
 
 Sir — From this natural reflection it will appear that I do not an- 
 ticipate from the repeal of the penal laws the immediate abolition 
 of all the evils of which they have been productive. We are not 
 so sanguine as to imagine that emancipation, by an instantaneous 
 virtue, will banish every misfortune, and diffuse universal happi- 
 ness through the land. It must, however, be the forerunner, 
 without which no permanent good can be expected to follow. 
 You may redress some partial grievance ; but as long as these 
 laws are unrepealed, the source of the waters of bitterness will 
 
LETTER XXIII. 
 
 Ill 
 
 not cease to flow over the land, poisoning, by their noxious quali- 
 ties, all the channels of social intercourse. 
 
 Nothing, then, short of a full participation of all the benefits 
 of the constitution will appease Ireland’s discontent, and quiet 
 her dissensions. It is in vain to raise the people from their pros- 
 trate condition, unless they are permitted to regain that erect 
 and dignified attitude which heaven has given to the human 
 form, and of which it has been deprived by the misgovernment 
 of man. 
 
 ovvjoTe bovfaw y.s.(pccKr) ofia<; ttyiQvxyiu 
 aM ctkoXw, k uvy^va Xo%xv 
 
 Since the days of the Reformation, it has been the policy of 
 our enemies to ascribe all the evils of Ireland to the errors of 
 her religion. Accordingly every bitter remedy that has been 
 administered was founded on the expediency of substituting 
 another. Since, however, her inveterate attachment to her old 
 religious habits has been found to have obstinately resisted inno- 
 vation ; it is high time to think of making some other experi- 
 ment. Notwithstanding the numberless ones already resorted 
 to, her malady is only gathering a deadlier inveteracy. When- 
 ever she is agitated by intestine discord, we are told that she 
 must first feel the vengeance of the law before she can hope 
 to partake of its benefits. But when the vengeance of the law 
 is appeased, its benefits are forgotten, and thus the history of 
 Ireland exhibits only the alternating vicissitudes of insurrec- 
 tionary frenzy, subdued by force into exhaustion, and exhaus- 
 tion again stimulated into fresh cruelty by the reaction of despair. 
 One expedient only has been left untried, and yet all have proved 
 abortive. Already has she passed under all the signs of the 
 political zodiac, save that of Emancipation ; and still no conjunc- 
 tion has been found propitious to her destinies. But there are 
 many who, while they affect a wish to heal our misfortunes, only 
 labour to prolong them, knowing that an effectual remedy would 
 ruin the profitable speculations of religious and political empirics, 
 who are thriving on the continuance of her distemper. 
 
 The moral maxim of Pope, that “ partial evil is universal 
 good,” has been rigorously felt by Ireland in all her political 
 relations. Nay, it has been hitherto adopted by the government 
 with a latitude of interpretation which no state necessity could 
 justify. Hence, our interests were not only sacrificed to the ap- 
 parent advantage of the whole empire, but sometimes to the very 
 caprices of opposite parties. Need I remind you of the disgrace- 
 ful scene that once occurred in the legislature, when an odious 
 measure was proposed by the ministry, in order to transfer on 
 
 * With abject mien the slave is doom’d to tread 
 The soil ; nor dares to raise his drooping head. 
 
112 
 
 LETTER XXIII. 
 
 the opposition the unpopularity of its rejection, and adopted by 
 the opposition to catch their foes in their own toils. Thus, each 
 acquiesced in the injustice of a law that was equally reprobated 
 by both ; the cause of the Catholics was converted into an arena 
 on which men might make an innocent trial of their parlia- 
 mentary tactics ; and, with a cruelty worse than that of Commo- 
 dus, the lives and liberties of the Irish people were sported away 
 for the sanguinary amusement of those political gladiators. 
 
 It is, therefore, no wonder if we are in such a state as to excite 
 the commisseration of those friends of the human race who 
 occasionally visit us, attracted by the fame of our misery, and 
 the yearnings of their own benevolence. They come among us, 
 and pour forth their real or dissembled sorrow over our suffering, 
 and then strive to amuse our easy nature by prophetic assurances 
 of unattainable perfection. There is much kindness in their 
 professions, and great liberality in their views. Their theories 
 are magnificent, since they are never to be reduced to practice. 
 The future accommodations of our inhabitants are handsomely 
 arranged on paper, and constructed with all the celerity of the 
 palace of Aladin. No matter how dense our population ; should 
 it swell to an hundred millions, all will be fed by some secret 
 aliment that will be extracted from some unknown substance. 
 
 The atmosphere will become purified from the noxious mixture 
 that is unfavourable to life, and our land, like that of Judea, will 
 become more fertile, as it is more exhausted. In fine, though 
 like the animals in the ark, each inhabitant should be confined to 
 a few feet of ground, all will be provided with sustenance by the 
 providence of the new system, and should any difficulty arise in 
 the way of those theories, it is immediately obviated by the con- 
 struction of some more squares, and the addition of a few figures; 
 and thus a mechanical prospectus, or a mathematical table, realizes 
 more than Lycurgus could ever have achieved, or Plato have 
 imagined. 
 
 These improvements are not to be confined to our physical 
 wants ; but the whole system of man is to undergo a complete 
 revolution : the faculties of mind are to be subjected to a regular 
 scale of measurement ; the force of every will, and the extent of 
 every memory is to be inscribed on a mysterious phrenograph ; 
 and the degree to which each one’s passions will rise or fall, is 
 to be adjusted by the nicest graduation. Every received maxim 
 is to be exploded as the result of tyranny or superstition, human 
 nature is to be again fused in a crucible of a new and untried 
 education, in which every passion burns with fierce intensity, and 
 then it comes forth purged from all its grossness, and invested 
 with perfection ! ! 
 
 The ignorance of the people seems to be destined rather for 
 the purpose of exciting compassion for Pagan nations, than for 
 
LETTER XXIII. 
 
 113 
 
 conferring on them a system of rational and religious education. 
 Our slavery awakens more pity for the negroes than for our- 
 selves ; and instead of any exertions to benefit the wretchedness 
 of their own country, some of our patriots pour their lamenta- 
 tions over some of the happiest countries in Europe, without 
 considering that the consciousness of their happy condition would 
 make them repulse with a lofty disdain the insolence of their 
 commisseration. Burke lashes with a just indignation the hollow 
 pretensions to philanthropy which were put forth by the French 
 infidels, who exhibited an unfeeling indifference for their kindred, 
 while they affected an intense benevolence towards their kind. 
 The remark may be equally applicable towards those universal 
 patriots, who, while they are whining their complaints over the 
 misfortunes of other countries, are totally insensible to the suffer- 
 ings of their own. Perhaps they have long since despaired of 
 her situation ; and really it would seem as if Ireland had been 
 deemed a subject for experiments, and abandoned to religious 
 and political anatomists to be studied and dissected, in order that 
 they might apply the result of their experience to the renovation 
 of the human species. 
 
 If any proof could be wanting to show the necessity of a sound 
 and practical system for our relief, it is the easiness with which 
 people listen to those wild and delusive theories. However, they 
 are not probably without design, since they divert us from the 
 contemplation of that object to which our views should be con- 
 stantly directed. Because the visions of a distempered enthu- 
 siasm cannot be realized in our favour, are we therefore to be 
 consigned to all the gloom of despondency ? Since we cannot 
 be restored to a state of more than primitive innocence, must we 
 be deprived of all the salutary restraints which are imposed by 
 wise and equal laws on the tyranny of the human passions? 
 And since we cannot be exalted to a happiness of which our 
 imperfect nature is now unsusceptible ; must we be denied the 
 common benefits that are enjoyed by our fellow- citizens, and be 
 told that we hope in vain to be redeemed from our bondage into 
 all the freedom of Catholic Emancipation. 
 
 While we are conscious that nothing less than a complete 
 restoration of our rights can be productive of lasting tranquil- 
 lity, we are not insensible to the favours which have been 
 extended to us during the last reign. If it was wisdom to 
 mitigate the severity of these laws by which we were aggrieved, 
 it cannot but be wisdom to bring the work to a consummation. 
 If arguments could be still wanting to illustrate this truth, they 
 could be easily advanced ; but such has been the triumph of 
 argument and reason, that our adversaries could only shelter 
 themselves behind the bulwark of the Protestant Establishment. 
 
 IIlEROPHILOS. 
 
114 
 
 LETTER XXIV. 
 
 LETTER XXIY. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Civil liberty, which is that of a member of society, is "no other than natural 
 liberty, so far restrained by human laws (and no farther) as is necessary and 
 expedient for the general advantage of the public. Hence we may collect, that 
 every wanton and careless restraint of the will of the subject, whether practised 
 by a monarch, a nobility, or a popular assembly, is a degree of tyranny. — 
 Blackstone’s Commentaries , book i, chap, i, p. 129. 
 
 Sir — Britain boasts, above all other nations, of the spirit of justice 
 that presides over all her institutions. There is a justice which 
 not only one individual is obliged to observe towards another, but 
 by which nations too are bound ; and principally the legislators 
 of any empire towards its dependant connexions. The sacrifice 
 of any portion of an empire, and the detention of those common 
 benefits of the State, to the support of which all contribute, is 
 deemed by the best authorities on jurisprudence, an act of 
 flagrant injustice, when such a sacrifice is not necessary to the 
 interests of the whole. This is a principle which reason approves, 
 and the authority of every civilian* has sanctioned. On what 
 ground of justice, then, can an entire nation be still deprived of 
 those civil privileges that are deemed the birth-right of a British 
 subject, when all the pretences on account of which those rights 
 were first withdrawn, have long since disappeared ? The fears of 
 foreign influence which were so much magnified, have long since 
 passed away. The political pretensions of the last of the race of the 
 Stuarts, which subsided in the enjoyment of the peaceful dignity 
 of a Roman Cardinal, have been finally extinguished in the grave. 
 Secure, no less in the constitutional justice of its claims, than in 
 
 * Civil liberty is the not being restrained by any law but what conduces, in a 
 greater degree, to the public welfare Paley, book vi, chap. v. 
 
 Paley adds, “ that it is not the rigour but the inexpediency of laws and acts 
 of authority which makes them tyrannical.” 
 
 Some politicians, to justify the exclusion of the Catholics, have distinguished 
 between civil and political liberty, a distinction which was unknown to Black- 
 stone. However, since our enemies consider a government despotic, under 
 which civil liberty is not enjoyed — since the jurists I have cited, consider civil 
 liberty incompatible with unnecessary restraints upon natural freedom — and 
 since the restraints upon the Catholics are now confessedly unnecessary for the 
 public good, I will leave them to reconcile the conclusion with their own 
 principles. 
 
LETTER XXIV, 
 
 115 
 
 the affections of its subjects, the throne is no longer threatened 
 with real or imaginary danger from any competitor. If, therefore, 
 the laws which proscribed the Catholics from the pale of the 
 Constitution, had their origin in those groundless apprehensions, 
 what justifiable reason can now be assigned for their continuance ? 
 If this argument has been frequently and forcibly urged, it is 
 one which has been never satisfactorily combated, it is one 
 which never can be weakened by repetition, and on which time 
 can have no other influence than that of strengthening its force 
 by developing its consequences. Rome, in the days of her 
 greatness, carried her hostility to the conquered countries no 
 farther than was necessary for her own preservation. In ex- 
 change for their independence, she liberally imparted all the 
 benefits of her laws and institutions, nor is there in the annals of 
 that empire, any example of a fingering and protracted cruelty 
 towards any of her provinces, that would reflect such disgrace 
 upon her counsels as the treatment towards Ireland would cast 
 upon the memory of British statesmen. 
 
 In appealing, therefore, to the legislature, to extend the rights 
 of the constitution to the Catholics of Ireland, we appeal to those 
 eternal principles of justice, which human policy cannot annul ; 
 from which statesmen are no more released than private indivi- 
 duals, and which Britain, beyond other nations, professes to 
 revere. 
 
 While she extends her commerce over the world, and diffuses 
 with it the improvements of her arts, the protection of her arms, 
 and the fights of her literature, the high character which she 
 affects for piety and justice are tarnished by the harshness of 
 her treatment to this country. As long as Ireland remains in 
 her present condition, the interference of Britain in the concerns 
 of other countries, will be deemed less an evidence of her humanity 
 than her ambition. If she interposes in the defence of an injured 
 people, her policy will be considered the result of a selfish wish 
 to secure her distant possessions, in which justice has no share, 
 nor can she ever claim the proud distinction of being the avenger 
 of freedom, while the slavery of the Irish people exposes in the 
 eyes of mankind, the injustice of her pretensions. 
 
 With all her boasted freedom and religion, that freedom is not 
 generous, nor is that religion wholly pure, which can suffer a 
 neighbouring country to languish in a condition which is as 
 hostile to the meek spirit of the one, as it is destitute of the civil 
 advantages of the other. But there is a freedom which is unsocial 
 and intolerant, and which is not far removed from the spirit of 
 despotism. Such was the freedom of some of the factious leaders 
 of the Grecian Republics, who, while they abused the name of 
 liberty, retained more than half the people under bondage the 
 most oppressive. Where the love of liberty is not softened by 
 
116 
 
 LETTER XXIV. 
 
 the true spirit of religion, it degenerates into a savage indepen- 
 dence, and then into a lust of power ; and power is always 
 gratified by the number of its slaves. It is no wonder then if we 
 are amused by the sounds of freedom, where its benefits are but 
 little felt ; or if we are stunned with invectives against arbitrary 
 power in countries where the condition of the subjects is happier 
 than in our own. Whatever may be the advantages of liberty, 
 that liberty is of little value which cannot be preserved but by 
 the slavery of an entire nation.* Better would it be to blend the 
 opposite extremes, even in these countries in which freedom was 
 carried to the highest pitch, than purchase the happiness of a 
 few, with the misery of the mass of the people. The reason why 
 the rational and tempered freedom that is enjoyed under the 
 mitigated monarchies of Catholic States on the Continent, is 
 disregarded, because, like the light of the sun, it is steady in its 
 influence, and uniform in its effects, and therefore does not strike 
 us with astonishment. Whereas the light of liberty which 
 occasionally shone on these ancient States, was only an inter- 
 mittent glare, that revealed more fully to the view a frightful 
 mass of misery, of servitude, and of crime. 
 
 When Athens gloried in her freedom, f it was generally de- 
 fended by the blood of her slaves, who were exposed to the 
 fiercest tide of the combat. The blood of Ireland has not been 
 less profusely expended in the support of British freedom. 
 Sparta too, has gloried in her free institutions ; yet we look in 
 vain for that equitable spirit which could reconcile them with 
 the recognition of the rights of others. No, it was a freedom of 
 which pride was the principle, and slavery the consequence. 
 The haughty spirit of the Spartans was gratified by the subjection 
 of their neighbour to a rigorous slavery ; and in the oath 
 by which they bound themselves never to release the unfortu- 
 nate inhabitants of the neighbouring country of Laconia, some 
 might behold an evil boding of the perpetual servitude of our 
 own. 
 
 If the freedom of England, then, is not compatible with that 
 of Ireland, in the scale of human happiness, it is surely of little 
 value ; and if it is, it has little of justice, and less of generosity. 
 As for the spirit of Christianity, it breathes not in the laws that 
 
 * Perhaps, after reflecting on the fate of the Catholics of Ireland, the reader 
 might he disposed to adopt the sentiment of the paradoxical philosopher of 
 Geneva: “Quoi! la liberte ne se maintient qu’a l’appui de la servitude.” — 
 Contrat. Social, lib. iii, chap. xv. 
 
 The contrast between the state of the Protestants and Catholics of the British 
 empire might induce us to hesitate before we would pronounce this sentiment to 
 he a paradox. 
 
 f The number of slaves in Athens, in the ver}^ zenith of her glory, is calculated 
 to have amounted to double the number of citizens. While there were but 
 twenty thousand citizens, there were forty thousand slaves. — Larciier on 
 Herod, book i, note 258. 
 
LETTER XXIV. 
 
 117 
 
 consign us to degradation. When first it was ushered into the 
 world, it broke the iron yoke of despotism which oppressed the 
 human race — it raised the slave from the abject condition under 
 which he groaned, and the mystic waters by which he was 
 redeemed unto the freedom of the Gospel, wiped away after a long 
 struggle with prejudice, the ignominy of his political servitude. 
 By fermenting the corrupt mass of mankind with the active 
 principle of an “ exalted obedience” which it felt not before, it 
 lessened the pressure of despotism, which substituted fear for 
 affection, and thus secured the stability of Governments by 
 mitigating their rigours. When this confidence then in the 
 attachment of the people, is not inspired by the Government, it 
 acts not on the benevolent and enlightened principles of the 
 Christian religion. It forgets that paternal relation which is so 
 strongly inculcated by our Redeemer , and plucks out of the 
 hearts of its subjects the strongest, as well as the most lasting 
 principles of action — the feehngs of gratitude, of affection, and of 
 duty. 
 
 It cannot then be pretended, that the policy which has been 
 adopted towards Ireland, was ever inspired by the charity of the 
 Christian religion. In vain, does England boast that her councils 
 are guided by justice, tempered by freedom, and softened by 
 religion. In her conduct towards Ireland, I have proved that 
 she has departed from all. Without any necessity, she still closes 
 against the Catholics the portals of the Constitution, in defiance 
 of the laws of justice, and in contradiction to the authorities of 
 Locke, of Blackstone, of Paley, and other great names whom she 
 venerates as the oracles of her legislation. Notwithstanding her 
 boasted freedom, as far as it regards Ireland, it has all that was 
 harsh, intolerant, exclusive and imperious in the ancient republics : 
 without being mitigated by that Christian spirit which subdued 
 into a milder tone, the genius of liberty ; and made Governments 
 of whatever form, reflect in their equitable administration, the 
 universal benevolence of that Being, from whose authority they 
 are derived. 
 
 The Emancipation of the Catholics, then, is enforced by the 
 eternal laws of justice, as well as by the spirit of that liberty 
 that breathes through her Constitution, and the principles of 
 that religion which England professes to respect. Against such 
 arguments resting on an eternal and immovable basis, nought is 
 opposed but the interest of the Protestant Establishment — an 
 institution comparatively recent in its origin, and by consequence 
 not essentially intertwined with the existence of the State, or the 
 interests of society. In speaking of the Protestant Estab- 
 lishment, it may be considered in the relation of a religious or 
 political system. If we view it merely under the former com- 
 plexion, there is no Christian who will think it deserving of his 
 
118 
 
 LETTER XXIV. 
 
 reverence, only in the same proportion as it reflects the revealed 
 doctrines of Christianity. Under this point of view, its con- 
 formity with the doctrines of Christ becomes a subject of fair 
 investigation : and should it appear that the doctrine of the 
 Establishment has departed widely from that which Christ has 
 revealed, such a religion could not be deemed essential to society ; 
 unless we were to suppose that error is more favourable than 
 truth to the happiness of mankind, or to adopt the paradox of 
 Hobbes, as dangerous in its consequence as it is absurd in 
 its principle; that truth and error entirely depend upon the 
 caprice of legislators, and that the will of the Government is 
 the sole standard of our faith, and the sole measure of our 
 duties. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we view it as a political establishment, 
 endowed with temporalities, deriving its origin entirely from the 
 legislature, and thus proving by the admission, that it can be 
 dissolved by the authority by which it was created, — then we 
 are relieved from the embarrassment that is produced by con- 
 founding it with its religious pretensions. We may bring to the 
 subject a mind unawed by the reverence which a belief in the true 
 religion imposes, and judge of the utility or inutility of the 
 Protestant Establishment, by an impartial view of the benefits 
 which it confers, or the evils of which it is productive. 
 
 Or, in fine, if we should consider the Protestant Establishment 
 as a religious and political system, united by the legislature, 
 the question will resolve itself into the views already exhibited, 
 since no State can derive support from religion, but because it 
 it is supposed to be true ; nor is it easily conceived, that any 
 religion of mere State creation, can lend to that State by which 
 it was created, any other authority than that which it has 
 received from the State to which it owes its creation. 
 
 It is not my intention to detain you with any discussion on this 
 subject under its former complexion. A comparative view of the 
 respective excellence of the Protestant or Catholic religions would 
 be foreign from my present purpose, nor shall I unseasonably 
 obtrude on your attention, a subject that is generally unpalatable 
 even to Protestant Ecclesiastics. However, I may be permitted 
 to remark that it has been too long and too much the fashion to 
 represent religious discussion as unworthy of a statesman, and 
 to identify it with superstition. Your mind is too well stored 
 with the knowledge of past times, and the principles of religion, 
 to adopt a prejudice as opposed to the history as it is fatal to the 
 happiness of mankind. Religion has been, what in every age has 
 given virtue its strongest impulse, and government its steadiest 
 security. While therefore religion is valued, ii is a proof that 
 public principle is sound ; and that morality and government 
 repose on a safe and solid foundation. But when, for a sincere 
 
LETTER XXV. 
 
 119 
 
 conviction of the truth, and an enlightend zeal for the interests 
 of religion, you substitute that indifference which consigns truth 
 to contempt, by confounding it with error; all the energy of 
 virtue is gone, all the life of society is extinguished ; and if there 
 is a repose, it is that philosophic and fatal repose of voluptuousness 
 which is at once the forerunner and the symptom of its dis- 
 solution. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XXV. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Sir — Imagine not that I am an advocate of a cruel intolerance ; 
 but while I disavow such a sentiment, I cannot sufficiently depre- 
 cate that specious scepticism which, under the guise of liberality, 
 dissolves all that is settled in religious conviction. I also wish to 
 combat a prejudice generally received, because seldom examined, 
 that the Catholic religion is less favourable to a sound and 
 rational freedom than Protestant principles. If a suspicion 
 should once prevail, that the Articles of the Church are not 
 believed by those who solemnly profess them, such a suspicion 
 would silently undermine the influence of religion, and be preg- 
 nant with consequences most fatal to morality. I am far from 
 charging the dignitaries of the Establishment with insincerity ; 
 but, though I acquit them of such an imputation, it must be con- 
 fessed that their different explanations* of the oath by which 
 
 * Dr. Blackburn, Archdeacon of Cleayeland, acknowledges that out of an 
 hundred ministers of the Establishment, who, to prevent religious difference, 
 subscribe every year to the Articles of the Church, not one-fifth subscribe or 
 assent to them in the same uniform sense. Dr. Clayton, another dignitary, 
 asserts that no two thinking men ever agreed exactly in their opinion, even with 
 regard to any one article of it. And Dr. Clarke pretends there is a salvo in the 
 subscription, namely, I assent to the articles, inasmuch as they are agreeable to 
 Scripture, though the Judges of England have declared the contrary. The 
 reader who is anxious to learn more of this disedifying contrariety of opinion 
 among the dignitaries of the Establishment, about the fundamental articles of 
 their church, may consult “ Milner’s End of Controversy,” part ii, letter 15. 
 
120 
 
 LETTER XXV. 
 
 they subscribe to the Articles of the Church are calculated to 
 weaken, if not to shake, the convictions of the people. Some 
 imagine that the oath involves the obligation of an inward belief 
 in the articles subscribed to; others maintain that it is only 
 a bond to uphold an external communion. These explanations 
 may satisfy their own minds, while they give proofs of their 
 ingenuity ; but others, who are not so deeply skilled in the 
 refinements of casuistry, may be tempted to attach but little 
 importance to the awful obligation of an oath, and thus to ex- 
 tend their indifference to the most solemn principles of natural 
 religion. 
 
 How often is the attention of the legislature solicited to the 
 petitions of Protestant clergymen, who pray to be released from 
 the necessity of subscribing to those doctrinal points which are 
 painful to their consciences. Even during the last session, a 
 similar petition was presented, complaining of the violence that 
 was offered to the uncontrollable right of private judgment by 
 subscribing to such confessions. The creed of Saint Athanasius 
 is become peculiarly objectionable ; and though still read in the 
 public liturgies, some of the clergy of the Established Church 
 venture loudly to complain that their creed is still stained by 
 this dark and cruel relic of antiquated intolerance. Some of the 
 first names that have adorned the Establishment, confessed that 
 they knew not what were the essential doctrines of Christianity ; 
 and others have so explained away whatever was hard to be 
 understood in Scripture, as to lower its loftiest mysteries to mere 
 ceremonial observances. I do not dwell on these observations 
 either for the purpose of controversy or of casting reproach on 
 the Protestant religion. I have casually introduced them, on 
 account of their connexion with the subject to which I have first 
 solicited your attention. From the repeated applications that 
 are made in England to accommodate the liturgies to the grow- 
 ing improvement of the times, it is evident that the belief of its 
 doctrines is loose and unsettled. To what pitch of reformation 
 the improvement of the times and the progress of philosophy 
 would bring this doctrine, it might not be easy to determine, 
 amidst such a discordant variety of opinions. However, if the 
 opinions of Paley, or some of the other most admired champions 
 of the Church, were fixed for an orthodox standard, the cum- 
 brous creed of $ he Establishment would be soon reduced to more 
 than apostolical simplicity. 
 
 You must, therefore, easily observe, that among the most 
 distinguished Protestants, there is little of conviction in the 
 leading articles of their creed ; and we know that where the 
 principles of belief are loose, the rule of private or public virtue 
 cannot be rigid. That approbation, then, of every error, which 
 insensibly creates an indifference to religion, and enervates the 
 
LETTER XXV. 
 
 121 
 
 vigour of public morals, must be eventually injurious to society. 
 I do not mean to propose the example of those to your imitation, 
 who labour to save the nation from this lethargy by encouraging 
 the war of sectaries. Religious sects are seldom the production 
 of piety or talent. In the commencement of religious revolu- 
 tions, they are sometimes the offspring of vigorous but perverted 
 intellects. In a more tranquil state of society, they are the 
 growth of deep design and sober imposture, produced by men 
 who, encouraged by the example and success of others, trade on 
 the follies and errors of mankind. Such precisely is the cha- 
 racter of the sects that succeed each other with such rapid 
 fecundity in the sister country. To share in the overflowing 
 wealth of the country was devoutly wished for by many a needy 
 adventurer, who could not reach it by the ordinary channels of 
 trade or commerce, or the learned professions. Hence, a new 
 and unheard-of factory of Bibles was set up, to which all con- 
 tributed who sought a character for sanctity ; and which em- 
 ployed a vast number of hands in their printing and circulation. 
 Such is the real origin of the Bible system, of which I may have 
 occasion to speak again — affording evidence of England’s wealth, 
 but none of her piety. 
 
 What counterpoise, then, to that religious indifference into 
 which the higher orders of the country are fast subsiding, can 
 be found in that crafty and counterfeit fanaticism of the sectaries, 
 which has no higher origin than the superfluities of that wealth 
 from which it is derived ? In vain will any country look for the 
 solid stay of her institutions among those reeling sectaries, who 
 drink of the spirit of delusion until they fall victims to their 
 own excesses. England boasts of her morality. If her morality 
 were to be measured by the number of her Bibles, she would, 
 undoubtedly, be the most moral nation upon earth. But, alas, 
 we have frightful instances of the unfeeling indifference of her 
 children to any moral responsibility, not only in those moments 
 when, in the frenzy of passion, duty may be forgotten, but 
 even in the moment of awful import, when the terror of ap- 
 proaching judgment ought to shake the most hardened insen- 
 sibility. What avails, then, the profusion of Bibles that are 
 never read ; or, if read, are turned into a subject of ridicule or 
 profanation? Or who is the best member of society — he who 
 obeys an authorized magistrate in promulgating the laws, or he 
 who, while he ostentatiously displays a copy of these laws, is as 
 ignorant of their contents as he is careless of their infraction, or 
 reads them only for the purpose of exposing the inconsistency of 
 parliament, and trampling on its authority ? From this correct 
 delineation of the state of England, I may be fortified in con- 
 cluding that there is in that country much of the pomp and 
 circumstance, but little of the vital spirit, of religion. From 
 
 i 
 
122 
 
 LETTER XXV. 
 
 within, there is a slow decay that has worked to the very vitals 
 of Christianity ; from without, there is sectarian bustle and 
 agitation, gathering violence in its progress, and threatening the 
 existence of the Establishment. To a statesman interested for 
 its safety, the danger must appear equally serious and alarming, 
 whether the State is shaken by external violence, or sapped by 
 the gradual subducation of those principles on which society 
 reposes. The vain efforts of the sectaries the Establishment 
 may despise, since they carry within them the active principle of 
 their own dissolution. But, should the external sources of her 
 greatness be dried up, England will unquestionably find her 
 greatest danger in that religious indifference, which is annihi- 
 lating her moral energies ; and which, though characterized by 
 the name of liberality, is not unlike that voluptuous liberality of 
 the ancient Romans, which, by deriding every truth, dissolved 
 every virtue, until at length it extinguished the spirit of freedom 
 and ushered in the reign of despotism. 
 
 I have thus discussed the religious complexion of the Pro- 
 testant Establishment at some length, in order to dissipate a 
 prejudice too frequently entertained, that the Protestant religion 
 is propitious to well-regulated liberty. If the tendency of a 
 religion lead to that indifference about truth or error, which 
 extinguishes those moral obligations that mitigate the sway of 
 the Government, and ennoble the obedience of the subject, that 
 religion may be pregnant, indeed, with revolution, without being 
 more favourable to freedom. Revolution is not liberty ; revolu- 
 tion and despotism approach, by way of extremes, and both 
 ancient and modern history attest that despotism is most fixed, 
 where revolutions are most frequent. If we have had a revolu- 
 tion which is deemed fortunate, it is no reason for making a 
 second experiment. If of all the combinations of which the 
 elements of society are susceptible, one has come forth admired 
 for its symmetry, it would be rashness to throw those again into 
 confusion, with the hope of bringing out another of a more 
 perfect form. 
 
 By the Emancipation of the Catholics, this constitution, instead 
 of being endangered, would acquire new stability. That reli- 
 gious indifference which knows no higher motive of action than 
 self-interest, would be corrected. By the infusion of a masculine 
 and vigorous morality, the decay of virtue would be restored — a 
 new spirit would be poured into the constitution — and every 
 member would feel an interest for that common centre of life 
 and freedom, from which it derived its own strength and 
 activity. 
 
 Having thus contemplated its religious aspect, I shall next 
 proceed to view it under its political complexion. 
 
 It is one of which it is needless to announce the importance. 
 
LETTER XXVI. 
 
 123 
 
 since it has already engaged the deep attention of the legisla- 
 ture, and excited in this country a long and serious controversy. 
 It may not, however, be unnecessary to lead back your attention 
 farther, in retracing the steps by which this controversy was 
 introduced. 
 
 Of all the calumnies with which the Catholics of Ireland have 
 been so unsparingly assailed, none has been more frequently or 
 industriously put forward, than their unconquerable disaffection 
 to the family of our gracious Sovereign. In vain did they 
 tender the repeated assurance of their duteous attachment to the 
 throne and persons of his august predecessors ; in vain did they 
 confirm this assurance by the solemn sanction of an oath, and 
 seal their sincerity by the profusion of their blood. Those 
 whose interests are bound up with the continuance of the system 
 of rigour and exclusion, repeated the odious calumnies with a per- 
 severance which no repetition could tire, and with an effrontery 
 which no refutation could shame. It was signified, at length, 
 that his present Majesty was to honor this country with a visit 
 after his coronation, and the inhabitants rejoiced at the oppor- 
 tunity it afforded them of testifying their affection. The warm 
 and enthusiastic welcome with which he was greeted on our 
 shores, and the heart-felt homage with which he was encircled in 
 our capital, proved that loyalty is not a counterfeit feeling among 
 the Catholics of this country. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * LETTER XXVI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Tal Jiero torna a la stagione estiva 
 
 Quel, che parve nel gel piacevo Vangue. — Tasso. 
 
 Thus the sun’s heat the glossy serpent warms 
 From Winter’s sleep, and with fresh fury arms. 
 
 Sir — I f his Majesty’s visit was productive of good, it also pro- 
 voked alienation; and while royalty diffused joy and warmth in 
 its passage, it also quickened into deadlier action those poisonous 
 
124 
 
 LETTER XXVI. 
 
 beings which had lain in the torpor of their own bigotry, until 
 awakened by its warmth into a more vigorous animation. 
 
 The farce of counterfeit harmony that was played off during 
 the King’s stay in Ireland was quickly dissolved on his departure. 
 Scarce was the centre withdrawn, which had attracted to a tem- 
 porary order the discordant elements of society, when they again 
 flew off with a more hostile repulsion. The work of discord 
 again commenced with such earnestness, as if men were resolved 
 to atone, by the sincerity of their antipathies, for the hollow and 
 temporary reconciliation into which they had been betrayed. It 
 might have been naturally expected, that the Church, on this 
 occasion, would have interposed its meek authority, to allay the 
 ferment of the times ; and that the mandate of conciliation, 
 which was issued by its head, would have been faithfully ex- 
 ecuted by his ecclesiastical functionaries. But, alas ! their zeal 
 overcame their charity, and through the intemperate charges of 
 some of the bishops of the Established Church, the growing 
 spirit of discord was further inflamed by polemical acrimony. 
 While Doctor Magee denounced from his Cathedral the religion 
 of Catholics, without condescending to assign a particle of argu- 
 ment for the sentence of proscription, the profound Corporation 
 of Dublin pronounced his Grace to be an oracle of theological 
 wisdom ! ! After the grave decision of so competent an authority, 
 it would have been impiety to dispute his Grace’s pretensions ; 
 and, accordingly, some of his paradoxes have been received with 
 a submission, and propagated with a zeal, which afford unequi- 
 vocal proofs of the readiness of the Protestant mind to receive 
 impressions unfavourable to our religion. 
 
 Dublin, however, was not the only stage on which the Pro- 
 testant ecclesiastics stimulated the expiring fervour of their 
 followers. Doctor Trench, whose exertions in relieving the poor 
 of the extensive diocese of Tuam are gratefully remembered, 
 evinced, in the course of last summer, a more than ordinary zeal 
 for the Protestant Establishment. It is with reluctance that I 
 associate Doctor Trench with the other individuals who have 
 endeavoured to ferment their flocks with the leaven of religious 
 bigotry. Had his Grace refrained from those invectives against 
 his Catholic brethren and their religion, which he discharged 
 from the pulpit, he might have descended to the grave with the 
 character of a meek and pacific prelate. The memory of those 
 scenes of religious proselytism, by which he succeeded in ascend- 
 ing to the archiepiscopal throne, would probably never have been 
 revived. Fortunately for his fame, a splendid opportunity had 
 offered itself of burying for ever the recollection of those scenes 
 that were associated with his elevation, and of merging the 
 ardent zealot in the milder character of a benevolent and 
 charitable pastor. The reader will perceive I allude to the 
 
LETTER XXVI. 
 
 125 
 
 disastrous period when the sounds of discord had died away 
 amidst the awful solemnity of public woe, and no sound was 
 heard but of famine over the land. On that occasion, the 
 solicitude of the Bishop was unremitting, in applying the relief 
 which had been obtained from Government and the English 
 people to the wants of the distressed peasantry. This kindness 
 was not lost upon the people : and the day on which his Grace 
 witnessed his harvest cut down by the gratuitous labour of the 
 neighbouring peasantry, proved that they are not the insensible 
 wretches they are represented to be by the violent and venal 
 defamers of their creed. Such acts demonstrate that they 
 possess a generous susceptibility of kindness from whatever 
 quarter it proceeds; nor do they confine to the professors of 
 their own faith the retribution of their gratitude. 
 
 But the Protestant Archbishop of Tuam was not content with 
 the rich reward which he might have earned by his exertions in 
 the cause of charity, without also signalizing his prowess in the 
 defence of the established faith. Had he confined himself to the 
 doctrines of his own Church, without reviling the creed of the 
 Catholics, as well as the acquirements of its pastors, his remarks 
 would have escaped animadversion ; but in the overflowings of 
 his zeal for the Establishment, his compassion extended itself to 
 the spiritual misery of his Catholic brethren, whom his Grace 
 did not fail to represent as the victims of ignorance, designedly 
 perpetuated by an artful and interested priesthood. From the 
 warmth pf declamation he might have been transported to the 
 effusion of language which he might have afterwards regretted. 
 And he deserves some praise for his forbearance in not imitating 
 one of his colleagues, who diffused his offensive sentiments in a 
 printed publication. But that in the course of his charge to the 
 clergy of Tuam, he assailed the faith, and insulted the feelings 
 of Catholics, is attested by persons of each persuasion ; and 
 though some have affected to admire his orthodoxy and zeal, 
 others have deplored his unseasonable intemperance. 
 
 Besides these splendid instances of provocation, which were 
 calculated to irritate and inflame, the pulpit rung with the invec- 
 tives of humbler parsons, who were anxious to catch the tone and 
 earn the patronage of those who had to dispense the wealth and 
 honours of the Establishment. The example set by these digni- 
 taries was extensively adopted, with this difference only, that 
 their imitators were freed from some of those restraints of 
 decorum which were necessarily imposed by their superior 
 station. All the worn-out calumnies against the ignorance and 
 restlessness of our people, and the mischievous designs of our 
 priesthood, were again and again put forth, without even the 
 drapery of a new dress to disguise the disgusting exhibition. 
 While the clergy thus poured forth the effusions of their intern- 
 
126 
 
 LETTER XXVI. 
 
 perate zeal, they were zealously seconded by other co-operators, 
 and the expiring sound of the pulpit was prolonged, by the 
 echoing of the press, to the extremities of our provinces. 
 
 While the religious and civil tenets of the Catholics of Ireland 
 were thus cruelly and wantonly misrepresented, a writer, gene- 
 rally supposed to be one of our bishops, undertook a vindication 
 of both, which he addressed to our Viceroy. The interest which 
 was excited by this publication, and the hostility which it pro- 
 voked are no unequivocal proofs of its merits. The novelty of a 
 person of his character placing himself in the presence of the 
 Viceroy, and pleading with respectful firmness the cause of his 
 injured countrymen, was calculated to excite surprise. Surprise 
 was soon succeeded by resentment : and those who were hitherto 
 in the habit of exclusively approaching the Lord Lieutenant, 
 have felt and expressed their mortification that their monopoly 
 has been invaded. The respectful use of a privilege which is 
 extended to all who feel themselves aggrieved, has been charac- 
 terized as an insolent intrusion ; and the wish of his Excellency 
 to show a strict impartiality in the administration of the laws, 
 has been artfully interpreted into a passion for an unworthy 
 popularity. 
 
 It is no wonder, Sir, that an inflexible regard to justice would 
 wear the appearance of partiality in the eyes of those who were 
 taught by long habit to expect a partial administration. And, 
 on the other hand, the Catholics have been so long accustomed 
 to opposition, that it cannot be deemed a wonder if they should 
 regard the cessation of insult as a kindness, and look upon 
 justice as a favour. But while his Excellency has sufficiently 
 proved, by not lavishing his attention on Catholics, that he is 
 above being swayed by popular favour, it is to be expected that 
 he will not be driven to a contrary course by the dextrous and 
 insidious imputation. 
 
 Among the many who have honoured this distinguished 
 prelate with their obloquy, one has appeared who has endea- 
 voured to give force to his animadversion by undertaking a 
 refutation of the bishop’s principles. It is somewhat singular 
 that this opponent of the ecclesiastical authority of Borne has 
 assumed the name of one of her earliest missionaries to this 
 country. Such is the charm of early impressions, that are 
 retained, with a devout attachment, in spite of the affectation of 
 riper years. 
 
 The pamphlet of “ Declan,” in point of purity of language 
 and pretension to theological learning, is unquestionably the 
 most creditable production by which the bishop has been com- 
 bated. But when he reflects on the character of the foes among 
 whom he is distinguished, his just discrimination will, doubtless, 
 appreciate the extent and value of the compliment. With the 
 
 * 
 
LETTER XXVI. 
 
 127 
 
 familiar demeanour of one who was conscious that he enjoyed all 
 the privileges of the State religion, he rebukes the unwelcome 
 intrusion of the prelate before his Excellency, and insinuates 
 that he had forgot in whose presence he had placed himself. 
 After reproaching his adversary with an antiquated garb, he 
 then puts on his court costume, which he fancied he was exclu- 
 sively privileged to wear, and endeavours to lay aside his 
 scholastic terms. But he soon lost sight of the individual whom 
 he addressed ; since the harshness of his language to his oppo- 
 nent breathed but little of the courtier whom he affected, and 
 could only be justified by his forgetfulness of the presence of his 
 Excellency, or from a prejudice which has been long entertained, 
 that the Catholics were out of the pale of the laws of civility as 
 well as the constitution, and that they were a caste of people 
 towards whom the courtesies of life might have been neglected 
 without any violation of decorum. On a comparison of both 
 productions, the impartial reader will determine which conveys 
 more of the meek spirit of a religious, and the dignified tone of 
 a cultivated, mind. The Catholic Bishop has been accused of 
 warmth in his language ; yes, he has been warm, and in his por- 
 trait of our unmerited suffering, his language rose to a tone of 
 firm, but respectful, remonstrance. But, if he was eloquent and 
 impassioned, his feelings were not pointed against the Chief 
 Governor, but against those who had accused him of sedition, 
 and dragged him before his tribunal : and if, like the Apostle, in 
 presence of Festus, he exhibited the chains which we wore, the 
 persecutions we underwent, and the religion by which we were 
 sustained, the theme was suggested by the calumny of his 
 accusers ; and if he sought for redress, it was not by acting on 
 the irritated passions of the people, but, with an high conscious- 
 ness of the justice of his cause, and his rights as a Boman 
 citizen, he sought protection from the frenzy of a persecuting 
 multitude, by throwing himself into the arms of the laws, and 
 appealing to the majesty of Caesar. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
128 
 
 LETTER XXVII. 
 
 LETTER XXVII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Sir — Among the evils which pressed severely on the peasantry 
 of this country, the author of the vindication has deservedly 
 numbered the tithes, which, independent of the anomaly of being 
 claimed by a clergy from persons to whom they make no return 
 of spiritual instruction, have become doubly odious from the 
 mode of their exaction. Since the enactment of the law of 
 agistment in the Irish House of Commons, by which the pasturage 
 of the gentry was released from tithes, which were entirely trans- 
 ferred on the shoulders of the peasantry, this disastrous subject 
 has been fruitful of unremitting vexation. Before the Union, the 
 scenes of oppression to which this odious system gave rise, were 
 distressing beyond description ; and the facts which have been 
 recorded by Grattan, prove that the sad reality of the evils which 
 it occasioned could not be exaggerated even by his eloquent 
 denunciations. The miserable cottier, whose annual labour was 
 entirely expended in paying the exorbitant rent of the acre on 
 which he raised the scanty support of his wretched family, saw 
 the tenth portion, seized by the agents of a parson, the blessings 
 of whose ministry he never felt, save in this annual visitation. 
 Without money to satisfy those rigorous demands, he often beheld 
 the fruit of his hard earning snatched away beyond the hope of 
 redemption, and himself and family consigned to the miserable 
 alternative of beggary or plunder. The former alternative was 
 most generally resorted to ; but when the resources of charity 
 were exhausted, by indigence constantly accumulating, hence the 
 peace of our country has been so frequently disturbed, and the 
 property of its inhabitants so frequently violated by these 
 desperate wretches, who, having tried the arts of industry in vain, 
 are often driven to crime, with the hope of being expatriated. 
 Miserable must be the state of society indeed, which dissolves all 
 those ties by which the Irish peasant is proverbially attached to 
 his native soil, and forces him to sacrifice all he holds most dear ; 
 nay, to court the infamy of a conviction which procures him the 
 means of emigration. Yet such is the state of Ireland at present; 
 and among the numberless convicts who are transported from 
 this country, there are found many who express an unnatural 
 cheerfulness at their lot, confident that any change of fortune 
 will better their condition. I am far from putting all these con- 
 
LETTER XXVII. 
 
 129 
 
 sequences to the account of the tithe system. The cause of misery 
 so widely extended is more complicated in its nature. But cer- 
 tain it is, that these lawless associations, by which the peace of 
 our country is so frequently disturbed, are more or less destruc- 
 tive in proportion to the rigour or the mildness by which 
 tithes have been exacted. 
 
 Perhaps the best evidence of the evils which have been 
 generated by this system, may be furnished by the attention 
 which has been directed to it last summer by the wisdom of 
 the legislature. Had the complaints which have been so often 
 preferred, been the effusions of discontent, they would not 
 have engaged the united efforts of the Government and Senate in 
 devising means to redress them. From the caution with which 
 petitions for redress of grievances are generally harkened to, the 
 jealousy with which they are examined, and even the delay that 
 preceeds any alteration in a long established system, we may 
 safely conclude that the legislature would not have resolved on 
 any modification in the tithe laws had not the evil grown into an 
 inveteracy beyond further endurance. 
 
 It must therefore bespeak more than any ordinary confidence 
 in any individual to arraign the wisdom of making some modifi- 
 cation of those laws, of which the evil effects have been fatally 
 illustrated. If the late measures of parliament have not given 
 complete satisfaction, or entirely remedied the evil, let us recollect 
 that they are only the incipient efforts of that deliberative 
 wisdom which will gradually bring the work to its full consum- 
 mation. Resting thus on the powers and wisdom of parliament, 
 I cannot fail to shield myself against those sinister imputations 
 which are frequently cast on the advocates for innovation. 
 “Declan” will not surely misinterpret the motives of the man 
 whose only appeal is to the legislature ; since, according to him, 
 the English legislature is the sole fountain of our laws, and the 
 source from which our blessings are derived. After thus acknow- 
 ledging the omnipotence of parliament in one instance, I know 
 not with what consistency he can refuse it the same virtue in 
 every other, unless he wishes to free it from the common lot 
 of all human institutions, by investing it with immutability. 
 
 But perhaps the clergy of the Established Church would fain 
 take a loftier position, by deriving their rights to tithes from the 
 Levitical priesthood. I could not have imagined, unless I were 
 convinced by the recent writings of its advocates, that the clergy 
 of the Established Church in Ireland, could have ever sought sup- 
 port for their temporal possessions in the law of Moses. It is 
 true, notwithstanding the confidence of our adversaries, that no 
 church can claim a right to tithes by virtue of its succession to 
 the ancient priesthood, when the ancient priesthood itself has not 
 been transmitted by inheritance. But if the Protestants should 
 
130 
 
 LETTER XXVII. 
 
 insist on the derivative nature and constructive immortality of the 
 priesthood of Aaron — they at least cannot be deemed the lawful 
 heirs of its privileges. The term of fifteen hundred years is a 
 frightful chasm in the chain of succession. During the darkness 
 of that interval, every record is lost that could connect the 
 Establishment with the dissolution of the Levitical law, and 
 since it is a peculiar feature in English jurisprudence to reject 
 prescription and invalidate possession, of which the title is 
 defective, it would be wisdom in the friends of the Established 
 Church, not to insist too strongly on the analogies between the 
 Jewish Church and their own. 
 
 I should be cautious in occupying your time, or tiring your 
 patience with polemical controversy. However, you might be 
 inclined to smile, on hearing that the champion of the Establish- 
 ment, instead of deriving the right to tithes from the possession 
 of the old religion, with which they were accompanied, ingeniously 
 supposes the tithes to have been the medium through which the 
 true religion was diverted from its original course, and conveyed 
 to the Protestant Establishment. Such an argument must bring 
 full conviction to every mind that looks upon the possession of 
 tithes as the essence of the priesthood. If, together with the 
 transfer of the tithes, the adoption of the changes prescribed at 
 the Reformation, was sufficient to identify the Protestant with 
 the Catholic religion, then the re-adoption of more material 
 changes, which a more liberal parliament might prescribe, would 
 be sufficient for an identical succession, provided still those 
 changes were conveyed through the channel of the tithes. And 
 if, perchance, the parliament should propose such changes as 
 would scarcely have an article of the Christian religion, still 
 accompanying them with tithes, doubtless its identity as a con- 
 stitutional incorporation , would still be preserved. And thus, 
 provided the tithes are preserved, they will prove a remedy 
 against the errors and dangers of innovation. While the tithes 
 are incorporated with the constitution of the Church, there is, to 
 use our author’s phrase, a vis medicatrix about them, which would 
 immediately throw off the poison of the rankest error, or convert 
 it to the nutriment of sound doctrine ; and thus Mahometanism 
 itself, passed through the alembic of the tithe system, would be 
 immediately purged to all its grossness, and assimilated by the 
 continued identity of a legal corporation, with Christianity 
 itself. 
 
 If ridicule could be indulged with propriety, on so grave and 
 solemn a subject, there is nothing calculated to excite it more 
 than the ludicrous attempts of the advocates of the Establishment 
 to reconcile their obsequiousness to the omnipotence of the 
 legislature, with the immutability of their religion. If the doctrine 
 of the Establishment be not defensible, but on the grounds of 
 
LETTER XXVII. 
 
 131 
 
 its legal adoption, let it enjoy all the authority which it can 
 derive from such a source. Let its abettors at once avow the 
 tenet that the legislature can controul the speculative belief 
 of the subject, and not expend any superfluous argument in 
 showing its conformity with Revelation. If, however, abandoning 
 the ground of its connexion with the Catholic Church, whose 
 tenets no legislature can controul, they derive its origin entirely 
 from the legislature, then we may be permitted, without the 
 imputation of impiety, to enquire into the political benefits of such 
 an institution. 
 
 In England, where the majority of the people are Protestant, 
 the Establishment may be useful. In Ireland, it is hostile to the 
 interest of its inhabitants. This difference may be easily traced 
 to the different circumstances of both countries. Whatever may 
 be the natural tendency of the Protestant religion to a latitude 
 of belief ultimately fatal to the best interests of society, while 
 those great principles on which it reposes, are respected, its 
 stability is upheld; and those by whom they are inculcated, 
 confer a political benefit. Hence the Protestant clergy have in 
 England a natural and constitutional right to the tithes, since 
 they are the real, as well as the constitutional ministers of 
 religious instruction. — Here the case is different ; the instruction 
 of which the people stand in need, is imparted by the Catholic 
 clergy. With Protestant ministers they hold no communion; 
 and hence, as no spiritual benefit is conferred on one hand, there 
 is no obligation of paying tithes on the other, save what the civil 
 law imposes. Since, then, there is no natural claim to tithes 
 arising from the interchange of reciprocal duties, and relations 
 beyond what the law has established, it follows that the law can 
 annul an obligation which is founded on no higher principle. 
 
 It is therefore an useless waste of time, to prove that parsons 
 have a legal title to their tithes; it is a position that is not 
 controverted; but it is contended that they have only a legal 
 claim. Little, therefore, will be effected by the advocates of the 
 system, unless they demonstrate that these rights he deeper than 
 mere legal enactments, and that they cannot be overturned, 
 without digging up some of those foundations which legislators 
 themselves are taught to revere, and on which all the superstruc- 
 ture of civil law is erected. But instead of finding a claim to 
 tithes connected with those sacred principles ; such a claim is at 
 variance with them all. The Protestant clergy of Ireland may 
 insist that tithes are a portion of their rights ; but these are rights, 
 to use the language of Mr. Burke, which are the most odious of 
 all wrongs, and which, as soon as they degenerate into wrongs, 
 the legislature may abolish. Whether the legal rights of the 
 Irish Protestant clergy are among those wrongs, the wisdom of 
 parliament will eventually decide. For certain it is that they are 
 
132 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 held by virtue of no other authority. It is true that the legal 
 possession of tithes was transferred to the Protestant ministers 
 from the Catholic priesthood. But since the discharge of these 
 duties, and the ministry of that instruction on which the natural 
 right to tithes was originally founded, did not accompany this 
 transfer, hence its sole validity was in the will of parliament, 
 which can be equally exercised in a second, as a will, as in a first 
 arrangement of those possessions. 
 
 But the Establishment has now become conscious of its strength, 
 and though in its infancy it acknowledged the competence of the 
 power that erected, and the omnipotence of the hand that 
 enriched it, it assumes a haughty tone, and defies annihilation. 
 The Establishment of the Church of England is a work of human 
 contrivance, growing with the progress of mind, and gradually 
 partaking of all the improvements of the times. Its artificers 
 ought therefore to practise a lesson of respectful moderation, 
 lest by aspiring to an independence of the power to which it 
 owed its origin, they should give a proof of their folly instead of 
 an argument of their wisdom ; and by despising, in an evil hour, 
 the omnipotence of parliament, they should provoke its ven- 
 geance to suspend their daring undertaking, and scatter the 
 workmen in confusion over the earth. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, 1823. 
 
 Sir — If the Church be a corporation — and that it is, is confessed 
 by its warmest supporters — the admission is not favourable to its 
 perpetuity. While the corporation lasts, its members, it is true, 
 are invested with a constructive immortality ; but this fiction of 
 the law protects the individuals only while the corporation lasts, 
 without guarding the body itself from dissolution. Such is ex- 
 pressly the doctrine of Blackstone, on whose authority “ Declan” 
 would fain rest the immobility of the Establishment.* 
 
 * See Blackstone, lib. i, cap. 18, sec. 485. 
 
LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 133 
 
 If the Church be a civil corporation, framed after the model 
 and adapted to the analogies of similar institutions, we may 
 safely conclude that it has already arrived to its meridian. 
 Corporations, at best, were but comparative benefits — they grew 
 out of a disastrous and turbulent state of society — and were the 
 first nurseries in which the seeds of industry and freedom were 
 reared. The charters which were wrung by the infant republics 
 of Italy from the distress or fears of the German Emperors, 
 were the first parchments on which the name of liberty was 
 inscribed, and must be still deemed valuable on account of 
 the blessings which they transmitted. But this very liberty 
 soon degenerated into an abuse, by being converted into an 
 odious system of monopoly, in which but few were allowed to 
 participate. Thus, while the benefits of industry were exclu- 
 sively engaged by a few corporate towns, the body of the people 
 languished in indigence, and the contrast of their vassalage with 
 the freedom of their more favoured neighbours, only aggravated 
 still more the misery of their situation : amidst the power of 
 royalty and the liberty of corporate bodies, the people were 
 placed, subject to whatever was vexatious in the one, without 
 enjoying any of the prerogatives of the other. However, in the 
 conflict of those opposite powers, the people at length became 
 the gainers, and the very excess of corporate influence and 
 wealth became slowly productive of the redemption of the 
 people. While these cities abused their wealth in purchasing 
 from a king’s distress a further monopoly, he often neutralized 
 the deed, by extending similar immunities to other cities. And 
 thus the embankments of corporate monopoly were gradually 
 levelled, and freedom, “ like the waters of the sea, flowed over 
 the nations of Europe, blotting out in its progress every vestige 
 of servitude.” 
 
 Hence, what was first a blessing becomes itself an evil, when 
 fenced in by an intolerant system. While it works the good for 
 which it was established, it is suffered to stand ; but when age 
 and the vices incident to human institutions gradually produce 
 decay, it is then consigned to dissolution. If the end of the 
 corporate establishment of the Church be to convey instruction 
 to the mass of the people, and bring about their conversion, 
 experience ascertains whether that end has been accomplished. 
 
 And if it be to cement an union between England and Ireland, 
 we are taught by the clearest reason that an union cannot be 
 effected between extremes by a medium which has not a sym- 
 pathy with both. Now, instead of the Establishment being such 
 a connecting medium between the countries, it is calculated to 
 keep them asunder ; and, doubtless, they should approach with 
 stronger affinities by the removal of the intermediate body, with 
 which one cannot associate. Happily, I have before removed 
 
184 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 any possible suspicion of being unfavourable to a regal connexion 
 between England and Ireland. And, therefore, in asserting that 
 the Establishment is not necessary for such a purpose, it will not 
 be understood that I should wish to sever that connexion ; on the 
 contrary, my motto would be that of the poet — 
 
 No wound in fight can either singly bear, 
 
 For both alike must every fortune share. 
 
 While I thus combat the weakness of those arguments on 
 which the advocates of the Establishment would fain rest it, let 
 me not be numbered among those rash theorists who, without 
 regard to the urgency of circumstances, would instantly subvert 
 a long-established system. With such theorists I have no con- 
 cern, conscious that their immature conceptions would be often 
 more dangerous in their execution than inveterate abuses. In- 
 stead of advancing anything disrespectful to the Government or 
 legislature of the country, my design has been to expose the 
 presumption of those who would fain place any portion of society 
 beyond the reach of legislative interference. In the enactments 
 which the wisdom of parliament will pass, the Catholics will 
 acquiesce ; nor shall they refuse, while the State requires it, to 
 contribute to the support of its public functionaries. But they 
 feel it an anomaly to be under any natural obligation of support- 
 ing a body of men, on the presumption of religious relations 
 which do not mutually exist between them ; and, therefore, the 
 only principle that can actuate them, is a respect for established 
 order. As the ministers of the Established Church are officers 
 who are paid, because they are supposed to perform certain 
 duties, to grant them annual pensions out of the Exchequer 
 would remove much discontent, and answer all the ends of distri- 
 butive justice. 
 
 The only objection to such a mode is the corporate nature of 
 the Establishment; but such an objection can have no weight 
 unless in the supposition that such bodies, whether they answer 
 the end for which they were incorporated or not, are liable to no 
 change, and bid defiance to dissolution. 
 
 Among those who feel but little gratitude for the civil or 
 religious advantages which the Establishment has conferred, 
 “ Declan” cannot surely be numbered. Were we to adopt his 
 devout sentiments, we should believe that the Church of Eng- 
 land was one of the greatest blessings that ever was conferred on 
 man. At the mention of her name, he breaks forth into an 
 ecstacy of jubilee ; and the rapturous enthusiasm with which he 
 turns towards England, reminds one of the fervour with which 
 the exiles of Babylon signed their devotions to Sion. What a 
 pity that any impediment would check the impetuosity of soul, 
 
LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 135 
 
 with which he seems to be borne from this land of bondage 
 towards that delightful country that leads to heaven ! But a 
 dignified situation in the Court of Assuerus would perhaps recon- 
 cile him a little longer to his sojournment, and cheer the de- 
 spondence of his captivity. 
 
 It is, then, unnecessary to dwell on the obvious reasons that 
 attach many individuals to the Establishment. While it pos- 
 sesses wealth and patronage to lavish on its adherents, it will not 
 want the aid of those who may mistake the splendor of its 
 honours for the splendour of its evidences. If the mind should 
 hesitate between opposite motives of belief, the weight of the 
 tithe system may have some influence in deciding its fluctuation. 
 Instead of wondering, then, at the conduct of those who desert 
 the religion of their birth, to enlist themselves under its banners, 
 it is a matter of surprise that greater numbers are not attracted 
 to its service. Yet the small number of apostates is a circum- 
 stance which, amidst all our afflictions, must reflect credit on the 
 steady faith of the people of Ireland. They want not incentives. 
 The present condition of the Establishment in Ireland holds out 
 the strongest temptations to apostacy, where, to be enlisted, 
 according to the strong language of Tertullian, is to be distin- 
 guished. Excellence is relative, and borrows much of its lustre 
 from contrast ; and it is remarkable, that some of those who are 
 put forward as the best champions of the Established Church, 
 are men who, had they remained in its bosom, would have 
 acquired but little eminence in their own. I am not, therefore, 
 
 surprised that his Lordship of L n should have recommended 
 
 the encouragement to apostacy, in order to renovate the decay- 
 ing vigour of the Establishment, by the infusion of fresh spirit 
 from the Catholic Church. But let me assure his Lordship that 
 such a declaration betrays a secret consciousness of the necessity 
 of some aid beyond what the Establishment can bestow ; and 
 were his Lordship to adopt the advice of “ Hierophilos,” he 
 would beg leave to suggest to him the impolicy of such a mea- 
 sure. Between the Establishment and those who, from selfish 
 motives, are drawn over to her support, there exists no sincere 
 and cordial sympathy : there is always a secret distrust ope- 
 rating in either quarter, and hence an affectation of zeal that is 
 not felt, on the part of those who fly to their enemies, lest they 
 should share the fate of David, who, after sojourning a while 
 among the Philistines, through an apprehension of Saul, was 
 banished from their camp. Let not, then, the Establishment 
 hope for cordial aid from those who are to be stimulated by 
 venal motives. The necessity of recurring to the service of 
 mercenaries, is always a sure symptom of the decay of native 
 virtue ; and his Lordship will not, I trust, fail to meditate on the 
 sage reflection of Montesquieu, that the confiding the defence of 
 
136 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 the empire to the unsteady faith of mercenaries was one of the 
 most powerful causes that accelerated the downfal of Rome.* 
 
 It is now insinuated by its redoubted champions, that without 
 the stimulus of its ample emoluments and gorgeous honours, few 
 would be found to devote themselves to the labours of theology. 
 Such an admission is a proof of the mercenary spirit I have 
 alluded to. Alas! the age of chivalry is gone; the unbought 
 grace of life and cheap defence of nations are no more ! ! And 
 to the generous assertors of the purity of her faith, have suc- 
 ceeded a crowd of calculating champions, who measure their 
 exertions by the prospect of their rewards. That disinterested 
 virtue — that lofty stoicism which worshipped the doctrine of the 
 Establishment, on account of its own native beauty, is now 
 relaxed ; and we are arrived, at length, at the disastrous reign 
 of a selfish philosophy, which makes virtue itself a subject of 
 voluptuous calculation. 
 
 Quis enim virtutem amplectitur ipsara 
 Prsemia si tollas ? f 
 
 While, therefore, the benefits of the Protestant Establishment 
 are eulogised by those by whom they are exclusively possessed, 
 we are ready to make large allowances for the exaggerations 
 which gratitude inspires. That it should be commended by 
 those who have been taught from their infancy to associate it 
 with whatever is venerable in their religion, cannot excite our 
 wonder ; but that it should have subdued all the prejudices of 
 early impressions, is a circumstance that may be viewed under 
 different complexions. To those who have been in the habit of 
 traducing the religion of Ireland, such conduct may appear the 
 result of religious conviction ; and no doubt they hail the acces- 
 sion of every such member as a new triumph of their principles. 
 On those, however, who study the human heart, and behold what 
 inducements are held out by one religion to flatter its propen- 
 sities, different will be the impression. For me, I will not now 
 undertake to weigh the relative motives of preference or rejec- 
 tion which are suggested by both religions. It is sufficient for 
 me to know that there is often a venal praise which is anything 
 but evidence of a sincere and cordial preference. An Irish mem- 
 ber of the Protestant Establishment may, therefore, exhaust his 
 rhetoric in his eulogy of the Church of England, while some may 
 entertain a secret suspicion that the priest speaks not from him- 
 self, but that the gold of Philip, or its expectation, has inspired 
 the responses of the oracle. 
 
 * Sur le Grandeur et la Decadence de l’Empire Romain, chap, xviii, page 134. 
 
 f Take its rewards, its worldly props, away, 
 
 And virtue’s doomed to languish and decay. 
 
LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 137 
 
 To prove the moderation of the proprietors of Church lands, 
 we are triumphantly directed to the striking contrast between 
 the real value of their estates, and the sum at which they are 
 let by their ecclesiastical possessors. And thus it is insinuated 
 that this vast difference is entirely in favour of the people. The 
 disingenuous fallacy of such a statement is calculated to mislead 
 but few individuals. Those to whom the lands are let by the 
 bishops are not the immediate tenants of the soil. The exorbi- 
 tant fines which are exacted for a renewal of leases are an equi- 
 valent for the moderate terms on which the lands are set by the 
 bishop ; and the necessity of indemnity for these fines, that are 
 as frequent as the successive appointments, makes the condition 
 of the humbler tiller of the soil intolerable. In the enormous 
 fortunes that are amassed by those ecclesiastics, the reader may 
 perceive the benefits that are derived to the humble tenantry. 
 It has been often insinuated that the Catholic clergy look with an 
 evil eye on the temporalities of the Protestants, and that their 
 hostility proceeds from a hope of one day participating in the 
 spoil. Those, perhaps, who saw themselves ejected from the 
 temporalities which they long possessed, and which were trans- 
 mitted by a title as sacred, at least, as that by which they are 
 held by their present proprietors, might naturally enough have 
 cast a longing eye after their possessions, and cherished some 
 lingering hope of restoration. But that generation has long 
 since passed away : like the descendants of those who were 
 stripped of their patrimonial estates, and who have long since 
 acquiesced in the transfer of the law, the priesthood of Ireland 
 have relinquished every personal claim to the possession of the 
 church lands. They have, in retaining their doctrine, succeeded 
 to the best and most valuable portion of the inheritance of their 
 predecessors ; nor should they ever covet the temporalities of the 
 Establishment, lest they should share the fate of the unfortunate 
 Giezi, and lest, by succeeding to Naaman’s wealth, they should 
 inherit Naaman’s leprosy.* 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Kings, book iv, chapter r. 
 
 K 
 
138 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, April, 1823. 
 
 Sir — H aving thus dwelt at some length on a subject which has 
 already occupied, and is still likely to engage, the attention of the 
 legislature, I shall pass to another of vast importance, which has 
 a close connexion with the question of Emancipation. Although 
 the Irish people are represented as indolent and inactive, this 
 dispositition, as far as it exists, arises less from want of industry 
 than the want of an object on which it may be usefully employed. 
 It is a received maxim that the best artist can do nothing without 
 a subject on which to exercise his skill. And thus the energies of 
 the people of Ireland, from want of means to excite, or materials on 
 which to exercise, their industry, are doomed to languish in 
 inactivity, unless when stimulated by mischievous projects. Had 
 some of the superfluous wealth of the sister country, which is 
 often lent for the purpose of exciting foreign revolutions, been 
 expended to encourage the arts of peace in Ireland, the capitalists 
 would be amply repaid by the profits which they might derive 
 from such speculations. The English nation is justly said to be 
 the wealthiest nation in the world ; but wealth, as Lord Bacon 
 remarks, is like manure, which must be spread, in order to be 
 productive. Of what advantage, then, is it to us that it should 
 be in English banks, or, if diffused, spread among foreign 
 countries with whose prosperity we have but little connexion ? 
 
 As an apology for these capitalists, it is generally observed, that 
 the unsettled state of the country, and the restless character of 
 its inhabitants, deter them from embarking their money in any 
 large manufacturing concern. While the country is suffered to 
 remain in her present anomalous condition — her peace frequently 
 violated — her people systematically divided — her religion a pre- 
 tence for exclusion — and her natural resources paralyzed by 
 the operation of a spirit of commercial monopoly — the same 
 apology will be repeated. But by the diffusion of equal laws, 
 these obstacles would soon give way. Much of the causes of the 
 discontent which agitates the country would be removed. 
 These scenes of intestine discord and sanguinary warfare that 
 are protracted and embittered by the rancour of religious bigotry, 
 would yield to a more tolerant and pacific temper. A union in 
 affection and interest would be the result of union of laws ; and 
 thus that great measure would remove the obstacles that are now 
 
LETTER XXIX. 
 
 1 39 
 
 set to the prosperity of our people; and which, while that 
 measure is retarded, it is impossible to remove. Thus, Sir, it is 
 evident what a clear connexion exists between the emancipation 
 of the Irish Catholics, and the full attainment of those other 
 political advantages of which we stand so much in need. At 
 present, instead of any encouragement being held out to the 
 working our mines, or establishing manufactures, these objects 
 would be instantly checked lest the trade of England should be 
 injured. We have coal mines in abundance, and others still more 
 valuable, but no capital to work them ; or, should the attempt be 
 made, the jealousy of the merchants of the sister country would 
 render it abortive, by giving a premium for discontinuing the 
 work. 
 
 While the mineral wealth of our country lies concealed in 
 mines for want of proper encouragement to work them, the rich 
 and solid ore of her intellect has been equally neglected. The 
 analogy between her natural and moral energies cannot escape 
 observation ; and the minds of her inhabitants, like the hidden 
 riches of her mountains, have been hitherto buried without a 
 labourer to extract, or an artist to refine, the solid bullion. It will 
 not be understood that I wish to disparage the intellectual 
 faculties of a people which no species of persecution could entirely 
 subdue. No, their vigour was bound up in fetters — their elas- 
 ticity was kept down by an intolerable burden, and, without the 
 wickedness that deserved the punishment, they exhibited all the 
 vigour of the fabled giants, whose strength was observed to heave 
 off the incumbent mountains that were successively piled upon 
 them, to crush their mighty energies. 
 
 With regard to the question of the ignorance of the Irish, 
 they have been the most injured people that ever existed. The 
 cruellest means which the malignant ingenuity of man could 
 devise, were resorted to, for the oppression of the human mind, 
 and yet the injury was aggravated by insult, in reproaching us 
 with our ignorance. Not only were all the benefits of political 
 power and civil freedom wrested from the Catholics — not only 
 was their religion proscribed as a superstitious impiety — but what 
 was unheard-of before, the common unalienable blessings of 
 knowledge were interdicted, and the terrors of persecution, not 
 content with bodily inflictions, reached the mind itself and blocked 
 up all the avenues of knowledge. Doomed to all the misery 
 which a sanguinary policy could inflict, they were even refused 
 the consolations of that learning which soothes adversity, and 
 denied that kind interchange of mutual sympathy which lightens 
 another’s woe, by sharing half its burden. Thus were we left 
 for ages consigned to darkness and pining in intellectual solitude, 
 while a participation of that light which heaven grants to all, 
 was made a crime against the government of the land. You 
 
140 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 know, Sir, how often has the reproach of rebellion been cast upon 
 the people of this country. Yes, Sir, in their very thirst for litera- 
 ture they became rebels;* and if ever the reproach was honourable, 
 it was in asserting, at the peril of their lives, their imprescriptible 
 rights to knowledge which God has given to every intellect, and 
 which the tyranny of man cannot take away. 
 
 What then must be our opinion of the justice of those who are 
 perpetually upbraiding us with our ignorance, without adverting 
 to the cause by which it was inflicted ; and who mix up their 
 insults with insinuations of the harshest nature against the 
 characters of our clergy, by whom, whatever of learning still 
 lingered in the country, was fostered and diffused ? They were 
 the ministers of that knowledge which instructeth unto salvation, 
 and had it not been for their exertions, the peasantry of Ireland 
 would have exhibited a spectacle of moral degradation to which 
 the philosopher would for ever turn, in calculating to what degree 
 the operation of mischievous laws can debase the faculties of the 
 human mind. 
 
 It is not then true that the peasantry are plunged in religious 
 ignorance to that degree with which they have been reproached, 
 or which the untoward circumstances in which they have been 
 placed, would warrant a stranger to conjecture. It is true, an 
 extensive system of well-ordered education is wanting ; but there 
 are other remedies of still more pressing necessity. If we credit 
 the views of those who gave the most patient attention to the 
 condition of society in every stage, and reasoned most profoundly 
 on its wants and perfection, we will conclude that the wants of 
 the physical man must be provided for, before he aspires to the 
 attainment, or can derive benefit from the possession, of intel- 
 lectual knowledge. Literary information is a secondary want. 
 On an extensive scale, it is the offspring of opulence and refine- 
 ment : on the most limited plan, it requires that degree of com- 
 fort which supposes that the most craving of our lawful demands 
 are first satisfied. Now, that the Irish peasant is not in that 
 state of comfort which enables him to profit of the advantages of 
 education, is a fact of melancholy notoriety. There is, it is 
 observed, a degree of depression below which a people cannot 
 sink. That the Irish have sunk to that melancholy point may 
 be clear, from the circumstance of the famine which, in the 
 midst of plenty, would have swept away its population, had it 
 not been seasonably arrested. What was then felt over the 
 entire land is only what is partially experienced in different 
 parts of the country ; and it is a fact that no nutriment but the 
 potato saves a great portion of the population from more fre- 
 quently experiencing the same calamity. 
 
 * See Brown’s Penal Laws, chap, vi, page 225, who quotes the Statutes of 
 William and Mary. 
 
LETTER XXIX. 
 
 14] 
 
 Let those, then, who affect such a zeal for the amelioration of 
 the condition of our people, labour to bestow those advantages 
 which must be the foundation of any improvement which educa- 
 tion can confer. Let it not be understood that I should withhold 
 its blessings : no, but I should say with the Redeemer to them 
 who were so punctual in smaller duties, and so careless of the 
 first : “ Let those things be done, and leave not the other things 
 undone.” 
 
 While Ireland, then, is suffering by the incessant recurrence of 
 those evils by which she is periodically afflicted, and the legisla- 
 ture is employed in bringing out to public view some of the 
 latent causes of her distemper, we are still amused with the 
 ludicrous exhibition of societies gravely proffering us the Bible 
 as the chief remedy for our misfortunes. Such imposition on the 
 pious credulity of the English people might have been endured 
 before they became acquainted with the real sources of our 
 wrongs. Then we might have been exhibited as men instinc- 
 tively savage, and our religion held up in the colours of an 
 odious superstition. But though the charge of ignorance might 
 have been just, it was not generous. If we were ignorant, is it 
 not because the avenues to knowledge were closed against us ; 
 and if we were doomed to walk darkling and alone, it is because 
 we were not suffered to cross the forbidden boundaries of know- 
 ledge, or to tread those fields of intellectual light* which reflect 
 a brighter sky, and where we breathe a purer atmosphere. If 
 the resiliency of native genius occasionally heaved off the intole- 
 rable weight, still there was a limit beyond which it could not 
 rise, and the fatal stone again recoiled, prostrating the unhappy 
 individual to the ground, who strove in vain to roll it to the 
 summit. 
 
 Though it might be policy to extend the blessings of educa- 
 tion, it is not wise to make our ignorance a subject of national 
 reproach. When our people were most sunk in barbarism, could 
 they not have thus replied to the revilers of their ignorance and 
 their creed : — “ Refrain from your invectives against our igno- 
 rance ; the exposure of its cause will not reflect much credit on 
 your policy or your religion. If the other nations of Europe 
 had thus reproached us, the reproach might have been easily 
 endured : we would then attempt to wipe it away ; or, if obliged 
 to submit to the imputation, we should at least endeavour to 
 mitigate its poignancy by tracing our ignorance to its cause. 
 But that we should be tauntingly upbraided with ignorance by 
 those who stript us of our knowledge, must excite feelings of a 
 generous indignation. If you wish to explore the sources of our 
 ignorance, consult the penal enactments of your statute books, 
 
 * Iargior, hie compos aether et lumine vestit 
 Purpureo — V irgil . 
 
142 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 and yon may trace it to a system of banishment and proscription. 
 After having consigned us to this state, why condemn the labour 
 of your own hands ? After having sown the dragon’s teeth, 
 why complain of their natural harvest ? To have been doomed 
 to ignorance and barbarism is enough. Aggravate not the evil 
 by the bitterness of contumely, and do not continue to impute to 
 us as crimes the evils and misfortunes which yourselves have 
 inflicted. If the light of knowledge be unfavourable to the 
 Catholic religion, why the attempt that has been made to extin- 
 guish that light which would have revealed its deformity ; or if 
 you relied on the superior beauty of your own system, why 
 again deprive us of that knowledge by which its beauty would 
 have been discovered ?” 
 
 Such might have been the language of our people in former 
 times. If now a different policy is pursued, there are grounds 
 to supect the motives of some of those who are most active in 
 the work of education. Though motives may be artfully dis- 
 guised, public declarations are often a sound criterion of men’s 
 principles. To show that the views of the Kildare-street Society, 
 to which so large a grant of the public money is annually made, 
 are hostile to our religion, will appear by a reference to the 
 transactions of its last annual meeting. The secretary distinctly 
 stated that the plan adopted by the society met the concurrence 
 of men of every religious creed, Catholics as well as Protestants, 
 of every denomination of Dissenters. With the exception of the 
 observations that grew out of the Duke of Leinster’s statement 
 in parliament, which his Grace’s character can well afford to sus- 
 tain, the report of the secretary was calculated to convey an 
 impression that the society was beneficial in its operation. Nay, 
 he laboured to make it appear that they possessed the confidence 
 of the Catholics of Ireland. But this impression was soon 
 effaced by the sincere disclosure of the next speaker, who de- 
 clared that the peasantry of Ireland were resolved to profit of 
 education in defiance of their pastors, and to examine by the 
 light of their own reason the religion in which they were educated! 
 Such a distinct avowal from an authorized member of the society, 
 in the midst of a public meeting, and remaining uncontradicted, 
 conveyed the hostile dispositions of the society to the religion of 
 Ireland. Here is the fundamental principle of the Protestant 
 religion openly avowed, that the peasantry are not only to read 
 the Bible, but to examine by its contents the truth of their 
 religion, and the legitimacy of that authority which they had 
 hitherto obeyed. 
 
 If the statement of the secretary, setting forth the cordial 
 concurrence of the Catholics and their clergy was true, what 
 becomes of the declaration which insinuated their hostility. If 
 the gentleman to whom I allude was incapable of insinuating a 
 
LETTER XXIX. 
 
 143 
 
 calumny, and that the children, in going to the schools, go in 
 defiance of the clergy, it must appear that the designs of the 
 society are hostile to the Catholic religion, unless we suppose 
 that it feels a warmer zeal for the purity of the Catholic faith 
 than that which is felt by its own teachers. And if, in fine, the 
 children cannot partake of the benefits or evils of those schools, 
 without first disregarding the authority of their pastors, we 
 know enough of the reverence of the Irish people for their 
 priesthood to conclude that their effects are not widely extended. 
 
 The truth is, Sir, some Catholic masters are employed — some 
 one or two agents are well paid and ostentatiously mentioned, as 
 exhibiting proofs of the liberality of the society, in the same 
 manner that the names of one or two Catholic commissioners* 
 have been mentioned in parliament by the Irish secretary, to 
 prove that places are not monopolized by Protestants ! ! A few 
 clergymen, probably placed in circumstances which appear to 
 them to render the general regulations of the Society innoxious, 
 have obtained a portion of their funds. In favour of some of 
 those, or perhaps of all, the general regulations have been pur- 
 posely relaxed by some of the agents, in order that they might 
 use the example of those as an argument against the general 
 repugnance which the system has met with. In some of the 
 schools the Bible is suffered to be a dead letter in the desks, 
 except when the Catholic pastor reads for the children a portion 
 of his own selection. I am far from condemning such a tolerant 
 principle ; but what must be condemned is, the insidious motive 
 with which these partial relaxations are made, in order to draw 
 from them an argument by which the public might be persuaded 
 that there is inconsistency among the Catholics, and that the 
 society is answering the ends of its institution. 
 
 Hikrophilos. 
 
 See the late debate on Mr. Grattan’s motion. 
 
144 
 
 LETTER XXX. 
 
 LETTER XXX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, May, 1823 . 
 
 Sir — It was the intention of the legislature, that the grant of 
 £14,000, made to the Kildare-street Society, should be prin- 
 cipally expended on the education of the Catholic poor. In 
 the number of Protestant establishments richly endowed for the 
 purposes of education, suitable provision was already made for 
 persons professing any branch of the Protestant religions. Now, 
 it appears from the report itself that the relation of those 
 educated by the Kildare-street Society to the gross population 
 is only as one to an hundred and twenty-one, in the largest 
 Catholic districts of Ireland — I mean the southern and western 
 provinces. As the number of clergy who have applied for pecu- 
 niary aid is small, it may be presumed that the greater number 
 educated are Protestants, and therefore that of the Catholics no 
 more than one out of five hundred of the gross population 
 derives any benefit from the funds of that society. The 
 average relation of one to five hundred may still be overrating 
 the number of Catholics educated, especially when we reflect 
 that it is in the north, amidst a Protestant population, that the 
 society has principally thriven, and that in that province there 
 are dioceses in which not one Catholic child enters its schools. 
 What then becomes of the immense mass over which the spirit 
 of these evangelists never moved, or who is it administers that 
 instruction which teaches them obedience to the laws, and lights 
 the way to heaven ? 
 
 From the report, it appears that out of all the clergy of 
 Ireland, only forty-six have applied for aid to the society, some 
 of whom have been refused, because they would not comply 
 with its conditions. To allow thirty pounds to each individual 
 would be probably exceeding the measure of their aid. But as 
 such a calculation is unimportant, whatever might have been the 
 sum granted, the entire would not probably exceed more than 
 the twentieth part of the entire funds of the society. The data 
 I have given are furnished by their own reports. The inference 
 is founded on fair and probable calculation. Whence it appears 
 that the benevolent views of the legislature are actually defeated, 
 and that the number of Catholics who partake of the fruits of 
 the public money is small in comparison to the mass of those who 
 
LETTER XXX. 
 
 145 
 
 are, by the bigotry of the system, excluded from its advantages. 
 Among the motions that are made in parliament to ascertain the 
 extent to which education is carried among the people, it might 
 be useful if a motion* were submitted to the house for an inquiry 
 into the number of schools that have been established solely by 
 the exertions of the Catholic clergy and laity, and supported 
 entirely by their joint contributions. This, Sir, is a practical 
 proposal ; it will bring before the public the comparative effects of 
 the Catholic clergy and the Bible Societies in the work of educa- 
 tion, and show what credit is due to those who so often insinuate 
 that whatever of instruction is imparted to the people is mainly 
 due to their own exclusive exertions. It will also demonstrate 
 an important fact, that if the schools erected by the Catholics 
 are not still more numerous, the circumstance arises from the 
 want of ability, rather than the want of inclination. It would 
 also appear that a system of education more profitable to the 
 people than that which is offered by the Kildare-street Society, 
 is practicable on a less expensive scale ; and that, therefore, a 
 portion of the money which is given to that society would be 
 productive of more benefit if it were vested in a committee, 
 acting with the concurrence of the Catholic clergy. 
 
 The object of this society, if we are to credit their professions, 
 is to produce harmony, and banish religious distinctions. If by 
 religious distinctions they mean those perpetual collisions that 
 arise among different classes of society, on the score of religious 
 intolerance, they are taking the most effectual means of pro- 
 tracting such distinctions, in consequence of the violence they 
 are offering to the consciences of Catholics, by insisting on con- 
 ditions to which they know they will not accede. But if by 
 religious distinctions they mean those strong and discriminating 
 features which point out truth from error, it is in vain for them 
 to hope that they shall secretly undermine a religion which has 
 mocked the efforts of violence. No, Sir, it would be a disastrous 
 day for the repose of the British empire that Catholics would lay 
 aside their religious distinctions, and fling all their doctrines into 
 the hideous mass of errors of which Bible Societies are com- 
 posed, thus realizing the fanciful supposition of Solon, of collect- 
 ing all the ills and blessings of life into one common fund, in 
 order that each might draw out an equal proportion. 
 
 The diffusion of knowledge among the peasantry is confessedly 
 a benefit of which they stand in need, provided it is administered 
 with a subordinate reference to their religion. Those who labour 
 to discover something to reprehend, will find in the best and 
 wisest system matter for misrepresentation. It is to the opera- 
 
 * Although such an inquiry is not immediately connected with the duties of 
 the officers of the crown, yet it is one on which they could be supplied with 
 information. 
 
146 
 
 LETTER XXX. 
 
 tion of such a spirit we may trace the distorted views in which 
 the conduct of the Catholic Church has been represented re- 
 garding the circulation of the inspired writings. I will not, 
 Sir, prolong your attention in showing how zealously she has 
 laboured in every age to propagate scriptural knowledge, by 
 citing the constitutions of her pontiffs and the canons of her 
 councils. Her ecclesiastical writers of every age contain the 
 most cogent exhortations to the people to the study of the sacred 
 volume. Nay, in every cathedral church provision was made for 
 persons whose exclusive duty it was to read and expound the 
 Scriptures to the faithful. But really the calumny of withhold- 
 ing the Scriptures for the sinister purpose of keeping the people 
 in ignorance, is deserving of other feelings rather than a serious 
 refutation. The subject has been already pressed on the present 
 writer in the shape of argument and ridicule by a zealous cham- 
 pion of the Bible. But the ground became at length too narrow 
 for argument, since the controversy does not really turn on the 
 diffusion of Scriptural knowledge. No, Sir, it is not with the 
 principle of spreading religious and Scriptural information that 
 Catholics are disposed to quarrel, but with the mode and spirit 
 in which Bible Societies are conducted. 
 
 The insinuations of the despotism of the Catholic Church that 
 are conveyed at those Bible meetings, are as insulting as the im- 
 putations on our loyalty and religion that are still preserved in 
 our oaths of allegiance. Both are equally founded on a spirit 
 of hostility which will not yield to conviction. But though the 
 Catholic Church venerates the Scriptures more than the sectaries, 
 she never will descend to capitulate with those who, in defiance 
 of the express words of the Bible, which they would fain revere, 
 have renounced her lawful authority. Mr. Canning must feel 
 the justness of this line of conduct which she pursues. Although 
 the British constitution breathes the spirit of freedom, its 
 guardians will never take their lessons of liberty from radical 
 reformers, nor desert their high station to compromise with those 
 whose clamorous and invidious panegyrics on freedom mean 
 nothing more than to accuse the government of tyranny. 
 
 However, as long as the distribution of the Bible continues to 
 be a lucrative traffic, it will not cease to attract a crowd of vota- 
 ries who expect to subsist on the Gospel. It is, perhaps, one of 
 the most signal instances of the astonishing improvements of the 
 human mind, and of its rapid advances to perfection, to behold 
 what a number of missionaries may now be enlisted in the ser- 
 vice of religion, without those impediments of discipline and 
 study which were so many drag-chains on the zeal of our ances- 
 tors. While the vigour of their youth was wasted in laboriously 
 collecting what they were afterwards to communicate, a more 
 compendious method has been adopted of late, which enables the 
 
LETTER XXX. 
 
 147 
 
 libertine and the infidel to become ministers of the Gospel, 
 without imposing on those the necessity of believing its tenets or 
 practising its morality. They are all become Apollos, mighty in 
 the Scriptures, nor do they require the aid of Priscilla or Aquila 
 to expound to them more diligently the way of the Lord.* But 
 if the picture of the vice and ignorance of the Irish people 
 which is exhibited by those Gospellers were correct, a stronger 
 accusation could not be preferred against the indolence of the 
 Establishment. Could a greater libel be pronounced on that 
 body, than to assert, that notwithstanding the immense revenues 
 which they are annually exhausting, nothing was done for the 
 regeneration of the people until the rise of the Bible Societies ? 
 Either then in their anxiety to applaud their own labours, they 
 must exaggerate the defects of the Irish character, or they 
 demonstrate that the wealth of the Established clergy has had 
 only the effect of enervating their zeal and plunging them into 
 indolence. 
 
 Without denying the necessity or undervaluing the advantages 
 of education, there are evils of a more pressing and physical 
 nature which, indeed, may be mitigated by the consoling ministry 
 of the Catholic priests, but which all the Bibles that have issued 
 from the press of their societies cannot cure — the rack-rents of 
 their landlords — the rigour of the agents of absentees — the 
 severity of ecclesiastics who, unlike the Levites of old, exact 
 the tenths of their substance, without any spiritual compensa- 
 tion ; and more than all, the cold and hunger that arise from 
 the want of food and raiment, are evils which I am sure would 
 not cease to afflict our peasantry, though they could recite the 
 entire of the Bible to the mysteries of the Apocalypse. The 
 condition of the Irish peasant is wretched beyond description. 
 The frequency of its exposure has had the effect of almost 
 stifling every thing like sympathy for his lot. Accustomed 
 to the uniform contemplation of his misery, many have grown 
 so indifferent as to despair of any relief, and a long and 
 familiar acquaintance with privations of every kind has ren- 
 dered himself almost callous to their endurance. The parliament 
 is told that Ireland is in a peaceable state : let them not, how- 
 ever, mistake the peace of Ireland for the repose of happiness 
 and order. It is not that state of tranquillity enjoyed under the 
 reign of Solomon, and described by the inspired writer under 
 the smiling image of “ each one dwelling without fear under his 
 vine, and under his fig tree.”| 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
 * Acts of the Apostles, xviii. 
 
 t III. Kings, iv. 
 
148 
 
 LETTER XXXI. 
 
 LETTER XXXI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, May, 1823. 
 
 Non tumultus non quies, quale magni metus et magnce irce silentium est. 
 
 Tacitus. 
 
 Sir — The intervals of peace which Ireland enjoys are the 
 troubled and boding silence of Tacitus, which succeeds the vio- 
 lence of discontent after it has subsided into the sullenness of 
 despair. The Irish peasant is not in a condition in which human 
 beings can be contented. His squalid looks, but dimly lighted by 
 a natural gaiety, which no suffering can utterly extinguish, and a 
 frame sinking under the weight of his afflictions, reveal the ruin 
 of a strong and vigorous constitution, shattered by violence 
 before the slow decay of years was suffered to come upon it. It 
 is no wonder, since he enjoys no respite from toil, which is the 
 common inheritance of all. Others may repair the exhaustion 
 of their labour, but to him the time of rest is only a transition 
 to misery, since he is often doomed to waste his remaining 
 strength by receiving the seeds of debility and disease during the 
 fatal moments of repose.* 
 
 While our peasantry are thus abandoned to a complication of 
 misfortunes, aggravated still more by the bitterness of insult, 
 some of our Irish members labour to mislead the parliament on 
 the real state of the people, and others, in the fulness of their 
 benevolence, labour to protect animals from cruelty. This is 
 surely a praise-worthy disposition ; but while animals are thus 
 made the objects of legislative enactments, the sufferings of 
 rational creatures ought not to be neglected. Benevolence is a 
 virtue, but that of the member for Galway is of the heroic caste, 
 since it far exceeds the standard fixed by the ancient poet — 
 
 Homo sum, et humanum nihil a me alienum puto, 
 
 and, after providing for human misery in every form, takes in 
 the whole range of animal creation. Others attend most punc- 
 tually the Bible Societies of London, as if to expiate the evils 
 to which they consign the people of Ireland by whining some 
 pathetic common-place over their spiritual blindness. My Lord 
 
 * See Reid’s Travels in Ireland, in the year 1822, in which the benevolent 
 writer records anecdotes of Irish sufferings, which, in general description, might 
 appear to be exaggeration. 
 
LETTER XXXI. 
 
 149 
 
 L n has caught the evangelical epidemic, and Saul aspires to 
 
 be numbered among the prophets of Israel. Really, Sir, these 
 biblical exhibitions are no less than ludicrous. To give a dra- 
 matic effect to the representations of the authors, and to stimu- 
 late the drowsy attention of their hearers, some pious anecdotes 
 must be seasonably introduced to illustrate the miraculous efficacy 
 of the Bible. While they deplore the fate of those whose 
 understandings are corrupted by the Arabian Nights, they 
 exemplify the justness of their own observations, and show that 
 their intellects are not yet recovered from the magical influence 
 of early impressions. An anecdote gravely told by one of the 
 speakers at the last meeting of the Bristol society, of a man who 
 was saved from suicide by touching a Bible which happened to 
 be in his pocket while he sought the instrument of death, seems 
 to be an easy adoption of the story of Aladin, who having 
 plunged into a river in despair, was rescued by the contact of his 
 ring with a stone, which immediately evoked to his deliverance 
 his tutelary genius. 
 
 The evils of this country are not to be traced to biblical igno- 
 rance ; or, if so, whence the dark catalogue of crimes that stains 
 the calendar of England? It has been calculated, and the 
 coincidence is worthy of remark, that crime has multiplied in 
 that country in proportion to the diffusion of evangelical fanati- 
 cism. Let then those benevolent Englishmen who labour for the 
 conversion of our country, endeavour to eradicate the unnatural 
 sins condemned by the Apostle, which abound in their own. 
 Let them endeavour to restore unity to the shattered frame of 
 their national faith, and purge its worship of those fanatic forms 
 of error by which the great are often duped, and which would 
 disgrace the superstition of Hindostan. 
 
 Like ancient Rome, England glories in her piety, because she 
 extends to every sectary the privilege of citizenship ; and because, 
 with the exception of the true faith, she excludes no form of 
 error from her worship. In the language of Osee, “ according 
 to the multitude of her fruit she hath multiplied altars.” And 
 in the words of another prophet,* “ according to the number of 
 her streets she hath set up altars of confusion.” While, there- 
 fore, the advocates of the Bible indulge all the latitude of belief 
 that leads to infidelity, and under the specious garb of devotion, 
 solicit the peasantry to a participation of their own errors, I 
 have heard of some who, on perceiving the contrast between 
 their lives and their professions, apply to them the language of 
 the Apostle — “ There shall be among you lying teachers, who 
 shall bring in sects of perdition ; and many shall follow their 
 riotousness, through whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken 
 
 * Jeremias, xi. 
 
150 
 
 LETTER XXXI. 
 
 of. And through covetousness shall they , with feigned words , 
 make merchandize of you, alluring unstable souls, having their 
 hearts exercised with covetousness, children of malediction ; leav- 
 ing the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the 
 way of Balaam of Bosor, who loved the wages of iniquity. 
 For, speaking proud words of vanity, they allure those who 
 for a little while escape ; such as converse in error, promising 
 them liberty, while they themselves are the slaves of cor- 
 ruption.”* The justness of the application of this passage to 
 the Bible Societies, I shall leave the reader to determine. But 
 it shows, at least, that the very book which is proffered for the 
 instruction of the people may be easily converted by them into 
 an instrument to use against those Societies, in exposing the 
 hypocrisy of their pretensions. 
 
 While the British Bible Societies boast of their success in 
 enlightening the darkness of Pagan nations, it is surprising how 
 fruitless their efforts have proved in their own. Let it not be 
 disguised — their object is proselytism ; and though they do not 
 succeed to the extent of their hopes, it is not owing to the want 
 of zeal and perseverance. The most sinister artifices are resorted 
 to, to accomplish this unworthy purpose. In the neighbourhood 
 of Raphoe, it happened that a number of Catholic children who 
 attended a Bible school were all seduced to church on a certain 
 day, in defiance of solemn engagements, and when an explana- 
 tion was demanded, the reply was, that this scene was merely 
 intended for edification ! ! Should the Catholic children be 
 therefore persuaded to renounce the religion of their fathers, by 
 frequenting the conventicles of the sectaries, no harm is intended, 
 since it is all intended for edification. This one instance I have 
 cited from among others of a similar nature, rather to illustrate 
 a general principle, than as a solitary fact from which to deduce 
 a general inference. Yet, notwithstanding their efforts, they 
 have made but few converts in this country. They are, there- 
 fore, obliged to appeal to distant regions for evidence of their 
 success. At one meeting of the Bible Societies we have an 
 account of the progress of the missionaries in the interior of 
 Africa, as far as the mountains of Mauritania. At another, we 
 are gratified with the wondrous relations of their labours in 
 Iceland, and assured that the pious evangelists, with a zeal un- 
 chilled by the northern climate, will succeed in penetrating 
 towards the pole. A third announces the joyous tidings that 
 some flourishing kingdom beyond the Ganges has borne fresh 
 attestations to the Gospel, and swelled the triumphs of the 
 Societies. Thus they prudently fix the scene of their operations 
 in distant countries, where they may boast of imaginary con- 
 
 * II. Peter, ii. 
 
LETTER XXXII. 
 
 151 
 
 quests, and still escape detection, like the famous Benjamin of 
 Tudela, who places in an Eastern country, far beyond the 
 reach of historical knowledge, a flourishing colony of Jews, 
 where the descendants of Judah still sway the sceptre over their 
 obedient brethren, awaiting with patient hope the coming of the 
 Messiah. 
 
 IIierophilos. 
 
 LETTER XXXII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING. 
 
 Maynooth College, May, 1823. 
 
 Sir — Having thus taken a patient review of the state of Ireland, 
 and the condition of its inhabitants, I cannot dissemble my con- 
 viction that the great source of its misfortunes, is the malignant 
 character of its laws. In the discussion of this comprehensive 
 subject, I have not forgotten those minor topics of partial 
 grievance which have engaged so much of the attention of writers 
 on the affairs of Ireland. The ignorance of the people, though 
 much exaggerated, is unquestionably the effect of her bad laws.* 
 Their poverty may be traced to the same source. 
 
 From the spirit of foreign commercial monopoly, and the 
 corporate regulations that shut out Catholics from a fair 
 competition in trade, and the learned professions, it is clear that 
 they cannot obtain the rewards of their talents or their industry, 
 and that therefore, the great mass of the people is doomed by 
 the spirit of bad laws, to unavoidable degradation. Nay, of the 
 offices that are accessible to Catholics, how few are obtained by 
 individuals of that body, though they might compete with their 
 calumniators in the moral or intellectual qualities that fit men 
 for the discharge of exalted duties ? To remove the invidious 
 imputation of partiality in the distribution of those offices, much 
 stress has been laid, in parliament, on the qualifications necessary 
 for filling them. From such an observation, it would appear 
 that it required great talent, and a long course of intellectual 
 discipline to fit those functionaries for their elevated station. If 
 so, what can convey a keener insult to the feelings of Catholics 
 than to declare that certain offices are open to their exertions, 
 
 * See Brown’s Historical Account of the Laws against the Catholics, chap, vi, 
 page 225, who quotes the Act 9, William III, chap. i. 
 
152 
 
 LETTER XXXII. 
 
 yet, at the same time, to close the Universities against them, and 
 deny them an opportunity of developing their talents to such a 
 degree as would enable them to obtain such situations. You tell 
 them such a dignity is within their reach, yet you deprive them 
 of the means to obtain it. It is embittering exclusion with con- 
 tumely, and mocking them with hopes which cannot be realized. 
 But, Sir, even this apology cannot be adduced to justify the 
 exclusion of the Catholics. To become a Commissioner of Excise, 
 or Stamp Duties, a Clerk of the Crown, or a Clerk of the Peace, 
 or a Magistrate, under the recent Acts of Parliament, does not 
 require any extraordinary reach of understanding beyond what 
 generally falls to the lot of mortals. The process of preparation 
 may require some patient attention to the routine details of office, 
 in which no duty occurs which the most ordinary and mechanical 
 mind could not perform. As for the long list of other situations 
 which are chiefly monopolized by Prostestants, though open 
 to Catholics, the qualifications for filling them are not difficult. 
 A contempt for the mass of the people united to an earnest wish 
 for perpetuating their servitude ; an ardent devotion to the 
 Constitution, while it protects their own monopoly ; a sincere 
 hatred for one religion, and a hypocritical zeal for another, of 
 both of which they are equally ignorant ; a hollow reverence 
 for the Bible, which they pretend to read, while they leave the 
 burden of its precepts to others ; a bodily vigour that can sustain 
 the fatiguing duties of celebrating frequent and protracted feasts 
 in honor of the ascendancy, and occasionally supply the slow and 
 lenient vengeance of the law, by summary inflictions. — Such are 
 the high endowments often found in the candidates for offices 
 from which Catholics are excluded ; and if such continue to be 
 the qualifications for preferment, there is no honest or indepen- 
 dent man that would not say with the Roman poet — 
 
 Horum 
 
 Semper ego optarem pauperrimus esse bonorum.* 
 
 Whatever crimes then proceed from the ignorance and poverty 
 of the people, may be traced to the bad laws which produced 
 them. The double burden imposed by the support of two bodies 
 of ecclesiastics, the one active and efficient, and the other aban- 
 doning their flocks to Biblical fanatics, had its origin in the same 
 laws. For in fine, there are few of the evils of Ireland, indepen- 
 dent of those which are common to every country, that have not 
 been generated by the same cause, and that do not partake of its 
 malignant qualities. Against the removal of such an abundant 
 source of misery, only one objection is eternally started — the 
 danger of the constitution. That this danger is now imaginary, or 
 
 * From such benefits I should deem myself happy to be excluded. 
 
LETTER XXXII. 
 
 153 
 
 rather affected, I have fully proved, by showing that the causes 
 which first suggested the ideas of danger, have long since disap- 
 peared. When the exclusion of a portion of the people from a share 
 in the civil rights of the State is not necessary for the safety of the 
 whole, such exclusion I have shown to be contrary to the laws of 
 justice, and the authority of the civilians whom England reveres; 
 and finally, by a reference to the unsteady opinions of the first 
 champions of the Establishment, it appears that a stronger faith 
 in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is necessary for tho 
 sickly morality of the English nation ; and that a large infusion 
 of the sound principles of Catholics, instead of endangering its 
 existence, would finally prove the salvation of the constitution. 
 
 Against arguments so cogent, what one solid reason can be 
 assigned for protracting the concession of the Catholic claims ? 
 The imputed intemperance of our orators, or the occasional 
 discontents of our peasantry. Such motives might consistently 
 enough operate upon the feelings of little individuals, who, 
 invested with the brief and transient authority of a day, consult 
 their revenge rather than their wisdom. But I cannot believe 
 that such narrow considerations could sway the councils of the 
 greatest empire upon earth. It would be a libel on the majesty 
 of the British Senate to insinuate that it could be moved from 
 the straight course of justice by which it should be guided, in 
 obedience to those prejudices which it is destined to controul. 
 It is in vain, then, to use the discontent of individuals who must 
 cease to be men, in order to cease to be discontented. It cannot 
 excite surprise, that the Catholics, conscious of the justice of their 
 cause, should give vent to their disappointment in strong and 
 vigorous language. It is in vain, therefore, we will be told, 
 that the indiscretion of the Catholics has retarded the progress 
 of their cause, since it would be to say, that the angry passions 
 which should float benenth it, have reached the elevation of 
 British justice, and turned it out of its orbit. It is therefore 
 to no purpose to tell the Catholics that Mr. O’Connell and his 
 fellow-agitators are violent. Yes, Mr. O’Connell is violent, and 
 those who quarrel with his violence, quarrel with the laws of na- 
 ture. Retaining in its course, the vigour which it gathered in its 
 descent from its own native mountains, the flood of his eloquence 
 rolls in a strong and impetuous current, becoming louder among 
 the rocks and rifts that oppose it in its progress, until at length it 
 disengages itself, and then rushes through every obstacle with 
 accumulated force : but if you wish to lessen its roar, or abate its 
 violence, remove the rocks, clear away the obstructions, and then 
 it will expand into a smoother and more majestic volume ; nor 
 shall it ever subside into the dull repose of many a brawling 
 stream that sparkled through opposition, until, like Pactolus, it 
 poured its placid wave over the golden sands of the treasury. 
 
154 
 
 LETTER XXXII. 
 
 As we do not therefore rest the merits of our claims on partial 
 considerations, we trust that no feelings of a partial or individual 
 nature will operate against the concession of that justice which 
 we demand as British subjects. That justice is on our side, I 
 have demonstrated ; and no winding policy should be suffered to 
 divert it from its majestic course. 
 
 To illustrate more clearly the justice of our cause, let us reverse 
 for a moment, the relative condition of Catholics and Protestants ; 
 and suppose that the interests of six millions of Protestants were 
 sacrificed to the pride and intolerance of half a million of 
 Catholics : would not the empire ring with the loud and reiterated 
 complaints of injustice ? But no ; the Protestants, instead of 
 bending to unavailing complaint, would assert with their swords 
 the common inheritance of freedom. 
 
 Those who are conscious that their principles are the best stay 
 of Government, are excluded from its benefits ; while those whose 
 allegiance is only precarious and conditional, are loaded with its 
 choicest favours. The obedience which Catholics render to the 
 Government, has its high origin in heaven. But reflect, Sir, 
 that they whose principle of obedience is so sublime, expect to 
 see the Government reflecting in the equal distribution of its laws, 
 the wisdom and benevolence of the Divinity, from whom their 
 obedience is derived. There are reciprocal relations that bind 
 Sovereigns and subjects to each other, and which are still 
 subordinate to those which bind both to the Almighty ; who, if 
 he commands obedience on the one hand, commands justice, and 
 wisdom, and benevolence on the other. Such, Sir, is the powerful 
 influence of Christianity, which, by teaching Princes their 
 obligations to the people, has given stability to their thrones, and 
 so mitigated the monarchies of Europe, as to form a striking 
 contrast with Asiatic despotism. Such is the doctrine which the 
 Ministers of the Gospel conveyed to the ears of Kings, in every 
 period of the Church. Such was the doctrine by which the 
 Bishop of Milan humbled the greatest Prince that ever swayed 
 the sceptre of the Boman Empire, into a public penitent, in the 
 porch of the temple; and such were the lessons of clemency 
 which Bossuet addressed to Louis XIV, admidst the very career 
 of his conquests. In a government deemed arbitrary, Massilon 
 spoke to the court in language which might be deemed sufficiently 
 bold for the meridian of England. “ C’est pour les peuples tout 
 seuls que le trone lui meme est eleve. En un mot , les princes ne 
 sont pour ainsi dire que les hommes du peuple As we have 
 not the powerful interposition of such holy and eloquent men to 
 protect us, hence the necessity of the shield of the laws. The 
 Protestants of this country are protected by equal laws ; the 
 
 Petit Careme. 
 
LETTER XXXII. 
 
 155 
 
 Catholics of France were secure in the interposition of the Church. 
 Alas ! we are deprived of the benefit of the one, without ever 
 experiencing any thing but severity, from the other. Yes, 
 Sir, the observation of a celebrated historian, that “ seldom were 
 the banners of the Church, displayed for the rights of the people,” 
 may be justly applied to that of England ; whereas, if extended 
 to the Catholic Church, it is amply refuted by the examples I 
 have quoted. Whenever our complaints are conveyed to the 
 legislature, we are repulsed in no quarter with so little mercy as 
 from the Episcopal benches ; and with one solitary exception, the 
 venerable and illustrious Bishop of Norwich, those who ought to 
 breathe the mild spirit of the Gospel, have been the most in- 
 exorable advocates of rigour and exclusion. As we cannot there- 
 fore turn to the Church, we again implore the protection of equal 
 laws. And in the name of that God, whose image a wise 
 government ought to be, we solicit the restoration of our rights 
 in return for the strong, and steady, and uncompromising alle- 
 giance, which the terrors of persecution could not shake. 
 
 In concluding this letter, apology is unnecessary, since I have 
 been only discharging a duty which I owed to my religion 
 and to my country. It is not merely in compliment to your 
 talents as a senator that I have taken the liberty of addressing 
 it to you; since I considered you in the higher relation of a 
 member of the Government, and feeling, of course, a conscientious 
 responsibility for your advice in directing its councils. In con- 
 formity with the view which I have stated in the commencement 
 of my letter, I have chiefly insisted on the necessity of Catholic 
 Emancipation, considering every other question only in a subor- 
 dinate reference to this national measure. The legislature may, 
 of course, devise some partial relief for the grievances of Ireland ; 
 but without that which has been insisted on, it will be only 
 perpetuating its own labours, which will be accumulating with the 
 progress of time. Without this great measure of Catholic 
 Emancipation then, you will toil in vain ; since, without the total 
 repeal of the Penal Laws, the vigorous root of the malignant 
 Upas will still remain, ready to shoot forth with fresh activity 
 into ranker luxuriance, darkening the land by its shadow, and 
 wasting, by its deadly influence, the moral energies of the 
 people. 
 
 Hierophilos. 
 
156 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 FROM THE CATHOLIC BISHOP OF MARONIA, 
 
 TO 
 
 THE PROTESTANT ARCHBISHOP OF TUAM. 
 
 Ballina, October, 1826. 
 
 You, Lord Archbishop, 
 
 Whose see is by a civil peace maintained ; 
 
 Whose beard, the silver hand of Peace hath touch’d ; 
 
 Whose white investments figure Innocence, 
 
 The Dove, and very blessed Spirit of Peace : 
 
 Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself 
 
 Out of the speech of Peace, that bears such grace, 
 
 Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of War? 
 
 But, my Lord, the profane charms of poetry may but ill suit 
 that severe and puritannical taste, which, I am told, is mixed up 
 with your Grace’s character. You are fonder, no doubt, of the 
 perusal of the Scriptures : if so, the counsel of Saint Paul may 
 not have escaped you — “ That those who rule well should be 
 esteemed worthy of double honour.” Some time has now 
 elapsed since your Grace’s charge at Tuam first attracted the 
 attention of the present writer, under another signature ; and 
 the honour which has been reserved for me, of addressing you 
 once more on a similar Charge in Killala, will, doubtless, be 
 interpreted by you (conscious of your own deserts), as that 
 double homage, which the excellence of your episcopal govern- 
 ment has extorted. 
 
 An invidious rumour has gone abroad, that you and your 
 colleagues feel a secret dislike to the titles of Protestant bishops. 
 It must be a calumny, circulated for the purpose of giving the 
 laity also a disrelish for the epithet. What! — a prelate to be 
 ashamed of the distinctive mark of that Church to which he 
 belongs. No bishop of the Catholic Church is angry that 
 “ Catholic” should be appended to his episcopal title ; nor shall I 
 easily believe that a Protestant bishop is altogether so simple in 
 his taste, as to wish to be stripped of the peculiar badge which 
 characterizes his own creed. Was it ever known that any chief 
 was ashamed to wear the colours of his followers ? It was the 
 boast of those who, by a figure of rhetoric known to your 
 Grace, are called “ Reformers,” to disclaim any connexion with 
 the Catholic Church, and to protest against its errors. A feeling 
 of gratitude towards our benefactors has been always a mark of a 
 generous mind. You are not, I am sure, destitute of that virtue; 
 
LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 157 
 
 and it is to give you an opportunity of exercising it, that I have 
 subjoined the epithet “ Protestant” to your title, in order to keep 
 alive, by a perpetual memento, your obligation to the founders of 
 the Protestant Church, who gave you an opportunity of being 
 seated on an episcopal throne, which, without a schismatical diver- 
 gency from the old Catholic line, you never would have ascended. 
 
 Do you imagine that the priests who ministered at the altar of 
 Bethel blushed at the recollection of the schism of Jeroboam? 
 I think they rather referred to it with secret satisfaction ; and, 
 like those who now adore a mysterious Providence, for having 
 turned a monarch’s lust into an instrument of reformation, the 
 pious priests of Bethel, “ who were not of the sons of Levi,” 
 blessed, no doubt, the licentiousness of the latter days of Solo- 
 mon, which had been the occasion of transferring to themselves 
 the treasures of the priesthood. 
 
 However, on maturer reflection, I am not surprised that the 
 epithet “ Protestant” gives you pain. It is not only divested of 
 the venerable associations of antiquity, but forces, by way of 
 contrast, the disagreeable idea of a Catholic bishop. This, my 
 Lord, in the next analysis of your feelings, you will discover to 
 be the secret cause of your uneasiness. Yes; had there been no 
 Catholic bishop, the name of Protestant bishop would not be 
 unmusical to your ears : since, then, the public attention might 
 not be pointed to the origin of your pretensions, you might hope, 
 in the process of time, to merge the Protestant in the name of a 
 Catholic bishop, and thus give an hereditary colour to your 
 claims — like the emperors who, no matter how they gained the 
 purple, adopted the name of Caesar, to throw an air of legiti- 
 macy over the deficiency of their original title. 
 
 I am not, therefore, surprised, that the name of Protestant 
 bishop is so annoying. It does not require a deep insight into 
 human nature, to account for the uneasy feeling. Had the epis- 
 copacy been an inheritance which could be lawfully partitioned 
 among rival claimants, then, however reluctantly, you might be 
 reconciled to have an associate of your throne. But, with all the 
 dislike which I can well conceive must be felt for theology by a 
 Protestant bishop, you must still be sufficiently versed in that 
 tasteless science to know that the episcopacy of the Church of 
 Christ, like its faith, its baptism, and its founder, is one and 
 undivided. So thought St. Cyprian — so thought St. Augustine, 
 who identified the unity of the church with the unity of the 
 episcopacy. But those venerable names are, probably, beyond 
 the reach of your theological labours. In the epochs of Pro- 
 testant chronology, the age of those Fathers is sufficiently remote 
 to be ranked among the fabulous times. The bright vista of the 
 genuine history of the church closes with that splendid pillar, 
 Matthew Parker. Beyond that boundary of orthodox as well as 
 
158 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 of historic light, all is idolatry and darkness, and its annals fit 
 only to be explored by the obscure diligence of credulous anti- 
 quarians. In speaking thus of your want of acquaintance with 
 the early church, I am far from meaning disrespect. It rather 
 makes us revere the loftier sources of your intelligence. The 
 young aspirant after the honours of the church beholds how 
 seldom they are reached through the rugged path of science. 
 He finds that a lever, wielded by some friendly and more powerful 
 hand, is the instrument by which some heavy bodies are lifted to 
 an elevation, to which their own vis inertias could never enable 
 them to toil. Human knowledge then becomes unnecessary. For 
 well may they dispense with the aid of learning, who, we must 
 believe, are “ taught by the Lord,” since they can gravely assure 
 us that they are admitted into a familiar converse with heaven. 
 
 Without fatiguing you, then, by any laborious references to 
 the primitive Fathers, I shall appeal only to the inspiration of 
 your own heart, and inquire whether its jealousy of every thing 
 Catholic does not attest the unity of the priesthood. The very 
 idea of a Catholic church in your neighbourhood frightens you — 
 the name of a Catholic bishop also appals you — and from every 
 ruin of the Catholic temples that are profusely strewn over our 
 country, the shade of the ancient religion rises before your 
 imagination, to reproach you with the novelty of your own. I am 
 not surprised at the fury with which those venerable temples were 
 defaced — nay, demolished, by the first founders of your church ; 
 I am rather surprised that they did not labour more to obliterate 
 every vestige of them from the land. It would have been in 
 accordance with the conduct of every apostate. “And Jeroboam 
 said in his heart, now shall the kingdom return to the house of 
 David, if this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the 
 Lord at Jerusalem.”* And, therefore, he built altars in Bethel 
 and in Dan, which were just as necessary as some modern temples 
 perched on the “ high place,” to attract the attention of tra- 
 vellers. Yes ; the temple of Jerusalem was the most obnoxious 
 object to the deserters of the ancient creed. Nay, their hate 
 extended to the God who was worshipped there ; and in the dark 
 picture which the author of “ Athahe” sketches of the soul of 
 Mathan, the apostate priest of Baal, every other apostate of 
 future ages shall discover a true image of the workings of his own. 
 
 Ce temple l’importune, et son impiete 
 
 Vaudroit aneantir le Dieu qu’il a quitte.f 
 
 The vehemence with which you poured forth your zeal against 
 the Catholic Church has not surprised me. It was ’only the 
 
 * III. Kings, xii, 26, 27. 
 
 f Racine has so powerfully portrayed this apostate, that the entire passage from 
 which those lines are taken may well be recommended to the perusal of the reader. 
 
LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 159 
 
 natural force of a current long checked by artificial obstructions, 
 and struggling for its freedom. The attention that was already 
 directed to your Charge in Tuam, made you cautious in that 
 quarter, lest some secret enemy should lurk in the church, and 
 reveal to the world the overflowings of that charity for Catholics 
 which you were anxious should not transpire beyond your own 
 flock. Had you gone to the southward, you justly feared that 
 the imperturbable Peter Daly would roll back the flood of your 
 holy indignation on yourself. It must still find vent, and, doubt- 
 less, you exulted in the prospect of discharging it with impunity 
 on the devoted heads of the Catholics of Killala. It was a 
 delicious anticipation ; and how you must have chid the tardy 
 hours until they brought back the triennial visitation, which was 
 to disburden you of the collected weight of all your pastoral 
 solicitudes. Impatient of delay, you hasten to the scene so 
 anxiously wished for, and strive, by your ardent example, to 
 rouse the harmless zeal of the good natured Dr. Verschoyle, 
 who, careless of controvery and fanaticism, seems to acquiesce in 
 the literal sense of the beatitudes — though he may reject it on 
 the eucharist — content if his meekness is rewarded with “ the 
 possession of the land.” I shall not detain you by the dull repe- 
 tition of your invectives against the errors, and superstitions, 
 and damnable doctrines of the Catholic Church. Damnable 
 doctrines of the Catholic Church ! ! Did your Grace con- 
 descend to inform your auditory of the period at which they 
 arose, or of the council by which they were condemned ; or did 
 you supply any clue of chronological data to disengage them 
 from the labyrinth in which your recondite labours must have 
 involved them. There is, my Lord, wonderful force of per- 
 suasion in the wealth of the Establishment ; and the darkest 
 mind of the most ignorant of your auditors finds his conviction 
 greatly enlightened by the splendours of its honours. We must 
 allow their due efficacy to these causes in producing external 
 decorum : still I imagine that the painter of physiognomy could 
 not wish for a richer scene for the exercise of his art, than to 
 contemplate the struggles between the seriousness and sup- 
 pressed laughter that take place on such occasions; nor can I 
 help recalling the observation of Cicero, who wondered how the 
 Tuscan Haruspices could meet together, and preserve the arti- 
 ficial solemnity of their demeanor. 
 
 The damnable doctrines of the Catholic Church ! ! Yes, there 
 are some of its doctrines which, in the eyes of a certain class of 
 people, must ever wear those odious features. It teaches the 
 necessity of penance for past sins ; and, doubtless, of all its 
 damnable doctrines this is the most appalling. I know it thus 
 encroaches on the dominion of the subject, since it may consign 
 to rigorous austerities those who are assured that their sins arc 
 
160 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 already covered with the white robe of justification. The doc- 
 trine of penance has worse effects, since it not only makes war 
 on the flesh, but presumptuously interferes with the vocation of 
 heaven, by shutting out from the sanctuary persons to whom the 
 spirit bears testimony that they are not only justified, but placed 
 on the very pinnacle of sanctity. It is true that illustrious sin- 
 ners have become illustrious saints. The grace of justification is 
 often sudden and overpowering. But, aware that the sorrow, of 
 which there is no external sign, may be reasonably distrusted, the 
 Catholic Church requires a long discipline of virtue in her candi- 
 dates ; lest the ungodly might whisper their profane suspicions in 
 the sincerity of a conversion and a zeal, which happen exactly 
 to coincide with the attainment of ecclesiastical honours. 
 
 But, rather than involve them in the maze of Catholic 
 heresies, why not, like the venerable founder of the Asmonean 
 dynasty,* encourage your children to a zeal for the law, by 
 pointing out to them the bright models of their fathers. You 
 are aware that the example of the great founders of empire or 
 of religion is one of the most powerful incentives to virtue and 
 renown. Let me, then, conjure you never to forget, in your 
 future charges, the glorious models of your predecessors. They 
 are too rich a theme for panegyric ever to be exhausted ; nor 
 could the dullest common-place of an episcopal charge ever strip 
 them of that veneration which their virtues have thrown around 
 them. Tell them, then, of the sanctity of the life and doctrine 
 of Luther, who, like his Delphic predecessor, inspired by the 
 gold or wine of Philip (how curious the coincidence of names — 
 the one of Hesse, the other of Macedon), proclaimed from his 
 spiritual tripod that the primeval innocence of the plurality of 
 wives was again restored ! ! And lest he might be considered, like 
 the Pharisees, to impose burdens upon others, which he would 
 not lighten by his little finger, he complied as edifyingly as 
 Mahomet himself with the law of lust which he promulgated, by 
 releasing himself and his consort from the superstitious vows of 
 the cloister. Paint to them next the disastrous visage of 
 Calvin — the faithful image of the mind which could extract out 
 of the volume of love and mercy, nought but the dogmas of 
 reprobation and despair — and close his portrait by a touching 
 allusion to the tragic story of Servetus, reserving the climax of 
 your praise for that act in which you will represent him as a 
 hero sacrificing his private affections to the stern source of public 
 duty, and, like Agamemnon, striving to render the Divinity pro- 
 pitious by the blood of a human victim. 
 
 Oh ! and forget not Zuinglius, the last, but not the least 
 renowned, of the triumvirate. Talk to them of his frequent 
 
 I. Machabees, chapter ii. 
 
LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 161 
 
 illapses of the spirit, and define, what mocked his own penetra- 
 tion to define, the ambiguous physiognomy of the nocturnal visitor 
 with which he was periodically favoured. Lead them back — 
 for, probably, they do not know it — to the spiritual origin of 
 their present curious notions about the eucharist ; and, since you 
 may not like the Roman Martyrology, give them a glimpse of 
 the select and goodly company of the blessed which, with a more 
 poetical licence than Dante himself, ho assorts together in his 
 paradise of the Reformation : — “ And there you will see (writing 
 to Francis I. on the joys of heaven) the two Adams, the 
 redeemed and the redeemer; and Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, 
 and Abraham, and Moses, and Joshua, and Gideon, and David, 
 and St. Peter, and St. Paul, and Hercules, and Theseus, and 
 Antigonus, and Numa, and the Catos, and the Scipios.” I am 
 only surprised that he did not put Henry VIII. of England 
 among the number ; and if, like Nero, in the “ Pharsalia” of 
 Lucan, there was any danger of his pulling down, * by his 
 weight, the side of the heavens in which he was placed, he 
 might, if it were not an anachronism, place Elizabeth, his truly 
 congenial daughter, on the opposite side, and thus preserve the 
 balance of the sphere. 
 
 From the precious specimen of the revelations of the profligate 
 preacher of Zurich, the reader may form a pretty correct judg- 
 ment of the nature of the mysterious apparition from which he 
 drew them, and guess whether it was the divine spirit of Patmos, 
 or the muse of Southey’s “ Vision of Judgment,” that opened the 
 heavens to his view. But the subject is too sacred for irony or 
 ridicule. What ! class the patriarchs of the Old and the apostles 
 of the New Testament with Cato the Censor, who gravely invited 
 his fellow-citizens to share his marriage bed — with Theseus, the 
 public robber — with Numa, the founder of idolatry — and (my 
 hand trembles in transcribing the audacious blasphemy) to huddle 
 the Redeemer of the world in the promiscuous apotheosis of 
 the impure and drunken divinities of Olympus ! ! 
 
 Such are the models which you must next propose to the 
 imitation of your clergy. In the delineation of their characters, 
 fling aside all the drapery with which their admirers for three 
 centuries have decorated them. It is only by stripping them of 
 those tawdry ornaments, and exhibiting them to the world as 
 they originally stood, that they can make a due impression. As 
 for the smaller groups of Reformers, who were incapable of dis- 
 playing the energy of the originals, it would be uninteresting to 
 enumerate them all. I will not require of you to draw out into 
 bold relief the character of Cranmer, or his associates, since 
 they seem to shrink from the gaze of criticism. No ; like the 
 
 * -ZEtheris immensi partem si presseris unam sentiet axis onus. 
 
 Lucani Pharsalia, 
 
162 
 
 LETTER XXXIII. 
 
 painter who showed his consummate art by casting a veil over 
 one of his figures, because he despaired of painting the variety 
 of shades that floated across its features, you, too, would rather 
 throw a veil over Cranmer’s character, than attempt to sketch 
 the confused succession of his religious and political creeds, 
 which, after all, are indescribable. I will not require of you to 
 dwell on the national disasters which accompanied the establish- 
 ment of your little ecclesiastical colony in this country, lest, like 
 the Trojan chief, you should be melted into all the tenderness of 
 tears at their recital. These are topics sacred to silence and 
 oblivion. The darkness of night should cover them ; nor qught 
 you again to expose them to public view, lest the occupants of 
 benefices, on contrasting their possessions with the violence from 
 which they sprung, should experience something of the feeling 
 of Faulkenbridge, who, while he gloried in the strength which 
 he derived from Richard Coeur de Lion, was abashed by a 
 parent’s shame, with which the inheritance was associated. 
 
 Should you feel somewhat mortified by this letter, you will 
 find its vindication in your Grace’s wanton and intemperate 
 aggression. It is really lamentable, that those who ought to 
 labour together for the public good, should waste their mutual 
 strength in theological contention. To what a miserable con- 
 dition is our country doomed, when they who would entirely 
 devote themselves to promote its peace, and propagate good will 
 among mankind, must be forced to repel attacks upon its reli- 
 gion, made by individuals who ought to feel a peculiar tender- 
 ness in provoking an attack upon their own ? If the country is 
 torn by religious discord, put your hand to your breast, and 
 declare to whose account should its wounds be laid. Who are 
 the people that are keeping a body of strolling auxiliaries in 
 pay, to prop the declining cause of the Establishment, by pour- 
 ing their vapid abuse on the Catholic Church ? Take care, my 
 Lord, lest these venal auxiliaries should not, like the barbarians 
 employed in the Roman service, turn, at length, upon their 
 masters, and seize the possessions of the Church which they are 
 hired to defend. The necessity of employing them — I am not 
 inclined to superstition — is really ominous. Dismiss them, 
 therefore, from your service in time ; calculate no longer on 
 assailing the Catholic Church with impunity. Should you push 
 too far the insolence of a temporary triumph, a Scipio may be 
 found to thunder at your gates. The tide that ran for three 
 centuries with Protestant prejudice has nearly spent its force, 
 and the troubled surface of society must become more calm and 
 level. The calumnies of Protestant polemics shall, like those of 
 the Arians of old, be only remembered to awaken pity for the 
 misfortunes of the age that indulged them ; and it is well if the 
 religious prejudices, with which they are loaded, do not sink, 
 
LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 163 
 
 with the tracts of the ecclesiastical Dunciads, some historical 
 works, the buoyancy of whose fine spirit would have borne them 
 to the most distant posterity. From the effects of your intem- 
 perance, your colleagues will, I trust, learn a wise forbearance ; 
 and should your Grace ever repeat your triennial visitation, and 
 be disposed to indulge in a feast of triumph against a religion, to 
 the service of which the church in which you spoke was once 
 consecrated, doubtless the present sketch, which you will not 
 easily forget, will make you apprehend lest some . my sterious 
 hand should draw more fully the character and destiny of your 
 Church on the walls of the Cathedral of Killala.* 
 
 * John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 ON THE NEW REFORMATION IN CAVAN. 
 
 Ballina, January, 1827 . 
 
 In one of the last numbers of the Evening Post, I observed 
 a series of resolutions relative to the apostacies at Cavan, and 
 bearing strong reference to the late document which was laid 
 before the public, by some of the Catholic bishops. That the 
 agents of proselytism should not derive much satisfaction from 
 the publication of the frauds that were resorted to in the un- 
 hallowed work, is quite natural ; and I am therefore, willing to 
 make allowance for the warmth of their feelings, when the light 
 of public exposure broke in on mortified vanity and hypocritical 
 pretensions to religion. I did, however, imagine, that prudence 
 would have prompted the suppression of those feelings — and that 
 the ministers of fanaticism would have availed themselves of the 
 opportunity afforded, by passing events, of withdrawing, if not 
 with dignity, at least with some colourable pretext, from public 
 observation. Yes, I did hope, that the carts which were exhibited 
 in Cavan, and which happened if we are to credit ancient writers, 
 
 * Not many years elapsed when this prophetic warning of the hand-writing 
 on the wall was fulfilled, and with nine other Protestant sees, its candlestick was 
 taken from the cathedral of Killala. 
 
164 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 to be the first clumsy platforms of the histrionic art, would have 
 disappeared, when a more magnificent theatre, exhibiting the 
 sorrows of royalty, rose to the public view — and that the indivi- 
 duals who 44 fretted their little hour” on this rustic stage, would 
 have respectfully retired before the tragic train of war, and the 
 mourning of courts, and the death of princes, these mighty 
 events that cast their shadows over a vast extent of society, and 
 still for a season, the petty contentions of mankind. 
 
 The resolutions alluded to, consist of vague assertions, without 
 containing a single fact, that would impeach the credit of the 
 statements to which the bishops gave the attestation of their 
 names. But lest the unwary might be led into such a belief by 
 the very circumstance of their being ostentatiously put forth, 
 though the credit which the public attaches to our character may 
 not require a contradiction, still it may be useful to declare once 
 more that the statement of the bishops is beyond the reach of 
 refutation. The part which calls forth the most indignant zeal 
 of those gentlemen is that in which, it seems, they are represented 
 as 44 disgusted at those fanatical exhibitions by which good-will 
 is impaired, and the peace of society endangered.” Now, in the 
 name of the other prelates, I beg leave to assure them that the 
 statement did not involve the gentlemen who adopted the resolu- 
 tion in the guilt or imputation of such a crime. It charged the 
 44 liberal and enlightened Protestants alone with the crime of 
 feeling disgust” at the diminution of charity, and the danger to 
 the public peace, of which the exhibitions were productive. 
 Whether these are consequences with which such scenes are 
 fraught, subsequent events have fully revealed, since it appears 
 from the public journals that the peace has been frequently 
 broken between the neophytes of the Protestant creed, and 
 followers of the ancient religion. Assuredly, we never charged 
 the framers of the resolutions with feeling disgust at such trans- 
 actions. If such be the happy temperament of their souls as to 
 harmonize with such scenes of strife and discord, they may 
 enjoy the luxury of their feelings without being taxed by the 
 Catholic bishops with the heinous offence of deploring the ex- 
 istence of charity and good-will among mankind. 
 
 Our expression confined this disgust to every 44 liberal and 
 enlightened Protestant.” How far precisely this qualification 
 may extend in Cavan, we are not aware; it appears that its 
 application is extremely limited. But sure we are, and it is an 
 assertion in which the public will acquiesce, that every enlightened 
 and liberal Protestant must feel disgust or indignation at the 
 scenes of fraud and violence that have been acted in that country, 
 where, according to depositions laid before us, some of which 
 were offered to the magistrates to be confirmed on oath, indivi- 
 duals were tempted to apostacy by bribery and corruption — 
 
LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 165 
 
 where the highways were covered with carts, conveying to the 
 strong citadel of the Reformation, a precious cargo of vagrants, 
 who were allured by the Jewish rewards of the new religion, and 
 who were principally recommended to its favours from their 
 habitual disregard of their own — where one man was threatened 
 with death for attempting to rescue a sister of fourteen years 
 from the hands of her persecutors, and another was obliged, 
 like Judith, to steal by night into the camp of her enemies, and 
 to use a similar artifice, without, however, the shedding of blood, 
 to save her sister from the danger to which she was exposed — 
 where a disciple of the new school, instructed by the practice, if 
 not the precepts, of Cranmer, strives to appease the scruples of 
 the converts, by telling them to abjure, with their hearts, the 
 apostacy which their bps had spoken — where, in spite of all those 
 lenitives, a sense of remorse forced some of the communicants, 
 it is hard to find a fit expression, to treat with manifest indignity 
 the sacrament which their conscience loathed — where others, 
 instead of deriving from the spiritual food the strength of Elias, 
 found that it had the effect of producing debility, from the terrors 
 which a consciousness of hypocrisy had inspired, and where they 
 are dragged in this state to hear fresh invectives against their 
 religion, while they cry in vain for the consolation of its ministers; 
 where — (I shall be pardoned for reflections suggested solely by 
 the evidence before me) — the texts of the Royal Prophet, on 
 justification, are blasphemously applied by profligates, while they 
 cover with a robe or dress the victims of their licentiousness, and 
 heal with the grace of reformation the wounds they have inflicted — 
 where, in fine, fanatical females apply the parable of the marriage 
 feast, to justify the force that is resorted to in carrying vagrants 
 from the high ways ; and where — if they are told that they may 
 abuse the liberty of “ prophecying,” and reminded that “ women 
 are to keep silence in the Churches,” they instantly fall into 
 paroxysms, like those to which Mahomet was subject, and like 
 the same impostor, who, artfully turning a natural disease into 
 an instrument of proselytism, brought a fresh revelation out of 
 every trance, awake with the infallible assurance that the 
 apostle, who knew well “ that some preach Christ out of envy 
 and contention, and not sincerely,” had interdicted females the 
 functions of the ministry, because he was jealous of the superior 
 eloquence of the sex ! ! 
 
 There is not a member of the preceding paragraph that has 
 not reference to some particular evidence. Nay, some of the 
 individuals whose testimonies it embodies, were prepared to repeat 
 their evidence on Sunday, in the public chapel, before an immense 
 congregation. But though they remained in town for some days 
 to evince their sincerity, and came to the chapel for the purpose, 
 we thought it more prudent not to agitate the minds of the 
 
166 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 people by any detail of those odious particulars. And yet, the 
 public is informed by the framers of the Cavan resolutions, that 
 they do not believe that bribery or fraud were the instruments 
 of proselytism. Such no doubt may be their belief — but there is 
 a belief which obeys instead of controling the bias of our inclina- 
 tions. There is, if we are to believe the Scriptures, a faith which 
 rejects the “ knowledge of God’s ways.” The Jews who gave 
 bribes to the soldiers, believed no doubt, nay, published their 
 belief, that the apostles had imposed upon the people by the story 
 of the resurrection. 
 
 And though I am far from impeaching the motives, or arraign- 
 ing the impartiality of magistrates who were doubtless swayed 
 by a sense of their duty ; yet it may be imagined that in refusing 
 the affidavit, they might have some apprehension, lest their 
 pious belief in the purity of the means that were resorted to 
 in the propagation of the Protestant religion, might have been 
 shaken by the rude and stubborn evidence of those sworn depo- 
 sitions. 
 
 It is denied that there was any obstruction to our going to 
 the chapel, and yet confessed, that a Methodist preacher had 
 planted himself at the gates, to greet, I presume, our approach, 
 and not to disturb our deliberations ! It happened, however, 
 that the itinerant fanatic was saluted by a rustic divine, who 
 both engaged in a sturdy disputation. It was, I am told, a rich 
 scene, and those who are acquainted with the picture drawn by 
 Le Sage of the powerful lungs, and fierce gesticulations of the 
 Irish disputants of Salamanca, would absolve the ingenious writer 
 from any unfriendly caricature of our national character. While 
 the Methodist preacher was abandoned to such an adversary, the 
 leaders meditated a richer prey, calculating, no doubt, that they 
 would easily scatter the flock, could they but once achieve the 
 flight of the shepherds. They accordingly send a controversial 
 challenge to the prelates — and the disdain with which the com- 
 munication of the fanatics was treated, inflicted a deadly wound on 
 their pride. The challenge is called respectful, and surely 
 it is the intellect of those individuals alone, that could associate 
 such ideas. 
 
 Let us suppose that the Protestant Primate, accompanied by a 
 few other bishops, found it necessary to repair to the diocese of 
 Kilmore, on business connected with the faith or discipline 
 of the Protestant Church — that two or three of those laymen 
 repair to the spot “ who are the cankers of a calm world and long 
 peace,” and who, from their bad success in their nautical pro- 
 fessions, think themselves qualified to guide the vessel of the 
 Church on the same principle that a Scotchman, named John 
 M‘Cree, mentioned by Sheridan, fancied he must have had a 
 wonderful vocation for tragedy, since he could make no hand of 
 
LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 167 
 
 comedy. Let us suppose that those accompanied by a few more 
 who might have gone through a mock form of ordination, had 
 challenged the prelates to a polemical debate, professing that in 
 tendering such a challenge, they were only anxious for the 
 investigation of truth. 1 know not how the prelates would have 
 relished such a proposal, or whether the insult of such a com- 
 munication would have been atoned for in their minds, by any 
 hollow professions of respect which might have been occasionally 
 spread through the letter. 
 
 There is, it may be remarked, a disparity in the cases. There 
 is surely some disparity, since in the one case, an appeal to 
 Scripture, before the tribunal of individual reason, would be 
 conformable to the principles by which the Protestant prelates 
 hold the tenure of their faith, and could not be declined without 
 a departure from that covenant on which the Protestant Church 
 was originally founded. They might rebuke, it is true, the 
 insolence of the froward children who would presume to arraign 
 the authority of their parent. They might — but the rebuke 
 would recal the memory of an older and more venerable, and 
 more authorative church, reproaching with the like schism and 
 disobedience, the authors of the Reformation, and it would realize 
 the observation of the wise man, that the disobedience of a son 
 to a parent, is sure to be avenged by the rebellion of more un- 
 natural children. 
 
 Not so the Catholic bishops. Their refusal of such a discussion 
 could recal no act of disobedience by which they forfeited that 
 authority with which the apostle commands his disciples to 
 preach, and which has descended to them by hereditary succes- 
 sion, “ knowing of whom they learn,” what “ is committed to 
 them,” and anxious “ to commend the same to faithful men who 
 shall be set to teach others.” “For, they enquire of former 
 generations, and search diligently into the memory of the fathers, 
 following the advice of the Lord to the prophet, — they stand on 
 the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, which is the good 
 way, and walk in it.” It is not to be imagined, that those who 
 have continued to tread each others footsteps, from the time of 
 the Redeemer, in the same old uniform path, would go out of 
 their way to meet every straggler. Is it to be imagined that his 
 Grace, Doctor Curtis, the Catholic Primate of all Ireland, the 
 venerable successor of St. Patrick, would so forget the “ dignity 
 of his age, and his ancient years, and the inbred honor of his 
 grey head,” as to fling the sacred deposit of faith, which has 
 been entrusted to him, into the public streets, and then scramble 
 for a share of it, with a parcel of individuals who are anxious for 
 the inheritance only, that they may scatter it to the winds of 
 heaven. These ideas are not offered by way of apology, for 
 declining such a contest — that they have been always the sen- 
 
168 
 
 LETTER XXXIV, 
 
 timents of the present writer, will appear from a resolution 
 entered into long before our journey to Cavan, by the clergy of 
 Killala, and in which, with the rest of the meeting, he expressed 
 his acquiescence. 
 
 That the unauthorized teachers, who go about tendering chal- 
 lenges to the Catholic bishops, express another feature of the 
 picture which the apostle draws of the impostors of future times, 
 “ speaking swelling words of vanity/’ that if they are anxious to 
 signalize their theological prowess in an episcopal contest — there 
 are other prelates whose religion is more recent, and, perhaps, 
 more vulnerable ; but that for any of the Catholic bishops to 
 descend from his apostolical seat to compete with such fanatics, 
 would betray no less folly than for the monarch of these realms 
 to parley with any pretender to his throne ; and that as well 
 might the rights and features of England’s legitimate heir have 
 been formerly recognized in the wandering impostor, Perkin 
 Warbeck, as the character of Christ’s genuine followers be dis- 
 covered in those errant orators, who pretend to the exclusive 
 inheritance of Christ’s kingdom. 
 
 Lest, however, it should be imagined that we shrink from 
 that grave and deliberate discussion, which would be likely to 
 be productive of any advantages, should his present Majesty, 
 adopting the policy of Honorius, command the bishops of that 
 Church of which he is the head, to meet the Catholic bishops 
 in conference, such as was held at Carthage, in the time of St. 
 Augustine, between the Catholic and Donatist bishops, for the 
 purpose of restoring peace to the Church ; I have very little 
 doubt of the disposition of the Catholic prelates of the present day, 
 to follow the example of their predecessors on that occasion. 
 With no less alacrity would they unfold the arguments of their 
 faith, could they calculate on a reciprocal disposition to follow the 
 light of conviction, and with no less sincerity would they welcome 
 into the unity of the Church of Christ, those who were a long 
 time straying from its bosom. But I had almost forgotten that 
 the schism of the Donatists was comparatively recent ; that it was 
 not on that account so difficult to be healed, since time had not 
 yet confirmed its inveteracy ; that they were not strongly held to 
 their opinions by those temporal ties which it is difficult to sunder 
 without a wrench of the human feelings ; and that the errors of 
 their system had not struck such deep root as to wind themselves 
 round every object of ambition — nay, to be intertwined with the 
 very texture of the civil polity. 
 
 Doubtless, the courtly prelates of the Establishment would 
 scarcely venture to stake the valuable possession of their faith 
 on the issue of such a conference. Truth is a fine theme for 
 declamation ; and the reformed faith is a specious phrase to those 
 who are amused by unmeaning sounds. But though the beauty 
 
LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 169 
 
 of truth may be heightened by panegyric, still I suspect that 
 among those who are most lavish of its praise, there is but little 
 of that generous stoicism which would embrace it without some 
 temporal dowry. It requires a steadier eye than many are 
 blessed with to view with equal indifference two churches — (I 
 confess the inaccuracy of the phrase), one of which is clouded 
 by poverty, and the other dazzling with the splendour of its 
 honours ; and it requires a steadier hand than all possess evenly 
 to poise the scales of controversy, while the gold of the sanctuary, 
 heavier than the sword of Brennus, would be found to cast the 
 trembling balance on one side. 
 
 What ! should the possessors of the princely revenues of the 
 Church established by law, meet the bishops of a religion which 
 the State has disowned? Were the conference to turn on their 
 claims or titles to such possessions, doubtless they ought to regard 
 it as an illegitimate intrusion on their rights, and treat it with 
 the same disdain with which the Catholic prelates treated the 
 proposed conference, regarding their spiritual privileges. The 
 question turns not upon titles or temporalities, but the purity of 
 the Christian religion of which such possessions are no criterion. 
 If the orthodoxy of a church were to be measured by the 
 gorgeous establishment of its ministers, doubtless, the Church of 
 England would be the purest and most orthodox portion of the 
 Church of Christ. But history has taught us, that heretical 
 conventicles sometimes found favour in the sight of kings. If, 
 for example, such a conference had been proposed between 
 St. Athanasius and the Catholic bishops on one side, and George 
 of Cappadocia, and the other Arian bishops on the other, whom 
 imperial favour seated on their thrones, the flatterers of courts, 
 and the friends of ascendancy would have been indignant at any 
 comparison between the orthodoxy of two classes, the one of 
 whom owed their elevation to the will of Constantine, and the 
 other was acknowledged bishop by the Church which the law 
 proscribed. Yet with a few years, George and Eusebius, and 
 their associates, passed away, confounded with the preceding 
 sectaries, while Athanasius — the superstitious, the heterodox, and 
 the idolatrous Athanasius (for even then, the Catholics were 
 accused of idolatry, for worshiping the Son of God by the profes- 
 sors of the pure, and scriptural, and reformed creed of Arianism), 
 Athanasius emerged from the cloud of all those errors, and is 
 revered as an orthodox bishop, even by those who charge the 
 Catholic bishops now with a similar idolatry. 
 
 Strange as such conduct may appear, it is not difficult to ac- 
 count for it. These ancient Catholics cannot now interfere with 
 the temporal interests of others. The grave has long since 
 closed upon them ; and, since their errors are become harmless, 
 there is no danger in the admission of their orthodoxy. Hence, 
 
 M 
 
170 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 their faith may be praised, nay, their sepulchres may be whited. 
 But as for their successors, they unfortunately inherit the same 
 superstition and idolatry which made the others obnoxious during 
 life, and must therefore pay the forfeit of their errors. They are 
 idolatrous in the respect with which they worship the Consti- 
 tution ; they are impious in endeavouring to share in the infinite 
 value of Christ’s atonement, by virtue and good works ; they are 
 infidels, because they deny the infallibility of contradictory creeds, 
 and those who kindly undertake the purgation of their faith by 
 the ordeal of temporal penalties, fancy they may atone for any 
 severity towards the children, by praising the religion, and build- 
 ing the monuments of their ancestors. 
 
 Before I conclude this letter, I must do the agents of prose- 
 lytism at Cavan, the justice to acknowledge they have been the 
 benefactors of religion in the diocese of Kilmore, and should be 
 entitled to the thanks of the Catholics, were it not that their 
 lofty and disinterested virtue disdains the idea of merit of any 
 kind : even the subordinate merit of co-operating with the 
 grace of God. We shall not, therefore, distress their humility 
 by the acknowledgment of our obligations ; since, with all their 
 frauds, and bribery, and corruption, they were but passive instru- 
 ments which the plastic hand of the Almighty moulded to his own 
 wise purposes. 
 
 But the Reformation still continues. If it has not been 
 entirely arrested, it cannot be denied that its career has been 
 considerably checked; and many of those who strove to feed 
 their intellects with the husks of error, are returning again to 
 be filled with that truth which satisfies every craving, and which 
 is to be found alone in the home of their father which they 
 abandoned. We did not expect to extinguish the Reformation, 
 since we did not expect to pluck the passions out of the human 
 heart, or to defeat the predictions of the apostle. St. Paul has 
 said, “ There must be heresies, that they also who are reproved 
 may be manifest among you ;” and this manifestation has con- 
 tributed to the purity of the Church. What! heresy become 
 an instrument of the Reformation of the Church. Yes, like an 
 acid that disengages substances that hitherto were blended — 
 heresy has a similar effect in disengaging error from the pure 
 doctrines with which it was mixed, and manifesting by the process 
 of depuration its deformity to the world. Hence, the heresies of 
 which St. Paul speaks, have been but an uniform process of re- 
 formation in the Church, opening channels to convey away those 
 impure errors that might infect its “ living waters,” by resting on 
 its bosom. Such was the first scriptural “reformation” of Simon, 
 which brought out of the Church, those who believed that he was 
 the Trinity ; and that he devolved a portion of his triple pre- 
 rogatives on Helen, who was at once the partner of his revelations 
 
LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 171 
 
 and his vices. Such was the scriptural “ reformation” of Menan- 
 der, <£ who, creeping into houses, led captive silly women, laden 
 with sins,” because he promised them that his baptism would be a 
 charm against death, converting them into so many Hebes, bloom- 
 ing with eternal youth and immortality. Such was the pure and 
 scriptural “reformation” of Marcion, who restored health and 
 soundness to the body that remained, by carrying with him the 
 corrupt and imputated members that would infect the entire, by 
 mixing with the purity of the Christian religion, the superstitions 
 of Zoroaster. Such was the scriptural “ reformation” of Arius, 
 who manifested to the faithful, all those whose reason could not 
 comprehend the mysterious divinity of the word. Such was the 
 pure “ reformation” of Nestorius, who purged the Church of all 
 those whose piety and reason were equally shocked at the un- 
 scriptural doctrine of calling the Son of Mary, the Son of God. 
 Such was the pure and holy “ reformation” of the Gnostics, who 
 carried off from defiling the Church, those who indulged in an 
 indiscriminate concubinage, because they believed marriage to be 
 abominable. Such, not to pursue further, the dark and fleeting 
 errors of the more ancient reformers, was the ££ reformation” of 
 Huss, who separated from the Church, and manifested those who 
 measured the authority of princes and of pontiffs, by the degree 
 of grace with which they were invested ; thus, converting every 
 Christian into a Brutus, who, since grace — the only title of legiti- 
 macy — is always invisible, would be constantly ridding the world 
 of its rulers, who would all become synonymous with the tyrants 
 of the earth. Such was the scriptural ££ reformation” of Luther, 
 who purged the Church of all those who believed that, by good 
 works ££ they were offering an affront to the spirit of grace.” 
 Such, the ££ reformation” of Calvin, who manifested by separating 
 them, those who believed that by no immorality could they 
 forfeit the gift of justification ; and thus gave an unchecked rein 
 to the indulgence of their vices. Such was the ££ reformation” 
 wrought in England under Henry, through the instrumentality 
 of Cranmer and his corrupt associates, manifesting those who 
 were the slaves of the vilest passions ; and such, in fine, was the 
 kindred ££ reformation” of Cavan, of which the agents, like another 
 Menander, ££ were leading captive silly women laden with sins,” 
 and illustrating the lessons of immorality which were taught by 
 every such preceding ££ reformation.” 
 
 It is by those outlets of heresy, carrying off all the peccant 
 humors by which the health of the Church would be endangered, 
 it is often reformed. The errors that would have brooded on its 
 surface are removed and set apart by the working of that 
 spirit which first moved over the abyss, and divided the confines 
 of light from the shore of darkness. This conflict between truth 
 and error — between vice and virtue — shall not cease; it was 
 
172 
 
 LETTER XXXIV. 
 
 shadowed in the adverse principles of Ormuyd and Ahriman, 
 feigned in the Persian theology, and is realized in the incessant 
 warfare with which the Catholic Church keeps aloof from its 
 confines, those agents of darkness who would extinguish the light, 
 and disturb the order of its peaceful dominions. Let then, the 
 sectaries continue to boast of those reformations of which they 
 are such sad examples, being the channels through which the 
 Church is relieved, and purified from every species of complaint. 
 
 ^ John. Bishop of Maronia, 
 
LETTER XXXV. 
 
 173 
 
 LETTER XXXV. 
 
 Ballina, 1827. 
 
 In the last number of the Quarterly Review , just published, 
 an article has appeared, purporting to be “ A Review of the 
 Report of the Commissioners of Education regarding the Col- 
 lege of Maynooth,” The title which the article bears is but a 
 thin and awkward disguise, by which the author would fain 
 conceal the treachery of his purpose. 
 
 Though called a review on the College of Maynooth, it is 
 nothing else than a political manoeuvre, artfully contrived, in the 
 present posture of our affairs, to prejudice the Catholic question. 
 Long and frequent use had now worn out the ancient topics of 
 accusation and reproach. The dispensing and deposing power 
 of the Popes, together with the Councils of Constance and of 
 Lateran, were so often drawled before the public, through the 
 stupid medium of some journals, or the more stupid speeches of 
 certain members of parliament, that no reasoning could stimulate 
 the palled and sated appetite of the public to relish their repeti- 
 tion. 
 
 Something, however, must be done ; and since the old ingre- 
 dients have lost their powers to charm, a new one, quite fresh 
 from the College of Maynooth, is flung into the political cauldron, 
 over which it is not difficult to descry a solemn spectral form, 
 exercising his nocturnal vigils, and preparing, with all the art of 
 the sorcerers in Shakspeare, the materials of his composition, 
 that he may fuddle the heads of all who may partake of the 
 magic potion. The author could not disguise his identity or his 
 fears. The priests and forty-shilling freeholders are continually 
 disturbing his imagination and repose. They have already 
 nearly annihilated his political existence ; and if the countenance 
 be an index of the sadness of his heart, “ a vision of the night 
 has more than once whispered through the veins of his ears,” 
 that at the next election the priests and freeholders shall achieve 
 its utter extinction. 
 
 The author, I am told, is an adept in chemistry as well as 
 statistics; and fancying, no doubt, that, passing through the 
 alembic of his mind, they should derive fresh qualities from 
 their admixture with the new ingredient, he has again intro- 
 duced the dispensations of oaths and vows, and the illimitable 
 
174 
 
 LETTER XXXV. 
 
 authorities of Popes and Councils — not forgetting what the 
 British monarch has to fear from the disciples of Ignatius — 
 and concluding by warning all loyal Protestants against the 
 spirit that animates the breasts and writings of “ J. K. L.” and 
 “ Hierophilos” ! ! One quality, indeed, is discernible in the com- 
 position — the singular confusion with which the materials are 
 huddled together. It is only right, however, to disengage them, 
 that the public may perceive the pure malignity of a writer, who, 
 like the bee of Trebizond, extracts but poison from the flower on 
 which all others gather sweets, and labours to communicate the 
 same poison to every subject which he touches. 
 
 In a letter already addressed to the public, through the Morn- 
 ing Chronicle, I have vindicated the College of Maynooth from 
 some of the attacks which are again renewed by the Quarterly 
 Review. The Courier was, probably, content with the reply ; 
 and hence his forbearance in pressing the same charges. The 
 reviewer is quite offended at the austere and gloomy character 
 of the College discipline. I believe him sincere. No doubt his 
 heart would mutiny against the moral restraints which the 
 Gospel and the Catholic religion impose. With all their affecta- 
 tion of reverence for Scripture, the lofty counsels of the Re- 
 deemer were never the favourite maxims of the Reformers. He 
 is, indeed, pleased to add, that were the students trained accord- 
 ing to his notions, we should be blessed with a more tolerant 
 priesthood.* What a pity that a small infusion from the 
 reviewer’s enchanted draught is not poured into their education ; 
 then we should have a more tolerant Catholic priesthood. Yes ; 
 we should have a priesthood tolerant of every error in belief, 
 and of every folly in practice — tolerant of the vices of the great, 
 and of the sufferings with which the poor are afflicted — tolerant 
 of the making of freeholders without a freehold, and of the per- 
 juries to which the peasantry were forced by their landlords — 
 whilst truth, and justice, and humanity should be the only things 
 that could never experience their amiable toleration. 
 
 Not to dwell longer on the discipline of Maynooth, I shall 
 next direct the reader’s attention to its doctrines, as far as they 
 regard the authority of Councils and of Popes, commencing with 
 the dispensing power, which is the most formidable in the mind 
 of the reviewer, as it haunts his fancy through the entire of his 
 lucubration. On this subject he charitably insinuates that Dr. 
 MacHale is of opinion, that almost every possible case comes 
 within the compass of the Pope’s power of dispensation.! Yet, 
 Dr. MacHale distinctly states — “ But if these are paramount 
 obligations, founded on natural law or the divine law, and which 
 are clearly impressed upon every mind, then we never entertain 
 
 * Review, page 460. 
 
 | Review, page 480. 
 
LETTER XXXV. 
 
 175 
 
 the question of dispensation, because we know that neither bishop 
 nor Pope, nor any power on earth, whatever utility could be 
 derived to the Church, can attempt to release a person from an 
 oatli confirming those obligations.”* I shall forbear any com- 
 ment on the reviewer’s statement. The reader may form his 
 opinion of his regard to truth and candour. Lest the single 
 expression of his opinion should not be sufficient, to Dr. MacHale 
 is put the following interrogatories : — “ If a person took an oath, 
 the fulfilment of which would be injurious to the temporal inte- 
 rests of the Church, would that be held so far to militate against 
 the utility of the Church as to be a sufficient cause for dissolving 
 the obligation of it ?” To which he replies — “ It would not be a 
 sufficient cause ; because the temporal interests of the Church is 
 a matter of secondary importance, compared to the obligation of 
 an oath, which binds us to the Almighty.”! And, again (for the 
 edifying patience of the commissioners could endure the endless 
 repetition of the same questions and replies) — “ Were a prince to 
 be considered as great a benefactor of the Church as Constantine 
 was, she could not grant him a dispensation that would absolve 
 him from an oath or vow, which ratified, by calling God to wit- 
 ness, a previously subsisting obligation.”! 
 
 After the evidence with which parliament was already fur- 
 nished regarding the Catholic doctrine, concerning the dispensing 
 power of the Popes, one would imagine that the commissioners 
 might forbear from trying the temper of their witnesses on a 
 doctrine which is attested by proofs the most unequivocal — the 
 conduct of seven millions of people. “ Catholics cannot define, 
 forsooth,” observes the reviewer, “ the cases to which the dis- 
 pensing power may be applied.” § Are not those cases as 
 definable — nay, as tangible, as the barriers that shut out Catho- 
 lics from the British constitution? Are not the oaths which 
 would fit them for offices of honour and emolument, oaths from 
 whose obligation the Pope could not absolve them ? Had the 
 Catholics of Ireland shown more pliancy on the subject of 
 oaths — had they, like Cranmer, the detestable duplicity of pro- 
 testing in a corner against the oath which he was publicly to 
 swear — had they the courage to encounter the scruples which 
 the late Lord Londonderry and others confessed they felt in 
 taking the oaths which qualified them for place, the reviewer 
 would not be insulting them with the imputation of doctrines 
 which he knows they do not hold. To what do the Protestants 
 of Ireland owe their ascendancy, but to the reverence of the 
 Catholics for their oaths ? And, had that one fence been 
 removed by the all-powerful influence of the Roman Pontiff, the 
 
 * Appendix to the Report of the Commissioners, page 284. 
 f Appendix , page 285. | Appendix, page 287. 
 
 § Review, page 481. 
 
176 
 
 LETTER XXXV. 
 
 influx of Catholic members and Catholic talent into places of 
 trust and emolument would sink their present occupants to their 
 original obscurity. 
 
 The reviewer, not content with imputing such opinions to Dr. 
 MacHale, in direct opposition to the language of his own evi- 
 dence, insinuates (for he affects to fear a libel, should he openly 
 declare it) that he availed himself of this doctrine, in publishing 
 the letters of “ Hierophilos.” With regard to a libel, I can 
 solemnly assure him, that he shall never be prosecuted on a 
 charge the truth of which he is able to substantiate. We have 
 no apprehension that he should publish the truth to the world ; 
 and we pledge ourselves that we shall never shield our characters 
 behind a doctrine, as convenient as constitutional, that truth is a 
 libel. But though he may publish the truth with impunity, his 
 falsehoods must not go without exposure. Dr. MacHale never 
 took an oath to the observance of the statutes of the College, 
 nor was such an oath ever tendered to him to be taken. Yet, on 
 a falsehood of his own invention, this dastardly writer imputes to 
 him the violation of an oath which had no existence save in the 
 reviewer’s mind. 
 
 By a real or affected aberration of intellect, the writer here 
 confounds the College of Maynooth with Trinity College. In 
 the statutes of that University there is a form of oath prescribed 
 to the Fellows, by which they bind themselves to their observ- 
 ance. I shall not say nor insinuate that this oath was always 
 administered to the Fellows of the College, since it would involve 
 an imputation, which I should not cast upon any individual or 
 body of men without evidence, which the reviewer did not give 
 himself the trouble of acquiring respecting the College of May- 
 nooth. Among the statutes there is one rather of a Popish 
 nature, prohibiting the Fellows from marrying, under the 
 penalty of expulsion. Waving, however, the question about the 
 oath, which was not probably annexed to the original statutes, 
 the statute to which I have just alluded has been frequently 
 violated — I will not say by archbishops and bishops, for I am 
 kindly accused by the reviewer of believing that the Protestant 
 bishops are only laymen ; but, comparing the age of some of the 
 children of the high dignitaries of the Establishment with the 
 period of their Fellowship, it will be found that some of their 
 children were born unto them whilst in the University ; and, to 
 avoid any other supposition, which a respect for those individuals 
 should forbid us to entertain, we must suppose that those children 
 were born in wedlock, and, of course, in violation of the statute 
 of the College. Yet, against this long-continued violation of 
 statutes — which, I suppose, is now at an end — not a whisper is 
 heard from the hypocrites, who loudly clamour against the pub- 
 lication of letters, because the author did not mention a circum- 
 
LETTER XXXV. 
 
 177 
 
 stance which every body knew, to the President of the College. 
 Perhaps, the reviewing sages are of opinion with Luther, that 
 the law against marriage is a law against nature, and from which 
 every individual has a right to look for a dispensation. And, 
 probably, they are of opinion, that it is more in accordance with 
 the spirit of academic institutions to engage in furtive marriages 
 than to indulge in the pursuits of literature and illustrate the 
 truths of religion. 
 
 But Dr. MacHale, in his evidence, observes the reviewer, 
 admits and justifies every expression of his writings. He thanks 
 him for the candid acknowledgment. Yes, his motto is never to 
 put to paper a single line which he should wish to erase ; and the 
 Bishop shrinks not from the adoption of the earlier opinions of 
 the Professor of Maynooth. He protests, however, against the 
 turn given to those opinions by the reviewer, since the truth 
 itself would appear ugly through so distorting a medium. Ac- 
 cording to the Review , he gives no titles to our prelates. On 
 the contrary, he has, with unsparing profusion, heaped on them 
 the titles of Lordships and of Graces, well knowing that those 
 are titles which his Majesty can confer at pleasure. If he has 
 doubted of their episcopal character, as it is understood in a 
 theological sense, the reviewer, he trusts, will compassionate his 
 involuntary scepticism, unless he demonstrates that his Majesty 
 is also the source from which an episcopal character is derived. 
 
 A question is put by one of the commissioners to Dr. MacHale, 
 regarding his inward and unpublished opinions, which would 
 appear revolting to the advocates of the inquisition at Madrid or 
 at Rome. Yet this advocate of freedom wonders why Doctor 
 MacHale should not reveal his whole mind, instead of checking 
 such unwarrantable interrogatories, by remarking, “that the 
 question regarded interior sentiments, and that human tribunals 
 only judge of external actions and opinions.” This reply, which 
 was but a gentle and just reproof to the petulance of delegated 
 office, is made a text for much invidious and mysterious com- 
 mentary ! It was not reluctantly extorted, since the commis- 
 sioners are aware that, to consult their own dignity, they found 
 it necessary to erase the next reply, which reminded them that 
 they outstepped the limits of their jurisdiction, in questioning 
 him about sentiments contained in his subsequent productions. 
 Strange insolence of man ! to be indignant at the reverence 
 which Catholics feel for the most venerable authority upon earth, 
 and yet, with his brief portion of secondary trust, to attempt to 
 exercise an inquisitorial power of ransacking the human heart, 
 which the first authority on earth would not assume. 
 
 It would be impossible in the short compass of a letter fully to 
 expose the manifest inconsistencies of the Review. In three sub- 
 sequent pages he lays down three positions regarding the four 
 
178 
 
 LETTER XXXV. 
 
 propositions, termed the Gallican Liberties : — “ The second insists 
 on the supremacy of General Councils over Popes.”* “'The doc- 
 trine respecting Councils, taught by the Professors of Maynooth, 
 is, we think, that Councils are superior to the Pope.”j “We 
 have, consequently, been surprised to find that the policy of that 
 (the Irish) Church has uniformly tended to support the Trans- 
 alpine Doctrines.” J Spirit of the Stagyrite! are the laws of 
 reasoning, as well as religion, subjected to the new reformation ? 
 What a profound specimen of logic, to draw from a proposition 
 which forms the extreme point of the Gallican liberties, the 
 opposite conclusion of Transalpine doctrines ! ! To Doctor 
 MacHale, in his evidence on this subject, the reviewer gives the 
 merit of being fair and explicit. If, then, his testimony was 
 fair, what must we think of the reviewer, who charges the Col- 
 lege with the inculcation of Transalpine doctrines, since Doctor 
 MacHale declares, “ that, aloof from the influence of those 
 motives that might have swayed the Continental schools, the 
 College of Maynooth, content with following the straight line of 
 defined doctrine, adopted neither the Cisalpine nor the Trans- 
 alpine opinions ?” 
 
 But the writer had an evident object in view, since he wished 
 to frighten his readers again with the ghost of John Huss, as 
 well as the terrors of the Vatican. The death of the Bohemian 
 martyr would not appear sufficiently tragical were it not brought 
 about by the influence of the chief authority in the Catholic 
 Church. And hence his view, in speaking of this subject, to 
 exalt the power of General Councils. But, again, when he 
 introduces the Roman Pontiffs shaking the world with their 
 spiritual thunders, the controlling authority of Councils utterly 
 disappears, and the Pope is left alone to rule the world by his 
 mere arbitrary fiat. But such artifices have lost their force. 
 The days of the Dueignans and the Lethbridges are gone by ; and 
 should Leslie Foster, who would fill up the worthy triumvirate, 
 attempt in parliament the wretched pantomime of exhibiting the 
 spectre of John Huss upon the stage, the nerves of a Brougham 
 or a Burdett would remain unmoved, or, rather, they should be 
 shaken with laughter at his ludicrous attempts to rouse such 
 strange apparations by his oratorical galvanism. 
 
 The efforts of any other orator shall be equally unavailing to 
 excite any apprehension of the Pope, “ that harmless old man,” 
 to use a phrase of Burke’s, “ whose name brings such terror to 
 the minds of old and young children.” Occupied in the tem- 
 poral government of his own territories, as well as the spiritual 
 concerns of the whole Church, he leaves the care of their domi- 
 nions to their respective sovereigns. But, according to the 
 
 * Review , page 471. 
 
 f Review , page 473. 
 
 % Review, page 472. 
 
LETTER XXXV. 
 
 179 
 
 sapient remarks of the reviewer, his temporal power may not 
 be dead , but dormant. If so, the improvements of centuries 
 should be again annihilated, and the human mind recast in 
 another mould, before that dormant power shall again revive ; 
 unless, indeed, we suppose that, like the Giant Malagisa, in the 
 “ Orlando,” who was conjured into a deep slumber, the Magog 
 of the Seven Hills has been charmed into a similar repose, 
 where he sleeps in quiet, until the time fixed by the destinies 
 shall arrive, when a chosen champion of Ireland, and who must 
 be a member of the Catholic Association, shall repair to Rome, 
 and, with three touches of his wand, awaken the sleeping giant 
 to the consciousness of life and the exercise of universal empire. 
 
 Such, Sir, are the leading topics that have been discussed by 
 this learned reviewer, who is so well skilled in theological science 
 as to talk of Catholics believing in the inspiration of General 
 Councils ! If I have dwelt more at length on the subject of 
 “ Hierophilos,” you will not be surprised, since the writer deems 
 it so important as almost to merit a separate review. With 
 regard to the President and Professors of the College of May- 
 nooth, I hope, with Mr. O’Connell, that the Review shall have 
 the effect of attracting public attention to their evidence, in the 
 Report of the Commissioners, where it shall appear full, con- 
 sistent, and satisfactory, and such as to reflect the highest credit 
 on their characters and their acquirements. The College of 
 Maynooth was made to pass through an ordeal which few such 
 institutions could sustain, and its reputation, far from suffering 
 by its heat, has come out more burnished by its activity. 
 
 I have not stopped for the present to canvass the legitimate 
 claims of the reviewers to the high office of censorship which 
 they assumed. I, too, shall, probably, soon take another oppor- 
 tunity of “ reviewing the reviewers,” and showing that, like other 
 mock personages, much of their importance is derived from the 
 histrionic illusion that hides their real dimensions, whilst they 
 appear on the public stage wielding the sceptre of criticism, and 
 promulgating their decrees on science and on literature. 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
180 
 
 LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 TO LORD BEXLEY. 
 
 Ballina, November, 1828 . 
 
 My Lord — These are strange times ; nor is it the least strange 
 of the features, which characterize them to see with what reck- 
 lessness of their dignity the peers of the realm are rushing into 
 print, and becoming ambitious candidates of ridicule. Heretofore 
 they seemed to have adopted the Persian maxim of investing 
 themselves with reverence, by keeping aloof from the ranks of 
 the people. If they were not great men, the secret of their 
 littleness was only known to their valet de chambre; nor did 
 they rashly exhibit themselves abroad, if they did not possess 
 those hardy qualities which are proof against public collisions. 
 Rely on it, my Lord, the people take delight in those exhibitions 
 of Aristocratic intellect, as it gives them an opportunity of 
 measuring the relative distance between it and their own. The 
 Morning Chronicle, which conveyed to me Lord Bexley’s letter, 
 contained another of William Cobbett’s on the opposite side, and 
 surely no reader has failed to remark how the puny production 
 of the peer shrinks before the strong and simple energy of the 
 man of the people. With the Duke of Newcastle and Lord 
 Kenyon, your Lordship fills up the triumvirate of literature. 
 Lords Farnham, and Lor ton, and Winchilsea are doubtless pant- 
 ing for the honour of digesting in plates of brass, the laws of the 
 Constitution. Lords Wicklow and Roden must contribute their 
 share to the labour, nor shall they cease to associate to their body 
 all the writing peers of the land, until they complete the number 
 of Decemvirs — a combination equally ominous to the liberties of 
 the country. 
 
 It is difficult to compress within appropriate limits the refutation 
 of your address, since, with a lofty disregard of all the unities of 
 time and place, and persons, your Lordship’s excursive fancy 
 ranged over every topic that could minister to the prejudices of 
 the public mind. 
 
 The Catholic Association is the first object that provokes your 
 rage. I am not surprised. It is too mighty an object to escape 
 notice, and it is every day assuming a more imposing attitude, 
 and larger dimensions. To annihilate or dissolve such a formida- 
 ble body, is the problem by which the great council of the nation 
 
LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 181 
 
 has been singularly perplexed. There are only two ways — force 
 or conciliation. The first has been already tried, as if to read a 
 lecture of wisdom to the advocates of coercion. But scarce was it 
 dissolved, when its sullen and mutinous elements again rushed to 
 the same centre, and constituted another association, which has 
 exceeded the former, as well in the closer compactness of all its 
 parts, as in the more extensive sphere of its attraction. Force 
 can have no other effect than that of binding the members of the 
 association more firmly together. It is only the warmth of 
 legislative favour alone that can s so dissolve them as to defy their 
 future coalition. 
 
 The college of Maynooth next comes in for the honour of your 
 enmity. The classification shows that your mind is not utterly 
 destitute of arrangement, as the Catholic clergy are strenuous 
 advocates for the final pacification of the country. But what is 
 the amount of the offending of the college ? Why, truly that it 
 continues to teach the unchangeable doctrines of the Catholic 
 Church ! The great political sin of its professors consists in this, 
 that a sense of gratitude for a sum of money, which is but a 
 paltry pittance in the Government expenditure, has not so sub- 
 dued their minds, as to make them traitors to the rights and 
 religion of the Catholic people. In becoming members of the 
 college of Maynooth, its students never convenanted to surrender 
 the pure faith of their fathers. Indeed your Lordship does not 
 mean to insinuate that the college grant should be withheld on 
 account of the report of the Commissioners of Education .Surely 
 we ought to thank you for such a sentiment ; nor are we sorry 
 that Mr. Vansittart is no longer the dispenser of the public 
 treasury. 
 
 It is not from a compliment to the Catholic people, the 
 Government has ever granted money for Catholic purposes. It 
 is from policy — and it is to this policy we shall be indebted for the 
 continuance of such grants, if not for their augmentation. It is 
 not the interest of Government to throw back the peasantry into 
 the ignorance from which they are rescued by the labours of the 
 Catholic clergy. It is not the interest of Government to let 
 those passions loose upon society which are restrained by the 
 controul of the Catholic priesthood. It is wiser, as well as more 
 economical to expend a few thousand pounds upon the men who 
 are keeping the people quiet, than millions upon those who are 
 striving to inflame them with a religious and political frenzy. 
 And, my Lord, I assert without fear of contradiction, that the 
 Maynooth grant does more in the moral improvement of Ireland, 
 than the enormous mass of money which is swallowed up by 
 the Army, the Church Establishment, and the countless Bible and 
 Vice-Suppressing societies all together. 
 
 But still the people of England are taxed to the amount of 
 
182 
 
 LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 nine or ten thousand pounds a year, for the purpose of maintain- 
 ing professors to teach the Roman Catholics of Ireland, that in 
 some cases a priest, in others, a bishop, and in all the Pope, can 
 release them from their sins, their vows, their oaths ! And then 
 you add, or rather premise, such is the doctrine laid down in the 
 class book of the college. But why, my Lord, did you not con- 
 descend to inform the honest freeholders of Kent, under what 
 circumstances, and with what qualifications, could such a power 
 he legitimately exercised. No, it did not suit your purpose. It 
 was enough if your Lordship could frighten John Bull into a 
 horror for popery, by an ugly phantom of your own creation. 
 Could your Lordship not lay before them the following sen- 
 tence of the report* alluded to in your address, and which 
 is extracted from a Catholic prayer-book, now before me, 
 entitled “True Piety “ It is a fundamental truth in our 
 religion, that no power on earth can license men to lie, to for- 
 swear, or perjure themselves, to massacre their neighbours, or 
 destroy their native country, in pretence of promoting the 
 Catholic cause or religion. Furthermore, all pardons or dispensa- 
 tions granted or pretended to be granted, in order to any such 
 ends or designs, could "have no other validity or effect than to 
 add sacrilege and blasphemy to the above-mentioned crimes.” 
 Here is an extract from a popular and an extensively read prayer- 
 book, compiled by one of the most venerable prelates of the Irish 
 Church, and approved by the adoption of the rest ; and yet, 
 instead of exhibiting it to enlighten the ignorance, and conciliate 
 the good will of the English people, you draw some dark and 
 imperfect outlines of your own, leaving the rest to be filled up by 
 their furious prejudices. Why not put in juxta position our 
 doctrine on oaths with that of Sanderson, a Protestant professor 
 in the University of Oxford, and afterwards bishop of Lincoln ? 
 No, the resemblance between both would disabuse the men of 
 Kent of their errors, and make them conclude that they were 
 imposed upon by the interested views of lords who labour to 
 divide the people in order to profit by their dissensions. The Ca- 
 tholics of these times are still doomed to the same savage treat- 
 ment which was inflicted on the Catholics in the time of Tacitus. 
 Now, through the calumnies of their enemies, as then through 
 the fury of their persecutors, they must be clothed in the skins of 
 wild beasts ; now, as well as then, must they be covered with pitch, 
 not only to blacken them before the public, but to make them fit 
 objects for the brand to be flung at ; and now, as well as then, 
 must they be exhibited with this hideous caricature, in order to 
 be hunted down by the public execration. 
 
 Of all the topics of reproach which are urged by Protestants 
 
 Page 228. 
 
LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 183 
 
 against Catholics, none has surprised me more than that regard- 
 ing oaths and dispensations. Is it because numbers swear a 
 religion to be damnable and idolatrous, of which they never 
 studied an iota, we must give them credit for a most sensitive 
 reverence for oaths ? Be assured of it, my Lord, that of those 
 who intrepidly swear to the idolatry of the Catholic religion, 
 there are some who would curse with a similar oath the thirty- 
 nine articles, if the orthodox loaves and fishes of the mosque of 
 Mahomet were to reward the seasonable change in their reli- 
 gious convictions. You are not ignorant how little of religion 
 animated the great actors in what is called the Reformation. 
 Your Lordship is not ignorant with what dexterity they accom- 
 modated their fluctuating creeds to the incessant shiftings of the 
 political fortunes of England ; and how the same persons were 
 prepared with the same lips to bless as orthodox, or to stigmatize 
 as heretical, the same identical opinions. While the Catholics of 
 Ireland have cheerfully submitted to the slow tortures of a poli- 
 tical ordeal, on account of the reverence which they feel for an 
 oath, no doubt some of the lookers on were as much surprised at 
 the prodigy of their fortitude or their folly, as the Carthage- 
 nians, who secretly mocked the sufferings of Regulus. To 
 sound, then, this mysterious subject to the bottom, the appre- 
 hension is not that the Catholics feel no reverence for an oath ; 
 but the apprehension of the Brunswickers, and the borough- 
 mongers, and the monopolists of all classes, is lest the Catholics 
 should lose that reverence, and thus share in the spoil from 
 which they are excluded. There is, then, a sentiment which 
 may be appropriately added to those which are already so loudly 
 toasted amidst the Orange orgies, and which, no doubt, will be 
 rapturously cheered by every loyal supporter of the Protestant 
 constitution ! ! 
 
 May all the Papists of Ireland continue to be as much the dupes 
 to their reverence for an oath, as were their Popish ancestors ! 
 
 But though such a sentiment might be echoed by the hypo- 
 crites who turn religion into an instrument of faction, it will not 
 be relished by that sound portion of the Protestant community, 
 who can view the most hard-hearted selfishness lurking under 
 the guise of a regard for the constitution. The people of 
 England are beginning to be sensible how often they have been 
 imposed upon by such hollow pretensions. As liberty was often 
 the stalking-horse of the little tyrants of Greece, religious 
 liberty is become the stalking-horse of the aristocratic faction 
 of Britain. But the eyes of the people are almost opened to 
 these delusions. They know how the unprincipled Somerset 
 could erect palaces out of the ruins of churches, under pretence 
 of abolishing every vestige of idolatry ; — they know how Henry 
 kept a succession of concubines, while the people were persuaded 
 
184 
 
 LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 that all this was done in order to protect the purity of the 
 Levitical law against the abominations of the Scarlet Lady of 
 Rome ; — they know how their ancestors were burdened with 
 poor rates, while the Lords, who were frightening them with the 
 terrors of Popery, were, at the same time, pocketing the wealth 
 of the monasteries. They know all this, nor will they suffer 
 themselves to be cajoled any longer by saintly Lords, who would 
 burthen them with fresh imposts, whilst they amuse them with 
 the shadow of a constitution, of which they reserve the benefits 
 to themselves. 
 
 Another article of impeachment against the Catholics of Ire- 
 land is, that Dr. Crotty justified the Council of Constance in the 
 execution of John Huss, and that Dr. MacHale wrote a series of 
 letters against the Protestant Establishment. I am at a loss to 
 know why the Catholics of Ireland should suffer for such high 
 misdemeanors. But Dr. Crotty holds his place, though guilty, 
 by his sanction of the sentence, of the murder of John Huss ; 
 and Dr. MacHale, instead of being removed from the College, as 
 he deserved, for daring to attack the majesty of the Established 
 Church, was rewarded with a bishopric. Why, really, those 
 letters contained the very milk of human kindness, compared to 
 the burning lava which has been since poured upon the devoted 
 heads of the parsons and the Establishment. Instead, therefore, 
 of censure, I ought to have been thanked for the charity of my 
 forbearance. But the great crime was, that the professor of 
 theology was attacking the Established Church behind the 
 masked battery of “ Hierophilos.” In vindication, he must say, 
 that none of those masked assaults were half so serious as those 
 which were avowed with his name ; and, again, that the signa- 
 ture of “ Hierophilos” became like a German mask, which is 
 worn by known personages, in order to avoid the inconvenience 
 of recognition. A Rev. Mr. Philpot, or the Quarterly Reviewer, 
 pretends not to understand any distinction between a real and an 
 assumed signature. Perhaps, I may furnish them with an ap- 
 propriate illustration. The Fellows of Trinity College were 
 forbidden to marry under the pain of expulsion. However, 
 they interpreted Genesis like Luther, and defied the laws of the 
 College. Were they removed? No ; because no lady assumed 
 the name of the Fellow to whom she was allied. It was a 
 matter of notoriety that such a one was the wife of such a 
 Fellow ; but he eluded the requisition of the law, on account of 
 her anonymous, or, rather, heteronymous, appellation. Until of 
 late this serious and important statute was constantly violated. 
 With your Lordship, I will ask, were these Fellows expelled? 
 And, with your Lordship, I shall answer — No But one of them 
 
 was raised to a bishopric, to insult the faith and exasperate the 
 feelings of millions, who are taxed to minister to the pride, and 
 
LETTER XXXVI. 
 
 185 
 
 pomp, and luxury of men, who, under the blasphemed name of 
 the God of peace are shaking the country by their political 
 fanaticism. 
 
 To conclude this letter, I admit with your Lordship that the 
 question is — whether the Catholics are equally entitled with 
 the Protestants to all the benefits of the constitution ? On this 
 one point, then, we come to close issue. For me, though nurtured 
 in the schools of arbitrary and Popish doctrines, I have learned 
 that no human authority has a right to control the dictates of 
 conscience, or to punish, by penal enactments, religious sentiments, 
 which war not with our obligations to the state. These are 
 the sentiments I have been taught, and these are the senti- 
 ments by which our fitness for civil offices ought to be estimated. 
 We are not to be judged by the criterion fixed by your Lordship, 
 namely, the doctrines that were considered hostile to the Govern- 
 ment — doctrines that are considered hostile ! ! We must protest 
 against this criterion, whilst it is left to every monopolising peer 
 to fix its fluctuating meaning. 
 
 Your Lordship, no doubt, would consider the Pope’s purely 
 spiritual supremacy an hostile doctrine. The Duke of Newcastle 
 would consider the belief of the real presence a most formidable 
 tenet. The invocation of saints would make Lord Lorton 
 consider that we were invoking legions from heaven to dispossess 
 him of his estates ; and, in short, every principle of the Koman 
 Catholics would be considered dangerous, whilst it was known 
 that the monoply of the few was to be shared among the 
 many. 
 
 It is high time that the empyrics in politics should resign 
 their trade, and that Ireland should be at length subjected to a 
 process that will restore her to soundness and to strength. 
 Without Emancipation, she will be feeble, and a burden to the 
 empire. Not that Emancipation will heal all her evils — assuredly 
 no. It is only the first step in the process of her regeneration. 
 Other measures for her relief must follow in due course, until 
 some powerful minister, backed by the co-operation of the entire 
 country, shall arise, and apply his Herculean strength to the 
 purging and re-forming of the Establishment. 
 
 In the meantime, Emancipation must be obtained. It must 
 be generously given, in order to be thankfully received. It is 
 not to be encumbered with any conditions that may be considered 
 as nets for the religion of the people. The people of England 
 are jealous of their civil and religious liberty. The Catholics of 
 Ireland are equally jealous of theirs. Your Lordship talks of 
 concordats, and introduces the different states of Europe. 
 There is no necessity for such a remote reference. England 
 wants strength ; Ireland requires tranquillity. Let the nego- 
 tiation be, therefore, carried on with a view to their mutual 
 
 N 
 
186 
 
 LETTER XXXVII. 
 
 political advantages, without any insidious attempts on the 
 religion of either. The Catholic religion can be made a useful 
 ally to the State ; but it is only when its profession is unshackled, 
 and its ministers are beyond the reach of any sinister political 
 control. 
 
 I have the honour to be, yonr Lordship’s obedient servant. 
 
 >I«John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XXXVII. 
 
 TO THE PROTESTANT ARCHBISHOP OF TUAM. 
 
 Ballina, February 10 , 1830 . 
 
 My Lord — It appears from the public prints that your Grace 
 has been lately exercising your pastoral zeal, in writing to your 
 clergy, to carry on a mission among the Roman Catholics ; and 
 if the copy of the circular be genuine, it is a production that 
 evinces no ordinary spirit. It was fondly imagined that a bene- 
 volent legislature had succeeded in stilling the angry spirit of 
 controversy by which the land was so long shaken, and the 
 appearance of the olive branch was hailed as a presage of 
 mutual conciliation. But, whilst the Government brings peace, 
 your Grace seems to imagine that the sword is a more befitting 
 badge for the ministers of religion ; and hence you seize once 
 more your theological trumpet, to arouse the sentinels of Israel 
 to vigilance and war. 
 
 At any time the letter to which I allude would be considered 
 the production of a mind under the most potent preternatural 
 influences. At present, and with all the difficulties that stare the 
 Establishment in the face, it exhibits the calmest indifference to 
 all earthly consideration. There is no alloy of worldly prudence 
 about your zeal ; no cold calculations of the dangers to which the 
 Church is exposed can chill the ardour of your charity. No ; 
 whilst the Establishment is now deliberately weighed in the 
 
LETTER XXXVII. 
 
 187 
 
 balance, and the other prelates are watching the legislature with 
 trembling anxiety for what may come to pass ; — whilst Lord 
 Mountcashel, with a warning voice, is turning the public atten- 
 tion to the decayed state of the walls, and wishes to exchange 
 some vain and gilded decorations for Doric pillars, to sustain the 
 tottering edifice ; — whilst Sir John Newport is giving notice that 
 he will submit this important subject to the wisdom of the 
 assembled senate of the empire; — whilst the pressure of tithes 
 and church-rates is the theme of every theorist, of whatever 
 creed, who reasons on the national distress ; — whilst the Pro- 
 testant Bishop of Ferns frankly owns that, without the rich 
 harvest of its temporalities, no minister of talent would think it 
 worth while to labour in the vineyard of the Lord ; — whilst, in 
 short, all are under the conviction that the public would be 
 benefitted by a more general distribution of the wealth that is 
 confined in the temple ; — whilst, thus, the temporalities of the 
 Church are the only portion of it in which its friends as well as 
 its foes confess they feel an interest, your Grace is happily free 
 from any disquietude on this subject. No such sordid cares can 
 reach the elevation on which your spiritual abstractions have 
 fixed you. Your heart has no griefs but for the spiritual blind- 
 ness of the poor Catholics; and were the Establishment to- 
 morrow shorn of all temporal honours, your Grace would, no 
 doubt, be overwhelmed with joy, could you but extend to the 
 benighted Catholics its spiritual consolations ! 
 
 But, my Lord, perhaps I do you wrong in thus attributing to 
 you an utter indifference to the world, which might only suit 
 one of the anchorites of old, and to which the sober and sensible 
 spirit of the Protestant religion deems it no merit to aspire. 
 Others of more rational and practical views will be disposed to 
 correct the mistake into which I have fallen, and will probably 
 perceive the deepest craft lurking under the simple guise of 
 religious enthusiasm. Yes ; the Earl of Mountcashel has at- 
 tracted universal attention to the gorgeous temporalities of the 
 Church, as well as to the enormous disproportion by which they 
 are applied. 
 
 Hence your Grace’s polemical missive, sent forth at this 
 seasonable juncture as a decoy to divert the public from the 
 substantial game that has been started, to follow in the pursuit 
 of shadowy phantoms. Such artifices will, however, no longer 
 do. Your brand has been flung too late — the pile has been 
 extinguished ere your torch has reached it — and its materials, 
 once so fiery and inflammatory, have lost their qualities of com- 
 bustion. You may now send forth your missionaries to set 
 Catholics and Protestants against each other. The Catholics 
 and Protestants are too much alive to their own interest to be 
 the victims of such delusion. There was a time when every 
 
188 
 
 LETTER XXXVII. 
 
 town had its missionary menageries — when some controversial 
 curiosity was imported from afar, and carried round the king- 
 dom to amuse the old women of either sex, who thronged 
 together to feast their ears with a foreign dialect, and their 
 eyes with a strange apparition. There was a time when the 
 most ignorant mountebank who raved against Popery could fix 
 the public attention. But the spell that bound the hearers has 
 been at length broken — the film that fascinated their eyes has at 
 length been rubbed off. No illusions of stage effect can blind 
 men any longer to the folly and the mischief of such exhibitions, 
 and so completely palled is the people’s taste by their repetition, 
 that if a public advertisement were to announce that your Grace 
 himself, at the head of your missionaries, were to appear striding 
 in stately pomp to the theological theatre, I question whether 
 you could command a sufficient audience to laugh at the solemn 
 mockery. 
 
 Making full allowance for the readiness with which your 
 clergy are disposed to obey your Grace’s orders, I doubt not 
 but they would prefer staying at home, to take care of their 
 tithes, and their wives and children, rather than risk all the 
 odium of a controversial crusade. They know it is sufficiently 
 burdensome to Catholics to pay them the tenth portion of the 
 fruits of their industry ; nor should they like to aggravate the 
 burden by additional reproaches on their religion. Let them, 
 however, go forth ; and in putting the two religions in juxta- 
 position, let them not fail, in addressing the Catholics — who are 
 often without a church to shelter them — to exhibit the blessings 
 of the Law Church, which piously transferred to the wives and 
 daughters of its ministers that wealth which the old Church of 
 Christ had superstitiously expended in the repair and erection of 
 churches, as well as the relief of the poor. Let them go to 
 some of the parishes of your Grace’s diocese, in which snug 
 churches have been raised at the expense of an exclusively 
 Catholic population, and let them persuade that population of 
 the advantage of a perpetual church cess entailed on them, for 
 the purpose of providing salaries for a clerk and sexton — per- 
 haps the only relics of the orthodox faith in the whole parish, 
 and who are still deemed so valuable as to require a golden 
 anchorage to keep them from being drifted away to Popery. 
 Let them, on meeting large flocks kneeling before the divine 
 mysteries, with their ample foreheads bared to all the rain and 
 winds of heaven, invite them to fill their own little conventicles, 
 where, in spite of the threatened woes of Ezekiel,* their elbows 
 may repose on cushions, and their devotions may be warmed by 
 the comfortable effusions of a stove. But, my Lord, the parsons 
 
 •Ezekiel, xiii, 18. 
 
LETTER XXXVn. 
 
 189 
 
 will not thus expose themselves to the bitter irony of a people, 
 perhaps more famed than any other for an exhaustless strain of 
 sarcastic intelligence ; they will not, for their own sakes, be 
 marked exceptions to the good sense that is pervading all classes 
 of society. There is now no further controversy about the 
 purity of the Protestant Church ; it is all turning on the perma- 
 nence of its temporalities. All are now agreed that the Esta- 
 blishment is a political machine originally framed by political 
 artificers, since kept together for political motives, and which, 
 like every other machine, as soon as the expense of keeping it in 
 repair shall overbalance its benefits, must be abandoned to a quiet 
 and natural decay. 
 
 On this topic there is no room for further disputation, now 
 that a controversy altogether of a different kind has started up 
 in the country ; which is the most effectual method of promoting 
 the prosperity of Ireland, and of uniting more closely all classes 
 of the long-distracted people. Who shall be foremost in ex- 
 ploring its resources ? — in giving vigour to its trade ? — in 
 opening new avenues of industry ? — and consigning to merited 
 contempt all the leaden lore of malignant bigotry by which the 
 minds of the people were so long poisoned? Yes; the apostles 
 of discord must at length retire. There is now a rivalry of 
 benevolence — an emulation in labouring for the public good — a 
 contention for advancing a nation’s happiness, which all the arts 
 of narrow-minded individuals will not be able to suspend. There 
 is, in short, a great anxiety to bury, by recent acts of kindness, 
 the memory of ancient strife ; and a flow of mutual good feeling, 
 silently working through the country, which all the odium tlieo- 
 logicum poured forth from your Grace’s episcopal vial shall not 
 be able to embitter. 
 
 I am your Grace’s obedient servant, 
 
 ►I<John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
190 
 
 LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 Ballina, April, 29 , 1831 . 
 
 My Lord — To save the lives of the people is, we are told, a first 
 principle in legislation. If so, and it is unnecessary to refer to 
 ethical jurists for its truth, I need no apology for drawing your 
 Lordship’s attention to the melancholy subject of this letter. 
 The office of Prime Minister, which you hold, affords to the 
 humblest of his Majesty’s subjects the privilege of some obtrusion 
 on that time which public functionaries have covenanted to 
 devote to public duty. At once the dispenser of the favours of 
 the crown to the people, and the organ of the prayers of the 
 people to the crown, you must naturally wish for that information 
 which may enable your Lordship to discharge the important 
 duties to both, which your high but painful office imposes on 
 
 y°u- 
 
 Occupied as is your Lordship’s mind at this moment, in bring- 
 ing to a consummation the great meafsures of Reform, I should 
 forbear the introduction of any other topic which was capable 
 of delay. Instead of embarrassing, it should be the study of 
 every friend to order to aid ministers in carrying a measure, 
 which, if crowned with success, shall reflect the highest lustre 
 on those who had the wisdom to devise, and the courage to 
 achieve, a project so fraught with national good. So unaccustomed 
 has Ireland been to favours, that she hails with more enthusiasm 
 than any other portion of the empire, the prospect of Reform 
 which she is so sparingly to share ; and I cannot but feel a pride 
 in the reflection, that her representatives were and shall be 
 among the most efficient in smoothing the progress of a question 
 which the foes of the nation’s happiness have striven in vain to 
 retard. 
 
 But important as the question of Reform is, the distress that 
 now afflicts, and the famine that menaces, some portions of this 
 country, are still more imperative topics. Reform itself might be 
 adjourned, with safety, for a short time, whereas should the lives 
 of his Majesty’s subjects become the victims of starvation, it is a 
 loss which no ulterior measures can retrieve. It is, my Lord, 
 my painful duty to communicate through you to his Majesty’s 
 government, that already some lives have become the victims of 
 
LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 191 
 
 this calamity. On last week, having visited a distant parish of 
 this diocese, I learned the afflicting news, that contagion, the 
 effect of want, prevailed to a great extent ; that, in one instance, 
 the father, mother, and three children were stretched on the same 
 bed, without a morsel of nourishment, or a penny to procure it, 
 or a human being to go in quest of relief, but as it was adminis- 
 tered by the casual visits of some charitable neighbours; and that 
 the first intimation the father received of the death of his wife, 
 was from the lips of the suckling babe being besmeared with the 
 blood, which, instead of milk, it extracted from the breast of its 
 deceased mother ! I shall not add a word of comment to a tale 
 of Avhich the simple reality cannot be read without horror. It 
 was a case of fever, to be sure ; but it was a fever brought on 
 by want of food, and raiment, and cleanliness, and the other usual 
 appendages of utter destitution. 
 
 There are in the same parish, in the union of Crossmolina, at 
 this moment, one hundred and twenty families, who know not 
 how they may be saved from a similar fate. As early as last 
 January, they had an appalling presentiment of the doom which 
 awaited them. Some of them sent a petition to parliament, stating 
 that not only their cattle and oats, but even their last potato was 
 seized for rent; nay, that some of them were locked up on 
 Sunday, and interdicted the consolations of religion by their 
 merciless landlord. Those families are at this moment without 
 cattle, without corn, without a potato, without a penny of money, 
 or any chance of wages ; and 1 met some of them this day who — 
 and respectable gentlemen confirmed the statement — were not 
 able to purchase a day’s provisions sold at a reduced price. 
 Other places are nearly in a similar state. It will not, therefore, 
 excite your Lordship’s surprise if I should draw your attention to 
 a large suffering portion of his Majesty’s people. I should rather 
 incur the deepest self-reproach were I to defer it longer — nay, I 
 deem it more necessary to urge it in the present crisis, lest the 
 condition of the people should be forgotten in the enthusiasm of 
 reform, or the tumults of an election ; since the more fervent the 
 joy inspired by the measure, the greater the danger, lest the cries 
 of distant distress should be drowned amidst the peals of the 
 national rejoicing. 
 
 The starving people of Mayo shall not, I trust, receive the 
 chilling consolation, proffered by your predecessors in office last 
 year — that the landlords ought to look to their tenantry. If, my 
 Lord, the word ought should be sufficient to convey relief — if the 
 repeated inculcation of the moral duties which should bind land- 
 lord and tenant were adequate to enforce their observance — we 
 might be spared the mutual necessity, I of penning, or your 
 Lordship of perusing this painful communication. If all acted 
 under the impression that the cries of the poor who reap the 
 
192 
 
 LETTER XXXVIII, 
 
 fields, and are defrauded of their labour, “ enter into the ears of 
 the Lord of Sabaoth,” the legislator might be spared the toil of 
 inquiring into the condition, or of providing for the wants of the 
 lowlier classes. 
 
 A parliamentary exhortation to the landlords to provide for 
 their tenantry might have been well fitted for those feudal times, 
 when the tenant held towards his landlord the humiliating quality 
 of serf or subject, and the landlord was invested with the absolute 
 disposal of his destinies. When the crown was unable to controul 
 the ruthless baron, who sported with the lives of the miserable 
 villains of the soil, then an appeal to their piety or their fear 
 might come with a good grace from any individual, who could 
 awe — by the terrors of religion, or the sword — the man, who, 
 trusting solely to his might, broke through the feeble restraints 
 of law. But the tenants of the present times are free subjects, 
 under a constitution in which landlords and tenants should equally 
 share. If, therefore, the one are found deficient in the obliga- 
 tions they owe to the other, let me respectfully suggest it is 
 the duty of the legislature to interfere. An exhortation, therefore, 
 to the landlords to look to their tenantry, while the law enables 
 them utterly to abandon them, is only a mockery of the public 
 woe. The smallest tax upon their property to relieve the pau- 
 perism which their rapacity is creating, would bring more 
 tenderness to the hearts of some landed proprietors, than the 
 homilies of all the episcopal bench could inspire. If, indeed, the 
 Irish absentees formed a military corps under the noble Duke 
 of Wellington, then a nod, or the exhibition of his mace, might 
 be sufficient to discipline them into mercy, without any fatiguing 
 expatiation on the moral virtues. But whilst they are permitted 
 to pauperize the people, and then to throw the load of their 
 support on the charity of others, without putting a finger to 
 lighten the burden, they should hear a lecture on the duties 
 of landlords in the same tone of feeling that one reads the 
 sublime theories of the far-famed squire on the responsibility of 
 a governor. 
 
 I am told, my Lord, that the Government is unwilling to make 
 any grant of public money in this crisis, lest it should be con- 
 verted into a precedent for similar future applications. I cannot 
 believe that such a motive could sway its resolves. What, refuse 
 to rescue thousands from the jaws of death, lest they should be 
 afflicted again with the like calamity ? It has already relieved, 
 with a large amount of taxes, wrung from this country, and in 
 more instances than one, the starving inhabitants of other nations. 
 It will not, I trust, suffer the reproach to be entailed on it, that 
 it has turned a deaf ear to the dying entreaties of its own. And 
 such will be the reproach, if before many days it does not inter- 
 fere to relieve them. 
 
LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 193 
 
 I shall not, however, dissemble, that again and again the legis- 
 lature will be importuned with similar appeals, until it lays the 
 knife to the root of the evil, by a process of severe and unsparing 
 legislation. There must be some deep-seated source from which 
 such overflowings of calamity are constantly issuing, and which 
 must be fearlessly approached, if the government are anxious to 
 dry up the fatal fountain. 
 
 Though there has been this year a partial failure in the crops, 
 it is not to the scarcity of provisions alone that the present want 
 is owing. No ; while I am writing this letter, the town of 
 Ballina, in which three hundred families are crying out for food, 
 is busy with the bustle of corn traders, and the public roads are 
 covered with the crowded conveyances of its exports. It may, 
 then excite your Lordship’s wonder, as it has lately that of an 
 agent from government, that the people should be starving while 
 the markets are stocked with provisions. This is the very 
 anomaly of which we complain. This is the master-spring which, 
 if not closed, will not fail to show itself in the repeated recurrence 
 of similar calamities. What avails it to the poor man, whose 
 crop and cattle are seized, if potatoes are sold for three or four 
 pence a stone, where he cannot bring one article to market, 
 or find work or wages to purchase them ? And to exemplify still 
 more this difficulty of procuring the price of food, it was stated 
 by two highly respectable gentlemen of the central committee of 
 Castlebar, that an humble farmer offered in vain seven cows for 
 1 cwt. of meal. Often are the cows of the poor auctioned for ten 
 shillings a head, to pay rent, and then, when his potatoes are seized 
 to supply the remainder, where there is no trade or manufactures, 
 he is left without resource. The extinction of our linen trade is 
 attested by the numbers of females, whose cheerful and virtuous 
 industry was once supported by the varied process of preparing 
 flax, and who are now seen digging in the fields for want of any 
 domestic manufacture. Nay, it is not unusual to meet young 
 females, not exceeding fourteen years of age, assisting their aged 
 parents to break stones on the public roads, and still deeming 
 themselves fortunate to find such casual means of support to save 
 them from misery. 
 
 The presumption of there being no starvation while corn is ex- 
 ported, is a fallacy which was refuted in the memorable year of 
 Twenty-Two. What is there to prevent the people from starving, 
 if they have no law to keep as much as will appease hunger, and if 
 the proprietors have no heart to feel for their misery ? Yes, 
 though the potato crop has partially failed, and may fail again, the 
 oats, the standard by which landlord and tenant regulate their con- 
 tracts, must, under circumstances of scarcity at home, be exported. 
 Ask any poor man on what means does he calculate for his rent. 
 His ready reply is, the harvest of oats. What for the tithes ? 
 
194 
 
 LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 The oats. What for the county cess ? The oats. What for the 
 vestry cess ? The oats. In short, the oats is the ready resource 
 of all the vexatious train of demands that come upon him. So 
 that the liver of the tortured giant was not assailed with half the 
 vulture pounces to which the poor man’s crop of oats is subject, 
 with this melancholy difference, that the latter has no renascent 
 virtue to satisfy their craving demands. 
 
 It happens, however, as during the last years, that the pea- 
 santry are eased from some of the lesser burdens, when they are 
 unable to support them all. Thus, magistrates have kindly refused 
 presentments, when they found the people unable to pay them their 
 rents. Vestry cesses too have been watched with a becoming jea- 
 lousy, as they were found to interfere with the paramount claims 
 of the landlord. The poor man’s crop is considerately guarded 
 by the landlord for himself, who, after scaring away the petty 
 vultures that hovered round the stack-yard, pounces upon the 
 whole, and calls rapacity protection. 
 
 I have not only admitted the quantity of our exports, but I 
 have shown that the exports, as the peasantry are now circum- 
 stanced, must continue in the midst of starvation. You perceive, 
 my Lord, how well the Irish peasant might be apostrophized in 
 the memorable words by which the Roman poet characterized 
 the labours of the team, while they plough and rear a crop in 
 which they are forbidden to share. Yes, such is now the state 
 of things, that the oats are generally guarded by a keeper 
 until it is shipped off to swell the boasted quantity of our 
 exports. 
 
 It is amusing to hear political economists deduce from such 
 exports proofs of our prosperity. In seasons like this, the greater 
 the quantity of corn shipped off, the wider the destitution that is 
 caused. The greater the quantity of exports, the greater the 
 quantity of luxuries that are imported for their price. Hence, 
 the quantity of imports only furnishes evidence of the numbers 
 of people that are consigned to hunger, in consequence of the 
 deprivation of the necessaries which are exported in exchange 
 for the luxuries of life. I am far from undervaluing the blessings 
 of well regulated commerce, or the refinements in society of 
 which it is productive. But were it not better for the people of 
 Ireland that all the vineyards of France and Portugal were 
 blasted for ever, and that all the teas of China had sunk in the 
 late earthquake, if they cannot be imported without the total 
 exportation of that corn, which afforded a vigorous nourishment 
 to the older race of peasantry, but realises to the present the 
 fabled apples of Tantalus, which they are forbidden to touch, 
 until it enables some absentee to swell the receipts of the gambling- 
 house, and then proudly to refer to Ireland’s exports as a proof of 
 her prosperity ! ! 
 
LETTER XXXVIII. 
 
 195 
 
 I am not surprised at the unfeeling indifference with which 
 such absentees treat the interests of their tenantry — nay, at the 
 confidence with which they speak of distress with which they 
 have neither sympathy nor acquaintance. I think it was Lord 
 Brougham lately remarked, that such is man’s insensibility to 
 every thing but the present, that what is to occur in six days is 
 looked upon sometimes as if it were never to happen. There is 
 much philosophy in the remark. If people are indifferent to what 
 is near, it may well account for the insensibility of some folk to 
 an after retribution. The thought, however, appears to me to 
 be as applicable to distance of place as to futurity of time. We 
 are but little affected with the relation of evils which we do not 
 witness. The late fires in Kent excited more interest in England 
 than all the horrors of a distant war ; and the tale of millions 
 perishing by an earthquake in the East, is heard with as much 
 indifference as if they never existed. Yet it will be confessed that 
 all these evils are not the less real because they are not seen, nor 
 does their distance from others mitigate the pains of the sufferers. 
 It is only on this principle that I can account for the indifference 
 of the Irish proprietors in London. The wretchedness here is 
 too remote to strike their senses, which, without recurring to 
 the philosophy of Locke, are, after all, the proper organs to 
 convey a due impression of external objects. The gilded saloons 
 of London are not the appropriate lecture halls for studying the 
 wretchedness of an Irish cabin ; the assorted raggedness of the 
 raiment of its hapless inmates is but ill represented in the varied 
 embroidery of fashion ; faces sparkling with mirth are not the 
 fittest mirror for reflecting the sunken eye and gaunt visage of 
 despair ; a taste palled with the satiety of feasts and revels cannot 
 well judge of the acuteness of the pangs of hunger ; nor is it 
 surprising if the sharp but distant cries of distress can find no 
 room in ears that are habitually filled with the voluptuous tones 
 of the lute and the violin. But it requires a heart as well as eyes 
 to be affected with the wants of others. There are individuals 
 who, after using every expedient to guard their houses from the 
 unwelcome intrusion of human wretchedness, and their eyes 
 against its contemplation, would affect to doubt amidst the com- 
 panions of their festivity, if any were dying of starvation. I am 
 not surprised. If the rich voluptuary were to be the historian 
 of the unpitied miseries of Lazarus, we never would have been 
 favoured with that instructive record. The unfeeling rich man 
 is not, therefore, the fittest deponent of the depth or extent of 
 human calamity, since the glutton who refused the crumbs, would 
 deny the existence of an evil, which he could not avow without 
 revealing his own cruelty. 
 
 But rather than fatigue your Lordship or the public by the 
 perusal of too long a letter, I shall, shortly, I fear, return to the 
 
196 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 subject again. Not many days shall elapse, if prompt relief is 
 not afforded, until I resume the painful topic. In this letter I 
 have endeavoured to press upon your Lordship my conviction, 
 that nothing but the protection of Government can save thou- 
 sands of the people of Mayo from the horrors of famine. In the 
 next I shall endeavour to demonstrate, that, unless the source of 
 the misery is checked by some vigorous legislative provisions, it 
 will come again and again, and be fraught at each returning visit 
 with some new accumulation. 
 
 In the meantime, I have the honor to be, your Lordship’s 
 obedient servant, 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 Ballina, May 20 , 1831 . 
 
 My Lord — This letter has been somewhat delayed, on account 
 of the bustle of the late elections. During that busy event, 
 which called forth all the energies of the nation, every other 
 interest w T as comparatively suspended. I, therefore, deferred 
 my promised communication, lest the cause of the poor should 
 suffer through the unseasonableness of the appeal — conscious 
 that even they could not be heard amidst the fierce contention 
 which public virtue was waging with the old spirit of corruption. 
 I must now, however, congratulate your lordship, as well as the 
 empire, on the successful issue of the great struggle. The 
 peaceful triumphs achieved by the people over their intestine 
 foes have no parallel in the splendid annals of their foreign 
 conquests. But a few days ago all the elements of society were 
 stirred, and every human being that moved therein felt the 
 sacred impulse that was communicated from the throne. Even 
 the huge and drowsy corporate drones, in whom ease and luxury 
 seemed to have suspended every capability of action, were 
 roused to a temporary excitement by the terrors of political 
 
LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 197 
 
 extinction. They have, however, quietly relapsed into their 
 former fat slumbers, without the danger of ever again annoying 
 his Majesty or the people by a noxious resuscitation. Already 
 every trace of the agitation has disappeared. Not a ripple is 
 seen on the surface of society — every heart is high with hope — 
 and the eyes of all are eagerly anticipating the gladsome vision 
 of the venerable ark of the constitution relieved from its rotten 
 and leaky planks, and refitted with sound timbers, majestically 
 moving over the bosom of the waters. 
 
 In my last letter I stated a few facts, by which the public 
 might be enabled to ascertain the fallacy of their views who 
 wish to draw conclusions against our distress from the quantity 
 of our exports. I attempted to show that, whether distressed or 
 prosperous, our exports must continue in the present system ; 
 nay, that for want of any other branch of trade or industry, 
 whereby to meet the rents, the exports of corn are generally in 
 the inverse ratio of our prosperity. To such extent is the rage 
 for exportation carried, that the tenantry are systematically left 
 without seed for the future culture of the soil, until bought 
 again at a usurious price ; and some landlords have adopted the 
 summary process of the Indian, who cuts down the tree to arrive 
 at once at all its produce. 
 
 Is such a desolating system to be left without some legislative 
 controul ? Are tenants not only to be abandoned to all the 
 capricious exactions of a cruel landlord, but, what is worse, 
 must the neighbouring people continue to sustain the burden of 
 that pauperism which they had no share in inflicting ? In vain 
 will it be advanced that the landlord has his rights, with which 
 the law cannot interfere. The tenant, too, has his rights, de- 
 rived from a higher and a holier source — “ The labourer is 
 worthy of his hire.” Were the proprietor to farm his own 
 estate, he would, surely, be liable to all the inflictions of a bad 
 season ; and were the present tenant to till his ground in the 
 capacity of a hired labourer, or even of a slave, he would be 
 permitted to eat of the fruit of his labour, nor would his em- 
 ployer abandon him to starvation. 
 
 Is the condition of the free tenant to be continued worse than 
 that of the hired labourer or the slave ? Is a British subject to 
 continue to live in a state of precarious existence, to which the 
 Negro would not be doomed by the Indian planter? Yes; a 
 precarious existence, entirely depending on the degree of bene- 
 volence the proprietor may possess, as well as on the bounty of 
 the public. Even in the bad theology which sprung from 
 oriental despotism, the malignant principle was not suffered to 
 exert all his influence, without the check of a beneficent being 
 with which he was associated. It is not, surely, under a consti- 
 tution that boasts the blessings of freedom, the blighting prin- 
 
198 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 ciple is to find no corrective ; so that the poor people are to be 
 thrown on the world, without house, without food, without 
 money, or means to procure it by any employment, merely 
 because they could not controul the times and seasons, and 
 multiply the harvest, or discover the art of making gold by the 
 philosopher’s stone. But cruelty recoils upon him who practises 
 it ; and the fields of some of those proprietors, untenanted and 
 untilled, are now abandoned to desolation. 
 
 In the present state of society, any landlord who is cursed 
 with a cruel heart, and a head that cannot calculate its real 
 interests, is restrained by no law from indulging his wasting 
 propensities. Were he obliged to relieve, in some shape, the 
 poverty of which his excesses might be productive, the avarice 
 of the member of society would prove an antidote against the 
 rapacity of the proprietor, and the consciousness that he should 
 support every pauper he would make, would prove a salutary 
 restraint to his desolating career. The neighbouring parishes 
 would not be inundated as now with the flood of wretched men 
 that is sometimes let loose upon them by those whose hearts 
 appear to be steeled against every feeling of remorse, as well as 
 every impulse of humanity. 
 
 Were the instances of harsh treatment but few — such as 
 might be gleaned by an industrious observer from amidst the 
 mass of general content — I should not obtrude those letters on 
 your Lordship’s or the public attention. If the general aspect 
 of society were such as to cause pleasure in the observer, I 
 should not admire one who would look for the shades in the 
 back-ground, rather than dwell upon the scenes of uniform 
 happiness. But, unfortunately, distress, and hunger, and squalid 
 wretchedness, form the general picture, which is scarcely re- 
 lieved by any view of comfort; yet the people are industrious, 
 and the land, even in this bad season, has been sufficiently pro- 
 ductive. 
 
 Hence, the statement, which I must repeat, that the present 
 calamity, however awful, is not temporary, but that it will 
 annually break forth, unless arrested by strong legislative re- 
 straints. The declaration will not, I trust, have the effect of 
 stopping the hand of charity; and it will not be said, why 
 attempt to stem a torrent which is destined to run its regular 
 course of ruin every year ? It is in order that it may be 
 checked I give this warning. It is to spare us the shame, and 
 the public the annoyance, of these annual eleemosynary appli- 
 cations, that I respectfully, but earnestly, solicit the attention of 
 the Government to the condition and the prospects of the suffer- 
 ing poor. 
 
 If the land were let and leased to the tenantry for an 
 equitable rent — if they were relieved from the arrears accu- 
 
LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 199 
 
 mulated in bad seasons — if the seed furnished by landlords to 
 preserve their land from waste, were, as it would in many cases 
 appear to the public, a gratuitous donation — then it might be 
 hoped that the distress would pass away with the season that 
 produced it, and that the tenantry, with the energy of their 
 labour applied to a prolific soil, might soon be placed in a com- 
 fortable condition. But the reverse of all these suppositions 
 would be a more exact description of their state. Many of the 
 estates in this country are now subject to the same rents for 
 which they were let during the years immediately preceding the 
 conclusion of the war. I need not advert to the immense depre- 
 ciation in stock and produce between the two periods. I shall 
 only remark, that if a proprietor knew then the value of his 
 land — a knowledge in which it must be confessed, whatever 
 might be his other acquirements, an Irish landlord is seldom 
 found deficient — on what principle of equity or justice can he 
 now demand for an article triple its real value ? If, in the 
 covenant between landlord and tenant, the latter was allowed 
 but a fair remuneration for his labour, when cattle, and linen, 
 and produce bore a certain price, is it not clear that he is 
 allowed no remuneration, if he is still charged the same rent, 
 whilst all the product of his industry has sunk more than three 
 or four-fold in the value ? The more familiar are these truths, 
 the more they illustrate my position, that while things continue 
 in such a state as that no industry can meet the rent with its 
 arrears, it is impossible that the people would not be at the 
 mercy of the proprietors, and, by consequence, when the 
 proprietors are merciless, exposed, even amidst plenty, to 
 starvation. 
 
 I am well aware of the usual apology that is advanced for 
 the proprietors. Their lands, it is said, are so encumbered 
 by annuities, mortgages, and marriage settlements, that some of 
 them cannot afford to lower their rents, or, what is synonymous, 
 to let their tenantry keep and eat of the fruit of their labour. 
 In the first place, this apology for cruelty and injustice is not 
 near as extensive as it is assumed. Because it is applicable to 
 some gentlemen, it is taken up as a convenient defence by 
 others, to shield their grinding extortions behind the plea of an 
 imperious necessity. 
 
 There are many considerable properties in this district free 
 from any heavy charges. Yet, I know the condition of the 
 tenantry to be but little affected by an exemption from such 
 claims ; nay, some landlords, who, in addition to a large unin- 
 cumbered rental, possess a large share of funded property, are 
 as oppressive as those whose estates are subject to incumbrances. 
 And, even during the last summer, there were among the 
 wealthiest of that class — and there may be this year — indivi- 
 
200 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 duals who refused a shilling to mitigate the horrors of a general 
 famine. Some law must wring from the reluctant gripe of such 
 persons what a heart incapable of pity forbids them to bestow. 
 Instead of being like stagnant pools, that swallow all the rains 
 and dews of heaven, while the waste around them appears 
 parched and sickly, they should be formed into useful reservoirs, 
 with legislative sluices and outlets, in order that, in seasons of 
 drought, they should discharge their redundant waters, to give 
 health and fertility to the country. 
 
 But, supposing the settlements to which I have alluded, is it 
 equitable that the few should not consent to retrench any of the 
 superfluities, in order that the many should be left something of 
 the necessaries, of life ? Must the people of whole villages 
 starve, lest some foreign member of the proprietor’s family 
 should contract in the least the circle of his follies ; or lest a 
 dowager should pluck a feather from her head-dress, or a jewel 
 from those ornaments which the grave decorum of age should 
 suggest to lay aside ? Are the dissipation and extravagance of 
 the war times, like an original sin, to be entailed upon the 
 peasantry alone, and their children, and to be expiated only by 
 those who had no share in the guilt ? What, then, becomes of 
 the moral axiom, that those who partake of the benefit should 
 also share in the burden ? These, my Lord, are serious con- 
 siderations. In spite of all that pride and selfishness may 
 suggest to the contrary, the “ salus populi suprema lex ” will re- 
 main an incontrovertible proposition. Annuitants, mortgagees, 
 and fund-holders have, doubtless, their rights ; not so extensive, 
 however, as to supersede the existence of the labouring classes. 
 Will it be asserted that they are like the sanguinary idols of 
 old, whose appetites cannot be appeased but by the immolation 
 of human sacrifices ? While regard is had to all other interests, 
 those of the agriculturist alone should not be neglected. If the 
 other officers of society are to be supported, surely the labouring 
 classes alone are not to be consigned to ruin, by whom you, and 
 I, and annuitants, and mortgagees, and fund-holders, and all 
 other functionaries are ultimately supported? Else we have 
 not been rightly taught that agriculture is the foundation of 
 public prosperity ; and the error of Ptolemy has misled the 
 ancients in political as well as astronomical science, in supposing 
 the land to be the basis of the social system, while the moderns 
 have discovered the funds to be the immoveable centre round 
 which agriculture and its obedient interests must revolve. 
 
 From this first position of being subject to rents which they 
 are unable to pay, follows the second — namely, of arrears con- 
 tinually accumulating. A prosperous year might have hitherto 
 enabled the tenant to liquidate a portion of the debt ; but he has 
 seldom been enabled to cancel it all. Hence, instead of receipts 
 
LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 201 
 
 in full, many of the acknowledgments of the tenantry are 
 eternally on account — a practice which, without any intentional 
 fraud, exposes to mistakes productive of the most serious incon- 
 veniences. The years 1817 and 1822 were such disastrous 
 seasons that, instead of being able to pay the rents, the tenantry 
 contracted additional debts by provisions furnished in some in- 
 stances by their landlords. The intermediate seasons were 
 employed in paying up some of the arrears ; so that, like the 
 quarter’s revenue, with regard to the national debt, the poor 
 tenant estimates the past half year, not by the quantity of 
 wealth which it might have brought, but by the condition in 
 which it placed him with regard to his arrears. Thus, every 
 year they hang over him, discouraging his hopes and depressing 
 his energies. In a prosperous season he may strive more fre- 
 quently to steep his cares, unfortunately, in intoxicating beve- 
 rage, despairing of his lot — or renew his tattered raiment — or, 
 what may be deemed a mighty effort of successful industry, to 
 re-place the milch cow that was seized and auctioned in the pre- 
 ceding season ; but as for any increase in his fortune, or any 
 additional comfort in his home, or any accession to his household 
 furniture, these are advantages to which he is forbidden to 
 aspire. A genial season may, like the seventh year in Judea, 
 crown his labours with a double harvest ; but he is not destined, 
 like that happy people, to enjoy a jubilee, which may give him 
 any release from the arrears of rack-rents, or any respite from 
 his toils. 
 
 This second misfortune that affects the tenantry, naturally 
 leads to the third — namely, that in their efforts to meet rents 
 and arrears, as well as taxes, to which their means are unequal, 
 they are of late years generally left without seed to cultivate 
 the soil. This last, an effect produced by the rents and arrears, 
 becomes in its turn an additional cause to aggravate their 
 burden. To this last fact, too, I appeal — a fact now too 
 familiar and notorious to be controverted — as a standing proof 
 of the total inequality between the rents of land and its produce. 
 It may be well, however, to show a little more minutely how 
 this circumstance operates on the poor tenant in diminishing his 
 resources. 
 
 In the course of last spring the tenantry of Tyrawley were, 
 for the most part, without seed oats, being obliged to dispose of 
 their entire crop the preceding winter, to meet rents and taxes. 
 Many of them were then furnished by their landlords, or their 
 agents or sub-agents, and sometimes by other corn factors, with 
 seed, at ten shillings a cwt., on credit until the next autumn or 
 winter. When that time came, they were obliged to thresh and 
 sell their oats at five shillings a cwt., so that, for whatever quan- 
 tity they got, they were obliged to dispose of a double portion 
 o 
 
202 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 of their crop, which amounts to cent, per cent, of usury. Again, 
 this very spring they were reduced to the same condition. In 
 many cases the proprietors come to their relief, and in others 
 the tenantry have not even that dear-bought consolation. I call 
 it dear ; because next winter, should they survive this season, it 
 will be exacted in many cases with a rigorous usury, amounting 
 to an hundred-fold. 
 
 Some proprietors are praised for expending some thousand 
 pounds on their tenantry. If it be a gratuity — as the public is, 
 in some instances, led to believe — the people owe much thank- 
 fulness. If it be all according to the following plan, the public 
 will estimate the value of the obligation. An absentee, who 
 draws many thousands from Mayo, relieves the tenantry on the 
 estates, and makes use of the agents for that purpose. The 
 agents purchase corn and potatoes, assemble the tenantry, and 
 put them through a long process of swearing regarding the 
 extent and nature of their distress. They then give them 
 corn, at ten shillings per ewt., on credit, until winter, though 
 they were obliged to sell their own oats last winter at five; 
 not, however, until they exact another oath, that they will 
 not sow that seed in any other soil but their own, and that 
 they shall pay the price laid on it, whatever day it shall be 
 demanded. On hearing such a statement, I was naturally 
 incredulous ; until in the presence of two gentlemen, I ques- 
 tioned some four or five of the tenantry, who all affirmed 
 that it was on such conditions they received the oats and 
 potatoes ! 
 
 Now, this absentee is a person confessedly of great bene- 
 volence. Yet what is the value of the loan of seed conferred 
 on the people on the estates ? To oblige them — probably, as 
 many have done last winter — to sell tw r o measures, in order to 
 pay for one of seed which they bought. If this is done without 
 the knowledge of the kind-hearted absentee, it only demon- 
 strates the evils which necessarily result from that system. If 
 done with the knowledge of that person, it is no theme for 
 panegyric. Yet, such is the wretchedness to which the tenantry 
 all over the country are reduced, that they are glad to get 
 seed and provisions on any terms — not from any want of fore- 
 cast of the consequences — they are well aware of it ; but, 
 amidst the cravings of want, they become, like the savage, 
 reckless of the future, provided they are rescued from the pre- 
 sent necessity. 
 
 Add, then, this additional burden of usurious contracts — now a 
 matter of course — to the annual amount of arrears to which the 
 tenant is already subject, and it is not difficult to perceive how it 
 must press still more heavily upon him. The consequence is, 
 no harvest can save him from starvation, provided the landlord 
 
LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 203 
 
 pushes his claims to the extent to which the law entitles him. 
 Hitherto, the rigour of the law was seldom enforced regarding 
 potatoes. There was a tacit covenant, generally respected, that 
 while the landlord had the oats for his rent, the tenant had the 
 potatoes for his family. But that sacred covenant has been 
 lately violated in various instances. Example is contagious, 
 when it is favourable to self-interest. As some, then, have com- 
 menced to seize the potatoes, what assurance have the tenantry 
 that others will not follow their example ? If so, no abundance 
 can shield the poor from starvation, as long as they have to 
 struggle against a load of rent, disproportioned to the produce, 
 accumulated by arrears, and aggravated still more by yearly 
 accessions from usurious contracts. You may, therefore, per- 
 ceive, my Lord, why I have stated that this evil was not tempo- 
 rary. Subscriptions may be raised for the relief of the poor ; 
 committees may be formed, and provisions distributed. Far from 
 undervaluing, I must applaud and support such benevolent mea- 
 sures. They are, however, but temporary checks, which will 
 not at all prevent the recurrence of the evil. Nay, what is this 
 huckstering of seed between landlords and tenants ? Under the 
 guise of humanity, an usurious traffic is exercised on the labour 
 of the latter, and the prolific seed of future calamity is per- 
 petuated. 
 
 In the present awful crisis, I feel infinitely obliged to the 
 generous citizens of Dublin who have come forward to our 
 relief, though they have so many charities of their own ; and I 
 implore them, as they value human lives, to continue their pious 
 labours. In the name of the distressed districts in the West, 
 where men are seen digging out the slit potato-seeds recently 
 put down, I must return my thanks to the people of England, 
 adjuring them, in like manner, to persevere in their work of 
 mercy. 
 
 But while I thus express thanks for individual benevolence, I 
 must express my conviction, that it is a reproach to any Govern- 
 ment, that a hardy and industrious people should be thrown so 
 often into the humiliating attitude of mendicants for food. I 
 owe it to the public to tell, that, unless Government interfere 
 largely, no private benevolence can avert famine ; and that, 
 unless some radical means be adopted, this moral malaria will 
 continue its annual ravages. I have patiently, and, I trust, 
 satisfactorily, stated my reasons. However abundant the next 
 season may prove, the crop will be seized before the produce 
 reaches a high price, and will not be sufficient to satisfy all the 
 claims upon it. If it be bad, the condition of the tenant will be 
 worse ; so that, in either alternative, he is doomed to the fate so 
 well expressed in the following lines, which, like those of Gold- 
 smith, contrasting the solid strength of the peasantry with the 
 
204 
 
 LETTER XXXIX. 
 
 shadowy and evanescent honours of a peerage, shall never lose 
 their freshness by any frequency of application : — 
 
 In vain kind seasons swell the teeming grain, 
 
 Soft showers distil, and suns grow warm in vain ; 
 
 With tears the swain his frustrate labour yields. 
 
 And famished dies amidst his ripened fields. 
 
 Such is the first but melancholy likeness between the above 
 picture and the condition of the peasantry of Mayo, that one 
 would be almost inclined to adopt the ancient opinion of be- 
 lieving a fact under the influence of a prescient inspiration. Had 
 the eloquent writer of these lines been himself an eye-witness of 
 the famine amidst plenty, he could not use words more appro- 
 priate, than those in which he described the condition of the 
 serfs under the feudal and unfeeling despots of ancient times. 
 From my heart I deplore the justness of the application. It 
 will, however, continue, unless the Government take the people 
 under their more immediate protection. On the means which 
 appear to me the most effectual in arresting this evil, I propose 
 to offer some remarks in another letter. 
 
 I have the honour to remain your Lordship's obedient servant, 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER XL. 
 
 205 
 
 LETTER XL. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 Ballina, July, 9 , 1831 . 
 
 My Lord — In the late interview which we had the honor of 
 having with your Lordship, it was suggested that however press- 
 ing was the present famine, the object of our mission would be 
 frustrated unless some legislative measures were adopted to guard 
 against its recurrence in seasons of general plenty. 
 
 Never did I feel the necessity of adopting such a suggestion 
 so much as since my return to this unhappy land. I had some 
 anticipations of the scenes I should witness, and strove to arm 
 myself with sufficient resolution to encounter them. But the 
 reality far surpasses my most gloomy misbodings. 
 
 It is some days since I arrived here, and lest I should be 
 imposed on by exaggerated reports, I was resolved, as far as 
 opportunity could allow me, to bring the state of the poor within 
 my own personal observation. I went into their wretched cabins 
 and found instances of many families, who, during several alter- 
 nate days, had not tasted a morsel of food. The testimony of 
 their neigbours was ready to confirm their distressing tale: a 
 more unequivocal evidence could be read in their pallid and 
 emaciated countenances. 
 
 I will not, however, dwell upon such evidence of hunger and 
 famine. It has been already laid before the public by the attes- 
 tations of strangers, whom sympathy brought to visit and com- 
 passionate our distress. Among those witnesses I refer your 
 Lordship to a letter published in the Evening Post of the 23d of 
 June, which describes the feeble frames and faltering limbs of the 
 wretched victims of starvation, in terms which were evidently 
 caught from the contemplation of the sad reality. But why refer 
 to any evidence, when the blood of those who lately exposed 
 themselves to the musketry of soldiers, rather than die by the 
 slow tortures of hunger, proclaims aloud the dreadful effects of 
 starvation ? 
 
 It has been rumoured that the agent of the Government here, 
 laboured to convey an impression that the distress was neither so 
 deep or extensive as it was stated. I could not credit such a 
 report. I knew that any agent must have had a heart as well as 
 eyes ; and, therefore, he could not deny the workings of the awful 
 
20 G 
 
 LETTER XL. 
 
 visitation, unless he had extinguished the light of the one and the 
 feelings of the other. 
 
 I perceived, however, at the last meeting of the Mayo 
 committee, that those rumours were unfounded. He came 
 forward to supply the deficiency between the funds in their 
 hands and the calculated amount of the necessary supplies of the 
 week. It might appear to some, that he was rigorous in insisting 
 that certain provisions sent by the Sackville-street committee, 
 should be merged in the common stock provisions for the 
 famishing people. In that instance I must applaud his conduct. 
 It was conformable to the pledge given to us, that the govern- 
 ment would aid the public exertions, and, provided that pledge 
 is fully redeemed, we shall be satisfied. During the three next 
 weeks, when famine shall be rapidly rising to its climax, the 
 demands upon the government must be on a far more extended 
 scale. All the past benevolence of the public would be abortive, 
 unless the people are supplied with provisions during this dis- 
 tressing interval. It is like a gulf between the present and 
 the coming year, in which thousands must perish unless con- 
 ducted through by the assistance of government. 
 
 Your Lordship may judge of my inability to devote the least 
 attention to any ulterior measures, when I assure you, that it was 
 with difficulty I could snatch from the pressure of distress, and 
 the clamours of mendicants, a brief interval to pen this melan- 
 choly document. Yes, the state of society is now completely 
 unhinged. Domestic industry is neglected. The public roads are 
 covered with thousands toiling from morning until night, for the 
 wretched pittance of six or seven pence worth of meal for an entire 
 family. While the men are thus working, the women and children 
 are constantly lining the public ways, and thronging round the 
 depots of the local committees, preventing each other’s accom- 
 modation by the pressure of hunger ; harrassing the feelings of 
 the distributors by their complaints, and invading the public ear 
 as they return in the evening, by blessings or imprecations, 
 according as they had the good or bad fortune to be relieved or 
 neglected. It was only yesterday evening I met a group of those 
 unfortunate individuals, many of whom, after watching a whole 
 day, returned home bitterly disappointed. 
 
 There was one in particular whose moans as well as fainting 
 appearance, attracted my attention : a feeble woman with a child 
 on her breast, who came to get a meal for a family of seven little 
 children. She left them in the morning without breaking her 
 own or their fast ; and she was now tottering home, a distance of 
 three miles, with her little bag empty, and wildly asking those 
 around her how she could meet the cries of her famishing children. 
 She literally reminded me of the words of the prophet, “ The 
 little ones look for bread, and there was none to break it.” And 
 
LETTER XL. 
 
 207 
 
 had I not afforded her the means of relief, I doubt, from her ap- 
 pearance, whether she would not have perished on the way. 
 
 Some interested persons may exclaim, there are in the accounts 
 from Mayo, instances of exaggeration. That there are cases 
 of exaggeration, nay, of fraud, I shall not hesitate to avow. 
 But they are the unavoidable result of the evil. The cases of 
 exaggeration, however, are but few, and the frauds are petty. 
 If then, some hard-hearted and dishonest individuals may be able, 
 by false statements, to filch a little of the charity provisions, is 
 that a reason why hundreds of thousands should be suffered to 
 perish? The precautions taken by the central committee of 
 Mayo, are such as that I should defy the most practised jobber 
 in the land, to do much in that way. The allocations to the 
 distressed districts are all made in provisions. The members 
 contract with the merchants after receiving proposals, and then 
 orders for their respective shares are given on the merchants to 
 the local committees. 
 
 Whatever, therefore, might be the disposition, there are suffi- 
 cient precautions against the execution of any serious frauds. 
 An undeserving object may sometimes intercept a few quarts of 
 meal. Some of the local committees may occasionally exercise 
 their small patronage in promoting some poor gentleman to the 
 stewardship of the public works, and allow him six-pence or a shil- 
 ling a day extra, in order to prevent the dignity of his caste from 
 being tainted by a community of office with less genteel mendi- 
 cants. But such things are only the nibblings of a mouse 
 compared to the more lordly spoliation of which the report (true 
 or false I know not), of 1822 almost frightened the English people 
 from a second exertion of benevolence. 
 
 To that generous people I must express our obligations, and I 
 shall do many of them the justice to say that it is owing to their 
 ignorance of our state they do not exert themselves as much to 
 prevent famine by a system of sound legislation, as they do by 
 their purse to mitigate its horrors. 
 
 I should fear to contemplate once more the recurrence of a 
 similar scene. I should fear it for the sake of the people, the 
 government, and, above all, the interests of morality and religion. 
 The invasion of a hostile power is not more dreadful in its 
 consequences than that of famine, especially amidst plenty. It is 
 a species of revolution, of which the effects are long felt. It 
 comes with a scorching effect on the moral virtues of the people, 
 and the traces of the searing bolt appear long and deeply fur- 
 rowed in their character. The inhabitants of entire districts 
 literally loosened from the soil, and flocking liko vultures wherever 
 the hope of food may lead them — numbers of aged and infirm 
 objects starving in their homes, deprived of the usual solace of 
 charity on account of the committees, and defrauded by their 
 
208 
 
 LETTER XL. 
 
 feebleness and their delicacy of that resource, while more sturdy 
 and shameless beggars sometimes intercept the public bounty — 
 complaints of partiality against those who sacrifice their health, 
 nay, life itself, in the daily distributions, and murmurs of ingrati- 
 tude from the worthless few, mingled with the more general 
 expression of thankfulness and benediction — landlords who were 
 deaf and blind and callous to the wants of their tenantry, while 
 they alone were called on to relieve them, becoming suddenly and 
 miraculously sensitive to their destitution, while they hope to 
 remove it by the charity of others — the lofty feeling that could 
 not brook eleemosynary aid now so impaired, if not utterly 
 broken down, as to depress a proud and high-minded peasantry 
 into a mass of mendicants — an improvident hope of relief in 
 similar cases, and consequent relaxation of industry — a sullen and 
 indignant hate towards their petty oppressors, for having stript 
 them first of their substance, and next of their shame, and a 
 spirit of political cabal, unknown to their more simple-minded as 
 well as better-conditioned predecessors — those are but a few 
 of the necessary consequences of famine in a fertile land — a foe 
 which, if suffered again to ravage Ireland, will utterly demoralize 
 the people, and destroy those virtues of which the wreck that yet 
 remains could still, in the hands of an able statesman, form the 
 foundation of one of the noblest social edifices that could be ex- 
 hibited in any country. 
 
 I have the honor to be your Lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER XLI. 
 
 209 
 
 LETTER XLI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE EARL GREY. 
 
 Ballina, August 8 , 1831 . 
 
 My Lord — We are at length arrived at that extreme point of 
 depression from which, if we are to credit the lessons of philo- 
 sophy and experience, there must be a gradual refluence to a 
 more prosperous state. Our comfort, then, is in the wretched- 
 ness of our condition. Our melancholy consolation is drawn 
 from the very depths of the misery into which we are plunged. 
 Misfortune itself is relative; and a comparison with the more 
 abject state of others has proved, in cases of poignant suffering, 
 no slight mitigation. But the Irish, and especially the wretched 
 people of Mayo, are denied the miserable solace that could be 
 derived from so unenviable a source. 
 
 Often has it been said that the lot of our countrymen is 
 without a parallel in the history of the globe. The very fre- 
 quency of the assertion has rendered people indifferent to the 
 force of its truth ; and the pictures that were hitherto drawn of 
 our misery, have been put, by those who could not witness it, to 
 the account of the fancy, or the feelings of those who were inte- 
 rested in its exaggeration. No longer, however, is this wretched- 
 ness problematical. It is now attested by the confession of all 
 classes. Persons who cannot agree on any other topic have been 
 forced to a melancholy coincidence of opinion on the frightful 
 distress of the people ; and the multitudes who have lately emi- 
 grated from our shores are spreading among their kindred be- 
 yond the Atlantic the tale of our misfortunes. 
 
 Now, making a fair deduction from the statements which 
 may be supposed to have been over-charged from political 
 excitement, allow me coolly and calmly to consider whether any 
 other country on earth can exhibit such an anomaly. To confine 
 myself to that point to which those letters more immediately 
 refer : — Are the people of any other country, similarly circum- 
 stanced, doomed to the horrors of periodical starvation ? I 
 shall not now dwell upon the painful particulars of the ordeal 
 through which the people have passed; it is now, thank God, 
 nearly over, and our future business will be to endeavour to 
 guard against its recurrence. 
 
 Had the late famine sprung solely from those deep natural 
 causes over which human foresight had no .controul, those letters 
 
210 
 
 LETTER XLI. 
 
 should have ceased with the calamity in which they originated. 
 To require the Government or the legislature to stay the mighty 
 march of the elements, would be just as reasonable as for the 
 inhabitants of Sicily to call upon their king to close for ever the 
 crater of Mount JEtna. Yet, many who have talked and written 
 about Ireland have been so taunted by her plunderers, as if they 
 were transferring upon man the unavoidable dispensations of 
 Providence. 
 
 But, my Lord, it is impossible to disguise the fact. There is 
 a marked difference between the famines in Ireland and the 
 similar visitations that come upon other countries. The sugar 
 planter of the West Indies may behold the whole labours of a 
 year swept away ; no one, however, can mistake the workings of 
 the hurricane and the storm. The sirocco may blast the har- 
 vests of the south ; but the pious husbandman cannot repine at a 
 calamity which no Government could ward off. The east of 
 Europe may be deluged by early rains and the inundation of its 
 rivers ; and if a famine should follow, the inhabitants have, at 
 least, one comfort, that the elements were sent them as pre- 
 cursors to warn them of its approach. But in Ireland, and in 
 Ireland alone, is the evil dissociated from the influence of natural 
 causes. Witness the last awful visitation. Did it not come upon 
 many with such celerity, that if relief had been longer delayed, 
 thousands would have perished ? Were not some of the land- 
 lords, who were latterly among the most importunate in solicit- 
 ing relief, among those who denied its existence ? W ere not 
 some of the individuals who announced the evil at a distance, 
 treated with the contempt and hatred heaped upon the prophets, 
 whose predictions of woe were never acknowledged but amidst 
 the appalling reality of the suffering by which they were 
 verified ? 
 
 In the event, however, of a general calamity, which should 
 blight the crop or sweep away the harvest, such serious doubts 
 of distress could not have been entertained. Its traces would 
 have been too deep and visible to be contested. Why, then, was 
 the distress so long disputed, until the sudden approaches of 
 death, in some instances, put a stop to the vain debate ? It is 
 because with a few exceptions along the sea-coast, there was no 
 striking natural cause to which to trace it, and man was naturally 
 unwilling to plead guilty to the work of his own hands. I shall 
 not deny that the potato crop was short. But whilst our oats 
 were exported in vast quantities from the distressed districts, it 
 is still incontestible that, far from labouring under a scarcity of 
 food, ours was a famine in the midst of plenty. Nay, were not 
 the provisions with which the people were fed, mostly the growth 
 of their own soil, and supplied, after the double expense of 
 freight and insurance ? 
 
LETTER XLI. 
 
 211 
 
 If, then, the distress sprung more from political than natural 
 causes, it is the duty of a wise statesman to take precautions 
 against its return. These precautions are the more necessary, 
 since it would be hopeless to expect that similar relief should be 
 granted in similar circumstances. The English will no longer 
 come forward with the same promptitude ; the Government 
 would, probably, be more tardy than before ; the contributions 
 of our own poor countrymen could not again be expected. 
 Nay ; could it be hoped that all those resources could be again 
 made available, the same disposition would not exist to call them 
 forth. Nor is it a wonder. The clergy are called upon to 
 preach to their flocks obedience to the laws, and resignation 
 under misfortune. But, surely, it is too much to require of 
 them to be undertaking missions to another country, and appeal- 
 ing to a distant people, at the risk of vast personal inconve- 
 nience, to save their flocks from starvation. And for w r hat 
 purpose ? Merely to protect the herds, or the sheep, or secure 
 the rack-rents of some unfeeling man, who may refuse a farthing 
 to his starving tenantry. No ; the clergy will continue to preach 
 a respect for property, but they certainly will not throw their 
 persons between it and hunger. Things will be allowed to take 
 their natural course, and come to a crisis, rather than that the 
 clergy should, by eleemosynary missions, labour to heave off a 
 load of misery which must descend the year after, and crush in 
 its fall all the efforts that were made to avert it. 
 
 Many are the remedies propounded for our misfortunes. The 
 specifics vary as the theories about the seat of the disease. 
 Some ascribe all the evil to the Government — others to the 
 people. Like other complicated effects, it might be shared— 
 though not in equal proportions — with both. When I reflect on 
 the effects of good government in far less generous natures, I 
 must confess that many of the people’s vices are traceable to the 
 influence of bad laws. If Government, then, has such an in- 
 fluence on the prosperity of a country, and the character of its 
 people, it is a mockery to contemplate any improvement in 
 either without a serious reference to the Government and the 
 legislature. 
 
 To talk, therefore, of the best measures of improvement, 
 without the skill and energy of Government to direct them, 
 would be like talking of passive instruments, without a superior 
 artist to wield them. Give me the will, the sincere and efficient 
 will, on the part of the Government, to improve Ireland, and we 
 ask no more. The sincere volition of a mighty agent cannot 
 remain dormant and inactive ; and if Ireland remains yet a 
 wilderness, it is because the Government never effectually willed 
 its cultivation. Let but Government will it, and the remotest of 
 its colonies are speedily improved. Its settlement in the Indies, 
 
212 
 
 LETTER XLI, 
 
 as well as those in Canada, bear the vigorous impressions of its 
 institutions, and distance itself is annihilated in the rapidity by 
 which its spirit is conveyed. Let but the Government issue its 
 fiat, Canada is traversed by canals for the circulation of trade, 
 whilst the Shannon, undisturbed by machinery or commerce, is 
 suffered to roll in silence its unprofitable waters through the 
 land — an emblem, as it were, of the dull and sullen repose of its 
 inhabitants. 
 
 In this very session of parliament hundreds of thousands of 
 pounds have been voted to forward the internal commerce of 
 Canada. Is it more important than Ireland to the strength and 
 security of the empire ? But we are told the Government feels 
 a deep solicitude for the prosperity of Ireland, and the ministers 
 are taxing their ingenuity to devise measures for improving the 
 condition of its people. I trust this is the case. One measure 
 only — and that rather of a negative than a positive character — 
 will be to me a test of their sincerity. But to smooth all the 
 avenues for improvement on the part of the people, is, it must be 
 confessed, an important consideration. Without their being pro- 
 perly disposed for the plastic hand of Government to mould them 
 to its high purpose, the best efforts of the most enlightened 
 Government could not be crowned with adequate success. Be- 
 fore I then point to the single measure, by which every honest 
 man will determine the sincerity of the Government to improve 
 Ireland, it is only just that I should satisfy those, who put all the 
 misfortunes of the people to a perverseness of disposition, which 
 all the influence of philosophy cannot cure. After a patient 
 hearing of the different plaintiffs against the people, the most 
 serious counts that are pressed by their accusers are a disposition 
 to early marriages, as well as a propensity to vegetate on a root 
 which, on account of the facility with which it is raised, destroys 
 the springs of industry, and dulls that spirit of enterprise which 
 is always quickened by artificial wants and enjoyments. These 
 are the radical effects which, it is said, vitiate our people, and 
 which, as long as they continue, must defy the efforts of the 
 most benevolent legislature. 
 
 I shall treat those two points with the utmost brevity and 
 candour. In adverting to early marriages and a superabun- 
 dant population, I shall not stop, for the present, to direct 
 a legislator’s attention to where the hive may conveniently 
 dispose of its colonies. The half a million of waste lands in 
 Mayo alone might check the fears of Malthus himself on the 
 subject of a superabundant people. Nor shall I avail myself, 
 with the dexterous ingenuity of a polemic, of the extraordinary 
 shiftings of controversy, and bring a Protestant parson of the 
 nineteenth to refute his predecessors of the sixteenth century, 
 who complained that the Catholic Church, by the encouragement 
 
LETTER XLI. 
 
 213 
 
 of monkish institutions, was an enemy to all Governments by 
 diminishing the population. No, my Lord, I shall not now press 
 this view of the subject. I shall only remark, that we shall 
 endeavour to dissuade the poor people from the practise of early 
 marriage, when we find it recommended by the morality of those 
 who inveigh so bitterly against it. The people, however, are not 
 yet refined into the licentiousness of believing that they are but 
 the ephemeral animals of a day, destined to minister to the pro- 
 fligacy of those who “ glory in their shame,” and who strive to 
 conceal the want of common understanding, with which nature 
 cursed them, under the mystified jargon of political economy. 
 The sorrows of the world are but little to them compared to their 
 virtue ; and that virtue the weaker portion of them are anxious 
 to guard at any hazard from the prowlers that beset them, by 
 flying, at an early age, into the sanctuary of marriage. 
 
 In the justice of the other accusation brought against my 
 countrymen, namely, their immoderate use of potatoes, I freely 
 acquiesce. Nay, for the comfort of those who disrelish the pre- 
 carious root, I pledge myself that I shall discourage its exclusive 
 use. To commence immediately would, I fear, be a useless expe- 
 riment; since, in the next month of September, all the corn 
 yards will, probably, be converted into so many stations, in which 
 armed keepers will be placed, to guard the oats from being tasted 
 by the tenantry. But though the advice may not be reduced to 
 practice this season, the public mind will be gradually prepared 
 for its reception. As it is now confessed that the precariousness 
 of the potato crop is one of the principal causes of famine, who- 
 ever wishes to stop the disastrous effect must labour to check the 
 cause, and, therefore, discourage the universal and exclusive use 
 of potatoes. Let, therefore, the people henceforward consume 
 bread, and export the potatoes to pay rents, and tithes, and 
 taxes. And if the English are not satisfied with the potatoes, 
 the Irish, by being obliged to keep them, will be spared the ne- 
 cessity of again appealing to their aid against starvation. I 
 cannot hope, with Henry IV., that every peasant here will have 
 his pullet ; I cannot believe, with another king, that every cot- 
 tage would be rendered comfortable by the possession of a dumb 
 Bible. But while I am anxious to make its spirit the inmate of 
 every family, I hope to see the day when they shall eat in plenty 
 and in thankfulness of the bread which was produced by the 
 sweat of their brow and the labour of their own hands. 
 
 I have the honour to be, &c., 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
214 
 
 LETTER X LI I . 
 
 LETTER XLII. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE. 
 
 London, September 5 , 1831 . 
 
 Sir — Not many days have elapsed since a distinguished individual 
 of my body was obliged to throw bis shield over a member of the 
 Upper House, to protect him from the outrage of a ludicrous 
 personification. It is no wonder if the same histrionic spirit 
 should be equally busy with the House of Commons, and gather 
 some strength in its descent to a worthy baronet from the loftier 
 pinnacles of the peerage. With the privileges of the honourable 
 house I have neither the right or the inclination to interfere. 
 No one admires more than I do the wisdom of the law which 
 protects the property and character of those who devote their 
 lives to the toils and anxieties of legislation. Far, therefore, 
 from indulging the profane wish of canvassing the free discussion 
 of the house, I must, in common with every British subject, revere 
 it as a sanctuary, where every member finds a refuge for his 
 fortune and his fame. 
 
 But the reports of petitions and speeches that go abroad must 
 be deemed legitimate topics of animadversion. It is in reference 
 to such reports I take the liberty of addressing myself to you, 
 Sir, and to solicit the public attention to the subject of the College 
 of Maynooth, and the Catholic clergy of Ireland. 
 
 It appears from some of these reports, that petitions have been 
 recently presented to the House of Commons, praying for the 
 withdrawal of the annual pittance that is allowed to that estab- 
 lishment. It is not difficult to trace the source from which such 
 petitions have sprung. The fomenters of religious discord, find- 
 ing that the imposture of their Education Societies was at length 
 unmasked, and exposed to merited scorn — perceiving that the 
 growing spirit and intelligence of the people could no longer 
 endure the mockery of being amused with proffers of education, 
 which always ended in disappointment — have, like ingenious tac- 
 ticians, had recourse to the last desperate experiment of warfare, 
 and endeavoured to defend their own system by a seasonable di- 
 version on their foes. Thanks, however, to the Government, the 
 artifice has failed. The Kildare-street Society is at length 
 defunct, and the spirit of rancorous bigotry which it nursed and 
 propagated is, I sincerely trust, extinct for ever. It is, there- 
 
LETTER XLII. 
 
 215 
 
 fore, vain for the advocates of the Kildare-street Society to 
 expect a compromise from the friends of the College. That 
 society being attacked by the united and simultaneous hostility 
 of an entire nation, the representatives of Ireland could consent 
 to no condition but that of absolute capitulation. As the strata- 
 gem proved unsuccessful, the enemies of the College will, I trust, 
 instead of pushing on a siege which must end in their own dis- 
 comfiture, consent to retire peaceably from its walls. 
 
 Such, however, is the waywardness with which the rules of 
 logic are wielded by some individuals, that I have no doubt but 
 it will be urged, that because the Kildare-street Society has been 
 dissolved, the grant ought to be withdrawn from the College of 
 Maynooth. What ! compare objects as wide as the poles asun- 
 der ? Because, then, you dissolve a society which literally tan- 
 talized the people, by presenting to them the draught of know- 
 ledge, and again snatching it away — a society which was an 
 instrument of proselytism, and the covert ally of religious perse- 
 cution — a society which was set up as a screen between the 
 Protestant Establishment in Ireland and the public, in order to 
 hide from that public the dereliction of duty of which most of 
 the clergy were guilty, who were pledged to keep schools in con- 
 sideration of their benefices — a society, in short, which insulted 
 the religion of the people, in return for the taxes which they 
 gave for its support — does it follow that you ought to annihilate 
 an establishment for the education of those ministers of religion 
 who alone possess the confidence of the people, and keep a secure 
 hold of their affections, who kindly minister to all their wants, 
 and lighten, by a sincere and cordial sympathy, the load of those 
 afflictions which they are unable to remove ? Who, in fine, (for 
 abler panegyrists in the House of Commons show the necessity of 
 dwelling on their deserts,) illustrate the most exalted heroism of 
 charity in laying down their lives for their flocks, as some have done, 
 to the writer’s sad recollection, in their attempts to stay the pro- 
 gress of famine and disease ? Is it because you put a stop to 
 the progress of fanaticism, you must also check the efforts of 
 those who are the promoters of public peace ; and because you 
 dispense with the aid of individuals who have been stirring up 
 the angry elements of society, you must also dismiss those who 
 have been throwing oil over the troubled waters ? 
 
 But as the benevolent exertions of the clergy cannot be con- 
 travened even by their enemies, I shall briefly advert to the 
 other grounds on which they are wont to be assailed. There are 
 many who give them credit for a kindness of heart, without 
 appreciating much the attributes of the understanding ; and 
 willingly acknowledge the extent of their labours, without the 
 trouble of inquiry concerning their literary attainments. 
 
 The first and most prominent accusation against them is, that 
 
216 
 
 LETTER XLII. 
 
 they are generally selected from the humbler classes of the 
 people. Waiving, for a moment, its truth or falsehood, I re- 
 joice in the objection. Ireland has been, for a series of years, 
 sinking fast from a comparative prosperity — her manufactures, 
 the source of domestic comfort, annihilated — her commerce, ex- 
 cept in the exportation of the necessaries of life, decayed — her 
 wealthy farmers, who once enjoyed comfort, reduced to the con- 
 dition of the lower classes, not only by exorbitant rents and 
 jury taxes, but by the support of the paupers who are created by 
 this oppressive system — in short, the vast space that is filled up 
 by the intermediate gradations of society becoming daily void, 
 and leaving a dreary waste to mark almost but two opposite 
 regions of society — it is made a subject of reproach that the 
 clergy are selected from the one, and a poverty of which they 
 are guiltless (for in modern ethics it is a crime) is imputed to 
 them by those who have the chief share in its infliction. No, 
 we have not in Ireland, as in England, the graduated scale or 
 intermediate orders so nearly approaching that they touch each 
 other, making society, to use a fine idea of Sheridan’s, one single 
 slope, gladdening the eye which reposes on it, with the com- 
 mingling variety of its shades, and beguiling the ascent to its 
 very summit, without diminishing its elevation. Society in Ireland 
 is, in general, like its scenery, either the depths of the valley, 
 naturally rich without cultivation, or the heights of the mountain, 
 barren as they are lofty, and frowning, by their savage rugged- 
 ness, on those who presume to approach them. But who are 
 they that thus reproach the priesthood of Ireland with being 
 selected from the humbler classes ? Are they individuals whose 
 escutcheons are emblazoned with the glories of ancient chivalry ? 
 No, they are, in general, the children of haughty churchmen, 
 who fatten upon the misery which they created, and, when 
 rendered plethoric, by sucking an undue share of the nourish- 
 ment of the body, they turn round to reproach the poor members 
 with their emaciation. How must Mr. Sadler rejoice at such an 
 argument in favour of the Poor laws ! Will not Mr. O’Connell 
 triumphantly exclaim, that unless the government adopts effectual 
 measures to check the pauperism and advance the prosperity of 
 Ireland, he must, in justice to his country, agitate the repeal of 
 the Union ? If the wealth which is abused by the Protestant 
 establishment in Ireland, were expended according to the original 
 intention of its donors, in supporting the poor, and spreading the 
 blessings of education, ecclesiastics rendered insolent by unmerited 
 wealth should not now be casting a reproach on the descendants of 
 the plundered, nor should Maynooth be coming, like an annual 
 mendicant, before the house, soliciting the continuance of its 
 bounty. The objection only shows the necessity of re-applying 
 church property according to its original intention. It will not 
 
LETTER XLII. 
 
 217 
 
 be necessary for me to combat the position of the Irish Secretary. 
 Waiving the right of parliament, which he controverts, I shall 
 adopt his own principle, namely, that it should be applied accord- 
 ing to the intention of those who gave it ; and provided he ascends 
 a step higher in his historical inquiries, we shall arrive at the same 
 conclusion. Little did the petitioners against Maynooth imagine 
 they were throwing themselves into the arms of their foes ; little 
 did they think that they were only strengthening the arguments 
 of the agitators who were complaining of the inequality with 
 which the affairs of Ireland were hitherto managed. They only 
 prove that the Pactolus of the treasury has flowed but scantily 
 amongst the Catholics of Ireland, and that even that little always 
 passed through the process of a Protestant filtration. They 
 may begin to imagine that it was wiser to be silent on such a 
 topic than to draw public attention to the anomaly of the richest 
 church and the poorest people on earth. Their avarice may 
 check their hostility, and beholding the monster of Poor Laws 
 which lies in wait to devour their wealth, they may repent having 
 gone so far, and may begin to retrace their footsteps. 
 
 But in what nation is the charge of poverty preferred ? In 
 one which boasts of its Christianity — which pretends to admire 
 the austere laws of Sparta and of Rome — nay, which practically 
 inspires much of their wholesome spirit into its own institutions. 
 In walking over the vaults of Westminster Abbey, whose are the 
 ashes on which we tread with most veneration ? In listening to 
 the eloquence of the House of Commons, do we cease to admire 
 the majestic current until we undertake a voyage to explore the 
 source from which it flows ? Is it not to preserve it from sub- 
 siding into a stagnant pool, which would retain nought but the 
 feculence of its former spirit, that the peerage is kept agitated 
 with the fresh infusion of plebeian blood by which it is occasionally 
 enriched ? There are, to be sure, some lofty stems of the aris- 
 tocracy so rooted in ancient virtue, that it passes to them like a 
 family inheritance, preserving their dignity and property from 
 decay. But, with the exception of Shrewsbury, and a few such 
 others, whose shields still recall the fields of Cressy or of Poic- 
 tiers, who are the lords that gather round them most of the 
 public admiration ? Let a stranger but visit the House of Peers, 
 and will he not easily recognize among its twinkling lights such 
 lamps as that of Plunket still shedding the broad and brilliant 
 radiance which they were wont to cast when fed by a free and 
 unalloyed atmosphere among the people ? 
 
 I have purposely dwelt upon this point less with a view to 
 vindicate the clergy from a charge which, if true, wmuld redound 
 to their honour, than to show that if there is aught of culpability 
 in it, it entirely recoils on their accusers. Still it is not true 
 that the clergy are taken from those low classes with whom low 
 
 p 
 
218 
 
 LETTER XLII. 
 
 vices are generally associated. No : they are the children of 
 that valuable portion of the people, who, equally aloof from the 
 contagion of the extremes of society, support themselves by the 
 industry of their farms, preferring a virtuous industry to the 
 arts by which many make fortunes, and whom the pressure of 
 the times is gradually sinking into that level which threatens to 
 inundate Ireland with one uniform mass of pauperism. Twenty 
 or thirty pounds a year, the average of the money expended on 
 their education, is a proof that they belong to the more decent 
 class of farmers. Their education in Maynooth is partly de- 
 frayed by Government, it is true ; but whether one partakes of 
 the Government bounty in college, or receives its charity at 
 home, in the shape of a sinecure pension, is substantially the 
 same ; nor do I see why the one who is enabled to go to the uni- 
 versity, by the aid of such a pension, should cast a reproach on 
 the gratuitous education of the other. 
 
 Next, the clergy of Maynooth are ignorant, and hostile to the 
 institutions of the country. If they were ignorant, the reproach 
 would not have been so frequently made by their enemies. It is 
 because they are not ignorant, and because they have displayed 
 a fund of knowledge, which has at once astonished and annoyed 
 the bigots of the land, that they have earned their lasting and 
 immitigable enmity. Had such charges been preferred before 
 they met their adversaries in many a theological encounter, they 
 might, indeed, impose upon the public credulity. But that they 
 should be now repeated, after the many signal victories of the 
 Catholic clergy, which proclaim their refutation, bespeaks an 
 insolent effrontery in slander which no evidence can shame. But 
 they are not conversant with the Bible. And what is the proof of 
 this assertion? Because, forsooth, the Bibles are sold at a 
 bookseller’s price in the College of Maynooth. Yet every stu- 
 dent is obliged to purchase one at his entrance into the house. 
 It is true, indeed, that the trustees have no fund by which the 
 price of the sacred volume may be so cheapened as to be thrown 
 upon the highways. They do not send forth an issue of thou- 
 sands of volumes, to be afterwards pawned in piles upon the 
 broker’s shop for the vilest commodities, and then vauntingly 
 proclaim the circulation of the Bible. No : the book is treated 
 with the reverence due to the sacred source from which it came, 
 and read with an attention due to its sublime and mysterious 
 communications. Ignorance is a word of vague and indefinite 
 import. An individual may be ignorant of many things highly 
 valued by the world, and still be profoundly versed in its duty. 
 Again, one may be a flippant master of the fashionable frivolities 
 of life, and still be very ignorant of his obligations. A wise 
 philosopher has said that ignorance, or rather nesciency of many 
 things, is great knowledge. According to that meaning of the 
 
LETTER XLII. 
 
 219 
 
 word the Catholic clergy are ignorant. They know not the laws 
 by which balls and masquerades are regulated — they are igno- 
 rant how to wind through the labyrinths of a waltz, nor do they 
 understand the mysteries of annuities and renewal fines, by 
 which the value of Church livings may be raised, without 
 alarming the vigilance of Hume and his economical colleagues. 
 But for a knowledge of their duty, I solemnly pledge myself — I 
 say it not in the spirit of vaunting, but in the sincerity of my 
 soul — that I shall find twenty Catholic curates in Ireland whose 
 annual stipend exceeds not thirty pounds, who, in the judgment 
 of any impartial jury, will display more classical information, 
 more mathematical science, more extensive biblical knowledge, a 
 more profound acquaintance with moral theology, as well as the 
 canons and history of the Church, than the whole bench of Pro- 
 testant bishops of that country put together. And perhaps the 
 reader may be inclined to suspend his scepticism regarding this 
 assertion on hearing my reasons. 
 
 In the College of Maynooth the students are disciplined into 
 their extensive knowledge by a long and laborious process of study. 
 As their duties in after life impose upon them the necessity of 
 correct information regarding the various and complicated obliga- 
 tions of those who have recourse to them for spiritual advice, 
 they are obliged to consult those profound masters of science who 
 may guide them in their important decisions. Not so in the 
 Protestant Church. Its ministers are not at all troubled on this 
 score. They may in a short space of time pass into the Church 
 from the bustle of a secular profession. Some verses in the 
 Greek Testament, a few chapters in Burnet’s Thirty-nine Articles 
 (a perplexed and stupid treatise), and a clear and distinct intona- 
 tion of the divine service, are, if I am correctly informed, often 
 the only trials of a sufficient qualification. As the days, then, of 
 inspiration and of miracles are supposed to be gone by, it cannot 
 be presumption to estimate, in general, one’s acquaintance with 
 any science in proportion to the assiduity with which it is culti- 
 vated. But the Catholic clergy write no books. No, because 
 their precious time is more valuably employed than if devoted to 
 literature. The time of building is not the season for its decora- 
 tions. The warfare of the martyrs and the confessors was suc- 
 ceeded by the literary reign of the doctors, who recorded their 
 triumphs. It is thus with the Catholic clergy in Ireland. They 
 were hitherto engaged in repairing the ruins of their Church, 
 and defending the faith of the people; and, like the Hebrew 
 priests, after their return from captivity, employed with the 
 trowel in one hand and the sword in the other, to repulse the 
 assailants by whom the work was occasionally interrupted. But 
 now that the edifice is secured, and that the enemy have sus- 
 pended their hostility, some individuals of finer taste, though 
 
220 
 
 LETTER XLIX, 
 
 not greater merit, may be found to clothe its walls with Corin- 
 thian shafts, and entwine the graces of an appropriate foliage 
 round their capitals. 
 
 In fine, the clergy educated at Maynooth are hostile to the 
 institutions of the country : nor is their demeanour so meek or con- 
 ciliating as that of their continental predecessors. I am rejoiced 
 that their enemies are at length beginning to do justice to the 
 pious and enlightened priesthood which so long preserved the faith 
 in Ireland. It is not the first time that men have erected mauso- 
 leums to the memories of the martyrs whom they persecuted when 
 alive. When Maynooth did not exist, the continental clergy were 
 sure to return to this country with foreign disaffection ; and now, 
 when that venerable body is gradually retiring from the scene, 
 they are panegyrized by their enemies, as if they thought they 
 could injure Maynooth by the contrast. The truth is, whether 
 the priests are educated in Rome, or Paris, or Maynooth, they 
 are hated by a party whose sole cause of hate is that they are 
 educated at all ; and the particular reasons that are assigned now 
 against one place, and again against another, remind me of the 
 logic of the rapacious animal, who, as he accosted in turn his 
 weaker brethren, affected to conceal, by a variety of arguments, 
 the one great reason why he possessed himself of the entire 
 spoil. 
 
 As to their hostility to the institutions of the country, here is 
 the crown of their offending. Had they never raised their voice, 
 or wielded their pen in asserting the rights or religion of their 
 country — if they would not challenge the praise of the bigots, 
 they would, I am sure, at least experience the forbearance of 
 their silence. But they have proved themselves hostile to the 
 institutions of the country, and let it not be disguised, it is for 
 this hostility they are assailed. But what are the institutions to 
 which they are hostile ? Is it to the House of Commons, or its 
 ancient or imprescriptible rights ? No ; well do they revere it 
 as the sanctuary of freedom. Is it the House of Lords ? No ; 
 they look upon the peerage as a firm and necessary bulwark 
 round the throne. Is their hostility, then, directed against the 
 Monarchy? No ; they regard it as the key-stone which 
 strengthens and completes the work of the constitution. Nay, 
 they are reproached for their reverence for kings. And what- 
 ever may be the popularity of our beloved monarch with the rest 
 of his subjects, there are no churches in the empire from which the 
 pious aspirations for his long life and reign ascend with greater 
 fervour than from the Catholic chapels, though not borne on the 
 lofty tones of the trumpet or the organ. 
 
 What, then, are the institutions to which the Catholic clergy 
 are hostile ? Enormous taxes to erect churches where there are 
 no Protestants to attend them; tithes and vestry cesses, and 
 
LETTER XLII. 
 
 221 
 
 grand jury jobbing, and the long train of local tyranny and 
 paltry litigation by which those payments are enforced ; Hiber- 
 nian and Kildare-street Societies, but with the extinction of the 
 latter their hostility, too, is at an end. Such are the excrescences 
 that have grown out of the system, and if they be miscalled the 
 institutions of the country, I hope the clergy of Ireland will 
 always remain hostile to such institutions. 
 
 To conclude, Sir, the Catholic clergy took a prominent share 
 in the formation of the Catholic Association, and in the collection 
 of the Catholic rent, which were the two great instruments by 
 which our freedom was achieved. They enrolled themselves 
 among those who combated for a participation in the constitution, 
 and cheered the exertions of Mr. O’Connell in behalf of his 
 oppressed countrymen. Though the bigots of the empire were 
 defeated by Emancipation, still it was a measure which, while 
 it enlarged the sphere of civil and religious liberty, gave fresh 
 accession of strength to the Government. Instead, therefore, of 
 being exposed to obloquy for their conduct on that occasion, they 
 are entitled to the gratitude of the empire. They have proved 
 that they are not the slaves of arbitrary power they were repre- 
 sented, and that they can aspire to and enjoy the blessings of a 
 tempered freedom. The Catholic clergy of Ireland shall per- 
 severe in the same steady course, attached from principle to the 
 order which is inseparable from good government, and interested 
 from duty, as well as affection, in promoting, by every means in 
 their power, the welfare of the people. A few bigots may re- 
 present them as factious. They know how to make allowances 
 for those whom nature never blessed with intellects, and who had 
 the misfortune to suffer whatever of intellect they had to be 
 irretrievably perverted. But while they indulge in no feeling 
 but that of pity for such men, they hail the moral reformation 
 that has already overspread the land. They have no dread 
 henceforward to be assailed in any theatre, even in the House 
 of Commons. I do not allude to the Catholic members there, 
 who have the information, and, what is more valuable, the energy 
 to rebuke any wanton aspersions on their creed — I allude to the 
 noble and generous spirit that animates the Protestant members 
 in general — that pervades the whole assembly — that is gradually 
 restoring some individuals from the terrors under which they 
 laboured ; and, in fine, after scaring the ghosts of ancient intole- 
 rance from the house, is converting it into what it ought to be — 
 a temple of purely legislative deliberation. The press, too, is 
 active in propagating the same spirit of an enlightened respect 
 for adverse opinions. With such opportunities of defence, the 
 clergy, far from fearing any attack, may gladly court inquiry, 
 conscious that justice shall ultimately triumph. They are not at 
 all impugned nor angry at being accused of hostility to the insti- 
 
222 
 
 LETTER XLIII. 
 
 tutions of the country, since it is a reproach they share in com- 
 mon with their beloved monarch, and the most illustrious charac- 
 ters in the land. Equally foes to factious violence and arbitrary 
 power, they will pursue a firm, a steady, and constitutional 
 course in the assertion of their rights, and prove that liberty is 
 never less likely to lead astray than when it is lit by the coals 
 that are kept kindled in the sanctuary. 
 
 I have the honour to be your very obedient humble servant, 
 
 ►J< John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XLIII. 
 
 THE CORONATION OF WILLIAM IV., KING OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Canterbury, September 10 , 1831 . 
 
 c|te]5 £o]bce ceccAp 
 <Sepc ip oifiAr) At) Apbpjg, 
 tu tsac Tip-ejoA w e Y\t) 
 
 Sip-eslA X>e Apt t)A bAitpb. 
 
 Tj A65 ^ac X>Aipe. 
 
 Forsake notfever, or the love or fear 
 Of him who rules the universal sphere. 
 
 The fear of God on man impressed with force, 
 
 Of all true wisdom is the first great source. 
 
 It may appear strange to the English reader that a letter from 
 one of the most celebrated cities in the kingdom should be pre- 
 faced by an extract from the native literature of Ireland. To 
 the general scholar, however, familiar with the language of both 
 countries, nothing can appear more natural than this reference 
 to the venerable Celtic tongue, suggested by the very name of 
 the ancient capital of Kent. Etymologists, it is true, sometimes 
 push their principles too far, and, by the excess of refinement, 
 throw discredit on the antiquities, which the} are desirous to 
 illustrate. But here there is a question, not of affinity between 
 
LETTER XLIII. 
 
 223 
 
 words, by reason of derivation, but of their very identity, and 
 it requires no exercise of ingenuity to discover that Canterbury 
 is the same as the chief city of £eAi)-cpte, the headland — or 
 Can-tire. The names of many of the rivers, promontories, and 
 mountains in England and Wales, as well as in Ireland, reveal 
 their descent from the same common origin, whence it appears 
 that the Irish and Cimbrian dialects are still vigorous branches 
 of the Celtic stem, which had spread not only throughout those 
 islands, but also through a large portion of Europe. 
 
 It is, however, more on account of the value of the precepts it 
 contains than of the language in which they are delivered, I 
 quote from one of the most instructive poems that has ^survived 
 the wreck of our literature. It is a treatise on good government, 
 composed by an eminent hereditary bard of the family, for the 
 instruction of one of the princes of Thomond, in the sixteenth 
 century, from which the preceding lines are extracted, as apposite 
 to those duties which are imposed upon a king, by virtue of 
 his coronation. The original is found in the first volume of the 
 Transactions of the Gaelic Society, with English and Latin ver- 
 sions. The eloquent writer of “ Telemachus,” which was com- 
 posed for the instruction of a prince, could not deliver wiser 
 counsels on the duties of government ; and the coincidence 
 between the recent coronation and the subject of the poem has, 
 along with the Celtic name of this city, determined the selection 
 of the passage prefixed to this letter. 
 
 On the 8th of this month, Westminster Abbey was made the 
 theatre of one of those magnificent pageants, which it has so 
 often exhibited, in the coronation of the monarch of England. 
 On that festival another link has been added to the royal chain 
 which stretches beyond the period of the Norman conquest, and 
 the same venerable pile witnesses the brilliant inauguration of 
 one king, soon after the remains of another had been deposited 
 within its walls. It afforded to the thoughtful an impressive 
 lesson of the rapidity with which the world shifts its successive 
 scenes of joy and of sorrow. It recalled the beautiful and ex- 
 pressive language of one of the most gifted of that class with 
 whose monuments the vaults of Westminster Abbey are strewn : 
 
 “ Welcome comes rejoicing, and Farewell goes out sighing 
 
 and never, perhaps, did the splendour of the world appear more 
 deceitful and evanescent than when it thus reached the nearness 
 of the tombs in which the new crowned monarch — the object of 
 all this pomp — was soon to be gathered to his predecessors in 
 this vast mausoleum of Edward the Confessor. 
 
 To take a part in this splendid ceremonial, and do homage to 
 their king, were assembled on the occasion the choicest of the 
 ancient peers of the realm. Though surrounded with a splen- 
 
224 
 
 LETTER XLIII. 
 
 dour not unbefitting the monarch of a great kingdom, it was far 
 from offending the spectators with that gorgeous and extravagant 
 display which attended, it is said, the coronation of the preceding 
 monarch, on which such a vast portion of the people’s treasure 
 was so criminally expended. As in the time of the eighth Henry, 
 a ceremonial anciently carried on to impress the people with 
 reverence, was diverted from its sacred purpose to minister io the 
 boundless vanity of the king; and the unfeeling extravagance 
 with which their reigns were ushered in, might be deemed an 
 appropriate augury of the heartless cruelty, with which their 
 subjects were afterwards treated. 
 
 Brilliant as was the ceremonial of the coronation, it was 
 nothing # more than a mere worldly pageant, devoid of any of 
 that reverential feeling which religion inspires, and calculated 
 only to amuse the votaries of fashion. Of coronets and of 
 heraldic emblems there was a varied profusion ; with the lustre 
 of diamonds and brilliants the eye might be dazzled into a pain- 
 ful sensation; peers and high-born dames seemed to vie with 
 each other in the splendour and variety of their ornaments ; and 
 yet, with all the solemn effect lent to the scene by the “ Majesty 
 of the place,” with its lengthened aisles, its lofty vaults, its 
 magic fretwork, and its prismatic lights, there was wanting that 
 which alone could inspire the soul with ecstacy. Yes, religion 
 was not there ; and wearing much of its semblance, the pageant 
 was far less imposing than a mere theatrical exhibition, having 
 no pretensions to religion. The temple was there, it is true ; but 
 it was the shell of which the soul, that once gave it animation 
 and glory, was departed, and were the spirit of its sainted 
 founder to come on earth, he could not find in its mutilated 
 liturgy a vestige of the holy sacrifice for the celebration of which 
 it was erected. The coronation took place on the Nativity of 
 the Blessed Virgin, but far from being fixed on by design, the 
 coincidence, probably, was not adverted to but by few in that 
 assembly. 
 
 There was a large portion of the subjects of the new monarch 
 who could feel an additional interest in the ceremony taking 
 place on a feast of the Blessed Virgin. But they were far 
 away, and familiarized, by long ill-usage, to a feeling almost 
 of indifference, to the coronations of Westminster Abbey. Dire 
 experience had taught them that, hitherto, every new reign, with 
 scarcely an exception, instead of being a harbinger of hope, was 
 but the prognostic of fresh political and religious misfortunes. 
 They found that the foreign and heartless flatterers who sur- 
 rounded every newly enthroned sovereign, practised well the 
 lesson of the advisers of Boboam,* counselling him to scourge 
 
 * 3 Kings, xii, 1 1 , 
 
LETTER XLIII. 
 
 225 
 
 his new subjects with scorpions. This was all the change which 
 the Catholics of Ireland had experienced for centuries from the 
 change of masters — the aggravations of a lot sufficiently calami- 
 tous, into one still more intolerable. Nor will their fate be such 
 as they have a right to expect, until religion again takes her seat 
 in that sanctuary from which it was forcibly detruded, and until 
 every such coronation is surrounded, too, by the rank and 
 chivalry of Catholic Ireland — proud of their duties of legislating 
 at home, for the interests of their own land, and proud of doing 
 homage to their crowned Sovereigns in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 The Irish traditions respecting the “ 1£ 1 A 5 *Pa] 1,” or stone of 
 fate, on which the sovereigns are seated, during the ceremony of 
 crowning, may be deemed the effusions of fancy. Perhaps so, but 
 if fanciful, they are as old as the genuine and rigorous historical 
 traditions of other countries. To smile at all such national 
 traditions as fanciful, has become the fashion of those writers who 
 would efface all the noble memories of the past, and hopes of 
 the future, and, at the same time, worship all that is loathsome 
 in the licentiousness, the despotism, and the cruelty of the age in 
 which they lived. It is not to the sneers of such materialists all 
 that is lofty in national recollections, and all that is holy and 
 consoling in religion, should be resigned. I am not, at the same 
 time, about engaging in any antiquarian contest about the origin 
 or the extraordinary migrations of this throne of “ destiny.” I 
 shall not prolong this letter into a dissertation about the time of 
 its importation into Ireland by the “ Guaca frj £>ai;aai),” or its 
 transit into Scotland, and its comparatively brief sojourn there, 
 or its final and fixed position in the chair of Westminster Abbey, 
 where it appears “ fated” to remain. If so, the monarchs of 
 England have nothing to fear from a legislature fixed in Ireland, 
 and the traditions of our country, instead of filling them with 
 alarm, are calculated to inspire confidence in the fixedness of 
 their thrones. The tradition associates the circumstance of the 
 coronation on that stone with the monarchy of Ireland. While 
 the English, then, keep possession of this “ fatal” emblem of 
 royalty — which, no doubt, they are jealous to retain — they can, 
 with impunity, indulge us with the restoration of an Irish parlia- 
 ment, and with an entire and undisturbed belief in our old 
 cherished traditions. 
 
 There is, no doubt, one attribute, the loss of which may suggest 
 to the lovers of legitimacy, some reasonable doubt of the present 
 race of English kings, being lineally descended from the ancient 
 monarchs of Ireland, and that circumstance is the sullen and 
 uniform silence of this stone, which, for many preceding ages, 
 used to send forth a joyous sound at the auspicious recurrence of 
 every rightful coronation. However, the English people will not 
 let go the stone for this undutiful omission of the “ stone of 
 
226 
 
 LETTER XLIII. 
 
 destiny” to recognise the legitimate occupants of the throne, lest, 
 like the celebrated Palladium of Troy, the fortunes of their 
 empire should be found to recede with its departure. 
 
 There is, I must own, no small danger in the continuance of 
 this ominous silence, and henceforward the “ 1^4,5 *^1” must, at 
 every succeeding coronation, fulfil its lofty “ destiny.” Never 
 should a monarch be seated on the throne of a kingdom amidst 
 a still and uninterrupted silence. Never should the diadem be 
 placed on his head, without being respectfully reminded of his 
 solemn duties. Never should the sceptre of empire be placed in 
 his hands, without the awful sound of justice and mercy, which 
 he is bound to administer, issuing from the sanctuary in which 
 he is seated, and going forth in pealing accents among the people. 
 This was the sound which the celebrated “ 1C|A5 was wont 
 to issue, and which has been, like other ancient emblems, much 
 disfigured by fable. It is this sound which should go forth at 
 the coronation of every sovereign, and if, through fear or flattery, 
 the ministers of the monarch are mute respecting this salutary 
 instruction, hence the danger which our traditions ascribe to the 
 silence of the stone. 
 
 In all the recorded covenants between kings and their people, 
 this duty of justice on one side was found to be correlative with 
 that of fealty and obedience on the other. This mutual promise 
 was exacted and given, when the ancient soldiers raised their 
 chief on their shields, and he promised to preserve inviolate their 
 customs and their immunities. These correlative obligations 
 have been freely and eloquently enforced in the ancient poem in 
 which Cormac, one of the greatest of our monarchs, gives in- 
 structions on government to his son. This precious document 
 is an illustration of that hidden but natural meaning of which 
 the celebrated story of the " stone of fate” is susceptible. The 
 same duty of justice descended to the Christian kings, and the 
 same warning sound, in enforcing its observance, went forth with 
 energy and effect at the recurrence of every royal coronation. 
 
 It is only in the Catholic church a true idea of the obligations 
 of royalty may be found. How beautifully they are set forth 
 in the admonition which the consecrating prelate gives to the 
 monarch to be crowned : — “ Thou shaft defend from all oppres- 
 sions, widows, orphans, the poor and the feeble.” And again : — 
 “ Thou shalt exhibit due reverence to the prelates, nor shall you 
 trample on their ecclesiastical liberties.” At the recent corona- 
 tion those duties were but carelessly inculcated. There was a 
 time, however, when they were conveyed to monarchs’ ears with 
 zeal and fervour. Of the ecclesiastical liberties which it is the 
 duty of monarchs to protect, and of bishops to assert, if violated, 
 but little is now heard save in the ceremony of consecration. 
 Not so when Thomas a Becket opposed, with evangelical intre- 
 
LETTER XLIV. 
 
 227 
 
 pidity, the guilty aggressions of Henry II. on the sacred immu- 
 nities of the church. To this holy martyr are the people of 
 those realms indebted for interposing between the rights of the 
 clergy and the lawless encroachments of a powerful monarch ; 
 and every Christian bishop, who wishes to be animated in the 
 discharge of his sacred duties, will do well to make a pilgrimage 
 to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XLIV. 
 
 Paris, September 21, 183 L 
 
 The fatal tidings of the fall of Warsaw had, a few hours before 
 our arrival, reached the French capital. Nothing could be 
 better calculated than this untoward event to exhibit, in their 
 proper light, the fluctuating feelings of the Parisian population. 
 Every glance was filled with defiance — every expression was 
 conveyed in a tone of reproach ; their gestures were fierce and 
 menacing, and the recent revolution of July, as yet fresh in 
 every recollection, inspired a general apprehension that the city 
 was about witnessing the recurrence of a similar tragedy. 
 Intense sympathy for the sufferings of the unhappy Poles, and 
 unmeasured indignation at the tyranny to which that brave 
 people were sacrificed, were, during a few days, the exclusive 
 and absorbing theme of conversation. Yet, after a few days, the 
 feeling seemed to evaporate ; it was succeeded by a brief interval 
 of sullenness, but even this silence did not last long. The elastic 
 levity of the French character suddenly rose above the pressure 
 of a distant disaster. New pursuits and new amusements effaced, 
 if not the remembrance, at least any painful impressions of this 
 sad event, and, ere a week elapsed, a tide of tumultuous feelings, 
 which had nigh threatened the city with destruction, had almost 
 gradually ebbed away. 
 
 A few days’ observation during such a stirring crisis, gave me 
 a greater insight into that characteristic rapidity with which the 
 French, or I should more correctly say, the Parisians, rush into 
 such extremes. They are obviously the children of impulse, 
 
228 
 
 LETTER XL1V. 
 
 easily susceptible of the worst as of the best impressions, and 
 hence their chequered history, filled with deeds of the most 
 fearful atrocity, as well as of the most hallowed renown. Far 
 from being surprised that the sufferings of Poland should engage 
 the sympathies of the French people, the wonder should be that 
 any European nation should be indifferent to the fate of a people 
 to whom all are indebted for the continuance of the blessings of 
 Christianity and civilization. Yes, when the Turks and Cossacks 
 overran the rest of Europe, Poland was the country that opposed 
 a barrier to their barbarous inundation, and the name of John 
 Sobieski, who so often led his brave countrymen to victory, 
 should be pronounced with reverential gratitude to the most 
 distant generations. 
 
 The Poles, then, have a claim of sympathy for their unhappy 
 lot upon all the lovers of religion and of freedom. And I trust 
 the day is not distant when the same peaceful and legal process 
 that has been adopted in Ireland under the great master of 
 bloodless revolutions, shall restore Poland, without a crime, to 
 the rank of a nation. As yet France would not be a fitting 
 agent or ally in the achievement of such a redemption. Its 
 spirit of chivalry, if not gone, is as yet half extinguished. 
 Those who could so desecrate the temples of the Almighty as to 
 appropriate them to the honour of those whose licentiousness 
 and crimes deserved public infamy, are not the proper instru- 
 ments for restoring the fallen glories of such a faithful nation as 
 Poland. Nothing can be more painful to the eye of a Christian 
 than the Pagan motto “ Aux grandes Tiommes la patrie recon- 
 naissante ,” figuring on the front of a church erected to proclaim 
 glory to God and peace to mankind. The ancient Pantheon in 
 Rome has been dedicated to the honour of the sainted martyrs. 
 It was reserved for the impiety of Paris to transform the beautiful 
 church of St. Genevieve into a Pantheon for honouring the 
 impure spirits of profligate infidels, whose works, after achieving 
 the ruin of society in their own country, carry with them a 
 similar demoralization wherever they are imported. 
 
 It must, however, be confessed, that public virtue and morals 
 were much decayed through the contagious example of royal 
 vices, before the rise and profession of this philosophical infidelity. 
 Whilst the valour of the French armies was extending the con- 
 quests of Louis XIV. abroad, the disorderly life of the monarch 
 and many of his courtiers was undermining the morality of the 
 people at home. He affected not even the decency to disguise 
 his vices ; he seemed to have braved public opinion as well as the 
 reproaches of conscience, and the visitor of the ancient city of 
 Versailles is shown, as some of its most curious monuments, the 
 chapel of the “ great monarch,” and the scenes of his illicit 
 amours, in sight of each other. Such examples of public im- 
 
LETTER XLI V. 
 
 229 
 
 morality must have descended with fearful rapidity and weight 
 among the less elevated classes. Bourdaloue, and Bossuet, and 
 Maisillon, might have thundered against vice and profligacy — 
 Boileau and Moliere might have pointed against them the polished 
 shafts of ridicule and satire — the reign of literature and of the 
 arts seemed at that period to vie with that of the French arms, 
 yet, under all this brilliant surface, public virtue received a 
 wound from the royal example, from which it did not recover 
 until the destruction of that very throne by whose occupants it 
 was inflicted. 
 
 The ecclesiastical quarrels, which were fomented and embit- 
 tered by political cabals, contributed, unfortunately, too, to pre- 
 pare a reception for writings unfavourable to religion. France, 
 as well as every other portion of the Church in Christendom, 
 had its immunities or liberties. Those sacred privileges were 
 secured to the rulers of the church, by canons and by customs, 
 against the caprices or despotism of the secular power. At the 
 period to which I allude, those sacred liberties were attempted to 
 be wrested from their original destination, and the flatterers of 
 the monarch would fain find, in the liberties of the Gallican 
 church, a plea for fresh encroachments on those ancient immu- 
 nities of its Bishops. Hence the most zealous advocates of those 
 liberties, understood in their modern acceptation, were, and some 
 of them no doubt unconsciously, the most successful advocates of 
 the slavery of the church. This intestine strife had long rankled 
 in the heart of the nation. It assumed a variety of phases, and 
 was carried on under a great variety of colours. Jesuits and 
 Jansenists occupy a prominent portion of the history of that 
 period, but amidst the contending combatants it is not difficult to 
 descry that the leading principle by which they were severally 
 animated, was either the untrammelled freedom of the church on 
 one side, or its complete subjection to the secular power on the 
 other. The Jansenists, who braved the thunders of the church, 
 were generally the favourites of the court. The Jesuits defended 
 not the fictitious, but the real liberties of the church, and earned 
 in return, the hostility of many of the courts of Europe. In 
 this intestine strife between those who fought or pretended to 
 fight under the banners of the church, its influence was gradually 
 weakened, and the public mind in some measure disposed for the 
 reception of those poisonous opinions by which it was subse- 
 quently saturated. 
 
 What has been the fruit of those opinions is yet but too visible 
 in the capital of this great kingdom. They have been looking 
 for freedom, and found the worst species of servitude. Nothing 
 can be more grating to the ear, as well as more painful to one’s 
 religious feelings than the sound of hammers and such like in- 
 struments, breaking on the repose and solemnity of the Sabbath- 
 
230 
 
 LETTER XLIV. 
 
 day. Yet such is the din you are doomed to hear from some of 
 the workshops of Paris on Sunday, and such is the monument of 
 servitude that attests the reign of their boasted freedom. The 
 Almighty, in instituting the Sabbath, secured to the serf a 
 grateful respite from the severity of his toil ; the church, follow- 
 ing up the same merciful spirit, enlarged the privilege, by the 
 institution of her sacred festivals. The votaries of philosophy — 
 the followers of those delusions which wore the name of liberty, 
 have flung away the shield with which the Catholic church would 
 fain protect them, and have accordingly plunged themselves into 
 the most abject servitude. Still I do not despair of the religious 
 resuscitation of France. The Catholic faith is still active, not- 
 withstanding the many and even recent persecutions it has 
 endured. The Archbishop’s palace is still a wreck since the 
 days of July; his library has been flung, by the fury of the 
 revolutionists, into the river. Some of the Catholic clergy are 
 constrained to disguise themselves in a secular dress, reminding 
 me of the similar costume worn by some of the priests of Ireland 
 until a recent period — the remnant of the persecution through 
 which they passed. Still in Notre-Dame, St. Roch, and several 
 of the other churches, the Catholic worship is carried on with 
 great solemnity, and the seed of the divine Word cast by zealous 
 preachers, is crowned with a consoling harvest. Zeal for the 
 freedom of instruction, and emancipation from the despotism of the 
 University is rapidly springing up among the clergy and people. 
 This is the last strong-hold of infidelity and intolerance. Until 
 the tyranny over faith and conscience exercised by the Univer- 
 sity is utterly abolished, a strong barrier will exist against the 
 restoration of the ancient religion. Symptoms of impatience 
 under this intolerable yoke are already discernible. The clergy 
 and Christian brothers are imbuing the young minds of the 
 growing generation with a strong leaven of the Catholic faith, 
 and when they succeed in destroying the unhallowed monopoly 
 in education which the University has laboured to usurp, the 
 Catholic church will resume once more its peaceful dominion over 
 the entire of the French people. 
 
 * John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER XLV, 
 
 231 
 
 LETTER XLV. 
 
 Geneva, October 5 , 1831 , 
 
 It is difficult to determine whether St. Denis on the one side of 
 Paris, or Fontainbleau on the other, is most calculated to impress 
 the instructive lesson of the instability of human greatness. 
 The royal sepulchres of the one, in which the ashes of the long 
 line of the French monarchs repose, naturally inspire reflections 
 on the fleeting tenure with which the most dazzling dignities are 
 held. And I have no doubt that the philosophic fury which at 
 the close of the last century waged war on those venerable 
 monuments of the dead, had less for its object any enmity to 
 the memory of the kings there interred, than to that holy 
 religion which can draw instruction from every object, and can 
 furnish out of the mausoleums of fallen ambition the most touch- 
 ing lessons of humility. But why should Fontainbleau, a resi- 
 dence for royal relaxation and amusement, read the same 
 saddening lesson as the Benedictine cemetery in which the 
 remains of the French kings are deposited ? Because it remains 
 a monument of the pride and of the fall of the most powerful 
 man that ever swayed the imperial sceptre of France. It was 
 in the palace of Fontainbleau Napoleon kept captive the succes- 
 sor of St. Peter. It was here he heaped on him the most humi- 
 liating indignities. The insolence of his imperial keeper, and 
 the heroic patience of Pius, are minutely detailed in the admirable 
 Memoirs of Cardinal Pacha, the companion of his captivity. 
 History does not record a more striking or instructive coincidence 
 between guilt and punishment, than that in the same apartment 
 in which the Emperor, like another Oseas, lifted his hand against 
 the Lord’s anointed, he was afterwards, by a just retribution of 
 Providence, constrained to sign with the same hand the sentence 
 of his imperial abdication. 
 
 In beauty of scenery, in variety of landscape, in the freshness 
 of its verdure, and in the magic rapidity with which wood, and 
 lake, and mountain, alternately break upon your view in Ireland, 
 the “ great nation,” as it is flatteringly called by the devotion of 
 its children, could challenge no comparison with our own. How- 
 ever, though the views of the country are less cheering, its inha- 
 bitants, compared with those of Ireland, enjoy far more freely 
 the blessings of their tame, but fertile soil. Instead of the lofty 
 walls that here frown upon you, rendering the domains of the 
 proprietors inaccessible to the very eye of the traveller, bristling 
 with terrors, like the ramparts of a garrisoned town, the bound- 
 
232 
 
 LETTER XLV. 
 
 less fields of France are seen without visible fence or mearing, 
 teeming with vine and corn, un violated by any trespass from 
 legal or agrarian plunder, and affording in this apparently unde- 
 fended condition a pledge of the tender and affectionate relations 
 that bind the proprietors and tillers of the soil as members of the 
 same family. The sacred inheritance of the rights of the culti- 
 vators of the soil was not cancelled by the fury of the French 
 Revolution. The Christian traditions of humanity and mercy 
 were not obliterated. Under the false guise of freedom, it is 
 true that the cruel authors of the Revolution would have substi- 
 tuted the most revolting servitude. But the genius of Catho- 
 licity and freedom rose after the revolutionary frenzy had sub- 
 sided, and there was no ascendancy party distinct from the great 
 body of the people, animated by religious and national hate, to 
 keep in thraldom the native children of the soil. 
 
 To an Irish Ecclesiastic the city of Auxerre had peculiar at- 
 tractions. It was here, under its sainted Pontiff, Germanus, that 
 St. Patrick first imbibed those holy lessons that fitted him, under 
 the divine grace, to be the Apostle of Ireland. I must confess I 
 felt the force of the inspired passage: u We have worshipped in 
 the place where his steps have trodden,” on reflecting that it was 
 to this city St. Patrick betook himself for instruction to qualify 
 himself for that mission to which he was invited by the memo- 
 rable vision from the Diocese of Killala. Next to Auxerre, Dijon, 
 the capital of Burgundy, and the birth-place of Bossuet, deserved 
 and attracted my attention. But here, notwithstanding some 
 noble churches, the spire of one of which is seen shooting to the 
 clouds, I regretted to find in another church, still converted into 
 a stable, the deep and unsightly furrows of the French revolution. 
 
 Had the Jura mountains occupied any other position, they 
 would have been deemed a range of striking elevation. But the 
 effect produced by their view, is impaired in a comparison with 
 the Alps, by the proximity of which they are overshadowed. 
 Had it been intended to produce an effect by suddenness, one of 
 the most powerful means to excite great sensations, no contrivance 
 could have been fitter for such a purpose than the abrupt turn 
 from the road beyond the French frontiers, through which an 
 immediate view of those stupendous mountains is unexpectedly 
 let in on the surprised beholder. I shall not easily forget, — to 
 describe it would be difficult — the sensation I felt at the first 
 glance of the distant Alps, belted, as it were, with a blue fringe, 
 their summits covered with snow, and leaving the imagination to 
 guess how far they were hidden in the clouds, whilst from under 
 
 * The village bearing the name of ^oco^ll, but little varied from the ancient 
 name J^ocluc, found in St. Patrick’s biography, is yet to be seen on the west 
 of Killala, not far from the Bay of Kilcummin. 
 
LETTER XLV. 
 
 233 
 
 the azure zone I have just mentioned, an immense sheet of spark- 
 ling whiteness overspread the valley, casting a transient illusion 
 over the entire of the scene by which we were surrounded. We 
 descended along the road, winding in spiral turns through the 
 mountain, with unusual rapidity : the hazy gauze which, a few 
 moments before, floated beneath us, began to disappear in thin 
 and shadowy fleeces, and revealed, in partial glimpses, the bosom 
 of the Leman lake, together with the verdant valley of the Jex, 
 leaving us in doubt which most to admire, the magic of the first 
 illusion, or the reality by which it was succeeded. As we passed 
 on, we beheld to our right the chateau, in which once resided the 
 philosopher or the fool of Ferney, and arrived, towards evening, 
 in the celebrated city of Geneva. 
 
 The political vicissitudes of this city, successively belonging to 
 Savoy, Switzerland, and France, and again restored to the 
 Helvetic Confederation, are but an appropriate counterpart of its 
 more disastrous, religious revolutions. It was early a favourite 
 retreat of those turbulent children, who sought to shake off the 
 authority of the church ; and it soon gave evidence to the world 
 that a soil saturated with the seeds of heresy, was the most pro- 
 pitious ground for infidelity to thrive. It was here Calvin 
 preached religious liberty to the citizens, and the lessons which 
 he taught were soon illustrated by the fires in which he sought 
 to extinguish the opinions of Servetus, who but improved on the 
 license and infidelity of his teachers. In the lapse of time the 
 revolting theology of Calvin yielded to the more fascinating 
 infidelity of Rousseau, the indigenous produce of the soil of 
 Geneva. But as if its own native growth was not sufficient to 
 infect this region, it was doomed to receive fresh accessions of a 
 kindred impiety, from France and England. Near both ex- 
 tremities of the Leman lake, are yet to be seen the houses in 
 which the fellow- labourers of Rousseau resided, the one at Ferney, 
 and the other at Lausanne. In the hall of Ferney, a picture 
 representing the author of the Henriade receiving a laurel crown 
 from Apollo, designed by the poet himself, is unquestionably one 
 of the saddest monuments of human vanity and weakness on 
 record. A far more rational and interesting memorial of Gibbon 
 is found in his library at Lausane ; soon, as I was informed, to 
 be brought to England, and forming one of the rarest and most 
 select private collections, in Europe. The bower in which the 
 historian wrote the last lines of The Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire, shaded with its blooming acacias, is still in 
 tolerable preservation. 
 
 The ill-omened conjunction of talent and impiety which the 
 neighbourhood of Geneva has exhibited in the lives and writings 
 of these so-called philosophers, has lent an unenviable celebrity 
 to the place. It did not escape the notice of Lord Byron, and 
 Q 
 
234 
 
 LETTER XLV. 
 
 probably it was the magnificent scenery by which he was sur- 
 rounded, when Mont Blanc could be seen from the bosom of the 
 lake, lifting its snowy top over the tributary range of hills that 
 lines its margin, that suggested to him the comparison between 
 those writers and the ancient giants piling Pelion upon Ossa to 
 storm Olympus, and wage war upon heaven. 
 
 Long, however, before the birth of these men, the seeds of 
 religious anarchy Avere cast in those regions. Little more than a 
 hundred years before, the associate of Luther raised the standard 
 of revolt in Geneva, the city of Constance witnessed an as- 
 sembled council of the Ecclesiastics of Christendom, for the 
 purpose of annihilating the spectacle of a Papal triumvirate, 
 which, in defiance of right and usage, sprang up from the scandal 
 of the times. Again but a few years elapsed, when the seditious 
 and schismatical doctrine which some had drawn from those de- 
 crees of the Council of Constance, which only the necessity of a 
 solitary case could warrant, was practically attempted to be 
 enforced at Bazle by the turbulent bishops who sought to depose 
 Eugenius, the legitimate Pope. In the person of one of the 
 Dukes of Savoy, they set up a Papal pretender in his stead. 
 The memory of this fatal schism is still attested by the monu- 
 ment of the abdicated Pontiff, in one of the churches of Lausane, 
 where, stripped of the inappropriate name of Felix, which he 
 had usurped, his remains now repose, under the more humble title 
 of Amady, Duke of Savoy. 
 
 But amid those saddening memorials of infidelity, of heresy, 
 and schism, that are scattered over Switzerland, there are more 
 numerous and enduring monuments of the piety of the Catholic 
 Church. It is cheering to an Irishman to find the ancient fame of 
 his own land for sanctity and learning attested even in those 
 Alpine regions. The city of St. Gall perpetuates the name and 
 memory of one of those holy and illustrious men, whom Ireland 
 sent forth in the days of its splendour, to dissipate the spiritual 
 darkness that covered a large portion of the continent. Well 
 have the people whom they instructed, proved their gratitude. 
 The name and veneration of St. Gall will be imperishable as the 
 Alps. Almost every where, the zeal and labours of St. Francis 
 of Sales, are the theme of the people’s devout gratitude, and 
 many interesting anecdotes of his life, mingle in their conversa- 
 tions. The darkness of infidelity and the revolutionary storm 
 which followed, obscured for a time, it is true, the memories of 
 such holy men, and defaced, if not levelled, the religious monu- 
 ments which they erected. But as the tempest has passed over, 
 the fruits of their piety again begin to revive. Though Geneva 
 has been the cradle of Calvinism, the service of the Catholic 
 church is such, as to inspire much consolation. It was here I first 
 observed a holy and benevolent practice — a memorial of the 
 
LETTER XLVI. 
 
 235 
 
 ancient Agape — baskets of bread blessed at the offertory and 
 then distributed among the poorer classes of the congregation, 
 that those who came from afar to refresh themselves with the 
 bread of life, might not, on their return, be exposed to the 
 danger of famishing on the way. The Catholic Church may 
 encounter opposition. Its doctrines may be checked by masses 
 of error interposed to arrest its progress. Still, in despite of all 
 obstacles, it will not fail to force its way, and, like the rapid 
 current of the Rhone that is said to sweep through the Leman 
 lake without mixing with its waters, the pure stream of Catholic 
 doctrine will rush through every opposing medium, and come 
 out as from its source, unmixed and undiluted with any of the 
 earthly qualities of the flood, which it may be destined to 
 traverse.* 
 
 * John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XLVI. 
 
 The Yale of Chamounie, October 8, 1831. 
 
 Had I been assured that Doctor Johnson had travelled through 
 the cantons of Switzerland, or Savoy, as he had through the 
 islands of Scotland, I should have conjectured that the story of 
 Rasselas had been first suggested by a visit to the delightful 
 valley of Chamounie, — not that the resemblance could have con- 
 sisted in the climate or the scenery ; for no two objects could 
 be more dissimilar in their physical features than the historical 
 vale, girt with mountains radiant with eternal snows, and the 
 fanciful one to which I have alluded, blooming with perpetual 
 verdure, and breathing all the soft and voluptuous fragrance of 
 an oriental atmosphere. The resemblance would consist in that 
 happiness with which the author of the tale associated the crea- 
 ation of his fancy, and which is found to a greater extent amidst 
 the rugged realities of those mountains, than in such artificial 
 enjoyments, as were imagined for securing the happiness of the 
 captive prince, of the secluded valley of Abyssinia. 
 
 * This real or fanciful phenomenon, occasioned by the rapidity of the Rhcne, 
 is thus described by Ammianus Marcellinus : — ‘ ‘ A Poeninis Alphibus effusiore 
 copia fountium Rhodanus fluens et proclivi impetu ad planiora degrediens, 
 paludi sese ingurgitat nomine Lemano, eamque intermeans, nusquam aquis 
 miscetur externis.” — Historise Roman* Scriptures, tom. 2. p. 430. Geneva, 1653. 
 
236 
 
 LETTER XLVI. 
 
 Perhaps there was not in Europe a happier portion of the 
 human race than the primitive inhabitants of the Vale of Cha- 
 mounie, previous to the visit of Pocock, whose name is still asso- 
 ciated with one of the caverns on the confines of the “ Sea of 
 Ice,” and at the foot of the Snowy Mountain. So much for the 
 benefits of intercourse, and the fruits of civilization. No doubt 
 much advantage may be derived from well-regulated social inter- 
 course, by which the remotest districts may be considerably 
 improved. But such intercourse has often its alloy ; and better 
 were it for districts and for countries to be left in the enjoyment 
 of an artless simplicity, sufficiently provided with necessary 
 comforts, than by the sudden influx of foreign tastes, to be also 
 made the victims of their concomitant vices. The primitive and 
 patriarchal manners of the inhabitants of this valley, have, it is 
 said, been injured by the incessant intercourse with strangers. 
 If so, their original constitution must have been unusually 
 sound, for, notwithstanding the continual stream of tourists, that 
 has been flowing into this valley since its discovery in the last 
 century, they are still a people, who, for pastoral innocence and 
 piety, may well be held up as patterns for the peasantry in any 
 part of Europe. 
 
 It was amusing to witness the overtures for ascending to the 
 summit of Mont Blanc, between my more adventurous companions 
 and an experienced guide, who about seven times in his life, had 
 essayed the perilous journey. To do him justice, he appeared as 
 disinterested as he was enterprising ; for though he shrunk not 
 from the task when importuned by romantic travellers, he gene- 
 rally dissuaded them from the hazardous experiment. A regular 
 convoy of pioneers would have been necessary for the expedi- 
 tion — some to carry food, others covering for the night, while 
 reposing on a couch of snow — one party laden with ladders to 
 scale the craggy rocks — and another with planks to throw across 
 the frightful fissures that yawned beneath. For me the descrip- 
 tion was enough : I was not so romantic as to wish to encounter 
 the reality, with no other prospect, save that of arriving, after 
 much danger and fatigue, at the summit of a mountain from 
 which you must descend with a precipitate retreat, lest your 
 lungs should suffer from the effusion of blood, caused from a 
 painful respiration, in such an attenuated atmosphere. We were 
 content with the less glorious, but more safe ascent of the subor- 
 dinate ridge that leads to the Cave of Pocock, on the margin of 
 the “ Mere de Glace,” or icy strait— a singular curiosity — 
 which, instead of presenting one smooth and continuous surface, 
 is furrowed into a strange variety of the most fantastic forms. 
 
 Having taken an early opportunity of visiting the parish cler- 
 gyman, whose influence was attested by the regularity of his 
 flock, I found his little study quite in keeping with the simple 
 
LETTER XLVI. 
 
 237 
 
 piety of his character. The books on the table were the Imita- 
 tion of Christ, St. Chrysostom on the Priesthood, and a copy of 
 the sacred Scriptures. They were but few, but nothing could be 
 more judicious than the selection. His study was not encumbered 
 either by journals or periodicals. The subjects discussed in such 
 ephemeral productions, did not seem to possess much interest, for 
 this good and humble clergyman. This apparent indifference to 
 every species of secular science or political knowledge, will, no 
 doubt, according to the various tastes of my readers, be made 
 the theme of reproach or of admiration. The latter was the 
 feeling in which I was inclined to indulge, and I could not help 
 wishing that it were the happy lot of the entire Catholic priest- 
 hood, to be equally beyond the reach of the disturbing influences 
 of the world. 
 
 But if this secluded pastor never mingled in civil or political 
 concerns, let it be recollected that it was his happy destiny, to be 
 placed in circumstances that released him from the painful neces- 
 sity. No alien missionary prowled among his flock, to make a 
 prey of their simplicity, or to bribe them from the faith of their 
 fathers, with portions of that treasure which had been accumu- 
 lated for the sustainment and propagation of that faith, and not 
 for its destruction. No ruins of demolished cottages were to be 
 seen strewn over his parish, attesting the unfeeling ferocity of 
 proprietors, who had sent their inmates from the scenes that 
 were dear to their childhood, in order to let the grounds out for 
 pasturage, or to more rapacious tenants. He had not witnessed 
 the victims of a political despotism now dragged to one tribunal 
 to make oath that they possessed a franchise for which their 
 conscience smote them, and again to another, where they were 
 forced to turn this imaginary franchise, into an engine for the 
 destruction or abridgment of their, own liberties. Those are 
 reflections that are seldom made by those who are so ready to 
 arraign the political interference of the priesthood of Ireland. 
 They either do not recollect, or industriously disguise the ano- 
 malous state of society that has forced them to take a part with 
 their helpless and persecuted flocks, to shield them from oppres- 
 sion. When these political evils are completely redressed — 
 when, instead of a mockery, the Irish Catholics shall enjoy the 
 reality of a franchise — when religion shall be free, and education 
 protected — when they shall have achieved their complete inde- 
 pendence of an alien Church and an alien legislature — then, and 
 not until then, may an Irish Catholic clergyman enjoy the peace, 
 and pursue the ascetic life of the pastor of Chamounie. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
238 
 
 LETTER XLYII. 
 
 LETTER XLYII. 
 
 Milan, October 16, 1831. 
 
 It is no wonder that the people of Savoy and Switzerland should 
 bear the impress of their Alpine scenery — in their repose, gentle 
 as their peaceful vallies, and in their excitement , stormy, as the 
 tempestuous magnificence of their mountains. And even in the 
 exhibition of those striking contrasts, the peasantry are still true 
 to nature, for seldomer is the tranquil solitude of those seques- 
 tered regions disturbed by the hurricane, than the habitual inno- 
 cence of its inhabitants is invaded by the strife of the destructive 
 passions. Life generally glides on, in a smooth and placid cur- 
 rent : like the disastrous fall of the avalanches, it is only occa- 
 sionally its peace is deeply furrowed, by the terrible inflictions of 
 revenge. It is in traversing the celebrated “ Tete Noir,” one of 
 the finest passes in the Alps, between Chamounie and Martigny, 
 you perceive this coincidence between the physical features of 
 the country and the character of its people. I have not seen the 
 stupendous summits of those “eternal hills,” girt with the winter’s 
 clouds, and shaken with its storms : they were calculated to 
 inspire awe even in their repose ; nor could the most indifferent 
 passenger contemplate their lofty pinnacles, again and again 
 outtopped by higher elevations, crowned with pines, of which the 
 verdure was hidden by wreaths of snow, without feeling a livelier 
 sense of the Omnipotent Spirit that sustained them. On the 
 mind strongly musing amidst this wilderness of sublimities, the 
 chiming of the bells suspended from the necks of the numerous 
 herds, broke like a musical hymn, reminding me of the beautiful 
 apostrophe in our Litany, bidding beast, and rock, and mountain, 
 to praise the Lord, and converting them into so many vehicles to 
 elevate the soul to heaven. 
 
 The road over the Simplon, atones for much of the destructive 
 effects of the ambition of Napoleon. If he was impelled to the 
 enterprise by vanity, it was a vanity which is seldom directed to 
 so useful a purpose. Others have erected statues, or pyramids, 
 to perpetuate their fame. It was reserved for Napoleon to in- 
 scribe his achievements upon the Alpine rocks, and to make his 
 mausoleum as lofty and as durable as its mountains. Both sides 
 of the Alps, but especially that facing Italy, cannot fail to 
 impress the passenger with the boldness of the man who could 
 conceive and achieve a project fraught with such difficulties. 
 Rocks, mountains, torrents, precipices, were all arrayed in oppo- 
 sition, proclaiming the impracticability of the work, and all 
 
LETTER XLVII. 
 
 239 
 
 were conquered by his genius. The columns that are seen lying 
 by the road to Milan, destined to complete his triumphal arch, 
 have been made the frequent theme of real or affected pathos, 
 as illustrative of the vanity of human ambition. However, the 
 memory of Napoleon required not the frail memorial of a tri- 
 umphal arch for its commemoration, nor of a gallery for his 
 busts, whilst the magnificent torrent of Frizinone, bounding along 
 its stupendous gallery, frets as it trembles under the far more 
 triumphal arch, with which he spanned its indignant waters. 
 
 The Simplon, as well as the Great St. Bernard, attests the 
 dominion of the Catholic religion, showing that no place, how- 
 ever frightful or repulsive, is inaccessible to its benevolent influ- 
 ence. Here, too, is a place of refuge reared and fostered by the 
 same spirit that climbed the icy steeps of St. Bernard; and here, 
 too, many a straying traveller, rescued from a grave of snow, 
 could tell the merciful deeds of the inmates of those asylums. 
 On descending from those chilly heights, you were enjoying in a 
 short time the delicious climate of another hemisphere. The soil 
 of Italy is scarcely touched when all the cheering influences, 
 for which it is famed, are felt. On arriving at the small city of 
 Domo D’Ossola in the evening, our first visit was to the cathe- 
 dral, and surely it was delightful to hear one of the finest con- 
 certs imaginable — the Litanies of our Lady of Lorretto, alternately 
 entoned by thousands of the youth of the city, who, after the 
 labour of the day, pealed forth in voices full of taste and melody, 
 their ardent devotion to the Queen of Heaven. 
 
 To the withering spirit of Calvin, which blighted the fruits of 
 Catholic piety on the northern side of the Alps, this scene, so 
 redolent of all that is beautiful in our holy religion, no doubt 
 would appear offensive. Nay, more, something of that feeling 
 which the savage fanaticism of John Knox brought in all its 
 baleful integrity into Scotland, has found its way into our own 
 country, and infected, in some degree, the more susceptible por- 
 tion of its population. Not only does the sacred emblem of our 
 redemption meet the eye, and challenge the reverence of the 
 passengers along the Italian roads, but you meet likewise tasteful 
 oratories, where the image of the Blessed Virgin is painted in 
 fresco, to which the peasantry, by uniformly uncovering their 
 heads, show a becoming veneration. This devout practice has 
 called forth not only the ridicule of Protestants, but it has been 
 treated by some Catholics in a tone of feeble apology, if not 
 worse, rather than in one of manly vindication. This shows the 
 latent influence of mixed religious impressions on their early 
 minds, of which they are unconscious. Some of those Catholics 
 are sincere in their belief — nay, devout in the practice of their 
 religion. They venerate the mother of God, and would be 
 shocked at the impiety that would deny the efficacy of her inter- 
 
240 
 
 LETTER XLVII. 
 
 cession. They would bow to the image of their crucified Re- 
 deemer, and would pity the ignorance or the bad faith of those, 
 who would accuse them of idolatry, for an act having reference 
 to him, whose image thus recalled a grateful feeling, for the bless- 
 ings of our redemption. * Yet I have known persons affecting a 
 pity for the too ceremonious piety of the Italians, forgetting the 
 inspired canticle of her who prophetically announced that she 
 would be honoured of all nations, and forgetting, too, that if the 
 relative honour paid to the mother, through her image, is wrong, 
 it would be difficult to free the superior reverence paid to the 
 image of the Son from a similar inconsistency. It is the inter- 
 course with persons of a different creed — it is the atmosphere 
 which we breathe, somewhat tainted with this mixture, that 
 occasions this surprise in the Catholics of the more northern 
 parts, when visiting the south of Europe. If this sickly feeling 
 has stolen over some of the best, when early intercourse with 
 infidelity was rare, it is not difficult to imagine the dangers to 
 faith and morals which must beset the young and thoughtless, if 
 unhappily the day should ever arrive, when the best fences of 
 both would be thrown down by an unhallowed system of promis- 
 cuous education. 
 
 Notwithstanding the wealth, and splendour, and historic re- 
 nown of Milan, its cathedral forms the pride and glory of the 
 city. It is in the vicinity of the Alps such a magnilicent temple 
 has its appropriate site — the one displaying nature in all its 
 majesty, and the other exhibiting over the arts the sovereignty 
 of religion. 
 
 It is a curious circumstance, that in Italy is to be found the 
 finest specimen of a style of architecture, entirely foreign to its 
 classic soil. The German style had found its way beyond the 
 mountains with the dominion of its German masters. From the 
 days in which Sempronius had associated his fame with one of 
 the Alps which we just traversed, modified into the name of 
 Simplon, the plains of Lombardy were the battle-field on which 
 it was sought to arrest the tide of Teutonic barbarism, which 
 continued to roll over the fair regions of Italy. Milan might be 
 deemed the gate that guarded those defiles, and it was to be 
 expected that it should bear the deep impressions of those 
 struggles, between the hostile nations. In its very cathedral you 
 behold the proofs of a border city, alternately swayed by strange 
 and varied influences. Its mixed and fantastic architecture has 
 been arraigned with a pedantry of criticism, in which the laws of 
 nature and the facts of history, were overlooked or forgotten. 
 Conquered by foreigners, with remittent gleams of domestic inde- 
 pendence, the cathedral is a mirror of its political destinies — the 
 uniform power of the Germans in its Gothic, pointed roofs and 
 arches ; the dominion of Spain in the profusion of its Moorish 
 
LETTER XLV11. 
 
 241 
 
 or Arabesque ornaments ; the indignant genius of Italy revolting 
 against Gothic rule, reclaiming its own influence in the erection 
 of the fagade of the Grecian order, and so influencing the entire 
 work, that the sterner features of the Northern style, were 
 softened and assimilated to the graces of the native architecture. 
 It is a delightful temple. One knows not which to admire most, 
 the vastness of the structure, or the variety of its details — the 
 richness of the materials, or their tasteful and elaborate decora- 
 tions. The principal events of the inspired writings, as well as 
 those regarding the illustrious saints and martyrs of the Church, 
 are represented in the stained panels of the pointed windows, or 
 in basso relievos along the walls. The exterior furnishes a sub- 
 ject of untiring admiration, shooting forth a forest of marble 
 minarets of the same materials as the church, all laden with 
 statues of saints, and glittering in the sun of heaven. 
 
 To the credit of Napoleon, this celebrated church is much 
 indebted to his munificence, for its completion. But the virtues 
 of St. Charles Borromeo are those to the commemoration of 
 which, it is specially devoted. The vast charities and self-denial 
 of the holy archbishop have employed the zeal of rival pencils in 
 their delineation. In one place he is represented distributing to 
 the poor of the city, in one single day, the vast sum of forty-two 
 thousand crowns. And again, in imitation of his Divine Master, 
 he is represented in a procession humbling himself for the sins of 
 his people, in order to stay the dreadful plague, with which Milan 
 was scourged, by the Divine vengeance. A special oratory, or 
 chapel, has been erected underneath, all covered with silver, 
 where the remains of the saint repose, in a chrystal sarcophagus. 
 Here I had twice the happiness to offer up the holy sacrifice of 
 the Mass. I viewed his colossal statue at Arona, in the attitude 
 of bestowing his benevolence on the land and people, of the 
 place of his nativity. But the works and virtues of the illus- 
 trious Archbishop of Milan, did not exclusively belong to any 
 locality. His praise is in all the churches. But along the 
 mountains of Savoy and Switzerland, his memory is particularly 
 cherished, together with that of St. Francis of Sales ; and their 
 virtues, like the flowers of those vallies, breathe still the fresh- 
 ness of their fragrance, unsullied and untouched by the noisome 
 breath of the world. 
 
 The political subjection of Milan to the dominion of Austria, 
 has been often the theme of sincere or hypocritical commissera- 
 tion. The cursory reflections already made, on the mixed and 
 capricious style of the architecture of the cathedral, show that 
 this submission to foreign rule, is nothing new to this celebrated 
 city. Nor is this yoke, however mortifying to the spirit of 
 native independence, so heavy, as far as regards the social con- 
 dition of the people, as the exaggerated pictures of a certain 
 
242 
 
 LETTER XLVII. 
 
 class of writers would lead us to imagine. Seldom is the dele- 
 gated power of a distant sovereignty, better administered than in 
 Milan. The opulence of the city, the flourishing state of its 
 trade, the magnificent style of the higher, and the comfort of the 
 lower classes, together with the contentment and cheerfulness of 
 all, attest that the representations of Austrian tyranny with 
 which we are often amused, are the effusions of interested tra- 
 ducers, rather than the genuine opinions of the people. That 
 the inhabitants of Lombardy should prefer a native government, 
 conducted on the principles of justice, is natural. But that they 
 are so impatient of the Austrian yoke, as easily to be seduced 
 into wild and Eutopian schemes of a federal Italian government, 
 to be formed by cruel and licentious anarchists, is at variance 
 with truth. When those indignant invectives against foreign 
 despotism are traced to their source, it is singular to find that 
 they generally come from a quarter, where they should be spared, 
 with more propriety. Some of your English tourists, and great 
 Irish absentees, occasionally strive to conciliate the good will of 
 the Milanese, by loud declamation on the evils of foreign despo- 
 tism. Native independence and native legislation are their 
 favourite themes, forgetful of the miseries, which the want of its 
 own legislature inflicts upon Ireland. Lombardy exhibits not 
 the starvation of its inhabitants, amidst the exportation of its 
 corn, as did Ireland this summer. Its nobles and its proprietors 
 abstract not the amount of its produce to Vienna, as those of 
 Ireland habitually squandered the rents of their estates in 
 London. The cries of matrons and of children, banished for ever 
 from the demolished cottages where they first breathed life, are 
 not music, such as an Italian ear could endure. And often those 
 who inflict or connive at such cruelties, are they, who are loudest 
 in their hollow eulogies of constitutional freedom, and in their 
 equally hollow condemnation of arbitrary government. The 
 people of Lombardy, have had better instructions in their rights 
 and duties, than those itinerant propagators of sedition. Some 
 of them are not wanting in shrewdly observing that they should 
 apply their lessons of benevolence to Ireland, so near home, 
 before they should thus expend them on a distant country. 
 They are not insensible to the blessings of good government. 
 They know as well as their prouder visitors, the just rights of the 
 people, as well as the duties of the monarch. The claims of the 
 poor can never be disregarded where one archbishop, in the per- 
 son of St. Charles Boromeo, devoted his ample revenues and life 
 to their support ; nor can the monarch ever claim exemption 
 from the duties of humanity and justice, where another, in the 
 person of St. Ambrose, excluded from the sanctuary, Theodosius, 
 the guilty master of the Homan world. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER XLVIII. 
 
 243 
 
 LETTER XLVIII. 
 
 Bologna, October 20 , 1831 . 
 
 If Rome were not the great centre which attracts the generality 
 of European travellers, with a speed that seems to accelerate as 
 they advance, the intermediate cities of Italy would be well 
 worth loitering among them for a longer time, than is generally 
 bestowed on their varied treasures of sculpture, painting, and 
 literature. In the commencement, one feels more than regret in 
 being, as if torn away from an intellectual feast, which he was 
 only beginning to enjoy. But you are soon reconciled to the 
 change, finding that every city furnishes fresh, and perhaps, 
 more interesting objects of curiosity, filling the mind with an un- 
 interrupted succession of historical incidents, and familiarizing 
 the taste to models of excellence, until it becomes gradually 
 assimilated to the surrounding objects, ceasing to wonder at 
 those master pieces of art, which, when first seen, are sure to call 
 forth all the excitement of a young admiration. Every city, 
 nay, every town, has its magnificent temples, its colleges, its 
 museums, its galleries, its annals, and monuments of every kind ; 
 and can boast of poets, or painters, or historians, whose fame may 
 have spread, far beyond the place of their nativity. There is 
 not a region over the entire surface of Italy, that is not redolent 
 of historic renown ; nor a river you traverse, from the Rubicon 
 to the majestic “ Father of floods,” which does not roll with it, a 
 succession of classic recollections. 
 
 In crossing the flat, but fertile fields of Lombardy, you are 
 filled with cheerful emotions, in witnessing the comfort of the 
 inhabitants. You are prepared for relishing the refinement of 
 the arts, when you feel, that the first essential foundation of the 
 physical comforts, of the people is laid. Smiling fields and 
 gladsome faces, exhibiting a delightful sympathy between man 
 and the rest of the creation, meet you as you go along ; nor are 
 your feelings harrowed with those pictures of a once happy 
 tenantry, evicted from the homesteads of their fathers, which 
 rush upon your mind on your approach towards Mantua, drawn 
 from the terrible realities of civil war, but which the poet did 
 not imagine would be realized as in Ireland, in the midst of social 
 tranquillity. Long viewed through the transparent medium of 
 the Italian poets, the Po cannot first be seen without more than 
 ordinary curiosity ; it appeared still more beautiful towards the 
 close of the evening, as the moon shone upon its peaceful surface, 
 giving a more distinct relief to the neighbouring ridge of the 
 
244 
 
 LETTER XLVIII. 
 
 Appenines. Of Placentia and Parma, contiguous cities, the latter 
 is now the chief, both being within the dominions of the 
 widow of Napoleon. The brilliant colouring of Corregio is 
 still as fresh on the roof of the ducal palace, as when it was left 
 unfinished by the hand of death, an emblem of the unfading fame, 
 which Parma derives from having given birth to this celebrated 
 painter. The neighbouring city of Reggio recals the memory 
 of Ariosto, whom Italy admires as the creator of the romantic 
 school of poetry, in which he had many admirers, and some 
 imitators. Again, the city of Modena challenges the homage of 
 every lover of truth and antiquity, as the birth-place of Muratori, 
 whose accurate and laborious dilligence leads you, by the help of 
 dates and monuments, through the labyrinth of the middle ages. 
 His is a name, which deserves the veneration of every scholar, 
 and there are few who ever pushed their researches into the 
 remote dimness of antiquity, that will not readily acknowledge, 
 that they found a guiding light, in the writings of Muratori. 
 
 Bologna has been distinguished as one of those cities, which 
 contributed earliest to the restoration of learning. Its Univer- 
 sity always enjoyed a distinguished reputation, and was one of 
 the most frequented in Europe. At a recent period the chair 
 of Greek was won, by the successful competition of Clotilda 
 Tambroni. Many great historical events are associated with 
 this city. Here the Emperor Charles the Fifth was crowned. 
 The beautiful white altar, adorned with basso relievos, illustrative 
 of the principal events of the life of St. Dominick, is one of 
 the finest monuments in the city, and which does honour to 
 the memory of Alphonso, Duke of Ferrara. The University 
 library, laboratory, and museum, are well worthy the ancient 
 reputation of the city. That of anatomy, is particularly rich 
 in the varied specimens of the human species, together with the 
 diseases to which human nature is subject. The monuments of 
 fools and monsters, with which it abounds, are sadly calculated 
 to lower the vanity of man. But Bologna may well boast of 
 one man, the immortal Lambertini, who, not only from the 
 eminence of his station, but the extent and variety of his acquire- 
 ments, stands out towards the middle of the last century, as one 
 of the most conspicuous characters in Europe. Born in Bologna, 
 reared in its University, the young mind of Lambertini was so 
 thoroughly imbued with classical learning, that in his old age he 
 could recite whole passages of Virgil, from which the graver 
 studies of his profession, had debarred him for many years. 
 With an intellect of vast capacity and untiring application, he 
 grasped the whole circle of theology, ecclesiastical history, and 
 canon law ; and when translated from the Archiepiscopal See of 
 Bologna to the throne of St. Peter, he continued for a long 
 Pontificate, to pour upon the Christian world an uninterrupted 
 
LETTER XLVII1. 
 
 245 
 
 flood of Catholic knowledge ; conveying the orthodox doctrines 
 of the Church, in language not unworthy of Leo, one of the best 
 imitators, of the ancient eloquence of Rome. 
 
 To study such men, and to contemplate their enduring monu- 
 ments, in the beneficent influence which their virtues and their 
 writings spread around them, has been the chief object of my 
 brief pilgrimage. And it must be particularly consoling to an 
 Irishman, in treading over such sacred ground, to find, even in 
 the classic soil of Italy, the monuments of Irish wisdom and 
 Irish virtue, among the most towering of those, which yet chal- 
 lenge the people’s veneration. Here, embosomed in the depths 
 of the Appenines, stands the venerable monastery of Bobio, 
 erected at the close of the sixth century by Columbanus. 
 Educated at Bangor, his breast burned with an ardent zeal to 
 carry the glad tidings of the Gospel to the Continent, then torn 
 by the dreadful contentions of intestine faction, and foreign wars, 
 that raged, throughout the falling Empire. The life and labours 
 of Columbanus, his frustrate efforts to reform the licentious 
 court of Theodoric, and his banishment from Luxien, procured 
 by the implacable vengeance of Brunechilde, his royal mother, 
 form an instructive and interesting episode in the ecclesiastical 
 history of that period. Sighing for that solitude and repose 
 which was the ambition of his life, and from which he had been 
 sacrilegiously extruded, he crossed the Alps, and found the 
 secure asylum which he sought from the liberality of Agilulph, 
 King of the Lombards, in the midst of the Appenines. 
 
 When a barbarous and oppressive code had reduced Ireland to 
 a similar state of anarchy and ignorance, as followed in the 
 track of the invasions that desolated the Roman empire, it was 
 cheering to us amidst those disasters, to refer to those illustrious 
 men who went forth to shed over this chaos, the blessings of light 
 and order. Though our colleges were destroyed, and our tem- 
 ples levelled with the ground, still as long as such high and holy 
 recollections were cherished, they were the harbingers of a hope, 
 that our country would again resume its character for sanctity 
 and learning, among the nations of Europe. Of this soothing 
 hope the Scotch sought to despoil us, and Dempster, availing 
 himself of the name of Scotia, which Ireland anciently bore, and 
 which was not applied to Caledonia, or Albany, till a more recent 
 period, endeavoured by the most shameful act of literary piracy, 
 to rob us of the rich treasure, of our sanctity and literature. 
 The clumsy imposture could not escape immediate exposure, 
 and accordingly it excited mingled feelings of indignation and 
 scorn. For some time it was considered deserving of the se- 
 riousness of refutation. Its best and simplest refutation is found 
 in the comparatively recent appropriation to Scotland, of the name 
 of Scotia, which Ireland anciently and exclusively bore. 
 
246 
 
 LETTER XL1X. 
 
 So clear, however, and incontestible are the claims of Ireland 
 to Columbanus, and the host of holy men whom it sent forth 
 in the period of its peaceful enjoyment of literature, that the 
 continental writers, invariably pointing to our country, scarcely 
 ever condescend to notice the foolish pretensions of Scotland. 
 Thus Muratori expressly names Ireland as the native country of 
 Columbanus, and guided solely by that love of truth* which 
 distinguished this historian, characterizes him as a most cele- 
 brated abbot, and an eminent servant of God, who was most 
 illustrious for his holy life and miracles. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XLIX. 
 
 Fiesole, October 29, 1831. 
 
 Finibus occidius describitur optima tellus, 
 
 Nomine et antiquis Scotia dicta libris. 
 
 Insula dives opum, gemmarum vestis, et auri, 
 
 Commoda corporibus, are, sole solo. 
 
 * * * 
 
 In qua Scotorum gentes habitare merentur, 
 
 Inclyta gens hominum milite, pace, fide. 
 
 X>opAcup. 
 
 £>]Ap, Z'A Z\]i aIu|P, <ScOC|A, Z]Jl pAp-rpA]C, 
 
 ’C& Apb a 5-ca] 1, p caIc’ pa epopee p5A]c. 
 paIIajp a 5-cpe, sup pop a ppeip, ap cpje, 
 
 <6 o ceAp’p o puAcc rj \ l mo^p ]ppe pAop up\p p 
 Apc| be pA^bp^p, peojbe, 5up be op, 
 
 ©up pop be e^be luAcrpAp, pAppp|ccb mop. 
 ***** 
 
 Jp cu|be A]c £ogoA6, cp]c ’b-ptpl jorpAb cAp? 
 
 ^15 fllb ’5 -cac, p ep]0CA|p, 5up eAp ca^p. 
 
 Such is the elegant and correct description, which a holy bishop 
 of this place, has, about a thousand years since, left us of the 
 land of his nativity. Then, as now, the beautiful stream of the 
 Arno watered the delightful valley which he contemplated from 
 
 * Appunto a questo re de Longobardi (Aegilolfo), recorse circa i tempi 
 Correnti San Columbano, abbate celebratissimo, nato in Irlanda, fondatore nella 
 Borgogna del manostero di Luxevils e d’ altri monasteri, &c. &c. — Annali d’ 
 Italia, tom. iv, parte I, page 37. 
 
LETTER XLIX. 
 
 247 
 
 the neighbouring hills of Fiesole ; then, as now, Florence was 
 seen as one of the fairest cities with which the Italian soil was 
 adorned ; then, as now, the luxuriant verdure of the vine and 
 olive, the cloudless sky, and the warm atmosphere, attested the 
 incomparable beauty of the land of Tuscany. Yet, notwith- 
 standing the charms and variety of the scene, the “ untravelled 
 mind of Donagha turns to the land and people of the far West,” 
 and in a strain of poetry, not unworthy of a more classic age* 
 records his fervent admiration of the fertility of the one and the 
 virtues of the other. The lines of this eminent man have since, 
 by the frequency of their application, become familiar to every 
 reader of the annals of Ireland — a proof that they were a 
 faithful picture of the country and its inhabitants. And though 
 ten disastrous centuries have rolled over it, since the happy 
 period, when the sainted exile of Fiesole, sung the fertility of its 
 soil and the fidelity of its people, Ireland and the Irish, are still 
 true to the description of their ardent and eloquent panegyrist. 
 When the above lines were written, the English language was 
 utterly unknown in Ireland. I have, therefore, rendered them 
 in the language in which their learned author wrote and spoke, 
 ere he left the shores of his own country. They may be but 
 feeble transcripts of the historic truth and classic beauty of his 
 own lines; but still they are faithful transcripts, and it is a 
 source of elevated feeling to think that the language in which 
 the Bishop of Fiesole was wont to describe the beautiful features 
 of Ireland, and the lofty virtue of its people, has, like them, 
 survived the most destructive efforts for its annihilation. Before 
 I returned to Florence, I discharged with pleasure a duty, which 
 the faith and humility of the Saint besought in his beautiful 
 epitaph from the passing traveller, of offering up a prayer for his 
 eternal repose.* 
 
 Whether you consider the charms of the scenery — the de- 
 liciousness of the climate — the magnificence of its churches — 
 the sumptuousness of its palaces — the refinement of its society — 
 or the treasures of art and history which time has accumulated in 
 the archives and galleries of Florence — this celebrated city will 
 not be deemed undeserving of the praise of its enthusiastic enco- 
 miasts. The exquisite collection of gems, statues, and paintings, 
 in the royal gallery, as well as in the churches, has long challenged 
 and obtained admiration, as containing specimens of the first 
 masters of ancient or modern times. It happens, however, that 
 many, who can view with real or affected enthusiasm those in- 
 nimate collections of statuary and painting, are utterly indifferent 
 
 * Parce, Viator adis, quisquis pro munere Christi 
 Te modo non pigeat cernere busta mea 
 
 Atque precare Deum, residet qui culmine coeli, 
 
 Tit mihi concedat regna beata sua. 
 
248 
 
 LETTER XLIX. 
 
 to the benevolent claims which the living members of society 
 have upon them. There are frequent instances of persons study- 
 ing, with all the diligence of connoisseurs, the fine proportions 
 and majestic symmetry of the human form, affecting to feel the 
 inspiration of the hand that could fashion to life the stone or 
 canvass ; and yet who can look without pity or compassion on those 
 living temples, that are actually animated with the spirit, with 
 which the Almighty artist has informed them. 
 
 It is not the legitimate study of the arts I censure ; it is the 
 extravagant and unfeeling hypocrisy of some of their pretended 
 admirers, I condemn. They are the offspring of virtue, of genius, 
 and of freedom ; and hence they have never thriven with such 
 success as under the encouragement and cultivation of the 
 Catholic Church. Charity, patriotism, devotion — every domestic 
 virtue that can endear — every public quality that can exalt — 
 every religious sacrifice that can consecrate the human cha- 
 racter — are the models that are found and brought to the utmost 
 perfection in the Catholic Church, and, hence, where the best 
 models are most abundant, those arts must naturally flourish 
 that are employed in their imitation. Give me such a man as 
 the author of the “ Mores Catholici,” to give, in the artless and 
 unlaboured simplicity of his own language, the impressions made 
 by the contemplation of those creations of the chisel or the 
 pencil, which are scattered in such profusion through his elegant 
 and instructive writings. It is he, or such a one, who could 
 understand the spirit in which the Church hung the walls of her 
 temples with paintings, or adorned their aisles with statues, and 
 convey to the reader more than volumes of elaborate dissertation 
 or hollow sentimentality, could convey. He crossed the threshold 
 of every temple in the spirit in which it was reared ; he viewed 
 every piece of Scripture or ecclesiastical history in relation to 
 the religious reality from which it was fashioned; in short, he 
 contemplated the whole circle of the arts — its painting, its 
 poetry, its architecture, its sculpture — as many vivid transcripts 
 of the virtues, which religion inspires, fosters, rears ; and, hence, 
 through the medium of his writings ; pictures, statues, churches, 
 basso relievos, become inspired with life, and animated teachers 
 of that faith and that morality, which they were called forth to 
 support and to adorn. 
 
 It must be confessed, however, that the practice of introducing 
 sepulchral monuments into churches, does not appear to be 
 regulated in some places, with sufficient discrimination. This 
 incongruity struck me in Florence, particularly in the Church 
 della Croce, where, as you ascend towards the altar, you meet, 
 on the right hand, the mausoleums of Michael Angelo, Dante, 
 Alfieri, and Machiaveli, with Galileo on the left — a goodly group, 
 no doubt, but which might be more appropriately lined than 
 
LETTER XLIX. 
 
 249 
 
 along the walls of a Catholic Church. It would seem as if you 
 were in a cemetery in which painting, poesy, history, and 
 astronomy wept over their choicest ornaments. A statue of 
 Galileo, with his telescope, would be appropriately placed in the 
 vestibule of an observatory ; one of Alfieri would be a fitting 
 ornament for a theatre ; those of Michael Angelo and Dante 
 would grace any collection placed in a temple — such as the 
 tribune of the lioyal Gallery — dedicated to the arts : But a 
 Catholic would not regret the absence of the cenotaph of 
 Machiaveli from the precincts of the church ; while the busts of 
 all, would be judiciously placed over the cornice of a library. 
 From the inscription on the tomb of Dante, “ Ter frustra 
 conatum,” it seems that this tribute to the Father of Italian 
 Poetry was thrice attempted in vain, and that his countrymen 
 had, at last, succeeded by the splendour of the tardy monument, 
 to make some atonement, to the neglected memory of departed 
 genius. 
 
 The chapel of the Medici now in progress of completion, 
 promises to be, in the beauty of its entire embellishment, one 
 of the principal ornaments of Florence. It is as creditable to the 
 city, as it is to the memory of the illustrious family, to whom it 
 is raised. Nothing can be more fit than that the arts should be 
 enlisted in the grateful perpetuation of the names of those who, like 
 the Medici, laboured so zealously and successfully in their revival. 
 The activity with which the work is carried on, does honour to 
 the taste and wisdom of the reigning family. It affords a spe- 
 cimen of the kind interest they take, not only in those measures 
 that affect the immediate welfare of there subjects, but in making 
 the capital of their small but happy dominions, worthy of the 
 visits and the sojourn of strangers. There are few foreigners, 
 whatever may be their religious or political prejudices on their 
 arrival, who will not depart with regret from the territories of 
 the Duke of Tuscany. There is more of that happiness, which 
 political writers have anxiously sought, to be found among the 
 people of Tuscany, than perhaps is to be found under any of those 
 theoretic forms of government, which they have so ingeniously 
 and elaborately imagined. It affords a proof that good govern- 
 ment is not so difficult a science, when there is the will to 
 govern wisely ; and that all the checks and balances, that clog, 
 and embarrass, and often impede, the actions of governments, have 
 been in some instances but the contrivances of men who laboured 
 for their own selfish and tyrannical ends to pervert government 
 from its simple object — the welfare of the community. Such 
 safeguards have been, and must continue, to be set up against the 
 capricious will of arbitrary and dangerous despots. But they 
 are frequently found securer engines for oppression than pro- 
 tection ; and when there is in the monarch or the minister, the 
 
 R 
 
250 
 
 LETTER XLIX. 
 
 disposition to crush and to oppress, the most sacred constitu- 
 tional powers are easily made available to make inroads from 
 behind them, on the liberty and happiness of the people. The 
 Tuscan government is not urged on by a lust of conquest, to 
 invade the territories of its neighbours, and to weigh down its 
 own subjects by a load of heavy taxation. An incessant and 
 inexorable requisition of their industry and toil, does not crush 
 the young and unripe powers of the rising generation, or cast 
 a cloud over their natural gaiety. No ; a moderate and rational 
 exercise of industry, seconds the bounty of Providence in the 
 cultivation of a propitious soil ; and the people indulge within 
 moderate bounds their innocent amusements, whilst they cele- 
 brate with joyous gratitude the solemn festivals of religion. 
 Those may provoke the censure of those Puritanical moles, who 
 know no nobler destiny or higher enjoyment for man, than to be 
 continually delving in the earth, striving to amass a fortune. 
 The people of Florence and its vicinity forget not, that the 
 interests of society itself are but secondary and subsidiary to 
 the eternal interests of man. It is this conviction, that accounts 
 for that constant cheerfulness, that characterises a well governed 
 Catholic population. You find the spirit of religion pervading 
 the rustic sports of the people, and presiding over the more 
 refined fetes of the elevated classes ; it gives a softened and more 
 charming tone to social intercourse, and approximates without 
 injury those classes which the pride or wealth of the world would 
 keep otherwise asunder. To civilize, to refine, to exalt, the arts have 
 undoubtedly contributed their share ; but he who explores more 
 deeply the cause to which those happy effects can be most dis- 
 tinctly traced, will not fail to find in the influence of the Catholic 
 religion, the most inspiring source of the superior moral refine- 
 ment of the people of Tuscany. 
 
 Besides those eminent men, of whom Florence may boast, who 
 have advanced every art, and enlarged the boundaries of every 
 science, this beautiful city has contributed its contingent to that 
 still loftier and more spiritual class, with whom Providence in its 
 mercy favours cities and states, to teach, by word and by exam- 
 ple, the science of salvation. One of the noble family of Corsini 
 had been placed in the episcopal see of Fiesole, the successor of 
 the virtues of Donagha, as he was of his episcopal throne. The 
 name of Mary Magdeline of Pazzi is a high one in the annals of 
 female heroism, and has been looked up to, as an encouraging 
 beacon to guide the slippery steps of youth through the paths of 
 virtue. But it is St. Antoninus, who flourished towards the middle 
 of the fifteenth century, who has challenged most the reverential 
 homage of the people. While he was Archbishop of Florence, the 
 celebrated General Council for a re-union between the Greek and 
 Latin Churches was held in that city, and, like St. Athanasius at 
 
LETTER L. 
 
 251 
 
 the Council of Nice, he was one of the most distinguished of its 
 illustrious Fathers. He pressed with zeal and success the counsels 
 of peace and union. But, alas I the hollow reconciliation was not 
 lasting, and, what was still more deplorable, symptoms were even 
 then appearing of the frightful and inveterate schism, which broke 
 out early in the ensuing century, and which has since developed 
 its malignant influence in many of the nations of Europe. Soon 
 after the close of the council, a frightful pestilence broke out in 
 Florence. The good archbishop was indefatigable in his exertions 
 to mitigate its horrors. It was then, as usually happens, the 
 heroic zeal and charity of St. Antoninus were conspicuous ; and the 
 extent of his learning, the ardour of his zeal, and the untiring 
 and incessant warfare which, by the most perfect self-denial, he 
 carried on against the world and himself, have given him a just 
 title to be recognised, as one of the best and holiest benefactors 
 of his country and his age. 
 
 * John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER L. 
 
 Sienna, November 6 , 183i„ 
 
 It is not the fame or antiquity of Sienna among the ancient 
 cities of Etruria, so much as the associations with which it is 
 intertwined, that prompts me to bestow on it particular attention. 
 Situate in the heart of Italy, and enjoying all the advantages of 
 that favoured soil and climate, it could not but be ranked among 
 those cities which the arts of Italy had raised into early renown. 
 Accordingly, Sienna held at an early period, and still holds, an 
 elevated place amidst its classic territories. Its magnificent 
 cathedral, though not comparable to that of Milan, is like it in 
 the Gothic style of building, standing as an isolated exception to 
 the many models of Greek and Roman architecture by which it 
 is surrounded. In its rich and varied pavement, the people are 
 enabled to read the instructive incidents of the Old Testament, 
 and the entablature round the interior of the Church is adorned 
 with a consecutive series of the busts and names of the Popes, 
 
252 
 
 LETTER L. 
 
 exhibiting in subordinate contrast, the names of the few anti-Popes, 
 who, at different periods disturbed, by their ambition, the peace of 
 the Catholic Church. 
 
 To the catalogue of the successors of St. Peter, this city 
 furnished a fair proportion, nor were they the least distinguished 
 of that exalted series. To the sympathy and support which St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury received from Alexander III., a native of 
 Sienna, we are indebted for the noble assertion of the liberties 
 of the Catholic Church, for which the illustrious martyr stands 
 out so prominently in its history. The seventh Roman Pontiff 
 of the same name, and of the same city, has been one of the most 
 untiring opponents of Jansenism, and one of the most successful 
 in unravelling the tangled web of theological sophistry, in which 
 they laboured to involve their insidious errors. Pius II., the ce- 
 lebrated Piccolominy, was also a native of the territory of Sienna. 
 The active part which he — JEneas Sylvius, took in the Council of 
 Bazil, in opposition to Eugenius IV., the then reigning Pontiff, is 
 familiar to the readers of ecclesiastical history. The dangerous 
 and schismatical tendency of the proceedings of that body, he 
 afterwards solemnly condemned, contrasting the ardour of youth 
 with the experience of a riper age, and drawing an emphatic 
 distinction between the opinions of ^Eneas and the doctrines of 
 Pius.* 
 
 Yet, from the daughter of an humble dyer, has Sienna derived 
 more glory than from the most distinguished of its children. 
 It is scarcely necessary to name St. Catherine of Sienna, one of 
 the most remarkable persons of the age in which she lived. Born 
 to no ample inheritance or noble title of this world, she cultivated 
 with the utmost assiduity the divine graces with which she was 
 favoured, and became one of the chief lights of her age. Though 
 she disliked the tumult of society, and sought in solitude an 
 uninterrupted intercourse with her God, yet she sometimes 
 mixed in the busy scenes of life, with a view to establish peace 
 between contending parties. Her counsel and mediation were 
 often solicited by the Potentates of Europe, and Petrarch himself, 
 notwithstanding all the literary celebrity which encircled his name, 
 did not exercise such extensive influence among his contemporaries 
 as St. Catherine of Sienna. He long sought, and sought in 
 vain, by the eloquence of his writings, as well as his personal 
 remonstrance, to prevail on the Popes to return from Avignon 
 to Rome, to heal the disorders in the city as well as in the 
 Church, occasioned by their long absence. St. Catherine under- 
 took a journey to Avignon for the same purpose, and succeeded 
 in inducing Gregory XI., to return. Of the disastrous schism 
 that soon followed, the seeds were sown in Avignon, and on the 
 
 * “JEneani respuite, Pium recipite,” was his own expression. 
 
LETTER LI. 
 
 253 
 
 death of Gregory, they produced their natural harvest. No one 
 felt more poignant grief at that lamentable schism than this 
 eminent saint, and none laboured more earnestly to bring about 
 a union. This she did not live to see accomplished. The birth- 
 place of such a distinguished servant of God I proposed to visit, 
 and was much gratified on finding myself in her cell, now a 
 church, which was the scene of her visions and her miracles. 
 Here was an humble virgin studiously shunning the world and 
 trampling on all its maxims, and yet an oracle in her day to 
 those to whom the destinies of churches and kingdoms were 
 entrusted. She was a living illustration of the power of mind 
 over the material elements of the world, especially when that 
 mind becomes, by co-operating with his grace, an obedient 
 instrument of the will of the Almighty. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LI. 
 
 Rome, November 10 , 1831 . 
 
 Xafjs s juoi Pu/xcc, QytyccTvig a^vjog 
 X^variopn^ot. froatpgu v ocv&aaa, 
 
 'Lepvov a. votma- ev n yvjv ohvfjt.vrov 
 
 Amv xygvo-crrov. Erinna.* 
 
 Hail Rome, with golden trophies crowned, 
 
 Valor’s own child, revered, renowned, 
 
 Majestic Queen, to thee ’tis given 
 On earth to hold the sway of heaven. 
 
 My pilgrimage is at length accomplished. I have reached the 
 shrine of the Apostles. One of the first and fondest wishes of 
 my life is gratified. Seated on the summit of Mount Palatine, 
 the cradle and the grave of the Roman empire, the vastest and 
 most varied picture that ever was held up to human contemplation, 
 lies before me. What a panorama revolving before the historic 
 eye ! Whether you regard the time through which it stretches, 
 the space over which it extends, the groups which crowd it, or 
 the pencils which lent it their shade and colouring, it is and will 
 remain, to the end of time, without example. From the first 
 
 * Quoted from Lipsius “De Magnitudine Romana,” 
 
254 
 
 LETTER LI. 
 
 faint twilight of history and fable, through which you descry the 
 indistinct images of the twin founders, to Gregory XVI., who 
 now occupies the Pontifical throne, what a continuous series of 
 wonders passes in review before the pilgrim of Mount Palatine. 
 From the' banks of the Tiber, the canvass spreads over the seven 
 hills, to the Sabine mountains. Then it gradually expands as 
 you descend, exhibiting, with every epoch, the widening con- 
 quests of the imperial city, until the name and manners of Rome 
 are diffused over the earth. What a succession of mighty names 
 crowd upon the view through this immense vista ! What a 
 number of nations, renowned in ancient and modern story, fix 
 your attention as they pass ! Tuscans, Greeks, Goths, Franks, 
 Germans, Sarmatians, and Britons occupy, in turn, a large space 
 of this moving picture. Philosophers, heroes, and consuls, on 
 the one hand ; Saints, Martyrs, and Pontiffs on the other — as if 
 vying with each other in prodigies of prowess, and the extent of 
 their empire. And, though in the vast representation there is 
 many a dreary blank, wanting the finish of master artists, there 
 are many more to relieve the dull vacuity, and animated with the 
 classic pens of a Livy, a Tacitus, a Virgil, a Vida, a Petrarch, 
 and a Tasso, whose touch would have illustrated a less interesting 
 subject. 
 
 And why not introduce my pilgrimage to the mistress of the 
 Roman world, by a reference to those immortal masters of Latin 
 and Italian literature? Why select a passage from a Greek 
 writer rather than from one of the natives who have, with such 
 appropriate eloquence, celebrated the praises of Rome ? It is 
 not from any preference of the Greek writers ; but the name of 
 Rome is Greek, and it is in that language alone, that we can 
 discover its genuine signification. It is synonomous with 
 strength, and like the eternal city, seemed to be prophetic of its 
 enduring power. In this interpretation I am far from being 
 fanciful. It is the opinion of some of the most learned anti- 
 quarians, such as Donatus and Grenovius, that the Latins had 
 built a city on the hill on which I am now seated, called “ Va- 
 lentia,” and which was changed by Evander, on his arrival, into 
 the corresponding appellation of Rome. 
 
 “ Quae modo Roma sonat, fait ante Yalentia dicta.” 
 
 But whether derived from Romulus, or imposed by Evander, the 
 name was an auspicious presage of the future glories of the city. 
 In this significant name, as well as the prediction that it would 
 be eternal, when it was yet but in its infancy, there is a myste- 
 rious coincidence between the profane and sacred writings. In 
 the image which exhibited to Daniel the successive empires of 
 the world, the part which represented that of Rome was com- 
 
LETTER LI. 
 
 255 
 
 posed of iron. How appropriately, then, was the name of 
 “ strength,” or Rome, or Valentia, applied to a city whose iron 
 dominion shook the feeble empires of the East, until it rose upon 
 their ruins. And though it yielded in turn, it was not to any 
 earthly sway, but to a mysterious power which grew up in its 
 own bosom, and which ensured to it, that eternity, which those 
 who first promised it, could not understand. 
 
 It is, then, no wonder that the very name of Rome should 
 inspire such a lively interest. It is no wonder that, at the mention 
 of it, the mind should be filled with such a train of classic as well 
 as sacred associations. Its charms are traced to childhood, and 
 precede the period of our literary education. With the excep- 
 tion of those sacred names of religion which are ever pronounced 
 with reverence, there is no other so generally known, so often 
 repeated, or which has so much claims to the interest of the 
 human heart. It is lisped in our infancy — it mingles itself with 
 our earliest instruction — and awakens ideas of affection or of 
 terror among every people. Ere I touched those fountains of an 
 eloquent literature, with which Rome has enriched the world, its 
 name was impressed, with an affectionate reverence, on my soul. 
 Ere I read those travellers who attempt to describe what they 
 had not heart to feel, my mind was imbued with the traditions of 
 those pilgrims, who trod a soil which was worthy of their foot- 
 steps. Yes; the Christian catechism anticipated the perusal of 
 the classics. The ancient pilgrims took precedence of modern 
 tourists, and it was with such ground notions, unspoiled by any 
 colouring of recent daubers, I brought my mind to catch its own 
 impressions, from the contemplation of the eternal city. Such 
 feelings may be called enthusiastic ; but if Rome is not capable 
 of inspiring such enthusiasm, it is in vain its ancient ruins or 
 modern glories are explored. Hence it is called by the most intel- 
 lectual of modern poets the “ city of the soul” — a phrase which 
 shows a congeniality of mind with those thoughts and recollec- 
 tions, which Rome alone could inspire. 
 
 Let it not, however, be imagined that I come prepared to 
 praise, without discrimination, whatever presents itself in this 
 delightful region. It shall have the full benefit of a mind that 
 has long poised the adverse opinions, by which its excellence or 
 its faults have been praised or censured. The modern Romans, 
 if at all descended from the ancients, have their blood so diluted 
 by foreign mixtures, that no sensible person can think of flatter- 
 ing the present race, by his admiration of the ancients. And 
 should any of the benefits of the Catholic religion be placed to 
 their account, they are benefits which they share with many 
 other countries, which shall not be assumed without reason, nor 
 held up to admiration without shewing their claims to pre- 
 ference. 
 
25G 
 
 LETTER LI. 
 
 Rome having been destined to become the seat of a vast 
 empire, the Palatine Hill would seem as naturally fated to be its 
 centre. With the Capitoline Hill towards the west — the Quirinal 
 stretching to the north — the Esquiline and Yiminal bordering it 
 on the east — and again Mount Coelius and Aventine encompassing 
 it to the south — it would appear as if this circle of tributary hills 
 were formed to own, and to protect, the sovereignty of Mount 
 Palatine. Accordingly, we find that it was here the Arcadians, 
 with their King, Evander, first fixed their residence.* It was 
 chosen by Romulus, as the seat of his rising colony, and though, 
 in the process of time, the capital became famous for the superb 
 temples of the gods, and the trophies of heroes, yet it never was 
 the residence of the kings or of the Caesars. Through every 
 vicissitude of revolutions and of war, Mount Palatine retained 
 its imperial pre-eminence. What wonder, then, that the foot of 
 every traveller should tread with reverence over this huge 
 mausoleum of departed power. At the western base of this hill, 
 where now stands the Convent of St. Theodore, the cradle which 
 saved the twin brothers, was first supposed to be deposited. 
 More to the south stood the modest mansion of Augustus, who 
 laboured to reconcile the Romans to the loss of liberty, by 
 affecting the simple habits of a Roman citizen. It was only, 
 however, in the reign of Nero that the vast pile, called a palace, 
 was erected, which stretched to the Esquiline Hill, and of which 
 the awful ruins that still remain, reveal the ancient magnificence. 
 This monument of the pride and extravagance of the imperial 
 monster is described by Suetonius.f Before the vestibule stood 
 a colossal statue of Nero, one hundred and twenty feet in 
 height. The centre was occupied by an extensive sheet of 
 water resembling a sea, and surrounded by a series of edifices 
 all adorned with porticoes. Its roofs were covered with gold ; 
 its saloons furnished with tables of ivory. This stupendous 
 fabric, towards the erection of which the empire was ransacked 
 of its treasures, was soon stripped of its ornaments, to be 
 transferred to the decoration of other buildings. Yet though 
 ages of plunder and dilapidation have passed over it, the massive 
 arches of brick that still remain, justify the description of 
 Suetonius, who compares its ample compartments to so many 
 cities. Next to the Colosseum, or the Amphitheatre of Titus, 
 whose ample walls are towering before me, there is no other 
 monument which impresses us with such an idea of the gigantic 
 resources which the Roman Emperors could command. 
 
 * ./Eneas urbe et sociis et classe relicta 
 Sceptra Palatini, sedemque petit Evandri. 
 
 Virgil, Eneid, ix. 
 
 f “Historic Romance Scriptores,” tome 2, page 60; Geneva, 1653. 
 
LETTER LI. 
 
 257 
 
 After a long contemplation of the ruins of Mount Palatine, 
 and a free indulgence of the varied recollections which they 
 awakened, I resolved to return home to the Irish College. 
 Having passed through the plantations, to use an idea purely 
 English, of Mr. Mills, who purchased a portion of this hill, I 
 could not but remark what an incongrous ornament, his gravelled 
 walks and trimmed hedges, formed over this royal cemetery. 
 They might be seen with pleasure in England, where all around 
 was in keeping with such artificial elegance. The Farnese 
 gardens that are stretched along them, with their overgrown 
 weeds and lofty cypresses, harmonize better with the melancholy 
 spirit of the place. As I descended towards the arch of Titus, I 
 met one of those religious, with whom Rome abounds, and whose 
 costume strikes with such peculiarity, on one’s first arrival on the 
 Continent. His body was wrapped in a coarse brown tunic ; a 
 portion of the same garment, in the form of a hood, was thrown 
 over hisTorehead ; and a pair of plain sandals, secured by straps, 
 was the only covering for the feet of this person. He seemed 
 absorbed in deep meditation. The subject of his thoughts was, 
 probably, the Redeemer’s Passion, which was represented in a 
 series of paintings near our place of meeting, known by the 
 name of Stations of the Cross. I soon discovered, he belonged 
 to a religious community of St. Bonaventure, who have a small 
 Convent on the summit of Mount Palatine. We are told by 
 Dionysius Halicarnassus, that a temple dedicated to Victory was 
 placed on the summit of this hill, and that, in his time, the 
 Romans offered their worship at its shrine. The temple of 
 Victory still consecrates the spot. The walls of the profane 
 shrine may have crumbled ; but in the little Church of St. 
 Bonaventure, the temple of Victory still remains. The faith, of 
 which Christ says, that it conquers the world, finds over this 
 tomb of Paganism, a temple and worshippers. And, however 
 lowly the garb of those religious may appear, there is no lover 
 of morality or social happiness that would not glory in the 
 change that witnesses the votaries of purity residing on the 
 ruins of a palace, of which the builder was one of the greatest 
 monsters of the human race, and from which he often issued to 
 the Circus, to disgust and appal whatever remained of ancient 
 virtue by his infamy and crimes. Such were the reflections, that 
 closed my first visit, among the ancient ruins of Rome. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
258 
 
 LETTER LII» 
 
 LETTER LII 
 
 Rome, November 12 , 1831 . 
 
 Aurea Tarpeia ponet Capitolia rape, 
 
 Et j unget nostro templorum culumna ccelo 
 Silius Italicus. 
 
 From Tarpeias’ rock, the lofty fanes shall rise, 
 
 Whose golden roofs shall reach the vaulted skies. 
 
 Having first stopped in the centre to contemplate the cradle of 
 the Roman empire, I next turned my attention to the Capitol, the 
 chief as well as the earliest inhabited of its tributary hills, and 
 which, in the glory of its associations, might rival the fame of 
 Mount Palatine. On mounting the steep ascent that leads to the 
 summit, one naturally meditates on the varied triumphal proces- 
 sions that swept along the same line, from the early time of Tar- 
 quinus Priscus, to deposit in the temple of Jupiter, the collected 
 spoils of a vanquished world. From the human skull, that was 
 duo* up by the workmen, during the excavation of the foundations 
 of the temple, was drawn a presage of the future eminence of 
 the place. The eliptical form of its summit, has furnished fanciful 
 writers with another proof of its distinction, resembling, as it 
 does, the configuration of the earth, of which it was to be the 
 Capitol. The statues that meet your eye, on approaching the 
 lofty platform, are well adapted to recall the memory of its 
 ancient splendours, some of them representing the persons of the 
 early emperors, and more the trophies of the captive chiefs, that 
 were borne by Trajan and Marcus Antoninus, on their return 
 from their eastern conquests. 
 
 To the anxiety of successive Pontiffs for the embellishment of 
 the city, are we indebted for the appropriate position of those 
 statues, that have been raised from the ruins of ancient Rome. 
 To Paul III. of the Farnesian family, who contributed much 
 to adorn other parts of the city, is due the praise of erecting 
 the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, breathing so much of 
 life and energy, that Michael Angelo is said to have stepped out 
 of the way, as if fearful of being trodden down by the animal. 
 Besides other Popes, Benedict XIV. has been one of the most 
 munificent contributors to the riches of the capitol, under whose 
 pontificate, some of the finest specimens of ancient sculpture, have 
 been transferred to it, from the celebrated villa of Adrian. 
 
LETTER LII. 
 
 259 
 
 Inferior only to that of the Vatican, the portals of its museum 
 are open not only to the humblest of their own people, but to 
 strangers from every region of the earth. Familiar with the 
 finest models, all classes are embued with a discriminating taste, 
 and not only do they feel a becoming sense of their own value, ^ 
 from the equity of those laws that make no jealous distinction of 
 classes, opening to all, those sanctuaries of art and science ; but 
 this early intimacy with genius, produces many successful imita- 
 tors of the works, which they admire. 
 
 Many an hour is devoted with pleasure, as well as advantage, 
 by strangers as well as the Roman citizens, to the contemplation of 
 those chiselled and painted monuments of gods, of heroes, of empe- 
 rors, and other interesting objects with which the museum of the 
 capitol abounds. The dying gladiator, alone, displaying a courage 
 unsubdued amidst the agonies of death, might well repay one’s 
 entrance into this treasury of the arts, and the bronze wolf, with 
 the twin founders of the city still exhibiting the stroke of the 
 lightning, could not fail to awaken recollections, which youth had 
 associated, with the mistress of the Roman world. 
 
 But you cannot long loiter on the summit, or walk around its 
 base, without meeting monuments far more interesting than those 
 which its Pagan antiquity recalls. How different now the temple 
 of Jupiter Capitolinus, or the prison of Servius Tullius, from 
 what they appear in classic story. In the huge and gloomy 
 prison of Servius Tullius, Jugurtha met a fate which he is said 
 by his historians, to have earned. Here, too, Cataline, with his 
 congenial band of cruel conspirators against every virtue, were 
 cast into chains, and all, but their guilty chief, paid the forfeit of 
 their treason. And here, in fine, according to an ancient tradi- 
 tion, was immured the person of the Prince of the Apostles, and 
 the fountain is still visible, filled with living water, which gushed 
 forth, to enable him to baptize his converted keeper. In being 
 thus cast into the same prisons to which the worst felons were 
 doomed, we see but another illustration of the blind caprice and 
 wicked injustice, with which, as in the case of his Divine Master, 
 the world dispenses its punishments and rewards. 
 
 Among the numerous temples that adorned, or disfigured, every 
 hill and plain of ancient Rome, the magnificent temple of Jupiter 
 Capitolinus rose from one of the loftiest peaks of the imperial 
 citadel ; commenced under the kings, but of which the completion 
 was, in the language of Tacitus, reserved for the epoch of its 
 freedom, adorned with porticos, of which some of the columns 
 were rifled from vanquished Athens, while its roof and massive 
 portals glittered with gold, which tributary provinces had sup- 
 plied. This temple was successively destroyed; — first in the civil 
 wars of Sylla and Marius, and again under Galba, Otho, and 
 Vitellius, who contended for the imperial sceptre. Under Vespa- 
 
260 
 
 LETTER LII. 
 
 sian, who succeeded to the throne, it was restored to all its 
 pristine majesty ; and again, after a similar casualty, it rose with 
 fresh beauty under Domitian, his degenerate son. 
 
 Though the foundations of the temple of Jupiter were not laid 
 for several years after his death, yet, from the day on which 
 Romulus hung on the lofty oak on the summit of the capitol, the 
 spoils of his vanquished enemies, it seemed destined, down to the 
 era of Constantine, to be the goal of the imperial triumphs. The 
 number, the pomp, and the ceremonies of those public ovations, 
 together with the great events with which they were associated, 
 the nations that were subdued, and the generals who vanquished 
 them, form some of the most brilliant episodes, in the narrative of 
 the Roman, writers. 
 
 Some of the most conspicuous names in antiquity pass in 
 review before us, and nothing which power and wealth and 
 patriotism could accomplish, is wanting to give effect to those tri- 
 butes of acknowledgment which were awarded by Rome, to those 
 successful warriors, who had extended its conquests. From the 
 Campus Martius, near the banks of the Tiber, the solemn proces- 
 sion winds its way in a circuitous direction, to give an oppor- 
 tunity for the full display of the public arrangements and the 
 popular enthusiasm. The civic authorities are marshalled in their 
 municipal robes — the victorious legions move in the procession — 
 the music of well-trained military bands gives animation to the 
 scene — while the victor, the object of the public rejoicing, is car- 
 ried on a gorgeous chariot ; and monarchs, such as Zenobia, Queen 
 of Palmyra, shorn of their diadems and of their sceptres, swell the 
 pomp of his triumph, until he arrives at the magnificent temple, 
 where he deposits all his spoils. Yet what an illusion was all 
 this triumphal pageant : it scarcely required the repeated warn- 
 ings of the slave, to remind the victor not to be intoxicated with 
 vanity. 
 
 Notwithstanding the veneration with which centuries of con- 
 quest had encircled it, the majesty of the Temple of Jupiter, was 
 obliged to yield at length to the sacred dominion of the cross ; 
 and from a spot so long defiled with the impure rites of Paganism, 
 are daily ascending the grateful orisons of the humble monks of 
 St. Francis. Far different are the themes for reflection which 
 the surrounding objects would suggest to the English or to the 
 Irish as they descend from the summit of Ara Coeli, and con- 
 template the first of the triumphal arches that rises towards 
 its base. The arch of Severus, recalls to the former the 
 conquest of Britain, and he may indulge in alternate feelings 
 of humiliation or of pride, when he reflects on the former state 
 of his country, then a miserable and barbarous province of that 
 empire, of which the spot on which he stands was the capital, 
 and contrasts it with its now flourishing condition, embracing 
 
LETTER LIT. 
 
 261 
 
 provinces and islands of which the Romans had no knowledge. 
 Again to the Irish Catholic, it will be a source of consolation to 
 reflect that neither the armies of Severus or of any of the Roman 
 conquerors who subdued Britain, ever penetrated into Ireland; 
 and that it is to its position, beyond the pale of the Roman yoke, 
 it was indebted for the undisturbed enjoyment of that early 
 civilization, which it received from the East, and which, ever since, 
 makes its records and antiquities so important in unravelling the 
 perplexed history of other European nations. Though the 
 Roman eagle which soared over the wilds of Caledonia, never 
 essayed his flight into our Western Island, the Irish Catholic 
 will acknowledge, as he walks from the arch of Severus, the con- 
 nexion of the destinies of his country, with the two other triumphal 
 arches which he meets on passing the Forum and the Via Sacra 
 towards the Palatine. Those are the arches of Titus and of 
 Cofistantine : the former, with its entablature, representing the 
 precious furniture of the Jewish temple, standing as a perpetual 
 monument of the ruin of that structure, and of the dispersion of 
 the Jewish people ; the other, with the sacred symbols of the 
 cross, attesting the victories which, under its sacred tutelage, w r as 
 won by Constantine over Maxentius and the other enemies of 
 the Christian name. With the objects of those triumphal monu- 
 ments, _the Irish Catholic feels delight in acknowledging his 
 sympathy. With what appropriate coincidence they stand, 
 without an intervening similar trophy, as kindred monuments of 
 the ruin of one religion, and the rise and triumph of another ! 
 To the Roman banners when adorned with the cross, Ireland 
 bowed in meek and holy subjection, and has, with a fidelity unex- 
 ampled in the history of nations, clung to that spiritual dominion, 
 which stretches where her temporal sway was never recognized, 
 and knows no limits but the boundaries of the habitable globe. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
262 
 
 LETTER LIIT. 
 
 LETTER LIII. 
 
 Rome, November 20 , 1831 . 
 
 ‘ ‘ Ita geminata Urbe, ut Sabinis aliquid daretur, Quirites a Curibus ap- 
 pellate.” — Titus Livius. 
 
 From the junction of the Sabines with the Romans, the hill of 
 the Quirinal first derived its name and population. Until then, 
 it bore the significant name of “ Agon,” expressive of the 
 contested games which were exhibited on its summit, and, though 
 it since assumed the names of the Quirinal, and Monte 
 Cavallo, its first apellation is that which appears prophetic of its 
 contests and its triumphs. Its position I have already adverted 
 to — stretching north of the Capitol, with the Esquiline to the 
 east, and the Valley of the Campius Martius to the west, watered 
 by the Tiber. From the fabled apotheosis of the founder 
 of the city, to the present day — a period of near twenty- 
 six centuries — the Quirinal has been a conspicuous theatre of 
 varied conquests. During the reign of Paganism, it held but a 
 subordinate rank to the Capitol or Mount Palatine ; but, with 
 the progress of Christianity, it has risen to a pre-eminence over 
 the majesty of both. The exquisite piece of sculpture, from 
 which it derives its present name of Monte Cavallo, has exercised 
 the ingenuity of antiquarians, who are equally divided as to the 
 artists, by whom they were executed, and the objects, of which 
 they are the representations. Their excellence is attested by 
 the names of Phidias and Praxiteles, to whom they are ascribed ; 
 but, as the former flourished in the time of Pericles, he could 
 not design any object belonging to the more recent reign of 
 Alexander. 
 
 From the Pillar of Trojan, which marks the ancient confines, 
 between the Forum and the Quirinal, to the distant gate, called 
 Porta Pia this region exhibited varied trophies of the renovating 
 spirit of the Catholic Church. The ancient Pontifical palace of 
 Lateran, has been exchanged for the more healthy habitation of 
 Monte Cavallo, and, accordingly, the Pope’s residence alternates 
 between it and the Vatican. Round this centre, a number of 
 sumptuous and appropriate edifices has successively arisen, and 
 gradually extended over the gardens of Sallust and Lucullus, so 
 much celebrated for there luxuriant splendour, during the de- 
 clining days of the Commonwealth. Of those, one of the most 
 interesting, is the edifice in which the conclave assembles in 
 latter times. An assembly, on whose choice many depend the 
 
LETTER LIII. 
 
 263 
 
 wise government of the Christian fold, cannot but be an object 
 of pious curiosity to every Catholic ; and the canons, which guide 
 the Cardinals during their deliberative seclusion, are fraught 
 with wisdom, and mark the solicitude of the Church, in its en- 
 deavours to secure for the faithful the blessings of a good pastor. 
 That the disinterested spirit which distinguished the earlier 
 elections of the Roman Pontiff, has never departed from the 
 Roman See, is consolingly attested, by the virtues and energies 
 of the latest Pontiffs. For their taste, in ornamenting the city, 
 not less than for their zeal, in defending the interests of religion, 
 have those successors of Peter been eminently distinguished. 
 Before the troubles, which clouded the close of the reign of 
 Pius VI., every portion of the city exhibited proofs of his 
 anxiety for its decoration, and none more than the Quirinal and 
 its environs. Perhaps Europe does not exhibit a finer prospect, 
 than that which presents itself to the eye, at the intersection of 
 the two great streets — the one leading to the Porta Pia, and the 
 other to St. Mary Major — with their three Egyptian obelisks, 
 two of them placed, by Pius VI., in their present position, and 
 evincing that the victory of the Catholic Church over Paganism 
 was not for the destruction of the arts, but for their preserva- 
 tion. Not less interesting, the four beautiful fountains, that are 
 gushing forth, at the corners of the intersected streets, com- 
 manding this prospect — emblems of the pure and permanent doc- 
 trine of Rome, and, like the four streams of Paradise, diffusing 
 itself over the four quarters of the world. 
 
 In the most summary and compendious notice of the Quirinal, 
 and its environs, it would be almost unpardonable to pass over 
 the celebrated Aurora of Guido, painted in fresco, on the ceiling 
 of one of the Saloons of the Rospigliosi Palace. The design was 
 suggested by the beautiful lines of Virgil, representing the morn- 
 ing chasing away the darkness of night, followed by the sun, 
 mounted on his fiery chariot, and diffusing in his career the noon- 
 day splendour. But though the idea was suggested by the Poet, 
 the inimitable Painter made the picture all his own. It was a 
 subject of all others congenial to his feelings and his taste. Not 
 only the admirers of Guido Reni, but those who were jealous of 
 his fame, confessed that, in tracing the finest features of the 
 human countenance, his pencil was unsurpassed, and had scarcely 
 a rival. Than his group, representing the hours, nothing can be 
 found superior, not even among the daughters of Niobe — one of 
 the pieces of sculpture he is said to have made his model ; and 
 well do the graces of this picture justify the eulogy of Passeri, 
 cited by Lanzi, that he gave to his creations the “ countenances 
 of Paradise.” * 
 
 * “Lanzi Storia Pittorica,” vol. IV., page 122. 
 
264 
 
 LETTER LII1. 
 
 Among the many churches and religious edifices, that adorn 
 this region of the city, I cannot omit the little Church of St. 
 Andrew, the Noviciate for the Jesuits. It is not for the purpose 
 of directing attention to the majesty of St. Peter’s, by reminding 
 the reader, that it equals all the compartments of this Noviciate, 
 in the vastness of its dimensions. But it is rather to stimulate 
 his piety, by the example of the young and holy Stanislaus, 
 whose statue, reclined or his bed, with the crucifix in one hand, 
 and the rosary in the other, strikes you with such an impression 
 of the reality, that you fancy the Saint is just peacefully resigning 
 his soul, in the arms of Jesus, and his Blessed Mother. It is 
 impossible to contemplate this scene, without feeling the influence 
 of that divine religion, which so subdues, even in youth, every 
 attachment to the world, as to give to the human form the 
 features of an inhabitant of heaven. Here, too — not far from 
 the Pontifical Palace — is the Church of our Blessed Lady of 
 Victories, so called, to commemorate the many signal victories 
 that were wrought over Christendom, through the fervent 
 prayers of the faithful to the Mother of God. Such was the 
 celebrated naval victory of Lepanto, where the proud armaments 
 of the Turks were scattered over the main, of which the tidings, 
 before they could be carried by human messenger, were revealed 
 to St. Pius. 
 
 Whether the name of Agon, by which the Quirinal was 
 originally called, be significant of a contest, or an eminence, 
 as some etymologists imagine, it has well illustrated either one 
 or the other meaning. In the passive fortitude of its Popes, 
 who have triumphed over the persecutors of the Church, it well 
 deserved the name of the Hill of Combats, and of Triumphs. 
 If the Church be likened, by our Bedeemer, to a city on the 
 mountain-top, conspicuous from afar, the Quirinal has shared in 
 the fulfilment of the figure, by fixing on the heroism of its recent 
 Pontiffs the eyes and veneration of mankind. It was from the 
 portals of its palace that Pius VII. was led into exile, by the 
 commands of Napoleon. A picture in the Pio-Clementine Gallery, 
 in the Vatican, represents, in minute detail, the circumstances of 
 this banishment. But the grief of the city, and of Christendom, 
 was, ere the lapse of many years, turned into joy, when the same 
 Pontiff was again seen returning, in triumph, from his captivity, 
 saluted by the enthusiastic welcome of his devoted people, who 
 recognized, in the event, another proof of the promises of its 
 Divine Founder, that the gates of hell should never prevail 
 against this Church, which had Peter for its foundation. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER L1V. 
 
 265 
 
 LETTER LIV. 
 
 Rome, December 3rd, 1831. 
 
 “Roma interim crescit Alba ruinis: duplicatur civium numerus : Coelius ad- 
 ditur urbi mons : et quo frequentius habitaretur earn sedem Tullus regiae capit 
 ibique deinde habitavit.” — Titus Liyius. 
 
 The ruin of Alba Longa embraced Mount Coelius within the 
 circumference of Rome. Thus it gradually extended its “ po- 
 merum” or its precincts, with its conquests, until the seven hills 
 were included within its Walls. The destruction of Alba Longa, 
 to which Rome was indebted for this accession to its territories, 
 and this augmentation of its inhabitants, is one of the most tragic 
 narratives, as well as the most pathetically told, with which the 
 Roman history abounds. Nothing can be more graphic than the 
 picture, with which we are presented, of the desolation of that 
 ancient city : you fancy you hear the crash of the falling houses, 
 and the shrieks of mothers and children clinging to the thresholds 
 from which they are rudely torn, nor could I ever hear of the 
 many scenes of terrible eviction which so frequently take place 
 in Ireland, in consequence of the unfeeling cruelty of landlords, 
 without being often reminded, from the similarity of the cir- 
 cumstances, of the vivid description with which the Roman 
 historian paints the sufferings of the banished inhabitants of 
 Alba Longa. 
 
 Various and interesting are the ancient ruins and modern 
 structures that are spread over Mount Ccelius, from the colossal 
 pile of the amphitheatre of Titus, to the church of St. John of 
 Lateran ; the amphitheatre may be deemed a providential monu- 
 ment which the conqueror of Jerusalem was permitted to erect 
 in this city, as a permanent attestation to the truth of the 
 Christian Religion. It is not more extraordinary in the vastness 
 of its plan, and the singular combination of all the orders of 
 architecture by which it is adorned at each ascending story, than 
 in its mysterious designation, standing, after the decay of ages, 
 the violence of barbarians and the plunder of citizens, an enduring 
 and irrefutable proof of the truth of the prophecies of the 
 Christian Religion, as well as of the most stupendous miracles, by 
 which its early and struggling stages were illustrated. The 
 J ewish nation has been swept away in the tide of conquest : of 
 its temple, once the wonder of the world, not a stone remains to 
 tell of its ancient glories. The scattered and indestructible 
 fragments of the Jewish people, are a social anomaly in the 
 records of the human race, and for which those prophecies alone 
 s 
 
266 
 
 LETTER LIV. 
 
 offer to the inquirer any satisfactory explanation ; but those 
 fragments are still too loose to make any impression on a sceptical 
 understanding. Here, however, in this huge amphitheatre, the 
 work of the outcasts of this ungrateful nation, is found genuine 
 evidence, which cannot be gainsayed, of the coincidence between 
 sacred prophecy and profane history, and which is sure to bring 
 conviction, in proportion as the circumstances of that coincidence 
 are minutely examined. 
 
 Here too the faith and fortitude of the early Christians were 
 tried on a conspicuous theatre, whilst an assemblage composed of 
 near an hundred thousand persons, panting for the effusion of 
 blood, were witnesses of their sufferings and their triumphs. The 
 blood so profusely spilt, soon became the seed of martyrs, and 
 those who came to sate their cruel appetites with the slaughter of 
 gladiators and of Christians, could not but acknowledge the 
 supernatural virtue which signalized such martyrs as Saint 
 Ignatius, whom the wild beasts, more humane than the spectators, 
 refused to devour or to harm. It is no wonder if recent writers 
 have been loud in the execration of that pillage, which rifled this 
 unexampled monument, not only of the pillars which clothed, but 
 of the massive blocks which composed its external walls, The 
 relatives of the Pontiffs of the houses of Farnese and Barber ini 
 have been praised as protectors of the arts, and liberal contributors 
 to the embellishment of Rome. Had they opened new quarries, 
 and erected their palaces out of fresh materials, they might indeed 
 have been entitled to a share of the praise of which they seem to 
 have been ambitious. But to have erected palaces out of the 
 demolished ruins of the Colosseum, appears to be a species of 
 sacrilege, if not against religion, at least against the arts, for 
 which all their splendid patronage of poets and painters cannot 
 atone. I am not insensible to the merits of those houses : some 
 of the Cardinals of the Barberini family showed a peculiar 
 interest in the preservation of religion in Ireland, at a period 
 when the fidelity of its children required sympathy and support. 
 Yet nought should excuse or palliate the plunder of the Colosseum. 
 
 The Barberini and the Farnese palaces, however splendid, 
 cease not to depose against the barbarous taste of those by whom 
 they were erected, and though Peter of Cortona exhausted all 
 his skill in exalting the glories of Urban VIII., and the 
 kindred Caracci have covered the walls and roofs of the Farnese 
 palace with the exquisite productions of their pencils, I should 
 indulge a wish similar to that of Saint Augustin,* desiring to 
 witness the triumph of ancient Home ; and rather resign all the 
 fawns and satyrs and other fanciful pictures with which those 
 
 ' * Expressed in tbe following words “ Tullum perorantem, Paulum praedican- 
 tem, Romani triumphantem.” 
 
LETTER LIV. 
 
 267 
 
 palaces abound, nay, the palaces themselves, than see Rome and 
 religion deprived of one ornament belonging to the Colosseum. 
 It is fortunate this work of devastion and barbarism has been 
 checked. Religion has extended its protection over its venerable 
 walls, the cross is seen rising from the centre of the area on which 
 its early and devoted followers profusely shed their blood ; and I 
 have listened more than once to those humble preachers, who 
 give instructions, on a spot which speaks itself with a force and 
 energy that need not the aid of human eloquence. 
 
 The mansion, once the residence, and now the convent, of St. 
 Gregory, is another interesting monument by which Mount 
 Ccelius is adorned. Living in one of the most disastrous epochs 
 in the Roman history, this Holy Pontiff has, by his piety, his mu- 
 nificence, his zeal and his learning, earned the veneration of the 
 Catholic Church. No English traveller, at least, should leave 
 unvisited the monument of this illustrious Pontiff, to whom his 
 nation was once so much indebted. The princely fortunes which 
 he enjoyed in Sicily and Rome, were all expended in the 
 service of the poor, and in the mitigation of the famine and 
 pestilence, with which the people of Rome were scourged at that 
 particular period. Though his time was so much occupied in 
 ministering to the comforts of the indigent, in correspondence 
 with distant bishops, as well as in negotiations with the Emperors 
 of the east, and the Lombard Kings, he astonishes us by his 
 learned and pious commentaries upon some of the most abstruse 
 and mysterious portions of the inspired writings. It was to St. 
 Gregory and other such Pontiffs that Rome is indebted for its 
 very existence : were it not for their pious and patriotic solicitude 
 for the interests of their flock and the safety of the city, long 
 since would it have presented the same sightless spectacle of ruin 
 as the neighbouring baths of Caracalla. 
 
 The ruins of those celebrated baths of the cruel son of Severus, 
 while they reveal a melancholy monument of Roman greatness, 
 should challenge the gratitude of every generous mind towards 
 the Popes, without whose beneficent influence the very site of the 
 city would now be a problem. Thrice in the space of a century 
 and a half was the imperial city taken and plundered by merciless 
 barbarians. Alaric, king of the Goths, Genseric, king of the 
 Vandals, and again a Gothic monarch, Totila, successively stormed 
 Rome, and rifled it of its most precious treasures. Within the 
 same brief period, were it not for the interposition of the eloquent 
 Leo, it would have endured from the furious Attila, king of the 
 Huns, a similar or more destructive calamity. Portions of the city 
 walls were levelled in these disastrous sieges ; the aqueducts that 
 supplied the baths were broken ; the statues with which the public 
 squares were adorned, were buried in the rubbish of the smoking 
 ruins ; and, such was the desolation of the city after the sack of 
 
268 
 
 LETTER LIV. 
 
 the inexorable Totila, that not a human being or a vestige of life 
 appeared there for the space of forty days. Such it would have 
 lain “ with darkness and desolation on its dew for ever,” had not 
 the good pastor again gathered his scattered sheep, and, like 
 another Zorababel, encouraged them to raise the walls which the 
 enemy had demolished, and to restore a city, which had become 
 the seat of a religion more powerful than its lost empire. But 
 half a century elapsed from the last of those disasters to the 
 reign of Gregory, and it is no wonder if the evils which then 
 had accumulated, had continued to be deeply felt to his time. 
 
 We are informed both by Tacitus and Suetonius, that it was 
 the wish of Tiberius, that for its primitive name of the Celian, 
 that of the Augustine Hill should be substituted. Whether it was 
 called by that name we have now no historical certainty ; but its 
 loftiest portion, that on which the church of St. John of Lateran 
 is erected, has acquired a pre-eminence far more characteristic of 
 power and veneration, than it would have acquired from the 
 destined name of Augustus. The palace anciently belonging to 
 the distinguished family of the Laterans, was conferred on Pope 
 Sylvester by the pious generosity of Constantine. Here too he 
 erected a magnificent church, in honour of Saint John the 
 Evangelist, and in the vicinity of the place where he came out 
 unhurt from the cauldron of oil, into which he was flung, before 
 he was banished to the scene of his Revelations at Patmos. It was 
 by the Asinarian gate in this neighbourhood that Totila entered 
 when he took and rifled Rome ; and we may presume, that equally, 
 if not more than any other quarter, it had suffered from the sacri- 
 legious rapacity of this ruthless barbarian. The Lateran palace 
 continued to be the Pontifical residence, and the church of St. John 
 of Lateran “the mother and mistress of all churches.” From 
 this parent church, the subject children of the universe should 
 naturally draw the pure waters of religion ; and accordingly, 
 from the time that the east ceased to be the scene of those 
 General Councils, which the errors of its early heresiarchs had 
 rendered necessary, Lateran became the natural centre for those 
 great councils of the west, which had so often assembled in the 
 middle ages, to preserve the faith and civilization of Christendom. 
 Within the space of one century, the church of Lateran witnessed 
 four of those ecclesiastical assemblies. As an instance of the 
 veneration of the Irish church for the centre of Apostolical unity, 
 the third of the councils of Lateran, held under the third 
 Alexander, was attended, besides four other Irish bishops, by 
 Lawrence, Archbishop of Dublin, and Cathal or Cahal, Archbishop 
 of Tuam. Had it not been for those and the similar assemblies 
 that were held during those disastrous times, we should have been 
 bereft of many of the religious and social blessings we now enjoy. 
 The Manichcans of Toulouse would have spread their blasphemies 
 
LETTER LIV. 
 
 269 
 
 and immorality, from the south of France to the neighbouring 
 provinces, and the Moors of Spain would not have been confined 
 to that peninsula, in boasting the extent of their dominion in 
 Europe. 
 
 With the interesting details of the architectural monuments of 
 St. John of Lateran, it is not my intention to occupy the reader; 
 they would be quite unsuited to the nature of those summary and 
 comprehensive sketches. The obelisk of Sixtus Quintius, that 
 great Pontiff, who, during a comparatively brief reign, added so 
 much to" the splendour of Pome ; the labours of Benedict 
 XIV., a Pope of congenial magnificence of mind ; the wooden 
 altar used by St. Peter, and now reserved for the exclusive use of 
 his successors ; the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, preserved in 
 this sanctuary of religion, together with the sacred table of tho 
 Last Supper — those, and the porphery sarcophagus of Saint 
 Andrew Corsini, one of the successors of Donatus, to whom I al- 
 luded in my letter from Fiesole, are topics which, instead of being 
 stretched into an amplified form, must be folded up into the brief 
 compass of mere historical allusion. On the confines of Mount 
 Ccelius, is also to be seen the beautiful church of the Cross, erected 
 by St. Helen, in which she deposited the portion of that sacred 
 relic of our redemption, which she discovered among the ruins of 
 Jerusalem. In the immediate vicinity were the celebrated, or 
 infamous, Varian gardens, where Heliogabalus practised scenes of 
 infamy, which, however coarsely told by Lampridius, he also 
 assures us, he had laboured to disguise under the veil of general 
 language, lest delicacy should recoil from the description. Over 
 the spot where the wood of the cross was buried, a statue of 
 Venus had been erected by her Pagan worshippers. A similar 
 idol is said to have stood on the site to which the pious empress 
 had transferred the sacred instrument of man’s salvation ; nay, 
 more, this place received the name of “ ancient hope,” from 
 a temple which it is thought was built there ; the ancient Romans 
 having indiscriminately raised fanes to the virtuous or the vicious 
 affections. Like the unknown god to whom the Athenians con- 
 secrated a temple, this unknown “ hope” to which the Romans 
 paid religious homage, was at length made manifest, and 
 mysteriously realised in the magnificent temple raised by Helen 
 on the spot, in honour of that cross, long looked forward 
 to by the patriarchs, and which has been, since it was consecrated 
 by our Redeemer’s blood, the “ hope” and consolation of the 
 exiled children of mankind. 
 
 John. Bisnor of Maronia. 
 
270 
 
 LETTER LV. 
 
 LETTER LV. 
 
 Rome, December 7, 1831. 
 
 From the indistinctness of their confines, the kindred hills of 
 the Esquiline and Viminal, may be classed together without 
 separation. Over this eastern region of the ancient city, some 
 of its most stupendous monuments are spread. Such are the 
 celebrated baths of Titus, and such the aqueducts of Claudius 
 and Nero, conveying into the bosom of the city, the distant 
 waters of the Sabine Mountains. The baths of Titus, on the 
 Esquiline, have ever been considered among the most interesting 
 ruins of ancient Rome, yielding only to the Colosseum, a work of 
 which the glory has been shared by his father, Vespasian. The 
 baths for ablution, the area for recreation, the places allotted for 
 reading, for declamation, and gymnastic exercises, with every 
 other accommodation which health and refinement could require, 
 bespeak the vast resources, which the masters of the Roman 
 world could then command. 
 
 During latter times the saloons of the baths of Titus have 
 furnished modern painters with models of the choicest interior 
 decoration. It was here Raphael found the ground-work of the 
 celebrated cartoons, with which he enriched the walls of the 
 Vatican. Those who were jealous of the fame of that eminent 
 painter, have not failed to accuse him, of closing up the saloons 
 from which he copied his ornaments, in order that he might escape 
 the imputation of borrowing them from the ancients. However, 
 the best and most generous critics absolved him from having 
 recourse to so discreditable a scheme, to exalt a reputation 
 which required no such artifice. 
 
 But there is on the Esquiline, a far nobler monument than the 
 baths of Titus, containing specimens of painting and of sculpture 
 not unworthy of the masters whom the munificence of the Popes 
 had encouraged. It is the Liberian Church, or that of our 
 Blessed Lady ad Nives, names expressive of the miraculous 
 incidents that led to its erection, It is, however, more generally 
 known by the name of Maria Maggiore, in consequence of its 
 far surpassing, in the majesty of its decorations, as well as the 
 amplitude of its area, the numerous other churches which the 
 piety of Rome has dedicated to the Mother of God. To a wealthy 
 citizen of the name of John, the Blessed Virgin appeared in a 
 vision, signifying her wish to have a church erected on the 
 Esquiline, its dimensions extending over the same space, which he 
 would find covered with snow. The Pope was favoured with a 
 
letter lv. 
 
 271 
 
 similar vision ; the coincidence of both was confirmed by the 
 fall of snow as announced ; the temple rose in obedience to the 
 miraculous manifestation; and, besides, the intrinsic beauty of 
 the church, sustained by magnificent Ionic columns, adorned with 
 exquisite entablature, it has been enriched with the successive 
 contributions of some of the greatest Popes to whom the entire 
 of the city was so much indebted. The chapels of Sixtus and of 
 Paul, the fifth of their respective names, on the opposite sides of 
 the great nave, rank among the finest specimens of pious and 
 elegant taste ; nor has a late Pontiff, Leo XII., forgotten 
 this cherished church, having enriched it with a magnificent 
 baptistry of porphyry. Were it not for the renovating spirit of 
 the Catholic religion, the beautiful pillars of white marble, that 
 at once adorn and sustain the church of St. Mary Maggiore, 
 would have lain buried amidst the rubbish of a ruined city, 
 neither animating the rivalry of the artist, nor guiding the 
 path of the historian. They were once, it is conjectured, ap- 
 propriated to the service of Juno. They are now, like the spoils 
 of Egypt, transferred to the temple of the Mother of God. It 
 is a delightful reflection to think that the arts, which were so 
 long dishonored in ministering to senseless idols, or mischievous 
 mortals, have been, by the fostering care of the Catholic Church, 
 restored to their native dignity. While the statues of such im- 
 perial monsters as Tiberius, and Caligula, and Nero, and Domi- 
 tian, and Commodus, were cast down after their deaths, by the 
 decrees of the same obsequious senates, who, during their lives, 
 had strewed the city with these monuments of their servility 
 and baseness, the gilded statue of an humble and secluded 
 Virgin, who lived in the time of Augustus, in a distant and 
 despised portion of the empire, is seen now to overtop the lofty 
 edifices of Pome, drawing towards it the profound veneration 
 of its inhabitants. Yes, her own prediction of being honored 
 by all nations has been long since realized. She was promised 
 as the chosen instrument, that would establish by the Incarnation 
 of her Divine Lord, the dominion of “ peace” all over the world. 
 A temple had been erected to “peace” by Constantine, which has 
 long since shared the fate of similar edifices. A pillar of that 
 temple with its Corinthian capital has been preserved, and, by an 
 auspicious coincidence, has been placed in front of this magnifi- 
 cent temple, raised to the Mother of mercy and of “ peace,” sur- 
 mounted by her statue of gilt bronze — an emblem of the homage 
 and veneration which she receives from the nations of the world. 
 
 On the very eastern confines of the ancient city, stands the 
 venerable church of St. Lawrence, the celebrated Deacon, whose 
 heroic sufferings and death, form one of the most interesting 
 episodes in ecclesiastical story. No traveller or pilgrim could 
 visit the “ eternal city,” without likewise visiting a spot which is 
 
272 
 
 LETTER LV. 
 
 consecrated by the memory of one of the most illustrious in the 
 entire catalogue of its numerous martyrs. The admirers of 
 Pagan fortitude, may dwell with rapture on the many trophies 
 which were won by the primitive patriots of Pome. They may 
 quote the devotion of a Curtius, leaping into the lake ; the 
 courage of a Scevola, flinging his hand into the fire ; or the 
 inexorable fidelity of a Regulus, returning to Carthage with the 
 certainty of the exquisite tortures he was fated to endure. Yet 
 those and similar instances of extraordinary fortitude, with which 
 the Roman history abounds, cannot bear a comparison with the 
 calm and tranquil patience, with which this holy servant of God 
 bore the slow tortures of the gridiron. Far from shrinking from 
 death, he courted it with a longing impatience of the fulfilment of 
 his desires. “ Whither dost thou go, holy priest without thy 
 deacon ?” was the ardent language in which he congratulated 
 Pope Xytus on the certainty of his crown, and expressed the 
 zealous repining of his devout soul in not being associated with 
 his martyrdom. “ Three days, and you shall follow me,” replied 
 the Holy Pontiff. The announcement filled the young deacon 
 with joy. The short interval was passed in distributing the 
 charities of the Church among the poor, and laying up a treasure 
 in heaven. Disappointment at the treasure, for which he panted, 
 being thus taken from him, filled his persecutor with rage, and, 
 accordingly, the victim was laid on a gridiron to be roasted on a 
 slow fire. The martyr smiled at his tormentors ; the fierceness 
 of the fire which was applied to his flesh, was subdued by the 
 stronger flames of divine love with which his soul was enkindled ; 
 his countenance beamed with a cheerfulness and a joy, which 
 heaven alone could bestow ; and, in the tranquillity of his death, 
 St. Lawrence has left an example that has since sustained 
 thousands of Christians, amidst the slow sufferings of the world. 
 This church is ranked among the seven, to the visit of which 
 the Popes have annexed a plenary indulgence. Under the 
 canopy of the great altar, the bodies of the saint, and of St. 
 Stephen, the first martyr, repose, united in sepulture as they were 
 in the office of deacon, and in the glory of martyrdom. Near, 
 are likewise the instruments of their martyrdom, the stones which 
 were showered on the one, and the gridiron that bore the 
 mangled body of the other. Next to the great Churches 
 dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles, none could be 
 more deserving of honor than that of St. Lawrence, whose name 
 has shed such glory on the annals of the “ Eternal City.” 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER LVI. 
 
 273 
 
 LETTER LVI. 
 
 Rome, December 14 , 1831 . 
 
 “ Traxerat aversos Cacus in autra feros, . 
 
 Cacus aventinae timor atque infamia sylvae. — Ovidius Lasti. 
 
 Of the seven celebrated hills of Rome, Mount Aventine longest 
 retained its wild and primitive form, adopting but slowly the 
 revolutions of civilization. Over no other of the seven hills 
 have the charms of poetry and fiction been thrown with such 
 profusion, and in no other spot have they been so long associated 
 in the faithful imagination. Its summit has been the favourite 
 home of fawns and satyrs ; over the waters, at its base, were 
 constantly hovering vultures, the messengers of evil or of auspi- 
 cious valicination ; and the youthful fancy, fed with the glowing 
 images of Ovid and of Virgil, could scarce divest itself of the 
 terror of the sylvan robber, who despoiled the neighbouring 
 flocks, until his fraud was tracked by the vigilance and checked 
 by the courage of Hercules. Although it was walled in at an 
 early period by Ancus Martius, it was only at a considerably later 
 period it became a densely inhabited portion of the city. The 
 inauspicious augury of Remus, and the more inauspicious death 
 by which it was soon followed, exercised their influence on the 
 minds of the earlier inhabitants of the city, and consigned Mount 
 Aventine to comparative solitude and desolation. Still it formed 
 a portion of Rome, completing the seventh of those celebrated 
 hills on which the mistress of the world was proudly seated. 
 
 En hujus nate, auspiciis ilia inclyta Roma, 
 lmperium tenenis animos equabit Olympo, 
 
 Septemque uno sibi muro circumdabit arces. 
 
 However, the wild freaks of the fawns and satyrs have since 
 disappeared ; screams of ominous birds no longer disturb its con- 
 fines, and the fears of Cacus, and the traditions of the monster, 
 have long since given way to more humanizing influences and 
 sacred recollections. 
 
 The superstition which had defiled the other regions of Rome 
 found a still more congenial soil in the remote recesses of Mount 
 Aventine. Temples in honor of Juno, Minerva, Diana, and other 
 deities, crowded a spot which appeared to be set apart for the 
 worship of impure idols. With the dominion of Christianity, 
 however, it shared the auspicious revolution of the rest of Rome ; 
 and the fallen pillars of those deserted fanes have been since 
 appropriated to the churches, which have beeh erected in honor 
 of St. Alexius and St. Sabina. The life of the former is one of the 
 
274 
 
 LETTER LVI. 
 
 most touching in all ecclesiastical history. When the glory of 
 the empire was sinking under the degenerate son of Theodosius, 
 Alexius aspired to the honors of a kingdom more lasting than 
 that of the Roman empire. After contracting marriage with a 
 lady of rank, he left his father’s house on a distant pilgrimage. 
 He at length returned, after an absence of seventeen years, and 
 remained ‘in his father’s house, in the capacity of a servant, 
 unwilling to claim the respectful attention which a son would be 
 sure to receive. His death revealed the mysterious sanctity 
 which his humility had so long hidden. His interment was 
 honored with becoming homage : his father’s home was converted 
 into a church, to honor his memory, and within the porch, one of 
 the first objects that meets your eye, is a statue of the saint in 
 the position he occupied when living, reposing under the stairs, 
 where he usually slept — a monument at once of his humility, as 
 well as of the extraordinary honor, which the Church bestows 
 on the meek and humble virtues of the Gospel. 
 
 On descending from Mount Aventine, the road conducts you 
 to the ruins of the church of St. Paul, now being repaired, and 
 again to the more distant church of the same apostle, known by 
 the name of that of the Three Fountains. If necessity were 
 the only reason to sway the Roman Pontiff, he would not have 
 encountered the cost of the repair, or almost the re-erection, of 
 this celebrated basilick. A city having already near four hun- 
 dred, some magnificent, and all beautiful churches, could well 
 dispense with the additional one of St. Paul, especially when we 
 reflect that its site was beyond the walls, almost a tenantless 
 solitude. But a loftier feeling than that of necessity inspired 
 Leo, on hearing of its disastrous destruction by fire, to issue 
 instant orders for its restoration. From the time of its erection 
 by Constantine, the basilick of St. Paul suffered many vicissi- 
 tudes of decay, delapidation, and of repair; and its protection 
 was an object of solicitude to many eminent Pontiffs. It stood 
 on the desert, near the banks of the Tiber, a glorious attestation 
 to the truth and permanence of the holy religion, in honor of 
 which it first arose; and while the waters that rolled by, but 
 typified the transient passions that played their fleeting hour on 
 the stage, this venerable temple stood an enduring monument of 
 the immobility and firmness of the Catholic Religion. It was, 
 then, to transmit to future ages this great trophy of its retro- 
 spective triumphs, that the repairs of this temple were un- 
 dertaken; and with the zeal and energy that prompted the 
 commencement of the work, it no doubt will soon be achieved. 
 
 Farther to the south-west is the church of the Three Foun- 
 tains, which, as an ancient and pious tradition records, gushed 
 forth on the decollation of the apostle. On the severance of the 
 head from the body, it is said to have made three springs, and 
 
LETTER LV1I. 
 
 275 
 
 from each spot on which it fell, there gushed forth a fountain of 
 running water. The tradition is surely not more wonderful than 
 the inspired narrative of the lightning, which prostrated him on 
 the earth on his way to Damascus, subduing the ravenous wolf 
 into one of the most zealous guardians of the fold. It is not 
 more wonderful than that temples should arise, on the circus of 
 Nero, to the chiefs of that sect, which, in his time, was so hated 
 and despised, that they were clothed with the skins of wild 
 beasts, hunted through the streets, and tortured with burning 
 faggots, in order to light up the darkness of the city. In the 
 conversion and subsequent life of St. Paul, the preternatural 
 agency of heaven was visible, nor is it incredible that the 
 gushing forth of fountains of water should mark the death of the 
 pure vessel of election, whose doctrine, derived by a mysterious 
 and miraculous communication from the bosom of the Almighty, 
 has ever since been pouring its living influence over the regions 
 of the earth. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 Feast of St. Stephen. 
 
 Rome, 1831 . 
 
 Unwilling to interrupt the series of observations suggested by 
 the contemplation of the seven hills of the ancient city, I have 
 not as yet made any reference to the Vatican. Yet no part of 
 Rome possesses stronger claims on the affections of the Christian. 
 It was not one of the seven hills on which the city was seated, 
 yet it is the object which generally challenges the first visit from 
 the piety of the pilgrim or the curiosity of the mere traveller. 
 I was scarcely an hour arrived, when I hastened to St. Peter’s, 
 to offer up my cold and imperfect prayers in unison with the 
 incense of prayer and sacrifice, that is daily ascending from 
 that magnificent and holy temple, to the throne of the Almighty. 
 Its precincts were worthy of the majesty of the temple. The 
 obelisk in front proclaimed the homage of the conquered arts and 
 wealth of Paganism to the spirit of Catholicity ; its refreshing 
 fountains, continually playing in the sun-beams, were an emblem 
 of its pure and perennial doctrine flowing from the shrine of the 
 apostles ; and its curved colonnades, stretching out on either side, 
 
276 
 
 LETTER LVII. 
 
 most significantly represented the ardent and affectionate eagerness 
 with which the Catholic Church greets her children, and cherishes 
 them in her bosom. No sooner did I cross the threshold of the 
 church than I felt, what others are said to feel, the illusion of its 
 folded perspective. As I advanced, it appeared to be gradually 
 unrolled, adjusting the harmonious position and size of the sur- 
 rounding objects, until I stood under the stupendous dome, of 
 which I had just seen the original model in the Pantheon : the 
 one reposing on the earth, the masterpiece of Pagan temples ; 
 and the other resting on lofty pillars, penetrating to the heavens 
 — the wondrous trophy of the Christian artist, by whose skill and 
 energy it was raised. 
 
 Though the capital is rich in works of art, ancient and 
 modern, it is distanced in competition by the splendour of the 
 Vatican. To the church of St. Peter was it first indebted for 
 the varied aggregate of unrivalled treasures, which have been 
 gradually gathered round it. The residence of the Popes, trans- 
 ferred from the palace of Lateran, led to the erection of its 
 palaces, its galleries, and magnificent saloons, in which were 
 deposited the relics of ancient art, disinterred by the zeal of 
 antiquarians, encouraged and animated by the munificent patron- 
 age of its Pontiffs. Poets and sculptors studied with assiduity 
 those elegant models, and laboured to rival their excellence by 
 similar creations of their own. The relation that Rome holds to 
 the world, collecting within its precincts more of historical and 
 classical monuments than are spread over the earth, the Vatican 
 museum may be said to hold to Rome, condensing within its 
 sanctuaries such a rare variety of exquisite treasures as might 
 be said to rival, it not in number, at least in value, all the other 
 collections of this city. Without neglecting them, it is no wonder 
 if my visits to the Vatican were more frequent than to any of 
 the other churches or palaces of Rome ; nor is it until after 
 repeated visits, that you can find a clue through the labyrinths 
 of their apartments, and become familiar with those master- 
 pieces, which must be frequently seen in order to be duly 
 valued. 
 
 When traversing the saloon of the relics of ancient monuments, 
 with its cinerary urns and antiquated inscriptions, such as might 
 give occupation for years to a Mabillon or a Muratori, you fancy 
 you are walking through some ancient necropolis ; and I felt — to 
 avail myself of an anticipated incident — as I afterwards felt when 
 walking over the subterraneous city of Pompeii, that, of names 
 once renowned, and of achievements that conferred cotemporary 
 fame, not a memorial now remained but a mis-shapen fragment 
 of marble, of which the orthography might puzzle the most 
 practised decipherer of the earlier forms of the characters of 
 Tuscany or Rome. Yet even those fragments have their value. 
 
LETTER LVII. 
 
 277 
 
 It was partly by their aid (because a stone recorded every event), 
 that such light has been thrown over the early history of the 
 city ; and I have often lamented, that in Ireland, where it may 
 be now done with safety, more attention is not paid to the 
 recording of national events, in the more durable materials of 
 monuments of stone. From the excavations that are occasionally 
 carried on in the city and neighbourhood, those monuments are 
 multiplying fast, and, notwithstanding the vast apartments of 
 the Vatican, are requiring more extensive and appropriate 
 accommodation. 
 
 To the four successive Popes, bearing the names of Clement 
 and Pius, the Vatican is justly indebted for its extension ; and 
 their names are in a special manner associated with its magnifi- 
 cent museum. Accordingly, the saloons bearing their names, and 
 appropriated to the representation of the chief events of their 
 reigns, stretch out (such is the fate of all history), and occupy 
 a larger space as you come down. Still, whether the apartments 
 be small or spacious, these objects, whether of painting or of 
 sculpture, will always attract particular attention, which have 
 already secured the suffrages of mankind. Such, amidst the 
 monuments of ancient sculpture, are the Nile with its attendant 
 Nereids ; the Laocoon, writhing in inexpressible agony amidst the 
 coiling and venomous embraces of the serpent ; and, in fine, the 
 Apollo, that may be admired but cannot be rivalled, combining 
 all the energy of the one sex, with the graces of the other, and 
 appropriately fixed in one the farthest niches of the museum, as 
 an object for attracting fresh admiration. Such, among the 
 paintings, are the immortal frescoes of Raphael, still displaying 
 the chief events of the inspired history on the ceilings of the 
 galleries of the Vatican. Such the other chambers, appropriated 
 by Julius II. exclusively to his pencil, and known by his name. 
 Such, too, his fanciful Arabesques, borrowed from the baths of 
 Titus, with which the walls of the galleries are decorated ; and 
 such, in fine, the awful picture, or rather group of pictures, of 
 Michael Angelo, in the Sixtine Chapel, portraying — a boldness 
 from which a less daring spirit would have shrunk — the terrible 
 scene of the last judgment, of the reality of which an idea may 
 be formed, when its empty and shadowy representation cannot be 
 contemplated without awe. 
 
 No doubt the peculiar circumstances of time and solemnity 
 under which this singular picture is contemplated, impart to it an 
 additional effect. The chapel opens on the first Sunday of 
 Advent — the day peculiarly consecrated to the commemoration 
 of the Last Judgment. During the four Sundays of that peni- 
 tential season, solemn mass is celebrated within the walls of the 
 chapel, on which this awful scene is delineated, and at which 
 the Pope attends, together with the Cardinals, robed in their 
 
278 
 
 LETTER LVII, 
 
 penitential attire. Without indulging in the language of ex- 
 aggeration, it is an assembly such as seldom can be witnessed. 
 You have a meeting composed of men eminent for piety, or 
 science, or age, or long and arduous habits of business, and often 
 conspicuous for a combination of all these qualities ; and if the 
 ancient Gaul was tempted to stroke the beard of one of the 
 Roman senators, to try whether the god-like assembly was 
 composed of mortals, none need fear the imputation of that awe 
 which ignorance or barbarism inspires, in pronouncing the senate 
 of the Roman cardinals, the most venerable and majestic assembly 
 in the world. 
 
 The magnificent ceremonies of Christmas-day formed an appro- 
 priate close for the preceding functions of Advent. At an early 
 hour in the morning I went to St. Peter’s, and had the great 
 consolation of celebrating three Masses in the subterranean 
 chapel over the tomb of the Apostles. Afterwards I attended at 
 the solemn Mass sung by his Holiness. At nine o’clock, the 
 cardinals, with their appropriate trains, together with the bishops, 
 prelates, and clergy, were to be seen crossing the nave from the 
 sacristy to a chapel on the right hand, near the great entrance- 
 door from which the procession commencedv At this time the 
 scene became animated by the crowds that were thronging to be 
 present at the august sacrifice : the bustle, however, was hushed 
 on their entrance; for, though some on moving up the nave 
 seemed in the attitude of conversation, not a whisper was heard 
 in the distance, and their little figures seemed to disappear, as 
 they spread in various directions, to procure the most convenient 
 view of the ceremonies. Still the city continued to pour in its 
 fresh multitudes, yet the crowds were comparatively unnoticed 
 in its vastness. 
 
 The nave was lined by two files of Swiss guards, whose singular 
 equipment in arms and costume contributed to heighten the effect 
 of the solemn scene. Behind the high altar a magnificent screen 
 was erected, covering the tribune of the church, and leaving 
 the intermediate space for the performance of the ceremonies. 
 Against this screen, which was tastefully hung with richly em- 
 broidered scarlet, a platform was raised, ascended by seven steps, 
 with a magnificent pontifical throne, elevated in the centre. 
 Benches for the cardinals, bishops, and other ecclesiastics were 
 tastefully fitted up on either side, and temporary galleries erected, 
 for the accommodation of many of the immense congregation. 
 After nine o’clock the procession began to move: first the different 
 ecclesiastics in their respective robes ; next the bishops, and then 
 the cardinals, sweeping, in a lengthened and varied train, over 
 the church, while the Roman Pontiff, seated on his throne, and 
 borne aloft by the nobles of the city, formed a suitable close to 
 the gorgeous spectacle. The liturgy was then sung with all the 
 
LETTER LVII. 
 
 279 
 
 power and harmonious variety of intonation, for which the Pope’s 
 choir is justly celebrated. The epistle and gospel were sung in 
 the Greek and Latin tongues. The impressive solemnity with 
 which the divine mysteries were celebrated fixed the attention ; 
 but when the sudden clangor of trumpets, mingling with the 
 explosion of cannons from St. Angelo’s, announced the elevation, 
 the effect was truly electric, and there was not a heart, that was 
 not a rebel to its own feelings, that was not prostrate in grati- 
 tude to adore that God, who then, as in Bethlehem, came under 
 a mysterious form — a sacrifice of peace and of propitiation. 
 Christmas-day has everywhere its peculiar claims to devotion. 
 There are, from the humble huts in Ireland, as pure and 
 precious orisons offered to the Almighty, as from any temple 
 on the globe. There are hearts in which God kindles the 
 sacrifice of his love, without any remote or intermediate incen- 
 tives. There is, however, no other place which furnishes 
 so much of fuel to enkindle the flames of devotion, as this 
 temple. The august sacrifice of Melchisedeck offered on the 
 anniversary of our Redeemer’s birth, by one who exemplifies 
 not only the rite but the person of the royal patriarch, in the 
 circumstance of being at once a king and pontiff in a city which 
 is the cemetery of ancient Paganism, and the centre of the 
 Christian world ; on the spot beneath which, with the kindred 
 ashes of St. Paul, repose those of the Prince of the Apostles, 
 whose spirit still animates and sustains his successors, realizing 
 the promises of the divine founder of the Church, whilst they 
 survive the shifting dynasties of the world — perpetuating the 
 oblation of the sacrifice of love, and that under a dome whose 
 lofty roof draws up the soul to heaven— -#iese were circumstances 
 calculated to awaken feelings which cannot be forgotten ; whilst 
 the vastness of the edifice reminds you, that it cannot be the 
 temple of any one country that you are treading ; but as you 
 walk along, with the sanctuary still receding from before you, 
 and view the tribunals of mercy, with their inscriptions in 
 various languages, inviting Greek and Hebrew, you are struck 
 with the hidden and mysterious immensity of the place — an 
 emblem of Him to whom it is dedicated — and forced silently to 
 exclaim, that this is no “ other but the house of God,” into 
 which “ the nations should be continually flowing from the four 
 winds of heaven.” 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
280 
 
 LETTER LVIII. 
 
 LETTER LVIII. 
 
 Rome, March 27 , 1832 . 
 
 The first of my visits to manifest the homage of my dutiful re- 
 verence to the Holy Father, was a few days after my arrival. It 
 was, to a Catholic bishop from Ireland, a visit fraught with conso- 
 lation. Notwithstanding all the efforts, which an impious policy 
 had recourse to, to sever our connexion with the chair of Peter, 
 efforts far more ingenious in their cruelty than those of the earlier 
 persecutions that hunted the Christians into the catacombs, it was 
 a gladsome introduction to be presented to the good Father of 
 the Faithful, and to receive at his feet the Apostolical benediction. 
 He is worthy of the elevation to which he has been raised. 
 Benevolence ! — it is too weak a word ; — affectionate charity beams 
 in every feature of the good Pontiff, nor is there wanting that 
 visible indication of a stern and unbending intrepidity* of charac- 
 ter, which will not fail, whenever it may be necessary, to vindicate 
 the dearest interests of religion. 
 
 The interval between Christmas and Easter was occupied in 
 visiting the most conspicuous churches, galleries, colleges, and 
 libraries of Rome, together with occasional excursions to the 
 remarkable places in the vicinity, which history and fable have 
 so much associated with the early fortunes of Rome. On 
 the feast of the Epiphany, it was a rare and interesting spectacle 
 to see priests from the Afferent Eastern Churches, Armenians, 
 Greeks, and Maronites, celebrating mass in their own peculiar 
 rites, and in their own respective tongues. The Sunday within 
 its octave, witnessed one of the most gratifying exhibitions, which 
 any country could exhibit, the young students, to the number of 
 about fifty, delivering compositions before the assembled dig- 
 nitaries of Rome, in the varied languages of their respective 
 countries. It was a scene which bore attestation to the Catholics 
 of the faith of Rome, as well as to the union which links its most 
 distant members, to see a number of young men, brought up in 
 adverse national prejudices, and speaking from their infancy 
 different languages, now assembled together, and moulded into one 
 intellectual mass, animated by one spirit, and, like their prede- 
 cessors of old, in the day of Pentecost, all understanding through 
 their different dialects the voice and faith of Peter, conveyed 
 
 * His fortitude in supporting the illustrious Archbishop of Cologne against 
 the persecuting policy of the King of Prussia, as well as his Apostolical rebuke 
 of the atrocious tyranny of the Russian autocrat, justify this view of his 
 character. 
 
LETTER LVIII. 
 
 281 
 
 in one single language, is a continuance of the gift of tongues 
 still perpetuated in the Church, and which cannot fail to make 
 its impression on a reflecting and religious mind. In the evening, 
 a large and selected society of some of the most distinguished 
 strangers in Rome, as well as the natives, enjoyed the elegant and 
 princely hospitality of the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda. 
 On that occasion, Monseignore Mezophanti * addressed a large 
 number of the guests in their respective European or oriental 
 dialects, with ease, if not with elegance. His acquirements as 
 a linguist are rare and extraordinary ; Crassus and others ac- 
 quired great celebrity for their ready talent in conversing with 
 strangers in their own language : it is not, I am sure, any 
 exaggerated praise to assert, that in variety of languages, or 
 readiness in speaking them, they could not have reached the 
 excellence of Mezophanti. 
 
 Among the numerous and richly assorted libraries with which 
 Rome abounds, the Vatican is far the first in the number and 
 variety of its volumes. It may be, therefore, easily inferred, 
 that far beyond competition, it is the first in the world. Its ma- 
 jestic entrance is worthy of such a library, as well as of the 
 celebrated Pope, Sixtus Quintus, who contributed so much to its 
 literary treasures, as well as to the embellishment of its archi- 
 tecture. A magnificent picture, seen as you enter, exhibits 
 Fontana, the architect, unfolding his plan to the Pontiff : then 
 you behold on one side, a series of the most celebrated libraries 
 in the world, and on the other, a succession of • the General 
 Councils, by which the faith of the Catholic Church was illustrated. 
 This library has been generally entrusted to men of vast erudition, 
 who were able to profit of its treasures, flfe again to return them 
 with interest, enriching them with valuable productions of their 
 own. Such was Assemani whose oriental researches conferred 
 additional celebrity on the library of the Vatican. And such 
 is the Monseignore Mai,f the present librarian, distinguished for 
 his valuable literary labours in restoring manuscripts, which were 
 thought to have been lost. His courtesy and kindness in affording 
 the easiest access to this treasury of science and of literature, I 
 feel much pleasure in acknowledging, for it earned a claim to 
 my gratitude. 
 
 But, indeed, courtesy has been the characteristic quality of all 
 the librarians in Rome, in affording to visitors every facility of 
 study and research. Such I experienced at the great libraries of 
 Ara Coeli, and the Minerva, and such too at St. Isidore’s, and the 
 Barberini library, in which documents and manuscripts connected 
 with Irish history abound. To that of St. Isidore, my visits 
 
 * He has been since, and deservedly, honored with the purple. 
 
 t He, too, has been, as a reward of his merits, associated to the College of 
 Cardinals. 
 
 T 
 
282 
 
 LETTER LVIII. 
 
 were frequent, as I found there a number of Irish manuscripts. 
 Besides, I loved to contemplate the portraits of celebrated Irish 
 men which decorate its walls, especially those of two of the most 
 illustrious men of their age and nation — Luke Wadding, the 
 learned author of the Annals of the Franciscans, and Florence 
 O’Mul Conry, Archbishop of Tuam, to whose zeal and labours 
 we are indebted for the foundation of Louvain, and the education 
 of many eminent men, who conferred honor on their country. 
 When one thinks of the dark and difficult times in which those 
 men lived, and the mighty things they achieved for their country 
 and their religion, he feels confirmed still more in his holy faith, 
 since they must have been endued with more than human for- 
 titude, in achieving such great enterprises. I met but one 
 solitary exception to this general disposition to accommodate, 
 in the keepers of the literary establishments in the Eternal City. 
 This exception was in the archives of the Vatican, — a department 
 quite distinct from its library. It is an immense collection of 
 documentary papers and instruments, bulls, letters, and rescripts 
 from the earlier ages to the present time. I was anxious to look 
 for some documents that would throw light upon our ecclesiastical 
 history, and enable me to fill up some chasms in the succession 
 of our bishops, during the persecutions. To my great surprise, 
 delay succeeded to delay, in such manner as to make it evident 
 that the keeper wished to deny me all access to the records 
 which I sought. On animadverting on conduct which appeared to 
 me so unaccountable, I found that the reverend gentleman was a 
 pensioner of the British government, employed to send them such 
 extracts of State papery as would elucidate the public transac- 
 tions connected with tlWhistory of England. Here, in this soli- 
 tary instance, I found the perverse influence of British money, 
 and drew my conclusion on the misfortune that would come over 
 Ireland, if ever the government should succeed in pensioning the 
 Catholic hierarchy. This man’s sympathies, duties, feelings, 
 seemed to be all absorbed by his gratitude for British money. 
 To our oppressors, as far as he was concerned, the archives were 
 open ; to the Catholic victims of their persecution alone, they 
 were inaccessible. However, a gentle hint that I would look for 
 redress from the pontifical government, nay, that his conduct 
 should be reported to the House of Commons, who might take 
 this reverend pensioner to task, wrought in him a kinder tone of 
 feeling, and procured for me a sullen and reluctant admittance. 
 Amidst the huge mass of documents, I could not succeed in the 
 object of my search. However, I lighted on many rare and curious 
 letters, that well recompensed me for my loss. Among others, I 
 was shown one of Mary Queen of Scots, written to the Pope in 
 her own hand, on the day preceding her execution. It was a 
 precious relic, which had the appearance of being discoloured by 
 
LETTER LVIII. 
 
 283 
 
 tears. It is no wonder; such a letter could not be written or read 
 without deep emotion. It led to a long train of thought on the 
 checquered life and tragic death of a woman, of whom her age 
 was not worthy. Nay, the bitter prejudices of her time, seem to 
 have descended to posterity. There was no chivalry, then, in 
 justice, to guard her life, nor chivalry in history to vindicate 
 her fame. But time will avenge her wrongs, and I could cheer- 
 fully encounter more of the sullenness of the pensioned Marini, to 
 have the gratification of reading such an autograph belonging to 
 this illustrious and ill used Queen, whose misfortunes created a 
 sympathy, which the misdeeds of the perfidious monarchs of her 
 race, were not able to obliterate. 
 
 Not far from the Vatican, on the Janiculum, the southern 
 brow of the same hill is a monument, which will fail not to tell 
 the Irish travellers, of what their ancestors suffered from the 
 offspring of Mary Stuart. The small church of St. Peter, de- 
 signed by Bramante, and which reminds you of the temple of 
 Vesta, on the banks of the Tiber, or of the Arno, at Tivoli, 
 contains this melancholy monument. A slab of marble in the 
 middle of the floor, with the names of O’Neil and O’Donnell, 
 recals to memory the flight of those noble cheiftans on a pre- 
 tended conspiracy, set on foot to enable the ungrateful James to 
 partition among a horde of English and Scottish Calvinists, their 
 hereditary domains, together with six counties of the Province of 
 Ulster. Few, whatever may be their opinions or feelings on 
 the justice of those ancient quarrels, or the policy that dictated 
 such cruel confiscations, could refuse a sigh or a tear to the 
 memory of the gallant Tyrone, the hero Bealanathbuide, who 
 had sustained so long and so bravely the sinking fortunes of his 
 country against the combined armies of Elizabeth. It was 
 difficult to resist the rush of feeling which was called forth by 
 the contemplation of the close of his career, as well as by the 
 ingratitude of his own degenerate countrymen. Here, bowed 
 down by misfortune, and blind through age and infirmity* this 
 gallant warrior closed his life like another Belisarius, outlawed 
 and attainted even by the suffrages of those Catholics, whom he 
 saved from utter ruin, without their interposing one solitary vote 
 for his protection. It is well that Christendom has a home for 
 the fallen and the broken-hearted. It is well that there should 
 be some healing asylum where one can find refuge from the 
 ingratitude and perfidy of the world. That home has been, and 
 shall ever be found in the city of the successors of St. Peter, and 
 I closed this sad and soothing train of reflections, by offering up a 
 heartfelt prayer for the devoted patriot, who, I trust, has found 
 that lasting home, “ where sorrow and grief shall be no more.” 
 
 My excursions through Ostia, Albani, Frescati, and Tivoli, 
 &c., during which I sojourned chiefly in the convents that are 
 
284 
 
 LETTER LVIII. 
 
 scattered throughout those districts, afforded much of instructive 
 and agreeable relaxation. The curiosities of those classic terri- 
 tories are as familiar, as the territories themselves are far famed, 
 * nor shall I occupy the reader’s time by their repetition. The 
 lives of the solitary anchorets of Camaldoli, would appear too 
 tame a narrative to some who might relish, better, more varied 
 and stirring scenes. Yet among those monks and such 
 other recluses, is to be found a cheerfulness and lightness of 
 heart to which the world is an utter stranger, and which it can 
 never imagine to be the inhabitant of such abodes. There was 
 one convent in particular, which I felt peculiar gratification in 
 visiting — that of St. Benedict, at Subiaco. Here, near the brink 
 of the Arno, and under a line of frowning rocks, parallel to the 
 stream, is situated the monastery of the holy and celebrated 
 founder of the Benedictines. Near, is another, dedicated to his 
 sister, St. Scholastica. I spent some days in this holy retreat, 
 enjoying the kind hospitality of the good abbot. In the chapel, 
 partly formed out of the cave in which the saint lay concealed 
 for three years, fed by an intimate friend, I offered up the sacri- 
 fice of the Mass. A beautiful marble statue of the saint under the 
 rock, together with the leaves, bearing the impress of the serpent, 
 by which he was so tempted, that he rolled himself amidst the 
 thorns to extinguish the flames of concupiscence, still recal the 
 memory of his early combats and his early triumphs. 
 
 I returned to Home before Palm Sunday, remaining there 
 during the ceremonies of Holy Week. It was a week that 
 embodied more of the impressive lessons and practice of religion 
 than many other wefks put together. Many visit Rome from 
 afar, though unable to remain longer than during those few 
 days, and well do they find their toil and piety rewarded. The 
 solemn tones of the Miserere in the Sixtine Chapel, make them 
 forget all their cares and fatigues, and transport the soul to 
 heaven. The kind and charitable attention paid to the pilgrims, 
 in the establishment set apart for that purpose, makes such an 
 impression on strangers, that I have heard young Americans 
 exclaim with wonder and delight, that if there was true religion 
 in the world, it was to be found in the charity of Rome. The 
 washing of the feet by the Holy Father, is another tender and 
 affecting office, which fails not to exhibit, in the minds of the 
 astonished spectators, the connexion between him and the founder 
 of the Church, whose humility and charity he thus imitates. 
 In my observations on Christmas day, I have already given 
 some faint idea of the Pontifical Mass. The Pontifical Mass of 
 Easter Sunday brings an additional ceremony of most imposing 
 solemnity — the benediction from the balcony of St. Peter’s : 
 one cannot witness a more touching or magnificent ceremony. 
 The Holy Father, accompanied by the cardinals, bishops, prelates, 
 
LETTER LIX. 
 
 285 
 
 and other ecclesiastics, who formed the procession, ascended to the 
 centre of the balcony ; the vast square was thronged with the 
 moving multitudes below; doubtless, there were among them 
 foreigners who differed in faith from the vast body of the 
 people. The Pontiff lifted his arm, waved his hand in the form 
 of a cross ; no sooner did he pronounce the blessing, than all 
 knelt, and, as if under the influence of the same mysterious spirit 
 that subdued St. Paul, I think there was not one that was not 
 prostrate to receive, through the person of his Vicar upon earth, 
 the benediction of the Redeemer of the world. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LIX. 
 
 Naples, May 30 , 1832 . 
 
 After coasting along the promontory of Circe and Gaieta, 
 celebrated in the JSneid and Odyssey, and stopping a short time 
 at Fondi, to visit those venerable halls, whence St. Thomas 
 diffused over Europe, and the entire Catholic Church, his learn- 
 ing and his fame, I arrived in the noisy city of Naples. It well 
 deserves the name of a noisy city, compared to the grave 
 solemnity of Rome ; and, as you approach it, its incessant bustle 
 breaks upon your ear, like the distant murmurs of an agitated 
 sea. Its bay has been compared to that of Dublin. If beauty 
 be sufficient to establish a likeness between two objects, the 
 comparison would be just — both being remarkable for varied 
 views of land and water, beyond many other bays in Europe. 
 But in vain will you look, in the straighter outline and flatter 
 surface of the city of Dublin, for the winding curvature and 
 abrupt elevation, which give to Naples a great portion of its 
 scenic effect ; nor does the one, though beautiful in many 
 respects, present the line of islands, or the conic peaks of 
 Vesuvius, which form such striking and peculiar features in the 
 bay of the other. 
 
 The churches are fine, but not as tastefully ornamented as 
 those at Rome ; nor is pulpit oratory at all to be compared to 
 the style of Roman eloquence. In the former city, the auditory, 
 however enlightened, might, probably, find the compositions on 
 great public occasions, too florid and too elaborate. The finished 
 compositions of Fosculo, his full voice and magnificent intona- 
 tions, reminded you of the precepts on oratory, while they fixed 
 your attention on the instructions of the preacher ; and, though 
 
286 
 
 LETTER LIX. 
 
 a long interval has elapsed since his time, they reminded me of 
 the sermons of the celebrated Father Segneri, in their exhaust- 
 less copiousness, and in the vast variety of illustrations, accumu- 
 lated from profane as well as sacred sources. Some sermons I 
 heard in Naples were of a far inferior description — a mixture of 
 talk and recitative music, of varied interludes, of conversation 
 and of pantomime, which seemed, to my taste, as it would to that 
 of the Irish people, better suited to the theatre than to the 
 pulpit. I am willing to make allowance for the peculiarity of 
 national habits and feelings. I know that in popular addresses, 
 whatever may be the nature of the subject, whether religious or 
 political, the model of excellence in one country is not a standard 
 for another ; but after making a due allowance for all the varie- 
 ties of temperament or education, I am sure I am only speaking 
 the sentiments of some of the most enlightened as well as pious 
 of the clergy, in expressing a wish that the capricious manner of 
 some of the Neapolitan preachers, were better regulated, and 
 brought nearer to the dignified standard of Rome. 
 
 On the evening of the 1st of May, after visiting the subter- 
 ranean ruins of Herculaneum, buried under the streets of Portici, 
 we proceeded to ascend Vesuvius, and reached the hermitage at 
 the base of its conical summit, exactly as the sun was going 
 down. Having stopped there until twelve o’clock, we again 
 resumed, with our mules, guides, and torches, the romantic 
 excursion. The mules, however, we were obliged soon to aban- 
 don. After a toilsome ascent over a deep surface of pulverized 
 lava, which, like sand, was constantly receding from under us, 
 we reached the top, where we were suddenly struck with a vast 
 surface of the burning mountain, that glared before us. We 
 paused for some time to contemplate a scene, which not only 
 made us think, but talk, with the utmost seriousness, of that fire 
 which never goes out, and viewed the fountain from which issued 
 this flood of lava, whose slow, and silent, and unceasing course, 
 apparently presenting the same volume as it rolled by, exhibited 
 also an emblem of the continuous sameness of those torments, of 
 which the elements of the place naturally reminded us. We 
 next steered our course to the crater towards the northern side, 
 which was sending forth, at the intervals of every five or six 
 minutes, masses of fiery smoke, which appeared still more terrific 
 from the distance. Our way was over huge and broken masses 
 of lava, through the openings of which we saw the fire beneath, 
 whilst we felt its heat upon the surface ; so that, by walking 
 slow, the place became intolerable, and, by quickening our pace, 
 we were in danger of falling into the burning fissures beneath, 
 and having our feet torn by the sharp edges encountered in the 
 fall. However, we went on, with fearless and steady steps, and 
 advanced so near the mouth of the crater, that the red balls, 
 
LETTER LIX. 
 
 287 
 
 which it discharged, were shot to a greater distance than the 
 spot on which we stood. Our protection from danger, as well as 
 our apology for the guilt of rashness, lay in our being stationed 
 on the sheltery side, whereas, if the wind suddenly veered, we 
 should run the risk of being exposed to one of those fiery 
 showers, that were blown to the opposite direction. For near 
 an hour we looked on the awful scene, with feelings such as 
 nothing but the sight of such a scene could inspire. The hollow 
 rumblings of the cavern — the paler and less fiery body of 
 smoke, exhibiting alternately black and yellow volumes, rising 
 over the margin of the crater, as a harbinger of the livid and 
 terrific sheets of fight that succeeded — and then the sudden 
 explosion of a m'ass of flame from its deepest recesses, attesting, 
 by the loudness of its roar, as well as the tremendous height of 
 its projecting power, the vengeful spirit of the volcano within ; — ■ 
 these, and two sensible shocks of earthquake, which inspired 
 even our guide with fear, and brought the fate of Pliny to my 
 recollection, left such an impression on my mind, as to be fully 
 content with one exhibition of the sublime terrors of Vesuvius. 
 After ascending the highest peak, from which we witnessed the 
 joyous sight of the rising sun over the dusky chain of the 
 Abruzzi, which revealed to us once more the city of Naples, the 
 bay that washed the base of the mountain, and the variety of 
 olive, vine, and mulberry trees, to which it gave fife and fresh- 
 ness — a prospect as fine as ever gladdened the eyes of mortals — 
 we returned, rejoicing that we were no longer in the world of 
 darkness, of earthquakes, and of terrors. 
 
 On Saturday, the 5th of May, was commemorated, the transla- 
 tion to the city, of the relics of St. Januarius. The anniversary 
 is celebrated with unusual pomp and magnificence. At twelve 
 o’clock the first procession commenced, during which the head of 
 the Saint was carried to the church of St. Clare from the 
 cathedral. The crowds were immense ; thirty-five statues of 
 saints, all of pure silver, and furnished with lighted tapers, were 
 borne in the procession — flowers from the balconies were flung 
 on the streets as we passed — and, at length, the precious relic, 
 encased in a golden bust, and covered with a mitre set with 
 precious brilliants, was laid by the aged and venerable arch- 
 bishop on the gospel side of the altar. Again, about five o’clock 
 in the evening, the blood of St. Januarius was carried amidst 
 another procession, equally striking and imposing. The blood 
 was laid on the epistle side, being contained in a small bottle, 
 which was encased between two crystal plates, in the form of a 
 remonstrance. The cardinal took this external covering by the 
 handle, having no connexion with the blood contained in the 
 vase, that lay between the crystals; nor, indeed, could it be 
 supposed (the only possible supposition) that the old man’s hand, 
 even in case of contact, could impart heat to the mysterious 
 
288 
 
 LETTER LIX. 
 
 substance. He exhibited it to the by-standers, amongst the 
 nearest of whom I was fortunately placed, and so solid was the 
 substance within, that, after turning the vase two or three times, 
 the same portion of it remained visibly unoccupied. About two 
 minutes elapsed — the substance still remained consistent and ad- 
 hesive, when gradually a redder border began to appear, show- 
 ing that the liquefaction was commencing, and then, in less than 
 two minutes more, it flowed, as it was turned, in every direction 
 through the entire vase. During the rest of the octave, the 
 miracle was repeated in the Church of St. Januarius. On 
 Sunday morning I assisted, after saying Mass. The blood was 
 in a state of liquefaction, even before it was presented to the 
 head ; it was not, therefore, so striking as on the preceding 
 occasion. On Monday morning we attended again. There were 
 some Protestants both from England and Ireland. The blood 
 was presented in a state that satisfied all that it was completely 
 solid, nay, immoveable, when the vase was turned. It remained 
 so for a longer time than on Saturday. The Creed was recited 
 by the priest who assisted, in which we joined ; the liquefaction 
 commenced, and so struck were all present, that some of the 
 Protestants kissed the vase with the utmost reverence and devo- 
 tion. I know not whether the scoffs of the impious and profane 
 may not prevent them from following the impulse of their better 
 feelings. As for me, I must confess, though sufficiently distrust- 
 ful of the credulity with which popular rumours of miracles are 
 sometimes received, I entertain no doubt whatever of the miracle 
 of St. Januarius ; nor can I conceive how any individual, who 
 witnesses and examines it attentively, can reject it, without a 
 secret scepticism in all miraculous interference. 
 
 The days following the festival of St. Januarius were agree- 
 ably spent in visiting the interesting curiosities of the city and 
 neighbourhood. Baiao, Cuma, Micenum, Lethe, Acheron, Aver- 
 nus, the Stygian Lake, and the Grottos of the Sybil, were passed 
 over with a circumstantial accuracy of observation, rendered 
 pleasing by the recollection of the beautiful poetry, in which they 
 were described. We saw the huge abutments which still remain, 
 as the monuments of the madness of Caligula, who strove to 
 unite Baiae and Puzzuoli by a bridge — an enterprize which sur- 
 passed in extravagance the frantic project of Xerxes, to chain 
 the Hellespont. Three young French gentlemen, who came out 
 of the baths of Nero, almost ready to gasp, and covered with 
 perspiration, showing an egg boiled, as the trophy of the experi- 
 ment, deterred my companions from the dangerous adventure. 
 After visiting the neighbouring islands of Ischia and Procida, so 
 remarkable — the former, for its baths, and, the latter, for the 
 antique and classical costume of its inhabitants, we returned 
 again to the city of Naples. 
 
 In our visits to the magnifioent museum of Naples, we were 
 
LETTER LIX. 
 
 289 
 
 assisted by the learned explanations of the well-known Canonico 
 Iorio, to whom all its treasures were familiar, from the charred 
 papyrus, disinterred at Pompeii, to the Farnesian Hercules. 
 Pompeii it was impossible to traverse without melancholy. For, 
 however the continual stream of travellers may dissipate the 
 awful feelings inspired by the place- — the deserted streets, the 
 ruined temples, and the silent amphitheatre, contrasting with 
 the animation which they once presented, force on the most 
 thoughtless the most serious reflections. For me, I indulged in 
 far sadder feelings than those inspired by pursuing Eneas’s 
 voyage through the regions of Cocytus and Acheron. In 
 reality I know not what phantasy could have inspired Virgil, to 
 have placed his Tartarus in one of the most delicious regions of 
 the globe. The thought might well suit a moralist, who might 
 wish to alarm the voluptuous inhabitants of Bairn by the terrific 
 fires, of which those of Vesuvius are but a phantom. But it is 
 impossible to come out of Pompeii without feeling your spirits 
 saddened by the contemplation of such an awful relic of divine 
 wrath, which, like Sodom, may remind you not only of the 
 vanity, but the wickedness, and, alas ! the punishment of thou- 
 sands, suddenly cut off in their thoughtless career. 
 
 After visiting Pompeii, on the one side, and Baise, on the 
 other, we felt an anxiety to visit the ruins of Pestum, as well 
 as the romantic city of Amalphi. The massive Doric pillars of 
 two ancient temples still remain, rivalling the Parthenon in taste, 
 and, probably, surpassing in antiquity the times of Pericles, 
 since the period of their erection is so remote, that they were 
 deemed ancient even in the infancy of Pome. After penetrating 
 into those wild regions towards Calabria, as far as Pisciotta, we 
 turned to Amalphi, which well rewarded us for the fatigues of 
 the woods and mountains of Apulia. This celebrated pity, 
 situate along the Gulf of Salerno, commands as fine a prospect 
 as any in Italy, and is, perhaps, one of the most romantic, in the 
 beauties of its position, as well as in the associations of its fame. 
 As you sail from Tarentum, you first catch a view of one half of 
 the town, winding in a curve, which terminates in a peak, while, 
 as you advance, you behold the female convent of St. Bose, 
 placed upon the summit of the^ock ; again the ancient convent 
 of the Capuchins, as if actually hanging between the air and 
 water, with scarcely a visible foundation. A huge mass of rock 
 hanging over it seemed every moment to threaten it with ruin, 
 as if in revenge for invading its seclusion ; and a Gothic tower, 
 perched on the highest point of the peak, gives additional fife to 
 the prospect. Scarce do you turn this point, when the other 
 half of Amalphi appears, embosomed in a similar crescent, 
 exhibiting in the Church of Magdalene the ascending edifices, 
 with green patches, like pendent terraces, between them, a still 
 
290 
 
 LETTER LIX. 
 
 more agreeable variety of outline than its other hemisphere. 
 The Cathedral dedicated to St. Andrew contains the remains of 
 the Apostle. The bishop appears to be a pious and apostolic man. 
 The people seem full of genuine and simple devotion, beyond 
 what I perceived in any other part of the Neapolitan territories. 
 On the evening of Tuesday, the 22nd, we went to the Church of 
 St. Magdalene, where we were much edified by the fervour of 
 the people, who had commenced, as is customary here, the feast 
 of Corpus Christi a month before the usual time. We left the 
 city of Amalphi with regret, and stopped at Sorento, the birth- 
 place of Tasso. If scenery and external circumstances ever had 
 influence on the growing intellect, Tasso had before him a con- 
 tinual source, from which the richest inspirations of poetry could 
 be drawn. Standing on the verge of a lofty rock, which pro- 
 jects into the water, the paternal mansion ©f the poet commanded 
 a view of Vesuvius, on the right, with Naples further to the 
 north and west ; opposite, the bay stretched before him, bounded 
 by Procida, on one side, and the promontory of Micenum, with 
 all the beauties of Baiae on the other, while the whole of this 
 magnificent prospect was seen every evening, lighted by the sun 
 sinking into the bosom of the deep, as it was seen by us, and 
 reflecting, in sudden alternations, all the fainter colours of the 
 setting luminary. No wonder that, with such a scene before 
 him, he could paint, with a magic pencil, the enchanted groves of 
 Armida. 
 
 But beyond the commercial celebrity of Amalphi, or the 
 poetical glories of Sorento, were the attractions which for me, at 
 least, were found in Salerno, the resting place of Gregory VII. 
 The fame of this eminent Pope has been long obscured by the 
 thick masses of misrepresentation, with which Protestant writers 
 have laboured to cover it. It has already commenced to emerge 
 into the light of its original glory. Not one of the successors of 
 St. Peter, of whom so many were eminent for their great virtues, 
 has been a greater benefactor to mankind than this calumniated 
 Pontiff. His life was an incessant warfare with vice of every de- 
 scription. His unconquerable vindication of virtue, and the rights 
 of hnmanity, arrayed against him the most formidable combina- 
 tion of the licentious and the op^essive. Tyranny, simony, and 
 profligacy, found in him an uncompromising avenger. Salerno 
 has shared in the fame, which the feats and arms of Robert Guis- 
 card had won in his wars with the Saracens. It has derived still 
 more from the exile and death of St. Gregory; and there is 
 none who values the brightest virtues that can adorn the true 
 patriot or the Christian Pontiff, can ever come near Salerno, 
 without making a pious pilgrimage to the shrine of the great and 
 holy Hildebrand. 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER LX. 
 
 291 
 
 LETTER LX. 
 
 Rome, August 20 , 1832 . 
 
 On the 7th of June I left Naples, on my return to the “Eternal 
 City.” The fine Palace of Caserta, divided into four ample 
 courts by the magnificent triple colonnade by which it was tra- 
 versed, was, next to the Benedictine Convent on Monte Cassino, 
 the object that appeared most deserving of attention. If splen- 
 dour of architecture, as well as the immense sums of money 
 expended on its erection, form just claims to admiration, the 
 royal Palace of Caserta may well rank among the noblest palaces 
 of Europe. For me it possessed a singular claim to veneration, 
 in a fine picture of Ossian, represented blind, with the harp 
 beside him. I was delighted that the fame of the son of Fion, 
 and the emblem of our national music, were cherished on the 
 southern shores of the Italian peninsula. 
 
 On the following morning I caught a view of the Convent of 
 Monte Cassino, ascended, said Mass over the tomb of St. Bene- 
 dict and St. Scholastica, and passed the remainder of the day and 
 following night within its hospitable walls, to which the appro- 
 priate motto over the porch, “ Quisquis es, ingredere hospes,” 
 invited the passing stranger. In front of the church is a fine 
 court, surrounded by arcades, through the centre of which you 
 ascend by a flight of steps that conducts you to the portico, 
 round which are ranged, in several large niches, some of the 
 most illustrious Popes and Princes, who were either members or 
 benefactors of the order. The remains of St. Benedict, and his 
 sister Scholastica, repose under the grand altar; thirteen oil 
 lamps are continually burning round their sepulchre. In the 
 library, which is select and varied, is to be seen a large collection 
 of Missals and Antiphonaries, exhibiting the most curious speci- 
 mens of the taste and industry of the monks, in the elegant 
 characters in which they transcribed, on parchment, the offices 
 of the Church, adorning them with gilded letters and appropriate 
 representations of its leading events. 
 
 The view of the neighbouring vallies was delightful, with their 
 amphitheatre of mountains, some of them capped with snow, 
 emblematic, as it were, of the purity and coldness of its cloistered 
 inmates, amidst the trials of a voluptuous climate. As the evening 
 fell, I heard, with no ordinary emotion, the piping of the shep- 
 herds tending their flocks on the neighbouring hills, which 
 forcibly recalled all the images of pastoral simplicity and inno- 
 
292 
 
 LETTER LX. 
 
 cence, with which our earlier years were familiarized, convincing 
 me of the reality of that rural happiness, of which the Roman 
 writers charmed us with the description. The sounds conveyed 
 to me a deeper and more mysterious emotion than could be 
 awakened even by classic recollections ; and the source of this 
 saddening feeling was the contrast between those shepherds and 
 the peasantry of my own country, from whom such strains were 
 but seldom heard, though nurtured in the midst of scenery and 
 recollections fraught with the most musical inspirations. 
 
 The interval between my return to Rome and the feast of 
 Corpus Christi, I devoted to visiting such of the churches and 
 palaces as I had not yet visited, as well as to more frequent 
 visits to the Church of St. Peter, which, like all such sublime 
 objects, is seen with new pleasure. The representation of the 
 battle of Lipanto, on the ceiling of the Colonna Palace, in which 
 a member of that distinguished family took so prominent a part, 
 cannot fail to excite admiration mixed with piety, recalling, as it 
 does, the delivery of Europe from the yoke of the haughty Mus- 
 sulman, through the powerful intercession of the Mother of God. 
 
 On the feast of Corpus Christi the procession set out from the 
 Sixtine Chapel, passed down the flight of steps leading from it 
 through the centre of the semicircular portico, next along the 
 line of houses to the left, under an awning supported by graceful 
 shafts, round which wreaths of evergreen were entwined,, and 
 hung at the tops with tapestry, descending in graceful festoons. 
 It then turned to the right along the houses bordering the 
 Piazza, and entered the opposite side of the portico, along which 
 it swept — one of the most magnificent spectacles imaginable, the 
 foremost part having reached the grand door of St. Peter’s 
 before the Pontiff appeared out from the northern side of the 
 portico, and enabling the eye to repose upon one unbroken circle 
 of ecclesiastics, exhibiting every variety of colour and of costume, 
 from the brown habit and ample tonsure of the Capuchin, to the 
 embroidered copes and chausibles of the bishops and cardinals, 
 and the dazzling triple crown of the Sovereign Pontiff. The 
 immensity of the surrounding throng, of every grade and 
 fashion, enlivened by a vast body of the military, added much 
 to the brilliancy of this august procession. It was one worthy 
 of the majesty of the occasion, and rich in deep and solemn 
 reflections, to any who contrasted the days when the meek fol- 
 lowers of Jesus, covered with the skins of wild beasts, were 
 exposed to every indignity, nay, death itself, amidst the scoffs of 
 insulting thousands, in the circus of Nero — this very spot, where 
 thousands were now assembled, to proffer to their Redeemer, the 
 homage of their heartfelt adoration. 
 
 On the festival of St. John the Baptist, the church of St. John 
 of Lateran attracted the piety of the faithful. The Pope assisted 
 
LETTER LX. 
 
 293 
 
 on the solemn occasion, and the procession with which the cere- 
 monies were concluded in the evening, impressed on the specta- 
 tors the majesty of “the mother and mistress of all the churches.” 
 In the neighbourhood of a church — the nursing parent of the 
 churches of the world — it was natural to look for those fruits of 
 good works of which the Catholic faith has been so prolific. 
 They are conspicuous in the magnificent hospital of St. John of 
 Lateran, where the sick are tended with the most assiduous and 
 tender charity. To sketch even the numberless charitable insti- 
 tutions with which Home abounds, would require an ample volume. 
 The wonder is, how funds are provided for the endowment and 
 support of so many nurseries of mercy, under every variety of 
 form. That of St. Michael is a monument of charity worthy the 
 imitation of every Christian country. Not only are the sick 
 attended with the utmost care, but an asylum is afforded to 
 young and destitute females ; and orphans, and other dependent 
 children, are instructed in sculpture by the most eminent masters. 
 Without encountering the dangers with which public theatres 
 are generally encompassed, you may witness dramatic exhibitions 
 of great excellence at this varied school of charity, science, and 
 of the arts ; and it is from nurseries such as these sprung some 
 of those master minds who have acquired eminence in Rome, and 
 spread their fame over Europe. 
 
 The month of August closes the brilliant series of those festi- 
 vals which, from its opening in Advent, are spread over the 
 ecclesiastical year. Accordingly, I prolonged my stay until 
 then, having witnessed the fascinating illuminations of St. Peter’s, 
 which exhibited different degrees of splendour, as if with the 
 celerity of magic — no inappropriate emblem of its doctrine, 
 which, unvaried in substance, exhibits fresh brilliancy through the 
 medium of those great artists who place it in different positions. 
 
 On the first of July a convivial party, possessing no small 
 interest, met together at the Irish College, including Count Mon- 
 talambert, Monsieur de La Menais, and Monsieur L’Accordeur. 
 Fortunately for Monsieur de La Menais, he was thus accompanied 
 by two young friends, who loved him much, but loved truth and 
 religion more. Though not sinking under the weight of years. 
 Monsieur de La Menais appeared to be sinking under the pres- 
 sure of far more crushing influences ; but his companions ap- 
 peared the very impersonations of Catholicity and freedom ; and 
 I am much mistaken if France will not have to acknowledge a 
 deep debt of gratitude to the one and the other. Count Monte- 
 lambert has been in Ireland, and his enthusiastic sympathy with 
 the. sufferings of the people affords a pledge of what he will 
 achieve for the religious freedom of his own oppressed country. 
 
 On the first of August I said Mass in the church of St. Peter, 
 at Vincula, at the altar dedicated to the chains which were mira- 
 
294 
 
 LETTER LX. 
 
 culously connected, without any mark of being welded together. 
 I was much gratified in having an opportunity to handle and 
 reverence those sacred emblems of the sufferings and triumphs 
 of the Apostle. On the fifth attended the feast of St. Maria ad 
 Hives, in the church of St. Mary Major, where flowers, in imita- 
 tion of the snow that fell on the site of the church to be erected, 
 fell down in artificial showers. 
 
 Before the end of August accounts of the dreadful ravages of 
 the cholera in Ireland reached Rome. Among the strange docu- 
 ments connected with this calamity was a letter, said to be 
 addressed by Dr. Whately, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin, 
 dissuading his clergy from exposing their lives, by attending the 
 victims of this disease in their last moments. It struck me as a 
 remarkable coincidence, that after perusing this extraordinary 
 document, one of the first spectacles that attracted my attention 
 was some of the order of St. Camillus de Lilis on their way to 
 visit the sick in their last agony. It is scarcely credible, I re- 
 flected, that the document to which I have just alluded should 
 come from the pen of any prelate professing Christianity ; or if 
 so, what wonder that a Church should wither and decay, of 
 which the ministers could publish such cold and unfeeling recom- 
 mendations. And yet here is a person who, it is seriously pro- 
 posed, should form one of a body to whom the Catholics of 
 Ireland should entrust the education of their children ! ! What 
 a contrast ! Here was a body, a portion of soldiers burning 
 with such zeal and charity, that they were ready, for their 
 brethren, to brave all the horrors of pestilence and death. But 
 they formed but a small portion of those champions of the cross 
 who are reared and disciplined for this spiritual warfare in the 
 nurseries of Rome. If the faith of Rome is spoken of all over 
 the world, its heroic charity and good works have been its com- 
 panions, and well have the missionaries and martyrs of its faith 
 and charity illustrated in the words of its Divine founder, that 
 one cannot show greater love than to lay down his life for his 
 brethren. On the 15th, the feast of the Assumption, the Holy 
 Father favoured me with an interview before leaving the “ Eter- 
 nal City.” In my own name, as well as in that of many of the 
 bishops of Ireland, by whom I was requested to draw the atten- 
 tion of his Holiness to the subject, I represented to him the 
 disastrous effects that would follow, if ever the Irish hierarchy 
 should have the misfortune of being pensioned by the British 
 government. His Holiness left me quite at ease on the subject, 
 assuring me that he sympathized in our disinterested views, and 
 further adding, that the safety and freedom of the Irish bishops 
 were in their own hands, since he never would give his sanction 
 to that, or any other such diplomatic measure which would be in 
 opposition to the sentiments of the hierarchy of Ireland, so much 
 
LETTER LXI. 
 
 295 
 
 endeared to him by its heroic attachment to the Catholic faith. 
 The Holy Father made me a present of a magnificent gold 
 chalice of exquisite workmanship, which I shall not fail to pre- 
 serve with due veneration, and hand down as a fresh pledge of 
 the affection which he ceases not to manifest to his children, from 
 every region over which his spiritual solicitude extends. 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LXI. 
 
 TO THE EIGHT HONORABLE THE EAEL GEEY. 
 
 Rome, August 27 , 1832 . 
 
 << Nec alia erit lex Eomse, alia Athenis — nec yero per senatum aut populum 
 hac lege solvi possumus.” — Cicero de Republica. 
 
 My Lord — Many months have now elapsed since I had the 
 pleasure, or rather the pain, of addressing your lordship on the 
 lamentable condition of large districts in Ireland. The scenes 
 that have since passed in rapid succession, have demonstrated, if, 
 indeed, demonstration was required, that the evils of that unfor- 
 tunate land are too deeply rooted to be the casual productions of 
 times or seasons. No ; they are the natural result of an invete- 
 rate system of misrule, to which almost all are now happily 
 agreed in tracing them; and thus candid unanimity in recog- 
 nizing the true seat of the disorder, ought to afford a presump- 
 tion of the speedy application of an effectual remedy. 
 
 But, alas ! I fear that such hopes are illusive, since it would 
 appear, from the report of the latest proceedings, that the object 
 is now rather to shift the position of the disease, than to eradicate 
 its virulence. When in Ireland, I could not, in common with 
 every individual who had a heart to feel, but take a lively inter- 
 est in its melancholy condition. That interest has been height- 
 ened since, by the strange and humiliating contrast that is found 
 between the excellence of our constitution and the misery of our 
 people. Whatever our notions may be of the governments of the 
 Continent, there is not so wretched a peasantry to be found 
 under them as that of Ireland. Of the British constitution, apart 
 from the more recent penal and bigotted statutes that do not be- 
 long to it, I am a sincere and fervent admirer, and distance does 
 not diminish my sense of its excellence. But if the maxim of 
 Junius be true, that you may infer the character of a govern- 
 ment from the condition of its people — and it is not an unfair 
 
296 • 
 
 LETTER LXI. 
 
 maxim of legislation — it would be well for those who cannot 
 endure the nations of the Continent to pause, on the contempla- 
 tion of Ireland, before they can boast of fhe unqualified superi- 
 ority of their own. Of those governments I am not, assuredly, 
 the panegyrist. Yet, for those who prefer practical utility to 
 theoretic excellence, the state of Ireland cannot afford any theme 
 of national exultation. 
 
 And yet many affect to feel the utmost surprise at the per- 
 severing discontent and distraction of that country. Their 
 surprise, however, would be less, if they seriously reflected 
 on the unjust inequality of her laws. But has not that injus- 
 tice been cancelled by the great measure of Emancipation? 
 No, Emancipation conferred but little benefit on the great body 
 of the people. At best it could only be regarded as the pre- 
 cursor of more extensive and substantial advantages. It opened 
 the way, it is true, to a small number of Catholics to wealth 
 and honors ; but the mass of the population was left to groan 
 under the accumulated load of oppression which centuries of 
 misgovernment heaped on their devoted heads. In short, the 
 whole system by which Ireland has been governed was always 
 partial ; nor did the same narrow and intolerant spirit cease to 
 accompany the measure of Emancipation. Seats in Parliament, 
 and other places of distinction, were made accessible to a few, 
 while thousands of the peasantry were stript of the valuable 
 privilege of the franchise of which they were in possession, 
 merely for the guilt of having learned its value, and exercised it 
 with independence. Can it, then, be denied, that in granting 
 this reluctant boon, the government kept in view the same nar- 
 row policy that was always pursued towards that unfortunate 
 kingdom? What did the people gain in the meantime by this 
 boasted measure? Were they freed from the iniquitous operation 
 of the vestry laws,* which empower a parochial little parliament 
 to levy taxes on the poor, in order to minister to the comfortable 
 devotion of sometimes but a single family? Were they freed 
 from .the odious imposts wrung from them for the support of 
 individuals, who, lest they should appear to form an exception to 
 the maxim, that taxes are always in consideration of some return, 
 take care, in the absence of any other service, to requite those 
 who pay them by insulting their religious feelings ? In short, 
 did they, after Emancipation, receive an exemption from the 
 most galling of all tyrannies, that tedious and enduring spirit of 
 religious hate, which forced, or attempted to force, on them an 
 obnoxious system of education, adding insult to injury, by the 
 hypocritical pretence that it was given in mercy to their igno- 
 rance ! No, my lord, none of those sore, deep-seated, and 
 
 * That odious impost has been since abolished. 
 
LETTER LX I. 
 
 297 
 
 extensive grievances were redressed. Sessions of parliament 
 passed over without the Kildare-street system being checked ; 
 and allow me to add, that it would still have maintained all its 
 parliamentary popularity, if the people who were oppressed by 
 its hollow professions of kindness did not assume a tone and 
 attitude of bold, but constitutional remonstrance. 
 
 With the evidence of this state of things before their eyes, 
 it is wondered that the people of Ireland still persevere in agi- 
 tation. They have persevered, because as yet the whole mass of 
 its inhabitants have not been brought within the pale of one 
 general comprehensive measure of justice, such as a nation has a 
 right to expect from a wise and paternal legislature. Let us 
 suppose that the Protestants of Ireland amounted to near seven 
 millions, and the Catholics but to one — that those Protestants 
 were the poorest class in the empire, and that the Catholics pos- 
 sessed such wealth as that they could easily procure the religious 
 service of the minister of their own choice — that notwithstanding, 
 those poor Protestants were often stripped of their most necessary 
 articles of furniture, to swell the enormous revenues, and minister 
 to the luxury of a Catholic priesthood, whose only requital for 
 those comfortable blessings of this world, was — to insult those who 
 gave them, by every offensive epithet which was ever ransacked 
 by polemical hate, and then to threaten them with the torments 
 of the other. Let us suppose, further, that those few Catholics 
 were empowered to erect large churches, and steeples, and 
 organs, for the accommodation of a few Catholic families, while 
 the unfortunate poor Protestants, at whose expense they were 
 built, must hear the word of God under the rain and wind of 
 heaven ; and that, in fine, the Catholic proprietors and priesthood 
 were receiving large sums of money levied on the Protestant 
 poor, in order to seduce their children to adopt a religion which 
 they loathed, — what would be the impression made on the 
 British House of Commons by the advocate of such a system ? 
 Would not the just indignation of every friend to freedom be 
 kindled against its continuance. Its advocate might go round 
 the dull and hacknied road of defence, in which his duller and 
 more bigoted predecessors walked before him, and talk of estab- 
 lished rights and spoliation of church property, without advancing 
 a single argument to palliate such injustice. But surely such 
 sophistry would soon give way before eloquent legislators, 
 who could not fail of winning the favour, and conquering the 
 conviction of the house, by those comprehensive views of immu- 
 table justice, and those burning appeals to a nation’s sense of 
 right and wrong, by which the Roman orator, whose legal apho- 
 rism heads this letter, not only animated his own contemporaries, 
 but instructed the latest posterity. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia, 
 
 u 
 
208 
 
 LETTER LX II. 
 
 LETTER LXII. 
 
 Loretto, Sepember 5 , 1846 . 
 
 Like the return of the wise men of the East to their own 
 country, my route from Rome was over new ground, by me 
 as yet untrodden. But through whatever region of Italy you 
 pass, you are sure to be delighted with rare specimens of the 
 arts, as well as the beauties of its scenery. Among the latter, 
 the cascade of Terni, the birth-place of Tacitus, is deservedly 
 celebrated, formed by the fall of the Velino into the Nar. It 
 is impossible not to admire the wild fascinations of the water- 
 fall in its first rapid descent, precipitating itself perpendicularly, 
 and then rushing over three high, but less steep declivities, 
 amidst spray and foam, into the stream below. On the opposite 
 northern bank is a palace inhabited by the unfortunate Queen 
 Caroline. A more interesting curiosity is found in the enormous 
 petrefactions hanging from the rocky roofs of a neighbouring 
 grotto. 
 
 The city of Spoletto, so rich in historical recollections of the 
 middle ages, is still remarkable for its Gothic aqueduct, supposed 
 to have been erected in the reign of Theodoric. Foligno, not far 
 distant, presented a dreary spectacle, having suffered so much 
 from a recent earthquake, which we slightly felt at Rome, that 
 beams were stretched between the opposite walls of the streets, 
 by which they were sustained. Serra Valle, a handsome little 
 town, indicative of its name, attracted my particular notice on 
 my way to Loretto, being built between two hills of the Apen- 
 nines, approaching each other so closely, as scarcely to have room 
 for its erection. On the 1st of September I arrived here, and 
 on Sunday, the 2nd, had the long sought consolation of cele- 
 brating Mass in the “ Santa Casa,” in which our Divine Redeemer 
 was conceived, and the Blessed Virgin was born. 
 
 In distant countries, the miraculous translation of the house of 
 Loretto, first into Dalmatia, and again over the Adriatic, excites 
 no extraordinary interest, because it seldom comes under dis- 
 cussion. Some affect to think the legend too clumsy even for 
 the trouble of controversy. But independently of many circum- 
 stances well worthy of consideration, the very apparent clumsi- 
 ness of the story gives it a title to credit, since a miracle so 
 much out of the ordinary reach of miraculous events, would have 
 scarcely entered into the conception of any, or gained anything 
 like a lasting assent, had it not originally rested upon irrefragable 
 attestations. 
 
 From the frequency of the pilgrimages to Nazareth, in the 
 
LETTER LXil. 
 
 299 
 
 earlier ages of the Christian era, the size, form, and dimensions 
 of the holy house were quite familiar to European travellers. 
 At the same time that it began to be missed in Palestine, a new 
 and a hitherto unheard-of house, attracted the notice of the 
 people of Dalmatia. The similarity of both houses soon, led to- 
 the knowledge of their identity. Persons who had visited Naza- 
 reth, and seen the dwelling of the Holy Family, were sent to 
 examine the circumstances of its disappearance from the East, 
 and its translation to the banks of the Adriatic ; and the more all 
 those circumstances were sifted, the stronger was the conviction 
 that the interposition of the Divine Power had conveyed it to 
 another land, to protect from the continued indignities of the 
 infidels, this holy sanctuary of the Incarnation. After a long 
 interval of time the “ holy house” was again transported over 
 the Adriatic Sea, and placed on the opposite shore. Here, too, 
 another translation took place from the spot on which it had 
 been first deposited, owing to the quarrels that sprung among 
 two brothers, from the sacrilegious traffic which they were 
 deriving from the piety of pilgrims. The truth of the miracu- 
 lous translations of the “ Santa Casa” is referred to in the 
 rescripts of several Pontiffs, and the devout pilgrimage to its 
 shrine has been recommended by the practice and example of 
 many of the most eminent and enlightened saints, who, in the 
 sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, reflected lustre on the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 Such is a brief history of this holy shrine, now the object of 
 my pilgrimage. Every portion of this revered relic engaged my 
 attention ; its interior walls left in their original simplicity ; its 
 door facing the north in its present position, its gable to the west, 
 perforated towards the top with a solitary window ; its chancel, 
 or space behind the altar, covered with plates of gold, and its 
 fire-place, now the depository of the little pious offerings of the 
 faithful. But the exterior of the house is clothed with marble, 
 and adorned with pilasters, sustaining a rich entablature, taste- 
 fully designed and executed, and crowned with an open balus- 
 traded parapet. Between the pilasters the walls are hollowed 
 into deep niches, to receive the statues of the prophets and 
 sybils who announced the mystery of the Incarnation. Over the 
 “ Santa Casa” is seen the lofty dome of the church which en- 
 shrines it, being placed at the point of intersection of the mag- 
 nificent cruciform temple which was erected to commemorate its 
 miraculous translation to Loretto. Its treasury has been rifled, 
 and much of its worldly glory is fled. The sacrilegious avarice 
 of another Heliodorus has plundered its wealth, and carried away 
 captive the precious treasures by which the piety of wealthy 
 votaries had enriched it. But it is only the glitter of its wealth 
 that disappeared, and, like the hidden glories of its holy inmates, 
 
300 
 
 LETTER LXI1I. 
 
 the Son of God and his Divine Mother, there is a mysterious 
 splendour within the walls of Loretto, which would fail all the 
 impiety of the world’s tyrants to take away, and to honor which, 
 kings and queens will not cease to bring their offerings to the end 
 of time. 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LXIII. 
 
 Venice, September 14 , 1832 . 
 
 After leaving Loretto, with feelings such as a visit to the 
 “ Santa Casa” is calculated to inspire, my sojourn in the inter- 
 mediate cities was comparatively brief. Ancona, now the key of 
 the Adriatic, exhibits a maritime bustle and activity, that singu- 
 larly contrast with the solitude of the other cities, lying along the 
 coast. It bears, besides, in its fine monuments, proofs of the 
 munificent attention of the Emperors and the Popes. Rimini I 
 should have passed through, with an indifference quite in keep- 
 ing with its present condition, were it not that it recalled the 
 scene of the Council, so memorable in ecclesiastical history, in 
 which the Fathers, cajoled by the fraud, and threatened by the 
 violence of the Arians, adopted an imperfect or ambiguous form 
 of faith, which has exposed their memory to reproach, and left a 
 warning to succeeding bishops, of the danger of temporizing 
 councils. Even the zeal which defends their orthodoxy, must 
 acknowledge their weakness, and lament the want of courage 
 which had exposed them to the dangers of a fall. Ravenna, 
 once the Dublin of the Royal Lieutenants of the Eastern empire, 
 now mourns over its historical recollections. It afforded Dante, 
 the Father of Italian Poetry, an asylum, which was denied him 
 by the ingratitude of his native city of Florence ; and the tomb 
 of the poet, which it contains, is visited with more of curiosity 
 and veneration, than the superb mausoleums of Theodoric or of the 
 daughter of Theodosius. Perhaps Italy does not contain a city 
 more calculated to inspire melancholy, or, rather, a just estimate 
 of the instability of human power. Rome, though fallen, and 
 buried in ruins, has again risen from her ashes with renovated 
 splendour. But Ravenna, the city of the Exarchs, and the occa- 
 sional residence of their imperial masters, is fallen, not to rise, 
 nor are its towers again likely to reflect one solitary gleam of 
 imperial splendour. 
 
 Ferrara, too, once the rival of Florence, exhibits another 
 
LETTER LXIII. 
 
 301 
 
 faded monument of ancient celebrity and renown. The glories 
 of Este, the songs of Tasso and Ariosto, who had long resided in 
 this city, were spontaneously recalled. I visited the prison of 
 Tasso, and it required no extraordinary enthusiasm to sympa- 
 thize with the fate of this singular poet, no less remarkable for 
 the brilliancy than the melancholy of his imagination, and whose 
 fitful maladies are said to have been aggravated by the severity 
 of Alphonso, whose praises he sings at the very opening of his 
 celebrated poem on Jerusalem. Whether it was to the infirmity 
 of the poet, or to the jealousy of his patron, Tasso’s confinement 
 is to be attributed, is a question that has exercised much of 
 adverse zeal and learning. It should more probably be ascribed 
 to the joint influence of both. But, whatever might have been 
 the cause, with Ferrara will always be associated the fame and 
 misfortunes of Tasso. At Sorento and Naples his young genius 
 had its dawn. At Rome his troubled spirit found its last repose, 
 from the caprices and persecutions of the world. But it was in 
 Ferrara it shone forth in all the fulness of its meridian splendour, 
 and there, too, it was first seen to be crossed by that eclipse, 
 which had gradually dimmed its lustre towards its decline. 
 From the residence of Ariosto, too, Ferrara derives a large 
 portion of its literary glory. The chair which he usually 
 occupied is kept in the library as an object of great curiosity. 
 His manuscripts, especially those of Orlando, are preserved with 
 care. The singular industry with which he wrought his poems 
 to the perfection which they exhibit, is illustrated by one stanza 
 appearing written in three successive different forms, a circum- 
 stance which so filled Lord Byron with admiration, as to have 
 occasioned him to bedew the manuscript with his tears. 
 
 After Rome and Loretto — I except neither Florence nor 
 Naples — Venice is the city which excites most interest. On 
 Monday morning I set out from Chioggia, a flourishing town on 
 the borders of the Lagune. Towards evening, the floating city 
 rose before my view ; and, on seeing it, as if springing from the 
 bosom of the deep, I fancied the figures of the ancient poets 
 endued with reality, nor could I deem the birth of Thetis so wild 
 a fiction, on witnessing the living energy of this daughter of the 
 ocean. We entered by the canal fronting St. Mark’s, by the 
 time the sun was going down, and casting his setting splendours 
 on the domes and pinnacles that broke on our sight, with all the 
 suddenness and variety of enchantment. As we entered the 
 magnificent basin, the Church of St. George was on our right ; 
 and, on our left, those of the Redentore, and Santa Maria della 
 Salute, with its triple dome ; while the lofty Campanile, in front, 
 directed our attention to the Cathedral of St. Mark, and the 
 open space opposite enabled us to catch a passing glance at the 
 celebrated horses placed over its portico — the trophies of the 
 
302 
 
 LETTER LXIII. 
 
 aged Dandalo. and his Venetians, over the imperial power of 
 Constantinople. 
 
 Every thing about Venice shares in the magic of its origin. 
 On the confines of land and water, it has a mixture of the two 
 elements, its streets being accessible only by gondolas ; and, 
 forming the boundary between the East and West, you pereeive 
 how largely its language, its manners, and, particularly, its 
 architecture, have borrowed from an oriental origin. Passing 
 under the far-famed Rialto, you cannot but admire the magni- 
 ficent palaces that line the canal, particularly those of Pizarro 
 and Rezzonico, bearing traces of Saracenic origin in the arches, 
 formed into pointed Gothic by the intersection of the Grecian 
 curves. The palace of the last of the Doges was shown us 
 along the canal. Like the banking-house in College-green, it 
 looked like the sepulchre of national freedom. Having waited 
 on the Patriarch Monaco, whose virtues have been since 
 rewarded with the purple, I experienced from him a kind and 
 hospitable attention. His amiable simplicity and warmth of 
 manner reminded me of some of the good ecclesiastics of Ire- 
 land ; nor was he at all insensible to the sufferings and fortitude 
 of the people of our country, in preserving, amidst the direst 
 persecution, the sacred inheritance of their religion. 
 
 During a week’s sojourn in the amphibious city, I visited its 
 principal churches — some of them the monuments of the taste 
 and genius of Palladio, and rivaling those of Rome, in the pro- 
 ductions with which the pencils of Titian, and Tintoretto, and 
 Paul of Verona, and other masters of the Venetian school, had 
 adorned them. The academy of the fine arts, as well as the 
 churches, furnish beautiful specimens of their works. In the 
 school of St. Rock is to be seen the famous Crucifixion of Tin- 
 toretto, representing the city of Jerusalem, and the various 
 groups of soldiers and pious people, who are supposed to have 
 assisted at the tragic scene. The composition gave full scope to 
 his imaginative powers, especially in the variety of costume. 
 The academy of the fine arts contains the Assumption of Titian, 
 which reminded me of the Transfiguration of Raphael, being 
 both among the master productions of men who had no superiors 
 in the art — the latter famed for the unrivalled grace and deli- 
 cacy of his designs and figures, and the former for the exquisite 
 freshness and fascination of his colouring. 
 
 The Doge’s palace and library, the senate-house and dungeons, 
 approached by the “ Ponte de Suspiri,” cannot be viewed with- 
 out alternate feelings of a different kind, as they recal the 
 memory of the glory and of the crimes of Venice. I was told, 
 on entering the dungeon of the Inquisition, that Lord Byron 
 begged of his conductor to be left locked there alone for an 
 entire hour, that he might feel more vividly, and paint more 
 
LETTER LX1II. 
 
 303 
 
 strongly, all its horrors. It was an experiment requiring a des- 
 perate courage to submit to ; for on this side the grave a more 
 terrible fate could scarcely be imagined, than to hear the sullen 
 jar of the closing portals of this terrible dungeon grating on 
 one’s ear, and awakening in the imagination all the hideous 
 images of its history. 
 
 In one of the churches dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, a 
 simple slab of marble placed on the floor, points to the resting- 
 place of Titian. In the same church is to be seen a fine monu- 
 ment to Canova, the eminent sculptor, which he is said to have 
 designed for this distinguished painter. On one side is repre- 
 sented a group of six females weeping, emblematic of the loss 
 which the arts sustained in his death. It is said that one of the 
 most beautiful of Mozart’s Masses, which he composed for another, 
 was sung for the first time at his own death ; and by a similar 
 coincidence, while Canova had meditated a suitable monument 
 for Titian, he was unconsciously labouring for the erection of his 
 own. 
 
 In the weeping figures which form the group of Canova’s 
 monument may be found appropriate emblems of the fate of the 
 fallen city. It retains, it is true, the name of Venice, but, like 
 Tyre and Carthage, its glory is fled — it is no longer the Venice 
 of the middle ages. The dominion of the Queen of the Ocean 
 is passed away, and she sits a solitary city, repining with unavail- 
 ing regret over her departed glory. Though the name has an 
 historical claim, it is one which must be confessed, is associated 
 with misdeeds of the blackest atrocity. Crime is sure, even in 
 this world, to find its retribution. Those of the Queen of the 
 Adriatic have not been unavenged. The winds which were wooed 
 by her successful commerce, now waft the sails of more pros- 
 perous cities. The stranger is supreme in her chambers of com- 
 merce, and among the imported officials, the insolent tones of 
 the Teutonic are as loudly heard over the humbler and more 
 harmonious speech of the natives, as is in Ireland the Saxon 
 dialect of the same tongue over the Irish, kindred to the Italian, 
 both owning the Celtic stock as their genuine origin. The fate 
 of Venice is another warning which history reads to proud and 
 oppressive nations to practice justice ; otherwise that the height 
 of their guilty power is but the precursor of their rapid decline. 
 
 John, Bishop op Maronia. 
 
304 
 
 LETTER LXIV. 
 
 LETTER LXIV. 
 
 Trent, September 22 , 1832 . 
 
 This is another, and the last in the series, of that class of places, 
 to which I have been conducted, by reverence for religion, and 
 admiration of those great and holy men, by whom its majesty 
 has been asserted. With the vindication of the most sacred 
 dogmas of the Catholic faith, the fame of the chief cities of the 
 East and West is associated. To Nice belongs the glory of 
 asserting the Godhead of the Son against the impiety of Arius, 
 the Lucifer of heresiarchs, who, like the rebel chief of the fallen 
 angels, thought to upset the throne of the Divinity. Constan- 
 tinople, with a kindred zeal, guarded the Church against a 
 kindred blasphemy ; and its Council vindicated the Divinity of 
 the Holy Ghost. The Virgin Mary, the next person in the 
 order of dignity, and nearest of God’s creatures to the throne of 
 the Most High, was assailed by the blasphemies of the wicked 
 Nestorius ; and to Ephesus was reserved the high honor, and the 
 affectionate duty, of asserting for the Blessed Virgin her just 
 prerogative, of Mother of God. In the refutation of subordinate 
 errors — offshoots from those huge impieties to which I have just 
 alluded — the same cities, together with that of Chalcedon, have, 
 through the zeal of the Fathers, assembled in their respective 
 General Councils, under the guardian spirit of the Apostolic 
 See, won the gratitude and reverence of the Catholic Church. 
 
 Nor was the West behind in the sacred duty of condemning 
 those sectaries, who strove to darken its faith, and defile its 
 purity, by their errors or their crimes. Rome, ever foremost in 
 every project and achievement, having for their object the pro- 
 tection of religion or the improvement of society, has had its 
 General Councils ; and the four Councils of Lateran, held during 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, attest its untiring solicitude 
 for the purity of the faith, as well as the freedom of Christen- 
 dom, which were then in imminent danger, from intestine 
 sectaries, as well as the more overwhelming power of the 
 Saracens. Lyons and Florence had, too, their share of distinc- 
 tion among the cities rendered celebrated by Ecumenical Coun- 
 cils ; and Constance had the singular good fortune of closing, by 
 its Council, that terrible schism, which had rent the Church in 
 twain, and of which the seeds were already cast in the Council 
 of Vienna, its predecessor, the Pope who presided there having 
 already fixed his Pontifical seat in Avignon, in the neighbour- 
 hood of Bourdeaux, of which see he was archbishop. 
 
 Yet, of all those cities, so entitled to reverence, there is none 
 
LETTER LX1V. 
 
 305 
 
 more conspicuous than the city of Trent, and no General Council 
 has laboured with more efficiency for the protection and elucida- 
 tion of the Catholic faith. In some of the preceding Synods, the 
 giant of heresy was smitten and laid prostrate by the sword of 
 the Spirit, which was wielded with energy by the assembled 
 Fathers. Soon, however, he started up under another form, and 
 again ravaged the Church, until extinguished by the exercise of 
 a similar authority. It was reserved for the Fathers of Trent, 
 not only to proscribe one error, but to crush it under every form. 
 They traversed the wide and varied ground of the canon of the 
 inspired Scriptures, the dogmas of faith and principles of morality 
 furnishing weapons to repel every assailant, and leaving no corner 
 in which the enemies of the faith might take shelter. The 
 sixteenth century is charged with ignorance, by the advocates of 
 licentiousness and disorder. The acts of the Council of Trent 
 furnish the most effectual refutation of their calumnies. Not 
 only do they stand out, a prominent and imperishable monument 
 of the faith, which they vindicate, but also of the learning, the 
 eloquence, and the purity of classical doctrine, which distin- 
 guished a large portion of those eminent and venerable Fathers. 
 
 It is no wonder if, oir leaving Venice, I should be impatient to 
 reach a city, possessing such lively interest. Had my rout been 
 reversed, and were I entering Italy for the first time, instead of 
 departing, I should have loitered longer among the classic monu- 
 ments of Vicenza, of Padua, and Verona. My mind was too 
 familiar to such specimens of excellence, as even they contained, 
 to detain me as long as I should stop, in different circumstances ; 
 but still those places were too much connected with renown, to 
 pass them over without a transient visit to their most striking 
 monuments. The banks of the Brenta were thickly studded 
 with beautiful palaces and casinas, erected by the “merchant 
 nobles” of Venice. To the soil of Padua, learning and genius 
 appear indigenous ; the name of Titus Livius alone, to whom it 
 gave birth, would confer celebrity on any city, and well has it 
 sustained the reputation worthy of such a name, in the number 
 of learned men, who have been reared in its university. The 
 peaceful pursuit of literature and the arts invested Padua with 
 some of the sacred character of an asylum ; and, accordingly, it 
 came, with comparatively little injury, out of the political con- 
 vulsions, by which the rest of Italy -was torn. The congress was 
 yet fresh in the memory of the citizens of Verona, as well as a 
 variety of anecdotes connected with the monarchs who attended 
 it. Those, however, will soon fade away. Besides Pliny, it may 
 boast of another name, that outweighs them all, in Maffei, by 
 whom the history and antiquities of his native city have been so 
 ably illustrated. His museum, and the amphitheatre, form the 
 principal curiosities of the city. No reader of Shakespeare 
 
306 
 
 LETTER LXIV. 
 
 would pass unvisited the tombs of Romeo and Juliet. Seldom 
 is the charm of association found so illustrative, in lending 
 importance to objects, as in this very monument. Though 
 eagerly sought by every traveller, its littleness almost escapes 
 observation, while the mausoleum of the Scaligers protrudes its 
 huge dimensions on the view of every passing stranger. Yet, 
 with all those elaborate appliances, the name of the Scaligers is 
 scarcely heard beyond the precincts of the city, while those of 
 Romeo and Juliet must continue to participate in the fame of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 The road from Yerona towards Trent leads through a beau- 
 tiful valley, watered by the stream of the Adige, and rendered 
 agreeable by the succession of handsome villages and romantic 
 views, by which its banks are diversified. Among the various 
 places that were suggested for the meeting of the Council, a 
 more appropriate selection could not have been made than this 
 city, embosomed in the solitudes of the Tyrol, and shut out from 
 the surrounding tumults, by the mountains that encircled it. It 
 possesses some handsome churches — among the rest, the cathe- 
 dral. But by far the most celebrated, is that of the Santa 
 Maria, in which the holy Council was so long assembled. The 
 traditions connected with such assemblies long survive ; and it is 
 equally creditable to the piety of the inhabitants, and the me- 
 mory of the Fathers, that, in speaking of the Council, the adjunct 
 of “ holy” is scarcely ever omitted. There may have been, 
 and there was occasionally, much warmth in their discussions. 
 Much greater heat of disputation was often evinced by persons, 
 to whose keeping, interests far less sacred were entrusted. The 
 faith of those might have been justly suspected, who could view 
 with coldness or indifference the frightful inroads then made upon 
 the fold. Their zeal, therefore, furnished proofs of piety rather 
 than topics of reproach, especially when it was found, from a close 
 intimacy, to have been enlightened by learning, and sustained 
 by the blameless habits of their lives. The dimensions of the 
 Church of Santa Maria are comparatively small ; its form 
 simple — two coupled pillars on either side, resting on large 
 pedestals, and supporting a corresponding entablature, form its 
 only exterior ornament. Nor is there any profusion of decora- 
 tions in the interior. The only object worthy of attention is the 
 picture near the great altar, which represents the members of 
 the Council ; their stations, dignity, and costume, grouped in the 
 same canvass, yet admirably distinct in detail — a picture, which 
 sheds a lustre on this little church, which the choicest collection 
 of the most celebrated masters could not bestow. 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER LXV. 
 
 307 
 
 LETTER LXV. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. 
 
 Frankfort, November 18 , 1832 . 
 
 Sir — Amidst the fears and rumours of war which here beset us, 
 I found leisure to glance over the last number of your literary 
 journal. If I may judge from the extent of its range, the force 
 of your sympathy for the miserable lot of mankind must have 
 been intense, indeed, when it could embrace such a vast and 
 varied compass. Spain, and Portugal, and Italy, are made to 
 furnish separate articles of your invective or your condolence ; 
 and the Pope and Jesuits, not forgetting the followers of St. 
 Dominick and Francis, form the usual corps dramatique, to fill 
 up the pauses of the parts, and relieve the lassitude of the 
 reader. The lovers of freedom must unquestionably applaud 
 the benevolent zeal which leads the editor of this Review to 
 follow the fortunes of Pedro, and penetrate beyond the Pyre- 
 nees, in order to let in some portion of philosophic light on the 
 dark dungeons of the Inquisition. But, sir, as your heroism 
 appears so generous in going thus in quest of foreign servitude, 
 had you no eyes to fix on those who are labouring to establish 
 real freedom nearer home, and to break more galling fetters? 
 As you are so shocked at the laziness of monks, and the amount 
 of ecclesiastical property in Spain, how did the three millions 
 annually wrung from the wretched peasantry of Ireland escape 
 your notice, and that to feed a body dying of actual plethora, 
 for want of any duties to perform ? In all the history of sine- 
 cures in Catholic countries, pray point out such an example of 
 oppression, in ancient or modern times. As the Jesuits are made 
 the special subject of your abuse, and Don Miguel loaded with 
 execration for their re-establishment, could you not transfer any 
 portion of your indignant feelings to those ecclesiastics in your 
 own country who are clinging, with a desperate tenacity, to all 
 that is revolting in church tyranny and corruption ? And as the 
 Pope and Ferdinand are copiously abused for keeping up a 
 standing army of monks and friars, had you not a word of 
 reprobation against the ministers of a government who wield all 
 the force of the military to retain in the possession of their un- 
 hallowed wealth a body of men, against which the sound intellect 
 of the country has risen. 
 
 No; such homely visions did not suit the policy of your 
 journal, or the views of the party to which it has uniformly 
 pandered. More distant and excursive benevolence is more 
 
308 
 
 LETTER LXV. 
 
 suited to that Whiggish philosophy of which it has been the 
 selected organ. Loud and vehement complaints against foreign 
 despotism — deep and solemn imprecations against the Pope and 
 his satellites — commisseration, high-toned and impassioned, for 
 the Italian legations, were topics better adapted to parade an 
 hollow philanthropy, without the cost of a single drop of prac- 
 tical commisseration. Are not the poor ragged peasantry of 
 Ireland, who furnish, by the terrible excesses into which they 
 are occasionally driven, a disastrous evidence of their wrongs, as 
 deserving of your interference as the Portuguese, who are so 
 stupid, it appears, as to be contented under Don Miguel ? Have 
 not the provinces of Munster and of Connaught more pressing 
 claims on British wisdom and benevolence than the remote lega- 
 tions of Foligni and Ferrara? Such artifices will no longer do. 
 The days of the humbugs of reviewers are gone by, as well as 
 other delusions, under which the public has too long laboured. 
 All the affected solicitude of the Whigs for foreign freedom (and 
 it is only affectation), will only serve to expose them to contempt ; 
 whilst the anomaly of the Church of Ireland is already begin- 
 ning to draw forth the curses of every country in Europe. 
 
 Perhaps, neither you nor your readers are aware of the 
 intense interest which the wrongs of Ireland, now more gene- 
 rally known, have awakened. The ignorant writer of the article 
 on Sismondi’s history has concealed the fact, that the grievances 
 of the tithe system find their way into all the leading gazettes of 
 Italy, Germany, France, and the Low Countries. The know- 
 ledge of the state of Ireland is an antidote against all the 
 political poison, with which your reviews, as well as many of 
 your London journals, are generally fraught. You may fancy 
 that, whilst you prepare your literary rockets, on the banks of 
 the Tweed or the Thames, they will go forth, loaded with 
 destruction, as far as the Tagus or the Tiber. Their force is 
 spent ere they reach their destination. When your productions 
 are read there, it is only to excite a just horror of your habitual 
 calumnies, or a contemptuous feeling for your ignorance. You 
 are surprised at the belief of the Italians in miracles. It is no 
 wonder, when they find Don Miguel still living and fighting, 
 who, according to the various reports of the Paris and London 
 journals, collected into a pamphlet, now before me, was put to 
 death, by his mutinous subjects, eighty-three times! ! And as for 
 your pretended solicitude for their happiness, it only calls forth 
 a strain of the most sarcastic irony. What ! they indignantly 
 exclaim — represent us as priest-ridden, whilst the people of 
 Ireland, nay, of England, are borne down by the heaviest eccle- 
 siastical tyranny on earth. If we support a clergy, they are a 
 clergy of our own choice, who make us some requital. They 
 instruct our youth ; they minister to all our wants ; and, far from 
 
LETTER LXV. 
 
 309 
 
 forcibly seizing our substance, they cheerfully share with us their 
 own. We are not, however, thank God, arrived to that pitch of 
 enlightenment and freedom, which would reconcile us to starve, 
 while our substance is seized by an unchristian priesthood, from 
 which we receive nothing but insult, and then fall down and bless 
 a government, which would force us, with bayonets, to submit to 
 our fate. If that be the freedom of your countries, we envy you 
 not its possession ; it is well worthy of the cruel and hard-hearted 
 origin from which it sprung. Behold, they tell you, the boasted 
 liberty of France. They talk of freedom, whilst their acts are 
 replete with tyranny ! The press is persecuted — the poor in- 
 offensive Trappists are banished — and education is utterly pro- 
 scribed, unless administered by a board of sophists, who, con- 
 scious that there can be no tyranny exercised with impunity 
 while the mind is free, labour to make a monopoly of the human 
 intellect, and reduce man to the condition of a machine, that is to 
 move in blind obedience to all their caprices. And as for England, 
 with what consistency can she talk of justice to other countries, 
 while she denies it to Ireland ? Let her first introduce among 
 her own people the ecclesiastical reform which she seems so 
 zealous to establish at Rome. It will be high time to turn her 
 attention to our condition, when she frees her own subjects from 
 that load of ecclesiastical despotism, which neither the people of 
 Italy or Portugal would endure. 
 
 Do then, Mr. Editor, as you are, doubtless, a man of philan- 
 thropy — for charity is not a term sufficiently philosophical — 
 condescend to turn your attention for some time, from the classic 
 regions of Italy, to the more important affairs of home. Lend a 
 helping hand to your kinsmen on the other side of the channel 
 (for you are aware that we are descended from the same old 
 Scythian stock), before you trouble us with the affairs of Spain. 
 It must be, no doubt, a kindred sympathy with the old race from 
 which we are supposed to be sprung, that you are so exceedingly 
 solicitous for the happiness of that gallant people. This, how- 
 ever, is a legendary tale, too old for the enlightened meridian of 
 Edinburgh. But should so much credulity finger still among 
 you, as to think we are sprung of the same Milesian fine, still 
 we, as of a more recent origin, are nearer cousins than the 
 Spaniards, and have, therefore, a stronger claim to your support. 
 Help us in our present difficulties, and we will forgive all the 
 injurious things you have hitherto said about Ireland. Nay, we 
 will waive the old disputes about our primogeniture, and not 
 quarrel as yet about the number of saints, of which Dempster 
 thought to rob us, some of which, no doubt, will modestly be 
 transferred into your new Scottish biography. 
 
 But if we cannot have your valuable assistance, cease, at least, 
 to write about subjects of which you are most profoundly igno- 
 
310 
 
 LETTFR LXV. 
 
 rant, until you receive more accurate information. There arc, in 
 the last number of your journal, evident symptoms of that super- 
 annuated imbecility, to which all things human are doomed. The 
 story about the Spanish monks has not even the merit of a well- 
 imagined or a well-told fiction. Such a clumsy tale, of which the 
 inventor would be scoured from any court of justice, defeats its 
 own malignity. It is well worthy of those travellers, whose 
 object is only to minister to the appetite for scandal that has 
 diseased the mind of the country, and who, in the unblushing 
 effrontery with which they retail foreign corruption, seem to 
 forget that they often furnish evidence of their own. The tale, 
 however, is a proof that the spell of Scottish fiction is broken, and 
 that the potent spirit which presided over its literature, and lent 
 it all its charms, is withdrawn. 
 
 As for Italy, the article regarding, it has as many blunders as 
 it has paragraphs. Some French pirates take forcible possession 
 of Ancona, and the sovereign subjects of Louis Philippe are sent 
 into a peaceful territory, to indemnify themselves, by foreign 
 license, for the political fetters which the Citizen King was forging 
 for them at home. They meet some congenial minds, fit con- 
 ductors of their spirit, and those few are supposed to represent 
 the people of the legations. An envoy is sent to Rome, to 
 mediate between the Pope and his people, and because the Sove- 
 reign Pontiff does not adopt the diplomatic wisdom of a Mr. 
 Seymour, in the government of his estates, the Times and Morn- 
 ing Chronicle must weep over the melancholy destiny of Italy. 
 How, fancy you, would they relish the intelligence, that some 
 Italian envoy was sent over by the Holy Father, to counsel his 
 Majesty to get rid of his usual advisers, and substitute a body of 
 cardinals in their stead ? The thing, however ridiculous, would 
 be as reasonable as the unwarrantable interference of the French 
 and English in the internal settlement of the Pontifical States. 
 But, in short, Italy is a theme which but few understand ; it 
 requires a tone of mind which few bring to it. Its hallowed and 
 romantic literature cannot be relished by the grosser spirits of 
 the Xorth ; and as well might a Mussulman, who pants only for a 
 sensual paradise, be expected to describe justly the devotions of 
 the Holy Sepulchre, as that the libertines who sometimes infest 
 Rome could feel or tell the meek influences of its government or 
 its religion. 
 
 Without, however, expecting any profound views on those 
 subjects, the readers of Reviews should, at least, expect for 
 their money a correct statement of history. The Edinburgh 
 Journal is too poetical for the tame sobriety of history, and 
 like the poet who synochrocised persons, whom time had placed 
 asunder, the writer in the Review introduces fancied personages 
 to the acquaintance of the Roman Pontiffs. Thus, Innocent IX. 
 
LETTER LXV. 
 
 311 
 
 is brought into contact with persons with whom he had no ac- 
 quaintance. Do not in future rely on the statements of those 
 who ought to read before they commence writing, and who, with 
 all the ignorance of schoolboys on every subject, save vice and 
 folly, affect to dissertate with pompous emptiness on the gravest 
 subjects which affect the interests of mankind. 
 
 As for any aid you can lend Ireland, she will, I am sure, dis- 
 claim your services. It has abler and more efficient instruments 
 to achieve its regeneration. To your Review , or to any other, 
 it owes not a particle of obligation. With much of speculative 
 freedom in its pages, your journal is the real abettor of the worst 
 of tyrannies in its admiration of that utilitarian system, which, 
 by loosing legislators from the force of anterior moral restraints, 
 would leave the people at the mercy of the most sanguinary 
 enactments. You boast of your Vattels, and your Locks, and 
 your Benthams, and your Paleys, and your Bacons, until some 
 of your ignorant readers, who never read them, are brought into 
 the belief that their maxims are the safeguards of happiness and 
 freedom. If we are to judge of the tree by its fruits, all the 
 laws that have been passed, and are still perpetuated by the 
 admirers of those writers, are anything but a model of that 
 meekness and justice which should characterize a code of Christian 
 legislation. Where, but under the iron sway of Bentham’s phi- 
 losophy, could the public prints ascribe the following sentence to 
 a judge of the land — “ I know of no such monster as unjust law.” 
 A more monstrous sentence, and one more fraught with des- 
 potism, was never ascribed to any individual. Here law and 
 justice are at once identified, and the most unjust and cruel 
 enactments bring the force of moral obligation. What a pity 
 the Catholics of Ireland during the last, and the Christians in 
 the first ages, did not become acquainted with this philosophy, 
 which would have saved them the foolish expenditure of their 
 property and blood, by teaching them that there was no such 
 monster as an unjust law. For me, I prefer the old theology of 
 Thomas Aquinas — a name that is never introduced into the 
 fashionable pages of your Review, but for ridicule — to the 
 maxims of sophists, who acknowledge no law superior to their 
 own. “ A tyrannical government is unjust, being ordained, not 
 for the common good, but for the private good of the ruler ; 
 therefore the disturbance of this rule is not sedition, unless when 
 the overthrow of tyranqy is so inordinately pursued, that the 
 multitude suffers more from the disturbance than from the ex- 
 istence of the government.” Probably you were not aware that 
 such maxims of civil liberty are to be found amidst what is called 
 the slavish rubbish of the scholastics of the middle ages. They 
 have been misrepresented as the foes of political freedom, and 
 moderns have taken the merit of discovering principles which, 
 
312 
 
 LETTER LXV. 
 
 without any of the alloy by which they mix them, may be* 
 drawn from the rich sources of Catholic jurisprudence. 
 
 Why have I thus referred you to those fountains ? To show 
 you that the Irish Catholics, in the vindication of their just 
 rights, have no need to draw from the turbid streams of French 
 or Scotch philosophy. No ; instead of the vile materialism of 
 those schools, which necessarily make man a despot or a slave, 
 there is a vitality about the doctrine of a justice anterior to law, 
 which protects the rights of a community, by forcing upon 
 governments the necessity of their recognition. 
 
 Forbear, then, I implore you, from the silly boast of a 
 monopoly of political wisdom. Your reign is nearly at an end. 
 Rivals have started up that are largely sharing the fragments of 
 your empire. You may continue to amuse the vacant reader by 
 loose and lengthy paragraphs, which are ever ready to crumble 
 for want of any meaning to sustain them, and then strive to 
 uphold them by the buttress of a but , the usual resource of the 
 architects of nonsense. In despite of all the opposition of its 
 enemies, and the silent neutrality of its pretended triends, the 
 cause of Ireland is happily progressing. The Edinburgh Review 
 may abuse the churches of Italy and Spain. His brother of the 
 Quarterly may scribble maudlin fustian in praise of the pious 
 children of Oxford and Cambridge ; in spite of the artifices of 
 both, the temporalities of the Church of England are fast totter- 
 ing, and the wealth which has been so long detained in injustice 
 must soon circulate through the country, and diffuse joy and 
 gladness over the land. Property may be seized, gaols may be 
 filled, and the people may be fatigued by a fresh succession of 
 legal terrors. There is nothing new under the sun, and those 
 who have read history to any purpose must know that prisons 
 and torture, when arrayed against right, have only matured the 
 advent of that justice which they were intended to retard. 
 Disclaiming any attachment to the inveterate Tories, who, it 
 seems, are at last ashamed of their odious name, I have the 
 honour to be, with an equal disgust of the triple alliance of 
 French Liberals, English Whigs, and Scotch economists, your 
 humble servant,* 
 
 * John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 * This letter I first published with the signature “An Irish Catholic.” 
 
LETTER LXVI. 
 
 313 
 
 LETTER LXVI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 ON THE NECESSITY OF A LEGISLATIVE MEASURE, TO ANNIHILATE THE 
 ESTABLISHED CHURCH IN IRELAND. 
 
 Ballina, August 20 , 1833 . 
 
 My Lord — In the last letter I had the honour to address to your 
 Lordship, I promised to fix your attention on one measure which 
 must decide our confidence in the sincerity of Ministers to pro- 
 mote the peace and happiness of Ireland. Not that the measure 
 to which I allude will confer any positive advantages. These I 
 am not sanguine enough to hope, until the tide of Reform shall 
 have swept away the mass of corruption which has been accumu- 
 lating so long in the temple of the Legislature. Then and not 
 till then, shall the people of Ireland send forth their unani- 
 mous prayers for the total removal of those burdens by which 
 they are bowed down to the earth ; and leaving to England her fa- 
 vourite forms of worship, they will not fail to petition a reformed 
 parliament for the repeal of the Established Church in Ireland. 
 
 Until that auspicious period shall arrive, we must be content 
 with a mere negative boon. Instead of asking that the fire of 
 religious discord should be utterly put out, we must be content 
 with praying that it may not be heated by additional fuel into a 
 more dangerous activity ; and instead of imploring the Legisla- 
 ture to appropriate to the support of the poor a portion of that 
 ecclesiastical property which has been the curse of Ireland, we 
 must at present content ourselves with entreating that the Parlia- 
 ment do not give new power to the foes of the public peace by any 
 grants to the Kildare-street, or any other anti-national societies. 
 
 Your Lordship must be well aware that religious bigotry has 
 been the deep and bitter fountain from which some of the worst 
 of the evils of Ireland have sprung. Until that is effectually 
 sealed up, it is in vain to hope for a prosperous tranquillity. It 
 was from a sincere or affected purpose of stopping its poisonous 
 effusions the great measure of Emancipation was carried ; after 
 which period we fondly hoped that the foul traces of sectarian 
 ascendency would utterly disappear. Yet, to our bitter disap- 
 pointment, we found in the ensuing year the Kildare-street and 
 other societies, which are the pregnant sources of religious dis- 
 cord, remain untouched, and still continuing to poison the land 
 by an uninterrupted stream of bigotry and rancour. 
 
 Whilst those remnants of ancient intolerance are suffered to 
 continue, religious freedom is but a name. Whilst the people 
 x 
 
314 
 
 LETTER LXVI. 
 
 find these societies turned into engines of annoyance, they in- 
 dignantly remark that Emancipation was a mockery, and that 
 they are insulted with a shadow of a liberty of which the sub- 
 stance is withheld. The Earl of Fingal may be permitted to 
 take his seat amongst the hereditary senators of the land. None 
 can more sincerely rejoice than I do in the tardy justice which 
 has at length restored the legitimate honours of that noble house. 
 O’Connell may, if you will, be made Lord Chancellor — nor shall 
 nis country deem any honours the government may be pleased to 
 confer, to exceed the measure of his services. A Catholic may 
 receive the Minister’s support, and become a member for the 
 Dublin Corporation. But allow me sincerely to assure your 
 lordship, that however highly the body of the people may ap- 
 preciate the deserts of any individuals, they shall take no per- 
 sonal compliments as an equivalent for their legitimate rights. 
 As long as their children are left a prey to proselytizing bigots, 
 they cannot believe they were really emancipated. Their under- 
 standings are too simple and unsophisticated to be amused by 
 diplomatic assurances of which they cannot feel the reality. 
 They may be told that a Catholic Peer is to regulate the cere- 
 monies of the Coronation. They would rather see the liberality 
 of government illustrated in affording an unprejudiced system of 
 education to the children of the Catholic peasantry. In short, if 
 all the Catholic Members of the House of Commons were to be 
 honoured with special marks of the royal favour, the govern- 
 ment cannot win confidence as long as the intellectual resources 
 of the great body of the people are neglected. Professions of 
 an equal regard to the followers of every creed may be made ; 
 their sincerity, however, will be estimated according to the 
 degree of encouragement given to anti-catholic societies. Who- 
 ever wills the cause must will the effect ; and to regret the pre- 
 valence of religious dissensions, whilst the Kildare-street and 
 other obnoxious associations are fostered, would be like the 
 conduct of a man who would cut some nettles out of his garden, 
 whilst he should industriously scatter the seed by which the 
 noxious crop might be continued. 
 
 We may be wrong in obstinately repelling the boon which is 
 proffered us by those good-natured societies. But we live under 
 a government where thousands are suffered to go wrong — nay, to 
 riot without control through all the fantastic varieties of opinion. 
 Amidst this universal license, by which British subjects are 
 suffered to roam with as much freedom through all the crossways 
 of religion, as they saunter through their parks, why should the 
 Catholics alone be restricted ? Such tender vigilance over their 
 movements must imply a secret suspicion of the soundness of 
 their intellects. But, my Lord, if they labour under any intellec- 
 tual distemper, it is now too old and too inveterate to be era- 
 
LETTER LX VI. 
 
 315 
 
 dicated. It is high time to come to the conclusion that it is vain 
 to labour any longer for our conversion. The Irish people are 
 utterly irreclaimable on the score of religion. They have proved 
 rebels to the light of Evangelism, as well as to the torches by 
 which its pious followers sometimes tracked them into their 
 mountains : even the gifts of Mammon, which have been abun- 
 dantly lavished to procure recruits to the holy cause, were ten- 
 dered to them in vain ; and after such perverse and persevering 
 obstinacy, is it not wiser to abandon them to their fate than to 
 expend any further labours upon creatures so utterly undeserving 
 of the favours they have rejected? There seems to be something 
 in the very soil and climate of Ireland uncongenial to the growth 
 of error. Sect may succeed sect with the rapidity of the wave, 
 and the frothy menace which is but the presage of its breaking, 
 yet sooner shall the Atlantic swallow Ireland in its bosom, than 
 its ancient religion and its monuments shall be swept away. 
 
 These observations have been reluctantly forced upon me by 
 the conduct pursued by the associations of the sectaries during 
 the late famine — I allude particularly to the spirit that guided the 
 operations of the committees of Sackville-street and Exeter-hall, 
 in making persons of a particular creed the exclusive organs of 
 their benefactions. Surely those bodies had an undoubted right 
 to choose befitting agents in the distribution of their funds. Had 
 they made an open profession of proselytism, I could not question 
 their candour, though I might laugh at their folly. But as if 
 they were conscious of the shame of such an imputation, the 
 committee of Exeter Hall nobly disclaimed the charge of being 
 influenced by any views of sectarian ascendency. To prove their 
 sincerity they put forth a catalogue raisonne of the individuals 
 through whom their funds were transmitted. And lo ! by a 
 singular combination of chances, that defeated their pure and 
 unprejudiced resolves, not a Catholic, lay or clerical, appears on 
 the list of the publication. Nay, they refused to transmit their 
 funds through the medium of public and responsible committees, 
 composed indiscriminately of Catholics and Protestants, by which 
 judicious union, the fair and impartial distribution of the funds 
 was secured. I am not, then, surprised that in the allocation of 
 their funds none but those of the favoured creed could be selected 
 by the discriminating judgment of the committee of Exeter-hall. 
 The public are not ignorant of the volley of calumnies, that was 
 poured upon the devoted heads of the Catholics, at the opening 
 of that assembly. It has since preserved its character for con- 
 sistency. As it grew out of bigotry, in the same spirit was it 
 conducted, and finally closed in the religious rancour from which 
 it sprung — 
 
 “ Servetur ad imura, 
 
 Qualis ab incepto processorit, et sibi constet.” 
 
316 
 
 LETTER LXVI. 
 
 That the wandering agents of Biblical societies, who fatten on 
 the calumnies which they propagate, should avail themselves of 
 the distress of the people, to strive to carry on their system, 
 cannot excite surprise. But that some* of the ministers of the 
 established church should join in the crusade, is a proof of the 
 most unaccountable fatuity. How quickly the most mutinous 
 and repulsive elements of sectarianism rush into a common com- 
 bination against truth and justice, has not escaped the observation 
 of any to whom the records of history are familiar. Of the 
 disposition then of schismatic ministers, to annoy the Catholic 
 church, no doubt can be entertained. Nay, they would cheerfully 
 form a junction with the followers of Mahomed himself, in opposi- 
 tion to their Christian brethren. But what surprises me is, that 
 the fanaticism of the parsons is not cooled by their selfishness, and 
 that a pious solicitude for their tithes does not teach them a little 
 moderation. They ought to read in the signs of the times, the 
 fate that soon awaits the system. The spirit of reform has gone 
 abroad, nor is it to be supposed that after sweeping away the 
 nuisances that defiled our civil establishments, it shall leave 
 unpurged the Augean stable of ecclesiastical abuses. Little did 
 the dignitaries of the establishment dream that they were 
 uttering a true prophecy, in announcing the second reformation. 
 Like Caiphas, they were the heralds of a truth of which they 
 were utterly unconscious. Yes, we are on the eve of a second 
 and a radical reformation. The first reformation relieved the 
 Church of England of the heavy load of fasting, and penance, and 
 celibacy, and good works of supererogation, and the necessity of 
 feeding the indigent, leaving, at the same time, the poor clergy 
 oppressed by the intolerable burden of the wealth which Catholic 
 superstition had accumulated. From that period until now, the 
 church is groaning under the heavy burden ; anxious, like the 
 creature mentioned by the Apostle, to be renovated. Its prayers 
 are at length heard, and the axe of reform, a deep and wholesome 
 reform, is already laid to its many rooted abuses. The im- 
 mense wealth, which must be a stumbling-block in the way of 
 its ministers, shall be removed, by the kindness of a Parlia- 
 ment, which will labour to extend to the church the sound spirit of 
 reform, by which it shall feel itself invigorated. It is then, and 
 not till then, the doctrine of the Church of England shall shine 
 out in unclouded lustre, and the pious parsons, who now pant for 
 its livings, will no longer be reproached with being attracted, like 
 Heliodorus, by the gold of the sanctuary. The poor 1 shall then 
 rejoice, that the funds which have been diverted from them for 
 ages, have at length returned to their legitimate channel ; and 
 the prelates will be doubtless glad that if, like St. Martin, the 
 Bishop of Tours, they may not part with half their robes, they 
 shall at least be eased of half their superfluities, to clothe and 
 nourish the poor of God. 
 
LETTER LXVI. 
 
 317 
 
 Such is the second reformation, which I venture to assert shall 
 soon be realized. The Protestant bishops have supplied me with 
 the naked text, but as the text is sometimes obscure without 
 illustration, I, in accordance with our tenets, have hazarded the 
 commentary. Nor does it require much political sagacity or any 
 religious inspiration to be confident of the near accomplishment 
 of the prediction. The Catholics have been for ages tired of the 
 established church. The burden of its tithes seems to press sorely 
 on the orthodox shoulders of the Protestant laity. There are, 
 to be sure, a few old bigots among them who have been taught 
 that the tithes were the essence of Christianity, and who fancied 
 that without them nothing could go right, since they strove to 
 pronounce together the Church and Constitution. But this obso- 
 lete race are fast sinking into their graves, and the few that 
 survive are retiring quietly into their old habitations, or uttering 
 an occasional feeble screech at the painful introduction of the light 
 by which they are surrounded. The young generation are, how- 
 ever, happily atoning for the blind and bigotted fatuity of their 
 fathers. Their organs not being hardened before the circulation 
 of liberal opinions, they have felt and confessed their influence. 
 Hence, if we except a few hereditary fools, on whose intellects 
 there is as regular an entail of idiocy as the family incumbrances 
 on their estates, all the young men whose minds have received 
 any cultivation, are arrayed against the tyranny of tithes and 
 vestries. In short there is no individual distinguished for a reach 
 of thought, or integrity of purpose in the country, who, according 
 to his temperament, does not indulge in feelings of ridicule or 
 indignation against the mockery of supporting an establishment 
 in defiance of every reason for which an establishment should be 
 upheld. If his Majesty’s bishops confined their pretensions to 
 the lordly titles which it is surely in the power of his Majesty to 
 confer, we should as cheerfully recognize them as any portion of 
 the secular aristocracy of the realm. Had they ministered any 
 religious comfort or instruction to the poor flock, by whose fleeces 
 they are clad in all the glory of Solomon, though they might 
 still merit the indignant reproaches of Ezekiel, there might 
 be some colour of right for their rapacity. But to stand up in 
 a country, and to possess all the pride and pomp and property 
 of a peerage, without those hereditary obligations which are some 
 pledge of its popularity ; and again to arrogate the respect and 
 veneration of pastors from a people who look upon them as 
 laymen, and for whose property they make no return except in 
 unbounded contumely towards their persons, and the most 
 unsparing calumnies on their creed, is an anomaly in legislation 
 to which no country on earth can furnish a parallel. Waiving 
 altogether the abstract and original right of tithes, it does not 
 escape the obtusest understanding, that if they were formerly 
 
318 
 
 LETTER LX VI. 
 
 given as an equivalent for service, to build the churches, and to 
 feed the poor, it does not follow that they should still be continued, 
 when they have ceased to be converted to those laudable objects, 
 and when the only return which the people can perceive is the 
 cruellest exaction of his tithes during the parson’s life, and after 
 his death a legacy of a long and needy family to increase the 
 public misery, and alas, not unfrequently to swell the amount of 
 public scandal. Was there ever such a price known to be paid 
 for the services of any officiating ministry ! And yet for what 
 this gorgeous establishment ! to teach a Bible which even the 
 most ignorant layman can understand as well as the Archbishop 
 of Armagh — nay, of which the plain and obvious meaning is 
 equally accessible to all ! ! These things have not escaped the 
 keen perceptions of our people. They have begun to extend 
 their antipathies to the persons who come into the remotest con- 
 tact with the collection of their tithes. Nay, we learn from a 
 late instance that they have applied the law of Leviticus on this 
 occasion, by refusing to bury in consecrated ground the descend- 
 ant of a tithe-proctor in the third generation ! But this indig- 
 nant feeling against a system, which is at variance with every 
 principle of reciprocal justice, is no longer confined to one or two 
 classes of the community. It has gradually worked its way, 
 until at length it has taken possession of the entire mass of 
 society. All the Catholic and most of the Protestant laity are 
 opposed to it ; nor shall my sincerity be questioned when I assure 
 your lordship, and the public, that the Catholic clergy will not 
 waste much of their precious time in inculcating the payment of 
 tithes to persons who neglect the churches, and suffer the poor to 
 starve. The press, that powerful engine that has already levelled 
 more grim and terrific powers, is already planted against the 
 walls, and some of the most practised at the art are seen among 
 the most formidable of the assailants. In short, my lord, the 
 blows are coming from every direction ; the battlements are 
 already shaking, and the long-defended Ilium is “ nodding to its 
 fall.” Not that the purity of the Protestant religion is therefore 
 in danger. No, its spirit shall then find vent ; nor shall it be 
 any longer confined by those who wished to immure it within the 
 dark bulwarks of an establishment, and like the Pagan priests 
 of old, to feed it with the odour of the fattest hecatombs. 
 
 To this consummation the ministers of the establishment are 
 now directing all their energies. As if impatient of the forth- 
 coming change, they are rushing forward, in order to accelerate, 
 by a fresh supply of the fire of fanaticism, the rolling engine 
 that is bringing reform in its march. Instead of being angry, we 
 should rather applaud the labours of those, who are propelling 
 the progress of events. The vacancy in Dublin as well as the 
 violence of the parsons, are fortunate instruments in the hands of 
 
LETTER LXVII. 
 
 319 
 
 a powerful minister. Let them but continue, and soon after the 
 reform in the state we shall have to thank them for the blessing 
 of a second and a radical reformation. 
 
 I have the honor to be, &c., 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 ON THE IMPOLICY AND INJUSTICE OF THE THREATENED ACT OF COERCION. 
 
 Ballina, Ash-wednesday, 1833. 
 
 My Lord — It is a strange and melancholy coincidence : on the 
 same day we have commenced to humble ourselves in fasting 
 and ashes, we receive the appalling intelligence of all the horrors 
 that are to await us. Yes, “ and in all provinces, towns, and 
 places to which the cruel edict was come, there was great mourn- 
 ing, fasting, and weeping, many using sackcloth and ashes.”* 
 However we may be reproached with superfluous penances on 
 other occasions, the report of a speech ascribed to your lordship, 
 in the British senate, has removed the imputation of unnecessary 
 sorrow at the commencement of this season. The menaces of 
 hostility to Ireland which breathe through that report — for it is 
 to the report alone that I refer — have fallen like a bolt of thunder 
 on the hearts of its inhabitants. At a time when the hopes of 
 the country were high, and its people were indulging in the an- 
 ticipation of measures for their happiness, they suddenly find 
 that all their hopes are almost entirely dashed, and that one of 
 the first acts of a reformed Parliament, is to consign them to all 
 the terrors of military law. 
 
 I will not, my lord, now expatiate on the ingratitude of such 
 a requital. I will not detain you by observing that Ireland did 
 expect a different return from ministers, who owed the final triumph 
 of reform to the unflinching fidelity of her representatives. 
 These topics have been urged elsewhere with an eloquence and a 
 a force which, if they failed to induce forbearance from those 
 measures, at least convinced the British people of the justice of 
 the remonstrance. Besides, I will not urge an argument, which 
 under some circumstances might not be conclusive, since, after 
 
 * Esther, iv, 3. 
 
320 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 all, whatever might be the services of Ireland, and your lord- 
 ship’s obligations to her sons, ministers have a right, nay, it is 
 incumbent on them as a duty, to suspend the constitution, if the 
 evident necessity of the case required such a sacrifice. 
 
 Leaving, then, gratitude and services aside, and confining my- 
 self entirely to the question of justice and necessity, I must 
 solemnly protest against the evidence for such a measure, espe- 
 cially as far as a large district with which I am connected. If 
 the number of crimes and misdemeanours which crowd the calen- 
 dar of England, were to be summed up together, no doubt it 
 might furnish a plausible argument to a minister of the crown, in 
 demanding powers beyond the law. Such a confused mass of 
 enormities, huddled together without reference to time or place, 
 or any clue to trace them, prevents distant persons from forming 
 any clear or correct judgment on the subject, and their minds 
 are naturally filled with phantoms which are magnified by their 
 prejudices or their fears. As if conscious, however, that this 
 wholesale synthesis of crimes, did not supply sufficient evidence, 
 the reporter adopts the process of analysis, and after mentioning 
 almost the entire of the province of Munster, the county of 
 Mayo is specially particularized, as one in a state of dreadful 
 disorganization. 
 
 In the whole course of my life, I can solemnly declare, that 
 I never felt more surprise, to forbear a harsher phrase, at any 
 public statement, than that which represented the county of 
 Mayo in a condition that would justify a minister of the crown 
 to demand a suspension of the constitution. To this part of the 
 country, then, I will confine myself, not possessing sufficient 
 local information to discuss the state of other parts of Ireland. 
 The task will, doubtless, be performed by others, and besides, 
 the evidence of each must be much stronger, by being restricted 
 to the district over which his information extends. In the name, 
 then, of two hundred thousand of his Majesty’s liege subjects, I 
 beg leave, respectfully, to inquire what evidence has been laid 
 before parliament, to justify the tremendous powers that are 
 sought by his Majesty’s ministers ? It is not sufficient to say, 
 that some outrages have occurred : they have occurred, and will 
 occur to the end of time, in the best regulated societies, notwith- 
 standing the combined influence of law and religion. But what 
 are the outrages which, in number, or in atrocity, exceed the 
 ordinary average of the calendar of this large county, and prin- 
 cipally, where is the character of combination against law and 
 the constituted authorities, that can warrant the extraordinary 
 measures that are contemplated ? When documentary evidence 
 was demanded in the Imperial Parliament, that evidence is re- 
 ported to have been found in the notoriety of the facts. This 
 is not true, at least with regard to Mayo, for seldom, as will 
 
LETTER LXVII. 
 
 321 
 
 appear from many respectably signed petitions, were the poor 
 peasantry of this county more amenable to the laws. 
 
 In the case of Mayo, however, your lordship is reported to 
 have repeatedly and exclusively appealed to the testimony of the 
 Marquis of • Sligo. Even under the rigorous law of Moses, 
 two witnesses were required before any measure of condem- 
 nation was adopted, that could affect the lives of the people. 
 St. Paul requires two, and allow me to remark, that it is foreign 
 to the spirit of the Christian religion, as well as the British con- 
 stitution, to strip the people of an entire district of the protection 
 of the laws, on so slender a testimony. Of the noble marquis 
 I wish to speak with great personal respect. But it is not dis- 
 respectful to him to insist, that neither his lordship’s single 
 testimony, nor that of any nobleman, should be a sufficient 
 warrant to hand over the inhabitants of an entire county to the 
 mercies of martial law. If his lordship’s testimony is to decide 
 on measures of severity, it were to be wished that it was found 
 equally effectual in procuring measures of relief. I well recollect 
 that early at our meetings in the central committee of Castlebar, 
 in the year 1831, the noble marquis read a feeling statement of 
 the utter destitution of the starving poor, which he addressed to 
 his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, praying for the interposition 
 of the government. The reply, however, was couched in those 
 courtly terms of regret which generally accompany the govern- 
 ment’s refusal. Again, after a short lapse of time, the distress 
 became more urgent, and all felt alarm that property and life 
 would be endangered. At the request of the central committee, 
 composed of all that had weight and influence in Mayo — the 
 noble marquis, himself, Catholic and Protestant Bishops, and 
 some of the leading gentry — another address was drawn up to 
 the government, respectfully pressing the necessity of its inter- 
 position against the famine which was already felt in the loss of 
 many lives ; yet the whole fruit of this document, conveying the 
 sentiments of the most respectable witnesses from all parts of 
 Mayo, was a repetition of the same barren politeness. As the 
 last resource, it was resolved, that a deputation from the body 
 should wait upon his Excellency, to represent the frightful con- 
 dition, and more alarming prospects of the people, and to press 
 upon the government the necessity of snatching them from the 
 jaws of famine. Even there, the credence given to our report 
 appeared reluctant, and the prospect of relief was faint. I must, 
 however, in justice to the noble viceroy,* remark, how striking 
 was the contrast between his feeling urbanity, and the official 
 petulance of his secretary who seems better fitted to devise 
 measures of oppression than of relief. From Dublin, however, 
 
 * Marquis of Anglesv j Right Hon. Mr. Stanley. 
 
322 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 we were referred to tlie English government, and your lordship 
 may well recollect, that the noble Marquis of Sligo, and one of 
 the present members of Mayo, the only witnesses who, as yet, 
 have borne public testimony to the disturbance of this county, 
 were of the number that composed this deputation. 
 
 Why, my lord, have I entered into this detail ? Because it 
 bears strongly upon the present question of the state of this 
 country and proves that a greater mass of evidence is required, 
 in order to save the people from starvation, than to inflict on 
 them all the horrors of martial law. To justify the suspension 
 of the constitution, and to deprive the inhabitants of an entire 
 county of the invaluable privilege of the habeas corpus, the only 
 evidence adduced is that of the Marquis of Sligo. Yet, when 
 there was a question of arresting the career of hunger, and sub- 
 duing a foe which, with a fearful cruelty, would soon tear all the 
 bonds of society asunder, the solitary testimony of the noble 
 marquis was utterly unheeded. In addition, the government 
 required all the valuable testimony which the suffering districts 
 could supply. The gentry and the clergy, both Catholic and Pro- 
 testant, lent their concurrent testimony to the distress, and still 
 it cost us a long and expensive journey to London, to induce his 
 Majesty’s government to save a famishing people. 
 
 We want nought on this occasion but “ equal weights and 
 measures.” Let but the same cautious process of inquiry be 
 adopted in inflicting penalties, that was resorted to in meting out 
 a parsimonious relief, and I pledge myself that the justice of 
 Englishmen shall exempt Mayo, and, I may add, the entire 
 country, from the threatened enactments. The favores ampli - 
 andi, and the odia restringenda, is not a maxim confined to the 
 canons of the Church. It ought to form the most prominent 
 feature in the character of every paternal government, and 
 surely it is not too much to ask, that a people should not be 
 punished on evidence which was deemed insufficient, when there 
 was question of rescuing them from immediate death. 
 
 I repeat, then, most emphatically, that there is no evidence to 
 justify the harsh measures that are contemplated towards Mayo. 
 Nay, we challenge an inquiry, and shall fearlessly abide by the 
 result. I have some experience of the habits of the people, and 
 have recently passed through a large portion of the county, and 
 I can declare with sincerity, that never did its inhabitants exhibit 
 a more peaceable disposition, nor could I trace the least vestige 
 of insurrectionary movements. Yet for isolated outrages, which 
 sprung from causes utterly unconnected with disaffection to the 
 state, the people are to be deprived of the sacred shield with 
 which the British constitution has covered them. And what 
 enhances still more this tranquillity is, the unexampled privations 
 under which the peasantry are suffering. Those who are pam- 
 
LETTER LXVII. 
 
 323 
 
 pered with the luxury of Ireland’s produce, may well deduce 
 from its exports, an argument of its prosperity. Did they live 
 here, and witness the condition of the peasantry, their theories 
 would be soon resigned as so many fallacies; since this very 
 year, in consequence of the depression of grain, thousands, I do 
 not exaggerate, were obliged to sell what they wished to reserve 
 for seed, and the food of their own families. But I may return 
 to this subject another time. It is a theme on which I would not 
 now venture to touch, since, whoever has witnessed the happiness 
 of the people of other countries, who are, of course, calumniated 
 by the Whig journals that advocate martial law, cannot but con- 
 template with a heavy heart, the incomparable wretchedness of 
 the people of Ireland. 
 
 Yet, this noble peasantry, because they are becoming more 
 sensitive to their condition, and pant for the reality of the 
 blessings of that constitution which they enjoyed but in name, 
 are the objects of hatred to those who have uniformly oppressed 
 them. His Majesty’s ministers are imposed upon by false state- 
 ments, and now, as of old, “ many abuse unto pride the goodness 
 of princes, and not only endeavour to oppress the King’s subjects, 
 but not bearing the glory that is given them, practise also against 
 them that gave it.” The minds of all are filled with indignation 
 that the character, and, eventually, the fives of peaceable subjects 
 should be sacrificed to the interested suggestions of a number 
 of individuals, who can be found in the most peaceable state, 
 “ seeking by crafty fraud to deceive the ears of princes that are 
 well meaning, and judging of others by their own nature.” Of 
 persons of this description, it is not to be expected that any 
 portion of Ireland should be exempt, nor is the county of Mayo 
 without its due proportion. Even virtues, seen through their 
 organs, wear the colour of crimes, and the free exercise of the 
 elective franchise, which, without freedom, is a mockery and a 
 contradiction, becomes, in the estimation of some of those people, 
 treason against the majesty of their landlords. If it be the 
 meaning of the law, or the spirit of the constitution, that the 
 landlords should command the votes of their tenantry, it would 
 be a much more simple and summary process to invest the land- 
 lord at once with as many votes as he has qualified tenants. If, 
 however, such a proposition should be received with merited 
 ridicule, who are they, I respectfully ask, who violate not only 
 conscience, but the spirit of the constitution, the tenant who votes 
 as he will, or the landlord who labours to extort it, against the 
 tenant’s interest ? 
 
 It is by the solution of this single case that the guilt or inno- 
 cence of the people of Mayo is to be decided. In a moral point 
 
 * Esther, xvi, 2, 3. 
 
324 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 of view I have no hesitation in deciding in favour of the freedom 
 of conscience. But I am not sufficiently skilled in the canons of 
 political casuistry by which others may arrive at an opposite 
 conclusion. Should it be decided by any magisterial bench that 
 it is a high misdemeanour for the people of any county to vote 
 against the known will of their landlords, to that misdemeanour 
 numbers of the inhabitants of Mayo must plead guilty. They 
 proved they were moral agents, possessed, as well as their task- 
 masters, of the faculties of an understanding and a will, and not 
 mere physical machines, to be impelled without volition. As for 
 the violence which is said to have disgraced the election, we 
 challenge inquiry into the sources from which it issued. My 
 object is to vindicate, not to cast censure. The invidious task of 
 accusation I leave to others — mine is the more congenial and 
 Christian duty of refuting the unmerited charges that have been 
 heaped upon a large and unoffending class. Let, however, in- 
 quiry be made, and then it will be found who exercised most 
 violence, and what freeholders were cast into confinement, and 
 fatigued with alternate promises and threats, until their resolu- 
 tion to vote for the candidate of their choice was finally subdued. 
 It is also made a heavy charge, that the popular candidate was 
 favourable to Repeal. Why not, on the same principle, deduce 
 an argument of the necessity of suspending the constitution from 
 the peaceful counties of Meath or Roscommon? But waiving 
 the policy or impolicy of discussing this measure — for of its 
 merits there can be no question — it is not true that it was the 
 Repeal of the Union that kindled the enthusiasm of the people of 
 Mayo. Within a very short period we had two other elections, 
 each of which, without any reference to Repeal, was warmly 
 contested. No, my lord, the people of Mayo, like the people 
 of Ireland, do not care if the parliament were in the moon, 
 provided they were well governed. But, besides the national 
 grievances, in which they largely participate, there is a flood of 
 bitterness and corruption long overspreading this county, and 
 all proceeding from the same stagnant representation. Of this 
 the people are resolved to get rid by opening new veins as yet 
 unexplored amidst the large properties of Mayo, and drawing a 
 more healthy current from their fresh and untainted source. 
 Without such a transfer they are well aware they cannot get rid 
 of the secret hostility of many underlings in office, who find it 
 their interest to calumniate them, while they can hope to profit 
 by their oppression. Allow me to assure you, that penal inflic- 
 tions, far from breaking this constitutional spirit of asserting the 
 right of election, will only give it the force of compression — and 
 whenever the next opportunity offers, it will act with a resilient 
 energy in electing the members of their choice, which all the 
 undue weight of any nobleman will not be able to control. 
 
LETTER LXVII. 
 
 325 
 
 From any participation in such unworthy views I must, in 
 justice to his character, exempt the noble Marquis of Sligo. He 
 is incapable of wilful misrepresentation, and he possesses, in a 
 high degree, those noble courtesies of manner which fail not to 
 win the favours of the smaller gentry, who deem it an honour to 
 approach persons of his rank. But, in the late election, his 
 lordship took a decided interest, and it is not too much to sup- 
 pose that this very circumstance has given a strong bias to his 
 feelings, of which he is unconscious. Of the influence of strong 
 political prejudices in warping the judgment, we have many 
 cogent examples. Sir Robert Peel piously believes, and the 
 Protestant bishops are of the same opinion, that true religion 
 will retire indignantly from the earth, if they are deprived of 
 one farthing of their enormous revenues. Lord Lorton, as well 
 well as many other statesmen, equally conscientious and pro- 
 found, can see nothing but separation in a Repeal of the Union ; 
 and, doubtless, the noble Marquis of Sligo, from the long habit 
 that has associated in his mind order with his lordship’s influence 
 in Mayo, imagines that the county would return to anarchy and 
 barbarism, if he did not transmit its representation as an inherit- 
 ance. Has not your lordship, in the question of reform, en- 
 countered the power of such fantasies, over well-disposed minds ? 
 Were not you accused by many of designs to overthrow the 
 constitution, as his Grace of Wellington was before in granting 
 Emancipation, and as O’Connell is now in demanding a Repeal of 
 the Union. No doubt the fears of the opponents of Emancipa- 
 tion and Reform were as sincere as those that are entertained 
 against Repeal. Lord Eldon fancied that on the evening on 
 which Emancipation passed, the sun of the glory of England had 
 gone down for ever. Did not many noble lords identify reform 
 with revolution ? Did they not confidently connect the triumph 
 of anarchy with that measure, and, like the astronomer in Ras- 
 selas, who fancied that if he ceased his labours, the heavenly 
 bodies would fall, many of their lordships imagined that the con- 
 stitution would reel from its course, if the boroughs — the obser- 
 vatories from which they watched and directed its movements — 
 were once destroyed. 
 
 Once more, I beg leave to impress upon your lordship, that 
 the people of Mayo challenge inquiry into their conduct, in the 
 full conviction that their county is not in the state in which it 
 has been represented. Let the unbiassed of every class, who do 
 not hope to thrive by measures of coercion, be questioned, and 
 their verdict will be in attestation of the peaceful conduct of the 
 people. For that peaceful conduct, especially in this diocese, I 
 may take some portion of credit ; and while I reprobate the few 
 outrages that have occurred, and caution the people against those 
 who would mislead them, I do not believe that there is a more 
 patient or better disposed peasantry on earth, under so many 
 
326 
 
 LETTER LXVII. 
 
 privations. In their name, then, I protest against the adoption 
 of any measures that would equally involve the innocent mass 
 with the guilty few. The existing laws are sufficiently strong 
 for the punishment of the latter. Let, then, those laws be vigo- 
 rously asserted, and the delinquents feel their force, that it may 
 be evident “ that rulers are not a terror to the good work, but 
 the evil.” Should they, however, become inoperative, through 
 the connivance of those who are appointed to execute them, in 
 the hope of being invested with tyrannical power, I tremble in 
 looking forward to the fearful consequences. I will not attempt 
 to balance the account between a calendar marked by no unusual 
 features of atrocity, and the expenditure of treasure, and per- 
 haps of lives, that may follow the suspension of the law. I will 
 not anticipate wanton and vindictive imprisonments, and the 
 virtue of a sister or a child made the price of a brother’s or 
 a parent’s liberation. Such a picture would not be fanciful. It 
 has been pourtrayed in 1798, and other disastrous periods, in 
 colours too vivid to be effaced even by our humid atmosphere. 
 We are told by the wise man, that what was, will be again, and 
 experience proves that the history of the past is but the pro- 
 phecy of the future. It is no wonder, then, that Ireland abhors 
 the very idea of martial law. The instinctive feeling with which 
 every people revolts from the idea of tyranny, becomes stronger 
 here from its bitter recollections. I know the materials of which 
 the individuals are generally composed, to whom such an extraor- 
 dinary power would be entrusted. I know their education, their 
 feelings, their habits, and propensities, and am convinced a man 
 of probity and independence — not that blustering independence 
 of the world, which often consists in words — but that virtuous and 
 Christian independence which swerves not from the dictates of 
 conscience — a man of such a character would rather become a 
 voluntary exile, and dwell among the Turks, than hold his liberty 
 by the courtesy of such an anti-christian faction. I have confined 
 myself principally to Mayo, in order that my appeal might have 
 more weight, founded, as it is, on personal knowledge, and chal- 
 lenging, as it does, any covert calumniators to gainsay its state- 
 ments. My sympathy, however, extends to Ireland, and I am 
 convinced, though there are atrocities which demand the most 
 signal vengeance of the law, yet there is no necessity to suspend 
 its ordinary operation. Adopting the noble sentiment of the 
 Apostle, in the name of each of the poor people who cannot 
 speak for themselves, I appeal to the British Parliament — I am 
 a British citizen. Let me then solemnly adjure your lordship 
 to listen to that appeal, and to appreciate the earnestness with 
 which the people seek all the blessings of the British constitution, 
 rather than to throw them into despair, by depriving them .of 
 its protection. Should, however, the measures be persevered in, 
 contrary to the hopes of the people of this country, and to the 
 
LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 327 
 
 conviction that they are uncalled for, they have a strong and just 
 reliance on the fidelity of their representatives, as well as on the 
 sympathy of all the honest English members of the House of 
 Commons. They were wont — at least they boasted — of making 
 common cause with the oppressed of all nations over the globe. 
 Ireland possesses stronger claims upon their patriotism, since in 
 the despotism established there, they may anticipate their own 
 danger, whereas, by seasonably guarding against the inroads on 
 Irish freedom, they will be more effectually providing for the 
 permanent security of their own. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s humble 
 servant, 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 TO THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER. 
 
 ON THE NOXIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 Ballina, July 4 , 1833 . 
 
 “ Is wisdom no more in Theman ? Counsel is perished from her children.” 
 
 My Lord — Your lordship has been doubtless surprised that I 
 have so long remained your debtor. It is now some years since 
 you honoured your present correspondent with some of the 
 choicest specimens of the style of a scholar, and the spirit 
 of a Christian. The Political Pamphleteer was one of those 
 noisy things of which the innoxious buzz was accompanied with 
 no sting, and hence no surprise could have been felt at my for- 
 bearance. The scene, however, is since changed, and the notice 
 which I refused to Dr. Philpotts, I willingly bestow on the Bishop 
 of Exeter. Your lordship is now seated among the senators of 
 the land, surrounded by legal embrasures, through which you 
 may securely discharge a battery upon your foes, without any fear 
 of retaliation. Those privileges with which the law has fenced 
 in your lordship, I am neither disposed to arraign nor to violate, 
 confining myself to the speech reported in the public journals. 
 On the principle which commands courtesy to those who cannot 
 defend themselves, it would become a Christian bishop to be for- 
 bearing in his attacks upon those who cannot be present to make 
 him feel the folly of his intemperate aggression. By the grace 
 
 of the Duke of Wellington, Dr. Philpotts is invested with 
 
 the name and temporal title of a bishop. The mace of the 
 
328 
 
 LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 military captain has realised in its potency, all the fabled won- 
 ders of a magic wand, and metamorphosed for a season, the 
 sturdy and violent opponent of the Catholic claims, into the meek 
 partisan of his patron, and the advocate of all his measures. 
 
 Do not imagine that I question the disinterestedness of your 
 views, or the sincerity of your professions. No ; from the infancy 
 of the history of your Church, to the present day, its members 
 were distinguished, by the most admirable flexibility to the per- 
 suasions of power. With every new administration, fresh light 
 broke in upon their views, and like obedient planets, they quietly 
 revolved round the political centre, to which they owed their 
 existence, reflecting the orthodox colour of every adverse creed, 
 to which caprice or fashion gave a temporary ascendency. By 
 the Church Reform Bill, if we are to believe your lordship’s 
 reported speech, the coronation oath is violated. Was it not to 
 be equally violated, if we were to believe your writings, by the 
 measure of Emancipation ? Yet a seat on the episcopal bench 
 dissipated all your illusions, and reconciled you to a measure 
 which you denounced with such vehemence. It is no wonder ; 
 the same objects appear different, when viewed from a different 
 position ; the sphere of our horizon always stretches, as we rise, 
 and it was therefore but natural that Dr. Philpotts should be 
 acquiring a more correct and comprehensive prospect of his 
 duties, as he was gradually ascending to his present elevation. 
 In following the footsteps of his Grace of Wellington, un tempted 
 by wealth or honours, your lordship was only walking in the 
 splendour which the pure, disinterested truth of his reasoning 
 flung around you, and well might you exclaim : 
 
 Andiamo, 
 
 Ma non gia per onor, ne per richezza 
 
 Questa non spero, e quel de piu non bramo. 
 
 The friends of the establishment have just reason to deplore that 
 the prelates of the present day are not characterized by the 
 pliancy of their predecessors. “Is wisdom no more in Theman?” 
 that those public functionaries, instead of gently sailing down 
 the tide of events, should struggle in vain against its resistless 
 current. I am not one of those innovators, who would vote for 
 ejecting your order altogether from the house of peers. No, my 
 lord, I should rather vote for their continuance, in order that 
 they should be seen from their lofty position, and that the world 
 might appreciate the profound wisdom of the arguments, by 
 which they are enabled to sustain their cause. Provided you 
 keep not your light under a bushel, we shall rejoice at every 
 occasion on which it may be displayed, if it were only to shake 
 the gravity of the benches. Your lordship is reported to have 
 occupied much of the attention of the house, with animadversion 
 
LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 329 
 
 on some of the Bishops of the Catholic church. For me, any 
 uneasiness I could have felt at your lordship’s attempt at being 
 severe, was removed by the general merriment which your ratio- 
 cination is said to have created. 
 
 But before I advert further to your reported effusions, allow 
 me to ask why, in your lordship’s attacks upon our characters, 
 trust to the invidious and irresponsible medium of private cor- 
 respondence ? You state that I have assailed the Protestant 
 establishment, and predicted its downfal. Your lordship must 
 be well aware that there was nothing novel in this intelligence. I 
 preach and write in public, and in private I say nothing. Are 
 not the writings on which you once animadverted with the most 
 perverse ingenuity of commentary, evidence that I did assail the 
 Protestant establishment, and confidently anticipate its dissolu- 
 tion ? Far, then, from shrinking from any avowal of hostility to 
 a system fraught with such injustice, I must frankly own that 
 the establishment has been, and shall continue to be, the object 
 of every legal and constitutional opposition in my power. How- 
 ever irreconcilable you deem such a declaration with the obliga- 
 tions of our oath, I must protest against your competency to 
 expound its meaning, nor shall any prelate of the school of the 
 unprincipled Cranmer be the guide for my theology. You deem 
 it a crime that I have predicted the fall of the Protestant church? 
 Has your lordship read Jeremy Taylor on the Liberty of Pro- 
 phesying ? What ! the pulpits of the establishment have rung 
 for centuries, and are still ringing, with prophetic anticipations of 
 the downfal of Popery, and every successive Pontiff is to be the 
 last of the unhallowed series who have kept mankind in darkness 
 for ages, and we only laugh at such silly denunciations. Yet, if 
 we venture, from the unerring analogy of other schismatical 
 churches, combined with the signs of the times, to predict that 
 the fall of Protestantism is not distant, we are charged with 
 turbulence, and considered as enemies to the state. Why, how- 
 ever, such excesssive sensitiveness on this point? Why such 
 fears and trembling anxiety about the fate of that pure and 
 unspotted church, which has descended from heaven, and is sus- 
 tained by the hand that planted it ? Why accuse me of a crime, 
 in predicting the fall of the establishment, when the members of 
 both houses are among the prophets of woe, and the great captain 
 himself, like another Chalcas, confessing that he would not vote 
 for the second reading of the present bill, only in the hope of 
 rescuing the church from the danger to which it would otherwise 
 fall a victim ? Behold, then, its most faithful children press 
 forward to relieve an expiring parent, without whose solicitude 
 they confess it would perish, and it is treason in me to anticipate 
 the fall of a thing so perishable. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to remark, that whilst I proclaim an un- 
 
 Y 
 
330 
 
 LETTER LXVIII, 
 
 appeasable hostility to the Church establishment, I entertain none 
 whatever towards any individual for his honest religious opinions. 
 On the contrary, the hypocrisy which the wealth and patronage of 
 the establishment have fostered, suppressing the expression of the 
 sincere convictions of the mind, are a powerful cause of the just 
 hostility of every ingenuous individual. As long as there were 
 none in the house to expose the flagrant injustice of the charge, 
 how often were Catholics held up to the execration of English- 
 men, as advocates of intolerance and persecution ? Witness, 
 however, the revolution of opinion which a few years have 
 effected. Who were the most strenuous advocates for universal 
 freedom of conscience ? The Catholic members. Who espoused, 
 with most zeal, the cause of Captain Acheson, whose conscience 
 forbade him to perform service at a ceremony of the Catholic 
 religion in Malta, which he deemed incompatible with the sincere 
 profession of the Protestant religion ? The Catholic members, 
 who, on that occasion, sincerely spoke the sentiments of the 
 church to which they belong, since nothing is more abhorrent 
 from the nature of the Catholic religion, than to require of any 
 person any exterior act or profession, which is at war with the 
 convictions of the heart. Yet, until lately, Englishmen laboured 
 under a contrary impression. It is not surprising, therefore, 
 that the bigots of every order should have so long laboured to 
 exclude Catholic members from parliament, conscious that, as 
 soon as they should enter, they would dissipate at once those 
 prejudices, that kept the eyes of the people spell-bound, and 
 open them to all the fraud by which they had so long been 
 deluded. No longer will the Bishop of Exeter, and his episcopal 
 brethren, be able, by a cry of — the church in danger, to excite 
 the feelings of the English against the Irish people. Your lord- 
 ship may fling your torch, and its smoke and hissing will only 
 show into what an uncongenial element it has fallen. 
 
 What little sympathy you have excited when, in agony of 
 real or affected grief, your lordship has pathetically deplored 
 the reduction of the hierarchy. Why, you add, not make a 
 similar reduction in the ranks of the Catholic bishops? My 
 answer to your lordship’s interrogatory will be brief and simple. 
 The reason is, the Catholic bishops are at your defiance. The 
 experiment has been already tried. The time was, and within 
 the memory of many still living, when not a part, but the entire, 
 was devoted to destruction, under one fell sweep of legal annihi- 
 lation ; and yet they again walk abroad, clothed in renovated 
 splendour, to show the impotency of law against justice, and to 
 prove that it is not in the power of man to annihilate what 
 God has decreed to be immortal. We are not weeds, that 
 may be planted or plucked up at pleasure ; we are not those 
 corporate functionaries whose titles depend upon a royal patent, 
 
LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 331 
 
 whom “ a breath can make as a breath has made,” and who may- 
 be conveniently laid aside, like many other municipal officers, by 
 the same power by which they were created. 
 
 Your lordship is aware of the parliamentary jealousy with 
 which we were treated at the passing of the relief bill. Then 
 the Protestant prelates, meek and humble souls, affected to 
 fear that we should assume their titles, as they are now trem- 
 bling lest we should become possessed of their palaces. Verily 
 it would seem as if those pious personages had no other thought 
 or dream, but of titles and palaces. In the title of a peer is cen- 
 tered all their claim to veneration ; and provided they have a 
 palace in which to slumber away, like Boileau’s ecclesiastic, their 
 unprofitable lives, the church is maintained with suitable dignity 
 and splendour. Alasl those who argue thus, know little of the 
 genuine sources of respect and veneration. Keep, then, as long 
 as the growing intelligence of the times will permit you to keep 
 them, your titles, and your palaces. For us, we require neither 
 one nor the other. We have here no permanent city ; and as 
 for titles, leaving the vain ambition of such baubles to your lord- 
 ship and the Gentiles, we shall be content with the more Christian 
 office of ministering to the wants of those over whom we were 
 appointed. Assume your titles ! ! Why, our Catholic prede- 
 cessors were bishops of our sees for centuries, before your religion 
 came into the world. It is not, then, your titles we assume, but our 
 own that we perpetuate, in transmitting the regular succession 
 of the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic doctrine. No, my lord, 
 your titles are of man’s creation; but our heraldry is from 
 heaven. Our shield is faith ; its field vermillion, from the blood 
 of the martyrs, and emblazoned with the light of hope ; on the 
 two compartments of this divine escutcheon, are to be seen the 
 sword of the spirit and the breast-plate of justice, whilst the crest 
 that crowns the whole, is the helmet of salvation. With such 
 armorial bearings, the trophies of many a hard-fought fight 
 against the errors of every age, we may smile at opposition, and 
 in the language of the inspired artist of our shield, defy the fiery 
 darts of our enemies. 
 
 But though indifferent to your palaces, your worldly pomp, 
 and titles, we are not indifferent to the evils which the Protestant 
 church has inflicted, and continues still to inflict on this ill-fated 
 country. It is the prolific womb, from which all the misfortunes 
 of Ireland teemed in fearful succession. Is it not to uphold 
 this monstrous establishment, that the national debt has been 
 accumulated on the shoulders of the devoted people, and that the 
 most industrious energies are tottering under its pressure ? To 
 uphold this establishment, all the asylums of science, of piety, 
 and humanity, were levelled, and education exiled from the land, 
 as it was deemed essential to plunge the people into mental dark- 
 
332 
 
 LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 ness, in order to make them enlightened Protestants. To uphold 
 this establishment, the sacred ties of nature were rent asunder, 
 and a more grateful offering was never laid on the altar of 
 ascendancy, than the unhallowed first fruit of the son, whose 
 apostacy had plundered an helpless parent. To uphold this 
 establishment the poor were stripped of the treasure which the 
 piety of their fathers had gathered in the temples of religion for 
 their support, and the maiden was deprived of those sacred 
 retreats, from which the odour of her sanctity and virtue might 
 be diffused to scatter the moral pestilence which is exhaled from 
 the corruption of the world. But as this is one of those blessings 
 which, though preferred by St. Paul, I know your lordship would 
 controvert, there are other counts against the establishment, in 
 which I am sure to gain your sympathy, and that of all the 
 lovers of science. I am told you have a taste for literature. 
 Is it not to uphold this establishment, that Ireland fell from the 
 literary rank by which her sons were distinguished ? I do not 
 allude to any records, which might be traced only to national 
 vanity ; I allude to the more solid and imperishable monument of 
 stone, which gratitude has erected to their memories in every 
 country in Europe. Was it not, then, the malignant influence of 
 the establishment, that blighted the genius of our country, during 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the muse of Italy 
 awoke to rival the ancients, and France and England, as if 
 inspired by the sound, followed in a career of improvement that 
 approached competition? During this disastrous period, the 
 spirit of the country was broken ; and the men who, did they 
 possess the advantages of their neighbours, would have shared 
 in all the glories of the revival of literature, were doomed to 
 drag out a life of proscription — their only solace, to lament the 
 misfortunes of their country in music, which, even in this fasti- 
 dious age has been one of the first instruments by which England 
 (thanks to our national poet) was charmed out of its hostility. In 
 short, is it not to uphold this establishment, that Ireland is still 
 without colleges or universities, or any other school of sculpture, 
 or of painting, or of agriculture, that would tend to develop the 
 natural and intellectual resources of the country ? Trinity Col- 
 lege and Maynooth, are scarce an exception — the one a sepulchre, 
 in which, from a spirit of national antipathy, the ancient records 
 of Ireland are kept industriously buried ; and the other, forced 
 from its straitened circumstances, to dispense with some of the most 
 ordinary apparatus for improvement, and, as yet, even destitute 
 of a press, for publishing the works most necessary for ecclesiastics. 
 And yet, instead of expending any of the surplus fund of this use- 
 less Protestant establishment, in more ample endowments of the 
 imperfect institutions that exist, or establishing others in the pro- 
 vinces, the entire must still continue to be devoured in the same 
 
LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 333 
 
 unproductive manner as before. However, this is called a measure 
 of church reform. It may be reform for the parsons ; but it is no 
 reform for the people, who are no longer to be amused by promises, 
 which confer no substantial benefit. If the property of the 
 church has been hitherto detained, in injustice, from the use of 
 the people, what matters it to them into what numbers of 
 portions it may be divided? As a measure of any practical 
 utility, it has no value, save the extinction of the vestry cess ; 
 but as a measure pregnant with prospective benefits, it is hailed 
 by the Irish people. If they were not to anticipate fuller advan- 
 tage from the measure, they should, with your lordship, grieve 
 rather than rejoice at the decapitation of some of the Irish 
 churches. They know well, as has been recently remarked, that 
 it is to them a matter of indifference, whether their substance is 
 devoured by many smaller kites or one master vulture. Besides, 
 it would be an injustice to multiply the labours of those function- 
 aries, without any equivalent, if it were not intended by this 
 ejectment, to clear their lands for the plough of future legislation. 
 Well has your lordship observed, that it is not in any human 
 power to impose upon any person, against his will, the burden of 
 the episcopacy. On hearing such a doctrine, it is no wonder 
 their lordships should relax their gravity, well knowing there 
 was no danger of seeing it reduced to practice in the Protestant 
 church. And as for me, I fancied your lordship was, at length, 
 turning to the right path, which led to the illustrious examples of 
 a Gregory, an Ambrose, or a Bonaventure, who really trembled 
 at the prospect of the pastoral office, because it suggested more 
 awful ideas than titles or palaces. But though it is not in the 
 power of parliament, or the King himself, to make a man a 
 bishop against his will, I see no reason why they should not be 
 permitted, for wise purposes, to enlarge the sphere of his utility, 
 by widening his jurisdiction. Were his emoluments to be in- 
 creased, they might, it is true, supply him with fresh energy, and 
 enable him to sustain the additional burden ; but it appears an 
 inexorable stretch of legislative power, to impose the additional 
 cares of other sees upon an individual who receives no additional 
 peace, or quiet, or comfort, as a compensation. 
 
 Come ne cibo cosi non ricevo 
 
 Piu quiete, piu pace o piu contento, 
 
 Se ben de cinque Mitre il capo aggrevo. 
 
 After all the evils it has heaped on this devoted land, it is 
 some consolation to reflect that the legislative axe is laid to the 
 root of the establishment. The pruners of the ecclesiastical 
 vineyard have not read the Roman history in vain, and already 
 ten of the lofty plants, which poisoned, by their narcotic influ- 
 
334 
 
 LETTER LXVIII. 
 
 ence, the wholesome vegetation, are laid low. This, doubtless, is 
 a prelude to a further and more enlarged process of expurgation. 
 With every successive measure of reform, existing abuses will be 
 removed, until, it is to be hoped, not a vestige of the mighty 
 nuisance will remain, and the sincere and honest Protestants will 
 be relieved from the imputation of being attached to the Esta- 
 blishment from mercenary motives. Then, with the drying up 
 of their copious fountain, shall the waters of bitterness cease to 
 flow, and men of every creed unite in forwarding the interests of 
 their common country. The professors of every faith will pay 
 their pastors, in proportion to their sense of the services they 
 receive, and entitle themselves to the praise of being sincere, by 
 such disinterested evidence of sincerity. But all this reform 
 must be achieved peaceably and constitutionally, without violence 
 or infraction of the law. It will be brought about principally by 
 the honest and independent exercise of the elective franchise, 
 which was wrested out of the hands of one class, because it was 
 wielded, it was thought, by the Catholic priesthood, and trans- 
 ferred to another. In the hands of its present occupants it has 
 found trustees equally pious and patriotic ; and on the principle 
 that it is the religious duty of electors, in every country, in 
 every college, in every convent, nay, in short, in every corpora- 
 tion, of whatever character, to choose the most worthy person to 
 the public office, it will be the duty of the freeholders of Ireland, 
 to choose the most worthy representatives, and the duty of the 
 priesthood, solemnly to impress on them the sacredness of the 
 obligation. 
 
 Sincerely wishing you life, to witness this happy consummation, 
 to which I have alluded, I have the honour to be, your lordship’s 
 obedient humble servant, 
 
 John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER LXIX. 
 
 335 
 
 LETTER LXIX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL GREY 
 
 ON THE REPEAL OF THE LEGISLATIVE UNION. 
 
 Ballina, Feast of St. Felix of Valois, 
 November 20 , 1833 . 
 
 In vain kind seasons swell the teeming grain ; 
 
 Soft showers distill’d, and suns grew warm in vain ; 
 
 The swain, with tears, his frustrate labour yields, 
 
 And, famished, dies amidst his ripened fields — Rope. 
 
 My Lord — The preceding lines are sadly illustrative of the 
 condition of a large portion of the Irish peasantry. Like many 
 of the sentiments of our own national bard, their repetition 
 serves but to show more clearly the justness of their application. 
 When, on a late occasion, I called your lordship’s attention to 
 the clamorous importunity of the starving inhabitants of Mayo, 
 I did not hesitate candidly to declare that the distress was not 
 entirely owing to the bad season, but that it was partly traceable 
 to a long practised system of the most inexorable local rapacity. 
 And, accordingly, I strove to impress upon your lordship, that, 
 without remedial legislative measures, which would strike at the 
 root of the evil, our appeal to the British minister would be, in a 
 great measure, abortive. We might, it is true, succeed in ex- 
 citing sympathy for our distress, during one or two seasons ; but 
 still our anticipations must have been gloomy, whilst the prolific 
 cause of our distress remained uneradicated. That cause — the 
 truth cannot be dissembled — is not to be found in the sterility of 
 our soil, or the badness of the seasons, or in the indolence of our 
 inhabitants ; but in that hateful code of laws, which enable un- 
 feeling landlords, who may have nought of humanity but the 
 form, to seize the entire produce of the tenants’ labour, and to 
 fling them, without food or raiment, on the mercy of society. 
 
 Great alarm has been already felt, on account of the shortness 
 of the potato crop. It is not confined, this season, to Connaught, 
 but has pervaded, as the public journals attest, the province of 
 Munster. The southern journals, with a laudable concern for 
 the interests of the poor, recommend the keeping of the corn 
 crop, to meet the probable approaches of distress. Such a re- 
 
336 
 
 LETTER LXIX. 
 
 commendation may be wise there ; but as for us, you might as 
 well look for dried grapes or figs among the peasantry, after the 
 month of February, as search for any vestige of the oat crop in 
 their little corn yards, even if the potato crop did not extend be- 
 yond that season. No, my lord, not only is the oat crop gene- 
 rally seized for rent, but it is also converted by the landlords, or 
 agents, or drivers, for they shift the odium from one to another, 
 into a traffic of the most revolting usury. There are few of the 
 under tenants who are not obliged, during this month, to pay for 
 the seed which they put down last season, and to bring to the 
 market more than two measures of oats for every measure which 
 they had to purchase. Yet, far from being allowed to keep the 
 seed necessary for the next season, they must give it up, and 
 take it back again, in March, from the very same stores, for more 
 than double the price for which they had delivered it ; and thus, 
 if they have not learned it in speculation, they can give a feel- 
 ingly practical instance of the problem of the infinite series, 
 stretching from year to year, in an endless chain of the most 
 usurious rapacity and oppression. 
 
 I have had several communications from benevolent individuals 
 in London and Dublin, solicitous to learn the extent of the 
 failure. These communications are still unanswered, as I have 
 been anxious to convey an accurate report, from the result of 
 inquiry and observation. Let it not, however, be imagined, that 
 I am meditating a mendicant mission to the English people. So 
 far from entertaining such a project, I must solemnly and season- 
 ably declare, that to whatever extent distress should rage, I shall 
 never appeal to the sympathy of the British people for its miti- 
 gation. No, my lord, it is unworthy the character of any 
 nation — especially of one so favoured by nature as Ireland — to 
 be a periodical mendicant at the doors of another. I should 
 cheerfully volunteer in any scheme of benevolence, however 
 humiliating, were I conscious of conferring a benefit on my 
 fellow man ; but the impression of receiving relief from England 
 in the time of our distress, would be anything but serviceable to 
 the interests of society. It would completely annihilate the 
 spirit of our peasantry, which two such experiments have unfor- 
 tunately so much broken down, and prompt our country squires 
 to manage, with a more dexterous hand, all the legal machinery, 
 which they have already so effectually wielded in “ grinding the 
 faces of the poor.” 
 
 No, my lord, we require neither English benevolence, nor — 
 though the assertion may startle ears long familiarized to its 
 industrious repetition — do we indispensably require the aid of 
 British capital. What we require is a practical vindication of 
 Providence, that it may no longer be blasphemed, by imputing to 
 seasons or to climates what is the incontestible effect of bad 
 
LETTER LXIX. 
 
 337 
 
 legislation. We want laws in accordance with the unchangeable 
 principles of justice, which require that in every covenant the 
 obligations and advantages be reciprocal, and which, while they 
 secure to the proprietor the first rent of the soil, will not suffer 
 him to defraud the tenant of the whole produce of his labour. 
 We want laws to check the continual emigration of our wealth 
 into other countries, to feed the absent drones of Ireland. Was 
 there ever such an anomaly — to be begging food from the very 
 people who are fed into insolence with the superabundance of 
 our produce, and to be depending on another nation, whose 
 capital is swelled by the starvation of our own ? Yes, I make 
 the assertion advisedly. English capital is swelled by the 
 luxurious extravagance of Irish absentees ; the luxurious extra- 
 vagance of Irish absentees is fed with the exports of the Irish 
 people ; the exports of the Irish people — unchecked by any law, 
 which would secure a portion to the growers — are regulated in 
 their amount only by the will of the absentee landlord, and the 
 extortions of the home agent : to satisfy these incessant two-fold 
 demands, the entire produce is often seized and exported, and 
 hence it follows, that English capital is accumulated with the 
 price of Irish starvation. 
 
 What ! it may be asked, are the Irish peasantry, in case of 
 the recurrence of distress, to be permitted to starve from a fas- 
 tidious feeling of not wishing to appeal to the generosity of 
 England ? No, my lord, there is another alternative. We will, 
 then, appeal to your lordship, or to the individual who tills the 
 place of prime minister, to apply a remedy to what is not the 
 effect of casualty, and to check by opposite laws that distress which 
 bad laws occasion. It is not to be imagined, at the same time, 
 that I am an unqualified believer in the sanatory powers of law. 
 This superstitious credulity in the potency of legislative enact- 
 ments, without any reference to their adaptation to the condition, 
 and feelings, and habits of society, but, above all, to their accord- 
 ance with original justice, seems to have been one of the besetting 
 sins of English ministers, as well as the whole train of subordi- 
 nate functionaries who dispensed the oracles of legislation. Laws 
 seemed in their eyes to possess a healing charm which none was 
 at liberty to question, and I must frankly confess, that there are 
 many of the English laws which I shall not cease to execrate, as 
 long as one shred of them shall hang together. It is not coer- 
 cive measures, then, that can supply the Irish peasantry with 
 food, or avert the return of periodical starvation. No; of 
 the impotence of coercion to effect good, Ireland can supply a 
 long lamentable experience. The humbler classes have been 
 sufficiently coerced. Now, it is in contemplation to make them 
 amends by the coercion of their task-masters. The former do 
 not look for any such ungenerous revenge, and if it is resorted 
 
338 
 
 LETTER LXIX. 
 
 to, the latter will not bear the yoke with the same resignation. 
 You may pass laws to have the hungry fed and the naked 
 clothed. Your laws cannot work miracles, and will be of no 
 avail without a development of the resources from which such 
 necessary funds are to be drawn. You may coerce the absentees 
 to remain in Ireland. Their hearts would recoil from enact- 
 ments so much at variance with, I do not say the reality, but the 
 boasted freedom of British law. In short, you may entangle 
 yourself in a labyrinth of legislation, and still not find the clue 
 by which you may arrive at the end for which such a cumbrous 
 edifice of laws may have been erected. In the best regulated 
 and most prosperous states of antiquity their laws were few and 
 simple, because they were the production of men who knew the 
 wants of the people, and were anxious to relieve them. Mem- 
 bers of parliament chosen in England and Scotland, who form 
 the overwhelming majority of the British senate, have not suf- 
 ficient knowledge of the wants of the Irish people, nor anxiety 
 to relieve them. The first proposition will scarcely be combated ; 
 and, as to the second, as the English members are the represen- 
 tatives of a nation which considers mastership as a right, it can- 
 not be disparaging to their moral feelings to assert, that they 
 shall always deem it a duty, that the laws which affect England 
 and Ireland should be marked with the same relative discrimina- 
 tion. Your lordship may recollect that Patres Conscripti, was 
 the appropriate name bestowed on the most venerable political 
 assembly, that ever yet fixed the attention of mankind. It was a 
 name characteristic of the paternal solicitude which legislators 
 owe to the people as to children. No such name or relation can 
 ever attach to legislators who are filled with the ideas of 
 ascendency of one portion, and the abasement of another, of the 
 subjects ; and hence Conscript Masters , rather than Conscript 
 Fathers , is the name which, at least as regards Ireland, the his- 
 torian should bestow on the British senate. Your lordship, or 
 the reader, cannot mistake the obvious tendency of those 
 remarks. I have a confidence in laws, but it is in such laws as 
 proceed from men who are acquainted with the wants of those 
 for whom they legislate, and filled with a parental anxiety to 
 promote their happiness. It is these alone that can enact laws 
 for the benefit of the Irish poor — direct their labours into remu- 
 nerative channels — develop the hidden resources of the country, 
 and then call forth all those noble creations of art, of literature, 
 of science, and of civilization, which, without any coercive laws, 
 will bring home the absentees, and make them feel a pleasure 
 and a pride in residing in the land of their fathers. Other mea- 
 sures may be partially beneficial, but none can be fully adequate 
 to the nation’s wants, save those that proceed from the nation’s 
 real representatives, such as the Irish members will be in future. 
 
LETTER LXIX. 
 
 339 
 
 not such as they were in the Irish parliament, when the people 
 had no share whatever in their election. Without the protection 
 of laws issuing from such a source, the evils of Ireland cannot be 
 effectually remedied ; and while the people shall cling, with 
 their characteristic heroic devotion, to the throne of the British 
 monarch, they cannot be content with anything short of the 
 vigilant, paternal, and presiding care of a national legislature. 
 
 Scarcely a day passes in this unfortunate country that does 
 not bring the account of seizure of crops, or auction of cattle, 
 -amidst circumstances of cruelty that would fill even a Pagan 
 with compassion. If at home, those heralds of woe come as thick 
 as the messengers of Job ; and when you go abroad, you behold 
 with your own eyes the melancholy evidence of their statements, 
 in the filthy pounds choked with cattle, the only modern archi- 
 tectural monuments in which Ireland may vie with any country 
 on earth, and which do so much singular honour to the pious 
 taste of agents and parsons. Not long since my attention was 
 arrested by the sound of an auction bell, which almost ceases to 
 excite wonder, from the frequency of its repetition. However, 
 from the murmurs which occasionally escaped from the crowds 
 that followed this functionary, it struck me as a case of more 
 than ordinary interest. On inquiring into the circumstances of 
 this transaction, I found that a village, Carookileen by name, had 
 been filled with a troop of police, horse and foot, from this and 
 the two neighbouring baronies, together with an appropriate re- 
 inforcement of bailiffs, clerks, drivers, and pound-keepers, the 
 ever-ready instruments of their employer’s will in executing the 
 most obnoxious mandates. I inquired of what crime were those 
 villagers guilty, that the whole barony of Tyrawly should be 
 “ frightened out of its propriety” by such an alarming muster of 
 armed police. I heard their only crime was the accumulation of 
 arrears of rent, which, from the uniform low price of produce, 
 but chiefly from seasons of distress, they were unable to pay. 
 As, however, vague reports might be naturally chargeable with 
 exaggeration, I can, fortunately or unfortunately, refer your 
 lordship to the sworn evidence of a number of individuals, some 
 of them bearing the signature of Oliver Jackson, others of 
 Thomas Paget, two of the most independent and respectable 
 magistrates in Mayo, attesting the genuineness of their sworn 
 declarations. 
 
 To transcribe the entire of their evidence into this letter would 
 extend it to a fatiguing length. To abridge it would be to spoil 
 that touching simplicity with which the tale of those poor suf- 
 ferers is so artlessly and affectingly told. I must, therefore, 
 content myself with referring your lordship and my readers to 
 the original published depositions. 
 
 From the first of those witnesses it appears that her house 
 
340 
 
 LETTER LXIX. 
 
 was broken down ; that a boy of three years old, a cripple, was 
 brought out of it, and her oats given to the bailiffs’ horses. 
 From the second, that, in consequence of the seizure of her crop, 
 she was unable to pay for the seed. From a third, that the 
 potatoes were eaten by the police, and that on his complaining, 
 one of the distraining party observed, that he would sooner give 
 them to the pigs than to him. From a fourth, that his wife, 
 confined for lying-in, was obliged by the party to quit her bed, 
 and that in consequence of the ill treatment which she received 
 from one of the drivers, when throwing her out, she is since in a 
 precarious state of health. 
 
 From one, your lordship may learn he could not pay those ex- 
 orbitant demands, on account of the failure of his potato crop. 
 From another, that the inhumanity of the drivers had interdicted 
 turf, water, or anything whatever to come inside his doors ; in 
 short, from all, that a formidable party of police, horse and foot, 
 bailiffs, drivers, clerks, and labourers, were quartered for several 
 days on the miserable villagers. 
 
 What was their conduct on this trying occasion ? Though 
 smarting under provocations which would have maddened a less 
 excitable people, did they offer any resistance to the multifarious 
 ministers of the law, while wringing from the wretched creatures 
 the very necessaries of life? No : under the guardian spirit of 
 religion, and trusting for consolation to its hopes, they bore it 
 with unexampled meekness. Contrast this their patience with 
 the systematic incendiarism of the sister country, not when starva- 
 tion stares them in the face, but when they fear the subtraction 
 of some luxury, by the diminution of wages, and then let the 
 calumniating journals of England and Ireland pour forth their 
 venal denunciations against the agrarian turbulence of the Irish 
 poor. They had recourse for advice to their pastor ; and, as the 
 proprietor was a ward in Chancery, they were advised to lay 
 their complaints before the Lord Chancellor, who would not fail 
 to lend a patient ear to their petition. They, accordingly, ad- 
 dressed to his lordship a respectful memorial, which was seconded 
 by a similar letter from their pastor. 
 
 More than a month has elapsed since the memorial was for- 
 warded, and yet no reply has been received by the sufferers. 
 The duties of his lordship are diffused over too wide a range, to 
 enable him to attend to the complaints of the distant inhabitants 
 of the barony of Ty rawly. The Almighty draws good out of 
 evil. Though overlooked by those, whom they considered as 
 their legal protectors, those poor people are not bereft of every 
 solace. Such examples of heart-rending cruelty have a powerful 
 effect in enlightening the minds, and stirring the sympathies, of 
 the people. Their eyes are gradually opening to the causes of 
 such oppressions ; and they who but lately reproached them with 
 
LETTER LXIX. 
 
 341 
 
 ignorance, are now beginning to deplore their imprudence, and to 
 think that the people are acquiring too much knowledge. The 
 clergy, too, have been reproached as parties interested in perpe- 
 tuating this ignorance. We have sufficiently repelled the odious 
 calumny ; but if we have been ever remiss, it is now generally 
 felt and acknowledged that we are atoning for our past apathy 
 by our efforts to enlarge their information. Yes, my Lord, they 
 are beginning to know, and they shall know it better, that the 
 laws, under the sanction of which such unnatural cruelties were 
 committed, were passed in the time of those misrepresentatives, 
 who, as they felt no obligation to the humbler tenantry, felt no 
 interest in providing for their protection. Hence they are re- 
 solved to return the future members of parliament without having 
 their honest votes diluted through the deteriorating proxies of 
 landlords. They feel that their nonage is passed. They feel, too, 
 that the recollection of that period has no charms which would 
 induce them to sigh for its return. Hence their stern and un- 
 shaken resolve never again to trust their votes to the disposal of 
 persons who, by sacrificing the interests of their wards to a cruel 
 selfishness, have proved themselves such treacherous guardians. 
 The bell that announced the auction of the food that was neces- 
 sary to sustain the lives of the villagers of Carookileen, shall be 
 heard through the trumpet of the press all over the empire, an- 
 nouncing to every ten-pound freeholder to take timely precautions 
 to guard himself and his children from a similar visitation. In 
 Mayo it has had already its effect, by calling the attention of its 
 constituency to the necessity of revising the code of laws between 
 landlord and tenant, for the purpose of throwing into it some 
 elements of humanity. It has already reclaimed from their cor- 
 ruption some of the oldest retainers of the system ; it has decided 
 the wavering and fixed the host of honest freeholders in the firm 
 resolve of never returning under a yoke which was no less ruinous 
 than ignominious. The utter bereavement of the poor, under the 
 insolent oppressions of their task-masters, who are controlled by 
 no law in the measure of their spoliation, shall form one of the 
 many topics on which our future representatives must be in- 
 structed. In this letter I have not room to enumerate the others. 
 It is sufficient to observe, that the abominable tithes, the master- 
 grievance, the salient spring from which all the waters of corrup- 
 tion, even those I have mentioned, flow, must, in the first instance, 
 be really, totally, and unequivocally destroyed. We shall, there- 
 fore, petition for their extinction ; and as we are not believers in 
 the omnipotence of parliament, so far as to destroy the signi- 
 ficancy of language, the petition for their extinction will be not 
 according to Stanley’s construction, but the good old meaning of 
 Johnson’s Dictionary. 
 
 As for the Repeal of the Union, any aristocrat might as well 
 
342 
 
 LETTER LXX. 
 
 rebuke backwards the flowing current that is rushing from the 
 west, as hope to stay the strong and steady tide of opinion which is 
 rapidly ascending in favour of that measure, and on which alone, 
 even a trust-worthy member can have any chance of being borne 
 into parliament. The people’s hopes are by no means visionary. 
 From what they have already accomplished, they have a well- 
 grounded confidence in the extent of their moral power. Checked 
 as they have been in their advances to science, by a Satanic 
 penal code, of which the effects will be long felt, they have made 
 such a progress in arithmetical proportions as to understand the 
 rule-of-three, and accordingly the youth of Ireland are now 
 busily engaged in working this problem. If a given number of 
 members, returned by the influence of the people, have, in despite 
 of coercion, been able to extort such large, concessions from the 
 British minister, what will double the number returned at the 
 next elections be able to achieve ? 
 
 I have the honour to be, your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 < John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
 LETTER LXX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 Ballina, Feast of Saint Mathias, 
 February 24 , 1834 . 
 
 Jam fragor tectorum quae diruebantur, audiebatur, quum larem ac penates, 
 tectaque in quibus natus quisque educatusque esset ; relinquentes exirent : jam 
 continens agmen migrantium impleverat vias, et conspectus aliorum, mutua 
 miseratione integrabat laclirymas. — Titus Liyius. 
 
 My Lord — I have been recently favoured with a communication 
 from the Commission of Inquiry regarding the state of the poor 
 of Ireland, containing a lengthened series of interrogatories. 
 The issuing of such a commission, after the varied and palpable 
 information that has been already laid before the House of Com- 
 mons, is a proof, that when any measures of relief are contem- 
 plated towards Ireland, the government is reso ] ved not to rush 
 into them with precipitancy. Except when there is question of 
 
LETTER LXX. 
 
 343 
 
 coercive enactments, every other inquiry is conducted with a 
 dilatory caution ; and on this, as well as on the question of tithes, 
 education, corporations, &c., &c., we are sure to have a long and 
 tedious train of committees, commissions, and correspondences, 
 which, like the former, will probably terminate in disappointing 
 the hopes which they created. Yet they will have one sure 
 effect — that of adding, however economically conducted, to the 
 burdens of the country; and, though frustrate of any public 
 advantage, they will be quoted by the few whom they have 
 benefited, as evidence of the government’s benevolent inten- 
 tions. Few former commissions were productive of any good, 
 and that good so trifling, that if nothing more is expected to 
 result from the present inquiry, one cannot but regret the vast 
 disproportion between the wretchedness of the structure, and the 
 cumbrous expensiveness of the scaffolding. 
 
 The inquiries of the commissioners respecting the poor of Ire- 
 land we have answered in this diocese, by a series of resolutions, 
 solemnly put forth by the assembled clergy, exhibiting, as far as 
 regards the physical, medical, and intellectual wants of the 
 people, a state of destitution in all those particulars, such as 
 could not be found under any civilized government. The appal- 
 ling picture, I know it, astonished some of the government func- 
 tionaries. It has been asked, with real or affected surprise, if, 
 in a territory co-extensive with two counties in Ireland, where 
 the people, from nakedness and hunger, are peculiarly exposed 
 to disease, there was no public infirmary ? Such, however, is 
 the fact. As for schools or colleges, they are a species of intel- 
 lectual luxury, which the rude inhabitants of this country were 
 not deemed fitted to enjoy. The clergy may be accused of sinis- 
 ter motives in putting forward such statements. Whilst the 
 facts contained in their text remain undisputed, they shall be 
 content that any volunteers become commentators of their mean- 
 ing. But if so much ignorance of the condition of this district 
 existed nearer home, are we to wonder that the members of the 
 British senate, who never set a foot in Ireland, should grope in 
 the dark when legislating for a country of which they have so 
 little knowledge? And yet, with this utter indifference to the 
 accommodation of the people, the county books will attest that 
 Tyrawly has been, uniformly, as heavily burdened with public 
 cesses, as any other portion of the country. 
 
 Do not be surprised if, notwithstanding the speech put into 
 the royal mouth, the people should persevere in petitioning for 
 an Irish parliament. The inhabitants of Mayo, in common with 
 the people of Ireland, still recollect the comforts they enjoyed 
 before the Union ; and it is happy for the country that the 
 memory of those comforts has not yet passed away. The pea- 
 santry were then clad with the fleeces of their own little flocks, 
 
344 
 
 LETTER LXX. 
 
 wrought amidst the cheerful and virtuous industry of home 
 manufacture. They ate of the corn which was reaped and sown 
 with the sweat of their brows ; and the numerous streams that 
 intersect the country murmured delightfully on the ear, whilst 
 turning the mills, that ground it for their own consumption. 
 They then drank of the milk which was supplied by their own 
 pasture ; and though flesh-meat was not an article of ordinary 
 consumption, scarce a week passed in which the poorest were not 
 regaled with that luxury. This picture of domestic happiness 
 is still recollected, and becomes dearer by the sad reality of the 
 privations with which it is contrasted. Nay, those privations 
 become more poignant still by the insulting speculations of heart- 
 less financiers, who, whilst the people are but half fed and half 
 clothed, deduce from the exports of the country an argument of 
 its prosperity. If those exports consisted of the superfluities of 
 the produce, or were they exchanged for a corresponding impor- 
 tation of the luxuries or comforts of other countries, the argu- 
 ment might have some weight. Now, their beef, their butter, 
 their pork, their poultry, their wheat, their oats, nay, their very 
 eggs, are all exported to swell the incomes of idle and luxurious 
 absentees, as well as to feed the voracity of agents, who, uncon- 
 cerned for their comfort, and uncontrolled by the influence of a 
 local legislature, drive a merciless slave trade on the poverty of a 
 wretched and unprotected tenantry. In return, the peasantry 
 can procure but little of the manufactures of England. Their 
 cabins are unfurnished, and the wretched state of their beds, 
 almost destitute of any covering, will astonish the commissioners 
 who may visit them. I trust Mr. Johnson, a young gentleman 
 who possesses influence, and, what is more valuable, a sense of 
 humanity, to which many of our gentry are strangers, will visit 
 the Irish cabins, and then he must be convinced that in return 
 for the exports which rob them of their food, the peasantry have 
 not been able to furnish themselves with the most necessary 
 raiment. Let, then, the interested opponents of a Repeal of the 
 Union continually harp upon its exports, and deduce evidence of 
 a sound system from a continual process of systematic exhaustion. 
 
 But I must proceed to other more particular and pressing 
 grievances, which have fixed the minds of the people on the ac- 
 complishment of that measure. I had scarce returned here after 
 some absence, when my attention was unfortunately turned to 
 many scenes of heart-rending oppression, which took place in the 
 interval. The first was the ejectment of a large number of 
 tenantry in the neighbourhood of Killala, and nearer still to the 
 small town of Ballycastle, who were cast upon the world during 
 the most inclement season of the year. Whilst those who are 
 now treated with such ruthless cruelty had the name of free- 
 holders, and were flexible instruments in the hands of those who 
 
LETTER LXX. 
 
 345 
 
 commanded their votes, to perpetuate their own degradation, no 
 inconvenience was felt from their numbers, nor could the land- 
 lords perceive the advantage of letting farms on a larger scale. 
 When, however, they became guilty of the crime of asserting 
 their freedom in reality, and paid the deep forfeit of that crime 
 by their disfranchisement, a new light suddenly burst upon the 
 benevolent proprietors, and the cabins that disfigure their estate 
 must be demolished, to make room for more geometrical divisions 
 of their land. Little do they feel the extent of suffering they 
 inflict, and the lot of many families, thus banished for ever from 
 their homes, weighs not a feather in the estimation of those who 
 look on the state of the poor only as a problem of political 
 economy. Their misery does not meet their eyes, and is heard 
 of only with the most callous indifference ; and when an eye- 
 witness told me of the groups of the occupants straying along 
 the roads, and the shrieks of the children, returning again and 
 again to take leave of the roofless cabins in which they were 
 reared, I was naturally reminded of the pathetic words of the 
 historian, with which I have prefaced this letter. But I must 
 conclude. I could not comprise in this epistle the other still more 
 distressing transactions. Besides, I have read a most extraor- 
 dinary and incredible speech, attributed to one of the members 
 for Mayo, as well as the new transmigration through which the 
 tithe system is to pass. Can the ministers be serious in denounc- 
 ing Repeal, whilst they are furnishing such materials for the 
 necessary agitation of that measure ? 
 
 I have the honour to be, &c., 
 
 j%i John, Bishop of Maronia, 
 
 z 
 
346 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL GREY. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC CLERGY CHARGED WITH PRIEST-CRAFT, BECAUSE THEY SHIELD 
 THE PEOPLE AGAINST THEIR OPPRESSORS. 
 
 Ballina, Eeast of St. Casimir, 
 March 4 , 1834 . 
 
 ‘ ‘Adrian visits each province, one after the other, in order to inspect the rural 
 districts, and cities of the empire.” — Translated from the Greek of 
 Joannes Xiphilinus. 
 
 My Lord — The solicitude with which the Emperor Adrian visited 
 the different parts of his vast dominions, has been made a sub- 
 ject of great praise by his historians and biographers. There 
 was scarcely a province, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, 
 that did not feel the salutary influence of the presence of the 
 monarch ; and the fear or hope of such frequent visits, had a 
 powerful effect in checking the influence of the remotest dele- 
 gates, and inspiring confidence among the people. This useful 
 trait in Adrian’s character, has covered a multitude of gross 
 personal delinquencies. It has shed some lustre over a life which 
 crimes had tarnished, and made even the folly of his huge mauso- 
 leum be forgotten, in the admiration which his attention to his 
 subjects had excited. Were our kind sovereign to see, with 
 his own eyes, the condition of his subjects, it would naturally 
 affect the policy with which they are ruled. If, for example, 
 his Majesty’s ministers were to advise him to visit Ireland, and 
 like Adrian, to become personally cognizant of the respective 
 characters of the people, and the delegated depositaries of his- 
 own sway, through the different parts of that kingdom, they 
 would, probably, have never counselled his recent speech from 
 the throne. He would have then witnessed the misery which 
 overspreads the land — the country towns, except on a market- 
 day, silent almost as a church-yard, and the owners of the 
 deserted shops standing with folded arms at their doors — the 
 peasantry clothed in rags, and so wasted from habitual privation 
 and premature labour as to exhibit, at the ordinary age of man- 
 hood, all the feebleness and decrepitude of old age — the gentry, 
 a sullen and isolated class, estranged from their tenantry, holding 
 no sympathy with the tillers of the soil, themselves a prey to the 
 general destitution that surrounds them ; and striving to rescue 
 
LETTER LX XI. 
 
 347 
 
 themselves from that pauperism which is making rapid approaches 
 to their own fortunes, rather by usurious and other hard-hearted 
 liscal exactions, than by a generous co-operation in advancing 
 any enlarged system of prosperity, in which all might participate. 
 In short, he would behold rivers, the most fitted for manufactures 
 and for commerce, never disturbed by the motion of a boat or 
 mechanical engine — coasts, the most abundant in fish, never vexed 
 by any fishing enterprise — fields which, even in their present state, 
 produce food for his army and navy, appearing still neglected 
 in the eyes of those who are accustomed to the advantages of 
 cultivation. Besides those evils which would at once meet his 
 eye, he would also behold snug little houses with huge steeples, 
 erected at vast expense, with none, or but few, to participate in 
 their devotional comforts, and thousands who produce the wealth, 
 by which those useless edifices are raised, hearing mass under 
 the canopy of heaven, exposed to all the peltings of the storm ! ! 
 He would thus behold the disgraceful anomalies of a people, per- 
 haps the most intellectual in the world, the least supplied with 
 the means of knowledge, amidst the most lavish endowments to 
 impart it ; and the same people, assuredly the poorest and most 
 destitute, in a country which is as undoubtedly the most fertile 
 and productive. 
 
 Aware that the effects of good government are often such 
 as to counteract the disadvantages of climate, and to pour 
 plenty over a country which was not blessed with a good soil, 
 he would naturally ask what curse came over a land so sin- 
 gularly favoured, as to blight all its natural advantages ? The 
 very nature of the interrogatory would introduce a train of 
 thought, which would soon lead to its solution ; and the benevo- 
 lent monarch would be convinced, that the folly of misgovernmcnt 
 can be as active in marring the choicest blessings of Providence, 
 as the wisdom of virtuous rulers in supplying their privation. 
 Above all, he would not fail to admire the heartfelt attachment of 
 a people, whom neither injuries, nor sinister reports, could alienate 
 from the throne. In their earnest, but peaceful and constitutional 
 exertions to effect a Repeal of the Union, he would recognize 
 the legitimate struggles of a people, to get rid of those evils to 
 which they can partly trace their misfortunes. Contrasting the 
 prosperity of England, less favoured by nature, with the miseries 
 of Ireland, enjoying greater advantages, he might be disposed to 
 adopt the sentiments of the people of the latter country, by 
 ascribing the difference to the circumstances of the want or 
 influence of a local legislature. Convinced, too, by historical ex- 
 perience, that a domestic legislature is far from being synonymous 
 with separation, he would, no doubt, receive with caution any 
 suggestions that would attempt to confound them ; and after 
 witnessing the effects of religion in checking the excesses of a 
 
348 
 
 LETTER LXXL 
 
 people naturally excitable, and smarting under unheard-of op- 
 pressions, he would have cast indignantly away any insinuations 
 of disaffection against men who could easily rival any of his 
 Majesty’s ministers in the fixedness of those principles that bind 
 their allegiance to the throne. 
 
 The shortest visit would have sufficed to convince his Majesty 
 of the suffering and loyalty of his people. Were he to reside 
 longer among us, instead of being surprised at the impatience of 
 the Irish, he would have wondered at the forbearance with which 
 they bore the vast accumulation of their unmerited wrongs. 
 Your lordship may form some inadequate idea of those varied 
 experiments on the patience of the people, by two or three 
 examples. In the month of January, one hundred and fifty- 
 four families on the estates of an absentee landlord were served 
 with ejectments in the neighbourhood, and some of the houses 
 of the unfortunate occupants actually thrown down. This, my 
 lord, is not the scene alluded to in my last letter. No ; there is 
 enough of distressing novelty furnished in this county to minister 
 to any taste, however panting for tragic excitement. The eject- 
 ments referred to in my former letter occurred in the neighbour- 
 hood of Killala. Those I instance now were on the property of 
 Lord Limerick, a good man, who loves to dwell on the olden 
 times of Toryism, and laments, I am sure, with a sincere regret, 
 the searching spirit that dares repine at his lordship’s enjoying 
 the luxuries of London scenes, whilst his tenantry, who were 
 never yet favoured with his presence, are ejected from their 
 homes. Surely he cannot be a party to those heart-rending 
 scenes. Whilst his soul expands amidst convivial happiness with 
 kindly feelings to the human race — whilst the stream of wealth 
 reaching his lordship must convince him that Ireland is another 
 Peru — whilst the turnpikes of Lancashire, to use a phrase of an 
 English writer, are choked with the pork and beef of Ireland, 
 his lordship could not believe that those who export such super- 
 fluities could ever be in distress — hence this generous scepticism 
 about the misery of Ireland — hence this noble-minded condem- 
 nation of any degrading provision for the poor — and hence, in 
 fine, his high loyalty against the disaffection of those who could 
 venture to insinuate that the Irish would wish for the return of 
 absent landlords. 
 
 But as I cannot hope to convince his kind-hearted scepticism 
 that such things could occur on an estate, of which he is the pro- 
 prietor, allow me to assure your lordship, that amongst the mise- 
 rable tenants that were unhoused on the occasion, there was one 
 who, on the following day, required the last rites of the church, 
 and who, though labouring under a disease which called for the 
 most tender solicitude, was dislodged from his tenement to make 
 room for the ministers of the law. Nay, such was the forlorn 
 
LETTER LXXI. 
 
 349 
 
 condition of many of those ejected creatures, that they were 
 observed to pass the following night in a deserted old mansion, 
 the Catholic chapel. 
 
 It might be imagined that on this occasion the ministers of the 
 establishment would interpose their kind offices in favour of the 
 afflicted, and, like the illustrious Pole, whose life is read in the 
 liturgy of this day, display the genuineness of their divine mission 
 by that spirit of sympathy with the poor, which distinguished 
 our Redeemer. Were the people of Ireland to judge the estab- 
 lishment by its treatment towards themselves, they should con- 
 clude that not only a portion of St. James, but every precept of 
 mercy, was expunged from the sacred volume by the first re- 
 formers. There is, it is remarked, a kindred spirit in misfortunes 
 which makes evils come together, and scarcely was the parish 
 visited with the aforesaid calamity, when a numerous retinue of 
 police were seen patrolling entire villages, and driving more than 
 fifty head of cattle to the pound to pay for the spiritual comforts 
 administered to the Catholics by the parson. He might, without 
 doubt, have amply indemnified himself for his arrears by apply- 
 ing for a portion of the million, which was humanely granted by 
 the legislature to relieve his starving brethren. The pound of 
 flesh, however, was sweeter, and the mutinous people of Ireland 
 should be taught, through the goading powers of an armed police, 
 to feel the mild influence of that church which is the perfect 
 model of Christianity ! ! Though the parsons have released them- 
 selves from the superstitious practice of fasting, it seems that, on 
 this occasion, they adopted the example of the Ninivites, by sub- 
 jecting the cattle to its operation. They were accordingly driven 
 into a filthy pound in this town, through which no water passed. 
 The consequence was, that the carcase of one of the cattle be- 
 longing to a poor pensioner, which died of bad treatment, was 
 seen carried into town, to be delivered, it is said, to the parson. 
 I know not how this strange transaction terminated, but it is 
 certain that the poor pensioner, who fought the battles of his 
 Majesty, was threatened by a small functionary, whose prowess 
 is only shown in driving to the pound, to be deprived of his 
 pension, if he did not observe a prudent silence on this subject. 
 He will not, I trust, suffer by my publication of the fact, nor do I 
 know by what warrant any individual could threaten to intercept 
 the merited rewards which his Majesty bestows on the defenders 
 of their country. 
 
 No doubt, it will be urged by those who maintain that the poor 
 are entitled to no mercy, that they were on this occasion treated 
 as they deserved. Why not, it will be asked, punctually pay 
 their rents, and meet, at any warning, their stipulated covenants ? 
 If the pecuniary obligations that bind the tenants to the landlords 
 should ever give way, let those be answerable for the conse- 
 
350 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 quence who never make allowances for times or seasons, but 
 stretch the chord until it snaps, by the violence of the ten- 
 sion. Who, my lord, were they who were thus ejected from 
 their homes, and whose cattle were driven, for the services of 
 religion ? A people who passed the three last winters attending 
 divine service in the open air, without any shelter from the 
 severity of the season. Yes, during that long period, have they 
 been obliged to hear mass without any roof but that of Heaven, 
 for want of means to cover a chapel, of which the walls are so 
 long erected. Nay, during the month of January, I was obliged 
 to go and address those poor people in the open air, to exhort 
 them to roof the chapel. Seldom did I perform a more painful 
 duty than that of urging such a claim upon persons whom I saw 
 shivering with the cold for want of necessary raiment ; and yet 
 those are the individuals who are represented as comfortable, by 
 interested reports. 
 
 During the same period in which one parish was thus afflicted 
 with the combined operation of tithes and rack-rents, a neigh- 
 bouring parish had nine individuals lodged in the county jail for 
 illicit distillation. This, my lord, is one of the crying evils with 
 which the land is cursed, and which springs from the same source 
 as the others to which I have alluded. Yes, it is the hated off- 
 spring of tithes and rack-rents which is not only wasting the 
 substance, but what is worse, impairing the health and destroy- 
 ing the morality of the people. One of the first tales of distress 
 which I heard on my return, after a short absence from this 
 diocese, was that of a poor woman whose son and husband were 
 lodged in the jail for having been taken in one of those factories 
 of illegal distillation into which they had incautiously strolled. 
 How long shall such a demoralizing system be suffered to con- 
 tinue ? Calculate the loss of their labour, and that of many 
 other such victims, at this season of the year. Calculate too, the 
 loss of health, their support in prison, as well as the vast expense 
 of the revenue officers who thrive on the continuance of this 
 ruinous practice. Calculate, in fine, the loss of morality from 
 intoxication which follows in its train, and then let any states- 
 man say whether any advance in the price of land can be a com- 
 pensation for such frightful losses. Yet this system of illicit 
 distillation is the necessary consequence of the unnatural dispro- 
 portion between rents and the price of produce. It has been 
 uniformly connived at by the landlords, in order to receive those 
 rents which the channels of ordinary industry can never enable 
 the tenants to pay. When pressed by exorbitant and vexatious 
 demands, which they cannot possibly meet, they are driven to the 
 terrible resolve of throwing their little produce into the lottery 
 of a smuggling distillation. The frequent consequence is seizure, 
 and thus they individually suffer, whilst the public is burdened 
 
LETTER LXXI. 
 
 351 
 
 with the heavy expense of their imprisonment. For the sake of 
 Christianity, let this inhuman traffic be put an end to. Let not 
 the unfortunate people be alternating between the fears of a 
 prison, or an ejectment : of a prison, if they strive by this illicit 
 process to raise their corn to the amount of the rent ; or of being 
 ejected, on the other hand, if the rent is not thus extracted out of 
 the produce. They have frequently before them the sad choice 
 of a gaol or the fields to repose in ; and remind me of the fate of 
 the unfortunate Britons, who complained that they were driven 
 by the Piets to the sea, and again by the sea into the hands of 
 their enemies. 
 
 Yet amidst this wide-spread local misery, and the consequent 
 anxiety of the people to see the source dried up from which it 
 springs, they are represented in the imperial parliament as in 
 the full enjoyment of every comfort, utterly opposed to the 
 Repeal of the Union, and the miserable dupes of turbulent agi- 
 tators, who have the singular art to persuade them that they are 
 miserable, notwithstanding the conviction they feel of their own 
 happiness. It is somewhat singular that it was at this same 
 period of the last session I had to defend a noble lord from 
 Mayo, from the mis-statements, which were ascribed to him by 
 the carelessness of reporters. And now again, on the recurrence 
 of the auspicious anniversary, I have to protect another member 
 of the family from a similar injustice. I allude to the statement 
 of the disturbed condition of the county of Mayo, which was 
 inaccurately, no doubt, ascribed to the Marquis of Sligo, and 
 from whom I found it necessary to remove the odious imputation. 
 It was an act of justice due, on my part, to the much-enduring 
 people, that they should not be calumniated by an anonymous 
 scribe, under the sanction of a noble name ; and accordingly I 
 ventured to lay before your lordship satisfactory evidence of the 
 tranquillity of this county. Again, it appears that the reporters 
 have taken a similar liberty with a member of the House of Com- 
 mons, who is charged with stating that the petitions from Mayo 
 for a Repeal of the Union are all the effect of terror and “ priest- 
 craft.” With the reports made in the House of Commons by 
 those who sit there from Mayo, the people have no concern. 
 They are utterly indifferent to their sentiments, since they are 
 convinced those sentiments are not in unison with their own. It 
 is, however, matter of great moment, that the feelings and con- 
 duct of the clergy and people of a large county should be totally 
 misrepresented, and that the one should be deemed the agents, 
 the other the victims of a sinister and noxious influence. Let 
 Mr. J. D. Brown then enjoy his convictions, and the privilege of 
 uttering them in polite language, without fear of being replied 
 to by the objects of his remarks. Let him riot in the parlia- 
 mentary immunities in which he is shrouded, and select a subject 
 
352 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 for his oratory, which will be sure to supply the want of talent, 
 and call forth those vehement responses from congenial minds, 
 which his eloquence on any other topic could never excite. 
 Those privileges I have no wish to violate, since the object of my 
 remarks is the published report, leaving the honourable member 
 for the property of Mayo, in the undisturbed enjoyment of the 
 fame, with which his senatorial courage must have crowned him. 
 
 It was not by design he is reported to have styled himself the 
 representative of the property of Mayo, and to have utterly 
 lost sight of the numerous class of freeholders to whom he 
 hitherto owed his seat. Yes, the secret wish of the Whig par- 
 tizans to restore the most degrading species of feudal vassalage is 
 revealed. When Louis Philippe assumed the title of King of 
 the French, and Leopold that of King of the Belgians, how 
 loud and rapturous were their congratulations ! And what was 
 the circumstance that called forth such enthusiastic jubilee ? The 
 recognition that the inhabitants of those countries were free 
 agents, to whom their respective monarchs owed their election. 
 The names of King of France or King of Belgium could no 
 longer be endured by the enlightened Whigs of France or the 
 Low Countries, lest it should imply the idea that those kingdoms 
 were their allodial properties, and that the people were serfs, ap- 
 pended to the soil, to be disposed of at the will of their masters. 
 I recollect the impassioned sympathy that was expressed 
 by the Whigs of England at this recognition of the rights 
 of freemen, and how one of the present ministers exhibited 
 ecstacies of joy at the dawning of this millennium of freedom. 
 And is it possible that those Whigs could cheer the sentiments of 
 a man, who boasts himself the representative of the soil of Mayo, 
 rather than the object of the choice of its freemen ? The pro- 
 prietors of Mayo, or of any other county in Ireland, are only a 
 small fraction, compared to the mass of the other freeholders. 
 IIow absurd, then, to boast of being exclusively the representa- 
 tive of the property, or, if you will, of the proprietors, meaning 
 nothing more than that all the rest is a parcel of serfs, whose 
 will is of no value, but who must be disposed of like the rest of 
 the master’s property. Let the farmers, the shopkeepers, the 
 merchants, and, in fine, all that class of freeholders who produce 
 the wealth, and constitute the chief strength of society, value 
 this compliment at its proper worth. But, after all, it is a par- 
 donable effusion ; it is only the natural recklessness of a man 
 who cannot conceal his hatred of that influence by which he sees 
 his own must be overturned. As for the reported attacks upon 
 the priesthood, your lordship will not surely imagine that I am 
 going to vindicate that body from the exercise of any occult 
 powers, which are generally associated with the refined phrase 
 applied to them by the enlightened senator. Should any member 
 
LETTER LXXI, 
 
 353 
 
 of parliament now be found haunted with such phantoms, it is to 
 be regretted that the legislature of the first James, had not tho 
 advantage of his labours. He would have been a valuable 
 member of the committees of that period, and would, no doubt, 
 have lent considerable light to the darksome speculations of that 
 profound monarch. The birth of such a being is some centuries 
 behind that period when it could be either useful or noxious ; and 
 as he seems to be a believer in astral influences, he ought to 
 curse the influence which retarded his nativity, until the learned 
 world has become indifferent to the wisdom of those worshippers 
 of the stars. However, the tales of the nursery are long remem- 
 bered, and perhaps there are some legends still lingering in the 
 west, and alluded to by the honourable member, to encourage 
 the belief that the mysterious craft or power of the priests was 
 only in the ascendant, when the augurs of a more favoured creed 
 had triumphantly anticipated its decline. 
 
 But to be serious — is it to be endured that sentiments should 
 be put into the mouth of any honourable member of the British 
 legislature, so much at variance with truth and justice ? It is 
 impossible that any individual could consider himself as the most 
 appropriate type and figure of the landed property of Mayo, 
 who, if I am not misinformed, does not possess even a freehold 
 in that county, and who owes his return to his connexion with a 
 noble person, who lately left Ireland without any regret, but 
 that of a few dependants, for his departure. He could not forget 
 the exercise of much clerical forbearance, if not of active support; 
 and though conscience, in the moment of silence and of thought, 
 the most equitable as well as the most formidable judge, must 
 have whispered despair of its continuance, still gratitude should 
 have imposed abstinence from abuse, through a deep sense of 
 past obligations. He could not but recollect that those who gave 
 their undivided suffrages to a candidate for Repeal at the last 
 election, far exceeded the joint supporters of a similar class of 
 the sitting members ; and with such recollections in his mind, it 
 is impossible that any member for Mayo, could have asserted that 
 the people of that county were adverse to a national legislature. 
 He must have probably known that from every district in Mayo, 
 the people were sending forth petitions against the tithe system 
 and the legislative Union ; and such a conviction must have 
 operated in making him forbear an assertion which could be so 
 easily defeated. But those petitions are the effect of priest-craft 
 and of fear ; for this singular reason, probably — that none are 
 entrusted to the honourable member. Let him console himself 
 for the want of the people’s confidence by making the most of 
 the present session, and continue to vote as he has done, for the 
 sacred integrity of the pension list, in the hope that his exalted 
 services to his country might entitle him to a small portion of 
 
354 
 
 LETTER LX XI. 
 
 that fund, which no worthless individual is known to enjoy. I 
 hope he will make unto himself friends of that mammon, that in 
 his retirement, after this session, from the bustle of parliamentary 
 life, he may be indemnified for the loss which his love of country 
 shall have incurred. He has pronounced his own sentence. 
 He knew that he long since forfeited the support of the people 
 of this county, and now he wishes to pander to the prejudices of 
 the aristocracy, by his advocacy of the pension list and tithes. 
 They will undoubtedly lose more than they will gain by the con- 
 tinuance of those burdens ; and in the general lottery of pensions 
 and fat parsonages, but little will fall to the share of the humbled 
 and neglected aristocracy of Mayo. Their interest, did they 
 possess intellect to see it, is no longer bound up with a nefarious 
 system of religious ascendency and exclusion. It is identified 
 with the general prosperity of the country, and they must sink 
 or rise with the depression or prosperity of the great mass of the 
 people. Hence it is their interest that the system of tithes 
 should be utterly abolished, and that the ministers of religion 
 should be paid, in proportion to their services. If your lordship 
 thinks that any change in that measure, short of real extinction, 
 will satisfy the people of this country, the thought is delusive. 
 
 They quarrel not with the mode of payment. They have a 
 rooted aversion to the unrighteous principle of ascendency on 
 which that payment is founded; and they are not such bad 
 logicians as to be satisfied that an argument strong in its prin- 
 ciple, loses its force as soon as there is a change in its form. 
 Call it then tithes, composition, land tax, church cess, vestry 
 rates, ministers’ money, parsons’ fees, or any other name you 
 can take out of the shifting vocabulary of legislation, the people 
 of Ireland will be justly discontented until the Protestant parsons 
 are supported by their Protestant flocks, or a portion of the tithes 
 commensurate with the necessity of their ministry. What, my 
 lord, becomes of the exclusive beauty of the Protestant worship ; 
 the charming simplicity of its service; and the overpowering 
 evidence of its doctrines? If it be really so captivating, its 
 followers will give to the world a more disinterested proof of 
 their conviction by supporting their own ministry, than by trans- 
 ferring this burden to the shoulders of those who are content 
 with their own religion, and do not wish to burden any others 
 with its support. Cui bono? is the question which justice 
 suggests regarding such an establishment. If such an anomaly 
 existed, in any other country upon earth, of a people prover- 
 bially starving, until the very repetition of the phrase ceases to 
 excite compassion, and an enormous staff of public functionaries 
 saddled upon the same people without any possible assignable 
 reason for its continuance, the English press would teem with 
 burning invectives against such a system, and the walls of St. 
 
LETTER LXXI. 
 
 355 
 
 Stephen’s would ring with the most indignant denunciations 
 of such a system. If any nation in Europe had suffered so 
 much from “ priest-craft,” as Ireland has endured from tithes 
 and parson-craft, it would form a rich theme for an historian’s 
 eloquence to dwell on. It would be curious to compare the 
 effects of “ priest-craft” and parson-craft on the rights and 
 happiness of the people in this land, which has consecrated the 
 liberty of the subject in its venerable constitution. In the 
 struggles for reform, in the debates for contracting to their 
 first dimensions the power of the aristocracy — in short, in any 
 question that affected the rights, the privileges, the properties 
 of the people, have not the ministers of the establishment been 
 uniformly found arrayed on the side of power, no matter how 
 exercised ? When did they, like Aaron, interpose to stay the 
 weight of ministerial vengeance from falling on the heads of the 
 people ? When were they ever found fulfilling the duty of 
 mediators between the throne and the subjects; conveying to the 
 sovereign the prayers of his people ; and again, the messengers 
 of mercy from the throne to the subject? When did they tender 
 any of their enormous revenues for the public service ? On the 
 contrary, were not ministers often obliged to add to the public 
 taxes, by the erection of churches for the best paid clergy in the 
 world ? They may, it is true, indignantly reprove vice where- 
 ever they discover it. In the middle circles, it is near enough 
 to be seen, but should it happen to perch on the pinnacles of 
 human greatness, then it gradually diminishes until it becomes 
 totally invisible from its distant elevation. Nay, were not some 
 found, who, on the question between the late King and his Queen, 
 were so dazzled with the splendours of royalty, to defend the 
 personal impeccability of the monarch ? 
 
 Towards such amiable and condescending teachers, I am not 
 surprised that there should be a leaning by the oligarchy. The 
 priest-craft of the Catholic clergy in Ireland is felt in a 
 different way; and is become equally obnoxious to the same 
 sensitive class. As for violence, it is a clumsy calumny, invented 
 by those who cannot understand, and endure still less, the 
 commanding influence of moral persuasion. Your lordship may 
 inquire how the petitions for Repeal of the Union from Mayo 
 are got up, and thereupon will judge what credit is due to 
 the parliamentary reporters of the House of Commons. These 
 petitions contain the spontaneous signatures of a people sen- 
 sitive to their distress, and sincerely desirous for a restoration 
 of their native legislature. And, however numerously signed 
 those petitions may be, they will not include the one-tenth of 
 the names of those who would invoke parliament to grant 
 this measure. But why those repeated attacks upon the legi- 
 timate exercise of the duties of the Catholic clergy ? Because of 
 
356 
 
 LETTER LXXI. 
 
 the exercise of their “ priest-craft” over the minds of the people ? 
 Allow me to explain to your lordship in what this formidable 
 craft of the clergy consists. They denounce perjury as an 
 atrocious crime, from the guilt of which, no candidate, however 
 powerful, can release its unhappy victim. They condemn force, 
 by whomsoever exercised, as striking at the root of the freedom 
 of elections. They condemn bribery as a still more treacherous 
 engine, which too often seduces the integrity of the judgment, so 
 as to forget that he who bribes is the enemy of his country. 
 They strongly recommend a severe scrutiny into the qualifica- 
 tions of every candidate — a recommendation recognised by every 
 law of election — and then exhort the electors to give their 
 suffrage to him who is most worthy of their choice. They ex- 
 plain the good or evil, of which the electors are instruments, by 
 returning individuals who have such influence in producing good 
 or evil to their country; and then, on the ground of that respon- 
 sibility from which no human act is exempt, they leave the 
 important question to the decision of the people’s own conscience. 
 They, finally, exhort the people to petition the parliament for 
 their rights. Behold, then, the extent of this dread priest-craft. 
 It consists in nothing more than enlightening the mind on its 
 public and private duties, and then raising a fence around con- 
 science, against fear, fraud, bribery, violence, and corruption of 
 every kind, by which its steady convictions are so often and so 
 successfully assailed. If this be priest-craft, it is a craft that 
 commenced, and will continue in the Catholic church to the end 
 of time. It is in vain, then, that your lordship, or any other 
 member, would attempt to controul this legitimate influence of 
 the Catholic priesthood. It is identified with the very nature 
 of their office ; the duties towards our country form a part of 
 the code of our ethics ; the duties of electors are written in every 
 treatise of the obligations of different states ; and until the course 
 of our theology be compiled by deputies of the government, a 
 measure which I should not be surprised to be in contemplation, 
 this priest-craft, so much complained of, will not cease to be bene- 
 ficially felt, and cheerfully endured by the faithful people of 
 Ireland. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Maronia. 
 
LETTER LXXII. 
 
 357 
 
 LETTER LXXII. 
 
 Tx>bA]t da b-ffiAi), July 4, 1834. 
 
 Graiorum cedant rivuli, cedant Romolidum fontes, 
 
 En ibi salubrior longe, scaturiens unda ; 
 
 Quae Uvara sanitare superans, nomen indidit agro 
 Ex quo earn hausere inclyti Eianorum Heroes. 
 
 ffijuf ua Rojrbe r)A u-0|teu5, 
 
 73obAp ua b-p|Ar>, nop b&p 50 fi-eus ; 
 
 13 |Ai)f be ^|Oft-u]i5e ’s-eosu^lb 
 
 ’<S Tt)Ap fu CAOjtA-jqOUA, pUu> 
 
 £>o 013 boi) bA^lle Aipm ’f cajI, 
 b’ ol a |* J*|Aua Jrnpr 
 
 Independently of the beautiful scenery, by which it is encom- 
 passed, the spot from which I now write, possesses for me those 
 peculiar charms, which are ever found associated, with the place 
 of our birth. It is, I think, St. John Chrysostom remarks, con- 
 trasting the correct and truthful simplicity of youth, with the 
 false and fastidious refinement of after-life, that if you present to 
 a child his mother and a queen, he hesitates not in his preference 
 of the one, however homely her costume, to the other, though 
 arrayed in the richest attire of royalty. It is a feeling akin to 
 that filial reverence, which the Almighty has planted in our 
 breasts, towards our parents, that extends also to the place 
 where we first drew our being, and hallows all its early associa- 
 tions. This religious feeling is the germ of true patriotism, 
 radiating from the centre of home, and taking in gradually all 
 that is around, until it embraces the entire of our country. It 
 is this mysterious sentiment, common alike to the rude and the 
 civilized, that gives his country the first place in each man’s 
 estimation, and makes him regard the most refined or the most 
 prosperous, as only second to his own. I should not value the 
 stoicism that would be indifferent to such a sentiment, and if it 
 be a weakness, it is one that is as old as the times of the Pa- 
 triarchs, and which some of the best and wisest men in the 
 Catholic Church, have consecrated by their example. 
 
 To him who wishes to explore the ancient history of Ireland, 
 its topography is singularly instructive. Many of its valuable 
 records have been doomed to destruction ; but there is a great 
 
358 
 
 LETTER LXXir. 
 
 deal of important information written on its soil. Unlike the 
 topography of other countries, the names of places in Ireland, 
 from its largest to its most minute denominations, are all signi- 
 ficant, and expressive of some natural qualities or historical 
 recollections. If the Irish language were to perish, as a living 
 language, the topography of Ireland, if understood, would be a 
 lasting monument of its significance, its copiousness, its flexibility, 
 and its force. A vast number of its names is traceable to the 
 influence of Christianity. Such are all those commencing with 
 cjll, of which the number is evidence, how thickly its churches 
 were scattered over the land. The same may be said of ceAropul 
 and ceApmuju, but, being derived from the Latin language, they 
 are more rare than the word cjll, a genuine Celtic word. The 
 words commencing with l^op and pAc, or rath, are supposed to 
 ascend to the time of the incursions of the Danes ; but, whatever 
 be the period of their introduction, they and bun are expressive 
 of military operations. Other denominations imply a territory, 
 either integral or in parts, such as cjp, bAjlle, leAc, cp]At;, ceAcpAb, 
 cu]£a 8, &c., and mean the country, the village, half, third, fourth, 
 or fifth of such a district. It is from cuigad, or a fifth portion, 
 our provinces were so called ; and though now but four provinces 
 are generally named, the corresponding word in Irish signifies a 
 fifth, as cu|5 ciq^Ajbe $qpeAU, or the five provinces of Ireland. 
 Hence, if a stone were not to be found, to mark the ruins of the 
 magnificence of Tara, the Irish name of a province, will remain 
 an enduring attestation of the ancipnt monarchy of Meath. 
 
 The name of pup, or Ros, so frequently characterizing some of 
 our Irish townlands, always signifies a peninsula or promontory, 
 or, for a similar reason, an inland spot, surrounded by moor or 
 water. The words commencing with rrjAg, or Moy, signify exten- 
 sive plains, and assume the appellation of cIuao, when compara- 
 tively retired. The highlands, from the mountain to the sloping 
 knoll, are well known by pljAb, ct)oc, cuIIa^, or Tully, and leAp3, 
 while 5leAp, I&3, called in English, Glyn and Lag, denominate the 
 lowlands and the vallies. It is not to be supposed that the num- 
 berless lakes and streams, that cover the plains or descend from 
 its hills, had not a large influence in giving their names to a great 
 portion of the country. Accordingly, we find loc, cobAp, AbAp), 
 peAb&o, forming the commencement of the names of several town- 
 lands and villages. The qualities by which these several names 
 are modified, are as various as the properties of the soil, and the 
 traditional records of each locality. 
 
 Tobarnavian has, like other ancient names, employed and 
 divided skilful etymologists and antiquarians. Some have de- 
 rived the name, from the excellent quality of its waters, not 
 inferior to the juice of the grape, whilst others, with more strict 
 regard to the just rules of etymologfV as well as the truth of 
 
LETTER LXXII. 
 
 359 
 
 history, havo traced it to the old legends of the Fenian Heroes. 
 'Gob a f ai) y| 0 |t) would be its correct name, according to the first 
 derivation, whereas Gob Aft t>a b-fiAt) is its exact and grammatical 
 appellation, as connected with the historical and poetical legends, 
 of the followers of the great leader of the ancient Irish chivalry. 
 Its situation, as well as the tales connected with the scenery, by 
 which it is surrounded, give additional force to this etymology. 
 It is situated at the base of Nephin, the second among all the 
 mountains of Connaught in elevation, and inferior but to few in 
 Ireland. The south view is bounded by a portion of the Ox 
 mountains, stretching from the Atlantic, in the form of an amphi- 
 theatre. They are called the 33 apt)a-t>a-5ao|c mountains, from a 
 narrow and precipitous defile, where the storm rules supreme, 
 and rendered famous by the passage of the French, in 1798, on 
 their way to Castlebar.* Round the base of this circuitous range 
 of hills, is seen, as if to sleep, the peaceful surface of the beau- 
 tiful Lake of Lavalla, bordering on the woods of Massbrook. 
 Directly to the east, the large Lake of Con stretches from the 
 Pontoon, to the north-west, the lofty hill of £ voc TIa|v|a inter- 
 cepting the view of its surface, and again revealing to the eye, 
 on the north side of the hill, another portion of the same sheet 
 of waters. Beyond the extremity of the lake, you can con- 
 template some of the most cultivated and picturesque portions of 
 Tyrawley, stretching along in the distance as far as the hill of 
 Lacken, of which the view is animated, by a fanciful tower of 
 modern construction. 
 
 Such is the view that presents itself from this elevated spot, 
 forming the summit level of the district, from the sea to the Ox 
 mountains. In this remote district, secluded by its encircling woods, 
 hills, and lakes, the olden legends and traditions of the land, were 
 preserved with a fond and religious fidelity. . When the other 
 provinces of Ireland, and a large portion of Connaught, were 
 overrun, and parcelled out among strangers, the territories of 
 Tyrawley were inherited by the descendants of the ancient 
 septs, until its fair fields were, at length, invaded and violated by 
 the ruthless followers of Cromwell. For its long immunity from 
 the scourge of the despoiler, it paid, at length, the forfeit in the 
 increased oppression to which its inhabitants were doomed ; and 
 whilst the descendants of the ancient settlers were mingled in a 
 community of blood and interest with those of the Celtic race, in 
 other parts of Ireland, the Catholics of Tyrawley, like those of 
 Tipperary, were doomed to be treated, by those more recent task- 
 masters, as aliens in country, in language, and in creed. 
 
 * As exciting events take a strong hold of the youthful mind, the age of seven 
 years at the time — the interval between 1791 and 1798 — enables me vividly to 
 recollect the distressing incidents of that period. 
 
360 
 
 LETTER LXXII, 
 
 The retired position of Glyn-Nephin afforded a secure asylum 
 to the songs and traditions of the olden times, and the indig- 
 nities, to which the inhabitants were subjected, by the Cove- 
 nanters, who were planted among them, served but to endear 
 every relic of story or of minstrelsy, which time had transmitted. 
 It was here Bunting* collected some of the most tender and 
 pathetic of those ancient airs, to which Moore has since asso- 
 ciated his exquisite poetry. It was here, too, on the banks of 
 Loch Con,f that Mr. Hardiman took down some of the sweetest 
 specimens to be found in his collection of Irish minstrelsy. It 
 was no wonder : The name of Carolan, who frequented the dis- 
 trict, was yet familiar with the older natives of the valley of 
 Nephin ; and in no portion of Ireland did his soul-inspiriting airs, 
 find more tuneful voices, than were there heard, artlessly pouring 
 them forth, amidst the solitude of the listening mountains. 
 
 Of the legends of Ireland, both oral and written, the people 
 were not less retentive, than of the songs of their bards. I knew 
 myself some who, though they could not at all read English, read 
 compositions in the Irish language with great fluency ; and even 
 of those who were not instructed to read, many could recite the 
 Ossianic poems with amazing accuracy. While Macpherson was 
 exhausting his ingenuity, in breaking up those ancient poems, 
 and constructing an elaborate system of literary fraud out of 
 their fragments, there were thousands in Ireland, and especially 
 in Glyn-Nephin, who possessed those ancient Irish treasures of 
 Ossian, in all their genuine integrity, and whose depositions, 
 could their depositions be heard, would have unveiled the huge 
 imposture. There is scarcely a mountain, or rock, or river in 
 Ireland, that is not in some measure associated with the name of 
 Fion and his followers. On the highest peak of Nephin, is still 
 visible an immense cairne of large and loose stones, called 
 “ ICeAcc or lion’s monument. Some fanciful etymolo- 
 
 gists are disposed to trace the name of Nephin, or Nefin, to the 
 chief of the Fiana, insisting that it means 30teArh-^]Ojfi, as 
 Olympus was the seat of the Pagan divinities. But though the 
 monument just alluded to may give weight to this opinion, the 
 authority of Duald Mac Firbis is opposed to them, ^e<vrbqi) 
 being, according to this learned antiquarian, its pure and 
 primitive orthography. The circumstance of @ol, one of the 
 most celebrated of those military champions, belonging to this 
 province, may well account for their intimate connexion with 
 our scenery ; and as the Fiana were supposed to have been 
 frequent and familiar visitors in those regions, it is no wonder 
 that their superior quality, would have drawn their attention 
 
 * See his “ Ancient Music of Ireland” — index, 
 f See Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, vol. I., page 341. 
 
LETTER LXXII. 
 
 301 
 
 to the waters of this fountain. The Latin and Irish lines, 
 with which I have prefaced this letter, are inscribed on a stone 
 slab — an appropriate and significant ornament of this ancient 
 fountain, from which are continually gushing its classic or legen- 
 dary waters. 
 
 From the disastrous period of the wars of Cromwell, few or 
 none of the Bishops of Killala, to the time of my two immediate 
 predecessors, had a permanent residence in the diocese. Doctor 
 Waldron, my lamented predecessor of pious memory, and Doctor 
 Bellew, filled up near the last half century of that dreary inter- 
 val.* The notices of the lives of the bishops of the preceding 
 portion are but scanty — nay, it would be difficult to supply some 
 considerable chasms with their very names. This has been a 
 misfortune not peculiar to the Diocese of Killala. The churches 
 of Ireland shared in the same calamity. It is to be hoped, how- 
 ever, that, whilst the material edifices, which they erected, have 
 been destroyed or effaced, their names are written in the more 
 valuable records of the Book of Life. Even of the bishops ante- 
 cedent to that period, the catalogue is imperfect. Duald Mac 
 Firbis, whom I have already quoted, has preserved the names of 
 seven bishops of the Mac Celes,j who flourished between the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To such annalists as the Four 
 Masters, and the authors of the Book of Lecan, &c., we arc 
 indebted for such fragments of ecclesiastical history as survived 
 the wreck of violence and of time. I indulged a hope, when 
 first I went to the Eternal City, to be able to trace back the un- 
 broken stem of our episcopal succession, and, through it, many 
 subordinate ecclesiastical branches. But even there the task be- 
 came difficult, if not hopeless. It is some consolation that this 
 diocese has supplied some of those who have been most successful 
 in illustrating the annals of Ireland. The Book of Lecan is 
 prized by every scholar, as one of the most valuable of our 
 records, and the name of Mac Firbis ranks among those great 
 benefactors, who, in times of difficulty and darkness, cast a 
 gleam of splendour over the declining literature of their 
 country. 
 
 >5* John, Bishop of Killala. 
 
 * The names of their immediate predecessors were, Erwin, Skerret, Philips, 
 Mac Donnell, of whom the last, or most remote in the series, is here still recol- 
 lected by some of the old and patriarchal natives. 
 
 f See the “Hi-Fiana,” one of the last volumes published by the Archeo- 
 logical Society. The learned translator, Mr. John O’Donovan, does great 
 .justice to the memory of Duald Mac Firbis, who earned the encomiums of 
 O’Flagherty and Charles O’Connor. 
 
 9 
 
 A 
 
362 
 
 LETTER LXXIIL 
 
 LETTER LXXIIL 
 
 TO THE CATHOLIC CLERGY OF THE DIOCESE OF KILL ALA, 
 
 Tobarnavian, September 1, 1834 , 
 
 Dear and Venerable Brethren — Your simple and touching 
 address, which speaks too genuinely the language of the heart to 
 be affected, utterly overpowers me. Although 1 anticipated that 
 such a separation as ours would be painful, I was not prepared 
 for the feelings which it inspires. When I look back on the 
 years I have spent in this my native diocese, and recollect that 
 spontaneous homage of the heart, with which I have been received 
 by the clergy and people, whenever I went among them, I 
 cannot but feel the pang of being torn from a place, where the 
 best affections and virtues of Christianity are cultivated. Yes ; 
 the soil is fertile — the seed is cast and reared by the assiduous 
 care of the clergy — and the fruit is manifest in the virtues of the 
 peasantry ; their fidelity to their God, their respect for his minis- 
 ters, their desire of public tranquillity, their practice of those 
 virtues that make home a temple, and, in short, their meek and 
 Christian patience under privations, which nothing but the spirit 
 of religion could enable them to endure. 
 
 To my attention to the wants of the people you have kindly 
 made allusion. Alas ! that I had but the mere will to mitigate 
 those hardships, which it often grieved me to witness. It is true 
 I have striven to call the attention of those who have a control 
 over their destiny, to a sense of their obligations ; and should the 
 Almighty at last give them “ hearts of flesh and bowels of mercy, 
 instead of the hearts of stone,” which they have hitherto exhi- 
 bited, no one would more sincerely rejoice than I at their con- 
 version. 
 
 As to my zeal for the house of God, when I consider that some 
 parishes in this diocese are almost without a chapel, I must de- 
 plore what I left undone, rather than take credit for what I 
 achieved. But the unexampled poverty of the people may well 
 plead our joint apologies. As for the cathedral, it was a work 
 which my predecessors, like the pious King David, seriously me- 
 ditated ; but, like the same King, they found obstacles to its 
 accomplishment, in that desolate wreck of the people’s fortunes, 
 which then, as well as in ancient times, followed the disastrous 
 shiftings of the ark of their religion. A comparatively better 
 state has enabled us to commence and to cover in a magnificent 
 
LETTER LXXIII. 
 
 3G3 
 
 temple to the Lord ; but let it be recollected that, besides the aid 
 I received from a generous public, I was mainly assisted by your 
 zeal and large pecuniary contributions, and that, besides the 
 faithful of Kilmore Moy, whose exertions are beyond praise, the 
 cathedral is a proud monument of the ardent zeal and generosity 
 of the clergy and the people of Killala. 
 
 You have kindly congratulated me on my appointment to the 
 metropolitan see of the province. Alas ! whilst others see but the 
 honours that dazzle from the distant heights, I ought, in common 
 with a Gregory or an Ambrose, tremble at the precipices which 
 lie beneath, and are always deep and dangerous in proportion to 
 the elevation. However, if I meet co-operation such as I met 
 here (and I cannot but anticipate a kind assistance), I fear no 
 difficulties ; and, relying on the aid of Him, who has often chosen 
 the “ weak things of the world to confound the strong, and the 
 foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” I have accepted 
 the pastoral staff, which has been confided to me by him to whom 
 Christ has given, in the person of St. Peter, the supreme domi- 
 nion of his fold. 
 
 It is to me most consolatory that the connexion that has 
 hitherto bound us is not to be entirely severed by my translation. 
 Whatever may be the solicitude which will extend over the pro- 
 vince, the clergy and faithful of Killala shall not be forgotten. 
 Accept once more my heartfelt thanks for the splendid carriage — 
 a proof that where there is the will, people can be generous out 
 of the poorest resources. In conclusion, I beg a share in your 
 prayers, and those of your flocks, to enable me worthily to sus- 
 tain the weight of my office. If you have sustained any loss by 
 my removal, I rejoice in the wise provision that enables you to 
 repair it, by the selection of such zealous and enlightened persons 
 as will furnish you with a worthy successor. To him I have the 
 consolation of handing over a flock, not only undiminished by the 
 prowlings of the wolf, but increased by many accessions of strayed 
 sheep returning to the fold. And by one of those wise dispensa- 
 tions of Providence, which binds the resolves of kings and senates 
 to its own ends, I have the further consolation of transmitting to 
 him, without collision with parliamentary pretenders, the old and 
 hereditary title of the legitimate pastors of the Catholic Church, 
 which, though sometimes clouded, can never be taken away, 
 whilst I subscribe myself, dear and venerable brethren, your 
 obliged and affectionate servant in Christ, 
 
 ^ John, Bishop of Killala. 
 
364 
 
 LETTER LXXIV. 
 
 LETTER LXXIV. 
 
 TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 
 
 ON .THE ESSENTIAL INJUSTICE OF PAYING TITHES, IN ANY SHAPE, FOR TIIE 
 SUPPORT OF THE PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of the Conception 
 of the Blessed Virgin, December 8 , 1834 . 
 
 Cedant arma togae. 
 
 My Lord — It is no longer doubtful that your Grace has ventured 
 to grasp the reins of government which fell out of the feeble 
 hands of your incapable predecessors. It is no longer a secret, 
 that you have been called to preside over the public counsels, in 
 order to support the tottering establishment in Ireland, or to 
 protract to a further period its inevitable fall. This, my lord, 
 is a hazardous undertaking. It is a project fraught with more 
 difficulties than any you encountered in your military campaigns, 
 and experience will convince you that it is much easier to scatter 
 the armies of Napoleon than to break the firm, resolved, and 
 concentrated will of eight millions of people not to pay an odious 
 impost, revolting to justice, insulting to religion, and a badge, 
 likewise, of national degradation. 
 
 In the one case nought was required but a superior numerical 
 force, or a preponderance of physical strength and courage. In 
 the other you have to combat a moral power, which neither 
 numbers, nor discipline, nor courage can conquer. Nay, it is a 
 power which is not only invincible by arms, but which, with all 
 the authority of the legislature at your side, you will find it im- 
 possible to subdue. Yes, my lord, the eternal laws of justice are 
 against you, and until right and wrong are found to be such 
 changeable things as to shift their position like the corps of a 
 camp, or the members of the senate, at the nod of a minister or 
 military commander, the opposition to tithes in Ireland shall 
 remain beyond the reach of any adequate control. 
 
 No doubt, my lord, you will be astonished at such a bold as- 
 sertion. However grating it may seem to your ears, the truth 
 has ere now reached you in a variety of forms, that the maxims 
 of the camp are not those that are fitted to sway a civilized 
 society. Amidst the tumult of arms, the cries of justice are so 
 generally unheeded, that the heart becomes insensible to its 
 dictates. Allow me, then, as you are not hurried away amidst 
 
LETTER LXXIV. 
 
 365 
 
 the rage of battles, to whisper to you calmly the reasons why 
 your efforts to uphold the church establishment in Ireland must 
 prove abortive. It is because the laws by which it was founded 
 and upheld were at variance with every principle of justice, and 
 because there has arisen in the country a moral power superior 
 to the brute physical strength by which those atrocious enact- 
 ments were hitherto enforced. Your Grace is not, I trust, one of 
 those persons who imagine that the mere will of a Sovereign or 
 his Minister imposes the obligation of law ; nor is it, I trust, 
 your impression that every enactment brings with it that solemn 
 sanction, provided it is passed by a majority of the senate. No, 
 my lord, all the united authorities of the sovereign and the 
 senate can never annex the conscientious obligations of law to 
 enactments that are contrary to right reason and justice ; and, 
 hence, the stubborn and unconquerable mutiny of the minds of 
 the people of Ireland against these odious acts (I will not call 
 them laws), which have ever forced them to pay tribute to the 
 teachers of an adverse creed. 
 
 Perhaps, during your military sojourn in the Peninsula, the 
 name of illustrious Isidore, Bishop of Seville, reached your 
 Grace’s ears. Allow me to lay before you his definition of law — 
 a definition that has been found so much in accordance with 
 reason as to have been afterwards incorporated with the juris- 
 prudence of Europe : “ Erit lex honesta, justa, possibilis, secun- 
 dum naturam ; secundum consuetudinem Patriae, loco, tempori- 
 que conveniens, necessaria, utillis manifesta quoque, ne aliquid 
 per obscuritatem in captione contineat, nullo privato commodo, 
 sed pro communi utilitate civium scripta.” This, my lord, is a 
 definition of law, the comprehensive correctness of which is best 
 evinced by its general adoption ; and which all the legal ingenuity 
 of Bacon or of Brougham could not impeach. Yet are the 
 enactments that enforce the impost of tithes conformable to its 
 dictates ? Are they honest, or accordant to the spirit of religion, 
 from which the co-relative obligation of obedience springs ? Are 
 they just — nay, are they morally possible in their observance, 
 and suited to the customs of the country, as well as to the cir- 
 cumstances and to times ? Are they necessary ? Are they useful ? 
 Are they written for a selfish ascendency, or to promote the general 
 public weal? These are the natural interrogatories that arise 
 from the first notions of law that are contained in the above 
 definition, and the entire of which must be answered in the 
 negative. So far from being honest, the laws regarding tithes 
 are at variance with every principle of commutative justice, which 
 supposes that the enacted law ratifies the previous obligation of 
 giving to each man his own. Yet previously to those penal 
 enactments that wrung his tithes from the Catholic peasant, to 
 find in a Protestant parson any root of ownership whatever to 
 
366 
 
 LETTER LX XIV. 
 
 such a property, I might challenge the entire Tory University of 
 Oxford. Subsequent laws may be heaped on laws, and majorities 
 may acclaim their enactment, but since justice was wanting at 
 the base, the whole superstructure crumbles, for want of a ne- 
 cessary foundation. Again, the Tithe laws, so far from being 
 necessary , it is universally confessed that an imperative necessity 
 has arisen for their abolition. Useful they never were; but, 
 whatever might have been hitherto their influence, it is now 
 admitted that they are become entirely and incurably noxious. 
 Not only are they not conformable to the customs of the country, 
 but the whole nation revolts against their endurance ; and as to 
 time , the period is arrived beyond which their utter extinction 
 cannot be safely protracted. The public good they never pro- 
 moted ; on the contrary, they were maintained as the aliment to 
 private cupidity, and always furnished a stimulant to the profli- 
 gate few to array themselves in unholy hostility against the 
 nation’s welfare. Far from doing any kind of office, the parsons 
 are recollected as a tribe who scourged the people with scorpions. 
 
 May I then be permitted to inquire, is it laws so unrighteous 
 your Grace is called on to maintain, and is it ascendency so 
 oppressive, you are resolved to perpetuate ? You may bend the 
 necks of the people under the weight of a military despotism — 
 it will only last as long as the hand that imposes it is on them ; 
 the moment it is removed, justice will recover its spring, and with 
 a force proportioned to the pressure. What avails, then, this 
 incessant and angry struggle against right and justice ? 
 
 Your Grace may be deluded with the notion that this oppo- 
 sition to tithes is only a temporary ebullition of feeling that may 
 pass away, and that the people may be brought to be recon- 
 ciled to the reimposition of the heavy burden. — Never. They 
 may, it is true, be forced to submit, but let me impress upon you 
 that it will be only a forced submission. The laws that shall 
 enforce tithes may be endured — they cannot be obeyed — and 
 hence the import of that word, passive obedience, so little un- 
 derstood and of which the misunderstanding has thrown such 
 undeserved odium upon Catholics. Passive obedience is nothing 
 else than a passive acquiescence in laws which are unjust, and 
 which one cannot correct ; yet are still tolerated on account of 
 the greater evil of public commotion, which should result from 
 their resistance. Hence the obedience to them is termed passive, 
 or permissive, in opposition to that active, free, and spontaneous 
 obedience of the heart, which a reasonable being always yields to 
 wise and beneficent laws, and which such laws only can impose. 
 In this latter and true sense of obedience, the laws regarding 
 Tithes to the Protestant establishment were never obeyed, and 
 never can, whilst destitute of all the elements of right and justice, 
 of utility and public good, that constitute such an obligation. 
 
LETTER LXXIV. 
 
 3G7 
 
 The truths I have now advanced have nought of novelty to a 
 mind disciplined in the science of morals and jurisprudence. 
 Not so however to a person who was wont to manage men like 
 machines, and who might have been taught to look on the sword 
 as the best sceptre of justice. You may now perceive that any 
 enactments to enforce tithes will not have the moral influence of 
 law. Nay, the consequence of such enactments would be, that 
 you would have to war, not with men, but with reason, with 
 religion, with justice, with necessity, with utility, with the 
 customs of the country, with the resolution of the people — in 
 short, with the public good — a combination of powers which 
 you will own to be more formidable than the armies of the 
 French Emperor. This is the reason why I have stated that the 
 conquest of such difficulties required courage and fortune superior 
 to any you had hitherto to display. Let me then adjure you not 
 to sully your fame by attempting impossibilities. Imitate not 
 the Persian despot, who thought to bind in fetters the waves of 
 the Hellespont. You may drive your triumphal car over the 
 prostrate people of Ireland. If so, it will be as mad a victory 
 as that of Caligula over the Bay of Bairn, by attempting to sub- 
 mit it to the yoke of a bridge. The treasures of the empire 
 may be spent, and lives may be lavished, as then, in the prosecu- 
 tion of the insane project ; but the broken arches of the pros- 
 trate work shall remain to tell posterity of the folly and the 
 cruelty of the projector. Witness your impotent laws against 
 Catholic bishops assuming their ancient and hereditary titles. 
 Think you they have any force of binding men’s consciences ? 
 The parliamentary church may enjoy any temporal privileges 
 which a parliament, without any injury to the people, may confer. 
 His Majesty’s bishops may surely enjoy all those 'lordly titles 
 which his Majesty, the rich source of worldly titles, can bestow. 
 But neither his Majesty nor the parliament can make what is, 
 to be what it is not, nor the true and legitimate bishops of the 
 Catholic Church to be other than the true and genuine suc- 
 cessors of the Apostles. 
 
 Imagine not that it is my intention to trouble your Grace with 
 a series of letters on the subject of tithes and the establishment. 
 I trust my time shall be better employed. I have written this 
 letter to convince you that the question is already disposed of, and 
 that further controversy on its merits would be nugatory. Com- 
 positions and land taxes in lieu of tithes are all vain artifices. 
 If the landlords take on them the payment of tithes, and attempt 
 to charge them on the tenantry, then the landlords will be con- 
 spiring against the payment of their rents, nor need they any 
 more dangerous combination. I shall freely declare my own 
 resolves. I have leased a small farm just sufficient to qualify me 
 for the exercise of the franchise, in order to assist my country- 
 
368 
 
 LETTER LXXV. 
 
 men in returning those, and those alone, who will be their friends, 
 instead of what their representatives usually were, their bitterest 
 enemies. I must therefore confess, that after paying the land- 
 lord his rent, neither to parson, or proctor, or landlord, or agent, 
 or any other individual, shall I consent to pay, in the shape of 
 tithe or any other tax, a penny which shall go to the support of 
 the greatest nuisance in this or any other country. 
 
 I have the honour to be your obedient servant, 
 
 ^ John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXV. 
 
 TO THE CATHOLIC CLERGY OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Feast of St. John the Evangelist, 
 May 6, 1835. 
 
 Dear and Venerable Brethren — We are again on the eve 
 of one of those periods so disastrous to the interests of morality 
 and religion that recur occasionally in Ireland. During elec- 
 tions, the minds of many of the faithful are so often loosened 
 from the ordinary restraints of duty, that it is unfortunately 
 looked upon as a time when bribery, perjury, drunkenness, and 
 every species of corruption, are permitted to supplant the ordi- 
 nary virtues of the people. It is our duty to endeavour to 
 check those mighty evils, filled with the just apprehension of 
 the threat of the prophet, that if the faithful should sin for 
 want of seasonable warning, the judge of the living and the 
 dead “ shall demand their blood at our hands.”* 
 
 I am well aware that an apology is sought for those transgres- 
 sions in the strong temptations held out by men who, as they 
 affect a zeal for the morality of the people, should never hold 
 out any dangerous inducements to sin. The dread of those who 
 might persecute the freeholders for a faithful discharge of their 
 duty, ought to be subdued by the words of the Redeemer, telling 
 us “ not to fear those who can kill the body, but rather to fear 
 him that can destroy both body and soul in hell.”f 
 
 * Ezekiel, iii, 17, 18. 
 
 f Matthew, x, 28. 
 
LETTER LXXV. 
 
 369 
 
 After filling their souls with this salutary fear which the Gospel 
 inspires, you will not fail to impress upon the peope that they 
 risk the loss of their immortal souls by the crimes of perjury 
 and bribery to which I have alluded. Remind them of the 
 inspired admonition, “ Speak the truth every one to his 
 neighbour : judge ye truth and judgment : love not false 
 oaths, for these are the things I hate, saith the Lord.”* Nay, 
 assure them* in the words of the same prophet, “ that the 
 curse of the Lord shall come to the house of the thief, and to 
 the house of him who sweareth falsely in his name.”f Let them 
 not, therefore, give a vote, unless their conscience assures them 
 that they have a real freehold, to the enjoyment of which they 
 have already sworn. 
 
 As for bribery, that foul crime that has done so much to 
 corrupt the purity of elections, by debauching the minds of the 
 people, your denunciations of so enormous a sin must be cogent 
 in proportion to its atrocity. The freehold is not a property to 
 be set up for sale.. It is held in trust for the benefit of the people, 
 and no man can have a right to traffic upon what is not solely 
 his own, and by such a vile bargain to inflict injury upon the 
 community. There can be no compromise of this truth ; let, 
 therefore, the people be persuaded that whoever receives a bribe 
 directly or indirectly for his vote, is to be excluded from the 
 benefits of tTie sacraments, until he makes restitution of the 
 money, which might be called the price of the happiness of the 
 poor, the widow and the orphan. No matter through what 
 medium the bribe may be received, no matter under what 
 specious contracts the traffic may be disguised, the Catholic 
 Church detests all such prevarications and evasions ; and, there- 
 fore, the saying of St. Augustin is applicable to all such cases : 
 “ until restitution is made, the sin is not forgiven.” Let those 
 who receive a bribe as the price of their country’s happiness, 
 entertain no hope of absolution until they atone for their crime, 
 by restitution of their ill-gotten treasure. When the film with 
 which bribery covers the eyes of the electors is once removed, 
 they will more easily perceive the straight path which duty 
 points out of giving their suffrages to those who shall best pro- 
 mote the interests of religion and the happiness of their country ; 
 for the Scripture assures us “ that presents and gifts blind the 
 eyes of judges, and make them dumb in the mouth, so that they 
 cannot correct. ”J When, therefore, that obstruction is once 
 removed, it will be an easy task to convince the freeholders 
 of their duty. In short, when once the hope of bribery, on 
 the one hand, and the fear of unchristian oppression on the 
 other, are taken away, the people will come to the hustings as 
 
 * Zachary, viii, 17. f Zachary, viii, 34. X Ecclesiasticus, xx, 31. 
 
,370 
 
 LETTER LXXV. 
 
 reasonable, intelligent, and free agents ought to come, with a 
 consciousness that they are not the serfs of any man, but the 
 trustees of religion, and that they owe no account, but to God 
 alone, for the use they make of the elective franchise. 
 
 It will be your duty to remove the ignorance, or cure the cor- 
 ruption of such voters as would fain persuade themselves that 
 they, indeed, are released from the obligation of serving the com- 
 munity, from gratitude to some great family. Some of those are 
 persons who, though labouring under such lamentable ignorance of 
 the plainest maxim of Christian morality, affect the possession of 
 superior information. Alas ! it is to be feared that, under the 
 abused name of a specious virtue, they strive to cloak their unjus- 
 tifiable selfishness. It would be bribery, it seems, in a poor man 
 to receive a few pounds for his vote ; and, forsooth, it would be 
 otherwise to receive some hundred pounds, or an equivalent situa- 
 tion, for a son or for a friend, by the transfer of a lot of subser- 
 vient freeholders. According to such depraved morality, the sin 
 of bribery would be lessened by the magnitude of its amount. 
 Impress then, upon all, that gratitude is an estimable virtue, 
 when exercised in its proper sphere. It has no right, however, 
 to trench upon the other moral and Christian duties. Each one 
 ought to be grateful for a gift when he can be so without injury 
 to others ; but the gratitude that would bring with it public injury, 
 instead of being a virtue, would be robbery and injustice. The 
 gratitude to which I allude means nothing else but because 
 persons who have basely sold their votes received in return a 
 share of the public plunder, they ought still to continue the same 
 system. Past sins, instead of being an incentive to their continu- 
 ance, ought to furnish the most powerful argument for their 
 expiation. Let those, then, who, through a mistaken gratitude, 
 have given their votes to the enemies of religion and of the 
 people, atone for their transgressions, by doing them justice 
 henceforth, in case they are unable to make a more complete 
 reparation. In matters of duty and of religion the church knows 
 no distinction or respect of persons. You are to treat all with 
 charity, courtesy and respect, according to their rank in society. 
 They, however, are to understand that no station affords an 
 exemption from the duties of justice prescribed by the Christian 
 law, but that the more influence a man possesses, the more he is 
 obliged to use it in leading others to follow his virtuous example. 
 Tell, then, those, if there should be any among your flocks, who 
 were wont, by any unchristian means, to coerce that freedom, 
 which the very word election always supposes, it would be sinful 
 in them to continue a practice, and, should they persevere, to im- 
 press on the freeholders that obedience to such commands, con- 
 trary to a sense of their own duty, would be a sin against the law 
 of God. And should any be found so ignorant of the respect 
 
LETTER LXXV. 
 
 371 
 
 they owe religion, as to mistake this inculcation of their bounden 
 duties to the people, as an interference with the rights of any 
 class, they ought to be taught, in return, that no class can have a 
 right to meddle with the consciences of your flocks. There are 
 other considerations connected with this subject, which I should 
 wish to explain to the people, but from which I must forbear, 
 for fear of being too tedious, leaving them to be supplied by your 
 own intelligent and prudent zeal. Such, for example, as the 
 ignorance of some who may fancy, that a bribe is a seasonable 
 God-send, too valuable to be rejected. I have explained the 
 heinousness of such presents. The whole world has not value 
 enough for the loss of one soul; but, should any be so weak, 
 as to consider the subject not so much in the light of duty, as 
 selfish calculation, they ought to reflect, that those who will give 
 the bribe will soon indemnify themselves by subjecting the com- 
 munity to fresh imposts, which would take away the entire 
 amount ; whereas, if all virtuously refuse it, they will have repre- 
 sentatives who will effect such an improvement in the laws, as 
 must advance the prosperity of the country, and the interests 
 of religion. 
 
 After all, I fear that some attempts may be made to annoy the 
 honest people who may discharge their duty. The best chance 
 of escape for them is to perform that duty so well, as to secure 
 the triumph of that franchise, which the constitution gives them 
 for their protection. If they do, they shall never again be mo- 
 lested, and the sale-masters of the votes of the freeholders will 
 quietly acquiesce in the just and peaceful triumph of conscience 
 over corruption, and of the constitution of the country over its 
 enemies. 
 
 Should they, however, be exposed to any suffering, you must 
 console them by the assurance that such has been generally the 
 fate of those who fearlessly discharge their duty, “ and that 
 those who wish to live piously in Christ suffer persecution.”* 
 Let me, however, adapting the beautiful language of the liturgy 
 of the season, exhort you “to strengthen the feeble hands, 
 and confirm the weak knees. Say to the faint-hearted, take 
 courage and fear not. Behold, your God will bring the revenge 
 of recompense.”! Exhort them to Christian patience, under 
 whatever sufferings they may endure — telling them, in the lan- 
 guage of St. Peter, “ For what glory is it if sinning and being 
 buffeted you suffer it ; but if doing well you suffer patiently, this 
 is thank-worthy before God. For this is thank-worthy if for 
 conscience towards God a man endure sorrows, suffering wrong- 
 fully”! 
 
 “ But let them commend their souls in good deeds to their 
 
 * II. Tim. iii, 12. f Isaias, xxxv, 3. f I. Peter, ii, 19, 20. 
 
372 
 
 LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 Creator.”* Praying to you and your respective flocks, an abun- 
 dant participation in all the blessing of the holy season, allow me 
 to conclude in the language of the Apostle : “ Wherefore, dearly 
 beloved, be diligent that you may be found before him unspotted 
 and blameless in peace.”f 
 
 I remain, your faithful servant in Christ, 
 
 ►J* John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 on the unheeded destitution of the suffering people. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Feast of St. Anne, 
 July 26, 1835. 
 
 My Lord — Six weeks have now elapsed, since I ventured to call 
 your lordship’s attention to the alarming condition of the western 
 peasantry. It were, perhaps, uncourteous not to acknowledge 
 the terms of civility with which the communication was professed 
 to be received. It would be a much more grateful task to be 
 able to convey, in the name of the starving creatures, their 
 gratitude for the realization of those hopes which that and such 
 other documents were calculated to inspire. Truth, however, must 
 not be sacrificed; and though we were amused with repeated 
 promises of relief, it must be confessed they brought to many 
 of the wretched sufferers only the bitter aggravation of disap- 
 pointment. Need I refer to the various and appalling state- 
 ments of actual starvation which, during the brief period alluded 
 to, reached the public through letters addressed to the Viceroy 
 or through petitions presented to parliament ? Those letters 
 were not couched in any vague generalities, nor did the writers 
 shrink from the most searching inquiries into the startling par- 
 ticulars to which they solemnly and feelingly deposed. No ; they 
 pointed in the most definite terms to the scenes of distress, as 
 well as the numbers of the sufferers. They detailed instances of 
 human endurance which those unpractised in such privations 
 
 * I. Peter, iv, 19. 
 
 f II. Peter, iii, 14. 
 
LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 373 
 
 would think nature unable to sustain, and invited the agents of 
 government to come and witness the work of famine within those 
 hovels where shame and hunger struggled, the latter forcing its 
 victims to go out in quest of food, and the former feeling more 
 imperatively keeping them within doors, lest ■. public decency 
 should be outraged by such exposures. Think you, my lord, that 
 the evil is at an end ? No ; I shudder at the forms of disease 
 which it is soon likely to assume. The people, unable to contend 
 with a foe to which the mightiest must yield, are already rooting 
 up the unripe stalks of the potato crop, and laying a broader 
 foundation for a famine next year than that which is now passing 
 over. 
 
 Again and again the sympathies of the legislature were striven 
 to be enlisted in their favour, by the feeling appeals of Mr. 
 Sharman Crawford, and such other practical and enlightened 
 lovers of their country. The secretary of the government is said 
 as often to have promised the promptest attention to their wants. 
 The sentiment was cheered ; the people starved ; and, alas ! the 
 unfortunate creatures who perished in Burishoole derive no con- 
 solation from the applause of this speculative benevolence. There 
 was not a week during that period in which a number of enormous 
 pensions was not paid to individuals, of whose services the world 
 are yet ignorant. And yet that valuable class, by whose exertions 
 and industry those drones are supplied, are abandoned, without any 
 extension of relief, many to the reality, and more to the chances 
 of starvation. Yes, my lord, the spectacle that was exhibited 
 this season along the western coast was one which a Christian 
 philosopher should be proud to contemplate. It taught in living 
 acts those lessons of real Christian charity which you would in 
 vain strive to gather in Oxford or in Cambridge. It exhibited 
 almost an entire population literally and voluntarily renouncing 
 the distinctions of ownership, and, like the primitive Christians, 
 putting their little possessions into a common fund, for the relief 
 of the common misery. Many were known to retrench their 
 scanty meals, in order to share them with their afflicted neigh- 
 bours, and it is to this heroic self-denial, rather than to anv 
 government aid, that we are indebted for the preservation of the 
 lives of the people. Those generous individuals, who, aided by 
 their contributions in mitigating our distress, are entitled to our 
 best acknowledgments. The seasonable supply of potatoes sent 
 by the kind-hearted people of Wexford has called forth, as it 
 merited, the lively gratitude of the suffering inhabitants. 
 
 Allow me once more to contrast, for the contrast is too striking 
 to be overlooked, the singular manner in which the people and 
 parsons are treated. A million of money, a sum that requires 
 some analysis to comprehend such a mass, and which is beyond 
 the reach of the comprehension of thousands, is lavished on a 
 
374 
 
 LETTER LXXYI. 
 
 small band of functionaries, though their most sanguine friends 
 could never yet explain one solitary benefit which they conferred 
 on this devoted country. They never manned the fleets of 
 Britain — they have not filled her armies — their brows are not 
 decked with the laurels of her battles. What, then, is that use- 
 fulness, which calls forth such sympathy for their imaginary suf- 
 fering ; or what is the vast amount of those services, that can 
 justify such incalculable remuneration ? Why, they are the 
 dispensers of law, of which each one’s conscience is, according to 
 the true principles of Protestantism, the best interpreter ; and 
 they are the expounders of a Bible, which requires no expounder, 
 being a plain and intelligible book, which all can understand ! ! 
 Behold, then, the range of their ministry ; and I put it sincerely 
 to Sir .Robert Peel, and the other pious panegyrists of the Irish 
 parsons, whether the people should be suffered to starve, and a 
 body such as I have described be so amply supported ? Suppose 
 three millions of money had been accumulated by the wise eco- 
 nomy of our ancestors, to sustain, with suitable dignity, the 
 temples and ministers of justice. Suppose that a body of men, 
 schismatic from the usages and practices of the realm, were to 
 pronounce any such authorized expounders an invasion on indivi- 
 dual independence ; and that they were gravely to dispense such 
 doctrines, while clothed with the ermine, and enjoying the emolu- 
 ments of the bench. Suppose that, in consequence of such fre- 
 quent appeals to their own enlightened independence, the people 
 came to the conclusion of the uselessness, nay, the noxiousness, 
 of the modern benchers, and the entire of such anomalous legal 
 establishment, and that some of them took the consistent priests 
 at their word, by taking into their own hands the decisions of the 
 law ; whilst the others, who form the mass of the people, prefer- 
 ring the ancient practice, always applied to the old courts of the 
 kingdom, and supported the judges by voluntary contributions, 
 rather than forego those advantages, of which experience had 
 taught them the value. Suppose that between those two nume- 
 rous classes the modern temples of justice were entirely aban- 
 doned, and that the few who crowded round their precincts were 
 persons who were gaping for some of the perquisites of the lonely 
 functionaries, rather than looking for any decision of law, what 
 would be thought of the financial or phiiosphical talents of the 
 minister who should, at any hazard, secure such a mass of pro- 
 perty for such useless judges, at the expense of the entire popu- 
 lation? Were a case, such as I have supposed, to occur in any 
 part of the civilized world, how the legislature would ring with 
 ridicule against its madness, and with denunciations against its in- 
 justice. Nay, were it practised in the remote regions of the East, 
 it would be no less a subject of severe reprehension, and many of 
 the British journalists would not fail to deplore such barbarism, 
 
LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 375 
 
 and to applaud, with the utmost complacency, the wisdom of their 
 own more happy institutions. 
 
 If, besides its own inherent inconsistency, this system of juris- 
 prudence were to mark, by its origin and establishment, the pro- 
 gressive steps of physical and intellectual misfortune through 
 the land — if, with its introduction, the arts had fled, literature 
 disappeared, and a wide and boundless waste of ignorance had 
 announced to the inhabitants the plenitude of its dominion — if to 
 its ruthless sway every ancient record was to be sacrificed, and 
 every ancient remembrance surrendered — if it demanded, for the 
 security of its reign, the abolition of the only language which 
 stretches across the gulf that lies between the modern and the 
 ancient world, and links the present with the by- gone times — if 
 the rack and the gibbet were the wonted engines by which it 
 insinuated the persuasion of its superior excellence — if, after the 
 destruction of its literary monuments, the land itself became 
 waste, and agriculture languished, for want of the outlay of the 
 capital now appropriated to the keepers of the empty courts, but 
 heretofore expended in the employment of the poor and the im- 
 provement of a country — if, with a train of associations connected 
 with the supposed legal establishment, as cause and effect, the 
 people were resolved not to pay their money for the perpetuation 
 of such blessings, the resolve could not, assuredly, excite any 
 surprise. 
 
 Amidst the variety of your senatorial avocations, your lordship 
 may have condescended to cast a glance at the scenic exhibitions 
 of Exeter Hall. They were quite in keeping with the policy 
 which the apostles of mischief have ever adopted towards Ireland 
 in the hour of her misfortune. The wretched inhabitants of the 
 west of Connaught, exhausted with hunger, supplicated for bread, 
 and those tender-hearted missioners attempted to drown their 
 cries in the louder and more protracted echoes of the charges of 
 their idolatry. If the potato crop failed, or if the entire of the 
 produce was seized by heartless and unrelenting landlords, Popery 
 was the pregnant source of the mischief. Yes, the spirit of anti- 
 Christian fanaticism has not relaxed in its various transmigrations 
 through successive sectaries, and to-day, as well as in olden times, 
 “ should the Tiber overflow its banks, or the Nile withhold its 
 waters, the zealots devoutly exclaim, Christianos ad Leones’ 1 
 Besides their affinity with the more classic Pagans, those mis- 
 sioners have- displayed in their rituals, a semblance with our old 
 Celtic hierarchy, of which they are, probably, unconscious. 
 Some of the plains of our country still bear the names and 
 monuments of those rites, by which children were sacrificed to 
 the oriental divinities. The “ field of slaughter” is not, however, 
 a name of mere obsolete tradition ; the rites have been renovated 
 in many a Rathcormac. 
 
376 
 
 LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 The cries of the victims have not only run through the 
 country, but the prophetic inspiration of Ireland’s cherished 
 bard has been fulfilled, and the lamentations of the widow and 
 the orphan have gone forth, wringing tears of sympathy from 
 many a generous soul in England and Scotland. The force 
 of this kindred feeling has been felt — its contagious propa- 
 gation would prove fatal to the Irish establishment. It must, 
 therefore, at all hazards, be arrested ; and, therefore, those itine- 
 rant prophets, who did not read the Bible in vain, were resolved, 
 like their predecessors in the valley of Jophet, to make a flourish 
 of drums, in order to drown, in the clamour of this artificial war, 
 the cries of the victims who had perished in the “ valley of 
 slaughter.” * 
 
 But such wily and treacherous artifices can no longer succeed. 
 The ignis fatuus of such mountebanks can no longer mislead the 
 intelligence of the English people. They may, like the prophets 
 of Baal, again and again flourish their drums — appropriate 
 emblems of the hollowness of their hearts, and the driftlessness 
 of their clamour. The “No-Popery” cry is, at last, extinct, for 
 ever ; and its last “ dying, dying fall” was that which quivered on 
 the lips of one of those tuneful Orpheuses, who soothed, with the 
 last echo of the favourite sound, the fierce passions of the mena- 
 gerie cased up at Exeter Hall. Britons now feel and appreciate 
 the value of Catholic Emancipation more than the Irish them- 
 selves. Till then, they were the dupes of every ecclesiastical 
 hypocrite, who persuaded them that they had no evil to fear but 
 the Papists of Ireland, and the deluge of those doctrines which 
 should, from thence, inundate their country. The Catholics have 
 been, at length, emancipated. Does the Englishman find that the 
 dismal phantoms, with which his mind has been filled by the 
 “ No-Popery” parsons, have been realized ? Does he find that 
 the Catholic representatives from Ireland have leagued in any 
 unholy alliance against his rights, or striven to swamp the free- 
 dom of the constitution in a flood of arbitrary principles ? No 
 such thing. He finds them foremost amidst the foes of every 
 species of corruption. To their steady and unflinching alliance 
 he is indebted for parliamentary reform. To them he will be now 
 indebted for the lustral waters that are pouring across the stables 
 of municipal corporations. In fine, to their compact and sacred 
 array, the Englishman is indebted for the recal of two successive 
 ministries, that were unceremoniously dismissed, and again re- 
 spectfully recalled, in accordance with the wishes of the people. 
 These are truths which the English know well. They sink deep 
 into their souls. They are not ungrateful; and instead of co- 
 operating to perpetuate in Ireland the most disastrous evil with 
 
 * See Moore’s “History of Ireland , ” page 19. 
 
LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 377 
 
 which a nation was ever cursed, they will make a requital for the 
 services they have received, and aid in the achievement of peace, 
 and order, and freedom, those who so nobly have contributed to 
 the establishment of their own. Let, then, those fanatics rave 
 about treatises of theology. Whilst we practically convince our 
 Protestant brethren of our love of our neighbour, of every creed, 
 is it to be imagined that we are to consult those empirics, in the 
 adoption of the books which we may recommend to our clergy ? 
 Whatever some old treatises may have been,' they are utterly 
 harmless, except by the experiment of exhumation : they have 
 been generally written with ink on leaves that long since moul- 
 dered. Our modern apostles are more classical, and seem to pant 
 for the opportunity of writing, like some of their predecessors, 
 their doctrines with an “ iron style,” and leaving to posterity in- 
 effaceable traces of its deep and deadly incisions. 
 
 After the severe condemnation of all our casuists at Exeter 
 Hall, it may be important to ascertain who it is that is in future 
 to guide our theological decisions. No other, it seems, than the 
 saintly Sir Robert Inglis, who has totally lost sight of every 
 earthly object in his charitable solicitude for the souls of the Ca- 
 tholic members of parliament. Nay, he appears to overlook the 
 danger of rashness and presumtion, not to talk of falsehood, with 
 which some of the boldest among Protestants confessed their own 
 oaths to be fraught. If a man swears absolutely to a thing which 
 it is impossible for him to know, he exposes himself to the immi- 
 nent peril of swearing what is false in fact and of incurring the 
 guilt of perjury. Has Sir Robert sufficiently convinced himself that 
 the Mass may not be idolatrous ? Has he bestowed sufficient at- 
 tention on the fultilment of those University oaths which bound 
 some of their members not to marry, or to those sworn obligations 
 of teaching schools which were annexed to the possession of bene- 
 fices? But what cares he for all these petty dangers compared 
 with those which beset his Catholic brethren ? For their salva- 
 tion his whole soul yearns; and in the beginning and end of 
 every debate he fulfils his chivalrous vocation by warning the 
 members, if they vote, of the gulf that yawns beneath them. 
 Poor man ! ! he has yet made no converts ; and in defiance of 
 every menace and of every admonition, the Catholic members 
 are following the error of their ways. What a pity that doc- 
 trines emanating from such a disinterested source should be 
 utterly disregarded ! But to be serious, my lord, you need not 
 fear the desertion of the Catholic members on the church question 
 more than any other. They have intellectual capacities to 
 discuss the nature of an oath, as well as the member for the 
 University, and they have courage to keep a conscience too. 
 Besides their own lights, they have a reverence for the pastors 
 of their church, which no genius supersedes, and which forsook 
 
378 
 
 LETTER LX XVI. 
 
 not an Alfred or a Turenne, in the full meridian of their glory. 
 They know that if they are exposed to danger by their oaths, it 
 would be the duty of those to warn them who ought to speak out 
 and who are aware of the course they are persuing. Let, then, 
 Sir Robert and the Bishop of Exeter sigh and whine, the Catho- 
 lic members will only deplore their folly. And should it appear 
 that the baronet himself, like his Pythian predecessors, was only 
 the mouth-piece of some craftier spirits, that lay concealed in the 
 hollow of the tripod, it will doubtless be manifest that some 
 weightier considerations, than a mere puff of inspiration dictated 
 the responses of Sir Oracle. 
 
 It is high time, then, that the laws of eternal justice and the 
 real and substantial interests of the people should be preferred to 
 that calculating policy, which hitherto sacrificed them, for. the 
 support of a mischievous establishment. The people can no longer 
 he neglected with impunity. They know it is they who fought 
 your battles, filled your fleets, and still feed the manufacturers 
 of England with the produce of their industry ; they know, too, 
 that they have been your lordship’s best allies in fighting against 
 corruption the battles of reform ; and they have intelligence 
 enough to understand that it is not a fair requital of all these 
 services that a useless body should be pampered with gorgeous 
 wealth, and they abandoned, without any sympathy, to starve. 
 This they have endured too often, and with a patience un- 
 paralleled in the history of any other nation. That they have 
 not done so this season is, in the estimation of some, one of the 
 greatest crimes of which the poor peasantry could be guilty. 
 Though it is lately become fashionable to reproach the priest- 
 hood of Ireland with a tendency to agitation — still, all this 
 could be easily forgiven them, if they did not expose the 
 wretchedness of the people, or if they persuaded them to lie 
 down and starve in peace. But to exhibit so many hundreds 
 without a cow, horse, or any four-footed animal — so many 
 families through the country without a night covering at an 
 average for twenty persons— to represent some of the gentry 
 employing persons to scourge from their gates the unfortunate 
 victims of their own rapacity, and others encumbering their 
 mercenary relief with conditions of such cruel and complicated 
 usury as to render it a prospective curse, is one of the most 
 treasonable acts of which the Catholic clergy could be guilty. 
 At the recurrence of an election, when there is question of de- 
 bauching the integrity of the people, the coffers are freely opened 
 to effect that immoral purpose. No matter what perjuries may 
 stare the guilty dispensers of this mammon in the face ; they 
 are hardened enough to brave all such terrors. But famine 
 threatens — no money appears. The only fear is the exposure 
 of certain classes ; and better far . it has been murmured, that 
 
LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 379 
 
 such nuisances should be entirely swept away than that persons 
 unaccustomed to such treatment should be writhing under the 
 indignant tongues of British senators, or suffering from the 
 equally bitter pen of British journalists. 
 
 Can, then, the British public wonder that the political power 
 of such men has for ever passed away ? Can they wonder that 
 they cannot lead any longer their wretched serfs to the political 
 market-place? Allow me to say, that they appear to possess 
 little consistency who to-day lash the landlords of Ireland as the 
 most grinding, unfeeling, rapacious, and oppressive, body on 
 earth, and to-morrow inveigh with equal warmth, against the 
 stupidity, ingratitude and recklessness of all natural ties, which 
 turned the infatuated tenantry against their amiable and kind- 
 hearted protectors. Let those journalists, then, retract all the 
 articles of impeachment with which their papers have teemed 
 against them ; let them resolve and write that instead of being 
 hard-hearted and persecuting, they are the kindest, most gentle 
 and compassionating men to be found; or let them cease to 
 wonder at the loss of their moral influence. The cause of reform, 
 then, has nothing to dread from their noisy and vaunting pre- 
 parations. They have been weighed, and found wanting, and 
 their power has passed away ; nor have they yet evinced any 
 symptoms of contrition or satisfaction sufficient to warrant the 
 hope of recovering the lost favour of the people. 
 
 As it is, then, in the honest hands of the latter that political 
 power is lodged, it would be impolicy as well as injustice to sacri- 
 fice them longer to the landlords or the parsons. Whilst the land- 
 lords could barter the representation to the highest bidder it is no 
 wonder if the people, without a voice or influence in the councils 
 of the nation, should be reduced to absolute servitude. As they 
 have now a voice, they will most loyally and constitutionally use 
 it on being left a portion of the produce of their own labour, rather 
 than that all should gorge those absentees who have hitherto un- 
 mercifully drained their very vitals. The extent to which the 
 ancient Scotch and Irish recognised the claims of kindred has been 
 often made a theme of ridicule. I must confess there is something 
 ridiculous in self-sacrifices which the Irish still make, whilst they 
 should loudly and imperatively demand relief from other sources. 
 Their exercise of the domestic affections must ever command the 
 admiration of every generous mind. But it is too bad that their 
 feelings should be continually exposed to this specious of martyr- 
 dom, in order that my Lord Limerick should enjoy the luxury of 
 expatiating, among the cold sentimentalists of the high circles in 
 London, on the warm-hearted kindness of the poor peasantry of 
 Ireland. I can assure his lordship that a large centage on his 
 and other estates, for the benefit of the paupers which are scat- 
 tered over them, will not at all dry up the fountains of domestic 
 
380 
 
 LETTER LXXVI. 
 
 cliarity. Some writers from Limerick have conjectured why his 
 lordship is so adverse to any provision for the poor. Whoever 
 travels through the extensive district between the Pontoon and 
 Ballina, may gather additional reasons for this reluctance. The 
 lake, the hills, the woods, the mountains would gladden his heart, 
 if he were not to be saddened by the humiliating contrast of the 
 misery of the noblest of God’s creatures. When Popery was in 
 its zenith in Ireland, Lough Cee resounded with the devout strains 
 of the harp of St. Columba ; along the banks of Lough Con you 
 may often hear the wailings of the untenanted cottier mingle with 
 the hoarse lash and the more terrific imprecations of the driver ; 
 but no hallowed sounds of thanksgiving or of joy are heard like 
 those of the Saint of Iona to breathe along its waters. 
 
 In concluding this letter, I may be allowed to make one or two 
 reflections on the serious misapprehension of some well-meaning 
 Protestants. We have no feeling of hostility whatever towards 
 them on account of their religious opinions. We quarrel with no 
 man on account of his creed ; nor is he, whatever may be the 
 complexion of his faith, an object of our alienation. But we 
 complain, nor shall we cease to do so whilst the cause continues, 
 of the political injustice with which religion has been forcibly 
 connected. We complain, that a vast property should be exclu- 
 sively devoured by a few ecclesiastical vultures, whilst the many, 
 for whose physical and moral nutriment it was intended, should, 
 in every sense of the word, be bereft of , its benefit. Let the Pro- 
 testants propagate their religion as largely and as freely as they 
 please, but let it be in a manner that will prove its purity to the 
 world. They talk of the revenues of Catholic priests. Why do 
 not they, if they have any reliance on their office, trust to the 
 same resources ? Some talk that the effect of reducing the 
 establishment will be to establish the Catholic religion in Ireland. 
 What ! establish the Catholic religion in Ireland ! ! They might 
 as well talk of resolving to plant the stars in the heavens, or of 
 plucking them out of the firmanent. The Catholic religion is too 
 deeply established in Ireland to be rooted out. It has been 
 established, and fostered, and sustained by the finger of Him 
 whose power no government can frustrate, and whose councils 
 no legislature can control. If the Protestant establishment is 
 founded on a similar basis, why not trust to a similar protection ? 
 Let it, like the Catholic church, flourish by its own vigour, or fall 
 by its corruption. As for the legislature, it has already done 
 enough for the establishment. There has been no lack of bribes, 
 of forfeitures, of confiscations, and all the grim artillery of penal 
 laws, so well described by Burke, which had so long frowned 
 upon its enclosures. Yet all were of no avail. The tree, though 
 fed with abundance of manure, has produced nought but barren- 
 ness. It is not deserving the toil or expenditure of any further 
 
LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 381 
 
 
 cultivation. It ought, therefore, to be left to its own fate, un- 
 assailed and unsupported. It has had sufficient time to thrive, 
 but though its roots have been saturated with abundance of 
 blood, no dews from heaven have desended on its branches. 
 Without at all, then, interfering with the purity of religion, the 
 barren trunk ought to be abandoned to the decay that has come 
 upon it, until, without any stroke of external violence, but by 
 the mere weight of its own caducity, it perishes from the land 
 which it has so long and so lamentably encumbered. 
 
 I have the honour to be, your lordship’s very obedient servant, 
 
 ►p John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT REV. DR. BLOOMEEILD, LORD BISHOP OF 
 LONDON. 
 
 Achil Island, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, 
 September 8 , 1835 . 
 
 My Lord — The remoteness of this island beyond the reach of 
 his Majesty’s mail, will, I trust, justify my tardiness in acknow- 
 ledging your lordship’s attention. The interesting occupation, 
 too, in which I have been engaged, guarding this distant portion 
 of the flock from the poison of errors, confirming the many in 
 the faith, and receiving back into the fold the few who were 
 straying around its enclosure, will, no doubt, plead in my favour, 
 as an additional apology. Whatever may be your lordship’s 
 opinion of the painful labour of such duties, I can sincerely assure 
 you that the gratification derived from them is such as could not 
 be supplied by any correspondence, however exalted. Yet, as 
 those busy reporters that invade the sacred recesses of legislation, 
 have represented you as pouring the viol of your unmeasured 
 wrath upon an humble and unoffending individual, who could 
 not by his presence disarm your anger, he must avail himself of 
 the only medium left him of bringing his censor to a becoming 
 feeling of the fatuity of his accusation. 
 
 It must be that the whole tenor of the observations ascribed to 
 you, regarding the extent, the usefulness, the res6urces, the 
 ministers and the opponents of the church establishment in 
 
3-82 
 
 LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 Ireland, is nought but fabrication. It would ill comport with 
 those modest acknowledgments of liability to error, which so 
 amiably characterize all the effusions of Protestant Prelates, to 
 assume at once such a tone of fierce intolerance and dictatorial 
 dogmatism, as runs through those supposed parliamentary 
 lucubrations. It is impossible that on a subject in which your 
 sources of knowledge were scanty and imperfect, you could 
 hazard such an assertion as that the Protestant religion was 
 spreading in Ireland. In the days of Lord Farnham and 
 Captain Gordon, such impudent assertions might have gained 
 credence. In latter times, commissioners of unimpeachable 
 veracity have sealed their refutation. What? the Protestant 
 religion increasing ! And what is the evidence to establish its 
 progress ? Eight hundred and sixty parishes without fifty 
 Protestants, and not one solitary individual professing that 
 faith to be found in a number of parishes amounting to one 
 hundred and a half. If from such data you deduce the spread 
 of Protestantism, it must be that you attach to numbers the 
 idea of negative quantities. 
 
 But instead of numerical figures, you have discovered an in- 
 fallible standard to ascertain its diffusion. What is this novel 
 criterion by which the public is to estimate the growth of Pro- 
 testantism in this country ? The increase of parsons, glebe- 
 houses, and churches since the Union ! ! It is true we have had 
 an increase of parsons, many of whom had not even a clerk to 
 answer “Amen,” until he returned from the Catholic chapel. 
 These parsons, without flocks, were snugly lodged in glebe-houses 
 built at the people’s expense for their accommodation. Does 
 your lordship call this an increase of the Protestant religion ? 
 If so, the calculations of those who estimate the extent of Catho- 
 licity from the numbers of its followers, must be erroneous. For 
 of the congregations that are seen on Sundays thronging from 
 the four quarters of the heavens to adore their God in the sacra- 
 fice of the Mass, there are many that have not a roof to shelter 
 them; and for none would the amplest area of any modern 
 Catholic church be sufficiently capacious. Those are not I sup- 
 pose to supply any evidence, that it is the Catholic religion, 
 and it alone, which has been established in the hearts of the 
 people. No, my lord, cold untenanted walls, lifeless stones, un- 
 trodden floors, and deserted boxes are your symbols of religion. 
 The hearts of the people, the living temples of the Holy Ghost, 
 and the tongues of the myriads who, quickened with his spirit, 
 celebrate his praise in the cities, in the towns, in the valleys 
 and through the mountains, are as nought. You may, then, 
 boast of your parsons as a proof of the spread of Protestantism. 
 I shall exhibit the people as evidence to the contrary, com- 
 pared to whom the parsons are but as a few drops in the vastness 
 
LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 383 
 
 of the ocean. And as for your churches, so far from being any 
 evidence of the growth of the Protestant religion, their steeples, 
 like the London Monument, are so many “ tall and lying bullies,” 
 erected to create a delusive belief of the establishment of the 
 Protestant religion, in places where a vestige of it was never to 
 be seen. 
 
 Conscious, however, of the fallacy of your views regarding 
 the extent of Protestantism, you encourage the hope of its pro- 
 spective diffusion, and suggest that all the measures of the legis- 
 lature should be so shaped as if Ireland “ were one day to be- 
 come Protestant.” When will that happy day, the object of so 
 many delusive prophesies, arrive ? If the propagators of error 
 have no retribution to fear until the day that Ireland becomes 
 Protestant, well, indeed, may they mock the day of judgment, and 
 rest secure from their delinquency. But such topics are really 
 too ridiculous for refutation. Are your lordship’s eyes alone so 
 infatuated as not to perceive, in the signs of the times, the evi- 
 dence of its failure instead of harbingers of its propagation ? 
 Your church establishment may flourish for some time longer in 
 England, as being more deeply rooted in the country. In 
 Ireland it has never sunk below the surface of the soil. Not 
 all the English Bishops, with all the missionaries they could 
 employ, and all the treasures of mammon with which they could 
 so liberally supply them, would make the least advance in the 
 fulfilment of your lordship’s expectations. There is something 
 in the very soil and atmosphere of Ireland uncongenial to the 
 growth of error. Its people are too quick, and too intellectual 
 in their conceptions, as well as too lofty and abstracted in their 
 hopes, ever to bend their necks to the ignominious yoke of an 
 establishment, which offers nought beyond the prospects of a 
 carnal, political paradise to its votaries. 
 
 Witness, for example, the recent abortive exertions of the 
 Achil Missionary Society, that was to renovate the face of this 
 island. Not only were the exaggerations of fancy put in requi- 
 sition, but all the resources of falsehood were resorted to, to 
 muster a crusade for the spiritual conquest of the inhabitants. 
 Before the dizzy eyes of the holy impostors, not one, but two 
 hundred Achils floated on the Atlantic, and England was repeat- 
 edly traversed to procure money for the salvation of the hundreds 
 of thousands with which those imaginary islands were peopled. 
 New houses rose, a spiritual colony was planted, moneys were ex- 
 pended without measure, and though hunger, and nakedness, and 
 famine were constant allies of which imposture availed itself, still 
 it could make no advances in this island. In vain was it attempted 
 to seduce the people from the faith of their fathers. A few 
 strolling strangers, such as could be appropriately grouped with 
 the fathers of the first reformation, was all they could enlist in 
 
384 
 
 LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 their ranks. The contemptuous scorn with which the natives 
 treated the pretensions of those ignorant fanatics, if adequately 
 conveyed to your lordship, would considerably sober your en- 
 thusiastic anticipations. Some of the brotherhood have already 
 fled from the bitter derision of the people — others are preparing 
 to follow their example — finding or feigning a convenient apology 
 in the unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. The Achil mission 
 is already another tale of the numerous failures of fraud and 
 fanaticism ; and its buildings, now unfinished, are like the Tower 
 of Babel — a monument of the folly and presumption of their 
 architects. Whoever, then, in future should contribute to such 
 a project, will be not only the dupe of delusion, but the willing 
 agent of imposture. 
 
 Your lordship is reported to have gravely advanced, as an 
 argument for the enormous wealth of the Irish establishment, 
 that without the pomp with which it* surrounds the ministers of 
 religion, their instructions could not fall with any force among 
 the humbler classes of society. This is doubtless a small infusion 
 of sarcastic irony with which the reporters deemed it necessary 
 to season the dullness of the production. Enormous wealth a 
 necessary ally of the Christian religion ! ! The pride which it 
 generates an indispensable precursor of truth ! ! And the lux- 
 urious indolence with which it unnerves its votaries, the most 
 appropriate instrument to give force and efficacy to their instruc- 
 tions ! ! St. Paul, and perhaps his best imitator, as well as 
 admirer, in eloquence, in purity and in the privations of life — St. 
 John Chrysostom, may now retire from the ranks of Christian 
 orators, of which they were the acknowledged leaders, and give 
 way to those who assert that a golden calf is a more potent 
 instrument of persuasion. No one familiar with the records of 
 history, or the feelings of the human heart, can believe in such 
 speculations. There are, and ever will be in society some un- 
 principled individuals for whom wealth will have attractions, no 
 matter with what objects it may be associated. But with regard 
 to the convictions of the heart, it is truth, accompanied by its 
 practical illustration in conduct, which alone can lead them 
 captive. 
 
 What aid did they ever derive from the splendour of wealth, 
 who achieved the most signal triumphs for the benefit of 
 mankind? To whom, under Providence, are we still indebted 
 for our Christianity ? To two poor and untitled individuals,* 
 a hermit and a monk — of whom the one, by the energy of his 
 voice, and the charm of his virtue — and the other, by the 
 burning spirit which he flung into his writings, awoke Europe 
 from its torpor, and saved its inhabitants from the licentious 
 
 * Peter tiie Hermit and St. Bernard. 
 
LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 385 
 
 dominion of the Koran. Was it with the weight of their purse 
 the zealous disciples of Loyola won and exercised their peaceful 
 reign over the once happy people of Paraguay ? But as such 
 historical retrospects may not be so agreeable to your lordship’s 
 taste, I shall confine myself to our own times, in which there is 
 less of enthusiasm, and more of calculation. I will then seriously 
 put it to your lordship, is the persuasive influence that still sways 
 the intelligent mass of society measured by the quantity of 
 wealth that is in possession of the teachers ? No, it is not still 
 so degenerate ; and though avarice has still silently worked 
 its corrupting way into large portions of it, the great body has 
 happily been proof against the infection. Is your lordship aware 
 that an humble Catholic curate in Ireland, with only £30 a year, 
 exercises more of that exalted influence which proceeds from the 
 mysterious communion of mind, than does, with all his untold 
 wealth, the Protestant Primate of all Ireland ? I have myself 
 witnessed, in two remarkable instances, what little importance an 
 auditory attaches to the possession or privation of worldly rank 
 or riches, in the dispensers of Christian morality. 
 
 The one was on the anniversary of this very festival of the 
 Blessed Virgin, when the august sovereign of those realms, sur- 
 rounded in Westminster Abbey by the ancient nobles of the land, 
 and encircled with all the magnificence which so interesting 
 a spectacle could call forth, entered into a sworn covenant to 
 promote the happiness of his people. The second was when 
 another monarch, and likewise the father of the Christian world, 
 with the princes and prelates of his court around him, as also 
 the bishops whom reverence towards their centre drew from 
 every quarter of the Catholic church, assembled in the Vatican 
 to prepare with due devotion for the celebration of the Christian 
 Passover. A discourse on the respective duties of the assembled 
 auditory, formed a part of each of these solemnities. The one 
 was delivered by a prelate of exalted rank and supercilious 
 bearing, whose full and corpulent frame, unwasted by fasts or 
 vigils, attested the sincerity of his belief in the superstition of 
 such practices. It was Dr. Bloomfield, the Protestant Bishop of 
 London — the other by a Capuchin, than whom nothing could 
 more strongly contrast with the former figure. The feet, almost 
 bare, were bound by a few latchets to their scanty sandals ; a 
 coarse, dark, flowing garment was wrapped by a leathern girdle 
 round his emaciated body ; the sinews upon his attenuated wrists 
 and fingers were seen to rise like reeds upon a column ; and the 
 fulness of the tonsure, which his downcast head had rendered 
 visible, manifestly revealed how completely he had got rid of all 
 the vanities of the world. The effect of their discourses corres- 
 ponded with the striking opposition of their characters — the one, 
 conscious of the obligations which he owed to the powers of this 
 
386 
 
 LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 world for his elevation, seemed disposed to return the compliment 
 by a kind accommodation to its maxims, as if his auditory were 
 adjuring him in the language of the prophet, to “ speak unto 
 them pleasing things.” He appeared to acquiesce in their amiable 
 requisition. No abrupt invectives against fashionable vice inter- 
 rupted the smooth current of his sermon ; no awful visions from 
 another world broke on the tranquil slumbers of his audience. A 
 cold, unimpassioned harangue, such as could have been composed 
 by Epictetus, was addressed to an auditory impatient for its 
 conclusion ; nor was there a single stroke depicting the beauty of 
 chastity, or the terrors of judgment, which could remind one of 
 the triumphs of an apostle over the illusions of a court, or over 
 the combined influence of sensuality and pride. On the con- 
 trary, the other came forward as one whose “ conversation was 
 in heaven,” and who, being abstracted from the influence of the 
 world, was resolved not to lend himself to its caprices. Each 
 word was a warning sent from a superior spirit, and though there 
 were present those whose lives were worthy of the pure and 
 primitive times, the most pious could not but feel the awful in- 
 fluence of the holy man when he denounced the more terrible 
 punishments that awaited the high and mighty delinquents 
 who in church or in state forgot the obligations of mercy to 
 the poor. 
 
 To persons whose ears and minds are long attuned to the 
 simpering notes and soft ideas of perpetual gratification, it will 
 appear strange that such an exhibition of pulpit eloquence could 
 still be tolerated. To the poor and oppressed people of Ireland, 
 who feel the direful effects of flattery on the great, it is equally 
 a subject of poignant regret that the wholesome, and the bitter 
 truths of religion, do not find their way into the fastidious ears 
 of many of the legislators. With such an accommodating moral 
 discipline as I have described, I am not surprised at the in- 
 fatuation that has characterized the recent measures of the 
 peers. What wonder that they should reject the corporation 
 reform, when they grow up with such hereditary notions of 
 their own irresponsibility ? It is not surprising that they 
 should reject the Catholic marriage bill, and punish with un- 
 merited rigour an unoffending offspring. In short, not to waste 
 time in prompting attention to all their wayward and capricious 
 movements, there is one consolation, that their bad effect must 
 be neutralized by their own folly. Their rejection of the 
 tithe bill should make us forget all their previous hostility 
 to truth and justice, and fill us with thankfulness for the 
 wisdom of their resolves. Do not, my lord, henceforward accuse 
 me or any other innocent individual of designs to subvert the 
 Protestant establishment. All our designs are innocuous, com- 
 pared to your own acts. You charge me with characterizing the 
 
LETTER LXXVII. 
 
 387 
 
 establishment with the odious names of vampire, and bloodsucker, 
 and Juggernaut. I have never loaded it with those offensive 
 epithets. It is Doctor Bloomfield who has done so — and if it be 
 true that “ they best can paint it who have known it best,” let 
 those who dislike the picture charge him, and not me, with the 
 correctness of the delineation. It is not our words or writings, 
 then, but their own deeds, that are hastening the dissolution of 
 the establishment. Yes, such deeds as those of Rathcormac, are 
 hurrying it on to its fate. 
 
 And not only those, but other deeds as dark, to which, in 
 obedience to the injunctions of the Apostle, I shall not give utter- 
 ance, but to which the gentlemen of the long robe, not so for- 
 bearing, have given a scandalous publicity. Those are the deeds 
 which, united with the decrees of the Lords, have doomed the 
 establishment to destruction. Already the parsons are commen- 
 cing the practices of the Catholic religion : fasting is becoming 
 a favourite observance. There is no longer any clamorous con- 
 troversy about communion under both kinds, since vestries cannot 
 tax the heterodox parishioners for the wine which would ad- 
 minister spiritual comfort to the faithful. Nay, hateful as celibacy 
 appeared to the Protestant churchmen, they are beginning to 
 agree with Malthus, that it would be unjust to be burdening 
 society with an unprovided offspring. For all these benefits allow 
 us to thank your lordship and your brother peers. With one 
 accord the people of Ireland have resolved to pay no tithes in 
 any shape, whether to landlords or parsons ; they are determined 
 to persevere in that resolution; one year more will settle the 
 question for ever ; and, as you and the lords have adjourned it, 
 you will be entitled to the credit of having effectually contributed 
 to the slow and natural demise of the parsons, and the extinction 
 of the Protestant church. 
 
 I have the honour to be your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
388 
 
 LETTER LXXVIII. 
 
 LETTER LXXVIII. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE COURIER. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Feast of St. Raphael, 
 October 24 , 1835 . 
 
 “ Religionis non est religionem cogere.” — Tertullian. 
 
 Sir — As your liberal journal has been made, I am sure uninten- 
 tionally, the vehicle of a gross calumny upon me, you will deem 
 it, I trust, but an act of justice to publish its refutation. I 
 allude to an extract, which appeared in the Courier of the 16th 
 of October, from a pamphlet of a Rev. Mr. Stanley, regarding 
 religious education in Ireland. Among many things in that 
 publication, more deserving of commendation than of censure, he 
 wantonly introduces my name, for the purpose of the most offen- 
 sive and gratuitous slander, in the support of which there is not 
 offered one particle of evidence. After historically stating the 
 odious practices of torture and persecution, which have cast such 
 a stain upon Protestants and Catholics of former times, he adds : 
 “ If one were to judge by his language, Dr. Mac Hale, the titular 
 Archbishop of Tuam, may be one of those who cling to such obso- 
 lete doctrines in all their odious integrity/’ 
 
 This must be allowed to be a heavy impeachment, especially 
 coming from one who affects a tone of peculiar candour and 
 moderation. Had it been uttered or written by any of those 
 practised slanderers, with whose effusions the columns of the 
 Times and Standard are daily teeming, I should pass it over, as 
 I have done many similar calumnies. But such an observation 
 from the rector of Alderly is calculated, if not met, to do the 
 more mischief : since his little work is, with many imperfections, 
 a wonderful effort of liberality, amidst the rancorous bigotry that 
 pervades the writings of almost all the English and Irish 
 parsons. 
 
 In the name of a large portion of the Catholics of Ireland, 
 over whose opinions I possess some influence, from my station, as 
 well as in the name of the honest British Protestants, who may 
 be misled by the assertion, I solemnly call upon Mr. Stanley, to 
 state his reason for so foul an insinuation. Should he not satisfy 
 a requisition so reasonable on my part, and so imperative on his, 
 the public must not think him entitled to their confidence. That 
 
LETTER LXXVIII. 
 
 389 
 
 u may be,” in which he insinuates his charge, is anything but a 
 manly or Christian mode of aggression. A man may be any- 
 thing, for aught another can know of the deep and mysterious 
 thinkings of his mind. But such thoughts are not the object of 
 the reward or punishment of any earthly tribunal. It is one’s 
 outward acts or language alone that can warrant a positive judg- 
 ment on his opinions. Now, I fearlessly appeal to all the spoken 
 and written language of my life, and challenge Mr. Stanley, or 
 any other person, to find a word which can justify the charge, 
 that I may be an advocate of persecuting any human being, for 
 speculative religious opinions. On the contrary, it is a doctrine 
 which I abhor from my soul ; it is one which I have uniformly 
 reprobated. If ever I might have indulged in any peculiar 
 warmth of language, it was when the odious doctrines or prac- 
 tices of religious persecution called forth merited denunciation. 
 Again I challenge Mr. Stanley, or any other who chanced to 
 read a line that I ever wrote, or hear a word that I ever uttered, 
 to find in them any leaning to such odious opinions. Persecution 
 of every kind has always called forth my severest censure, nor 
 has it ever been qualified, but by expressions of pity for those 
 who might have been ever betrayed into so cruel and unchristian 
 a practice. 
 
 What is Mr. Stanley’s pretended evidence ? Some epithets, 
 which I am supposed to have applied to the Established Church 
 in Ireland, taken from the parliamentary speech of the Bishop of 
 London. Now, I must protest against my opinions being viewed 
 through the distorting medium of any enemy, but especially a 
 Protestant bishop. It is a maxim that no one should suffer twice 
 for the same crime, and, as I have already brought to judgment 
 his lordship of London, for his unwarrantable calumnies, I shall, 
 for the present, forbear any further infliction. But, in reality, 
 the distorted words, which the bishop ascribed to me, so far from 
 warranting Mr. Stanley’s inference, are rather demonstrative of 
 the horror in which I hold persecution. I have denounced the 
 tithes, as the prolific fountain from which blood has copiously 
 flowed through Ireland. I have held up the Church Establish- 
 ment, as entitled to anything but affection from the people. In 
 all this I have been but the feeble echo of the louder and more 
 indignant denunciations of abler men, who have raised England, 
 Scotland, and Ireland, from the lethargy of their delusion, and 
 called forth the sympathies of the world, in reprobating such a 
 system. And for thus denouncing tyranny — for thus pointing 
 the public indignation against cruelties, committed in the name 
 of religion — for thus advocating the just principle, that no one 
 is bound to pay others, for continually abusing and insulting his 
 religious creed — I am exhibited by a meek minister of the GospeL 
 as one of those who still cling to the antiquated doctrines of per- 
 
390 
 
 LETTER LXXVIIL 
 
 secution. If such be the premises from which he draws his con- 
 clusions, he must have the merit of discovering some hitherto 
 unknown laws of reasoning. 
 
 Having done with his unwarranted attack upon myself, I shall 
 say but little on the merit of his production. Compared to the 
 splenetic and ferocious calumnies of the whole tribe of the 
 fanatical fudges, it is a pamphlet of some merit. However, the 
 writer makes a very erroneous estimate of its value, if he 
 imagines, whilst the odious monopoly and monstrous injustice of 
 the Establishment are perpetuated, that his arguments can make 
 the impression which he benevolently anticipates. Nay, more, 
 should it be his object, by his smooth and conciliating language, 
 to reconcile the people of Ireland to the abominable Church 
 Establishment, he is but a covert advocate for the continued 
 persecution, which he so strongly and justly reprobates. You 
 cannot well complain of any system which you contribute to 
 uphold. You cannot complain of the cruelties of any monster 
 whilst you minister to its support. Nor can Mr. Stanley or any 
 other complain of the folly of antiquated doctrines of persecution, 
 whilst they endeavour to fence against public exposure the injus- 
 tice of ecclesiastical monopoly. He has drawn up a catalogue 
 raisonne of analogies between the Catholic and Protestant 
 Churches. He has striven to narrow the gulf that lies between 
 them, and to bring them into closer and more Christian approxi- 
 mation. It is not to be imagined that I regret such charitable 
 labours. On the contrary, I should rejoice that the most re- 
 pulsive systems of religion were brought into an identity of 
 truth and benevolence. I am glad that he has taught the good 
 Protestants of England, that the difference between their religion 
 and that of Rome was not as great as they imagined. This 
 remark I must accompany w r ith two others equally important, of 
 which I owe the one to my own sincere conviction — the other, to 
 my respect for the religious feelings of my dissenting brethren. 
 Whilst I rejoice that the difference is not so great as they 
 imagined, I must deplore that there is a disagreement on many 
 serious and all-important subjects. But again, in doing so, I 
 must remark, that it is without any feeling of the least unkind- 
 ness to any human being. 
 
 It is in vain, however, that you strive to persuade people, that 
 the pass between their religions is narrow, if you advocate that, 
 by which the narrowest channel will appear indefinitely widened. 
 I have often seen every tenet of the Catholic religion advocated by 
 some distinguished Protestant polemic. I pledge myself — and I 
 make the pledge solemnly and advisedly — that should the day 
 come when the tone of the public mind will be so calm as to value 
 such discoveries, I shall prove every article of the Catholic faith 
 by the testimonies of Protestant writers. Why have we not done 
 
LETTER LXXV1II. 
 
 391 
 
 so hitherto ? Because we had too deep a knowledge of the force 
 of human temptation, to be amusing ourselves with such experi- 
 ments. It is here the rector of Alderly is deceived, or wishes to 
 deceive others. Does he imagine that the Tories of England 
 will become enamoured of the Catholic faith, by persuading them 
 that it was from its rich and gorgeous canvass the painters of 
 the Reformation borrowed whatever there was of excellence in 
 their own ? Does he imagine that they prefer the Church of 
 England, because it happens to be the nearest to that of Rome, 
 and because it is “ less deformed, because reformed the least ?” 
 Does he imagine, in short, that they would become attached to 
 the Catholic religion, though he were to show there was no 
 difference between it and the pretended reformed faith ; but that 
 they were both, in every form of outline, like opposite rocks, 
 which some sudden shock had separated ? Little does he know 
 of the heart of man, or the history of his kind, if he indulges in 
 such hopes. He must, before his reasoning reach the heart, 
 remove the obstructions that stand in the way. Does he know 
 that former governments wished to plant Ireland with colonies of 
 Jews, or Turks, rather than have it peopled by Catholics ? If, 
 then, by the showing of Mr. Stanley (and Mr. Stanley is per- 
 fectly orthodox in the supposition), the Church of England is 
 more like that of Rome than any other separated conventicle, it 
 cannot be that a love of religion prompted the persecution of 
 the Catholics of Ireland. No ; it was pelf — it was plunder — it 
 was spoliation. And it is pelf, and plunder, and spoliation, 
 though now disguised under legal forms, that prompt the con- 
 tinued and untiring persecution of the Catholics. Let me sup- 
 pose that Catholicity, and monopoly, and the power of the few, 
 were on one side, and that Protestantism, and poverty, and 
 the proscription of the many were on the other, who could 
 doubt of the position which would be adopted by the Biblicals, 
 and the Tories? To attempt, then, to disarm their tyranny, by 
 favourable representations of the Catholic religion, is a hopeless 
 task. The only method of doing it effectually, is to annihilate 
 the monopoly on which they fatten. Hence, I attach but little 
 value to the learned labours of Mr. Stanley. Lactantius said 
 once, he could collect a body of sound morality from the scat- 
 tered sentences of pagan writers. So could I gather the body 
 of Catholic theology from the several admissions of Protestant 
 controversialists. It will be high time to enter on this hallowed 
 mission of peace, and charity, and reconciliation, when we shall 
 all meet on the ground of political equality. Then I promise 
 that our dissensions shall cease. Then the people of England 
 shall know that the No-Popery cry was an artificial clamour, 
 kept up by interested and unbelieving bigots, to cheat them out 
 of their property and their freedom. To put down, then, that 
 
392 
 
 LETTER LXXIX. 
 
 spirit of persecution, which the rector of Aldcrly deplores, wo 
 must take away the tithes — the accursed aliment that feeds it. 
 Let every man in the empire who loves true religion and 
 Christian charity, but echo the same sentiment : the reign of 
 tyranny and Toryism will be at an end ; and it will not be 
 difficult, with the blessings of Providence, to smoothe the way to 
 a general reconciliation. 
 
 I have the honour to be your obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETT PR LXXIX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION.* 
 
 Dublin, February 12 , 1838 . 
 
 My Lord — A declaration ascribed to Lord Lansdowne in the 
 Freeman's Journal of this day has filled my mind with serious 
 alarm for the purity and freedom of the Catholic religion in 
 Ireland. It is needless to allude to the statement of his intention 
 to forward the suggestions recommended for adoption by the 
 education commissioners. At present I have not leisure, on the 
 eve of my return to my diocese, to enter into all the bearings of 
 the question of the system of education, with a fullness deserving 
 ils importance. It is not less vital than the questions regarding 
 the veto on the appointment of Catholic bishops, or the pen- 
 sioning of the Catholic clergy, which have long and repeatedly 
 occupied the deliberations of the Catholic bishops. It must then 
 excite the surprise, and alarm the fears of the faithful, that any 
 minister should declare his resolve to act on a report essentially 
 connected with the religion of the Irish people, on which the 
 bishops could not have pronounced an opinion, and into the 
 grounds of which they had not time to inquire. I should, there- 
 fore, beg of your lordship to pause in the career of legislation, 
 until the sentiments of the Catholic bishops and clergy of Ireland 
 are sufficiently ascertained on the benefits or evils of the system, 
 
LETTER LXXIX. 
 
 393 
 
 and its practical operation. I take occasion to address your 
 lordship thus briefly to remove a delusion under which many 
 members of the legislature manifestly labour. They seem to be 
 under an impression that it is competent for them, through the 
 agency of boards of their selection, to assume and exercise com- 
 plete control over the education — even the religious education — 
 of the people. That is an error, which would be as fatal to 
 the interests of the state, as it would be to the purity of the 
 Catholic religion. It is but right to acquaint your lordship that 
 the Catholic bishops, and the Catholic bishops alone, have the 
 right to regulate the choice of the books out of which the faithful 
 are to draw the nutriment of piety and sound doctrine. It would 
 be a lamentable day for Ireland that books of piety were to be 
 regulated by the devotional taste of those alone, to whom any 
 government would wish to confide the spiritual care of the people. 
 Could I transfer this right, or delegate my duty of vigilance to 
 another, I should gladly resign the trust to any one or more of 
 my brethren in the hierarchy. But every bishop is entrusted by 
 the Holy Ghost, and by the successor of St. Peter, with the pe- 
 culiar care of his own flock. I beg leave, therefore, to assure 
 Lord Stanley, and others who would wish to subject the Catholic 
 Church to the influence of the ministers of the day, that to no 
 authority on earth, save the Pope, shall I submit the books from 
 which the children in my diocese shall derive their religious in- 
 struction. On the disproportioned number of Catholic and Pro- 
 testant commissioners — on the lectures to be given in the training 
 of the masters — on the recent number of inspectors, and their 
 qualifications and duties — on the want in the board of a fair repre- 
 sentation of the different localities of Ireland — but, above all, on 
 the mass of important evidence which I have gleaned from the 
 voluminous reports regarding the recent education inquiry — I 
 shall forbear any remarks until my resumption of the subject. I 
 must, however, not forget to remark that the attention of the 
 public is alive to the dark and mysterious nature of the office 
 which is to be exercised by those foreign functionaries, some of 
 the new inspectors — all forsooth for the preservation of the faith 
 of the people, and the legitimate influence of their pastors ! ! 
 The Catholic clergy will not, I hope, omit to inspect the English 
 or Scotch puritan inspectors. In the meantime, deprecating any 
 interference with the temporal titles or revenues of which the 
 Protestant bishops are so jealous, and assuring your lordship that 
 it is assumed only in conformity with the primitive practice, before 
 titles or benefices were known in the Catholic Church, I have the 
 honour to be your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishof of Tuam, 
 
 2c 
 
394 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL, 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, 
 February, 22 , 1838 . 
 
 My Lord — The imminent danger to the interests of religion 
 with which the present system is fraught, prompts me to redeem, 
 without delay, my promise of directing your lordship’s attention 
 to the subject of National Education. Hitherto it has been tried 
 as a mere experiment — not, however, without some of the dis- 
 trust and apprehension which the anomalous formation of the 
 board, and the principle on which it was founded, naturally gave 
 rise to. Let it be recollected, that the present system of educa- 
 tion was never hailed by the Catholics of Ireland as a positive 
 benefit. Coming from a friendly government, anxious to confer 
 a favour, it was tolerated as less obnoxious than the Kildare- 
 street Society, which the government was obliged, at length, to 
 abandon, after lingering a baneful existence of near twenty years. 
 In the commencement of its career, that society was, like the 
 present system, specious and delusive ; it enlisted in its support 
 men of integrity and virtue. Like the present .system, it was de- 
 nounced as too conciliatory to Catholics by the bigotry of those 
 who cannot be satisfied with anything less than the perversion 
 of the entire body, or their consignment again to all the intel- 
 lectual privations which they were so long fated to endure. 
 This hostility of many of the Protestants left some of the Catho- 
 lics long insensible to its danger. A similar opposition, from the 
 same quarter, to the national board, has had a similar effect of 
 disarming their fears, as if, indeed, between the Catholic church 
 and the extreme position which may be taken by Lord Roden, 
 or the Bishop of Exeter, there was not ample space for many 
 an insidious foe to make inroads on its doctrine. If, then, we are 
 to rest satisfied with the National Board because it does not 
 satisfy the Protestant bigots, the same line of argument must 
 plead in favour of the Kildare-street Society, and reconcile the 
 Catholics of Ireland to its legislative restoration. 
 
 But though the timid and the time-serving urged the argu- 
 ments of expediency in favour of their plausible system, the 
 pastors of the Catholic Church, at length alarmed at its danger, 
 
LETTER LXXX. 
 
 395 
 
 conveyed to their respective flocks their own just apprehensions. 
 They petitioned parliament against the society, and prayed for 
 a portion of the public funds to be placed at the disposal of 
 Catholics, for the education of that large mass of the people 
 who recognised their spiritual authority. Again they petitioned, 
 but petitioned in vain ; and, in despite of their repeated prayers, 
 the Kildare-street Society would have still flourished, to their 
 annoyance, had the freeholders of the country not wrought a 
 tardy persuasion in the parliament, of the utter unfitness of that 
 society to promote national education. Yes, it was at the general 
 election in May, 1831, that the freeholders made it a condition 
 with the candidates for their favour that they would oppose any 
 government which, under the guise of educating their children, 
 would carry on a treacherous persecution against the Catholics of 
 Ireland. It is not, then, to the spontaneous benevolence of a 
 Whig government we are indebted for the extinction of the 
 Kildare-street Society. No, whether Whigs or Tories, you are all 
 equally hostile to the Catholic religion. Such was the fidelity 
 of the humble but heroic patriots, who are persecuted or aban- 
 doned by the very persons who are reaping the fruits of their 
 sacrifices, that achieved this national blessing. Nor will they 
 be wanting, on the recurrence of a similar opportunity, to re- 
 quire similar terms from the members of parliament, and to 
 insist that, if they are denied their other national rights, they 
 must at least have the religious education of their children free, 
 without being forced through the suspicious mediums of govern- 
 ment commissions. 
 
 It was necessary to glance briefly at the last stage of the 
 Kildare-street Society, and the circumstances under which it dis- 
 appeared, to enable the public to form a just estimate of the in- 
 auspicious introduction of its successor, the present board. Had 
 the government been in reality disposed to do justice to the 
 Catholics of Ireland, they would have listened to the petition of 
 the Catholic bishops, praying for separate grants for the educa- 
 tion of their flocks. Their numbers, their poverty, and their 
 unimpeachable fealty to their sovereign, gave them a claim to 
 the attention of the legislature. The tithes of the entire king- 
 dom, and six hundred thousand acres of church land, formed, 
 surely, an ample fund for the education of the small section of 
 Protestants. The monopoly of those funds, originally destined 
 for the general mass of the people, should have given additional 
 cogency to their claims on the justice of parliament. The grant 
 would be amply requited by the diffusion of religious peace, and 
 a corresponding feeling of gratitude: but such simple counsels 
 did not suit the cabinet, and the policy which was first tried by 
 the apostate Julian, and, after a long interval, adopted by Joseph, 
 and since pursued by the most despotic governments in Europe, 
 
396 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 finally prevailed. The people must be taught that the religious 
 instruction which was hitherto derived from the apostles, through 
 their successors, is to be placed under the control of the ministers 
 of a secular government. A board is accordingly formed, well 
 fitted in the machinery of its construction, to carry out the views 
 of the minister. If it were framed on fair principles of repre- 
 sentation, we should have six Catholics for one Protestant com- 
 posing the board, being nearly the proportion of their respective 
 numbers. But such a board might not be a pliant instrument 
 for the political projects which the other education societies had 
 failed to achieve. It must, therefore, have an overwhelming 
 preponderance of Protestant influence, with just as much of 
 Catholic representation as can never equal the majority con- 
 tinually opposed to it, whilst its appearance in the board may 
 inspire that body with confidence. However, not to alarm the 
 jealousy of the Catholics, this majority is said to be on the prin- 
 ciple of representing various religious denominations: — one a 
 Socinian, another a Calvinist, and three orthodox church-of- 
 England men, as if it had not already in its gorgeous establish- 
 ment sufficient protection. Such was the dexterous contrivance 
 with which the materials of the board were apparently balanced, 
 on the model, I must presume, of the pre-established harmony of 
 Leibnitz, as if, forsooth, all sections of Protestantism were not 
 combined in a common league against the Catholic Church, and, 
 I must own, not inconsistently, since the Catholic Church equally 
 proscribes them all. Those Protestant members (for I shall call 
 them by that generic name, which characterizes all Dissenters 
 from Catholicity) are praised by some as gentlemen of the most 
 liberal cast of thinking ; by others they are denounced as the 
 bigoted adherents of their respective creeds. Perhaps they 
 might with more justice be divided into both classes. However, 
 it would be a driftless discussion, since the indifference of the one 
 would have as fatal an influence on the religion of Catholic 
 children, as the decided hostility of the others. 
 
 Of the board there are two members, one an English, and the 
 other a Scotch gentleman, and each zealously representing the 
 established religion of his native country. Doctor Whately, the 
 Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, is well known for his publica- 
 tions against the religion of the Catholic people. I should not 
 quarrel with any gentleman who conducts religious controversy 
 as a fair and honourable opponent. But the Catholics of Ireland 
 should be cautious in entrusting the education of their children 
 to one who owes his archiepiscopal throne to his hostility to 
 their faith, and who has dedicated his book on the “ Errors of 
 Ilomanism” to his bosom friend, Blanco White, who was the 
 first to track the path for the M‘Ghees and the O’Sullivans, and 
 who, to use the language of the apostle, “ foaming out his own 
 
LETTER LXXX. 
 
 397 
 
 confusion,” strove to cast the slaver of a corrupt heart on the 
 holiest institutions of the Catholic Church. It may be said that 
 the Protestant Archbishop is not now the same Dr. Whately who 
 penned the offensive dedication. There is no evidence of any 
 change. Besides, it would be a libel on his grace to charge him 
 with apostacy from his early principles, or to insinuate that he is 
 one of those who may take up a theory for convenience, and 
 afterwards repudiate the opinions which conducted him to his 
 elevation. The Rev. Mr. Carlile is, I understand, a native of 
 Scotland, and a minister of the Presbyterian church, who, some 
 twenty years ago, directed his zeal against episcopacy, and 
 became lat^Jy an associate with members of adverse churches in 
 giving a new version of portions of Scripture, in which the in- 
 gredients of their respective creeds were to be so judiciously 
 blended, that not an undiluted particle of a separate faith, might 
 be seen in the amalgamation. But the attempt has failed, illus- 
 trating the interrogatory of St. Paul, regarding the incongruous 
 combination of light with darkness. As well might you expect 
 order to spring from chaos as any precise form of faith from such 
 heterogeneous elements ; and yet it is this production, without 
 shape or figure, equally rejected by all, since none can see on it 
 the impress of his own faith, we are gravely told by a Catholic 
 commissioner, is “ approved by the Catholic bishops of Ireland !” 
 I, for one, protest against such an unwarrantable inference, 
 having never read a line of the lessons until my attention was 
 directed to them by the strange declaration. Now, however, 
 since our silence has been construed into acquiescence, I must 
 own that so far from approving of them, I know the Scripture 
 lessons to be liable to more serious objections than are suggested 
 by their mere indefinite form. 
 
 Alas ! it seems to be the fate of Ireland that no plan can be 
 devised for her improvement, whether it regards education or the 
 relief of the poor, that is not to be conducted by individuals op- 
 posed to us by religious and national antipathies. For the educa- 
 tion of the youth of Ireland, a board is constituted, in which the 
 chief influence is exercised by two aliens in reality — in religion 
 and in country — an English Protestant and Scotch Presbyterian. 
 This influence is manifest in the train of subordinate functionaries 
 of their religion, with which they have contrived to fill the most 
 important departments. The secretary a Protestant — the chief 
 teaching master a Protestant and a Scotchman — time has not yet 
 revealed the number of Protestant inspectors. Such preference, 
 however humiliating, might be endured, if it were not attended 
 with danger to religion. The character, the station and piety, of 
 one individual alone have hitherto protected the system, from the 
 distrust and hatred which it merited. It is, however, now 
 manifest that he is unable to obviate the evils with which it is 
 
398 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 pregnant, and better far for the Catholics of Ireland that the 
 plan would be carried on with the undisguised and unmitigated 
 bigotry of the Kildare-street Society, than that they should be 
 deluded into a confidence of fairness which he, or even a greater 
 number of the same character, would be unable to realise. Can 
 they be present when the teachers meddle in biblical criticism, 
 and learn or dispense the Rabbinical treasures that are exported 
 from Coblentz, or from Edinburgh ? They do not hear that by 
 each of the six days of the creation is to be understood a period 
 of thousands or millions of years — that Jesus Christ (I regret to 
 be thus obliged to transcribe the sacred name) was the spirit that 
 moved across the waters. They do not hear that elchizedeck 
 was the same person — that Enoch and Elias shall never again 
 come : or, what is more important, they do not hear that justifi- 
 cation makes no change in the soul — that it is the mere imputa- 
 tion of righteousness, and that faith is forfeited by the violation 
 of the evangelical law ! They cannot be present when those 
 masters may instil into the infant mind throughout Ireland, such 
 pernicious commentaries. Surely it is not necessary for the rising 
 generation that the heads of the teachers should be filled with 
 such poisonous opinions, nor can it tend to the purity of their 
 morals that they should be trained amidst the licentiousness of 
 crowded cities. I am quite satisfied with the ancient simple faith 
 once delivered to the saints, and am resolved never to entrust 
 the religious education of any child in my diocese to any teacher, 
 whether Protestant or Catholic, whose faith shall be fashioned by 
 such lectures as were and may still be delivered in the normal 
 schools of the Board of National education. 
 
 Having so formed the board as to secure in its literal meaning 
 a vast Protestant ascendancy, the minister’s next object was to 
 strive to subject the consciences of the clergy and people to his 
 political supremacy. Such is the clear meaning of Lord Stanley’s 
 letter to the Duke of Leinster. “ They (the board) will exercise 
 the most entire control over all books to be used in the school, 
 whether in the combined literary or separate religious instruc- 
 tion.” What a pity that Lord Stanley did not live in the times, 
 and form one of the ministry, of Henry the Eighth. The senti- 
 ments of his letter seem well to accord with that monarch’s 
 notions of the extent of his political power. What ! the pastors 
 of the Catholic Church cannot convey their religious instructions 
 to the people, unless those instructions, if delivered through 
 the medium of books, be placed under “ the most entire control” 
 of a board formed by the secular power ! Let individuals talk 
 after this of agitating or political ecclesiastics. It is such persons 
 as Lord Stanley call them into existence — rash and headstrong 
 ministers — who, ignorant or regardless of the boundaries which 
 are set to the civil power, are not content until they encroach 
 
LETTER LXXX. 
 
 399 
 
 beyond them, and then call them haughty prelates who, with a 
 Christian and constitutional freedom, war against their unwar- 
 rantable aggression on spiritual authority. It is the same sen- 
 timent that excited the long and angry _ quarrels between 
 the church and the empire. It is the sentiment that is now 
 shaking the repose of the Prussian provinces, and excites the 
 sympathies of his flock for the persecutions sustained by the 
 illustrious Archbishop of Cologne. The government has a right 
 to check seditious publications, and to inflict punishment on such 
 as would spread disaffection ; but to interfere with mere spiritual 
 doctrines, innocuous to the state, is beyond its legitimate con- 
 trol. The. harshness of the letter is softened down by a subse- 
 quent explanation of the commissioners, that they mean to 
 exercise no control over the standard works of the respective 
 churches ; but what are the standard works, is not yet ascer- 
 tained. The catalogue may be abridged or enlarged at their 
 pleasure. It appears, too, that some of the standard books first 
 enumerated were discovered to be too controversial for the liberal 
 spirit which the majority of the board are labouring to propa- 
 gate, and that some valuable books, written by some of the most 
 pious Catholic bishops, such as the works of the venerable Dr. 
 Challoner, ought to be purged of some harsh and unpalatable 
 passages. These portions I shall illustrate by reference to the 
 published evidence regarding the National Board. 
 
 But the subject is too ample and important to be disposed of 
 in a single letter. Some of the worst consequences of the system 
 have not yet been exposed. Such, for example, is the concession 
 made to the importunate demands of the Protestants or Presby- 
 terians of Ulster of having the Scriptures read at any hour that 
 may be required, not by the pastors, but by the parents or 
 guardians of the children. Such, too, is the secret service to be 
 required of the inspectors, plainly conveyed in the following 
 passage : — “He will also be required, from time to time, to inquire 
 into such matters as we may refer to him, and to report specially 
 thereon.” No doubt the fulfilment of this office of secret espio- 
 nage on the part of these inspectors will be a peculiar recom- 
 mendation to the favour of the majority of the board, and to the 
 patronage of the government. Such, in fine, is the cumbrous 
 machinery of the system, swallowing up in sumptuous edifices, 
 and an expensive staff of officers, for open and secret services, 
 the immense funds, of which but a small share finds its way to 
 the education of the poor. Such, too, will be your poor law bill ; 
 its ostensible object to relieve the poor — its real end to oppress 
 the middle classes, and multiply places and patronage to such 
 extent as to absorb the revenues which should go to relieve des- 
 titution. Between English poor law, and Scotch education func- 
 tionaries, Ireland will be placed in a most happy position. Never, 
 
400 
 
 LETTER LXXX. 
 
 it is my solemn conviction, were its liberties and its religion 
 placed in more imminent peril. Its enemies, jealous of the 
 gigantic progress it has recently made, are labouring to throw 
 back the country into its former state of abject dependence. 
 Hence their efforts to sap the religion of the people, under the 
 specious guise of a liberal education. Hence the heavy taxation 
 by which the middling classes are to be oppressed, and some of 
 the higher detached from them by the distribution of the patron- 
 age, which that taxation will supply. Mr. O’Connell is right 
 in opposing the details of the poor law bill. I am only surprised 
 that, as the present ministry owes its existence to the confidence 
 of the Irish members, it perseveres pressing the details of this 
 measure, which are as confessedly opposed to the wishes as they 
 will be fatal to the interests of the Irish people. In common 
 with the Catholic clergy of Ireland, I am most anxious for mea- 
 sures by which the physical and moral condition of the poor 
 would be improved ; but we should not suffer ourselves to be 
 deluded by plans so contrived, that the relief contemplated will 
 be intercepted by a train of expensive placemen, and that but 
 little of it will reach its destination. Your poor law and your 
 education board will be twin institutions, well worthy of each 
 other — the one pressing on the country the flood of its Scotch 
 faith, and the other filling it with the abundance of its English 
 charity, until the national feeling of Ireland is to be completely 
 drenched, under the influx of the exotic mixtures. Centralization 
 is now the great secret of policy ; it is deemed wise to draw the 
 most distant within the vortex of court influence. Hence, instead 
 of placing funds in the hands of responsible bodies, who in their 
 respective districts would administer relief and education at little 
 expense, you must have central boards in London and in Dublin, 
 of which the principal object, at least the effect, will be to swell 
 the crowd of eager suitors who are continually besieging the 
 porches of the court in their importunate scramble for its 
 patronage. 
 
 I have the honour to remain your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 401 
 
 LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEMS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION AND POOR LAWS. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, March 6 , 1838 . 
 
 My Lord — The brief interval that has elapsed since my last 
 letter to your lordship, has furnished fresh proofs of the spirit 
 that first swayed, and still pervades, the counsels that preside 
 over the scheme of an anti-Catholic education. I appeal to your 
 lordship, as well as to the Secretary for Ireland, as competent 
 witnesses of the truth of this position. If the most recent 
 debates on the detestable details of the poor law be correctly 
 reported, your lordship hesitates on entrusting the appoint- 
 ment of the chaplains to the ordinary ecclesiastical superiors; 
 and, to an interrogatory proposed by the member from Water- 
 ford, relative to the provisions for education in the poor-houses, 
 Lord Morpeth replies that it shall be provided for by a plan, 
 formed by the guardians and commissioners. Xow, no Catholic 
 clergyman is to be a guardian of the poor establishments, lest 
 we are told, their appointment should disturb the harmony 
 that is to reign in those abodes ! ! — whence it clearly follows 
 that the entire education of the poor in those houses is to be 
 controlled by the arbitrary will of individuals, many of them 
 English and Protestant commissioners. In hesitating to confide 
 the appointment of the chaplains to the ordinary spiritual autho- 
 rities, is it your intention to perpetuate the angry collisions 
 between the secular and spiritual powers, which, growing out of 
 the persecution of former times, so long disturbed the peace of 
 society ? Does your lordship forget the disgraceful and pro- 
 tracted strife that occurred in Dublin, relative to the chaplain of 
 one of its prisons, when one party, covering their rancorous 
 bigotry under the shield of an iniquitous penal law, kept a sus- 
 pended priest in pay, in contemptuous defiance of the legitimate 
 pastor ? This is but a solitary instance of the many such scenes 
 that have occurred, and recently, too, in different parts of Ire- 
 land. And you, my lord, the minister of a government, flattered 
 with the name of paternal, are for continuing those collisions, 
 and furnishing fresh aliment to the expiring bigotry of the 
 times. 
 
 We did hope that, with the abolition of the chartered schools 
 
402 
 
 LETTER LXXXI, 
 
 of Ireland, there would be an end to that species of tyranny that 
 was exercised over their unfortunate inmates. The prison houses 
 for the poor are, it seems, to be subjected to a similar discipline. 
 It is not enough that their wretched occupants should be forced 
 from their families, and the ties of nature and affection should (as 
 is the universal complaint in England) be rent asunder, but the 
 consolations of religion itself must depend on the caprices of anti- 
 Catholic commissioners. With the injurious effects of this mea- 
 sure on the physical comforts, or the political freedom of the 
 middle classes, it is not my purpose to engage, at any length, 
 your lordship’s or the public attention ; nor should I advert to it 
 for the present, were it not for the observations made in parlia- 
 ment, on the subject of chaplains and education, revealing, as in 
 the case of the national board, the ministerial hostility, but ill- 
 disguised, that is directed against the Catholic Church. 
 
 Allow me, however, to remark, that it is not true that those 
 who find fault with the present poor law project, have never sug- 
 gested any other. Often has the attention of parliament been 
 directed to the waste lands of Ireland, so capable of remunerating 
 any expenditure of money and of labour. From the want of 
 capital and enterprise among the generality of the proprietors, 
 those lands lie unprofitable, whilst the peasantry, who are often 
 overcrowded in the interior, might derive comfort and wealth 
 from their cultivation. If but a portion of the money to be 
 expended on the erection of the vast prisons were to be laid out 
 by the government in the purchase of those lands, over which 
 the legislature is competent to give it a control, and if those 
 lands were then let on such terms of rent and tenure as would 
 adequately reward the outlay of labour ; if, too, the Establish- 
 ment were persuaded to surrender a portion of the wealth, of 
 which the unjust seizure was the first source of the public 
 misery, and landlords obliged in their covenants to make allow- 
 ance to their tenants for the fruit of their toil — then, instead of 
 the squalid and disgusting wretchedness, that every where meets 
 the eye, not only would the wastes be covered with abundance, 
 but, what would be better, those who labour in producing it 
 would become contented and cheerful, by sharing in its enjoy- 
 ment. Whereas in the present plan, as is well remarked by Mr. 
 O’Connell, there is but little to soothe, and much to embitter, the 
 public misery ; and, as has been ably demonstrated by Mr. Shar- 
 man Crawford, there is nothing of prevention and nothing of that 
 sanative legislation, which should be directed to the original 
 sources, from which the appalling and unprecedented wretched- 
 ness of Ireland continues to flow. I will add that the plan is 
 pregnant with still worse consequences than any to which they 
 have adverted. With the penal provisions of the law, and the 
 most arbitrary power to be vested in the commissioners and 
 
LETTER LXXXr. 
 
 403 
 
 guardians, they arc liable to be made charter schools or charter 
 prisons for proselytism, as you may call them, where the destitu- 
 tion of the people will become a fit instrument for such designs, 
 and where but as little of the instructions or consolations of 
 religion will be let into their dungeons as their keepers may 
 choose to bestow.* 
 
 These, my lord, are not exaggerated consequences, they are 
 the ordinary effects that are flowing every day from the combi- 
 nations of power and bigotry in different parts of the kingdom. 
 Even in the town which I inhabit, one of the most Catholic in 
 the kingdom, with a large and efficient seminary for the education 
 of the male and female children, such is the paltry and vexatious 
 tampering with the poverty of the people, that, literally, for a 
 mess of broth or of buttermilk, the children are occasionally 
 tempted to go where their faith may be endangered. What 
 security have we that the same offensive system shall not be 
 pursued in those prisons, whilst the law contemplates to vest in 
 mixed boards of Protestant and Catholic laymen the exclusive 
 education of the children, nay, the appointment of their pastors ? 
 Let there be in every town large and appropriate asylums for 
 the relief of the aged and infirm. It is a provision imperatively 
 called for by a sense of humanity and religion. And let the 
 benefits of religious instruction be freely communicated to them, 
 as well as to the other members of the community, by their ordi- 
 nary respected pastors. Employ the redundant labour of the 
 country in working the mines of wealth that are hidden in its 
 uncultivated lands, instead of wasting the public taxes in the 
 erection of prisons, and immuring the able-bodied within their 
 walls. Such a plan (it is neither complex nor impracticable) 
 would be more in accordance with the feelings of the country 
 than the one you are precipitating with such indecent haste 
 through the house. At a comparatively small expense it would 
 provide for the existing distress, and guard against its pros- 
 pective accumulation. It would be drawing upon the rich and 
 permanent resources of nature, rather than resorting to the con- 
 trivances of art, which are the miserable expedients of a great 
 deal of modern legislation. The wastes that are now a solitude 
 would be covered with a cheerful peasantry, inhaling health and 
 vigour from labour in the open air, rather than disease and 
 weakness from confinement in those prisons ; the inmates of the 
 same families would not be separated from each other ; and, 
 without severing those ties that bind not only the Irish, but all 
 mankind, to their native land, it would have all the advantages 
 that are contemplated by the advocates of emigration. 
 
 * The recent attempts to proselytize made in the Dublin and other poor-houses 
 of the kingdom, but too sadly realize the truth of those predictions. 
 
404 
 
 LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 You are pledged to do justice to Ireland. It is on that condi- 
 tion you have so long enjoyed the confidence of the Irish consti- 
 tuencies. It is strange, then, that the ministry would press the 
 obnoxious details of such a measure with the knowledge which it 
 must have of the general aversion with which it is viewed by the 
 entire country. It may be on the paternal principle that the 
 Irish are yet in a state of pupilage, and that their interests are 
 best promoted by not consulting their inclinations. It is, doubt- 
 less, on such an assumption that you are pushing forward the 
 present bill, exclusively adopting the views of a Mr. Nichols, 
 who, travelling through many parts of the country, as the 
 Italians say, like a coach trunk, had not time to make himself 
 acquainted with the nature of our distress, and could not be a 
 competent person to suggest an appropriate remedy, since — and 
 I say it without meaning him any offence — his country, as well 
 as his religion, allowed him not to ascend to the bitter causes of 
 our destitution. Yet it is to such persons, groping their way in 
 darkness, importing all the prejudices of foreigners, and unac- 
 quainted with the peculiar circumstances of Ireland, that the 
 operation of the whole machinery of the poor law is to be 
 entrusted. Like all the education societies, the poor law scheme, 
 unless materially altered, will end in disappointment, and leave 
 no other effect but the memory of the extravagant and ruinous 
 expense with which the country was burdened by the enormous 
 salaries of its officers, and of the religious annoyance to which 
 the people were exposed by a vexatious interference with the 
 legitimate authority of their pastors. 
 
 If, then, a ministry, supposed to be favourable to Ireland, 
 cannot disguise its jealousy of the Catholic religion, what wonder 
 that a government decidedly hostile should have exhibited that 
 hostility, in framing a Board of National Education ? Do not 
 imagine that there is anything singular in what I have advanced 
 regarding the principles on which that board was formed. Were 
 my letter reduced to a series of propositions, it contained the 
 following statements : That the bishops of Ireland put on record, 
 by their petitions to parliament, their decided preference of a 
 system of separate education. That the government, by acqui- 
 escing in their prayer, would be consulting no less for the tran- 
 quillity of the state than the purity of religion. That the 
 selection of appropriate books for the religious education of 
 Catholics belonged, without reference to any secular or govern- 
 ment tribunal, exclusively to the bishops. That the present board 
 exhibited in its construction all the odious features of a Protestant 
 ascendancy. That even, setting religious bigotry aside, it was 
 not fair, as far as regarded local representation. That it was 
 tolerated merely from expediency, like the Kildare-street Society, 
 without ever having received the solemn approval of the Catholic 
 
LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 405 
 
 body. I am not aware that any of those or the other proposi- 
 tions into which that letter could be resolved, is still liable to 
 contradiction. I am only surprised that the commissioners of 
 education would have, on the very eve of the meeting of the 
 bishops, put forth a document deeply affecting the religion of 
 those entrusted to their care, and at variance with their former 
 resolutions, without even the courtesy of awaiting their delibera- 
 tions. It was not so of old. It only shows what the Catholics 
 of Ireland should have to expect, if government boards were to 
 obtain influence over the important concerns of their religion or 
 its pastors. The Protestant spirit of the majority of the com- 
 missioners breathes through that document, and never was one 
 more calculated to deceive, or to conceal, under a plausible 
 phraseology, more of the seeds of future persecution ; though 
 nothing could be farther from the minds of the Catholic 
 commissioners than to give it their sanction, if they thought 
 it liable to such consequences. The paramount importance 
 of the question of education was, as must always be, felt and 
 acknowledged by all. In my last communication I made no 
 reference whatever, nor did I think myself authorized to do so, 
 to the sentiments of the Catholic bishops, as manifested in the 
 late assembly. As, however, an invidious and unfair reference 
 has been made to them, suffice it to say, that the evils of the 
 system of a mixed education in principle and in its practical 
 effects in various countries of Europe were exposed by prelates 
 more competent, from talent and information, to form a just 
 opinion of the subject than I was ; and that after much discussion 
 the subject was adjourned, on account of the lamented indisposi- 
 tion and absence of the Archbishop of Dublin. This much, how- 
 ever, is certain, that, of the prelates, some confessed their full 
 conviction of the evils of the system — others, their fears of 
 danger, and their anxiety to read the evidence published regard- 
 ing its practical operation ; none, as far as I could learn, was an 
 unqualified approver of the system on principle, and all decidedly 
 preferred — could they obtain parliamentary aid on such terms — 
 a system of separate education. On principle, then, there was 
 no difference of opinion. On a question of expediency, lest we 
 should encounter greater evils, it is no wonder if there should be 
 some discrepancy, as there must be on open questions in all free 
 assemblies, especially when we recollect what time and delibera- 
 tion and exposure, were necessary to open the eyes of all to the 
 dangers of the Kildare-street Society. 
 
 I, therefore, again beg leave respectfully to advise your lord- 
 ship and Lord Lansdowne to pause, ere you give a legislative 
 sanction to the recommendations of a document, which was never 
 approved by the Catholic bishops of Ireland — nay, more, which 
 will never receive the approbation of that body, since they 
 
406 
 
 LETTER LXXXI. 
 
 could not approve it, without cancelling their own solemn and re- 
 peated resolutions. I must further add, that, in recommending 
 to your lordship to give a grant for separate education, I am 
 only conveying the petition last adopted on that subject by the 
 unanimous consent of that body. Were you to vest such a grant 
 in a board like that of Maynooth, composed of bishops repre- 
 senting the different local interests of Ireland, and a few of the 
 Catholic aristocracy and gentry — men who have proved their 
 attachment to the faith — and to make such a board, not like the 
 education one, the dependent creature of the crown, but like that 
 of Maynooth, independent of the caprices of the minister, and 
 perpetuated by the elective power of its members, you would do 
 more to conciliate the confidence of the Catholics of Ireland, and 
 secure peace and good will among all classes of her Majesty’s 
 subjects, than all your crude, though elaborate contrivances of 
 an undefinable system of liberality can ever achieve. 
 
 I now leave your lordship and the public to judge whether, in 
 expressing sentiments in such accordance with those of my vene- 
 rable brethren, I can be said to be alone. No, my lord, the 
 “ solus eram ” is not a sentiment congenial to the faith or dis- 
 cipline of the Catholic Church. It is the motto which is seen 
 inscribed on the forehead of every schismatic, from Simon Magus 
 to Luther ; and those who adopt it must deprive themselves of 
 all claim to authority. Not so with us : our just boast is a fel- 
 lowship in the same faith, and a communion in the same dis- 
 cipline. Speaking not from ourselves, but delivering that which 
 was handed down to us as a deposit, and “ commending it to 
 other faithful witnesses,” we embody in our instruction not only 
 the collected influence of our contemporaries, but, likewise, the 
 unbroken mass of the authority of the wise and virtuous of past 
 times. It is this wide-spread companionship with the present and 
 the past — it is the solicitude of being himself one of the faithful 
 and unswerving witnesses to which the future may look with 
 confidence as a connecting link, that gives the humblest and least 
 talented bishop in the Catholic Church an influence and authority 
 which no intellect or learning, severed from such connexion, 
 could command. It is on this connexion I shall rely in com- 
 bating your new-fangled and treacherous systems of education, 
 unknown or reprobated in the best and purest ages of the Ca- 
 tholic Church. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s humble 
 servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 407 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 TO THE EIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Gregory, 
 March 12 , 1838 . 
 
 My Lord — The Catholic clergy and people of Ireland owe a 
 large obligation to her Majesty’s ministers, for having awakened 
 them from the fatal confidence in which their vigilance so long 
 slumbered. They have but to compare the splendid triumphs 
 which they achieved, when relying on their own exertions, with 
 the retrograde movement of their religious and civil interests, 
 since the transfer of their confidence to those who proved un- 
 worthy of such a trust ; and the humiliating contrast must fill 
 them with alternate sentiments of exultation and of sorrow. 
 With a combination of energy, of union, and perseverance, un- 
 exampled in the history of any other people, they not only 
 escaped from the religious thraldom in which they were long 
 kept, but wrung from the reluctant hold of their enemies such 
 an ample concession of civil rights as the most sanguine seer of 
 his country’s regeneration, could not have a few years previously 
 anticipated. Never was there a more signal illustration of the 
 power of mind over the most formidable obstacles, especially 
 when acted on by the exalted influence of religion. Had the 
 enemies of Ireland, content with the hereditary oppression which 
 they so long exercised, only forborne from insolent aggression on 
 the faith of the people, they might have still voted in the undis- 
 turbed monopoly of their power ; but, in an evil time for them- 
 selves, they pushed their insolence too far. Despairing of open 
 force, of the abortive effect of which the very existence of the 
 vast Catholic population of Ireland was a monument, they had 
 recourse to fraud, and spread over every portion of the country 
 their religious toils, in order to catch the unwary simplicity of 
 the rising generation. 
 
 They carried on for some time the insidious scheme of severing 
 the connexion between the pastors and the faithful with apparent 
 success, and never failed to season their religions instructions 
 with the most insidious insinuations against the Catholic priest- 
 hood. From covert attacks they were emboldened to carry on a 
 system of open aggression. The zeal and energy of the clergy 
 and the people were, at length, roused by a mutual sympathy 
 
408 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 for each other, and they resolved to repel the injuries and 
 insults which they respectively sustained. The one, by a display 
 of talents and learning, which at once astonished and dismayed 
 their opponents, nobly vindicated their insulted religion — the 
 other, determined to guard their faith, by raising up the fallen 
 fences of their civil liberty, without which religion itself cannot 
 be long protected ; and all, with unanimous accord, put themselves 
 under the guidance of an individual, whom Providence raised up 
 to achieve the independence of his country. 
 
 Let us but compare the prospects which our then position placed 
 before our view, with those which we now contemplate, and we 
 shall be able to ascertain what we have lost in the interval. 
 Wielding a moral power which was able to control successive 
 ministries, the people were desired to suspend its exercise, and 
 that ample justice should be the reward of their moderation. 
 They have, as they often did before, listened to the insidious over- 
 tures ; and the interval has been dexterously employed in striving 
 to dissolve the national combination, and to put in abeyance not 
 only the justice for which they covenanted, but to meditate 
 more deep designs against their religion. Waiving other topics 
 necessarily connected with the consummation of that justice, 
 which has been so long promised and delayed, your lordship 
 cannot but indulge a secret triumph in the alteration of tone 
 which has taken place with regard to the annihilation of tithes, 
 and the reduction of the church establishment. Such, a few 
 years ago, was the pressure of a just public opinion on your 
 honourable house, that they came to the resolution of easing 
 the country of the incumbrance of near two thousand super- 
 numerary Protestant clergymen. I question much whether the 
 present bill of Mr. O’Connell, which secures the integrity of 
 even the entire body, may not be rejected, merely because it 
 contemplates some transfer of the burden exclusively from the 
 shoulders of the Irish people. Who could imagine that the 
 ballot, a mode of suffrage which the dictates of conscience and 
 sound policy equally recommend, would have any opponents, 
 especially among those who owe their seats to the heroism of 
 freeholders who risked, by their open votes, the most heartless 
 persecution. Yet there were found among the Irish members 
 some who, slumbering in the enjoyment, or panting for the pos- 
 session of office, sacrificed to the nod of the minister the interests 
 of the persecuted peasantry of this country. As my concern, 
 however, is at present with the religion of Ireland, I must confess 
 that I seldom contemplated a more sad spectacle than to find our- 
 selves, after such a struggle, borne down, as well by the force of 
 the current as by the relaxation of our own efforts, to the same 
 point from which we started some years ago. And yet is this all 
 the clergy and faithful of Ireland have gained by the signal 
 
LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 409 
 
 triumphs, in which they bore a conspicuous share, that they must 
 now submit in silence to such dangerous and ignominious condi- 
 tions in the religious education of the children, as in the period 
 of their civil and religious disabilities would not be endured ? 
 
 What were the unanimous sentiments of the Catholic bishops 
 of Ireland in the year 1824, regarding the introduction of the 
 Scriptures into schools, your lordship may learn, from the follow- 
 ing extract of a petition on the subject of education, which they 
 presented to parliament : “ That Roman Catholics have ever con- 
 sidered the reading of the Sacred Scriptures by children as an 
 inadequate means of imparting to them religious instruction — as 
 an usage whereby the word of God is made liable to irreverence 
 — youth exposed to misunderstand its meaning, and thereby not 
 unfrequently to receive, in early life, impressions which may 
 afterwards prove injurious to their own best interests, as well as to 
 those of the society which they are destined to form.” Compare, 
 my lord, this solemn, deliberate, and unanimous expression of the 
 sentiments of the Catholic bishops of Ireland with the modifica- 
 tion in their rule by which the commissioners propose the reading 
 of the Scriptures in the schools, at any time that will not be 
 objected to by the parents or the guardians, and you will perceive 
 that the board, or the government, or both, vainly calculate on 
 the hierarchy’s surrendering now those conscientious principles 
 which they maintained under more adverse fortunes. I have 
 experienced no small share of obloquy for asserting those ordi- 
 nary duties annexed to my sacred office, and which I cannot 
 resign without a renunciation of the trust which the Prince of 
 Pastors confided to me. Over the books used for the religious 
 instruction of my flock I have stated that I shall exercise, without 
 regard to any board, exclusive and absolute control. It may 
 now be necessary to add that I shall never entrust their religious 
 education to any person professing a different faith, or whose 
 faith shall be tainted by the religious training of any professing 
 a different creed. No master shall have the control of such 
 education, who will not be appointed with my express approval, 
 or removed upon my representation. 
 
 Under any wise government, anxious to promote not only the 
 interests of morality, but of social peace and harmony, and to 
 which the volume of history was not opened in vain, such senti- 
 ments, far from provoking the bitterness of controversy, could 
 not create any surprise. You might as well find fault with the 
 institution of episcopacy itself, as quarrel with the fulfilment of 
 obligations from which it is inseparable. Permit me, then, my 
 lord, to lay unquestionable evidence before you, that so far from 
 any arrogant assumption of individual privileges, I am only 
 literally conveying the resolutions adopted by that body to which 
 I belong. In the year 1826, January 25, at our general meeting, 
 
410 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 held in Dublin, we unanimously adopted the following resolu- 
 tions : — 
 
 “ Resolved — That, in order to secure sufficient protection to 
 the religion of Roman Catholic children, under such a system of 
 (national) education, we deem it necessary that the master of 
 each school, in which the majority of the pupils profess the 
 Roman Catholic faith, be a Roman Catholic ; and that, in schools 
 in which the Roman Catholic children form a minority a perma- 
 nent Roman Catholic assistant be employed ; and that such 
 master and assistant be appointed upon the recommendation, or 
 with the express approval of the Roman Catholic bishop of the 
 diocese in which they are to be employed ; and further, that 
 they, or either of them be removed upon the representation of 
 such bishop. The same rule to be observed for the appointment 
 or dismissal of mistresses and assistants in female schools / 5 
 
 “Resolved — That we consider it improper that masters and 
 mistresses intended for the religious instruction of Roman Catho- 
 lic youth, should be trained or educated by or under the control 
 of persons professing a different faith / 5 
 
 “ Resolved — That, in conformity with the principle of pro- 
 tecting the religion of Roman Catholic children, the books in- 
 tended for their particular instruction in religion shall be selected 
 or approved by the Roman Catholic prelates ; and that no book 
 or tract for common instruction in literature shall be introduced 
 into any school in which Roman Catholic children are educated, 
 which book or tract may be objected to on religious grounds by 
 the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese, in which such school is 
 established / 5 
 
 “ Resolved — That, appointed as we have been by Divine Pro- 
 vidence to watch over and preserve the deposit of Catholic faith 
 in Ireland, and responsible, as we are, to God for the souls of our 
 flocks, we will, in our respective dioceses, withhold our concur- 
 rence and support from any system of education, which will not 
 fully accord with the principles expressed in the foregoing reso- 
 lutions / 5 
 
 Let any impartial individual now judge whether it is my views, 
 or those of the Education Board, that are in accordance with 
 those resolutions of the Catholic bishops. The commissioners, in 
 deference to the importunity of a few Presbyterian Protestants 
 from Ulster, propose that the Scriptures be read in the schools 
 by the children, at any hour their guardians or parents may 
 choose. The prelates pronounce this to be a practice making 
 “the word of God liable to irreverence, and pregnant with 
 danger to themselves and to society / 5 The commissioners assume 
 such control over the books to be introduced into the schools, 
 that they may prohibit them if they deem them “ objectionable, 
 as peculiarly belonging to some religious denomination / 5 
 
LETTER LXXXI1. 
 
 411 
 
 Tho prelates declare, as indeed they should, “ that the religious 
 books are to bo selected by themselves, and none to bo introduced 
 that may be objected to on religious grounds by the bishop of 
 the diocese in which any school is established.” The commis- 
 sioners, by the power they assume of “ withholding the salary 
 from any master whom they may deem objectionable, until 
 another is appointed, and their sanction obtained,” exercise the 
 most entire control over the appointment or dismissal of tho 
 teachers. The prelates declare, “ that such masters are to be ap- 
 pointed upon the recommendation or express approval of the 
 Iloman Catholic bishop of the diocese, and to be removed upon 
 his representation.” In fine, it has been hitherto the practice of 
 the commissioners to employ persons of quite a different faith for 
 training Catholic teachers, and who have striven to fill their 
 minds with the leaven of their own opinions ; whilst the prelates 
 unanimously declare it to be “ improper that masters and mis- 
 tresses, intended for the religious instruction of Roman Catholic 
 youth, should be trained or educated by or under the control of 
 persons professing a different faith.” 
 
 If, in a system of combined education, we deemed such safe- 
 guards necessary for the protection of the faith, it follows that 
 we cannot divest ourselves of fears for its integrity during the 
 prevalence of a system, where all those safeguards are neglected 
 or removed. I do not anticipate that the pastoral solicitude for 
 the purity of their religion, put forth in those resolutions, shall 
 find much ministerial sympathy. I trust, however, that you 
 will not be equally indifferent to the solemn warning of the 
 dangers to society, with which they proclaim such a system to 
 be fraught. It cannot be otherwise. It is worse than mockery 
 to strive to blend in one harmonious mass elements that are 
 essentially discordant and repulsive, and while men attach a 
 value to religion, and believe — as believe they must — that only 
 one is stamped with the prominent seal of the Divinity, it is 
 impiety to attempt to smoothe away that impression by a re- 
 fining process, intended to obliterate all the distinctive features 
 between truth and error. That the printing office of tho board 
 may be turned into a theological laboratory in which all the 
 asperities of creeds and confessions are to be rubbed away, 
 may be inferred from the testimony of some of the commis- 
 sioners, as well as the motley character of some of their com- 
 pilations. Not to dwell further on their sensitive antipathy to 
 books “ objectionable as peculiarly belonging to some particular 
 religious denomination,” allow me to direct your lordship’s at- 
 tention to the declaration made on the production of the following 
 passage from “Dr. Challenor’s Catholic Christian Instructed :” — 
 
 “ What if a person, through the absolute necessity of his 
 unhappy circumstances, should be tied to a place where he can 
 
412 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 never hear mass, do you think he might not then be allowed 
 to join in prayer with those of another communion, by way of 
 supplying this defect? No, certainly. It is a misfortune — and 
 a great -misfortune — to be kept, like David, when he was perse- 
 cuted by Saul, at a distance from the temple of God and his 
 sacred mysteries, but it would be a crime to join one’s self upon 
 that account with an heretical or schismatical congregation, 
 whose worship God rejects as sacrilegious and impious. In such 
 a case, therefore, a Christian must serve his God alone, to the 
 best of his power, by offering to him the homage of prayer, 
 adoration, contrition, &c., and must frequently hear mass in 
 spirit, by joining himself with all the faithful throughout the 
 earth, wherever they are offering to God that divine sacrifice, 
 ever sighing after those heavenly mysteries, and praying for 
 his delivery from that Babylon which keeps him at a distance 
 from the temple of God.” “ Having read this, I wish to observe,” 
 replies Mr. Blake, “ that I have no doubt there will be found in 
 this book, and in other Homan Catholic books, matter that may 
 give offence to the feelings of Protestants, and that nothing could 
 be more gratifying to me than to see it utterly expunged.” 
 
 I, too, am unwilling to give offence to the feelings of Protes- 
 tants ; but, if passages are to be expunged from doctrinal books, 
 because they may take offence, it follows that they should be 
 purged of every Catholic principle, since some would take offence 
 as long as one solitary tenet would remain. There is a spirit 
 of deep and solemn reverence for the true worship breathing 
 through the above quoted passage, which shows that nothing 
 could be farther from the mind of the pious author than any 
 want of real charity towards those who had the misfortune to 
 be deprived of its benefits. It reminds me of the pure and 
 lofty piety of Eleazar, who refused to purchase life by the least 
 compromise with the stern duties of his religious law. While 
 such a sincere respect for faith sways the teachers of religion, 
 there is very little danger of the prevalence of an unprincipled 
 liberalism, which would mistake indifference of faith for feelings 
 of charity, and call those bigots who wished to retain the impres- 
 sions of any particular creed. The doctrine laid down by the 
 venerable prelate, of not joining in worship with any other sect, 
 cannot be controverted or disguised. The style in which the 
 doctrine is put forth is bold, it is true, and characteristic of those 
 strong lines that marked the religious opinions of his age — but, 
 with all its apparent harshness, I should prefer the book in its 
 integrity rather than subject it to the experiments of some of 
 our moderns, whose peculiarities of faith are so polished by the 
 perpetual friction of political life as to leave scarcely a visible 
 trace of any religious character at all. As long as a scrupulous 
 regard is felt for the obligations which religion imposes, it is a 
 
LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 413 
 
 pledge of the soundness of the nation’s morality. It would be 
 almost as safe to entrust the education of Catholic children to 
 Pagans as to any persons who would strive to cancel the sound 
 doctrine of Dr. Challenor and the Catholic church, regarding 
 the sin of ever joining in religious communion with the sectaries, 
 or taking any part in the unholy worship of their conventicles. 
 But, once destroy this conscientious adherence to religious faith, 
 which, properly understood, is always allied with a regard for 
 the conscientious opinions of others, and you fill the country 
 with public functionaries, who will not scruple to make a traffic 
 even of the sacred interests of religion. 
 
 The experiment, of which only the intimation is expressed 
 with regard to our doctrinal books, has been actually made 
 by the board on the sacred volume. They have published ex- 
 tracts, under the name of Scripture Lessons, omitting passages, 
 for which Catholics feel peculiar veneration, as well as the 
 language long consecrated by custom, in which their doctrines 
 were conveyed. I instance the words “ penance” and “ repen- 
 tance” — the former being the phrase in the Douay, the latter in 
 the authorized version, by which the original is usually rendered. 
 In the Scripture Lessons, not owing, I suppose, to any Protes- 
 tant preponderance of influence, the Catholic phrase, “ penance,” 
 never occurs. That its omission was not fortuitous is avowed 
 by Mr. Carlile, who owns that he was anxious to get rid of the 
 word penance through the whole of the book, and for that 
 purpose a clumsy note is appended, calculated to mislead both 
 Catholics and Protestants regarding the meaning of penance, 
 which, if it does not entirely suppress, at least does not 
 sufficiently unfold, the Catholic doctrine of satisfaction by 
 penitential works. On this important subject I refer your 
 lordship to the Scripture Lessons from the New Testament,* 
 and also to the Evidence on the new plan of education be- 
 fore the select committee, f Seldom has a more injurious ex- 
 
 pedient than that now referred to been adopted to withhold 
 from view the opposition on point of doctrine between different 
 Christians. However, the attempt must be as abortive as it is 
 dangerous, fully proving what the experience of eighteen cen- 
 turies has already demonstrated, that by no political junction 
 of individuals, or by no conventional refinement in phrase, can 
 the essential difference between true and erroneous doctrine be 
 ever confounded. Surely it could never be imagined by the 
 Catholics of Ireland, when this very Mr. Carlile was carrying 
 on a most offensive warfare against their religion and its pastors, 
 that the day should arrive when he would be entrusted with the 
 compilation of Scripture Lessons, in which he labours to get rid 
 
 * No. 1, page 14, &c. 
 
 f Report, page 1384, &e. 
 
414 
 
 LETTER LXXXII. 
 
 of the old language expressive of Catholic doctrine. They 
 must feel additional reverence for this source of scriptural know- 
 ledge, on learning that they have omitted in those lessons the 
 language of the evangelical salutation. The commissioners could 
 not agree on the translation of the Greek word, though Grotius 
 a Protestant commentator, translates it “ gratia plena/’ or, “ full 
 of grace.” Therefore they thought it would answer the purpose 
 of accommodation better to insert within a bracket a compendium 
 of that portion of the sacred volume. But mark, my lord, at the 
 end of every lesson there is a series of questions, to be put by the 
 masters and answered by the scholars, embodying its entire sub- 
 stance. There is not a portion of controverted doctrine between 
 Catholics and Protestants that may not thus be made the sub- 
 ject of insidious interrogatory by masters who were themselves 
 trained in the manner of teaching those lessons by a Presby- 
 terian teacher, who I suppose was as anxious to “ get rid” of the 
 reverence paid to the Blessed Virgin as Mr. Carlilo was of 
 penance, or Luther of the real presence. Among the questions 
 with which the foregoing concludes are : — “ How did the angel 
 address her (Mary) ?” “ What more did he say to her ?” By 
 
 which it appears that the very words of the angelical salutation, 
 cautiously omitted in the lesson, may be made the subject of its 
 explanation. The masters may then explain that the “ full of 
 grace” of the Catholic church is a devotional phrase founded on 
 error not so orthodox as the “ highly favoured” of the Church of 
 England, or the “ peculiarly blessed” of Mr. Carlile and the 
 board ; and then the learned commentators of the national schools 
 may show the children that there is not much more favour 
 implied in the words addressed to the Virgin than in the similar 
 language applied in the Sermon on the Mount, to various classes 
 of mankind. See then at once the proselytizing spirit that first 
 suggested the formation of such an anomalous body — a spirit 
 that is still perseveringly bent on the attainment of its object. 
 The majority of that board have been, in defiance of every 
 principle of right and justice, placed there for the purpose of 
 “ getting rid,” in all the books published by the Board, of 
 Catholic language and Catholic doctrine ; and well and stre- 
 nuously have they laboured in their vocations. Nestorians in 
 religion, as far as regards their jealousy of the honour of the 
 Mother of God, they have designedly expunged the “ Hail Mary 
 full of Grace,” lest children should find in those lessons, those 
 words which they are taught to lisp, from infancy, with affec- 
 tionate veneration. It is not wise, my lord, it is not statesman- 
 like, to strive to dissolve the holy charm that consecrates those 
 truths that are imbibed in childhood. The same church that 
 instils into the tender minds of children a reverence for the 
 Mother of God and revered of Heaven, as sedulously labours 
 
LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 415 
 
 to impress upon them a respect for the throne. Do not, then, 
 encourage the rash schemes that would dissolve the ties that 
 connect them with Heaven. If they are once broken, history 
 will teach your lordship that they cannot feel much respect for 
 the obligations that bind them to society. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 fcj* John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Celsus, 
 April 7 , 1838 . 
 
 My Lord — On a retrospect of the vital question of the religious 
 education of the youth of Ireland, I must own that I have to 
 reproach myself with being so long silent regarding the evils of 
 so incongruous a system. Though from its very origin tho plan 
 created serious apprehension, to which I did not fail then to give 
 expression, yet I consented to watch in silence the experiment 
 of its fuller operation. In this forbearance I deferred to the 
 feelings of many, who, fatigued by the long and importunate 
 hostility of former proselytizing bodies, were content to seek a 
 temporary respite from their annoyance in a less obnoxious 
 association. The impressions that were made by the first forma- 
 tion of the board have been strengthened by all that came under 
 my observation during the interval. The exclusion of some 
 persons and districts from any participation in the funds of the 
 board, and the favour that was extended to others, where there 
 were influential political patrons, excited suspicions that the 
 board was regulated by political, as well as religious antipathies. 
 There were instances, too, of masters who embraced the Pro- 
 testant religion, one of whom, in this very diocese, had been 
 kept in a national school, after the remonstrance of the pastor. 
 Surely it cannot be made a subject of reproach to the Protestant 
 Archbishop of Dublin, or to the Calvinistic minister, Mr Carlile, 
 
416 
 
 LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 or tlie other Protestant members who compose the majority of 
 the board, that they should rejoice in every such conversion, and 
 that they should deem it a blessing that every teacher in the 
 national schools should abjure what they are pleased to call the 
 errors of Romanism ; and, were they invested with absolute con- 
 trol over the appointment and dismissal of the masters, without 
 reference to the religious influence of the local pastors, who 
 should, as on the above occasion, withdraw their children from 
 the danger of perversion, no doubt there would be other instances 
 of equally creditable conversions. Though it appears from the 
 resolutions of numbers of the clergy of this diocese, that there 
 are in it fifty-nine parishes, containing a population of two hun- 
 dred and sixty thousand Catholics, left destitute of any aid, 
 though the clergy were amused with a driftless correspondence, 
 still we suffered such manifest injustice in the distribution of the 
 public funds without any public exposure. Notwithstanding all 
 these facts, I might still observe the same silence, were it not for 
 the fundamental change, affecting the best interests of religion, 
 contemplated in the last Report of the Commissioners of Educa- 
 tion, as well as the alarming evidence of the ulterior views of the 
 government, or rather its advisers, which the examinations before 
 parliament unfolded. 
 
 The following words (paragraph 34) in that memorable report : 
 “ W e have received your Excellency’s permission to revise our 
 existing rule as to religious instruction,” &c., were those which 
 chiefly fixed my attention. Is it, then, from her Majesty’s vice- 
 roy permission is to be obtained for adjusting the rule by which 
 the religious education of the Catholic youth of Ireland is to be 
 conducted ? Is it from the Castle of Dublin the canons are to 
 issue which are to govern the bishops and pastors of the Irish 
 Church in training the young generation in the knowledge and 
 practice of the faith of their fathers ? For the Protestants, it is 
 fair and consistent that the members of that creed should take 
 the lessons for guiding the religious education of their youth 
 from the spiritual head of their church, or her representative. 
 But as for Catholics, it has been unheard of, since the days of 
 Henry, that they should apply to the temporal monarch, or her 
 lieutenant, for making or changing any rule for religious educa- 
 tion, or that the Court of St. James should supersede the autho- 
 rity of the Vatican. The effects of the application bear evidence 
 of the source from which the authority of the commissioners is 
 derived. One of its first and most disastrous consequences was 
 an utter forgetfulness of the respect due to the legitimate pastors 
 of the people, and the adoption of the principle of making the 
 sacred Scriptures a school-book, in defiance of the solemn and 
 unanimous resolution of all the Catholic bishops of Ireland. 
 
 “We therefore propose (say the commissioners, paragraph 38) 
 
LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 417 
 
 modifying the letter of the rule, so as to allow religious instruc- 
 tion to be given, and the Scriptures to be read, or the Catechism 
 learned, during any of the school hours, provided such an ar- 
 rangement be made as no children shall take part in, or listen 
 to, any religious reading or instruction to which their parents or 
 guardians object.” It is said that a commissioner has addressed 
 a circular letter to all the bishops of Ireland, except one, to 
 know whether the present plan of education was so dangerous 
 as that it could not receive their sanction. This is grati- 
 fying intelligence. It proves, that whatever might be their 
 wishes, the commissioners and ministers of government cannot 
 hope to carry on any system of education that is at variance 
 with the resolves of the Catholic hierarchy. It were well had 
 they adopted the wise precaution of consulting them, before they 
 ventured on publishing their report. Had they done so, they 
 would not have fallen into the fatal error of sanctioning the prin- 
 ciple of making the Scriptures a school-book, in direct opposition 
 to the repeated resolutions of that body. The faithful of Ire- 
 land, who are deeply interested in this inquiry, must be anxious 
 to know if the prelates were consulted on the question whether 
 it was “safe and useful” to make the Scriptures a school-book, 
 provided the parents and guardians of the children had no objec- 
 tion to their introduction. 
 
 This is the fundamental change in the system of education 
 of which I arraign the present commissioners. It is the prin- 
 ciple on which the great controversy between the Catholic 
 prelates and all the Biblical associations hinged. It is but 
 right to know whether they were consulted on this principle 
 which not only involves their own authority, but likewise the 
 authority of the Pope. “The reading of the Scriptures by 
 children the prelates have solemnly pronounced to be an usage 
 whereby the word of God is made liable to irreverence, youth 
 exposed to misunderstanding its meaning, and thereby not unfre- 
 quently to receive in early life impressions which may afterwards 
 prove injurious to their best interests, as well as of the society 
 which they are destined to form.” Let, then, the correspondence 
 be exhibited. Let it not be concealed whether the distinct question 
 regarding the introduction of the Scriptures was at all mooted ; 
 and then it will be manifest whether the prelates of Ireland 
 have pronounced the principle of making the Scriptures a school- 
 book to be now “ safe and useful,” which they before pronounced 
 to be productive of irreverence, and injurious to the children 
 and the best interests of society. 
 
 It will not, I am sure, be pretended that the irreverence of 
 which the practice of making the Scriptures a school-book is 
 productive, is diminished by the regulation of leaving their 
 perusal to depend on the wishes of the “ parents and guardians,” 
 
418 
 
 LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 It is singular what stress is laid throughout the entire of this 
 famous document on the wishes of “ parents and guardians,” in 
 contradistinction to “ pastors,” who appear to be almost totally- 
 forgotten. In one paragraph the commissioners condescended 
 to allow pastors to have “ access to the children for the purpose 
 of religious instruction.” But who are those pastors ? “ Such 
 
 pastors or other persons as are approved of by the parents or 
 guardians.” The phrase of the “ approved pastors” would not 
 suit the Presbyterian principles of some of the commissioners. 
 No ; it must be “ such pastors as are approved of by the parents 
 or guardians,” to show that if their lawful pastors, in obedience 
 to the highest authorities in their church, forbid the introduc- 
 tion or perusal of the Scriptures, then the parents and guardians 
 are authorized by the board to select another pastor, or any 
 other persons, to read and expound them. 
 
 That this regulation, at variance with the essential principles 
 of government in the Catholic church, was drawn from a Presby- 
 terian source, is evident from its conformity with the following 
 resolutions of the Synod of Ulster, which “ are stated to be 
 agreeable to the resolutions of the board :” — “ That it shall 
 be the right of all parents to require the patrons and managers 
 of schools to set apart for reading the holy Scriptures a con- 
 venient and sufficient portion of the stated school hours, and to 
 direct the master, or some other whom the parents may appoint 
 and provide, to superintend the reading.”* Never was the long- 
 contemplated design of detaching the faithful from the obedience 
 due to their lawful pastors more insidiously put forth than in 
 this last report of the Commissioners of Education. It is for the 
 pastors and the parents of the children mutually to look to 
 the consequences, and weigh well whether the proposition comes 
 from a friendly source that would sever a connexion which cen- 
 turies of suffering have endeared. The system teems with the 
 seeds of persecution. Suppose the Catholic clergy, as in this 
 diocese they will invariably do, to prohibit the Scriptures being 
 made a school-book by the Catholic children, under any circum- 
 stances. Suppose, too, that some of our sanctimonious gentry, 
 who, in the neighbouring county of Mayo, and other places, are 
 at this moment throwing their unfortunate tenantry on the 
 world, be seized, as they were some years ago, with a desire of 
 expiating their practical oppression by a proffer of the Bible — 
 they have only to require of their wretched dependants to send 
 their children to the national schools, and insist on their natural 
 right of having the Scriptures put into the hands of their 
 children, and expounded by “such pastors or any other persons 
 who arc approved of by them or the guardians,” and in doing so 
 
 * Evidence before the House of Lords, vol. 1, page 66. 
 
LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 419 
 
 they would be acting in accordance with the regulations of the 
 National Board. Besides, it may not be generally known that 
 one of the commissioners has avowed his wish of placing the 
 education of the country in the hands of a minister of public 
 instruction, assisted by a Council, the appointment of each of 
 whom should be exclusively and invariably vested in the 
 crown* I have already given a specimen of this gentleman’s 
 theological accommodation, in the expression of the gratification 
 he should feel in having erased from Catholic books every sullen 
 line that should separate, even in public worship, the Catholics 
 from the sectaries. Yet he has been relied on as one that was to 
 secure the faith of Catholics from the influx of error ! ! It must 
 be confessed that the advocates of the unlimited prerogatives of 
 royalty must admire his principles no less than those who are for 
 the abolition of the odious distinctions of religion; for such is 
 his antipathy to popular influence or self-election, that a particle 
 of either he would not suffer to influence the choice of the council 
 or minister for public instruction, but that all should bo unre- 
 servedly left to the arbitrary discretion of the Crown. 
 
 But amidst this barren waste, where religious faith or civil 
 freedom look in vain for a resting-place, the board has, it seems, 
 contrived to plant one green spot on which the eyes of all are 
 invited to repose. They have, it is said, planted a garden, where 
 all the exotics of the world will spontaneously bloom, without the 
 funds which are granted for all parts of the kingdom being ex- 
 pended on its cultivation. Whilst the model school was being 
 built, at the enormous expense of nearly £30,000, the secretary’s 
 general answer to applicants was, “ There are no funds and if 
 complaints were made, that the remoter peasantry were neglected, 
 surely they ought to be satisfied, on being told that the money 
 was expended on architects, and a long train of clerks and in- 
 spectors. Let them now be reconciled to similar privations for 
 two or three years more, whilst the parliamentary grants must 
 be wasted not only on stewards, but on lecturers on botany, &c., 
 who, like the commentator on the six days of the creation in the 
 model school, will doubtless commence his learned lectures by a 
 sarcastic sneer on the literal meaning of the Mosaic history, and 
 then demonstrate to his agricultural pupils, how the indigenous 
 moss, that grew in unsightly patches out of the rocks, was im- 
 proved by Scottish skill into the most luxuriant vegetation. 
 What a mockery of the public mind ! Establish as many schools 
 of agriculture as you please (and, I must confess, they are much 
 wanted), but do not insult the understanding of the people, by 
 wasting on a system of jobbing the funds that are said to be for 
 the religious education of the poor of Ireland ; and which reli- 
 
 * Appendix to Reports of Commissioners, 173 — 6, pages 84, 5. 
 
420 
 
 LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 gious education, no matter how long you may insist on it, we shall 
 never suffer to reach them from a poisoned source. 
 
 It must, no doubt, give great consolation to the ejected tenantry 
 of Connaught, whose tears are now appropriately mingled with 
 the sorrows of this season, to behold, on their passage to some 
 more friendly country, those agricultural schools. It must allay 
 their affliction to be told, in the canting sentiments of the fourth 
 report, how plenty would bless the land if the peasantry had a 
 little more of industry and order ! Not a word against the hard- 
 heartedness of their taskmasters escapes in this precious docu- 
 ment, though some slight recommendations of humanity to land- 
 lords would not be unseasonable. However, the humblest of 
 peasantry can feel the insulting derision of such plans for their 
 improvement. Those to whom I have alluded can say that they 
 needed not to leave their own western mountains, to witness 
 improvements equal to those of any agricultural school. Nay, it 
 is to make room for such improvements, and to accommodate 
 influential political friends, who talk much of philanthropy and 
 the idleness of tenants, they are banished from their homes. 
 They can admire, as much as any botanical professor, the beau- 
 ties of an improved farm ; but they will not fail to murmur, on 
 their departure, deep execration upon those, whose green fields 
 must be watered with the tears of the widow and the orphan. 
 
 I have now, my lord, briefly stated the grounds on which, 
 however tardily, I have been obliged to enter my solemn protest 
 against the present system of, not national, but government, 
 education. Those grounds are : First — The introduction of the 
 Scripture as a school-book, in defiance of everything that is 
 exalted and holy in the Catholic Church ; secondly — The attempt 
 to set at nought the authority of the legitimate pastors, and to 
 have it superseded, in the choice of books and masters, by a 
 board, the majority of which are at once able and willing to 
 make selections in both injurious to our religion ; and, thirdly — 
 The more fearful prospect, which is not disguised, of having the 
 entire education of the country placed in the hands of some cor- 
 rupt and time-serving minion of the crown. For the present, I 
 pass over their flagrant violation of their original rule, of regu- 
 lating annual grants to masters by the number of the scholars, 
 since I shall demonstrate, from their own reports, that schools 
 containing but a few scholars, under favourite patrons, receive 
 larger grants than others that contain four or five times the 
 number ; I shall pass over the marked neglect with which this 
 diocese has been treated. The interests of near a half million of 
 Catholic inhabitants, which it comprises, might be deemed worthy 
 the attention of any legislature. But your education board is a 
 proof of what we may expect from the poor law. The education 
 of the many has been the pretext ; patronage for the few has 
 
LETTER LXXXIII. 
 
 421 
 
 been the fruit of the system. Such will be the poor law, since it 
 seems there are already eight thousand of these birds, that are 
 attracted by every prey, fluttering and screaming for a share of 
 the provision, ostensibly intended for the poor, but which those 
 political vultures will not fail to devour. 
 
 Were I to be longer silent in regarding a system so fraught 
 with evil, I should incur the self-reproach of “ detaining the truth 
 in injustice/’ I should be only treasuring up for my latter days 
 the remorse of having timidly betrayed the faith, like the late 
 Archbishop of Mentz, who, terrified by the frowns, or seduced 
 by the favours, of the Prussian government, confessed that he 
 compromised, in an evil hour, the sacred interests of his 
 religion. 
 
 Who could imagine that, in a land, where liberty is so much 
 boasted of, such efforts would be made, as I know have been 
 made, to suppress all inquiry on this important subject, and that 
 some of those who hailed the accession of the priesthood, in the 
 assertion of their political rights, would be the first now to turn 
 round, and strive to stifle the voice of those very pastors, when 
 raised for the protection of their flocks, against the inroads of 
 irreligion ? The frustrated attempts that have been made by 
 the organs of the government, who yet pretend to be the advo- 
 cates of the people, to crush all discussion regarding this govern- 
 ment board, fully reveal the spirit that is at work, to lay the 
 freedom of our national church at the feet of the minister ; else 
 why, if the board is so fairly constructed — if it represents the 
 religion of the Irish people — if there is nought of bigotry in its 
 composition — no leaning towards Protestant opinions in its books, 
 such as the studied substitution of repentance for penance, &c. — ■ 
 why not rejoice that the light of public discussion should be let 
 in on its proceedings ? No ; the sensitiveness with which they 
 shrink from inquiry, betrays a consciousness that the system 
 cannot bear public discussion. Supposing even I were wrong in 
 my views of the board, I should expect that, whilst the opinions 
 of the other bishops were sought (if report be true), I should not 
 be laid under the political excommunication of any commissioners. 
 Had a circular been addressed to me, I should have been probably 
 able to show that the chief evils of the system, namely, making 
 the Scriptures a school-book, might have been overlooked in that 
 communication, whereas some of the other prelates had not yet 
 probably an opportunity of reading the fouler report of the com- 
 missioners, or the more obnoxious mass of evidence which has 
 been laid before the legislature. The exclusion of any one pre- 
 late, for having merely performed a conscientious duty, only 
 shows what the bishops of Ireland should expect if any govern- 
 ment commissioners had power to rule them. It was one of those 
 small expedients, to which human policy has ever had recourse, 
 
422 
 
 LETTER LXXX1II. 
 
 when combatting the majesty of truth. I havo advanced nothing 
 regarding the principles of that board, in condemnation of which 
 I have not been able to array the unanimous and deliberate reso- 
 lutions of all the bishops of Ireland, assembled together. I 
 might, in condemnation of the principle of making the Scriptures 
 a school-book, refer to the rescripts of some of the Pontiffs, who 
 sat in the chair of St. Peter for the last fifty years. It is, then, 
 to mo a matter of indifference what may be the opinion of a 
 body, composed of a majority of the rankest enemies of my 
 faith, so long as I speak the recorded sentiments of the bishops 
 and the Pope. Whilst I can put what I have written in juxta- 
 position with the resolutions of the one, or the rescripts of the 
 other, I can well afford to bo put under the political ban of any 
 government commissioners, who, at the conge of a Protestant 
 Lord Lieutenant alone, proceed to make fundamental changes in 
 the religious portion of a course of education. 
 
 In a very recent number of the Freeman's Journal there was 
 an extract attributed to Mr. Carlile, which, if it be genuine, 
 proves what confidence the Catholics of Ireland ought to repose 
 in the national board. The authenticity of the passage is ques- 
 tioned ; I am glad of it, since it will afford an opportunity of 
 knowing if the board be, in reality, so bigoted as that passage 
 would warrant us in believing, as Mr. Carlile is not an inactive 
 member of that body. Mr. Blake confesses, in his examination 
 before the select committee of the House of Commons, 1835, 
 that so important was Mr. Carlile, that the business of “the 
 board could not be carried on without his services.” He is the 
 compiler of the Scripture Lessons, of which I have interdicted 
 the use throughout all the schools of this diocese. But I have a 
 letter of Mr. Carlile’s before me, published in the Morning 
 Chronicle , of September, 1824, containing passages, than which 
 more offensive could not be written against the Catholic religion, 
 and particularly its clergy. I will, however, for the present, 
 content myself with the following extract from another active 
 member of the board — I mean Hr. Whately, the Protestant 
 Archbishop of Dublin. Its genuineness, I hope, will not be 
 questioned, since, if it be, the whole book of “ The Errors of 
 Romanism” must be a forgery : — “ It (the Romish system) was 
 the natural offspring of man’s frail and corrupt character, and it 
 needed no sedulous culture. No one, accordingly, can point out 
 any precise period, at which this ‘mystery of iniquity,’ the 
 system of Romish corruptions, first began, or specify any person 
 who introduced it. No one, in fact, ever did introduce any such 
 system. The corruptions crept in one by one — originating, for 
 the most part, with an ignorant and depraved people, but con- 
 nived at, cherished, consecrated, and successively established, by 
 a debased and worldly-minded ministry, and modified by them, 
 
LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 423 
 
 just so far as might best favour the views of their profligate 
 
 ambition The corruptions of the Romish Church 
 
 were the natural offspring of human passions, not checked and 
 regulated by those who ought to have been ministers of the 
 Gospel, but who, on the contrary, were ever ready to indulge 
 and encourage men’s weakness and wickedness, provided they 
 could turn it to their own advantage.” * 
 
 When Dr. Whately was penning this singular passage against 
 the religion and the priesthood of the Roman Catholics, how 
 ineffable would be his surprise, were he assured that the time 
 would come when he would be allowed to dictate, ex cathedra, the 
 conditions on which that priesthood and people should receive, for 
 the youth of their communion, a religious education. 
 
 His Grace may regulate as he chooses the religious education 
 of his flock, without any interference on my part. He shall 
 never have any control over the spiritual instruction of mine. It 
 is enough that we should have been cajoled by hollow professions 
 out of the hoped-for concession of our rights. We shall not suffer 
 ourselves to be betrayed by any acts, however deep and disguising, 
 into any abandonment of religion. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Athanasius. 
 May 2, 1838 
 
 “ I have ever thought a prohibition of the means of improving our rational 
 nature to be the worst species of tyranny that the insolence and perverseness of 
 mankind ever dared to exercise.” — Burke. 
 
 My Lord — Having felt and witnessed the blighting influence of 
 the penal code on the intellectual and religious freedom of the 
 country, it is no wonder that the writer of the above passage 
 
 * “The Errors of Romanism,” by Richard Whately, D.D., London edition, 
 18mo., pages 11, 12. 
 
424 
 
 LETTER LXXX1V. 
 
 should have pointed against it his most eloquent denunciations. 
 From the statutes of Edward, requiring all Latin and English 
 Missals to be consigned to the flames, under a heavy penalty, 
 unless such as “ are set forth by the king’s authority,” to the 
 establishment of the board of Lord Stanley, controlling all books, 
 except those that are set forth by the king’s commissioners, we 
 contemplate, under a sad variety of forms, that “ worst species 
 of tyranny which prohibits the means of improving our rational 
 nature.” From the enactments of the same sovereign, enforcing 
 a uniformity of worship, and inflicting a fine of one hundred 
 marks upon all who should disparage the Prayer-book, to the 
 formation of a board who are angry with those who disparage 
 their Scripture Lessons, who recommend in their third report 
 “ to hold the faith in the unity of spirit,” whilst themselves pro- 
 fess the most conflicting variety of creeds, you behold the same 
 anomalous system always at variance with the freedom of con- 
 science, and labouring, though in vain, to bring about a mere 
 artificial uniformity. Since the time of the notorious George 
 Browne, the founder of the abortive reformation in Ireland, to 
 his Protestant successor, Dr. Whately, it has been the uniform 
 policy to represent the Irish as “ zealous, yet blind and unknow- 
 ing and, like the flexible prelate who received a royal reproof 
 on account of the contrast of his liberal indifference after his 
 promotion with the zeal which recommended him to the office, 
 many of his successors were stimulated to assert, by similar 
 “ monitions,” the spiritual headship of the monarch, “ though 
 they found much oppugning therein,” fearing to incur his 
 Majesty’s displeasure. Though a considerable period has since 
 intervened, how like the language of Archbishop Browne, who 
 represents the Catholic clergy as “ crafty sorts to cozen the poor 
 people,” to that of her Majesty’s commissioner, who compares 
 the “ Romish to a pagan priest, who keeps hidden from the 
 people the volume of their faith, that they may, with ignorant 
 reverence, submit to the dominion of error.” * 
 
 In the diversity of societies which it has since animated, the 
 spirit of persecution has been always the same, in some more 
 fierce, in others more mitigated — always prohibiting the im- 
 provement of our rational nature. Since it is in vain you attempt 
 to improve it, if you require conditions which outrage that free- 
 dom which the Christian religion requires, it is the same spirit 
 that has transmigrated through the infamous charter schools of 
 Ireland, where the spiritual food administered to the unfortunate 
 inmates was so poisonous, as almost to have effaced from their 
 mis-shapen forms the noble image of their Maker. It is this 
 spirit that has passed through the Hibernian, the Kildare-street, 
 
 * Doctor Whately’s “ Errors of Romanism,” page 112. 
 
LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 425 
 
 and Tract Societies, of every denomination, and that now exerts 
 itself with a hateful energy in the Education Board, where, if not 
 seasonably checked, it will be more fatal to religion than in all the 
 associations to which that body has succeeded. Yes, my lord, I 
 assert, without fear of contradiction, that the board was regularly 
 constituted on the principle of that worst of tyrannies which 
 Burke so pointedly reprobates ; or we must adopt the other con- 
 clusion, that our rational nature may be improved by institutions 
 that war with the freedom of religion. If once you concede to 
 the civil magistrates the right of insisting on the conditions on 
 which the subjects are to receive religious education, I must own 
 your lordship will make out a case to justify the wreck that has 
 been made of the schools, and colleges, and other sacred institu- 
 tions of this country, and you will acquit the Reformation of 
 much of those horrors which followed in its train. But if, on 
 the other hand, you are bound to own, with the best and wisest 
 men, that religion ought to be free from all coercion, by what 
 consistency can you claim a right over that which has the greatest 
 influence in moulding the religious opinions of children — namely, 
 books and teachers ? And must not the Catholics stigmatize the 
 folly of their fathers for spurning the proffers of education, 
 which were disapproved of by their clergy, if they now submit 
 to a system, not only requiring unholy conditions, against which 
 the bishops of Ireland unanimously protested, but a system that 
 was formed after a public avowal, on the part of the Commis- 
 sioners of Education Inquiry, utterly to disregard the resolutions 
 of the Catholic bishops ? 
 
 I shall not, then, for the present, prosecute my intention of 
 exposing the partial distribution of the funds committed to the 
 board, or of inquiring why the education of two hundred and 
 fifty scholars costs at the rate of fifty pounds annually in one 
 district, whilst it is deemed only worth ten pounds in another — • 
 or why, in other places only eight pounds are assigned for the edu- 
 cation of more than two hundred scholars. For those interesting 
 details I refer the reader to the Appendix of the Report of 
 Education before the House of Commons. The comparison will, 
 doubtless, lead him to the conclusion that, in the estimation of 
 their relative value, the vicarious merits of their respective 
 patrons have been, in defiance of all the Calvinism of the board, 
 occasionally imparted to the scholars. These, however, are but 
 the natural consequences of a system, which has been itself 
 founded on the most manifest injustice. To expect from it any 
 other but their natural results, would be the same as to expect 
 wholesome fruit from a tree, whilst its vicious root is in full vigour. 
 The board itself is but the creature of a vicious principle, and, 
 therefore, the religious bigotry and political injustice that pre- 
 sided over its formation, must be expected in all its operations. 
 
426 
 
 LETTER LXXXIY. 
 
 Perhaps in the history of human inconsistencies there is nothing 
 more amusing, than to exhibit to the world an example of most 
 flagrant religious intolerance, and then to turn round and up- 
 braid others with that same intolerance, because they have 
 unmasked their hollow pretensions. Were I to advocate the 
 principle of giving to Catholics the power of interfering with the 
 Protestants in the religious education of their children, then I 
 should be justly chargeable with the imputation of religious 
 intolerance. I only claim the same exemption from any an- 
 noyance of conscience, which I should most cheerfully extend 
 to all the children of the human race. 
 
 To illustrate this worst of tyrannies, which is manifest in this 
 system, let us suppose a similar board to be formed for the lite- 
 rary and religious education of the Protestants and Catholics of 
 England, composed only of three Protestants, who bear the same 
 proportion to the Protestant population of that country as two to 
 the Catholic population of Ireland — suppose all the rest of the 
 commissioners, forming more than double that number, to be 
 Catholics — yet, in order to amuse the Protestants with a specious 
 fairness, some are said to be placed there to represent the Gal- 
 ilean, and others the Ultramontane opinions, that may be found 
 under the general profession of the Catholic name. To follow 
 up the parity, let us suppose that two of the Catholics who com- 
 pose this English board, so far from being identified with the 
 country, were aliens and Irishmen, who had uniformly indulged 
 in the most rancorous invectives against the English clergy and 
 people — suppose, too, that the first act of such a board, which 
 was to arrogate the unjustifiable power of regulating the religious 
 education of the English Protestants, was to associate to them- 
 selves a Catholic secretary, who so managed the affairs of the 
 board that the official phrase, “ that he had the honor of laying 
 such a communication before the commissioners,” frequently 
 meant nothing more than that he had the honor of laying it 
 before himself, and submitting it to his own deliberation. Let 
 us fancy, for it can be but fancy, that the English Protestants 
 have sufficient patience for the slow execution of such a scheme 
 for their cajolement as I am now describing, and that they behold 
 one of the Catholic commissioners from Ireland bringing over 
 two or three of his own family, to place them in the model 
 school for training the future teachers of the English Protestant 
 youth, to expound the Scripture lessons that were compiled by 
 the Catholic commissioner, into which he infused his own peculiar 
 opinions, and out of which he scruples not to own that he 
 laboured to exclude “ repentance and righteousness,” and every 
 other distinctive phrase that was consecrated to Protestant 
 orthodoxy ; suppose that one of the Protestant commissioners, who 
 was to protect the faith of the Protestant youth, was a most 
 
LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 427 
 
 accommodating gentleman, who, in common with the rest of the 
 commissioners, relishes not for instruction “ books objectionable, 
 as peculiarly belonging to some particularly religious denomina- 
 tion that, on the contrary, he strenuously recommends books 
 which would conceal every distinction of creed, and that so 
 anxious was he to smoothe the road to science, by levelling into 
 an even surface all the roughness of religious opinions, that nothing 
 should give him more gratification than to see the passages ex- 
 pressive of Protestant doctrine expunged out of the works of 
 the most pious and moderate bishops of his own communion, 
 and that no sentiment should be ever uttered that could jar upon 
 ears attuned to the sounds of liberality. Let us next suppose that 
 a large staff of well paid Catholic clerks was stationed in the 
 normal school, to answer the applicants that there are no funds, 
 whilst at the same time they multiply their inspectors beyond 
 any former example — that out of this number the majority is 
 still Catholic, for the youth of Protestant England, by way of 
 illustrating in their own example, the value of figures, and giving 
 a proof of their practical appreciation of the golden rule of 
 proportions. Let us suppose that in this revision of the inspecting 
 corps they had discarded the most intelligent and meritorious 
 of all their officers, because he was guilty of the crime of talking 
 of the glories of old England; of feeling enthusiastic zeal for 
 the religion of his ancestors, and denouncing the injustice of 
 having the Magna Charta laid aside by the six coercive acts of 
 Lord Castlereagh. Suppose that whilst the distant provinces 
 were neglected, under pretence of having no funds, those raw 
 recruits, the creatures of political patronage, were assigned a 
 larger salary than is even now paid to the learned professors 
 who have devoted their lives to training up Protestant clergy in 
 one of the English universities, and that the officers alone 
 swallowed up more than half the sum that is given for the edu- 
 cation of the pastors of the Protestant people — we must add 
 that before they are fitted for the office of inspection, they must 
 be immured for some months in the model schools, to be initiated 
 by the foreigners in their craft, and to be taught, by the example 
 of their immolated predecessor, the prudence of stifling every 
 emotion of country or of creed, until, disembowelled of every 
 national feeling, they come out accomplished, but heartless in- 
 spectors. Suppose, in fine, that a Protestant prelate had been 
 associated to this incongruous board, for the purpose of lulling into 
 a treacherous confidence the entire of the English hierarchy, and 
 that this board, emboldened by the strange forbearance which 
 they had on that account experienced, issued a resolve not to 
 admit the Scriptures to be taught in the schools, or expounded 
 by laymen, though the Protestant prelates had declared that to 
 be a practice fraught with reverence, and productive of advan- 
 tage to the children and society — nay, that they attempted so to 
 
428 
 
 LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 intercept the English bishops in their right and duty of teaching, 
 that they should not put a book into the hands, or appoint a 
 master for the instruction of the children of their flocks, unless 
 they obtained the fiat of the commissioners. But, applied to 
 England, I am pursuing a phantom. As well might the ugly 
 chimera, imagined by the Roman writer, composed of animals of 
 earth and sea, be invested with life and form, as the strange body 
 I have deseribed to exist in England. It is only in unfortunate 
 Ireland, long accustomed to misgovernment and insult, that such 
 amionstrous reality, so revolting to its faith and so dangerous to 
 its liberties, could be endured. 
 
 The laboured ingenuity with which the advocates of the 
 government board have endeavoured to elude the resolutions of 
 the bishops, proves their reluctant conviction that they must at 
 last yield to the justice of those requisitions. We are told, 
 forsooth, that they passed at a distant period, having no reference 
 to a system of education, such as the board has adopted. It 
 may, therefore, be necessary to show that so far from contem- 
 plating any other system, they referred to the very plan of a 
 mixed education, which the government commissioners of 1826 
 were then projecting. In furtherance of this project, various 
 conferences were held, and a repeated correspondence took place 
 between the commissioners of education on the one hand, and 
 the heads of the Catholic and Protestant churches on the other. 
 The conferences turned on the compilation of Scriptural or 
 Christian lessons, and among the letters that passed between them 
 we find the two following in one of the reports of the education 
 commissioners : * 
 
 “41, North Cumberland-street, 23rd January, 1826. 
 
 “Doctor Murray presents his compliments to the commissioners of education 
 inquiry, as he is desired by the Catholic archbishops and bishops now assembled 
 in Dublin to submit te-them the enclosed resolutions, relative to the system of 
 education proposed for the poor of Ireland. He is further prayed to state that 
 it would be highly gratifying to the prelates to be informed, at the earliest 
 convenience of the commissioners, whether a system of general education, 
 founded on the principles embodied in those resolutions, would be likely to meet 
 their views and receive their approbation ? 
 
 “ Commissioners of Education Inquiry.” 
 
 “ Merrion-street, 26th January, 1826. 
 
 “ The Commissioners of Education Inquiry present their compliments to 
 Doctor Murray, and have to acknowledge the receipt of his letter of the 23rd 
 instant, enclosing a copy of the resolutions entered into by the Roman Catholic 
 archbishops and bishops of Ireland, at his house on the 21st instant, and stating 
 that it would be highly gratifying to the prelates to be informed, at the earliest 
 convenience of the commissioners, whether a system of general education, 
 founded on the principles embodied in those resolutions, would be likely to meet 
 their views and receive their approbation. As it is the duty of the commis- 
 sioners to report their views only to his Majesty, they must abstain from any 
 expression of opinion on the subjects contained in the resolutions which Doctor 
 Murray has transmitted to them. 
 
 “ The Most Rev. Doctor Murray.” 
 
 Ninth Report, pages 8, 9. 
 
LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 420 
 
 It is unnecessary to comment on the latter production. It 
 is conceived and expressed in the true style of his Majesty’s 
 commissioners, who fancy it unbecoming their delegated office 
 to express any opinions of their views to the Archbishop of 
 Dublin, conveying the resolutions of the assembled bishops of 
 Ireland, on the momentous question of religious education, in which 
 their rights and duties were so deeply involved. However, 
 the Catholic prelates did not shrink from the assertion of their 
 duties on account of the high tone assumed by the commissioners. 
 They insisted on their resolutions, which I have laid before the 
 public in a former letter, as the basis of any accommodation that 
 might be proposed on the important subject. Nay, the vene- 
 rable prelate already mentioned, in a subsequent letter, ad- 
 dressed to Mr. Frankland Lewis, on the subject of “ Christian 
 Lessons” for the use of such mixed schools, concludes with the 
 following important passage : — “ I am instructed to say that the 
 Roman Catholic prelates would not think themselves called on 
 to discourage the attendance of children of the Roman Catholic 
 faith in any schools in which the use of this compilation, so 
 amended, might be required, provided the regulations of said 
 school were in accordance with the resolutions of the Roman 
 Catholic prelates, which I had the honour to transmit to the 
 commissioners on the 2 3rd of January last.* 
 
 I should not have animadverted on the dictatorial tone of the 
 letter of the commissioners, were it not that their own subse- 
 quent report furnished a satisfactory commentary on that pro- 
 duction. It is true they could not be required to give their 
 views to any others than those, from whom their commission 
 was derived. But that loftier pretensions than a mere dutiful 
 and official reserve were couched in that communication, may be 
 fully inferred from the following extract of the report which 
 they submitted to his Majesty : — “ It is necessary for us to state, 
 with respect to the resolutions of the Roman Catholic bishops, 
 bearing date the 21st January, 1826, that we feel it our duty 
 not to suffer them, in any way, to obstruct or interfere with us 
 in the course we were pursuing.”! This is a candid statement, 
 and reveals the opinion which the commissioners entertaind, 
 regarding the respective shares which the Government and their 
 pastors should have in the religious education of the people. 
 The document bears the signatures of the five commissioners 
 of education, including that of A. R. Blake, one of the Catholic 
 members of the present board. It may be curious to compare 
 the reverence which this gentleman expresses, in the course 
 of his examinations before the Parliamentary committees, for 
 the opinion of one individual prelate, with the disregard which 
 
 * 9th Report of Education Inquiry, page 21. t Ibid, page 27. 
 
430 
 
 LETTER LXXX1V. 
 
 he here exhibits for the solemn resolutions of the congregated 
 body. It would appear as if he fancied there was a virtue 
 went forth from the Government, which entitled those who were 
 in connexion with it to a species of infallibility. It must be on 
 this strange supposition that Mr. Blake has attempted to elevate 
 a garbled motley book, compiled by a Calvinist, and covered over 
 with the leprosy of unsound and suspicious doctrine, to the 
 dignity of the Douay Bible. How wayward is the ratiocina- 
 tion of some individuals ! This gentleman construes the silence 
 of bishops, who never read those mischievous productions, into 
 a solemn approval, and yet their express, solemn, and recognised 
 resolutions he sets so much at nought as that he feels it his 
 “ duty not to suffer them then to obstruct or interfere with him 
 in the course which he is pursuing.” For his strange doctrine 
 on the silence of the bishops, I must express to him my deep 
 obligation. It first directed my attention to those pernicious 
 volumes, and, having read some portions of them, I did not fail 
 to interdict them in all the schools under my jurisdiction, so 
 that the faithful will be free from their pestilent contagion. 
 Should any doubts have existed regarding their evil tendency, 
 they must be dissipated by the last learned and zealous letter 
 of “ Camillus,” a writer who feels on the subject as an Irishman 
 and a Catholic should do, and to whom his countrymen should 
 be indebted for the continuance of such valuable productions. 
 As to the commissioner, however, he must labour under a very 
 erroneous impression, if he fancies there is anything in an office 
 under the crown which gives any additional weight to the 
 opinions of any individuals on religious subjects. This, at all 
 events, is certain, that the Irish people will confide in the 
 opinions of their bishops, regarding the faith of books and the 
 moral fitness of the masters, as much when they are aloof from 
 its contact as when they are in connexion with any Whig, Tory, 
 or Radical anti-Catholic Government. They are not yet suffi- 
 ciently educated to comprehend the fine logic of the individual, 
 who would feign make the world believe, that a system is not 
 bad because it has the approbation of one bishop, whilst the same 
 individual contemptuously disregards the solemn resolutions of 
 that bishop, and all his brethren, when coming in the way of that 
 obnoxious plan, which he was resolved at all hazards to pursue. 
 
 Notwithstanding all the efforts of the board to reconcile to 
 itself the conflicting bodies by which it is opposed, it has only 
 involved itself in fresh embarrassments. To conciliate the Rev. 
 Drs. Cooke and Boyton, they scruple not to violate the resolu- 
 tions of the Catholic bishops, and the discipline of the Catholic 
 church. The former has declared — “ that if the parents are left 
 at liberty to direct that their children shall read the Scriptures 
 at such times as they shall think fit, that is all he thinks neces- 
 
LETTER LX XXIV. 
 
 431 
 
 sary.”* Dr. Boyton confidently expressed the same opinions on 
 the necessity of the unrestricted use of the Scriptures as the 
 condition of his adhesion.f “ We do not thank them for their per- 
 mission,” are the blunt expressions in which the reverend gentle- 
 man conveys his manly determination never to surrender his own 
 religious convictions, or his rights to the truckling policy of the 
 commissioners. They have yielded to those bold requisitions. 
 What is the consequence? The same which your lordship’s 
 associates are daily experiencing from the Tories, in return for 
 your adoption of much of their policy. They have been alien- 
 ating those who had some confidence in them before, and earning 
 the derision of those whom they thought to win by concessions. 
 Amid such unprincipled overtures, are the Catholics the only 
 body, whose religious principles are to be put in abeyance ? 
 No, my lord, they will adopt the same manly tone ; and as they 
 ask not to interfere with the religious scruples of others, they 
 will not allow any unauthorized board to barter away their 
 religious rights in compliance with the requisition of Protestants. 
 By appealing to their representatives in Parliament, they have 
 already got rid of the religious tyranny of a secular society. 
 They will not, after recovering their civil rights, suffer a bigoted 
 board to worm itself into all the concerns of religion, until it 
 should succeed in giving it over, bound head and foot, to the 
 secular power. Whilst they are anxious for the complete freedom 
 of others, they cannot be insensible to their own. Perhaps your 
 lordship is not aware of their intense commisseration for the 
 negroes, nor of their indignant surprise that some of the Irish 
 members who were so lately emancipated should forget so soon 
 the sympathies of other nations, and be so lost to the feelings of 
 humanity and religion as vote for the continuance of the torture 
 of the negroes and the tyranny of their task-masters. If, then, 
 they interest themselves for others, they will not be indifferent 
 to the fate of their own children. Instead of a paltry central 
 board, as expensive as it is unproductive, formed after the sus- 
 picious model of persecuting Prussia, and regulated by the same 
 despotic machinery as its armies, they will, in a fierce tone, 
 demand, in return for their taxes, those ample local colleges that 
 abound in every country where true Christianity prevails — that 
 are congenial to its paternal spirit, and that are dear from 
 hereditary associations to the people — where the children will 
 not be brought up with suspicion of their very catechism, and 
 made to hide it, as if it were a wicked thing, from the insults of 
 some itinerant mercenary, and where their simple minds, while 
 ranging through every scene, will be gathering fresh evidences of 
 that creed, that first taught them to reverence their Maker and 
 to love all mankind. As well might you compare the peddling 
 
 * Evidence of Education before the House of Commons, p. 4771 . t Ibid, p. 250 . 
 
432 
 
 LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 craft of a hawker with the commerce of those <fi nobles of the 
 earth,” whose vessels are freighted with the treasures of every 
 clime, as compare the wretched squirtings of small knowledge 
 that are drawn out of those forcing schools, with those rich 
 reservoirs to which I have alluded, springing up in all the pro- 
 vinces, and protected by municipal freedom from all contact with 
 the aliens of the faith, who would infect them with religious poison. 
 
 The boasted juste milieu of the board is anything but a pre- 
 sumption that it is right, or a proof of its stability. What ad- 
 mirable logic ! It is right because it encounters hostility from 
 opposite quarters ! Doctor Gregg must not fail, in the coming 
 controversy, to urge the argument in favour of the Church of 
 England, and to show that it must be right, because it is exposed 
 to the double batteries — of the Catholics on the one hand, and 
 the Dissenters on the other. Theirs is the juste milirn of Louis 
 Philippe — a vacillating policy, veering about with every breath 
 of expediency, because they are conscious of their weakness, 
 and have no fixed principle to guide them. In proportion as 
 they have receded from their first rules they have lost their 
 former grounds, insecure as it was, without gaining any firmer 
 footing ; and by this middle policy they will not fail to illustrate 
 the truth of the Irish proverb regarding the fate of the man 
 who, in attempting to grasp the opposite banks, loses his hold of 
 both, and is borne along by the current. 
 
 In the first letter of this series which I had the honour to 
 address to your lordship, aware of the sensitiveness of the 
 Protestant prelates to their lands and titles, I sincerely depre- 
 cated any intention of interfering with the one or the other. I 
 fancied this declaration should have appeased their most nervous 
 apprehensions. Again, however, I may be allowed respectfully 
 to remind those prelates, and such others as tremble for their 
 temporalities, that mine is altogether a spiritual and apostolical 
 title ; and that their fears from its hereditary retention (for our 
 title is retained, and not assumed), are as vain as those of the 
 monarch who imagined that his sceptre was to be seized by Him 
 whose “ kingdom is not of this world.” Let them, then, enjoy 
 the fat of the earth, until the hearts of the legislature are 
 moved to vote them, as they have already voted some of their 
 associates, a useless encumbrance. We shall never repine at 
 their possessions. Let them, too, take their seat among the 
 senators of the land, and we shall be silent, provided they forget 
 not the dignity of their office, to launch from their high places 
 their violent invectives against our religion and our country. 
 Those are honours which may be scattered among any whom the 
 “ Queen desires to honor,” and it becomes not any loyal, subject 
 to contest her approbation. Her Majesty undoubtedly has as 
 good a right at her coronation to swell the number of episcopal 
 barons, as of any other portion of the peerage, and to increase 
 
LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 433 
 
 or diminish the lustre of the mitre, by the appendage of a 
 coronet. Those are baubles by which the vain are attracted to 
 the throne, and which fortunately become instrumental in making 
 human weakness subservient to the public weal. All, then, that 
 is temporal in the episcopacy, its worldly rank and its worldly 
 wealth, flows from the secular authority of which it may dispose 
 at its good pleasure, and I should be the last to controvert the 
 competency of that power, which has already strewn ten episcopal 
 thrones, and scattered their honours to the wind. But the 
 spiritual authority of the bishops is not in the power of Parlia- 
 ment to give or take away ; it flows from a higher and a holier 
 source, and the evidence of its untainted purity, is found in the 
 continuity of the stream from its Apostolical origin. There is, 
 then, nothing strange or novel, or that breathes any aspirations 
 after temporal titles, in the practice of Catholic bishops using the 
 name of the see over which they preside. Your lordship’s 
 learning can trace the practice to the remotest period of Chris- 
 tianity — a practice which has spread over every country where 
 the Gospel was preached, and which shall ever be preserved, like 
 the other time-honored memorials of the Catholic church. It 
 was the title used by Catholic bishops, in the perfecting the most 
 important instruments, as well as those solemn occasions when 
 they addressed monarchs or their ministers in behalf of an 
 oppressed people. I hold the seals of some of the most remote 
 as well as the latest of my revered predecessors.* I knew 
 
 * To the Catholic it must be a source of consolation, and to every reader 
 who values historical knowledge, a subject of interest, to be furnished with 
 the following series of the Archbishops of Tuam, reaching unbroken from the 
 Most Kev. Oliver Kelly, my lamented predecessor, to the fatal period of the 
 importation of the Parliamentary Church, notwithstanding all the efforts that 
 have been made to destroy all our records. 
 
 His predecessor, Edward Dillon, died in 1809. 
 
 Boetrus Egan in 1798. 
 
 Ph. Philips. 
 
 Mark Skerret was Archbishop, 1775. 
 
 Michael O’Gara, 1742 (Hibernia Dominicana Suppl.) 
 
 Bernard O’Gara, brother to the former, 1732 (Hib. Dom.) 
 
 James Lynch, whose name appears so often in the memorable registry of 1704, 
 is found discharging his episcopal functions in the ordination of priests, from 
 1674 to 1691, at his rural residence in Cluanbar ; and by a French periodical of 
 1701, we find that in the same year he was living in exile in Paris. 
 
 John Burk, translated from Clonfert in 1647, was living in 1670 (Hib. Dom. 
 Suppl.) 
 
 Malachy Keely, or O’Kelly, was killed in Sligo by the Puritan rebels in 1646. 
 From the nuncio Binuccini, who knew him well, his memory received the 
 following tribute : — “ L’Arcivescovo era potentissimo per il credito e per l’elo- 
 quenza.” 
 
 Florence Conry, or, as his Irish name imports, O’Mul-Conry, was Archbishop 
 of this see from 1608 to 1629 (Hib. Dom. & Ware). To tills illustrious prelate 
 the whole Irish Church is deeply indebted, being the founder of Louvain, which 
 was the nursery in after times of so many eminent ecclesiastics. 
 
 James O’Healy was living in 1594 (Mac Geoghegan ). 
 
 Nicholas Skerret died in 1583 (Hib. Dom). 
 
 Christopher Bodkin, in 1572, with whom Ware concludes the series of the 
 Catholic Archbishops of Tuam. 
 
434 
 
 LETTER LXXXIV. 
 
 no example of one of them, when his office required it, de- 
 clining to assert his legitimate title ; nor have I ever heard of 
 a Catholic bishop carrying his compliance with an odious penal 
 law so far, as not to impress on the most solemn instruments the 
 seal of his episcopal authority. If so, then, where is the 
 crime in the Catholic bishop of a see saying that he is that bishop, 
 unless truth be a transgression, or English more reasonable 
 than Latin? Now, I put it to your lordship’s conscientious 
 sense of right, which would be the greater crime, to perform 
 publicly and repeatedly, solemn acts, which, in case of no 
 title must be null and sacrilegious, or in the case of the acts 
 being acknowledged by all as valid and legitimate, simply to 
 express that title from which their validity and legitimacy flow ? 
 I have dwelt upon this subject to remove the misapprehensions 
 of some, to relieve the fears of others, and to satisfy all that a 
 title at which they affect to take umbrage, so far from having 
 originated in the vain ritual of heraldry, is nothing more than the 
 ordinary title of every Catholic bishop, designating his spiritual 
 union with the see over which he is placed by the successor of 
 St. Peter. It is, then, unnecessary to waste controversy on so 
 clear a subject, since every one knows who are the titled, tem- 
 poral, Protestant prelates, created or blown away by the breath 
 of .royalty ; and who the true, spiritual, Catholic bishops, partak- 
 ing of the firmness of the rock on which they are founded, and 
 invigorated by a communion with that see, which continues to 
 pour over the earth the pure waters of its apostolical fountain.* 
 
 I have the honor to be, &c. &c., 
 
 John Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 * There is within view, and before the portico of our cathedral, an ancient 
 and venerable monument, well calculated to illustrate more strikingly how 
 utterly untenable are the claims of the Parliamentary Prelates, compared with 
 the rights of the Bishops of the Catholic Church. It is the base of a magnifi- 
 cent cross, erected towards the middle of the twelfth century, by Hugh 
 O’Hoisin, Archbishop of Tuam, and by Turlogh O’Connor, Monarch of Ireland. 
 This fact is ascertained by the following inscriptions in the Irish language, 
 along the base, and in vertical lines down the length of the shaft of this 
 monument : — 
 
 <$>fi bo cboniopbA ^Aftkvfcbe bo ^ieb Wc <$>pp|r) l<xp ]i) beprjAb 
 
 cbpoffNV. 
 
 A Prayer for the successor of Jarlath, Aed, or Hugh O'Hossin , by whom this 
 
 cross was made. 
 
 <$>jt bo T3bo||tbelbucb uo £or)cbubup . . . lap ]\) bejir)Ab, &c. 
 
 A Prayer for Turlogh O'Connor by whom was made, &c, 
 
 “ This cross,” writes Mr. Petrie, “ may justly rank as the finest monument 
 of its class and age remaining in Ireland. Yet,” the indignant and learned 
 antiquarian continues, “to the disgrace of the inhabitants of that ancient city, 
 
LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 435 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 TO TIIE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE NATIONAL OR GOVERNMENT SYSTEM OF EDUCATION. ' 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Ignatius 
 July 31, 1838. 
 
 My Lord — The important events that have been crowded into 
 the last few weeks, must recal to you and your lordship’s 
 colleagues the delusiveness of the policy which you have hitherto 
 pursued towards Ireland. You fancied that what was called 
 agitation here was entirely the result of the potent influence of 
 some political leaders interested in its continuance. You en- 
 tertained another strange fancy, the natural consequence of 
 the first, that by setting them at rest, society should not be 
 vexed by any future agitation. The vast tithe meetings recently 
 held in Kilkenny, in Wexford, in Kildare, and in Mayo, must 
 awaken your lordship from those dreams of security, in which 
 you but too sanguinely indulged. For near three years there 
 were no brands cast to inflame the populace — no tones of 
 indignant denunciation against rulers were heard to “shake 
 the fierce democracy.” Not only was the surface of society 
 smooth and peaceful, but every quarter of the country echoed 
 with the artificial chorus of praise of a paternal government. 
 Why, then, have the people, as if moved by a sudden and 
 spontaneous impulse, risen to the attitude of a bold and majestic 
 remonstrance against their civil and religious grievances, of 
 which the recent history of the country has demonstrated the 
 
 its shaft, head, and base, though all remaining, are allowed to be in different 
 localities, detached from each other” (Round Towers, p. 317). To the truth of 
 the fact mentioned by the learned writer on the round towers, I lament to be 
 obliged to subscribe. His just indignation at the neglect with which this monu- 
 ment has been treated, I cheerfully applaud ; nor should I attempt to screen 
 the present inhabitants from the censure, were it in their power to remedy 
 the evil of which he complains. But the head and shaft are in the Protestant 
 church-yard, by which so many relics of Catholic times have been forcibly ap- 
 propriated, in order to mimic that antiquity of which it so much feels the loss. 
 It is to expose that want of antiquity that I have introduced the mention of 
 this singular monument ; and though its parts are now scattered, reclaiming 
 a union with each other, they still speak eloquently, reminding us of the glory 
 of the Catholic Church, not only when Protestantism had no existence, but 
 before an English foot had trodden on Irish ground. 
 
436 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 beneficial effects ? Because they find themselves not only 
 literally disappointed in the hopes which they were taught to 
 entertain, but see some of the evils of which they complained 
 considerably aggravated. Yes, my lord, they find, to their cost, 
 promises forgotten, pledges broken, grievances — for the ex- 
 tinction of which they laboured — fastened with new legislative 
 ties upon the country ; and men who, without any early sympathy 
 with the people’s wrongs, afterwards dexterously contrived to 
 raise themselves on the people’s shoulders to posts of official 
 emolument and honour, again resuming their natural pre- 
 dilections, and turning round on the very people who pushed 
 them into distinction. These are sentiments, the truth of which 
 can no longer be disguised ; they were long suppressed by many 
 in the hope that individual views would be merged in a general 
 concern for the public weal. But as it is now confessed that the 
 great interests of the community are put in abeyance in pro- 
 portion to the urgency of individual pretensions, there is no 
 longer any affectation of reserve, and in every quarter of the 
 country you behold how a sense of the danger that threatens 
 their civil and religious liberties, gives free utterance to the public 
 disappointment. 
 
 Your lordship is aware that the people of Ireland have ever 
 found in the Protestant Establishment, the salient spring of all 
 their national calamities. You are also aware that with every 
 ministry, whether Whig or Tory, that hitherto ruled its des- 
 tinies, the first question was, how that Protestant Establisment 
 could be maintained ? and that the “ salus populi,” which 
 was the first maxim in every sound system of ancient legislation, 
 has been, with regard to Ireland and its inhabitants, only a 
 subordinate consideration. Faithful to the model that has been 
 shown you, your lordship has not swerved from the political 
 maxims of your predecessors. Indifferent what may be the 
 effects of measures, provided they promise to secure the Estab- 
 lished Church, you urge their adoption, and receive the support 
 of those who consider the small section of its followers, of far 
 more value than the peace and happiness of seven millions of 
 people. No matter that this establishment is now confessed 
 to be incompatible with the prosperity of the land — no matter 
 that to the opinion of its inutility, has succeeded the conviction 
 of its utter and irreclaimable noxiousness — no matter that the 
 progressing tide of a Catholic population is so covering whatever 
 little of dominion it held, as to contract it to a mere isolated 
 rampart ; still the small religious fortress must be preserved, to 
 which, not only the interests of the country are to be sacrificed, 
 but on which an expenditure is wasted, which, if properly 
 applied, would spare the infliction of all the onerous measures 
 for which it has furnished an argument, and which are intended 
 
LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 437 
 
 for its support. Not only are the vast proceeds of the church 
 lands, which should have been sufficient, even were it useful, 
 swallowed up in its vortex — not only are the tithes, gathered 
 as they have been from fields of blood, thrown into its un- 
 productive reservoir — it has been likewise the occasion of 
 burdening the country with enormous taxes, towards the kindred 
 systems of poor laws and education, which mark the pre- 
 dilections of their framers, for the interests of the Established 
 Church. I shall not dwell upon the obligations of the people 
 to this paternal ministry, for swelling the constabulary force 
 beyond any former example. It is in vain that you refer with 
 complacency to the reduction of the military, while the people, 
 who feel the effects of the change, can point to a corresponding 
 increase in the heavier pressure of their county cesses, since, 
 instead of the pay of the army coming from the consolidated 
 fund, the cess payers are immediately burdened with the support 
 of a staff, almost useless in many districts for every purpose, 
 except that of patronage, or of prolonging the existence of the 
 Establishment, by the collection of its tithes. It is, then, to 
 your lordship’s colleagues in office, and to their paternal solicitude 
 for the interests of the Established Church, the people are 
 beholden for this increase of their burdens. To what other 
 source than the Establishment, can they trace your poor laws, 
 by which the county rates will be considerably augmented ? 
 The frightful pauperism that ever followed the Reformation in 
 its first establishment, proved, whatever may be thought of the 
 orthodoxy of their faith, that its teachers were lost to the feelings 
 of humanity. Hence the loud and importunate demands of the 
 people for relief, wherever any remnant of freedom was left 
 them. Though they were deprived by the new occupants of the 
 church revenues, of that support which was liberally allowed 
 them by their ancient possessors, still they insisted they should 
 not starve, and in England extorted from the mass of the com- 
 munity, in the shape of law, what the trustees of their own 
 sacred funds refused in the name of religion. Hence, in the 
 estimation of its cost to the country, the poor rates should be 
 added to the other revenues of the Establishment. Were the 
 Protestant hierarchy of this country composed of the majority 
 of the people, there might be some apology for this extraordinary 
 exercise of legislative solicitude for its perpetuation. But when 
 it is so rapidly diminishing, as to'promise soon to disappear from 
 the land, the people had a right to expect that, far from being 
 burdened with fresh taxes, the Useless treasures of that Church 
 should have been applied by the government and the legislature, 
 to the relief of that frightful wretchedness, of which the rapacity 
 of that same Establishment had been the most prolific source. 
 But the worst consequence of the measure is, that under pre- 
 
438 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 tence of providing for the poor, it is intended for the gradual 
 destruction of the franchise ; and thus, in the name of mercy, 
 the people are to be robbed of the best shield for their pro- 
 tection. For this insidious policy, the requital should be general 
 execration. 
 
 Having obtained possession of the funds which, while ad- 
 ministered by the Catholic hierarchy, dissipated ignorance and 
 diffused the blessings of knowledge, it should have been expected 
 that it would devote a large portion of them to the same 
 laudable purpose. But, . alas ! its ministry was productive of 
 intellectual as well as corporal privations, and often has the 
 legislature been obliged to interfere to supply, at an enormous 
 expenditure of the public money, the wants of which the selfish- 
 ness of that Establishment was productive. To this very day 
 have not the grants for education been a uniform and heavy 
 item in the public taxes, and, with the exception of the niggardly 
 grant to the College of Maynooth, have not all those sums been 
 expended for the purpose of raising buttresses, to support the tot- 
 tering walls of this crazy establishment ? For this has the wily 
 ingenuity of statesmen been tasked to devise those abortive schemes 
 of proselytism and perversion, that have rapidly succeeded each 
 other, from the days of the Protestant Primate Boulter to the 
 formation of that anomalous society called the National Board. 
 Of all those fleeting bodies, the one uniform object has been the 
 support of the Protestant Establishment, which, in addition to its 
 now enormous revenues, should be charged with the accumulated 
 amount of all the monies, that have been ' squandered on these 
 noxious associations. But of all its predecessors, the National 
 Board is that which has been most extravagant in its scale of 
 expenditure, and which threatens to be most fatal in its 
 hostility to the Catholic religion. Yes, my lord, its anti- 
 Catliolic spirit is no longer problematical ; its deep and insidious 
 designs can no longer be a subject of doubt or controversy ; and, 
 if further testimony were wanting regarding the object that is 
 meditated, that testimony could be furnished by your lordship’s 
 recent speech on the subject of education. You express a deep 
 regret, and I give your lordship full credit for sincerity, that the 
 education of the Irish people could not be conducted by the 
 ministers of the Establishment ; but as this was not practicable, 
 the next best thing, was the newly contrived machinery of the 
 board, which would be productive of corresponding results. 
 The Catholic people of Ireland owe your lordship a deep debt 
 of obligation for the candour with which you suffer the minis- 
 terial views to appear through the disguise in which they are so 
 often enveloped. But it required no new manifesto to warn us of 
 the lurking hostility of that system. It fully revealed itself, 
 from the day that the members of that body sought and obtained 
 
LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 439 
 
 permission from the Lord Lieutenant to revive the rules 
 regarding religious education, and exemplified the spirit of the 
 source from which they derived their mission, by regulations 
 manifestly at variance with the authority of the Catholic church. 
 The novelty of such a strange proceeding excited general 
 surprise, and a searching inquiry soon succeeded, which has 
 opened the eyes of numbers to the dangerous tendency of a 
 system, which attempts to supersede the most solemn duties of 
 the legitimate pastors of the people. As your lordship stated 
 that it would be desirable to have the education of the people 
 conducted by the ministers of the establishment, 'why not extend 
 the force of the same observation to the pastors of the Catholic 
 church ? This would not suit the policy that must still be 
 pursued, of sacrificing every other interest to Protestant ascen- 
 dency. To have their flocks instructed by Protestant ministers 
 is an admirable principle. To entrust the education of their 
 flocks to Catholic priests must, it would appear, be a downright 
 abomination. To wrest them entirely out of their hands, and to 
 transfer them to Protestant ministers, is a hopeless project : 
 therefore, a new machinery must be constructed — wielded almost 
 exclusively by Protestant power, and yet so contrived as to 
 conceal its pernicious object from the people. This machinery 
 has, indeed, worked astonishing results : witness the Scripture 
 Lessons, of which the gross errors do not require a theological 
 microscope to find them, since they are now palpable to the 
 dullest apprehension : witness the complete analogy between 
 its operation and the effects of the mixed systems, which have 
 filled Germany with infidelity and discord. Allow me to recom- 
 mend strenuously to your lordship’s perusal a recent letter of 
 Hibernicus, whose seasonable and judicious extracts from a 
 production called the “ Red Book,” published in the Rhenish 
 provinces, put the policy of the British ministers, and that of the 
 Prussian government in juxta-position. Witness the recent 
 appointment of twenty-five district inspectors, of whom a ma- 
 jority for Catholic Ireland are Protestants ! to be the authorized 
 missionaries of this board, in regulating the quantity as well as 
 the quality of religious instruction that is to be imparted to the 
 people ! Had I been hitherto silent on this anti-national board, 
 this singular appointment, together with that of the additional 
 commissioners, should force from me the exposure of all its evils. 
 What has any of your Protestant inspectors to do with the 
 Catholic children of the province of Connaught, for example, 
 with whom there are scarcely any Protestants to mingle ? As 
 your system is avowedly a mixed one for a mixed population, 
 its working cannot be adapted to a country, in which no such 
 mixture is found. Does your lordship seriously imagine that 
 I shall permit that board, or any such uncanonical body, to 
 
440 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 send their Protestant missioners into the schools of this diocese 
 composed exclusively of Catholic children, there to be in con- 
 tinual communication with them, and tainting the simple purity 
 of their faith with the poison of the Scripture Lessons of Mr. 
 Carlile? No, my lord, it is not in the power of any British 
 minister, to achieve such an unholy project. Already have a 
 zealous clergy, among other wise and spirited resolutions, come 
 to the determinatiou of protesting against any Protestant inspec- 
 tors being sent, to regulate the religious education of their flocks. 
 Yet, in spite of these resolves, the board have, in the insolent 
 exercise of their authority, sent a Protestant inspector into one 
 of the districts of Tuam, where *1 am told he has been spared 
 even already the toil of instruction. In this they must yield, 
 as they have been obliged to do with regard to the Scripture 
 Extracts, or this diocese will disown their unhallowed connexion. 
 For a long time these Scripture Lessons were practically en- 
 forced, notwithstanding that in their preface the commissioners 
 were content with a modest though strenuous recommendation. 
 Many an unfortunate schoolmaster throughout Ireland was sub- 
 ject to the petulant reproofs of their itinerant officials, for not 
 having the Scripture Lessons more frequently in the hands 
 of the children, — I know not whether they might not in this 
 instance have exceeded the measure of their instructions. Now, 
 however, the Catholic masters are released from the obligation 
 of teaching those pernicious tracts. They have disappeared 
 from this diocese without a murmur on the part of any officer 
 of the board, and the learned labours of Mr. Carlile may now 
 sleep in his repository, a melancholy monument of such a waste 
 of public money, as well as of the unconquerable attachment of 
 the people to their ancient religion. 
 
 Allow me to impress this truth upon your lordship, that 
 whether our schools receive aid from the Government or receive 
 it not, they shall always be so conducted that no inroad be made 
 on the authority of the pastors, or the discipline of the Catholic 
 church. I am told the board complains of the inconsistency of 
 persons asking a share of the education fund, whilst they resolve 
 to suffer no undue interference with their own complete autho- 
 rity over the religious instruction in the schools. Pray, by 
 what authority do those functionaries annex to the appor- 
 tionment of the fund, of which they are but the trustees and 
 not the proprietors, arbitrary conditions, offensive to the faith 
 and subversive of the authority of the pastors of the people for 
 whom those funds are intended ? Those funds come through 
 the Legislature from the pockets of the people. The insulting 
 conditions which the board requires, have no direct Legislative 
 sanction. They are the bye-regulations of some few bigots who 
 rule the board, of which an approval is sought from some Secre- 
 
LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 441 
 
 tary or Lieutenant; and, then, these regulations are made to 
 intercept the bounty of the Legislature ! So far from being 
 approved of by the Legislature, I will venture to assert that 
 they shall never obtain any such sanction. No ; such regula- 
 tions would be reprobated in the House of Commons. Let the 
 experiment be tried — let Ministers strive to embody those offen- 
 sive and anti- Catholic propositions into an act of Parliament 
 that are insisted on by the board, and there are but few Catho- 
 lics in Ireland that would not startle at the re-enactment of 
 the old penal code. Until the Legislature, then, decides the 
 conditions, the people have a right to ask and to obtain the 
 pecuniary aid that is destined for education, without subjecting 
 their consciences to unholy conditions. The board may refuse 
 it, it is true, but it will be at their own peril ; let, then, those 
 districts that are so refused appeal loudly to the Legislature; 
 let them require of their representatives to insist that the public 
 funds shall not be rendered unavailable by conditions, that are 
 at war with the spirit of religion. 
 
 This ministry, of which your lordship is a member, take great 
 credit for doing justice to Ireland. Is it justice to the Catholic 
 people to refuse them education, unless administered through a 
 Protestant medium ? Is it justice to have more of the fund, said 
 to be intended for the education of the poor of that persuasion, 
 squandered on officials — the greater number Protestants — than 
 the entire sum that is granted for the education of the whole 
 priesthood of Ireland? No, my Lord, the injustice and the 
 bigotry of the whole system of anti-national education are best 
 attested by the zeal with which the ministerial press in England 
 as well as in Ireland, laboured to check public discussion. If 
 it be fraught with those benefits which its advocates ascribe to 
 it, why not let it enjoy all the advantages of public inquiry — or 
 why the alarm of journals, calling themselves popular, should 
 they let such discussions into their columns ? If the Govern- 
 ment strive, then, to propagate this system by force or by cor- 
 ruption, it will not argue much of the wisdom of Gamaliel, since 
 it must betray the strongest suspicions that it requires other aid 
 than its own excellence to recommend it. 
 
 It is in vain that all the energies of patronage, so actively at 
 work in other departments of the state to win over influential 
 persons into an interested acquiesence, have been put into re- 
 quisition. It is in vain that temptations have been held out 
 to apply for some of the lucrative places, and the corruption 
 which has eaten its way into much that was once sound in 
 society, has striven to cross the very threshold of the sanc- 
 tuary. It is in vain that you have endeavoured, by a more 
 expensive pecuniary provision, to raise the small ignorant officials 
 whose previous acquirements did not fit them for any such dis- 
 
442 
 
 LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 tinction, far above the condition of the professors of Maynooth 
 College, or the parochial clergy of Ireland. Were you to give 
 them the treasury, it will fail of giving them influence ; and the 
 humble working curates will continue to do more in the instruc- 
 tion of the people, and in the support of the true interests of 
 the state, than the entire junta of your high paid mercenaries. 
 No, no, my lord ; rely on it, all your efforts to uphold so un- 
 popular a body, and so unchristian a system, must prove abor- 
 tive. The people are now beginning to know the materials of 
 which it is composed. Amidst the apostacy or corruption of a 
 portion of the press, there was also a portion placed beyond tbe 
 reach of temptation. Besides the Freeman's Journal , which has 
 pursued the straightforward tenor of its truly patriotic course, 
 without any inclination towards the powerful bodies that alter- 
 nately sought to draw it from its path, I hail with pleasure the 
 manly tone, in defence of their religion and their freedom, which 
 has recently distinguished many of the provincial journals of the 
 kingdom. With such vigilant sentinels to arouse the indolent 
 into a just alarm of the stealthy approaches of the foe, there is 
 very little danger that the faith which their more manly prede- 
 cessors could not subdue by open force, should now be filched 
 from us by the deceitful stratagems of the Caledonians and 
 the Saxons. Let it not be imagined that I wish to excite any 
 unreasonable prejudice against those, to whom your lordship’s 
 compassion for the Irish Catholics would entrust their educa- 
 tion. No ; they must be judged by their works. We are told 
 in the Gospel that a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, nor 
 do people gather vines and grapes from brambles and thorns. 
 Reserving some more precious extracts from their writings to other 
 occasions, I beg to submit the following passage from a member 
 of the anti-national board to the Catholic people of Ireland, that 
 from the quality of the stem they may form a judgment of the 
 nature of the fruit, which they are suffering their children to 
 pluck from its branches: — 
 
 “ Idolatry of the grossest kind (he writes regarding the Ca- 
 tholic Church) was gradually restored. The worshippers of 
 the one true God, manifest in Christ Jesus, practically paid their 
 chief adoration to deified mortals. The Scriptures were secluded 
 from the people under the veil of an unknown tongue, and their 
 interpretation fettered, and their authority superseded, even with 
 the learned, by a mass of traditions which made the W ord of God 
 of none effect. Then sacraments became superstitious charms — 
 then public worship a kind of magic incantation, muttered in a 
 dead language, and Christian holiness of life was commuted for 
 holy water, for fantastic penances, pilgrimages, amulets, pecu- 
 niary donations, and a whole train of superstitious observances 
 worthy of paganism in its worst forms.” But I must pause here, 
 
LETTER LXXXV. 
 
 443 
 
 and forbear polluting my page, with the blasphemous application 
 of a Scripture passage to the chaste spouse of Christ, worthy 
 only to find utterance in that school which has striven, by the 
 most audacious interpretations of Scripture, to strip the Divine 
 Word of its due reverence. And who, the reader must anxiously 
 inquire, is the author of this passage, so full of fine-turned com- 
 pliments to the Catholic religion?* No other than Doctor 
 Whately, the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin — the faithful 
 fellow-labourer of Mr. Carlile in compiling the Scripture Lessons, 
 since we are informed by the latter, in his evidence before Par- 
 liament, that whilst the other members but little interfered, this 
 zealous prelate not only gave his personal aid, but delegated a 
 Protestant minister to the task of their compilation. The fruit 
 is worthy of the seed from which it sprung ; and let the poor 
 Catholic children, who hunger for the bread of life, eat in future 
 of this bread, kneaded out of the dough of English Lutheranism, 
 fermented with the leaven of Scotch Calvinism, and mixed with 
 the milk and water of Irish liberality. But no, they shall not 
 taste of such rank and unwholesome nutriment in this diocese. 
 Not only the clergy, but the faithful have taken the alarm, as is 
 attested by their public resolutions. Doctor Whately has ob- 
 tained from some individuals the reputation of liberality. This 
 is a phrase which assumes a variety of meanings, according to 
 the variety of tongues by which it is uttered. We are told to 
 beware of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Whatever might be 
 the insinuating courtesy of their exterior deportment, I know 
 not what confidence could Catholics repose in those who would 
 assail their religion in terms of such gross slander and vitupera- 
 tion. The Catholics may now judge what instruction should be 
 given to their children, if he and such aliens from the Catholic 
 Church (as they do almost possess it) should continue to entirely 
 possess control over that instruction. We must disown the 
 unholy and unnatural alliance which a corrupt and anti-Catholic 
 policy has framed. There can be no lasting association between 
 light and darkness, or of truth with error, or of God with 
 Belial. The ass and the ox were forbidden to be yoked together, 
 and those biblical advocates for the blending of all seeds of doc- 
 trine, and weaving into the same texture different qualities of 
 belief, will find, in the interdict of mixing different seeds in the 
 same soil, or of making cloth of linsey-wolsey, the condemnation 
 of their own project. A corrupt press may defend it for some 
 time, and were the Koran to form a school-book with the Bible, 
 the system would have the advocacy of some of those who must 
 abide the dictates of the reigning powers. But we have another 
 engine, of which the corruption, and the pride, and the power of 
 
 * Errors of Romanism, p. 311. 
 
444 
 
 LETTER LXXXYI. 
 
 the world have ever felt the sacred influence ; that engine is the 
 Gospel going forth from the house of God. Against the Divine 
 energy of that power no corruption shall prevail ; nor can the 
 bigotry and injustice of your education plans succeed long, when 
 denounced, as this has already begun to be, from more than a 
 hundred altars. 
 
 I have the honour to be your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam, 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 Achill Island, Feast of the Dedication of the Churches 
 of Ireland, October 24 , 1835 . 
 
 My Lord — In the unprecedented rapidity of the spread of 
 public discontent, your lordship must perceive the fruits of your 
 recent legislation. Scarce did the intelligence of the odious 
 Tithe Act reach the country, when it was received by all classes 
 of the people with universal abhorrence. If you hoped that this 
 measure would pacify Ireland, your lordship must now be 
 convinced of the delusion under which you laboured. But you 
 could not entertain such a hope without imagining that the Irish 
 people had lost all their sensibility to oppression, or that they 
 would patiently endure all their former wrongs, provided they 
 were called by another name. If the Catholics of Ireland be 
 doomed to pass under the yoke of an alien and oppressive estab- 
 lishment, what matters it to them whether it is to the landlord or 
 the parson they are coerced to pay the tribute of their religious 
 servitude ? Better far to enact at once, that it is just and 
 necessary that persons should be perpetually retained in parishes 
 where there are none to hear them, and that fifty, as in this 
 diocese, should be taxed with the religious instruction of one 
 individual, than that the vigils of the Senate and the patience of 
 the people should be wasted, in confusing a question that is too 
 clear for mystification. 
 
 Again and again have the people, in an endless variety of 
 petitions and solemn resolutions, declared that under no name 
 or form which it might assume, would they consent to pay this 
 
LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 445 
 
 execrable tribute, and sealed this declaration with their blood. 
 Still an attempt is made to perpetuate it under a less obnoxious 
 name. No sooner is the tithe recognized under the appellation 
 of rent-charge, than the latter is assailed with the same hatred 
 which was directed to the former, and significant indications 
 given that the same feeling may extend to the entire of the rent- 
 roll. To obviate such deplorable consequences, the landed 
 gentry seasonably come forward to mingle and sympathize with 
 the occupiers in the expression of their utter detestation of the 
 new measure. Thus the ranks of the people are recruited with 
 an important accession of force that hitherto appeared indifferent 
 to the result, and some from the impulse of selfishness, others 
 from benevolence, and all from a wise policy, have concurred in 
 the opposition to tithes that now pervades the entire kingdom. 
 Nay, many estimable landlords, rather than come in collision with 
 the bitter feelings of their tenantry, have avowed their determi- 
 nation to relinquish their claims to the tithe charge, and make a 
 painful sacrifice of their own interests to the peace of the 
 country. 
 
 It is not to be imagined that the landed proprietors will submit 
 without a murmur to the accumulated load of injury and insult, 
 that has thus been thrown upon that devoted body. There are 
 few of them yet so degenerate as to feel any ambition, that the 
 offices of bailiffs or of tithe-proctors, should be associated with 
 their hereditary titles. Much as some of them may feel for the 
 interests of the Established Church, they feel for those of their 
 children more, whose prospects have been attempted to be 
 sacrificed to an odious monopoly, without the compensation of 
 any public good resulting from such a sacrifice. They really are 
 deserving of general commisseration. Between the exactions of 
 the parsons on the one hand, and the Poor Law Commissioners 
 on the other, their ample properties will soon be squeezed into 
 small dimensions. However, the interests of such a class are too 
 important to be overlooked by any government. Standing aloof, 
 as they have hitherto generally done, from the common interests, 
 they were feeble and powerless against the encroachments of 
 the Establishment. At length they have seen their error, and, 
 leaguing themselves with their tenantry in constitutional compact, 
 have determined never to cease their exertions until they 
 achieve a legal and peaceful triumph over the common foe, which, 
 by alternately addressing itself to the interests of either, dex- 
 terously succeeded so long in marring the happiness of both. 
 
 In confirmation of this assertion, I refer your lordship to the 
 different numerously attended tithe-meetings, that have been held 
 all over the country, as well as to the resolutions which they 
 adopted. Assembled in different and remote quarters of the 
 kingdom, without concert or any previous arrangement, they 
 
446 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 have come to an unanimity in their resolves, which nothing but 
 their common and deeply-felt grievances could inspire. Their 
 proceedings were not characterized by violence nor any marks of 
 excitement ; on the contrary, they bore the impressions of de- 
 liberation and debate ; the immense masses were guided by the 
 intelligence of the gentry — all unanimous in their denunciations 
 of tithes, or rent-charge, or any other compulsory support of an 
 hostile establishment ; and in the properties of the one, as well as 
 in the numbers of the other, there was nothing wanting to give 
 manifestation or weight, to the legitimate wishes of the people. 
 
 The longer your lordship delays the complete settlement of 
 the tithe question, by contracting the establishment to the wants 
 of its adherents, and appropriating its revenues to useful purposes, 
 the deeper will be your embarrassment. You are not only 
 retarding the prosperity of the country — you are also endanger- 
 ing its peace, by encouraging every religious empyric to play 
 the delusive and abortive game, of converting its people from the 
 supposed errors of Popery. Instead of being, as it should be, a 
 rich field to invite and reward the expenditure of capital, and to 
 excite a generous rivalry amongst the encouragers of every 
 improvement, pouring forth abundance among its cultivators, 
 without any reference to the colour of their creed, it is still 
 doomed, by the same sinister policy which has so long rendered 
 it a waste, to be the theatre of religious bigotry, from which 
 peace, and commerce, and agriculture, and all the arts which can 
 only flourish where there is complete freedom, shall be scared 
 away by the rod of religious injustice. Of this the melancholy 
 state of Achill furnishes a striking example. Possessing in the 
 mixed soil of which it is composed, as well as the shores by 
 which it is surrounded, mines of wealth which would bless its 
 inhabitants with abundance, what are the means which, to the 
 disgrace of the British empire, we find employed for its cultiva- 
 tion ? Instead of intersecting it with roads, and enabling the 
 inhabitants to cover the thin stratum of bog with the gravel 
 which is found so near the surface, we find that hypocrites or 
 fanatics, who affect to feel an interest for the natives, are sending 
 money to insult their misery, under the pretence of teaching 
 them a new and untrodden road to heaven. Instead of fur- 
 nishing them with boats and nets to explore their coasts, so famed 
 for their fisheries, they are sending individuals who are con- 
 tinually stretching out their nets to catch the souls of the people. 
 The English and Irish people are deceived and insulted by the 
 lying accounts of trading missionaries, who cross land and seas to 
 make one convert, and when they convert him make him a child 
 of hell. Surely such a disgraceful traffic must be rebuked, it 
 will be said, by the proprietor of the soil or the government of 
 the country. The proprietor appears of late to be entirely 
 
LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 447 
 
 absorbed in religious concerns, and to feel more anxiety for the 
 spiritual than the temporal interests of his numerous tenantry. 
 As for the government, there is no evidence that they discourage 
 a scheme, which is productive of much annoyance to the inhabi- 
 tants, and must lead to the worst consequences. The coast 
 guards are all under their control, and it appears that some of 
 that body have been as zealous in guarding the natives against 
 the horrors of Popery as they have been in protecting her 
 Majesty’s revenue. Nay, complaints of the most unwarrantable 
 interference with the creed of the people and the authority of 
 the pastor, and substantiated by proofs, have been preferred by 
 the Catholic clergyman, without obtaining any respite from its 
 continuance. It affords no presumption that this missionary 
 colony, as it is called, finds any disfavour with the ruling- 
 ministers, when we find the coast guards there almost exclusively 
 Protestant, as if to swell the numbers of their conventicles. 
 No, my lord, I am sure it is regarded with peculiar interest, and 
 that until the frauds and imposture that are resorted to are 
 so unmasked, as to make its support a matter of reproach, all 
 Catholics will be studiously excluded from any situation on that 
 coast. As an evidence of the frauds by which the public are 
 deceived, the Catholic clergy are willing to publish the real state 
 of the Achill mission in the Herald that circulates the slanders — 
 a proposition which could not be refused to be acceded to, were 
 truth the object of the publication. And yet such are the 
 persons who avail themselves of every opportunity to favour 
 schemes of proselytism, full of calumny and insult, to whom we 
 are to intrust the control over the religious education of our 
 people. Whigs or Tories, whatever may be the shades of your 
 political creeds (and they are daily becoming less distinct), they 
 are utterly lost in your common and deep aversion to the Catholic 
 religion. To commit the religious education of my flock to 
 teachers over which such undisguised enemies of my faith should 
 directly, or through dependent boards, have control, would be 
 the same as to give to the wolf the superintendence of the 
 fold. Who, think you, was the person who offered the most 
 outrageous insult to the Catholic clergyman in Achill in the 
 discharge of his religious duties ? An unprincipled creature — 
 once a Catholic, and who, while teacher under the National 
 Board, thought fit, like the famous Cranmer, alternately to per- 
 sonate a Catholic and Protestant. One of the parish priests of 
 this diocese, deeming him an improper person to be still entrusted 
 with the education of Catholic children, corresponded with the 
 board on the impropriety of his being continued in that situation. 
 His remonstrances were vain. No doubt the majority of that 
 body found in the circumstance of the master’s change of faith, 
 a fresh claim to their confidence ; and surely they could not 
 
448 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 disparage their religion so much, as to remove an individual from 
 a school, who manifested such a zeal for its diffusion. Nay, he 
 was the very individual fitted for such a place ; for so completely 
 did he illustrate in his own person the religious harmony that is 
 aimed at in this system, that to please the priest he went to mass 
 on Sunday, and on Fridays ate meat with the Protestant pastors, 
 to show what a fit medium he was to reconcile religious discor- 
 dances. The zealous clergyman, however, considering that it 
 was not to a government board that he was answerable for the 
 souls committed to his charge, withdrew the scholars from any 
 contact with one who would not fail to blow over their unsullied 
 minds the tainted breath of his own wicked principles. This 
 was the individual who lately, as one of the Achill missionaries, 
 whilst the priest was just going to sustain the departing spirit of 
 one of his flock with the confidence and consolation derived from 
 the administration of his religion, insulted him in language to 
 which the foul and incendiary itinerants who are infesting every 
 land, could scarcely have given utterance. 
 
 Here is a good specimen of the masters who should have to 
 form the faith and morals of the youth of Ireland, if this board 
 could supersede the solemn resolutions of the bishops of Ireland 
 regarding the choice and dismissal of teachers, and succeed in 
 claiming control over that body. The query sheets which they 
 circulate at this moment, claim, in utter contempt of the aforesaid 
 resolutions, this unchristian control. Nay, they are striving to 
 reduce it to practice by appointing to districts almost exclusively 
 Catholic, Protestant inspectors, who, in reality, are nothing less 
 than head-masters or teachers in such a district, visiting some of 
 the schools oftener, and all, once at least in each month, and 
 devoting three hours at a time to an examination of masters and 
 pupils, not forgetting the Scripture Lessons where they are not 
 expelled, and the unbounded range of invidiously insinuating 
 their pernicious doctrines, which the vague and indefinite inter- 
 rogatories at the end of those lessons afford them. Nor can 
 they omit to dwell with particular complacency on a note in the 
 last number of the Scripture Lessons, purporting to be explana- 
 tory of a passage in the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apos- 
 tles, from which the primitive fathers deduced the sacrament 
 of confirmation. Your lordship’s time is, doubtless, too precious 
 and too much absorbed in state affairs, to bestow a particle of it 
 on the dogmas of theology. I must, however, warn such as are 
 anxious for the faith, and have not read the passage, that the 
 text from which Catholic theologians draw the chief scriptural 
 argument for confirmation, is illustrated by an invidious note 
 which refers to the effects of the descent of the Holy Ghost, 
 which were transitory, while it studiously passes over those 
 sacramental graces of confirmation, which were to be permanent 
 
LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 449 
 
 in the Catholic church. If I had not another of the many 
 objections already preferred against those pernicious tracts, 
 this note alone would sufficiently recall the latent spirit of the 
 Calvinist, who, true to the principles of Blondel and of Beza, 
 strives to obliterate, with his anti-Catholic commentary, a prin- 
 cipal proof of the sacrament of confirmation, as well as of its 
 connexion with the episcopal authority. 
 
 Impressed with the conviction that persons professing one 
 creed cannot be fit teachers for those of a different religion, 
 the clergy of this diocese came to the wise resolution of never 
 suffering the children to be under the control of Protestant 
 masters or inspectors, the latter of whom, as appears from 
 their training as well as visiting duties, must exercise a dan- 
 gerous influence on the young and simple minds of unsus- 
 pecting children. One of those inspectors has stated that the 
 Scriptures are strong against the divinity of Christ; and no 
 doubt, as they must be zealous for the propagation of their 
 own opinions, they would not fail to dwell upon some of the 
 questions and answers which bear upon this doctrine. St. Paul 
 cautioned the faithful even to avoid a heretic — mine is not, 
 the harsh and unfashionable phrase, the original is St. Paul’s, 
 which, from an apprehension of offending all polite and liberal 
 Christians, will, probably, in the next number of lessons, be 
 softened down into more conciliating language. The stern and 
 uncompromising apostle knew, however, that faith and morals 
 are soon corrupted by evil communication. If there be such 
 a thing as heresy in the church, it must be at least in de- 
 nying the fundamental doctrine of the divinity of the Son of 
 God, who, by the effusion of his blood purchased our redemption. 
 If then we are cautioned to avoid such as spread dissensions on 
 less important points, is it to be imagined that we can suffer the 
 little children to be in continual contact with those as examinators 
 in their lessons and selectors of their religious books, who would 
 taint their faith with any doubts about the divinity of our 
 Redeemer? Accordingly, we have interdicted, all official in- 
 tercourse with such masters and inspectors. I say official, to 
 obviate all misrepresentation. 
 
 We feel neither contempt nor hatred for any on account of 
 their religious opinions. They are objects of our charitable 
 sympathies ; nor do we inquire about their creed in the fulfilment 
 of all social obligations. In short, we treat them as we should 
 wish to be treated ; and, conceiving it would be unjust that 
 Catholics shall exercise any coercive or furtive control over the 
 religious education of Protestant children, we claim for ourselves 
 the fulfilment of the same equitable covenant. Yet, in despite 
 of those resolutions, founded on the fairest principles of religion 
 and of reason, and published to the world, the National Board 
 
450 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 have, in the plenitude of their arbitrary authority, sent us a 
 Protestant inspector in a diocese where scarcely any Protestants 
 attend the schools. The masters in Tuam, in Westport, and in 
 all the districts where my instructions reached them in time, 
 refused him admittance. The commissioners have since expended 
 a good deal of stationery, in insisting on the dismissal of those 
 contumacious masters. They were not ignorant, I am sure, that 
 those faithful teachers acted in conformity with the instructions 
 of their bishop. If they were not, they cannot be released from 
 the charge of encouraging ecclesiastical insubordination, by 
 writing to a clergyman to dismiss a master in opposition to the 
 commands of his bishop. Be it, therefore, known to them that the 
 masters will not be dismissed, and that they have earned by 
 their fidelity an additional claim to support. They threaten to 
 withdraw the grant, and erase the school of Tuam from their 
 catalogue. As soon as they please. But, reflect on the con- 
 sequences of investing this bigoted board with such arbitrary 
 power over the hard-earned taxes of the people from whose 
 pockets they are wrung. We are not ignorant that the board, 
 so far from being an independent body, is the obedient creature 
 of the ministry. If, then, they withdraw the grant, unless their 
 conditions, which violate conscience, as well as the authority of 
 a bishop over his flock, are complied with, allow me to warn you 
 that half a million of people and their faithful representative 
 may soon withdraw their confidence from a government, which 
 would encourage such covert persecution. Principiis obsta is as 
 applicable to religious and political, as to other diseases ; and it is 
 not for the paltry sum of fifteen pounds, a Christian pastor is 
 to suffer the admission of a principle pregnant with future 
 mischief, at first slow and insinuating in its operation, but ready 
 to pour its unchecked evils on the Church when it had attained 
 sufficient strength and maturity, and when they who could first 
 check it, may be no more. Let them, then, withdraw their miser- 
 able grant, and instead of the Tuam National School, we shall 
 gladly inscribe the Tuam Homan Catholic School, surmounted 
 with the emblem of the cross. On learning that all connexion 
 is broken with them by the board, abundance of funds will flow 
 in for the support of the school. The merits of the board, and 
 its affinity with all the political bodies that have striven in every 
 age, in this and other countries, to make the Church the footstool 
 of the state, shall not be forgotten. Already the laity of every 
 class, the educated gentry, as well as the generous poor, have 
 pledged their devotion to the cause of free and unshackled 
 education ; and it is not to be imagined that those who for years 
 have raised such ample contributions towards their country’s 
 freedom, will relax their efforts when there is question of pre- 
 serving unshackled the freedom of their religion. 
 
LETTER LXXXVI. 
 
 451 
 
 It is, then, high time to give up this protracted and bootless 
 warfare against the ancient religion of Ireland. It is time to 
 adopt a policy more consonant with justice and the prosperity of 
 the land, as well as the feelings of its people. The paramount 
 influence of the Catholics of Ireland cannot longer be contro- 
 verted. They are, emphatically, the people. You may talk of 
 the Established Church ; the Catholic clergy, who shall never 
 deserve that name in the odious and degrading sense of any 
 pecuniary dependence on the state, are, in reality, the Established 
 Church, rooted in the hearts and affections of that people. Why 
 then, a narrow and bigoted system of legislation, suited to some 
 of the past reigns rather than to the boasted wisdom — and it is 
 but a boast — of the present period? Why strive, by anti- 
 Catholic boards and missions, consisting of men opposed to our 
 faith and nation, to uphold an establishment which never can 
 thrive on the soil of Ireland ? Why not at once appropriate the 
 tithes to the development of the physical and intellectual re- 
 sources of the country, without any direct or indirect interference 
 with a religion, to which the people have clung with a fidelity, to 
 which history has not a parallel ? As the attempt to make them 
 Protestants has proved abortive, why not, in the wise language 
 of the enlightened Laud, strive to make them good Catholics, by 
 not interfering with the legitimate authority of their own pastors ! 
 Make an ample and generous provision for the present incum- 
 bents. It would be unjust, nay, cruel, to consign them to 
 destitution. But, after their demise, consult for the interests of 
 the nation. Your lordship must cast away the thought of being 
 able to keep up much longer the crazy establishment, in the face of 
 the opposition of eight millions of people. It is time to put an 
 end to the mockery by which the nation has been so long deluded 
 on the subject of tithe, by successive acts of parliament, and not 
 to expose the legislature to the reproach of the folly of Laomedon 
 by striving to raise up again and again the fallen towers, which 
 the popular agitation of every successive year is overturning. 
 There is only one secret for allaying this agitation, which is 
 justice. Were you to exhaust the treasury in patronage, it will 
 not purchase peace without justice to the mass of the people. 
 The consumers of the tithes are the fierce agitators that are 
 tearing up society from its foundation. Appropriate the tithes 
 to national purposes, and one great cause of popular ferment is 
 destroyed. Extinguish, then, the tithes in reality by such 
 appropriation, and you will close up the bitter spring of our 
 worst national calamities. Extinguetur atque delebitur non modo 
 hceo tarn adulta reipublicce pestis , verum etiam stirps ac semen 
 malorum omnium. 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
452 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII, 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CLERGY AND FAITHFUL OF THE 
 DIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of the Apostles SS. Simon 
 and Jude, October 28th, 1838. 
 
 Dearly Beloved Brethren — Impressed with the solemn ad- 
 monition of the Apostle, exhorting us to* “ take heed to the 
 flock over which the Holy Ghost has placed us,” through the 
 special favor of the Apostolical See, we have endeavoured, with 
 unremitting solicitude, to protect the portion of the fold with 
 which we have been entrusted, against the ravenous wolves that 
 invade its inclosures. We need scarcely allude to the various 
 sectaries who, under the benevolent guise of relieving the 
 spiritual and intellectual wants of the poor, have laboured with 
 incessant assiduity to poison the faith, and corrupt the hearts 
 of the rising generation. Against the insidious inroads of those 
 enemies of our faith, we have, in common with the faithful pastors 
 of the Irish Church, lifted our warning voice, lest the souls com- 
 mitted to our care should perish through our apathy. Of this, 
 our duty of untiring vigilance, we have, besides the advice of the 
 inspired writings, been roused by the supreme watchman,! 
 whose station on the loftiest towers of the Citadel of the Church 
 affords him a commanding prospect of the various departments 
 of his fold, and enables him to sustain the most feeble by his 
 pastoral exhortations. 
 
 Having witnessed with what versatile craft and dexterity, the 
 enemies of our faith have successively shifted their attacks, in 
 order to rob you of that precious treasure, it became our duty 
 to adopt the most effectual plan for your future protection. 
 Education was the uniform channel through which, from the 
 disastrous rise of the new religion, its poison was striven to be 
 conveyed. Accordingly, the bishops of Ireland, assembled in 
 synod, in the year 1826 , after repeated conferences of some of 
 their members with government commissioners, adopted a series 
 of solemn resolutions, which were to be as landmarks to guide us, 
 how far we might go on the hazardous and untried path of a 
 mixed education, in order to guard the little children from the 
 danger to which they might be exposed. These landmarks, 
 
 * Acts, xx, 28. 
 
 f Ezech. xxxiii. 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 453 
 
 which we hoped would he sacred and inviolate, we have seen 
 transgressed by a new Board of Education, which claims to itself 
 an authority which exclusively belongs to the bishops of the 
 Catholic Church, and which the prelates of Ireland will not 
 fail to protect. We witnessed with unaffected sorrow the utter 
 inattention with which these resolutions of the Catholic hierarchy 
 were treated by this board, and our regret was the more poignant 
 on account of a venerable prelate, who was pledged to the 
 resolutions of his brethren, being associated to the board by 
 which they were totally disregarded. From a feeling of respect 
 for him we suffered much to pass over in silence, which would 
 have called forth our earlier animadversion and remonstrance. 
 It was only when we saw that the vicious system teemed with 
 evils which no zeal or piety on the part of any individual 
 member of the body, however active, could correct, that we 
 tardily raised our feeble voice to protest against a scheme of 
 education, which threatened such serious dangers to the fold. If, 
 then, we have been guilty of any error, it is surely not one of a 
 rash or precipitate zeal. We have rather exposed ourselves to 
 the reproach of slumbering, while the enemy was striving to sow 
 tares* in the field, or rather of suffering feelings of personal 
 respect to stifle so long the denunciation of evils, which a sense of 
 public duty should have previously elicited. 
 
 In warning you, then, dearly beloved brethren, against the 
 present evils and still greater dangers of this novel system, it 
 will be a consolation to you to hear that the instructions which 
 we gave regarding books and masters, were in entire accordance 
 with the deliberate resolves of all the bishops of Ireland. Now 
 the rules of the National Board are in direct opposition to those 
 resolutions. It requires, therefore, not much penetration to 
 conclude, whether it can be entitled to the confidence of the 
 Catholics of this diocese. To enable you to draw a simple and 
 safe conclusion, we shall beg to lay before you now the re- 
 solutions of the one, contrasted with the regulations of the 
 other : — 
 
 “ With a trembling sense of the obligations which the nature 
 of our joffice imposes on us, we have come together, after the 
 example of our predecessors, to deliberate in common on the 
 awful interests with which we are charged. We have taken into 
 consideration various subjects which are intimately connected with 
 the welfare of religion, and whilst we have sought with jealousy 
 to guard the sacred deposit 4 commited to our trust by the Holy 
 Ghost,’| we have also esteemed it a duty to be e ready to satisfy 
 every one that asketh us a reason of that hope which is in us,’! 
 that you, ‘ dearly beloved, our joy and our crown, may stand 
 
 Matthew, xiii. 
 
 f II. Timothy, i, 14. J I. Peter, iii, 15. 
 
454 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI1. 
 
 fast in the Lord,’* and that he who is on the contrary part 
 may be afraid, ‘having no evil to say of us.’f We know, 
 dearly beloved, the filial duty with which you are solicitous to 
 hear the voice of those who ‘ watch as being to render an account 
 of your souls. ’:J We hasten, therefore, to make known to you 
 our unanimous decisions on such matters as are of common 
 concern, that you, on your part, may fulfil our joy ; that being 
 of one accord, ‘you stand fast in one spirit, with one mind, 
 labouring together for the faith of the gospel.’ § 
 
 “ Having considered attentively a plan of national education 
 which has been submitted to us : Resolved — That the admission 
 of Protestants and Roman Catholics into the same schools for 
 the purpose of literary instruction may, under existing circum- 
 stances, be allowed, provided sufficient care be taken to protect 
 the religion of Roman Catholic children, and to furnish them 
 with adequate means of instruction. 
 
 “ That in order to secure sufficient protection to the religion of 
 Roman Catholic children, under such a system of education, we 
 deem it necessary that the master of each school in which the 
 majority of the pupils profess the Roman Catholic faith be a 
 Roman Catholic ; and that in schools in which the Roman 
 Catholic children form only a minority, a permanent Roman 
 Catholic assistant be employed, and that such master and assist- 
 ant be appointed upon the recommendation, or with the express 
 approval of the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese in which 
 they are to be employed ; and further, that they, or either of 
 them, be removed upon the representation of such bishop. The 
 same rule to be observed for the appointment or dismissal of mis- 
 tresses and assistants in female schools. 
 
 “ That we consider it improper that masters and mistresses 
 intended for the religious instruction of Roman Catholic youth, 
 should be trained or educated by, or under the control of persons 
 professing a different faith, and that we conceive it most de- 
 sirable that a male and female model school shall be established 
 in each province in Ireland, to be supported at the public expense, 
 for the purpose of qualifying such masters and mistresses 
 for the important duties, which they shall be appointed to 
 discharge. 
 
 “ That in conformity with the principle of protecting the 
 religion of Roman Catholic children, the books intended for their 
 particular instruction in religion shall be selected or approved by 
 the Roman Catholic prelates, and that no book or tract for 
 common instruction in literature shall be introduced into any 
 school in which Roman Catholic children are educated, which 
 
 * Phil, iv, 1. 
 
 f Tit. ii, 8. 
 
 t Hebrews, xiii, 17. §Phil i, 27. 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 455 
 
 book or tract may be objected to on religious grounds by the 
 Homan Catholic bishop of the diocese in which such school is 
 established. 
 
 “ That, appointed as we have been by Divine Providence, to 
 watch over and preserve the Catholic faith in Ireland, and, 
 responsible as we are to God for the souls of our flocks, we will 
 in our respective dioceses withhold our concurrence and support 
 from any system of education which will not fully accord with 
 the principles expressed in the foregoing resolutions.” 
 
 Such, dearly beloved brethren, are the resolutions on the 
 subject of the system of education, then submitted to their 
 judgment, which were unanimously adopted by the venerable 
 members of the Irish hierarchy. Allow me now to lay before 
 you the regulations of the National Board on the same vital 
 questions, regarding books and masters, and lest we should our- 
 selves be misled, or incautiously mislead a few by reference to 
 any minor variable rules, which undergo modifications according 
 to the convenience of the commissioners, we shall quote from 
 those fixed and legal documents, that are drawn up with all the 
 technical precision of law, and intended to bind the respective 
 parties to the rigorous fulfilment of these covenants. 
 
 “ And it is hereby expressed and declared (a copy of a lease 
 signed by two trustees to a national school and three of the 
 commissioners), and it is the true intent and meaning of these 
 presents, and of the several and respective parties thereto, that 
 the entire control over all books to be used in the said schools , 
 whether for the purposes of combined moral and literary educa- 
 tion , or of separate religious instruction, shall be from time to 
 time , and at all times, vested in the said commissioners, parties 
 hereto or other such commissioners as aforesaid, their successors 
 for the time being, none of the said books to be used or em- 
 ployed in such combined moral and literary education , except 
 under the sanction of the said commissioners for the time being, 
 nor in such separate religious instruction, but with the approba- 
 tion of such of the said commissioners for the time being as shall 
 be of the same religious persuasion with the children for whose 
 use they are intended; and further, that all the master and 
 masters, teacher and teachers of said schools for the time being, 
 shall not only in the first instance, before they shall be so ap- 
 pointed, have received previous instructions in a model school in 
 Dublin, sanctioned by the said commissioners, and shall also 
 have obtained from the said commissioners for the time being 
 testimonials of good conduct and general fitness ; but shall be 
 liable to be fined and fineable, removed and removable, or sus- 
 pended from time to time, and at all times , and when as often as 
 such commissioners as aforesaid for the time being shall deem it 
 
456 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 necessary at their will and pleasure , in such way and manner as 
 they shall deem expedient.” * 
 
 Now, dearly-beloved brethren, we leave it to your own dispas- 
 sionate judgment, and to your zeal for the faith of the young 
 generation, whether you are to be influenced by those enact- 
 ments of this secular board, or by the mild and pastoral solicitude 
 conveyed in the resolutions of the bishops. Weigh the trembling 
 anxiety with which they deliberate on the subject, and the 
 caution with which they declare such a system may, under ex- 
 isting circumstances, he allowed, to show their consciousness that 
 they were about to try untrodden ground, and then the strong 
 resolutions, asserting their inalienable rights over “ books and 
 masters” to “ secure sufficient protection for the religion of 
 Roman Catholic children.” Compare the legal terms with which 
 those commissioners strive to claim unqualified control over the 
 two most important mediums of religious instruction, and you 
 may judge whether “it was hailed as a blessing by the great 
 mass of a people who are so devoted to their pastors, and jealous 
 of the purity” of their religion. It was rather suffered, as a 
 lesser evil than those by which we were hitherto afflicted, and 
 accompanied with much of the distrust and caution that mark the 
 foregoing resolutions. Unwilling to “ abound in our own sense, ”f 
 “ not be more wise than it behoveth to be wise, but to be wise 
 unto sobriety”;]; we were rejoiced to be able to confirm our in- 
 structions to you regarding this system, by the corresponding 
 sentiments of all our venerable brethren. And the enlightened 
 docility with which the same instructions were received by you, 
 are a proof that they were felt to be conformable with the spirit 
 that has always guided the pastors of the Catholic Church. As 
 the grounds of those instructions are now more fully understood, 
 you will not, in future, sign any papers that would require a 
 transfer to any other body of that control over books and 
 teachers, relative to religious instruction, which we, in common 
 with the bishops of Ireland, have reserved to ourselves. It will 
 be more Christian and more candid to declare, that it is incom- 
 patible with the instructions of your pastor, § who is to watch, as 
 being to render an account of your souls, to sign such requisi- 
 tions, than to expose yourselves to the imputation of bad faith 
 by their non-fulfilment. As the duties of inspectors bring them 
 now into nearer and frequent intercourse with the children, 
 making them examinators on religious subjects, such as the words 
 in the Scripture Lessons, you will apply to them the same rule 
 as to masters, and not allow any persons to be official superinten- 
 dents of Catholic schools, who will not profess the Roman Catholic 
 
 * Minutes of Evidence on the new plan of Education, Part I., p. 654. 
 t Romans, xiv, 5. J Romans, xii, 3. § Hebrews, xiii, 17- 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 457 
 
 faith ; they shall, however, be open to every gentleman, of what- 
 ever creed, who chooses to visit them. And as we have declare^ 
 that “ we consider it improper that masters and mistresses 
 intended for the religious instruction of Roman Catholic youth 
 should be tfained or educated by, or under the control of, persons 
 professing a different faith you will perceive the propriety of 
 not sending any persons to the model-school in Dublin, where 
 they are “ trained under individuals professing a different faith, 
 and where they are examined in the Scripture Extracts, precisely 
 as they are expected to examine the scholars.”* 
 
 Here, dearly beloved brethren, we might pause, content to 
 leave it to the judgment of the most dispassionate, whether our 
 instructions, relative to the system of education, are not as con- 
 formable to the resolutions of the Catholic bishops, as the regu- 
 lations of the National Board are opposed to them ; and whether, 
 in conveying those instructions to you conjointly, we have not 
 been as far from “ domineering”! over the clergy, as requiring 
 from the faithful anything more than “ a reasonable obedience.”! 
 But as a distinguished prelate, himself a member of the board, 
 has addressed the Roman Catholics of Ireland in defence of that 
 body, we deem it a duty we owe to our flock to vindicate, at 
 somewhat further length, the grounds on which they should feel 
 alarm at the progress of a novel system, which has originated in 
 Protestant Prussia, and still progresses there, to the manifest 
 injury of our holy religion. 
 
 Though there may be now a discrepancy of opinion between 
 some prelates on this subject, you are not to feel surprised. It 
 only shows the compatibility of rational liberty with union, 
 reminding us of the beautiful language of St. Augustin, that 
 “ while on debateable points we may assert our freedom, we shall 
 never forget the unity that binds us on necessary ones, or the 
 charity that should link us on all.” In the first place, two letters 
 are introduced, in favour of the system, from the Primate, and 
 another from a respected prelate of the North of Ireland. Now, 
 it happens that we find the names, not only of the Prelate, who 
 is a member of the board, but also of the Primate, appended to 
 the resolutions which we are vindicating as the standard of our 
 sentiments and conduct regarding the National Board. Nay, 
 one, the Archbishop, a member of the board, states, in his cor- 
 respondence with the Commissioners of Education Inquiry, that 
 he was “instructed to say that the Roman Catholic prelates 
 would not think themselves called on to discourage the atten- 
 dance of children of the Roman Catholic faith, in any schools in 
 
 * Iteport of Plan of Education, question 1132. 
 f I. Peter, v, 3. 
 
 $ Homans, xii, 1. 
 
 2 a 
 
458 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 which the use of this compilation so amended might be required, 
 provided the regulations of said school were in accordance with 
 the resolutions which he had the honour to transmit to the com- 
 missioners, on the 23rd of January last.” Here the resolutions 
 alluded to are insisted on as the condition on which alone the 
 children would not be discouraged from frequenting the schools 
 of a mixed system of education. Conditions quite opposite are 
 now insisted on by the contracts of the board, with applicants for 
 their aid. If, then, those venerable prelates be referred to in 
 favour of the board, we, too, must claim the weight of their 
 joint authority, in union with the bishops of Ireland, in opposi- 
 tion to the most important of the regulations which govern that 
 institution. 
 
 Again, by referring to the date of those letters, early in 
 March, we find that scarcely any of the weighty objections 
 relative to the errors of the Scripture Lessons then appeared, 
 nor were many other obnoxious parts of this system as fully 
 developed. The resolutions of the bishops are not at all ad- 
 verted to, nor the serious and fundamental change regarding the 
 perusal of the Scriptures in school, whether separately or 
 conjointly, to be left to the discretion of parents and guardians, 
 without any reference to the authority of the ordinary, is not 
 undertaken to be justified in that correspondence. The most 
 important questions, then, are left untouched, and were we to be 
 written to, we could not do less than express ourselves in terms 
 of sincere personal compliment to the respected prelate, such as 
 we published from Rome on the first origin of the system, 
 qualified, however, by the expression of our convictions that 
 the concerns of religion were too serious for mere courtesy, 
 and that we could not acquiesce in the transfer of a trust to 
 any hands, however pure, for the due fulfilment of which we 
 could not be released from our own responsibility. As to the 
 opinion of the majority of the bishops and clergy at present, they 
 are the persons most competent to depose to their own sentiments. 
 Many might have given a vague approval to the system, without 
 entering into the particulars. We know there are many serious 
 propositions fraught with important practical consequences 
 connected with it, which none could approve. Such, for example, 
 is the power of permitting the vernacular Scriptures in or out 
 of school hours — whether in separate or joint education — a 
 power which no secular, or even ecclesiastical board or bishop, 
 has a right to exercise, without the permission of the ordinary of 
 the diocese in which such vernacular versions are read. 
 
 Finally, the circumstances of the north of Ireland are so 
 peculiar, and the difficulties that must beset its prelates relative 
 to schools are so great, that what must often be tolerated there 
 from necessity can form no model for the free adoption of the 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 459 
 
 Catholic provinces of Ireland. The Kildare-street system was 
 found, in order to escape from greater evil, to be in operation 
 there, when it was almost disused in other parts of the country. 
 Yet, it could not be inferred from that circumstance, that it ought 
 still to be continued. It is so with the present system. It is not 
 surprising that it is deemed a relative benefit, when contrasted 
 with the annoyance experienced from the wealth and power of 
 some of the enemies of the Catholic religion. It is stated in 
 evidence before the committee on education that in a district cf 
 the north alluded to, “ the practise is to read the Scriptures in 
 the authorized version, in a school where there are nearly three 
 hundred Catholic children, and that the Protestant version has 
 been expounded by the teacher, a Protestant layman.” Making 
 allowance for probable exaggerations in the circumstances of this 
 ease, they prove how difficult it is to secure complete religious 
 freedom in that province. However, under the zeal of its hier- 
 archy, and the spirit of its people, it will soon overcome those 
 untoward obstacles. It has excited surprise that religious 
 instruction under the constitution of the National Board, should 
 be represented as under the control of the ministers of a secular 
 government. However, it seems to be admitted by the appeal 
 to the feelings of the Catholics of Ireland, whether such a 
 control was liable to any abuse in such hands. That it would 
 be intentionally abused in such hands, has not been asserted nor 
 insinuated. That the religious instruction is placed by the 
 board, as far as its influence extends, under the control of the 
 ministers of a secular government, is undeniable. If any doubts 
 existed hitherto on the subject, they must be dissipated by the 
 stringent clauses of the covenant which we have cited, placing 
 the religious instruction, as far as regards books and masters, in 
 the hands of the commissioners. Books and masters, next to the 
 feeble and limited efforts of our personal exertions, are the 
 ordinary and most efficient instruments by which we can fulfil 
 that important commission of teaching , which we have derived 
 from our apostolical ministry. It is by virtue of this ministry 
 our priests have power to teach, and were any of them to attempt 
 to preach unsound doctrine, on us alone would devolve the re- 
 sponsibility of protecting the faithful from such errors. Yet, 
 the constitutions of the board attempt to take from the bishop 
 over an ordinary lay school-master the power, which he possesses 
 over the most exalted of his clergy. Of this control of the 
 secular power over religious instruction, you have an instance in 
 the case of the Boffin and Achill school-master, whom we could not 
 dismiss, according to the rules of this board, until the scholars 
 were withdrawn from his dangerous instruction and example. 
 
 Having discussed this question from the commencement on 
 strict principle, without reference to persons, we must deprecate 
 
460 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 any other course that might possibly lead you astray. Can it, 
 then, be doubted, that the religious instruction hitherto derived 
 from the Apostles, is placed by the board under the control of 
 the ministers of a secular government? The clause that the 
 religious books for separate religious instruction shall be under 
 the control of the commissioners of the same religious persuasion 
 as the children, and not under that of the bishop of the diocese, 
 places the truth of this assertion beyond any controversy. You 
 are not, thank God, even approaching that degree of indifference 
 regarding your faith, exhibited in this clause, as that you would 
 allow to the laity the right of dictating to their bishop the books 
 which should be used for religious instruction. The laity, thank 
 God, would be in general the last to claim it. Yet such is the 
 power claimed by the government board. But as that portion 
 of the prerogative may be deemed to be confined to the episcopal 
 members of the board, even then it is placing religious instruction 
 under the control of a secular government. The member of 
 the board selects the religious books as a bishop in communion 
 with the Holy See, or as a minister of the government. If in 
 the former capacity, every other bishop must exercise, by virtue 
 of his office, the same jurisdiction in his diocese. If as a minister 
 of the government, then it is still true that religious instruction is 
 placed under the control of a secular government, since to him 
 is given a power which he could not exercise as a Catholic bishop. 
 As to the practical results, which are always more to be attended 
 to than reasoning, however cogent, you must perceive to what 
 consequences such a power would lead, when one of the lay 
 commissioners would remove from the schools, if allowed, some 
 of the most pious productions of our venerable bishops. 
 However, the resolutions of our prelates providentially guarded 
 against the assumption of any such illegitimate control. It is 
 true that the interests of true religion can never be promoted by 
 the vituperation of those who hold a different religious creed. 
 It does not, therefore, follow that one bishop should be selected 
 by the government to determine the religious books that should 
 be used in the schools of the diocese of another, or to regulate, 
 either by himself, or what would be more dangerous, in union 
 with Protestant members, the fitness of teachers for religious 
 instruction. It is admitted that there is not a sufficient number 
 of Catholic members in the board to inspire us with sufficient 
 confidence. It has appeared surprising that any apprehension 
 should be felt from Protestant inspectors, or that they should be 
 designated as “ the authorized emissaries of the board in regu- 
 lating the quantity and quality of religious instruction that is to 
 be imparted to the people.” We must confess, we entertain the 
 most serious fears for the faith of the children from frequent 
 contact with authorized visitors and examinators, whose religious 
 
LETTER LXXXV1I. 
 
 4G1 
 
 prejudices are directly opposed to their creed. Nor can it bo 
 questioned that their secular office is to regulate the quantity and 
 quality of religious knowledge to be dispensed to the children. 
 The quantity is regulated by the hours allotted to religious 
 instruction. The quality is to be determined by the control 
 that is assumed over the selection of the religious books, from 
 which it is to be drawn. They are the authorized missionaries of 
 the board in seeing that those arbitrary rules be enforced. They 
 may, if any bishop should be so negligent of his duty as to 
 allow the exercise of such an unchristian control, remove from the 
 schools the religious books which he should recommend to his 
 own flock for perusal. If so, can it be deemed that they are 
 to regulate even the quality of religious instruction to be dis- 
 pensed to the people ? You could scarcely believe, dearly 
 beloved Christians, that one of those inspectors of the board 
 is said, on good authority, to have prohibited Butler’s Lives of 
 Saints to be used for instruction — a book replete with the most 
 varied and valuable information, and which furnishes the 
 strongest incentives to virtue in the heroic lives of the holy- 
 men who exemplified, in their own practice, the precepts of the 
 Gospel. This book, and the Imitation of Christ, we especially 
 recommend to the diligent study of the young in the schools, as 
 well as to all other persons in the diocese. 
 
 It is no wonder, however, that the Lives of the Saints and the 
 Catholic Christian Instructed, and such other holy works compiled 
 by men of primitive faith and sanctity, should find peculiar disfa- 
 vour with a board, composed, for the most part, of persons utterly 
 indifferent, or hostile, to the Catholic religion. For them they, 
 are striving to substitute books, which represent God in the work 
 of the six days, not creating, but forming the earth that existed 
 (it is assumed for a certainty) for many previous generations. 
 Although “ God hath delivered the world to their disputations, 
 so that man cannot find out the w'ork which God hath made from 
 the beginning to the end,” none would rejoice more than we at 
 • any improvement in school-books, that would open to the young 
 mind a literary prospect unclouded by bad prejudices. For this, 
 however, those books should not be infected with scepticism that 
 might lead to dangerous discussions, and shake the children’s faith 
 regarding the very foundations of religion. 
 
 As for the Scripture Lessons, it is some advantage that they 
 are not enforced. They are still, however, “earnestly and 
 unanimously recommended,” though tainted with an anti- 
 Catholic leaven, from which it is difficult for young minds, under 
 the obnoxious system of the national schools, not to imbibe the 
 poison of the deadliest errors on faith and morality, such as 
 grace, justification, good works, satisfaction, the priestly and 
 episcopal characters, and their corresponding offices of sacrifice 
 
462 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIL 
 
 and of ordination. On the disputed points between Catholic 
 and Protestant, the language of the authorized Protestant is 
 generally preferred to the Catholic Douay version. For example, 
 instead of “ priests,” the Catholic child finds “ elders,” or pres- 
 byters. The notes are sometimes so ambiguous as to leave the 
 doctrinal meaning to the caprice of the teachers. 
 
 At other times they consist of the very objections, with which 
 the Catholic faith is generally combated, and when they go 
 beyond verbal explanation, and touch on doctrine, they lean for 
 the most part towards the errors of the sectaries. Following 
 the example of some ancient Heresiarchs, the compiler of the 
 Scripture Lessons reproaches the father of the faithful with 
 having incurred a disgraceful punishment for dissimulation or a 
 suppression of mental truth ; while Saint Augustin demonstrates 
 that his conduct was not only correct and indicative of full 
 confidence in God, but that otherwise he would have been 
 tempting the Almighty to use in his favour an extraordinary 
 interposition. In short, in the compilation of the lessons them- 
 selves, extracts are introduced, for which no cause can be 
 assigned, to the exclusion of others equally appropriate, than 
 that they are the usual favourite passages from which Protestants 
 derived their peculiar opinions on the points of grace, good works, 
 free will, and predestination. Nay, in the one instance, where 
 the passage from St. James on good works is introduced, we find 
 a translation not only differing from the Douay and Vulgate, but 
 even from the Irish Protestant version, and where the Greek, 
 which is said to have been followed — where the original was that 
 language — did not require this marked deviation. 
 
 Even these novelties in words which, in modern languages, 
 are often shifting their meaning, should not be lightly adopted. 
 The Catholic Church is fond of antiquity, and sacred inflexibility 
 is its character. Possessing an ancient and unchangeable 
 doctrine, it delights in retaining the ancient words by which this 
 doctrine is consecrated. Forms of phrase, between which as 
 little difference could be assigned as between penance and 
 repentance, fomented the most angry controversies in the Church. 
 Yet those words were not indifferent, since, like presbyters and 
 priests, they were understood in a different theological meaning. 
 You cannot surely imagine it conducive to piety that the young 
 children should be puzzled with critical doubts about the “ sound 
 form of prayers which you taught them in their infancy.” Yet 
 these lessons are calculated to throw doubts on some passages in 
 the Lord’s Prayer, and diminish their reverence for the Angelical 
 Salutation. You should not like to hear them talking about the 
 hard name of some German critic to show that some passages of 
 the Lord’s Prayer were not found in some ancient manuscripts. 
 Nor could you be edified in hearing some children, after returning 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 463 
 
 from their schools, finding fault with their aged parents for 
 saying “ Hail Mary, full of grace,” remarking that such a 
 privilege was only applicable to God alone, whereas, they were 
 taught by their masters that the Greek only authorized them to 
 pray, Hail Mary, peculiarly blessed. No, dearly beloved bre- 
 thern, you will impress on them a reverence for the fixed and 
 “ sound form of words” which you have taught, and the necessity 
 of “ avoiding the profane novelty of words, and the oppositions of 
 knowledge, falsely so called.” 
 
 With such Scriptural lessons, then, and strange translations 
 recommended, as “ truth recorded under the influence of inspi- 
 ration,” to be taught by masters, perhaps Protestants (for they 
 can by the rule of the board be Protestants, even in Catholic 
 districts, as well as the inspectors), and with the exposition which 
 will be given them by persons all to be trained in a model-school, 
 where the greater number of teachers are said to be Protestant, 
 and where the compiler of those extracts is, along with another, 
 of his own Calvinistic opinions, entrusted with a large share in 
 the teaching and training department, we must solemnly declare 
 our conviction that we are not without serious apprehensions 
 for the purity of the faith of the rising generation. Whether 
 there be some inaccuracy in the relative numbers of Catholic or 
 Protestant teachers in the model-school, or of inspectors, or of 
 masters through the country, is a matter of little importance, 
 since there is question of a principle which authorizes the board 
 to select them as they choose, even in opposition to the prevailing 
 creed of the districts in which such inspectors and masters may 
 be appointed. They may as well appoint Protestant masters to 
 conduct, as Protestant superintendents to inspect, the exclusively 
 Catholic schools. One prelate perceives no danger in Protestant 
 inspectors — another may see none in Protestants teaching Catholic 
 children — other persons might permit the Protestant Scriptures 
 to be read by Catholic children ; and of all those cases it is 
 certain that there are now instances in different parts of Ireland. 
 Doubtless much of this is tolerated through mere necessity. It 
 should not, however, be inferred that we ought to be refused a 
 portion of the parliamentry grant for education, because we 
 cannot acquiesce in such sentiments or practice. We may be 
 too sensitive to the fears of having the “ faith once delivered to 
 the saints” tampered with by Protestant masters or mistresses. 
 Still, a wise government should respect such conscientious con- 
 victions. 
 
 It may appear to others that there is no danger, provided the 
 Catholic clergy exercise due vigilance. We respect their honest 
 sentiments ; but if other prelates and their clergy cannot feel 
 the same persuasion, surely they or their flocks should not bo 
 deprived of their just portion of a grant which they cannot accept 
 
464 
 
 LETTER LXXXVI1. 
 
 but on conditions that trench upon religious freedom. They may 
 have the grant if they subscribe to the conditions of the board. 
 It was the argument of every hostile society that hitherto assailed 
 their faith. It was the argument which dictated the penal laws, 
 as well as the ancient persecutions, since the Catholics of both 
 periods might enjoy honour and emolument provided they sub- 
 cribed to the terms that were proffered them. 
 
 We see a source of danger in the very confidence that some 
 repose in the system. Where there is security there is little 
 incentive to vigilance. They must, therefore, watch least against 
 its dangers who repose most confidence in the “ National Board.” 
 In few parishes in Ireland is there an adequate number of clergy- 
 men to discharge the various duties of the mission. “ The 
 harvest is great, but the labourers few.”* They are laboriously 
 occupied in attending the sick and hearing confessions for a great 
 portion of the year. Human nature, instead of being exposed 
 to temptations, should be protected. No parents would suffer 
 into their families a domestic of tainted principles, because he 
 might be honest if sufficiently watched. The faith of their 
 children is too precious to be trifled with ; and where 
 neither the parents nor the pastors can be present, they 
 should be entrusted to those in whom they could repose con- 
 fidence, and not to any whose corrupt faith would be a source 
 of contagion. 
 
 Without questioning the sincerity of the confidence reposed in 
 the honour of the Protestant commissioners, nothing can induce 
 us to commit the religious education of the children of this diocese 
 to persons selected by men entertaining their avowed hostility 
 to our religion. There is manifest danger that this confidence 
 in their honourable feelings, may be carried too far. Perhaps it 
 is owing to this circumstance, of confidence too unsuspecting, that 
 the Scripture Extracts abound so much in the peculiar language 
 of the Protestant version, and that if we are to believe the com- 
 piler, while the Protestant Archbishop suggested alterations — he 
 does not recollect any alteration suggested by the Catholic 
 Archbishop.f The Protestant commissioners have been deter- 
 mined enemies of our creed. They have given no proof that this 
 hostility has ceased. On the contrary, the only difference 
 between their present and former characters seems to be that 
 then they came like wolves undisguised, and harmless, because 
 then shunned by the flock. But now they are the same wolves 
 in sheeps’ clothing, and the more dangerous, because the same 
 fears are not entertained of them, on account of being habitually 
 seen with the legitimate pastors of the fold. 
 
 * Matthew, ix, 37. 
 
 f Report of Education, page 84, question, 895, 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 465 
 
 Allow us sincerely to warn you of the anti-Catholic spirit that 
 is abroad, aiming at a severance of the sacred ties that hitherto 
 connected the faithful and their pastors. The invidious religious 
 system against which the bishops of Ireland, as if by a special 
 Providence, drew up their resolutions, first originated with the 
 unprincipled monarch of Prussia, who was the bosom friend of 
 the leaders of the infidels of France. The system, well worthy 
 of such parentage, went on gradually encroaching on the liberties 
 of the bishops, until its bitter fruits are now developed in the 
 persecution of the illustrious Archbishop of Cologne, whose merits 
 and sufferings have excited the sympathy of the Roman Pontiff. 
 By not suffering any inroads on the religious education of our 
 youth unknown to our sainted ancestors, we shall preserve the 
 Church in Ireland from the endurance, at a future day, of similar 
 disasters. 
 
 Our gracious Queen will, no doubt, appreciate the un calculating 
 allegiance which Catholics have to their sovereigns, and will not, 
 when reminded of its danger, enforce a system which, by invading 
 religious liberty, might poison those pure principles uniformly 
 taught by the Catholic Church, “ of being subject to higher 
 powers — for conscience sake.”* In cautioning you against the 
 dangers of religious education being under the control of an 
 anomalous alliance of conflicting creeds, we are protecting the 
 state from corresponding conflicts in society. And in vindicating 
 the full right of spiritual teaching , which has descended to the 
 bishops from the Apostles, unshacked by regulations which 
 encroach on its efficient exercise, we are only advocating that 
 which has exalted human nature and spread the arts of civiliza- 
 tion among mankind. Yes, the pastors of the Catholic Church 
 have done more to diffuse literature throughout every country in 
 Europe than all the other associations, of whatever name, put 
 together, and at much less expense to the people. Instead of 
 checking, then, we are anxious to spread education, but to have 
 it so regulated that it may not become an engine, as it has in other 
 countries, of religious oppression. 
 
 Wo have been informed that the Education Board are resolved 
 to withdraw their grant from the Tuam schools, because we have 
 refused to submit our schools, exclusively Catholic, to the control 
 of Protestant inspectors. As other schools in the diocese have 
 been similarly circumstanced, we feel it our duty to prepare you 
 to meet with firmness, should you be doomed to encounter it, the 
 same temporary privation. Were small annoying trials of this 
 sort to subdue their fortitude, we should not now be enjoying the 
 precious inheritance of the faith of our fathers. They made far 
 greater sacrifices, when they not only “ sustained a great conflict 
 
 * Romans 13, 1 — 5. 
 
466 
 
 LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 of afflictions — but, received with joy the plundering of their 
 goods, knowing that they had a better and permanent substance.” 
 We have, however, no fears of the continuance of any annoyance, 
 since the policy of a wise government will not fail to respect the 
 conscientious feelings of the subjects, and secure to them a fair 
 proportion of the public funds they are entitled to. Besides, we 
 have the assurance, that such was the honor of the Protestant 
 commissioners, that the Catholic members were never taught to 
 feel the inferiority of their numbers. If so, it affords a pre- 
 sumption that you will not be deprived of the education grant, 
 since they will not fail to plead in behalf of your religious liberty, 
 and will not be left in a minority by their associates. This con- 
 cession is more than due to them. Such was the firm and intrepid 
 perseverance of the Presbyterians of the north of Ireland, that 
 they obtained from the board a concession, long refused to them, 
 of having the Scriptures read in the schools at the requisition of 
 the guardians and parents of the children. This concession was 
 yielded to that small body, though, as regards Catholics, it 
 invades the discipline of the Catholic Church, and may, in the 
 hands of bigoted landlords or other powerful lay patrons, become 
 a source of religious persecution. If, then, the original rule was 
 so changed as to make this concession to a few, which may 
 interfere with the religious freedom of the many, it is not un- 
 reasonable to expect a similar respectful deference to the religious 
 scruples of thousands, when this deference will not trench upon 
 the religion or the freedom of one solitary individual. We are, 
 then, to hope that the arbitrary and offensive regulations re- 
 specting masters, &c., found in their present query sheets, 
 will be exchanged for others more conformable to the resolutions 
 of the bishops and your religious feelings. The Protestants 
 themselves cannot refuse a more reasonable concession than the 
 one made to them; for we cannot suppose that the Catholic 
 members will not insist on conditions conformable to the spirit 
 and letter of the resolutions of the hierarchy; otherwise any 
 further confidence in such a system would be delusive. But 
 should the board not think it fit to continue their grants, then 
 you have but the alternative of conveying the expressions of 
 your grievances to the throne, reminding respectfully her Majesty 
 that as you bear a fair share in the public burdens of the state, 
 you hope for a fair participation in its benefits. The wisdom and 
 benevolence, as well as the justice, of our gracious Sovereign 
 will not lend a deaf car to the respectful and numerous petitions 
 of a large portion of her faithful people. 
 
 In this instruction we have confined ourselves, as seemed 
 befitting the duties of our sacred office when addressing our 
 flock, solely to the view of guarding your religion. We have not 
 adverted to the plans now in contemplation, of giving such bodies 
 
LETTER LXXXVII. 
 
 467 
 
 a power of taxing the people, by which it will appear that the 
 small pittance hitherto granted under the show of gratuities were 
 intended to lead to an extensive system of assessment for edu- 
 cation, over which neither the clergy nor the people should 
 possess much control. “ Is a government (remarks a Catholic) 
 who has bestowed much attention on the subject which should 
 enlighten and teach , to yield to the prej udices and follies of a 
 people who are to he taught ?” It would seem as if he placed 
 the government and the subjects in the same religious rela- 
 tions as the pastors and their flock. Never was the important 
 question of education, with all its bearings, more deserving the 
 attention of all the Catholics of Ireland. Similar, and as un- 
 favourable to religious freedom is the despotic power which 
 enters into the system of education recommended for adoption in 
 England. 
 
 We trust we are not yet fallen on the unhappy times when 
 “ Men will not hear sound doctrine, but according to their own 
 desires will heap to themselves teachers.”* Such is the lot of 
 those who have once “ Passed the ancient bounds which their 
 fathers have set.”f Not so with the faithful children of the 
 Catholic Church, “ Who follow their shepherd, because they know 
 his voice.”j: Impressed with a deep sense of the obligation of 
 
 that office, we have thus addressed you, knowing that if through 
 our neglect any of them should perish, their “ blood would be 
 demanded at our hands.”§ “Now, our Lord Jesus Christ 
 himself, and God our Father, who hath loved us, and hath 
 given us everlasting consolation and good hope in grace,” || 
 exhort your hearts, and confirm you in every good work and 
 word. 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 * II. Tim., iv, 3. f Proverbs, xxii, 28. J John, x, 4. 
 
 § Ezekiel, iii, 18. || II. Thessal. ii, 16. 
 
468 
 
 LETTER LXXXV1IL 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 TO HIS GRACE THE MOST REV. DOCTOR MURRAY. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of the Redemption. 
 
 April 7, 1838. 
 
 My Lord — A letter addressed to me, with your grace’s sig- 
 nature, appeared last week in some of the Dublin Journals. 
 Through whatever channel, public or private, your grace is 
 pleased to convey any communication to me, it shall be always 
 acknowledged with a respectful attention. By way of justification 
 of this mode of address, your grace observes that no other 
 kind of correspondence has hitherto passed between us on the 
 subject of national education. It is true — not even when 
 your grace thought it right to solicit, in a vague, separate, 
 and private correspondence, the opinions of the other Catholic 
 prelates of Ireland on a subject on which your grace was already 
 in possession of the precise, collected, and public resolves of that 
 venerable body. Previously to that period, I addressed an 
 influential member of the government relative to the inherent 
 defects in the principles and constitution of the board itself, which 
 were more fully developed in the preceding report of that 
 body, and of which it would be vain to expect a correction from 
 the individual members. From these letters it will appear, I 
 trust, that I have not transgressed the legitimate bounds of 
 prudent vigilance and fair discussion that must be allowed 
 towards all public bodies, especially one that was assuming such 
 a despotic control over the religious education of the people as 
 has been unheard of, from the days of the apostles, in any free 
 portion of the Christian Church. I have discussed the merits 
 of the board on the tenable grounds of facts and arguments. 
 On some of its members I have not animadverted, but as far as 
 their connexion with such a system was fraught with unavoidable 
 danger to the religion of the people. I am, therefore, at a loss 
 to account for the extraordinary sensitiveness which would 
 mistake such arguments, in those or the subseqent letters, “ for 
 aspersions” on the board, or on your grace, by implication. On 
 the contrary, that body is indebted to your grace for the long 
 and extraordinary forbearance that has been extended towards 
 them ; and were it not that you happened to be a member of the 
 board, its principles and its proceedings would have long since 
 
LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 4G9 
 
 been exposed to public animadversion. Now, when it stands 
 much in need of an advocate, your grace steps forward in its 
 defence, identifying yourself with the proceedings of men who, 
 in the unnatural position in which they were placed, could never 
 have any hold on the confidence of the Catholics of Ireland. 
 
 What, it may be asked, has swayed your grace’s resolution at 
 this particular period ? Are all the members of that establish- 
 ment quite at ease, or do they feel no apprehension at the 
 prospect of a serious reform ? Has the nobleman who is the 
 Secretary for the Home Department recently made no inquiries 
 into the gross mismanagement of the entire concern ? and have 
 the members of the government manifested no determination to 
 make no alteration in the system ? A satisfactory answer to 
 those questions may account for the peculiarity of style you have 
 been pleased to adopt in your late letter, which, if it be the 
 “ stylus curice,” is unquestionably not the one which is in usage 
 at the court of Rome. It may also reveal the motives of your 
 grace’s charitable inquiries about the probable causes of my 
 opposition. My applications to the board did not, I believe, 
 amount to half the number of the few years it is in existence. 
 But whether or no, it is a strange doctrine, if those who 
 made but one solitary application, are supposed to be debarred 
 from the right of exposing the mischievous tendency of a system 
 which is more fully developing itself with time, lest, whether 
 successful or not, they may incur the imputations of disappoint- 
 ment or ingratitude.- Such idle and small insinuations shall 
 never deter me from the discharge of an awful public duty. I 
 know not what gratitude the mere trustees of public property 
 are entitled to for its fair distribution. I am not a suitor for 
 government favours, through the board or any other channel ; 
 the ears of the castle functionaries are not fatigued with my 
 importunities, nor are their desks covered with my solicitations. 
 And could I have any doubt of the propriety of the disinterested 
 course which I have pursued, your grace’s letter would read a 
 salutary lecture to all ecclesiastics, not to suffer their apostolical 
 freedom to be tramelled by secular obligations. *Your grace 
 observes that you now retire from the controversy. It is really 
 a novel species of tactics to fling your missive, and then to retire 
 before he whom your grace had “ so courteously saluted” at all 
 made his appearance in reply. It is a proof of the force of that 
 letter, and I have no doubt but it will do more than all I have 
 written to precipitate the fate of the board. As your grace has 
 undertaken the defence of all the commissioners, may I be per- 
 mitted respectfully to inquire whether any of their near relatives 
 are quartered on the funds of that establishment, and whether 
 any portion of their solicitude arises from the apprehension that 
 any of them may share the calamities of its fall ? 
 
470 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 The appearance of the fourth report of the commissioners, 
 with its important modifications at the time of the meeting of the 
 bishops, the publication of the parliamentary evidence regarding 
 the principles and working of the system a little before, together 
 with the attention which was directed to the strange translations 
 of the Scripture Lessons by the same evidence, would have spared 
 your grace any ingenious conjectures, and sufficiently accounted 
 for my exposure of many of the evils and the dangers which 
 were only then revealed. If to those reasons we add that the 
 question of education and the Scripture Extracts, was seriously 
 discussed within your grace’s diocese, as well as in other quarters, 
 it will appear that its importance was felt before the late as- 
 sembly of the bishops. The subject was put upon the minutes 
 on the first day of our meeting. In deference to your grace’s 
 lamented indisposition, it was adjourned from day to day, with 
 the consent of all the prelates, and other topics discussed, of 
 which it had precedence. At length, when it was ascertained 
 that you were unable to attend, it was introduced on the last 
 day of our meeting by another prelate, who took a theological 
 view of the subject worthy its solemnity and importance. If 
 1 took a part in the discussion, it was one which I shared in 
 common with the other members. It would have been but justice 
 to the public to state those circumstances, rather than leave it 
 under the impression that any unfair advantage was taken of 
 your grace’s absence in discussing the merits of the system of 
 education. 
 
 In that assembly, the question was discussed chiefly on its 
 theological merits, and as far as it was likely to have a disastrous 
 influence on the purity and freedom of the Catholic religion. 
 The justice or unfairness with which its funds might be distri- 
 buted I have ever considered as a distinct and secondary question 
 — not that it is unimportant ; on the contrary, it is one into 
 which all prelates as well as people have a right narrowly to 
 inquire. The marked unfairness that characterized the distribu- 
 tion of the funds of the board was a matter of loud complaint 
 and general notoriety. It was also deemed (and that conviction 
 is daily gaining further ground) that no proportion existed be- 
 tween the enormous expense of the machinery and the compara- 
 tively little benefit of which it was productive. I am free to 
 confess that some of the manifest injustice of the board towards 
 poorer districts arises out of some of its fundamental regulations. 
 It only proves that they have no reasonable cause of jealousy 
 when, instead of corresponding with them, we ascend to the 
 source of those imperfections, by calling on the government to 
 correct those as well as the other more serious evils, over which 
 the members had not entire control. 
 
 Of late such is the pressing importunity of some of the 
 
LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 471 
 
 functionaries of the board, that there is more difficulty in re- 
 sisting their solicitations than in obtaining their sanction to 
 establish National Schools. Hence, it is clear our opposition 
 springs not from any disappointment on that score. No ; it 
 has sprung from the unhallowed and unchristian conditions 
 that arc required in establishing and conducting these schools ; 
 and, as long as such conditions shall be insisted on, so long 
 shall my opposition, and that of the clergy and people, continue 
 without respite or mitigation. It really astonishes me that any 
 . board could be so regardless of the respect they owe to the 
 deliberate sentiments of the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland, as 
 to hold at nought their unanimous resolution ; and it astonishes 
 me more that your grace, who took so prominent a part not only 
 in framing, but, what is more important, in duly and widely 
 promulgating those resolutions, should now treat them with 
 such indifference as if they were only matters of temporary 
 expediency or convenience. I need not remind you of your cor- 
 respondence on that subject with the Commissioners of Educa- 
 cation Inquiry. Your grace recollects, too, that you conveyed 
 them to Lord Killeen (now Fingal), in order that that respected 
 nobleman would communicate them to the Catholic Association. 
 It may be necessary, too, to inform the public that this body, 
 then representing the Catholie people of Ireland, had many 
 hundred copies of the pastoral and resolutions of the bishops 
 then struck off, and circulated at their expense throughout all 
 parts of the empire — such was the importance attached to those 
 which your grace now calls “ certain episcopal resolutions” — such 
 was the earnest and unanimous solemnity with which thoy were 
 promulgated — and such, too, the evidence that they were adopted 
 in reference to the proposed system of education since tried ; to 
 serve not only as a control upon any commissioners, but as a 
 guide and a light to the clergy and laity of Ireland. 
 
 Now, does it accord with the respect due to the ma- 
 jesty and inflexibility of truth, as well as to the consistency of 
 those who framed them, to strive to fritter away the force of 
 those solemn and duly circulated resolutions ? — “ A new era 
 arose,” your grace states, “ and it (the national system), was, 
 therefore, allowed to be a substitute for them.” A substitute ! ! 
 And is it a bishop of the Catholic church, himself a party to 
 their adoption, who thus insinuates that they are not of force ? 
 I own, that there may be provisional regulations adapted to con- 
 tingent circumstances, and which will not be obligatory when 
 such circumstances pass away. But it would be worse than so- 
 phistry to rank those resolutions among such provisions. They 
 are the simple and absolute expressions of a trust, which neces- 
 sarily belongs to the bishops of the Catholic church. They may 
 delegate it as they choose — it cannot be resigned. Why, then, 
 
472 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 pretend that this right has been “ renounced” by the bishops, or 
 cancelled by a change of circumstances different from those under 
 which it has been solemnly asserted ? 
 
 There is no ground whatever for such an interpretation. The 
 suffering of children to come together under a system of mixed 
 education — here is the question of expediency, which may be 
 permitted or prohibited, according to circumstances. But the 
 conditions on which such indiscriminate intercourse, under a 
 system of mixed education is to take place — here again is the 
 question of strict and inviolable obligation, uniformly binding, . 
 in order that the faith or morals of the children may not suffer 
 from the latitude allowed in the former case. It is through books 
 and masters such a mixed system is chiefly liable to damage. 
 And as it is the peculiar duty of the bishop, who is to watch, “ as 
 being to render an account of their souls,” to preserve them from 
 the danger or contagion, it follows he cannot permit such contact 
 or intercourse, without retaining that power which would render 
 it innocuous. Your grace, then, clearly perceives that the control 
 over books and teachers in religious matters is one which a 
 bishop cannot resign, and that the resolutions to which I have 
 referred, so far from containing any distinct argument, are only 
 the simple and unanimous assertion of inalienable rights, which 
 cannot be contradicted. 
 
 Your grace refers to two illustrious prelates — now no more — 
 Doctor Doyle, and my immediate predecessor. Are you aware 
 that the former said, regarding the system : “ We are not dumb 
 dogs, that cannot bark ?” and had he lived he would have given 
 the alarm. The other, as appears from his examination, was 
 stern and uncompromising, “ insisting on the Hail, Mary, full of 
 grace,” and objecting to a harmony not “ conformable to our 
 version.” 
 
 Why, then, the unnecessary trouble of referring to the 
 separate correspondence of some of the bishops, for the invi- 
 dious purpose of weakening the effect of the unanimous resolves 
 of the entire body. In the very effort you may find a fresh 
 proof of the invariable consistency of truth. Not a word ap- 
 pears in the entire correspondence to controvert the irrefragable 
 positions contained in their own resolutions. It could scarcely 
 be expected, from what appeared to them, that they would have 
 made any allusion to those important points. Like all despotic 
 bodies, anxious to gain slowly and by stealth, an uncanonical or 
 unconstitutional power, the board has cautiously abstained from 
 giving umbrage in its infancy by any offensive exercise of the 
 extraordinary authority of which it was laymg the dangerous 
 foundation. Hence it was all courtesy and condescension to local 
 patrons, permitting them to exercise for a time a discretion con- 
 trary to the letter of the commissioners’ laws. It is this insinu- 
 
LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 473 
 
 ating practice that has come generally under the contemplation of 
 the public. The rigorous and jealous rules, that never would 
 have been framed but with a view to their prospective enforce- 
 ment, have been generally unheeded. Let it not be imagined, 
 that I impute any carelessness to my venerable brethren. 
 So far from doing so, it was only long after the period of their 
 writing those letters that I happened to light upon the passage 
 which I lately quoted, and which gave me an insight into those 
 proceedings which I never anticipated. In their approval, then, 
 of the system, they never so much as allude to those resolutions 
 to which they were pledged, and which were supposed still to 
 regulate the present system. 
 
 All, then, that your grace could gain from this partial corres- 
 pondence would be, at most, that some of those prelates 
 delegated to you their own rightful control over the books and 
 masters. This, according to the axiom of canon law, each one 
 may do at his own risk and responsibility. But why not give the 
 entire correspondence of the bishops ? Did none of them com- 
 plain of the neglect of their own districts ? Did any urge strong 
 theological arguments against the system ? I trust you will give 
 those documents, with such a good grace as to show they were 
 not wrung from you. From the tone of the commissioners, 
 mistaking individual or temporary concessions for right, there is 
 less disposition now to repose confidence in the body than before; 
 and I shall candidly declare, for myself, that from the proofs of 
 arrogant and unchristian assumption of power, on the part of 
 the board, which we have experienced, I should think it most 
 dangerous to surrender to it, or any such body, this temporary 
 delegation. The resolutions, therefore, to which I have alluded 
 are not temporary. The spirit that animates them is indestruc- 
 tible and eternal. And, as well might your grace attempt to 
 make at once the bishops the creatures of the government, as 
 strip them of that control which forms one of the most sacred 
 portions of their functions. The faithful will not be deluded by 
 invidious regulations. 
 
 The pastors chosen by the parents or guardians are “ per- 
 mitted,” forsooth, into the schools to give religious instruction ! 
 What a mighty privilege, and extraordinary condescension, in 
 Catholic Ireland ! Yet, there are circumstances in which, 
 according to your rules, the bishop might not be permitted to 
 give religious instruction to his own flock. Talk, after this, of 
 the perfect freedom of your system. It reminds me of the 
 first and last attempts of Henry on the hierarchy of England. 
 The title of head of the church * was first merely nominal 
 and innocuous. All the constituted teachers of religion were 
 permitted their usual functions. They were not aware of the 
 silent invasions of the tyrant until the bishops found that, under 
 2 H 
 
474 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 the harmless name of the head of the church, which they had 
 allowed him, in an evil hour, all their authority to preserve 
 religion was gone. It will be so — no — but it would be so if the 
 National Board were again permitted to have the leave of the 
 Viceroy, and his alone, to revive and remodel the religious part 
 of education for the youth of Ireland. Never, from the first 
 persecution of the Church until this hour, has there been 
 devised a system of religious education, from which the authority 
 of the bishops has been more zealously excluded. Look through 
 the whole scheme — from the government, its parent, to the hum- 
 blest official — whether board, books, inspectors, masters, election, 
 recommendation, dismissal, children, patrons, and guardians, not 
 only is there not an allusion to the authority of the bishop of the 
 diocese, who, in every Christian country on earth guides the 
 religious education of the flock, young as well as old, but the 
 jealous letter of the law excludes him from any control over 
 those departments; nor is there anything wanting, save the 
 power to enforce those odious regulations. Witness, for example, 
 the exclusive control over the books, as set forth in the legal 
 instrument quoted in the letter to the clergy and people of 
 this diocese. “ Could you, beloved brethren/’ your grace writes, 
 “ could any one believe that I would keep out of the hands of 
 Catholic children any book that would be really useful to confirm 
 them in their religious principles, and to improve them in virtue ?” 
 May I not also inquire whether they believe that any Catholic 
 bishop in Ireland would keep out of their hands any such pub- 
 lication ? If not, and they would answer in the affirmative, 
 where is the necessity of multiplying your varied duties by 
 such varied censorship ? or do the government imagine that 
 their appointment to such an office, confers on the object of 
 their choice, a monopoly of sound taste and discretion ? It 
 seems they do, and commissioner Blake modestly states that 
 he should be glad to have such a control over books for separate 
 religious instruction, “ lest there might be political matters mixed 
 up with religion, and political matters of an exceptionable nature.” 
 Are the bishops of Ireland come to such a pass, that they should 
 submit their books for religious instruction to such strange 
 censorship ?* 
 
 To appease, however, as if, any alarm on this point, your 
 grace states that the rule of the board at present is, “ If any 
 other books than the Holy Scriptures, or the standard books of 
 the Church to which the children belong, are employed in com- 
 municating religious instructions, the title of each is to be made 
 known to the commissioners!” Surely a work of supererogation 
 if they have not the power to exclude them. 
 
 * Parliamentary Evidence, page 44, question 546. 
 
LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 475 
 
 I am not surprised at the prudent celerity with which your 
 grace attempted to despatch the important controversy regarding 
 the strange translations, and the more obnoxious notes of 
 the Scripture Extracts. They are a subject deserving of your 
 most serious consideration. In a like summary manner, your 
 grace has disposed of the argument as to the practical effect 
 which the omission of the “ Hail Mary, full of grace” was calcu- 
 lated to produce on children’s minds. Had you stated the 
 reasons of its omission, it would have enabled every reader to 
 form a satisfactory conclusiou on the subject. The Rev. Mr. 
 Carlile avows that it was omitted, “ because it did not appear to 
 him to be a literal translation of the original Greek.”* Care, 
 however, is taken to draw the children’s attention to the passage 
 by the question — “How did the angel address her (Mary)?” 
 The answer suggested by their ordinary prayers would be as 
 “ full of grace,” instead of which another form of phrase, call it 
 translation, or call it paraphrase, is substituted. And why this 
 hitherto strange explanation of the angel’s words ? Because, 
 according to the testimony of one of the commissioners, the 
 original Greek was unfavourable to the form which they were 
 taught in their infancy. There is another and a strange reason 
 suggested by the same individual for the omission. “ Besides, 
 this question as to the form of words, the commissioners were of 
 opinion that connected with the doctrine of the incarnation there 
 was that in the Scripture language which it was difficult or im- 
 proper to explain to children.”! Are not the masters, we are 
 told, forbidden to enter into any explanation of religious or 
 mysterious subjects? What, then, was there improper in this 
 chapter of St. Luke to be put into the hands of children, ac- 
 cording to the Douay version, more than any other portion of 
 Scripture ? Such a reason might have some force coming from 
 those who think the indiscriminate use of the Bible in schools 
 calculated to produce “ irreverence.” But I see not with what 
 consistency could it be adduced by those who, in opposition to 
 the Council of Trent, permit, without the leave of the ordinary, 
 and at the instance of guardians, the children to range through 
 the whole of the inspired volume, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. 
 No, my lord, disguise it as they will, the true reason of the 
 omission was that the “ Hail, Mary, full of grace,” consecrated 
 by the reverence of the Catholic Chnrch, was unsupportable to 
 the Nestor ianism of some of the commissioners. 
 
 Your grace’s singular mode of reasoning, with respect to the 
 permission, allowed by the board, of reading the Scriptures, will 
 not detain me long. “ It permits {that is , it does not prohibit — 
 
 * Parliamentary Evidence, page 66, question 914. 
 
 t Parliamentary Evidence, question 916. 
 
476 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 how could it ?) your grace remarks, the use of the sacred volume 
 to those who may choose to avail themselves of it.” What a pity 
 that this felicitous exposition of the word “permit” was not 
 thought of in the infancy of the board. It would have saved 
 those long and stormy debates and remonstrances of the Presby- 
 terians of the north, which shook the board to its very centre. 
 Was it not the easiest thing imaginable to say to those mutinous 
 men, “we do not prohibit”- — how could we? — “the perusal of the 
 sacred volume, and, therefore, as we have no coercive power, all 
 may read it as they please.” This would have been plain conduct, 
 and intelligible language ; and it is surprising that six years 
 were permitted to elapse before the board had hit upon this 
 convenient interpretation. But they were aware that such an 
 interpretation would cut two ways, and that in opening the 
 schools to a few Presbyterians, it would scare away the Catholics 
 from their thresholds. The Catholics were taught to look upon 
 the board as composed of gentlemen of truth and honour, who 
 would not allow to any the means of tampering with the faith of 
 the children, or the discipline of the Catholic church. It is pro- 
 hibited by the Council of Trent, that the reading of the vernacular 
 Scriptures be indiscriminately, and in public, conceded to all, 
 although the reading of such books is permitted to those who can 
 read them with fruit, and profit — those who have obtained the 
 permission of the ordinary. Your grace appeared to throw some 
 doubts upon the extent of the power which I assigned to the 
 ordinary. On that score, you are at liberty to argue with 
 the authority of a general council. Yet, without reference to 
 this authority, to which we are all subject, this plenipotentiary 
 board grants permission to read the Scriptures in the National 
 Schools, merely at the requisition of the parents or the guardians. 
 It is only in the separate, not in the mixed education. Who 
 authorized your grace or the board to give permission in either 
 case ? You obtained his Excellency’s permission to revise the 
 religious portion ! ! The church recognizes no such authority. 
 There was no “ studied ambiguity” on my part, nor an insinuation 
 that the Scriptures were permitted in the mixed system of educa- 
 tion, but there was an open, simple, and irrefutable assertion 
 that you were as incompetent to grant any such liberty in the 
 one case as in the other. But it only not prohibits. Is this, 
 then, the meaning of the solemn covenant tacitly entered into 
 during the brief term of the experiment between the board and 
 the Catholics of Ireland? Why were the Kildare-street and 
 other kindred associations got rid of? Because they afforded 
 facilities to bigoted and persecuting patrons, to force on the chil- 
 dren of their Catholic dependents the perusal of the Scriptures, 
 in defiance of the solemn sanctions of the Catholic Church. And 
 does not the injurious exposition of the permission given under 
 
LETTER LXXXV1II. 
 
 477 
 
 the National Board afford the same facility ? Cannot they now, 
 as well as then, exercise their tyranny over the children, by 
 telling them that, in despite of their bishops, they must read the 
 Scriptures in the schools ? and in doing so they would be acting 
 within the rules of the National Board. A steady and inflexible 
 regard to the fixed authority of the Catholic Church would have 
 at once spared such embarrassment and danger. In one of your 
 grace’s letters you observed, that “ from the moment of our first 
 connexion with the commission, the Catholic members have never 
 been allowed to feel their inferiority in number.” This is an 
 important admission, and will no doubt lead to the consideration 
 of what confidence we ought to repose in the board. 
 
 I did imagine that many of the obnoxious regulations of that 
 body were strenuously combated by the Catholic members, and 
 that if they were unsuccessful we had the consolation of thinking 
 that an improvement might be expected from an increase in their 
 number. It seems now, however, that such a hope would be a 
 fallacy, and that it is a matter of indifference whether it is com- 
 posed of Catholics or Protestants. Against any of the acts of 
 the board there does not appear to have been any remonstrance 
 on the part of any member — nay, your grace, with a singular 
 effort of generous intrepidity, takes upon you the responsibility 
 of all the proceedings of your associates. I am then to under- 
 stand that the mission of two Protestant inspectors into this 
 diocese, contrary to the previously known instructions of the 
 ordinary, and the published resolutions of its clergy, had your 
 grace’s unqualified sanction. I am also to understand, when 
 those inspectors were refused admittance into schools, exclusively 
 Catholic, pursuant to such instructions and resolutions, that a 
 letter sent from the board to one of my clergy, requiring perem- 
 torily the dismissal of one of their masters, in defiance of the 
 command of his bishop, had your grace’s concurrence. I am 
 further to understand that the continuance of an unprincipled 
 apostate in the office of giving religious and moral instruction to 
 Catholic children, in direct opposition to the remonstrance of 
 their parish priest, until he withdrew the scholars, had likewise 
 met with your grace’s approval. Now, my lord, permit me to 
 observe that had these things been done, with the remonstrance 
 of the Catholic members, which they were unable to enforce, 
 then their inability would be a proof, that the system was 
 disentitled to confidence. The case becomes worse if they 
 were able, but unwilling, to interfere. If any other person, 
 were he even a bishop, member of such a board, had, through 
 the official organ of the body, lent his sanction to a letter 
 addressed to one of your grace’s clergy, requiring the dismissal of 
 a master who acted by your directions, you would doubtless deem 
 it an extraordinary and unwarrantable interference. Because 
 
478 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 we would not submit to such arbitrary proceedings the grant is 
 withdrawn. What then becomes of the appeal to the feelings of 
 the Catholics of Ireland, when they find the members of their own 
 creed concurring in acts and regulations which encroach on the 
 liberties of conscience, and tend to encourage insubordination ? 
 The truth is, these inspectors have been sent in order to crush 
 the spirit that manifested itself in this diocese ; and if the 
 board were to succeed in an effort as unconstitutional as it is 
 uncanonical, the other parts of Ireland would find to their cost 
 that its fate would be only a prelude to the encroachments which 
 would be successively made on their own religious freedom. To 
 be, then, explicit : in the reform which I meditate, and with less 
 than which I shall never be satisfied, it is only a declaration of 
 the pledge I have given in the solemn resolutions referred to, in 
 union with your grace, and from which no change of circumstances 
 shall induce me to recede. Any plan of education shall meet my 
 unqualified opposition that shall not secure to every bishop the 
 right which he has by the nature of his office, of being de jure 
 the chief guide and director of any system of religious education 
 intended for his flock, within the limits of his own diocese.* 
 
 In this resolution I am confirmed by the singular tone of 
 your grace's last epistle. I have never made any remarks 
 upon the pastoral instructions which you may deem proper to 
 deliver to the clergy and the people placed under your jurisdic- 
 tion. I know not by what authority you venture to animadvert 
 upon those which I have thought it my duty to deliver to my 
 own portion of the fold. Nay, it appears that your zeal has 
 kindled on this subject; for, not content with this extraordi- 
 nary intrusion on the duties and office of another prelate, you 
 hesitate not to say, that a “ blush should have burned on his 
 cheek” for the course he was pursuing. I can well understand, 
 my lord, the zeal of Esdras “ rending his mantle and sitting 
 down mourning because the priests and the Levites did not 
 separate themselves from the people of the lands.”f — I can un- 
 derstand, too, the zeal of the apostle whose “ spirit was excited 
 within him when he saw the city given to idolatry.” — I can 
 understand that of the Redeemer when he drove the money 
 changers from the temple. — I could understand, too, though it 
 may appear harsh from an apostle whose habitual character and 
 mildness were sweetened with old age, how St. John could inter- 
 dict even the ordinary salutation to such as brought not the 
 doctrine which he preached. But it was reserved for your grace 
 
 * The principle laid down in this sentence is vindicated and enforced in the 
 letter addressed by the Apostolic See on this subject, to each of the four Arch- 
 bishops. The instructions of the Holy See have been disregarded by this pre- 
 sumptuous Board no less than the remonstrances of the Bishops on whose right s 
 they strive to encroach. 
 
 f I. Esdras, ix, 1 — 4. 
 
LETTER LXXXV1II. 
 
 479 
 
 to have your “ spirit so excited” as to hope that another prelate 
 should have blushed, and on what account? For guarding his 
 flock from the snares of the old enemies of the Catholic Church, 
 now coming in sheep’s clothing ; for labouring to prevent the 
 danger of contagion from habitual contact with error ; for pre- 
 serving those fences of the faith, which, if we are to believe the 
 Scriptural authorities I have quoted, as well as the testimonies of 
 the ancient Fathers, are best secured by habitual remoteness 
 from the chance of infection. Yes, you are right, and I must 
 confess that zeal should be entirely extinct in my soul if the blush 
 of a generous warmth were not to burn on my cheeks in witness- 
 ing power and corruption arrayed in propagating a system which, 
 as it is now practically developed, is, first, dangerous to faith and 
 morals — secondly, subversive of ecclesiastical authority, which, 
 instead of promoting peace and concord among those of a different 
 religion, is calculated to foment and exasperate religious strife 
 among the “ domestics of the faith and, finally, which, instead 
 of binding more firmly the attachment of the people to the ruling 
 powers, must, as in every other country in which it is enforced, 
 propagate the seeds of civil contention. 
 
 The course, then, that I am pursuing is neither a dark nor a 
 devious one ; it is, on the contrary, plain and straightforward, 
 and so far from being at variance with any canonical line of 
 conduct, it is conformable not only with the rights and duties of 
 my office, but also with the unanimous resolves of my venerable 
 brethren. Of their wishes to cancel those solemn resolves, there 
 has appeared no evidence, nor even any presumption. Nay, it 
 might be as well expected that we could commit an act of apos- 
 tolical suicide as attempt to abdicate rights which we could not 
 yield without a surrender of our apostolical succession. But 
 while my course is strictly conformable to the tenets of the 
 Catholic Church, and the writings of its most zealous and 
 enlightened bishops of every age, I must own that it is and shall 
 be at variance with the course which the National Board is now 
 pursuing. The object of their system is, that children of different 
 persuasions should imbibe similar ideas. My object is, that while 
 they are taught charity to all of every religion, they should not 
 imbibe those similar ideas, that would gradually efface the strong 
 and marked distinction of the Catholic creed. Their object is to 
 prohibit books that may appear “ objectionable to them as pe- 
 culiarly belonging to some religious denomination.” My object 
 is to prevent them or any such self-constituted body, from 
 exercising a control that would thus wear down to one undistin- 
 guishable level, the prominent and dissimilar features of truth and 
 error. In short, though it may not be their aim, the tendency 
 of their system is to bring about an unnatural “ fellowship 
 between light and darkness,” and to create that musty sort of 
 
480 
 
 LETTER LXXXVIII. 
 
 theology — a chaotic compound of truth and error — which has 
 long hung over the universities of Germany, and teemed with a 
 monstrous immorality, the congenial offspring of such a mixed 
 origin. Mine is to keep distinct from such admixture that light 
 and order which were first ushered in by the “ Sun of Justice,” 
 which it has been the labour of the zealous pastors of every age 
 to keep asunder from the surrounding errors, and which have 
 never been ifiore conspicuous in any portion of the Church than 
 in our own. In short, following the Catholic Church for my 
 guide, I dislike all such mixtures. In the moral and political 
 world they are as fatal in their consequences, as they are un- 
 natural. The Church dislikes a mixed education, as she does 
 mixed marriages. Behold the recent and disastrous consequences 
 of either in Belgium and in Prussia. What was it that drove 
 William from the throne of Belgium ? The despotic attempt to 
 force upon the children of that faithful people, a system of 
 mixed education. What is it that is filling Prussia at this 
 moment with tumult, and turning the eyes of Europe to the 
 sufferings of Drost, Archbishop of Cologne, the illustrious con- 
 fessor of the faith, in the castle of Minden ? Mixed marriages, 
 together with the fatal pliancy of Spiegel, his predecessor, 
 in yielding to the unprincipled requisition of the Prussian 
 court. Not only did the unfortunate prelate become an instru- 
 ment in the hands of the King in enforcing his anti-Catholic 
 regulations, but succeeded, also, in obtaining the concurrence 
 of the bishops of Munster, of Paderborne, and of Triers. What 
 was the consequence ? A solemn and penitential avowal of one 
 of those prelates of the fatal condescension into which he was 
 betrayed. “ Nunc vero, morbo dolorosissimo correptus, in vitce 
 discrimine versans, divina gratia illustratus, ex actis illis Ecclesice 
 Catholicce mala gravissima oritura, et Ecclesice Catholicce cano- 
 nes et principia iisdem Icesa esse perspectum habeo ; quantum hac 
 in re summi momenti , erravi, pcenitentia ductus, libera mente et 
 proprio motu retracto. ,,% Such was the dying declaration of 
 Joseph, the bishop of Triers. It is not a matter of remote 
 occurrence. It does not belong to those olden times to which 
 it w r ould be refreshing, not only to ourselves but to our readers, 
 to refer in this important controversy, in order that they might 
 derive their knowledge from their unmixed and untroubled 
 fountains. No, my lord, it is a matter which has occurred within 
 these two years. Why refer to it ? Because 1 am anxious for the 
 
 * TRANSLATION. 
 
 “ But now, being in danger of death, from a most painful illness, and en- 
 lightened by the divine grace, I am fully convinced that those acts will be 
 productive of the most serious evils to the Church, and that the canons and 
 principles of the Catholic Church have been impaired by them ; wherefore, 
 seized with the sorrow, I, freely, and of my own accord, retract, as far as I have 
 erred, in this matter of the greatest importance — Joseph, Bishop of Triers." 
 
LETTER LXXXIX. 
 
 481 
 
 peace of the country, as well as the purity of the Catholic 
 religion. From the extraordinary power now claimed by the 
 State over a mixed education, it would soon claim a similar des- 
 potic control over mixed marriages, and strive to stretch its net 
 over all our ecclesiastical concerns. It would never want sub- 
 servient instruments. Some future Spiegel might arise from 
 among the hierarchy of Ireland, who would attempt to favour 
 • the dangerous views of the government, and weaken the canons 
 of Home, as he had done, by sinister commentaries. I am 
 anxious to meet the evil in time, and to save our National Church 
 the exhibition of such scandals at a future day, as well as the 
 necessity of humiliating retractations. 
 
 I have the honor to be, my lord, your faithful brother in Christ, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER LXXXIX. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 St. JarlatD’s, Tuam, December 16th, 1838. 
 
 ‘ ‘ Sed ut res nostras prosequamur, haereticorum, qui rem Anglicanam eo 
 tempore administrabant, de Academiis corrumpendis curaerat ; ut illis religionis 
 ac disciplinarum fontibus infectis, facilius in universam Rempublicam manaret 
 lues.” — Sanders de Schismate Anglicano. 
 
 My Lord — If the history of the past be justly deemed a pro- 
 phetic picture of the future, the lines I have just quoted from the 
 learned historian of the English schism, fully reveal the policy 
 that has been pursued by the government in the establishment of 
 the National Board. If philosophy teaches us that similar causes 
 will produce similar effects, we may contemplate in the disastrous 
 fate of the sister country, what might be expected in Ireland from 
 a similar corruption of its religious and academic institutions. 
 And if sound theology inculcates that errors in faith are like 
 a contagion, that may be quickly propagated, it behoves the 
 Catholics of Ireland to look with extreme caution to all the 
 schemes of national enlightenment, that arc now so industriously 
 sent abroad. 
 
 Because shallow theorists and corrupt speculators are striving 
 to occupy the public mind with a novel system, it is fancied there 
 
482 
 
 LETTER LXXXIX. 
 
 is now felt a livelier zeal for education than in any former age. 
 Never was there a greater delusion. When true philosophy was 
 extinct among the ancients, a crowd of sophists, who only 
 repeated its name, arose upon its ruins. When the spirit of 
 ancient eloquence disappeared, it was succeeded by a plentiful but 
 barren crop of rhetorical essays and commentaries. It is then 
 natural that when penalties and proscriptions succeeded in ex- 
 tinguishing those legitimate lights that diffused the blessings* 
 of knowledge, a new race of education-pretenders should start up, 
 who, leaving undone the great work for which their predecessors 
 toiled, are eternally dissertating on plans of education. 
 
 For what your lordship has already done with regard to the 
 National Board, I should express my acknowledgment, were it 
 not that you might labour under an impression that we could be 
 satisfied with any thing less than the complete remodelling of the 
 whole system. The public attention is at length rivetted on the 
 proceedings of that body. Your lordship’s recent visit to Dublin, 
 and the subsequent reforms, or rather revolutions, that have since 
 taken place, will attest whether the board can well abide the 
 public scrutiny. The wonder is, how any body invested with 
 such vast influence over the moral and political destinies of any 
 people, was suffered so long to exercise a species of irresponsible 
 power. Whether it is contemplated in a religious, or political, or 
 municipal point of view, it is an institution that should exercise 
 the public vigilance. From what has already occurred, I should 
 suppose the ministry are determined to spare us the labour of 
 exposing its mischievous tendency. Should it last another year, 
 your lordship will find, that, instead of being a bond of union 
 among the sectaries, it will become a focus of civil and religious 
 contention, and that the intestine spirit that has already rent the 
 board itself, and scattered some of its members, shall soon extend 
 to the entire kingdom. 
 
 The moral and religious education of an entire people is not 
 a theme to be trifled with. I shall, please God, treat it with all 
 the seriousness of argument which its importance merits as con- 
 nected with the religion of the people and the interests of the 
 State. But, before I resume that topic, I beg to point the 
 public attention to this municipal corporation, affecting the free- 
 dom of the different districts of the country. Ireland is at this 
 moment engaged in a constitutional struggle to achieve, among 
 other objects, the destruction of those corrupt corporations, that 
 have so long oppressed the liberties, and misappropriated the 
 finances that were entrusted to their care. There is an active 
 exertion now making for the re-construction of municipal bodies, 
 which, under the salutary vigilance of parliament, will have 
 power to direct their own local affairs. It is a question well 
 worth the consideration of the Catholics, and, I will add, of the 
 
LETTER LXXXIX. 
 
 483 
 
 Protestants of Ireland, whether at such an auspicious moment, 
 when they are almost sure of municipal reform, they are to 
 suffer another new corporation to spring up among them, more 
 anomalous in its construction, vaster in its influence, and more 
 dangerous to the civil and religious freedom of all classes, than 
 any of the corporations whose annihilation is so justly sought. 
 Nay, more, though ostensibly set up for the benefit of the poor 
 of Ireland, on the principle of a fair and equitable appropriation 
 of its funds, there has not been in Ireland a corporation, of which 
 the funds have been more unequally distributed. 
 
 This, my lord, I pledge myself to demonstrate in my next 
 letter to your lordship’s full satisfaction, by minute reference 
 to the published accounts of the board and parliamentary docu- 
 ments. 
 
 Some may not relish the theological discussion of this subject, 
 as breathing too much of polemical asperity ; to others, its dan- 
 gers to the State may appear too remote or problematical to fill 
 them with any serious apprehensions ; but, to the intellects of all, 
 the financial views of the subject will be quite accessible, and the 
 least educated will not fail to understand that, under the guise of 
 educating the poor, it is a system for providing for the retainers 
 of the rich, and that while the former are comparatively ne- 
 glected, the funds are swallowed up by a regiment of high- 
 salaried officers. 
 
 This system of insulting delusion will no longer be endured by 
 the people. Already are petitions against its continuance receiv- 
 ing hundreds of thousands of signatures. Can your lordship 
 imagine that the people of Tuam, for example, will be contented 
 that they are to have no share in the funds that are levied off 
 them, in common with the rest of the empire, unless they submit 
 to the obnoxious regulations of persons amongst whom there is 
 not, and cannot be, any enduring principle of cohesion ? No, 
 they will not be content ; and their discontent will go forth 
 among their other grievances in. loud remonstrances to the 
 legislature, and their honest representatives will faithfully con- 
 vey their wrongs to her Majesty’s ministers. After I shall have 
 submitted to your lordship and the public a brief abstract of the 
 funds placed at the disposal of the board, and the manner in 
 which they have been expended, you will form some judgment 
 of the amount of public benefit that has been derived from this 
 institution. In the meantime, I have the honor to be your lord- 
 ship’s obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
484 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 ♦ 
 
 LETTER XC. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, 
 
 December 29 , 1838 . 
 
 “Sed quia viderunt haeretici, multa meliora ingenia, ex priori Catholica insti- 
 tutione in fide adhuc manere, ex Germania aliisque locis vicinis, homines ad 
 fraudem magis exercitatos, quam primum accersendos censuerunt.”— Sanders 
 de Schismute Anglicano. Lib. II. 
 
 My Lord — The coincidence between the unprincipled arts that 
 were resorted to in seducing the English nation from the faith, 
 and those that are now dexterously practised on the Irish people, 
 is observable in a variety of instances. In nothing, however, is 
 this perverse identity of purpose more manifest than in the simi- 
 larity of schemes adopted towards both countries to poison the 
 seats of learning, and pervert the minds of its professors. To 
 exemplify this striking analogy I have already referred to San- 
 ders, the accurate historian of the Anglican schism, and the same 
 authority will furnish me with other illustrations. At present I 
 need but cite the case of Germany, which then poured its errors 
 and its profligacy over England. At this moment its universities 
 are receptacles of the rankest heresy and infidelity, probably the 
 most corrupt seats of learning in the civilized world. And yet, 
 strange to say, these are the models that are proposed to the 
 Catholics of Ireland, and by men called liberal Catholics, to 
 fashion the literary institutions where their children are to 
 receive their education. 
 
 Reserving, however, this ample and important part of the sub- 
 ject for another occasion,- 1 shall proceed to fulfil the pledge, given 
 in my last letter, to direct your lordship’s attention to the “ dis- 
 tributive justice” that has guided the financial concerns of the 
 National Board. From the theological positions which I have 
 already laid before your lordship, it is unnecessary to state that, 
 were justice itself to preside over the apportionment of its funds, 
 I could never be reconciled to the dangerous practical principles 
 regarding Church government and discipline, that have been 
 recently unfolded in the proceedings of that body. Again, were 
 it a Catholic board, composed exclusively of members of that 
 body, it would disentitle itself to the general confidence of the 
 people, if it were to exhibit the same utter disregard to equity 
 and fairness in the relative allocation of its finances, that is 
 discernible in its public and authentic documents. If on each 
 of these grounds it be liable to serious objections, your lordship 
 
LETTER XC. 
 
 485 
 
 may judge how insupportable it must be with the two-fold evil of 
 religious danger to the entire, and obvious injustice to many 
 parts of the kingdom. 
 
 Claiming the usual indulgence in matters of account of “ errors 
 excepted,” I beg leave to refer to the documents that were 
 ordered to be printed by the House of Commons in the course of 
 the last session. In the year 1832 there was a parliamentary 
 grant of £37,500 for the advancement of education in Ireland ; 
 in 1833, £25,000; in 1834, £20,000; in 1835, £35,000.* 
 From the statement of estimates of miscellaneous services, 
 page 3, it appears that in the year 1836 the grant was 
 £46,653, and £50,000 in each of the following years. 
 
 These various items, transcribed from parliamentary docu- 
 ments, show that with the exception of a trifling deduction, the 
 sum of £264,153 has been, within the brief period of less than 
 seven years, placed at the disposal of the National Board. Of 
 the first parliamentary grant, it seems that some small portion 
 was applied to the Kildar e-street Society, by way of “ burying 
 the synagogue with honor,” and appeasing the sullen spirit of 
 that fallen establishment. 
 
 Another parliamentary “ return of the total amount of money, 
 and of the value of other aids, actually issued by the Board of 
 National Education to the several schools in Ireland, from the 
 establishment of said Board, to the 15th of December, 1837,” 
 I find the following account of its expenditure classed under four 
 different heads, in the several provinces : — 
 
 Ulster 
 Munster . 
 Leinster . 
 Connaught 
 
 Ulster 
 Munster . 
 Leinster . 
 Connaught 
 
 Ulster 
 Munster . 
 Leinster . 
 Connaught 
 
 Ulster 
 Munster . 
 Leinster . 
 Connaught 
 
 BOOKS AN 
 
 BUILDING. 
 
 FITTING UP. 
 
 SALARY. 
 
 D OTHER SCHOOL 
 
 £ s. d. 
 6,875 12 11 
 5,844 18 10 
 9,007 18 10 
 4,569 17 8J 
 
 3,033 14 1 
 1,492 14 5 
 3,626 4 34 
 1,058 15 10" 
 
 18,126 8 0 
 10,930 7 5 
 18,527 10 8 
 10J 
 
 6,491 12 
 
 REQUISITES. 
 
 4,401 19 0J 
 2,758 2 Hi 
 5,121 7 3| 
 1,384 16 9J 
 
 * Report, Education, Ireland, p. 13. 
 
486 
 
 LETTER XC. 
 
 From this return, ordered to be printed last June by the House 
 of Commons, it appears, that the sum of £103,252 Is. ll^d. has 
 been publicly accounted for up to the preceding December, of the 
 quarter of a million of money, that has been granted for the 
 education of the poor of Ireland. It is unnecessary to detain the 
 reader long in pointing out the marked inequality, nay, injustice, 
 as to the several provinces, in the distribution of a fund, that was 
 intended proportionably for the entire kingdom. 
 
 In exposing this manifest injustice, I shall not for the present 
 go into minuter details than a comparison of the different aids to 
 the provinces, content with observing that, should the smaller 
 localities of the great districts be compared, some neglected parts 
 of Leinster and Ulster will have as much reason to complain as 
 Connaught has with regard to the preference shown to these two 
 favoured provinces. 
 
 Far in advance of the other two provinces, even of Ulster, 
 which comes next in favour, there has been expended in Leinster, 
 on buildings, near double the sum that has been laid out in Con- 
 naught. If it should be conjectured that the local influence of 
 the board in Leinster was at all exercised in its behalf, it would 
 only prove the value of the extension of some like protection, to 
 the remote and neglected provinces. The vast inequality in the 
 first item of building might possibly be deemed the result of 
 chance, if the same munificence and extravagant preference for 
 the seat of educational administration, did not mark every feature 
 of the expenditure. In the fitting up, Munster, with its immense 
 Catholic population, is placed in nearly as low a scale as Con- 
 naught ; while the latter province has not even a third of that 
 outlay compared to Leinster, which is immediately placed under 
 the fostering solicitude of the board. Again, in the contest for 
 the prizes of salaries, we find the masters of Ulster and Leinster 
 running nearly an equal race. Those of Munster are lagging 
 far behind; but as for Connaught, it is left the same uniform 
 pre-eminence in privation destined for it in every state measure, 
 being treated with the same insulting neglect by all her Majesty's 
 commissioners, whether of railways or of education. It is on 
 the same principle, no doubt, that Connaught holds the same 
 relative position with regard to books and school requisites ; and 
 for this the commissioners have my sincere acknowledgments : 
 we shall thus be spared the necessity of purging our schools of 
 some of their poisonous productions. In the commencement, the 
 singular merit of their school-books was clamourously eulogized. 
 Latterly there seems something like a prudent and studied 
 caution on that subject. Perhaps the rich mines from which their 
 literary treasures were extracted have been laid open to the 
 curiosity of the world, with the additional discovery that the 
 manufacturers of the books were no less destitute of originality, 
 
LETTER XC. 
 
 487 
 
 than they were in gratitude in acknowledging the extent of their 
 obligations. 
 
 The preceding parliamentary accounts of the board will show 
 that up to the 15th December last, £13,505 3s. 2Jd. is the 
 amount of the entire sum that has been expended by that body 
 since its establishment in all its items of outlay in this province. 
 Should any additional expense have been incurred by the un- 
 necessary training of a few of its teachers in a model-school, in 
 Dublin, I cannot count it a benefit that they should be attempted 
 to be laughed, as has occurred, out of their reverence for their 
 patron saint by some anti-Catholic, Scotch school-masters. This 
 sum of thirteen thousand pounds would, supposing their popula- 
 tion equal, be nearly what each of the provinces would be yearly 
 entitled to, out of the amount of the grant made by the parlia- 
 ment during each of the last two years. Connaught has received 
 during the whole time of the existence of the board, but very 
 little more than the portion it would be entitled to, within each 
 year of that period. Whereas, instead of such an unequal 
 pittance, it should have injustice received, even in the proportion 
 of its actual population, about fifty thousand pounds of the sum 
 allotted for education since the year 1832, when the board was 
 established. Were the interests of each of the provinces pro- 
 tected by prudent, economical bodies, who would be bound, like 
 the trustees of the College of Maynooth, to account to parlia- 
 ment for the outlay of every farthing, and who, like the same 
 trustees, would perform their duties gratuitously, it follows that 
 the poor of this province, for example, would have had the benefit 
 which has been denied them, of the expenditure of near forty 
 thousand pounds on the education of their children. And yet 
 we are gravely told that we ought to be fully content with such a 
 system, because some two or three Catholics happen to be mem- 
 bers of that body. Whether Catholics, or Protestants, or Pagans, 
 it is a matter of little consequence in such a gross inequality of 
 the distribution of public funds, since no circumstance of religion 
 or of infidelity can palliate such palpable injustice. 
 
 But Connaught is poor, and it is no wonder it should not share 
 in the benefits of legislative aid to the same extent as the 
 other provinces. No doubt it is ; but I should draw from its 
 acknowledged comparative poverty an opposite conclusion. It is 
 like the argument of the commissioners of railways, who have 
 wasted more than twelve thousand pounds of the public money 
 on a report which calumniates the people of an entire province, 
 and strives to exclude them from a just share in the outlay of the 
 public revenues. If Connaught then is poor, what has made it 
 so? The same neglect of the care of a fostering legislature 
 which Ireland feels, compared to England, operates on the con- 
 dition of this province in particular, compared to the rest of the 
 
488 
 
 LETTER XC. 
 
 kingdom. It stands, therefore, the more in need of legislative 
 interference to develop its resources. It is entirely left out of 
 the contemplation of the honest and disinterested commissioners 
 of railroads until it becomes prosperous ! ! Who ever heard of 
 a patient being abandoned by a physician, and deemed unworthy 
 of his care until he should recover his health ? As the Education 
 Board was established for the poor of Ireland, the poorer any 
 portion of its inhabitants, the more they were entitled to the 
 considerate regard of that body. Perhaps they went on the 
 maxim, that to him that has much, much shall be given, and from 
 him that has not, even that which he hath shall be taken away. 
 
 If, then, there happen to be some places so poor that they 
 could not contribute in the same proportion as other districts, 
 that regulation was a vicious one, which required in all cases a 
 third of the sum to be contributed in the locality where the school 
 was to be erected. But is it in reality from a want of zeal for 
 education or a spirit to contribute to its support, that Connaught 
 has been treated with such marked injustice by the board ? It 
 may be imagined that it has been neglected, because it refused 
 its quota in the local contributions. If sc, these local contribu- 
 tions must be small compared to the other provinces, in proportion 
 to the small pittance of the parliamentary funds which it received. 
 Now, instead of this being the case, it will be found that the sum 
 contributed by its localities bear a greater proportion to the 
 grants of the board than do the similar local advances in the 
 other provinces. 
 
 From the parliamentary returns regarding education, above 
 referred to, it appears that — 
 
 Ulster has contributed in building, &c. . £4,030 12 5| 
 
 Munster ..... 1,660 17 6| 
 
 Leinster ..... 5,842 2 4 
 
 Connaught 2,295 17 0J 
 
 By a comparison of those items with the grants for building 
 and fitting up, referred to at the commencement of this letter, it 
 would appear that the local contributions of the province of 
 Munster are less than the one-fourth ; and those of Connaught 
 nearer the one-half, than those of either Leinster or Ulster. In 
 the case of Munster, where there is a large Catholic population, 
 and many of them necessarily poor, the board, or any body of 
 education trustees, would have acted wisely in not pushing the 
 rule of a stated portion of local contributions to extreme rigour. 
 The comparative statement proves, that in Connaught, the poorest 
 of the provinces, it has been more sternly enforced than in any 
 other part of the kingdom. 
 
 Allow me, my lord, respectfully to inquire whether it is the 
 bona fide intention of the legislature, that the public money should 
 
LETTER XC. 
 
 489 
 
 really be expended on educating the poor, or for multiplying the 
 channels of ministerial patronage ? If the latter, as is the 
 general belief, better at once, like the late Lord Londonderry, 
 who quartered a respectable incumbrance on the College of May- 
 nooth, to fix the number of those retainers, as well as the amount 
 of their sinecures, than to be amusing the nation with a show of 
 funds that are not destined for its benefit. If, on the other hand, 
 it is really intended for the education of the poor, that wisdom 
 which adapts the means to the end will dispense with all super- 
 fluous machinery, and a strict sense of justice will not allow 
 useless officers to absorb those revenues which, under a severer 
 management, would be productive of a more diffusive advantage. 
 In short, to use a scholastic axiom which must appear too old- 
 fashioned to the numerous retinue of functionaries that are 
 jostling each other at the porch of the national academy, “ Non 
 sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate.” If your lordship wishes 
 to conduct national education on principles at once safe and useful, 
 I might refer you to the Jesuits, or to the biography of Joseph 
 Calasanctius, as I would on the subject of poor laws to St. Vincent 
 of Paul. Sure I am that the life and labours of the latter person 
 alone would furnish your lordship and the legislature with more 
 statesman-like views on the two paramount questions of poor laws 
 and education, than all the crude and dangerous speculations of 
 Messrs. Blake and Nicholls put together. 
 
 Adopting the principle of a just economy in conducting the 
 national education, your lordship will get rid at once of the useless 
 humbug of a metropolitan model-school, and the long suite of 
 clerks and inspectors — an invention which our liberal theorists 
 have imported from Prussia, and which really embarrasses, instead 
 of smoothing, the avenues to knowledge. Though at The risk of 
 lengthening this letter, I know it must be gratifying to my readers 
 to learn what is the enormous cost of those incumbrances, and 
 what a drawback they are on the funds that are said to be 
 granted for the education of the poor of the kingdom.* 
 
 * In the 1 * Estimate of the Expenses of the Commissioners of Education for 
 the year commencing 1st April, 1838, and ending the 31st March, 1839,” we 
 find the following items for keeping up the aforesaid machinery : — 
 
 CENTRAL MODEL AND TRAINING DEPARTMENT. 
 
 Superintendent of Model Schools and Training l)e- 
 
 partment ... 
 
 
 £300 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Lecturer in History and Geography 
 
 
 150 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Lectures to Teachers on Education, 
 
 Chemistry, and 
 
 
 
 
 Natural Philosophy ... 
 
 300 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Masters of Male Model Schools ... 
 
 
 300 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Assistants and Monitors in ditto ... 
 
 
 250 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Mistress of Female Model ditto ... 
 
 
 130 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Assistant in ditto 
 
 
 30 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Master and Mistress of Infant ditto 
 
 
 200 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 Servants connected with training of 
 
 Teachers and 
 
 
 
 
 Model Schools 
 
 
 190 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 2 i 
 
490 
 
 LETTER XC. 
 
 This is, no doubt, carrying on the education, if not of the 
 poor of Ireland, at least of some of those of the metropolis, on 
 a truly magnificent scale. The model and training department 
 alone costs £2,490 ; £5,076 is the annual expense of inspection, 
 besides £500 of an outfit this year to equip the superintendents 
 with horses. The board office, with its whole train of functionaries, 
 including a dozen of clerks, is a concern of £2,815 10s., the 
 aggregate of which sums expended on the board office alone and 
 its officers, amounts to more than the annual sum that is yearly 
 granted for the professors, and every expense connected with the 
 education of the Catholic priesthood in the College of Maynooth. 
 Ten thousand pounds, under the judicious control of all the pro- 
 vincial bishops as trustees, together with a few others of the 
 clergy and laity, who would account to parliament for the ex- 
 penditure, would diffuse more of useful education in one province 
 than is now produced for the fifty thousand pounds throughout 
 the entire kingdom. It must, however, be confessed that this 
 sum would not support at the same amount of salary the present 
 establishment of sinecure and supernumerary retainers. When 
 I consider how much of the funds is diverted from the useful 
 purposes of education to mere government patronage, I can 
 account for the golden philippics of the government press, sur- 
 
 Travelling Expenses to and from Dublin of Teachers 
 for Training — say four classes of fifty each, at 
 £2 per man 
 
 Extra Masters in Training Department 
 General Superintendent ... 
 
 Assistants in Dublin 
 
 £400 0 
 240 0 
 300 0 
 300 0 
 
 INSPECTION. 
 
 Twenty-five Superintendents of National Schools ... 3125 0 
 Horses for ditto, at £20 ... ... ... ... 500 0 
 
 Lodgings for ditto, at £30 ... ... ... 750 0 
 
 For extra Travelling Expenses ... ... ... 600 0 
 
 BOARD, OFFICE, AND GENERAL MANAGEMENT. 
 
 Resident Commissioner, per Treasury Minute ... 500 0 
 Secretary ... ... ... ... ... 500 0 
 
 Accountant, and Clerks of various classes, &c. ... 1085 10 
 
 BUILDINGS IN MARLBOROUGH-STREET. 
 
 For erecting of a Keeper’s Lodge and Gateway in 
 Gardiner-street, new Carriage-way, Walk in- 
 closing Infant School, with Boys’ and Girls’ 
 
 Schools, Gas-lamps and Fittings, Clock, &c. ... 761 18 
 
 Fitting up Lecture and Class-rooms, Museum, &c., 
 and forming and levelling the Garden and Recrea- 
 tion Ground ... ... ... ... 1558 14 
 
 For completing the basement story of the Female 
 School-house, to be used as Class-rooms ; also Hot 
 Water Apparatus for heating the Buildings, &c. 4893 4 
 Building a Class-room connected with the Infant 
 School, Presses, and Flagging Yard, Recreation 
 Shed, Fittings and Furniture, Heating Appara- 
 tus, &c. ... 657 16 
 
 Miscellaneous ... ... ... ... ... 950 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 4 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
LETTER XC. 
 
 491 
 
 passing in vehemence the less courtly inspirations of the Tory 
 journals. Look, for example, at the host of its clerks, all ready 
 to attack any who will interfere with their occupation. When I 
 reflect on the numerous cases of those learned crafts-men, 
 all skilled to let loose their feathered arrows on their foes, it 
 should not be wondered if those who had the 'courage to assail 
 the system should have long since shared the fate of St. Sebas- 
 tian. 
 
 Make special grants as large as your lordship may think 
 proper to Marlborough-street, either as a diocesan or provincial 
 school ; but while it is enriched with all the elegance of archi- 
 tecture, let not the people of the provinces be derided, as here- 
 tofore, with the answer, “ there are no funds.” Establish there 
 as many schools for infants, and academies for adults, as your 
 lordship may find the parliament disposed to indulge your taste 
 in ; erect magnificent suites of saloons, and fill them with the most 
 sumptuous furniture ; build museums and flower gardens, and 
 expend the public money in stocking them with exotics from the 
 East and mummies from Egypt — they will be as accessible and 
 useful to the indigent children of the provinces as the similar 
 institutions of Oxford or Trinity College ; dedicate one wing to 
 the philosophers, another to the muses, and place their marble 
 busts in all its niches, until you make it rival the villa of Adrian 
 in the number and variety of its native and foreign schools. I 
 trust, however, that no Chancellor of the Exchequer, in proposing 
 such a grant, will be so wanting in gravity as to insult the sense 
 of the legislature and the Irish nation by calling a grant so 
 extraneous to such a purpose a grant for “ the education of the 
 poor of Ireland.” 
 
 I have the honor to be, my lord, your lordship’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
402 
 
 LETTER XCL 
 
 LETTER XCL 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, 
 
 January 18 , 1839 . 
 
 “ Reocant ergo ex Germanie Martimim Bucerum insignem haereticum, Petrum 
 
 Martyrem et Bernardinum Ochinum, oliosque hujusfarinse quos partim in 
 
 Academiis collocant ne ulla fraus de esset aut diligentia ad Inventutis decep- 
 tionem. Ampliora tamen stipendia Bucero at Martyri ut haereiicorum ante- 
 ignanis assignarunt.” — Sanders de Schismate Anglicano. 
 
 My Lord — We are assured by the wise man that there is 
 nothing new under the sun. The recurrence of the stated cycle 
 of the stoics was supposed to bring back the events of the past 
 in regular succession ; and the enemies of the Catholic faith, 
 whether under the deliberate influence of their own free will, or 
 impelled, as they may fancy, by the stoical fatalism or predesti- 
 nation of the Calvinists, are now re-acting the same scenes of 
 profound deception in Ireland which were exhibited three 
 centuries ago on the theatre of England. Compare both epochs, 
 and you will find the designs, the instruments, and agents of the 
 one to be like regular transcripts of the other, Bucer, and 
 Martyr, and ‘Ochin, the professors of a foreign faith, who were 
 brought from other lands to preside over the English academies, 
 and to inoculate the rising generation with their own religion, 
 are the prototypes of Whately, of M‘Arthur, and of Carlile, 
 those men of alien countries and an alien creed, to whom an anti- 
 Catholic government would chiefly entrust the task of regulating 
 the schools and conducting the education of Catholic Ireland. 
 
 As one of those gentlemen has retired to his kirk, and re- 
 signed for its humble cares the ostentatious title of Education 
 Commissioner, I should forbear the introduction of his name, were 
 it not that his address, on his return to his flock, as well as the 
 legacy of professional instructions which he has left for the 
 benefit of the teachers of Ireland, are of too much value to be 
 passed over in silence. Those productions are now public pro- 
 perty, and, in animadverting on them, I have no wish to canvass 
 the reasons which must be best known to your lordship, of his 
 retirement from a board where Mr. Blake said his services were 
 so essential that they could scarcely be dispensed with. They 
 
LETTER XCI. 
 
 493 
 
 are, however, now dispensed with ; and if, as we were led to 
 believe, he was necessary for the very existence of the board, it 
 follows that his retirement must be a prelude to its dissolution. 
 
 From the singular tone of the reverend gentleman’s address, 
 it would appear that the Catholic hierarchy and clergy of the 
 country had done but little towards the regeneration of Ireland, 
 until it had been blessed, like England on a former occasion, with 
 the religious and literary labours of foreign sectaries. In a tone 
 of singular self-satisfaction, he boasts how much the board has 
 already done towards enlightening, and elevating, and tran- 
 quillizing the people of Ireland ! Until this jumbled association 
 of the professors of various creeds began their labours, it would 
 seem that the people of Ireland sat in complete darkness, and 
 were entirely ignorant of peace or order. How must not the 
 Catholics of Ireland value the delicate compliments conveyed in 
 the singular address of this guardian member of the National 
 Board. So, then, the efforts of the clergy and laity of Ireland, 
 to enlighten and tranquillize the country, were vain, until some 
 English Bucer, and Scotch Peter Martyr, and next, some German 
 Ochin, imported by Mr. Wyse from the orthodox universities of 
 that country, are hired at larger salaries than the natives, to 
 diffuse throughout this benighted land the benefits of religion, of 
 peace, and civilization. 
 
 It is hard to say what should be the feelings of a people pos- 
 sessed of any national pride on witnessing such contemptuous 
 insults towards their religion and their country. Amidst the 
 most galling persecutions of past times, Ireland had at least one 
 consolation, that it never could stoop to the religious yoke of the 
 foreigner. The land that enlightened others with its learning 
 and sanctity would never consent to receive its religious books 
 from the pens, or its oral instructions from the lips, of persons 
 sent from the seats of spiritual darkness and infidelity. And 
 hence, the faith which is first received from that Holy See, 
 “ which heresy never infected,” has been preserved as pure and 
 as fresh as the national emblem that grows upon its soil. Whilst 
 the faith of any people is free, they may well smile at the chains 
 that may be forged for their civil liberties. But, woe to the 
 nation that suffers the faith to be bound, either by force or the 
 more dangerous fetters of court flattery and connexion. It has 
 been well remarked that civil oppression deprives a people of 
 only a moiety of its liberties, it is only when it seizes the soul, 
 and binds up its religious energies, that then they are reduced to 
 abject and irreclaimable bondage. 
 
 That this spiritual tyranny over the religion and consciences of 
 the people of Ireland is now aimed at by the enemies of our faith, 
 can no longer be disguised. Recent events have placed the 
 matter beyond the reach of contradiction. Witness the rage that 
 
494 
 
 LETTER XGT. 
 
 has been given vent to in several quarters, because an important 
 question, involving the faith and morals of the rising generation 
 of Ireland, has been referred to the decision of the father of the 
 Christian World. What ! (we are publicly told by those who 
 affected such anxiety for the education of the Catholics of 
 Ireland) submit the affairs of this country to the decision of a 
 foreign potentate ! It is again in contemplation, another seriously 
 avers, to restore the days of Hildebrand, because we are willing 
 to recognize the voice of Peter in the person of his successor. 
 Those who had it in contemplation to force masters into model- 
 schools, and ultimately thrust their mongrel system of education 
 down the throats of the people, are now in an agony of frenzy 
 because we look for light and aid from that holy city which has 
 ever been the fortress of religious freedom to every nation whose 
 faith was attempted to be crushed. Relish the unpalatable truth, 
 then, as your lordship chooses, the fact which the friends of the 
 board were the first to publish is certain — the system of national 
 education is referred to Rome, and the fate of the board hangs 
 in the balance, depending for its existence on the decision of 
 Gregory. 
 
 Mr. Grattan has, I understand, given notice of a motion to 
 ascertain the working of the system of Ireland. We are now 
 arrived, it seems, at the mechanical, in contradistinction to the 
 metaphysical age. Formerly, schoolmen laid down certain and 
 indisputable principles, from which they drew, by a fair process 
 of reasoning, legitimate conclusions. Hence, if the principles on 
 which a system was based were bad, they concluded, in a sum- 
 mary way, that its working must be vicious. For this they are 
 reproached with dealing in phantoms, and it well becomes the 
 advocates of a mere material and mechanical philosophy wholly 
 to lose sight of principles, or, as they were called, “ ideas,” in the 
 formation of a system, and to confine themselves to its mere 
 mechanical operation. To ascertain the benefits or evils of a 
 system by the induction of facts, must always require time for its 
 development — time, at length, unfolding the dangerous principles 
 of the National Board, and in the same proportion, enlarging 
 the numbers of those who tremble for the further mischiefs of 
 which it may be productive. Until lately, but little attention was 
 bestowed upon the subject. The growing assumption of the 
 ministers of government to enlarge or abridge the powers of the 
 commissioners relative to the religious portion of the system, at 
 length created alarm, and opened the eyes of many to its designs 
 on the religious liberties of the people. As yet the lectures of 
 Mr. Carlile, to the intended masters or teachers of Ireland, were 
 not known. They are deserving of the profound attention of the 
 people of Ireland. Let, then, the system be tried even by its 
 working, of which a zealous and mysterious secrecy is a portion. 
 
LETTER XCI. 
 
 495 
 
 They are printed — whether they are published I cannot say. 
 As they are printed at the people’s expense, they ought to be 
 circulated for the people’s benefit, unless it be a maxim with the 
 board that the lectures that are whispered within the porch 
 should, like those of ancient philosophers, not be divulged among 
 the people. 
 
 It appears, however, that profound secrecy is one of their 
 maxims, and that the instructions communicated, require that no 
 officer of the board give publicity to any documents that may 
 come into his hands, or any part of the business of the estab- 
 lishment that may come to his knowledge. Is it to masters 
 receiving such instructions, the people of Ireland are required to 
 confide the education of their children ? One of the objects of 
 some the great advocates of modern education is, to abolish the 
 belief of mysteries, and to substitute a system of what is called 
 rational Christianity. Yet, since the days of Pythagoras, I never 
 knew of such an attempt to surround popular instruction with 
 secrecy, and mystery so impenetrable, as those which are thus 
 inculcated in the inaugural lecture of the late professor of 
 education. 
 
 But for the present, I must forbear any further commentary 
 on this singular production, as well as on its mysterious objects, 
 attacked by the important report of the recent parliamentary 
 debate upon that subject. It is said that your lordship stated it 
 as your opinion that a system of education, emanating from a 
 central board, formed of the professors of many creeds, was not 
 at all suited to England. Nay, you are reported to have said 
 that the established clergy should control education in that 
 country. Why, then, does your lordship think it fitted for the 
 people of Ireland ? And why not entrust, for a similar reason, 
 the education of the Catholic people to the Catholic clergy here ? 
 I fear there is something of the habitual policy pursued towards 
 the two countries in this singular distinction. If there is in the 
 world a country to which such a motley education as that of the 
 National Board is peculiarly adapted, is it not England, with its 
 cameleon creeds, reflecting every colour and shade of opinion, 
 from the brightness of the Catholic faith to all the blackness of 
 infidelity ? And again, if there be a country which more than 
 another evinced its dislike for fashionable varieties in matter of 
 faith, and its utter abhorrence of religious innovation, that 
 country is Ireland. Why, then, strive to force into one country 
 a system so utterly unsuited to its people, and relinquish it on a 
 soil so congenial to its cultivation ? The pride of the establish- 
 ment must be cherished, must be soothed in England, though it 
 is a matter of notoriety that, with its gorgeous endowments, it 
 has so neglected the great duty of the education of the people, 
 as to have abandoned the great bulk of them to the most de- 
 
496 
 
 LETTER XCI. 
 
 plorable ignorance. It is the same spirit of reverential deference 
 for the Established Church, and of a corellative hatred for the 
 Catholic Religion, that so deeply engages the sympathy of some 
 statesmen, and prompts them to push forward, at all hazards, the 
 present detestable system. Finding with what tenacity the 
 people cling to the Catholic faith, whilst their education was 
 conducted by their pastors, who alone have a sincere and 
 disinterested zeal to enlighten the people with the saving truths 
 of religion, they have employed every engine to wrest this office 
 from them, and entrust it to associations which must be under 
 the control of the government. They are not ignorant of the 
 effects of the saying — “ Strike the shepherd, and the flock will 
 be scattered and could they once succeed in paralyzing the 
 exertions of the legitimate pastors in their respective dioceses, 
 they could hope to make easy inroads on the faith of the un- 
 protected people. This is the real object of all the mighty 
 zeal that is now affected for the education of the people, and 
 of all the projects of modern philanthropists and of all their 
 literary tours, and scientific peregrinations, for the benefit of 
 the human race ! I am not ignorant of the character of their 
 boasted institutions, or of their practical working, with regard 
 to the faith and morality of the people. And when the 
 universities of Prussia and of Germany are referred to, they 
 should be, at least, held up as a warning to deter from, rather 
 than as models for, imitation. But it is neither to Prussia, nor 
 Germany, nor Scotland, nor England, we shall ever look for 
 models for the education of the youth of Ireland ; nor shall we 
 ever resign the maxims of the wise and the virtuous who have 
 gone before us, for the crude and dangerous speculations of some 
 shallow or false-hearted men, who are panting for an opportunity 
 of raising on the ruins of religious faith a system of infidel 
 philosophy. 
 
 I have the honor to be, your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 ^ John, Archbishop of Tuam, 
 
LETTER XC'II. 
 
 497 
 
 LETTER XCII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE CANONICAL TITLES OF THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS TO THEIR RESPECTIVE 
 
 SEES. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Gregory VII., 
 
 May 25 , 1839 . 
 
 “ If it be just in the sight of God to hear you rather than God, judge ye.” 
 (Acts, iv.) 
 
 My Lord — With the privileges of the assembly of which your 
 lordship is so conspicuous a member, it is not my purpose to 
 interfere, content with confining myself to the published report 
 of proceedings, for which neither your lordship nor I are respon- 
 sible. From this report it appears that the archbishop and 
 clergy of Tuam, professing the Roman Catholic religion, unani- 
 mously proffered to the House of Commons an humble and 
 respectful petition, for the redress of a manifest grievance, and 
 that this prayer of their petition was refused to be listened to 
 unless they consented to subscribe to a proposition fraught with 
 pernicious errors. It was required, it seems, as a condition of its 
 reception, that the title of Archbishop of Tuam should be can- 
 celled by the petitioners. Now, it is an unquestionable fact, that 
 they are daily in the habit of performing solemn duties, of which 
 the validity entirely depends on the essential jurisdiction that 
 flows from the above title, and that, consequently, they could not 
 renounce its assertion without submitting to the imputation of 
 their own acts being null and sacrilegious. This they could not 
 do without renouncing the highest authority in that church 
 which God commands them to hear, under pain of being ranked 
 among heathens and publicans. Whether, then, it is just to hear 
 you requiring one thing, or God, through the authority of his 
 Church, requiring another, I leave to your lordship’s unbiassed 
 judgment to determine. 
 
 But such is the prudent forbearance of the legislature, that it 
 does not insist on the practical suspension of the exercise of the 
 office, provided there be a deferential abstinence from the as- 
 sumption of the name. Is the Episcopacy, then, an office merely 
 suffered because it cannot be suppressed, and of which the title 
 should be concealed under the shadow of ignominious toleration ? 
 If one incurs no guilt by being practically and in fact the bishop 
 
498 
 
 LETTER XCII. 
 
 of a see, or the metropolitan of a province, it is strange what 
 guilt can attach to any authentic instrument which respectfully 
 predicates the innocuous reality. Such policy reminds one of 
 the language of Tertullian to the ancient persecutors, that their 
 edicts were pointed not against crime, but against the mere 
 Christian profession. It also resembles the cruel clemency of 
 Trajan, who instructs his officers that the Christians should not 
 be sought, yet punished if discovered. Why, continues the same 
 apologist, not prosecute us if guilty, and, if not guilty, why 
 punish us when discovered? To one of your lordship’s clear 
 perception it is unnecessary to prolong the parallel or press the 
 application. 
 
 I may be told, however, in the lofty assumption of some deep- 
 read senator, that no Catholic bishop exists in law . If so, every 
 breath he draws in the country must be, as much as the signa- 
 ture of his title, an act of rebellion against the majesty of legis- 
 lation. As your lordship is an advocate for an extensive course 
 of education for all classes, I humbly hope that candidates for the 
 senate will not be excluded from its benefits — that they, too, will 
 have a training school, and that before they present themselves 
 on the hustings they produce a certificate that they have read 
 over, at least once, “ Cicero’s Treatise on Laws.” If so, the future 
 readers of the reports of the House of Commons may be re- 
 warded for the toil of their perusal, and, instead of sometimes 
 groping their way through a dark and confused chaos of bigotry 
 and dulness, they will be instructed with the lore, and warmed 
 with the eloquence of many a Lushington and O’Connell, who, 
 having ascended to the pure fountain of justice, from which all 
 law derives its force, will tell, in the language of the Roman 
 orator, of that universal law, anterior to all covenants, and felt 
 in every clime — a law not learned from man, but drawn from 
 nature, and to which London now, as well as Rome and Athens 
 of old, must bow in all the acts which they promulgate for the 
 guidance of mankind. 
 
 There was in this country an important legal personage, who, 
 finding the judicial sceptre in his hand, thought by its magic 
 touch to annihilate the entire Catholic people. Accordingly, 
 when seated on his chair of law, he issued his oracular judgment 
 that there was not one Catholic subject in Ireland. In defiance 
 of this mandate, he found, like an ancient monarch, that the 
 wave of the growing multitude gradually flowed on, and had not 
 death seasonably relieved him from his alarms, he would have 
 feared that his seat would have been upset by the ascending tide 
 of the disobedient population. Time has now lully revealed the 
 folly of kicking any longer against the goad, or endeavouring to 
 stay the force of laws to which all human ordinances must yield. 
 Such grave maxims, then, should be suffered to sleep in the 
 
LETTER XCII. 
 
 499 
 
 tombs of those who uttered them. That they are now obsolete 
 can be attested by the House of Commons itself, and whoever 
 asserts there is no Catholic Bishop in law in Ireland might be 
 scared by the apparition of so many Catholic members, who are 
 evidence of the impotent mendacity of the law, which pronounced 
 them dead, or of the more miraculous virtue of their political 
 resurrection. 
 
 Whenever your lordship shall make the important discovery 
 that the title or jurisdiction of a Catholic Bishop or Archbishop 
 is derived from the state, it will be high time to threaten him 
 with its vengeance, in cancelling that title or withdrawing that 
 jurisdiction. For my part, with a dutiful and conscientious 
 allegiance to our Sovereign, which no temptation shall ever sever, 
 I shall never owe any obligation to the state for my office or my 
 title, conscious that they are derived from a higher origin than 
 any over which the state has control. You condescend, forsooth, 
 to acknowledge us bishops in this or the other see in any part of 
 Ireland, and so might be any travelling prelate from Asia or 
 America, who might come on a visit to this country. I suppose 
 your lordship would fain reduce us to the loose and unsettled 
 state of the parsons of the established church, who are sometimes 
 shifted to different parts of the kingdom. No, my lord, there is 
 not in the world a hierarchy more fixed in its position and juris- 
 diction than that of Ireland, and instead of being, as our enemies 
 would make us, a troop of ecclesiastical Arabs, ready to light 
 upon the possessions of our neighbours, each has his defined and 
 allotted sphere of spiritual jurisdiction, and each can present the 
 title deed of his see with the grand seal of the successor of the 
 Prince of the Apostles, to whom Christ gave the keys of the 
 kingdom of heaven. Do then, abridge, extend, annihilate, at 
 your good pleasure, any and every portion of the Protestant 
 prelacy ; follow up next session the example already given, 
 and take away, if you find them too numerous, ten more lamps 
 of the churches of the establishment, until the last of them 
 be totally extinguished. In all this the power of the state must 
 be fully recognized over the creature of its own hands ; but as 
 for the Catholic Church, and the spiritual power of its bishops, 
 allow me respectfully to remind you that it cannot be subjected 
 to any similar o peration. The hereditary title, at which such 
 gratuitous umbrage is taken, is entrusted to me as a sacred 
 deposit, which I would be more culpable in yielding, or in com- 
 promising, than your lordship would be in alienating the trans- 
 mitted honors of your house. For centuries before the Protest- 
 ant religion was heard of, and while the stem of many a lofty 
 pedigree was yet springing from an humble root, it was borne 
 by my predecessors, and it is not from any presumptuous reliance 
 on the power of the world that I predict that the same title will 
 
500 
 
 LETTER XCII. 
 
 be borne, intact and untarnished, by my successors, when the 
 laws which strive now to disown it, shall, like their penal and 
 impotent predecessors, have passed away. 
 
 Whence, then, the untenable charge of assumption or usurpa- 
 tion? It is a novel discovery in law that the first possessor 
 or his heir is a usurper. Following the plain and obvious 
 principle of St. Augustin, the Catholics can prove the unin- 
 terrupted continuity of their faith, by revolving ‘the unin- 
 terrupted series of their bishops. And of those bishops there is 
 not one who cannot this day accost any rival claimant in the 
 same emphatic language, that was addressed by the same apolo- 
 gist already quoted, who, after refuting the follies of Paganism, 
 pointed all the force of his vigorous intellect against all who laid 
 unauthorized pretensions to Christ’s inheritance : “ Who are you? 
 Whence are you come ? By what right do you fell my wood ? 
 By what authority do you cross my fountains ? By what 
 power do you shift my mearings ? Mine is the possession — the 
 old possession — the first possession. I have a sure footing set 
 by them who were the original legitimate occupants. I am the 
 heir of the apostles.” 
 
 I cannot dissemble my conviction, that the reason why the 
 petition did not find favour with your lordship, and many others, 
 was more on account of its matter than its form. There was 
 surely no want of respectful phraseology, which never should be 
 forgotten, especially when addressed to such an assembly. I 
 am, therefore, inclined to think, that were the petitioners, instead 
 of complaining of the evils, to applaud the benefits, and solicit 
 the extension of the system of education, the letter of the law 
 would have been urged rather than its spirit, and the value of 
 the material would have amply compensated for the legal defi- 
 ciency of its form. Now that the system is, thank God, defunct 
 in my diocese, I mean not, though I have collected a variety of 
 important facts, illustrative of its spirit, to occupy your lordship 
 or the public with the detail. Will your lordship believe that a 
 schoolmaster in this diocese, if I am rightly informed, was fined 
 five shillings for reciting at twelve o’clock, in conformity with the 
 pastoral instructions of his ordinary, the “ Angelus Domini,” or 
 the announcement of those glad tidings of salvation which the 
 archangel brought to earth from heaven, and threatened with 
 dismissal should he be guilty of its repetition ? It is unnecessary 
 to say that the substance of that holy message — the incarnation 
 of the Divine Word in the chaste womb of the Blessed Virgin, 
 forms the foundation of the Christian faith. Indulgences have 
 been annexed by the Pope to its repetition. The guilt of its 
 recital must, therefore, have been either in the obedience of a 
 portion of his own flock to the instructions of their ordinary in 
 a matter of religious instruction, or in the acknowledgment of 
 
LETTER XCII. 
 
 501 
 
 the power of the Pope to grant such indulgences, or finally in 
 the opposition of the form of prayer itself to the elements of 
 Socinianism, which some of the enlightened legislators of the 
 present day are anxious to mingle in that system of “ common 
 Christianity,” of which it would mock the powers of man to 
 determine any specific form. From the unanimous petition of 
 the numerous clergy of this diocese, faithfully conveying the 
 feelings and sentiments of half-a-million of people, your lordship 
 may learn that none hereafter shall again incur the penalty 
 annexed to the guilt of the above prayer. Could any doubt 
 have existed in our minds regarding the hostility meditated 
 against our religion, it would have been dissipated by the recent 
 proceedings. They have exhausted whatever little remnant of 
 confidence was yet placed in some individuals, and removed the 
 thin veil by which they disguised their hereditary and implaca- 
 ble enmity to our creed. Whatever may be the real or affected 
 political feuds of Whigs or Tories, like the reconciliation of 
 Herod and Pilate, they both meet on the common ground of 
 hatred to the Catholic religion. Look to their conduct towards 
 England and Ireland. Because they believe it will be fatal to the 
 faith of the latter, they press a system which they are unwilling 
 to adopt for the former, lest it should have the same fatal influ- 
 ence on the religion of the established church. This is the one 
 object of all their crude and unheard-of experiments in education. 
 For us we are resolved never to yield to a confederate band of 
 shallow and infidel sophisters, the faith which persecution could 
 not wrest from us. The vague phrase of Christianity affords no 
 security, since errors as impious to the Divinity, and as danger- 
 ous to morals as those of Paganism or Mahometanism, have in 
 ancient and modern times found shelter in the profession of the 
 Christian name. 
 
 Many have ere now repeated the just and philosophical 
 question, put in the reported debate — “ Was it wise, was it pru- 
 dent to reject on such grounds the petition of so large and 
 influential a body of men, especially when it violated no law ?” 
 I trust we shall hear no more of clerical interference in politics, 
 since the question is come to the defence of our clerical and 
 spiritual rights and privileges, against political aggression. These 
 it will be our duty to vindicate, and to their assertion we shall 
 devote ourselves without fear of refutation. I shall leave the 
 parsons to express their fears as to the effect it may have on the 
 truce that was given to the campaign regarding their tithes or 
 rent charges, or whether it may not hasten the expression of the 
 feelings of the people, that the boasted extension was only a 
 temporary shifting of the burden from one shoulder to another. 
 But, my lord, I must conclude, surrounded as I am by the im- 
 portunities of numbers in distress : this is a topic more worthy of 
 
502 
 
 LETTER XCII. 
 
 our joint consideration than a war about the phantoms of names 
 or titles. Yes, my lord, for, after all, it is only against phantoms 
 the hostility of our enemies is excited. The more solid property 
 that once accompanied those formidable titles we do not covet— 
 and hence, any secret fears that may be entertained by your 
 lordship on that score will, I trust, be dissipated for ever. With 
 this sincere announcement, I trust that our next petition in behalf 
 of the hungry and starving poor will not be treated with the 
 same insult as that which appealed in behalf of their intellectual 
 necessities. We have had a meeting and subscriptions for their 
 relief, as we had before to make permanent provision for their 
 free and unshackled education. Our efforts have been blessed 
 with success, and the state of education is at this moment more 
 flourishing than it has been for a considerable period. No private 
 funds, however, could be adequate to the mass of wretchedness 
 that meets the eye in the hordes of poor mendicants, that are 
 covering the highways, and a still more pitiable distress that is 
 pining within doors through the shame of exposure. Allow me, 
 then, to abjure your lordship, as well as the other members of 
 the government, to turn your attention to the increasing distress 
 of the large districts of Mayo and Galway, and, without weighing 
 too scrupulously their religious faith, to consider the claims of 
 their unimpeachable political fidelity. Let it not be said that the 
 flock must suffer because the minister may not relish a title 
 which their pastor is not free, even were he willing, to resign. 
 The people are now conveying their petitions for physical, as 
 they have lately done for intellectual, bread, and I trust no penal 
 obstacles will be suffered io intercept their prayer, and that for 
 the bread which they look for they will not grieve to have re- 
 ceived but “ a serpent or a stone.” 
 
 I have the honor to be, my lord, your lordship’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 John Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
LETTER XCIII. 
 
 503 
 
 LETTER XCIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 ON THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 St Jarlath’s, Octave of All Saints, 
 November 8, 1839. 
 
 <c Ab istis novis professoribus intra paucos menses formati permulti, per 
 totum regnum desseminarunt ea quae ab istis peregrinis preceptoribus paulo ante 
 dedicerant.”* — Sanders de Schismate Anglicana. 
 
 My Lord — We are assured by the historian of the Anglican schism 
 that the foreigners who were imported into that country, for the 
 purpose of perverting its faith, found ne means more effectual 
 than to procure the training of the masters who would propagate 
 their own religious notions. Such, too, has been the policy of 
 every anti-Catholic government from that period to the present 
 time. The incompetency of the teachers of the old schools has been 
 the uniform theme of every projector of a reform of education, 
 and hence the anxiety to subject them to a course of discipline 
 which would gradually mould their minds to the formation of new 
 opinions. On the necessity of a new order of teachers there is 
 a wonderful coincidence of opinion between Bryce and Blake, 
 and Knight and Jerod, and Morpeth and Muggeridge, those 
 sapient guides to whom the Catholics of Ireland are now called on 
 to resign the entire control over the education of their children. 
 
 Under the thin disguise of preparing masters, by highly 
 literary and scientific acquirements, it is not difficult to perceive 
 the more dangerous designs that the enemies of our holy religion 
 have in view. One great object is to detach them from their 
 dependence on the pastors of the people, — and to imbue them 
 with a corporate spirit, or an “ esprit de corps” f which is to teach 
 them to look upon themselves as a large and isolated class of 
 functionaries, formed to give a proper direction to the minds of 
 the people, and entirely independent, in their appointment or 
 dismissal, or the discharge of their functions, of the bishops, to 
 whom the religious education of the people should essentially 
 belong. “ My hope,” says the Rev. Mr. Carlile, in one of his 
 training lectures to the assembled masters in the model school, 
 
 * “ Having been trained in a few months by those new teachers, many spread 
 throughout the entire kingdom those principles which they imitated a short time 
 before from those foreign masters.” 
 
 f See page 41 of Report of Education, 9th August, 1839. 
 
504 
 
 LETTER XCIII. 
 
 “ is, that thus every officer in the establishment will be enabled 
 to form some just estimate of the duties performed by his fellow- 
 officers, and especially that we shall all imbibe more of an esprit 
 de corps, that will render us all willing to do in our several places 
 what lies in us to advance the great cause in which we are 
 engaged.” What is this great cause in which these officers, thus 
 bound by an “ esprit de corps,” are engaged ? Is it to educate 
 the Catholic children of Ireland according to the models adopted 
 by the Catholic Church in Catholic countries ? No such thing. 
 Protestant countries are the example set up for our imitation. 
 “ And while even Scotland (continues the learned lecturer) has 
 fallen far behind Germany, Russia, and Holland, in this duty, 
 England and Ireland are only now beginning to open their eyes 
 to its importance.’’ What a happy coincidence it was for Ireland 
 that Whately and Carlile happened to land upon its shores, 
 otherwise the eyes of its children would never have been opened 
 to the blessings of education ! ! In the strain of modest com- 
 placency the Commissioners congratulate themselves on the 
 result of their exertions. So true is the Scripture saying, that 
 “ others have laboured, and they have entered into their 
 labours.” He next tells them that copies shall be delivered to 
 them of a pamphlet published by himself, entitled “ Thoughts 
 on the Mixed Character of Government Institutions in Ireland, 
 with particular reference to the system of National Education.” 
 Such is the pure fountain from which the masters of Ireland 
 are to derive their knowledge on crossing the threshold of the 
 training schools of the National Board : a pamphlet on mixed 
 education, emanating from a Protestant government, written by 
 one whose whole life was devoted to circulating calumnies on the 
 Catholic creed, and who again returns to recruit the Biblical 
 societies that are incessantly at work to pervert the faith of the 
 people ! ! And lest one reading should not suffice, or lest the 
 lessons it contains should be obliterated from their memories, they 
 are furnished with copies to bring them as household books, that 
 they may often refresh their minds with their perusal. Is it in 
 publishing such vile and noxious tracts the funds of the people 
 are to be expended for their perversion ? Next comes another 
 precious production, having for its title “ Lessons on the Truth 
 of Christianity.” Whole parcels of those poisonous tracts have 
 been sent “ On her Majesty's Service,” for the use of the National 
 schools. What a precious cargo to be dispensed to the Catholic 
 children of Ireland ! The author’s name is not appended, but, if 
 report says true, they have come from the pen of one who has been 
 designating the ministers of the Catholic Church as “ adepts in 
 priestcraft,” and their religion a “ mystery of iniquity;” their 
 sacraments “ superstitious charms,” and their public worship “ a 
 kind of magic incantation their practices of piety “ a train of 
 
LETTER XCIII. 
 
 505 
 
 superstitious observances worthy of paganism,” and, in fine, the 
 
 Catholic Church itself “ the of Babylon.” Were our 
 
 pious ancestors to be proffered a book on the subject of religion, 
 written by a man capable of reviling their church, and faith, and 
 priesthood, in such profligate terms, they would indignantly 
 consign it to the flames. In the present enlightened days, such 
 persons must be the compiler of the theological primer, from 
 which children are to lisp the first rudiments of Christianity. 
 What a guardian of the integrity of the faith of the Catholic 
 children of Ireland ! This is truly the guardianship of the kite, 
 which, in its impatience to sieze and devour the entire prey, scares 
 off all rival vultures. 
 
 But, not to condemn from such prejudice, however just, the 
 book is bad, and bears evidence of a latent hatred to the Catholic 
 Church, and a disbelief in its most cherished and revered 
 mysteries. No true believer should be brought up in the notion 
 that Christianity was a sort of promiscuous state, in which every 
 individual, provided he assumed the name of Christian, might 
 claim an equal share. Such is the impression calculated to be left 
 by the perusal of this contemptible little volume. All the different 
 forms of faith utterly disappear, and all creeds, from the defined 
 articles of the Catholic Church to the shadowy opinions of the 
 wildest latitudinarian, may be merged together in the vague pro- 
 fessions of Christianity. Jurie himself would have been deemed 
 a narrow bigot by the author of these “ Lessons.” He excluded 
 from the pale of the Church all who erred in “ fundamental ” 
 articles. But here there is not a trace of “ fundamental ” or non- 
 fundamental errors or doctrines; and our “ common Christianity ” 
 — the fashionable and favourite phrase of the day — is represented 
 as a sort of commonage, in which the legitimate inheritors of the 
 true faith, as well as the roving hordes who are the followers of 
 every error, may be squatted down together. Never was there 
 a system more insulting to the understanding, or more delusive 
 and treacherous in its consequences. No writer of any character 
 that I know, whether Catholic or Protestant, has omitted, in 
 adverting to the internal evidence of Christianity, the mysterious 
 sublimity of its doctrines, by which the pride of the understand- 
 ing is subdued. The omission of any allusion to its mysteries, in 
 this treatise, is not a little remarkable. It would not suit the 
 taste or policy of one who wishes to include all within the pale of 
 a reasonable Christianity. Where is any reference to the mysteries 
 of the trinity of persons in the unity of the Godhead, and mys- 
 terious incarnation of the eternal and substantial Son of God in 
 the womb of a virgin — the fundamental mysteries on which Chris- 
 tianity reposes? You look for them in vain in the aforesaid 
 Lessons. They pretend to discuss the evidence of the prophecies, 
 that foretold the Redeemer of the world. Why is the celebrated 
 2 K 
 
506 
 
 LETTER XCI1I. 
 
 prophecy of Isaias, regarding the Emmanual whom “ the virgin 
 shall conceive,” forgotten in this reference ? No ; to acknow- 
 ledge that a virgin was the mother of the Eternal God would 
 shock the intellect of the readers of this treatise of Rational 
 Christianity , and would justify the exclusion of Nestorius from 
 its pale. To allude to the co-eternity of the Son with the Father 
 would be ruffling the smooth level on which all Christians were to 
 meet, and justify the condemnation of the Arians by the father 
 of the Council of Nice. Christ, therefore, must be talked of as 
 a mere teacher of a sublime morality, as a wise legislator, and an 
 extraordinary person who wrought a great revolution in the 
 world. The Socinians, who deny his divinity, speak of him in 
 equally commendatory terms. Nay, some of them, speaking of 
 the Redeemer, would not use the language of this writer ; for, 
 though he was not, in the sense of the world, among the high 
 born, and though his earthly parentage was humble, still the 
 repetition of the “ Jewish peasant” is not language in which the 
 Redeemer of the world is to be characterized. It speaks more 
 than the contemptuous language of the Socinian. But what 
 wonder ? The Socinians themselves are said to be represented 
 in the board. Their opinions, then, and those of the Arians, are 
 as much entitled to a place in any treatise of Christianity as the 
 doctrines of the Catholic Church. The evident aim and tendency 
 of this treatise is to destroy every distinction between the different- 
 classes, no matter whether heretics or not, provided they profess 
 the Christian name. Not a word about the Catholic Church 
 consecrated in the Apostle’s Creed, as if it were a body distinct 
 from Christianity, whereas it is nought, but Christianity con- 
 tinued. It is in vain to attempt to distinguish between the 
 Catholic Church and genuine Christianity. The era of their 
 origin is the same ; the boundaries of the one are co-extensive 
 with those of the other ; and though the sectaries may cast their 
 shifting tents there during their fleeting hour, no permanent 
 religious structure but that of the Catholic Church alone can ever 
 be raised on the platform of Christianity. But the author must 
 be consistent. Having striven to banish from his Christianity the 
 belief of mysteries, and represented it as a scheme only partially 
 and imperfectly revealed to us, he gravely adds, “ that it may be 
 that the gospel which has been declared to us may be but one 
 small portion of some vast scheme which concerns the inhabitants 
 of numerous other periods ! !” Ever since the period of the 
 Reformation it has been fashionable to represent the Christian 
 religion as a system capable of fresh improvements with the 
 growing enlightenment of each succeeding age. It was reserved, 
 however, for the ingenuity of the author of those Lessons to give 
 children a new idea of the sublimity of the Christian religion, by 
 teaching them, that in process of time it may be found by some 
 
LETTER XCI1I. 507 
 
 new discoveries in philosophy to concern the inhabitants of the 
 moon and the other heavenly bodies ! ! 
 
 As your lordship’s solicitude is to be henceforward employed 
 on the colonies, rather than the home department, I shall not direct 
 your further particular attention to the question of Irish education ; 
 nor should I even now trouble your lordship, or any other of 
 your colleagues, with this letter, as the vicious system is happily 
 banished out of this diocese, were it not that I wish to warn you 
 against the mischief that may be done by the crazy designs of 
 subalterns in office, who seem anxious to restore the spirit of 
 ancient persecution. It is not necessary to inform your lordship 
 that the clergy of this archdiocese have unanimously, and with 
 one accord, renounced all connexion with the detestable system 
 of the government education, and that they further declared 
 their solemn and firm purpose of withholding from its schools 
 all the children under their spiritual jurisdiction. Your lord- 
 ship, at least, will not forget this important fact; for, to your 
 ill-disguised hate of our holy religion, couched though it be under 
 a hollow liberality, we are indebted for the honor of having that 
 petition rejected, notwithstanding your being opposed by the 
 highest legal authorities in the house. Such an array of talent 
 and eloquence in its favour proves that the ministry was not 
 driven by any necessity to the rejection of that petition, but that 
 they were rather indulging their natural feelings of aversion to 
 our creed ; and yet it is in compliment of such men, and lest we 
 should embarrass their movements, we are called upon to acquiesce 
 in a system of education, which that same spirit of hostility first 
 called into existence, and which is displaying that spirit in pro- 
 portion as it is developed. At first the system humbly recom- 
 mended itself as a boon. Now, it seems the people are to be 
 fatigued into its acceptance by a plan of the most importunate 
 annoyance. Not only have the clergy of the diocese rejected it, 
 but likewise the laity, including the most influential gentry, as 
 well as the great body of the people, have in several meetings 
 adopted the strongest resolutions against it as an engine of civil 
 and spiritual despotism. And still the joint secretaries of the 
 leopard-like board, who so happily combine in their own persons 
 the various hues of religious opinions that are found among its 
 members, are expending their time and stationery in insulting 
 attempts to seduce or force some of those clergy and laity from 
 the resolutions which they so solemnly recorded. Were it not 
 for recent events, I might imagine that this persecuting system 
 might have been pursued without the knowledge or concurrence of 
 the Catholic members of the board. Still I will not lay it to their 
 charge, though in candour I am not able to acquit them of a par- 
 ticipation in a scheme which is carried on by the authorized 
 sectaries of the body. I trust the Catholic members of the board 
 
508 
 
 LETTER XC11I. 
 
 will pause ere they lend themselves to a system of religious per- 
 secution which strikes at the root of episcopal authority. Let 
 them confine themselves to the duties of their families, or at least 
 to such secular concerns as they may be employed in, but let them 
 not venture, even upon obtaining his Excellency’s permission, to 
 dictate to any bishop what religious books he is not to put into 
 the hands of the children, for their spiritual instruction. Such 
 presumptuous interference will not be tolerated, nor will those 
 gentlemen add to their reputation by their perseverance in such 
 a course. I speak of such as may have been ignorant of the 
 extent of annoyance to which the system has been pushed. As 
 for those who would lodge all the educational powers in the 
 crown, with them reasoning is useless, since, as long as they are the 
 dispensers of the government grants, so long will they uphold the 
 plan, were it even to prostrate all ecclesiastical authority. The 
 promotion to office of one who is an advocate of the system will 
 not secure to it support ; on the contrary, it must have the effect 
 of exciting distrust in the most confident, since he is the advocate 
 of a system of education, which has deluged Germany with infi- 
 delity and its consequent corruption of morals. With the joint 
 and unanimous concurrence of the laity, clergy, and archbishop 
 of the diocese, this system is now banished from beyond its 
 boundaries, and education is more flourishing than ever it could 
 have been under the government board. If, after this solemn 
 warning to desist from religious annoyance, these functionaries 
 should persevere, we shall not fail to represent them as abettors 
 of a worse than Julian persecution. 
 
 We are arrived at one of those perilous periods in the annals 
 of the Church of God, at which, under the treacherous guise of 
 peace, the most deadly hostility is aimed at our holy religion. 
 It is a crisis in which it is the duty of the vigilant and zealous 
 pastor to lift his voice and alarm his flock against the prowling 
 wolves that are meditating the destruction of the fold. There 
 is a wide-spread combination throughout Europe, arraying the 
 hostile spirit of secular influence against the Scriptural powers of 
 the Church, and a connivance at the wicked designs in many 
 quarters where it should not be expected. Witness the atrocious 
 persecutions that have raged against the illustrious Archbishops 
 of Posen and Cologne. The same spirit that prompted those 
 persecutions is at work in these countries, but checked by circum- 
 stances under a more mitigated form. Your lordship need not 
 glory in the temporary advances your insidious scheme of 
 education has made. Recollect, it was made silently and 
 almost unwatched, while the pastors were lulled into a delusive 
 confidence. I am only surprised, considering the weakness and 
 corruptions of the world, that it has not received more general 
 support. The Kildare-street system could reckon Catholic 
 
LETTER XCIII. 
 
 509 
 
 supporters, although it was almost as bad as the national system. 
 Your lordship is aware that the pensioning of the Catholic clergy 
 had its advocates, and that the execrable veto, which would have 
 annihilated the pure spirit of our hierarchy, had its courtly 
 abettors among the high and influential of the land. Numbers 
 of Catholics, panting for places and for pensions, began to mutiny 
 against the zeal or the perverseness of the ecclesiastics, who 
 refused to break down any of the fences of their sacred disci- 
 pline, though the laity should be debarred from entrance into 
 office but by the breach. What wonder, then, that the same 
 spirit should be still active, and that some Catholics would view 
 with indifference, nay, secret satisfaction, the gradual inroads of 
 the government on the purity and on the independence of the 
 spiritual authority of the Church. The veto has been rejected, 
 it is true ; so, thank God, has the proposition to bribe, by the 
 gold of the treasury, the freedom of the Catholic clergy. Yet 
 never were resolutions against those baneful measures more 
 solemn or more unanimous than those by which we have pledged 
 ourselves to withhold our concurrence and support from any 
 system of education that would attempt to wrest from us our 
 natural and inalienable control over the most powerful agents of 
 instruction, for good or evil — the books and masters. 
 
 In my conduct, regarding the pernicious scheme of education, 
 I am only redeeming that solemn pledge, and never again shall 
 I suffer in any school in my diocese the erroneous books, and 
 the apostate school-masters, that were there under the august 
 sanction of the government. I am persuaded the Grand Turk 
 himself would give us a safer system of education than any 
 ministry, whether Whig or Tory, would be disposed to give us. 
 Nay, compare the letter of the Sublime Porte to the Patriarch 
 of Constantinople with the jealous and coercive regulations that 
 issue from your educational offices, and your lordship will see 
 how far the successor of Mahomet has left behind the ministers of 
 your government in a truly enlightened respect for the rights 
 and dignity of the religious teachers of a large portion of his 
 subjects. No such liberal policy has as yet characterized your 
 councils. The present ministry is beholden to Catholic support ; 
 it is a bad requital for such support to encourage a covert 
 religious persecution against those who will not suffer its un- 
 hallowed attempts to abridge the rights of any portion of the 
 hierarchy, over the entire religious education of their people. 
 
 I have the honor to be, your lordship’s obedient servant. 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
510 
 
 LETTER XCIV. 
 
 LETTER XCIV. 
 
 TO THE VENERABLE THE CLERGY AND FAITHFUL OF THE 
 ARCHDIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 ON THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Vugelius, 
 
 1839. 
 
 Dear and Venerable Brethren — In perusing the eventful 
 history of the Roman Catholic Church, you cannot but be struck 
 with the spirit of holy enterprise by which it has been ever 
 animated in extending the spiritual conquests of its Divine 
 Founder. The force of the commission given to the apostles of 
 being witnesses to our Divine Redeemer not only in* “ Judea and 
 Samaria, but even to the uttermost parts of the earth,” has been 
 felt by their successors in the ministry. Hence, the rapid and 
 successful propagation of the Gospel in the first ages throughout 
 the provinces of the Roman empire ; and hence, too, in latter 
 times, the annexation of countries hitherto buried in the darkness 
 of Paganism, to the spiritual kingdom of Christ. Through the 
 active exertions of this untiring zeal, the simultaneous Catho- 
 licity of the Church is always secured, and, when in punishment 
 of the sins of the pastors and people, the Almighty suffers in 
 some places the extinction or eclipse of the faith, the loss is 
 generally repaired by the acquisition of new territories. By 
 none has the spirit of zeal, in spreading the empire of Christ and 
 his Gospel, been so signally and successfully evinced as by 
 the Roman Pontiffs, the successors of St. Peter, who have in- 
 herited the plenitude of the apostolical ministry. With the 
 power of the keys which they received, in the person off St. 
 Peter, they have shared, in a conspicuous manner, the same 
 exalted privileges of proclaiming the divinity of the Son of God, 
 and of manifesting their love for him, which distinguished the 
 Prince of the Apostles. Is it not to the zeal of St. Celestine, 
 Bishop of Rome, that Ireland was first indebted for the mission 
 of St. Patrick ; and, is it not the vigilant solicitude of his 
 successors that has watched over our religion, and sustained the 
 fidelity of the Irish nation in preserving that pure inheritance ? 
 Is it not the ardent desire of extending the empire of Christ, 
 which burned within the breast of the first Gregory, that Britain 
 was indebted for the knowledge of the Gospel which it has had 
 
 * Acts of the Apostles, i, 8. 
 
 f St. Matthew, xiv, 19. 
 
LETTER XCIV. 
 
 511 
 
 the misfortune to have lost, but which, thank God ! it is once 
 more rapidly recovering. Without multiplying references to 
 their successful zeal in conquering new kingdoms to the yoke of 
 Christ, I need only point your attention to the sacred institution 
 for the propagation of the faith, founded by Pope Urban VIII., 
 and which, under Providence, has been instrumental in spreading 
 the spiritual dominion of Rome, among regions to which her im- 
 perial eagles never reached. 
 
 Of all the associations that have sprung from the untiring zeal 
 of the successors of St. Peter, this has been the most enterprising 
 and successful. If the impiety of Luther severed a large portion 
 of Europe from the vivifying stem of the Apostolical Church, it 
 was a consolation to find that, as soon as these rotten branches 
 fell off, it stretched its vigorous shoots over the most remote 
 portion of the opposite hemispheres. Never, perhaps, at any 
 period did the Catholic Church exhibit a more interesting 
 spectacle than at this moment, combated on all sides by open as 
 well as insidious enemies, and still, wherever you turn your eyes, 
 “ enlarging the place of its tents, and lengthening the cords, and 
 strengthening the stakes of its tabernacles.”* On the plains of 
 Hindostan the bloody victims of the Juggernaut are giving way 
 to the pure sacrifice foretold by Malachi, and the missionaries of 
 China are rivalling the heroism of the first martyrs. Carthage 
 is awakening again to the sacred eloquence of St. Cyprian, and 
 the sands of Africa are watered once more with the rich fountains 
 of the gospel. The Catholic religion is advancing fast amidst 
 the young nations of America, and from Patagonia to the St. 
 Lawrence, the accents of salvation are heard throughout the 
 entire of its vast regions. Nay, some of the nations of Europe 
 are now atoning for the apostacy of their ancestors. Scotland is 
 beginning to revere the memory of St. Columbkill, the founder of 
 its Christianity, rather than of John Knox, who was its ruthless 
 destroyer. England is suffering from Ireland the generous 
 retaliation of the gospel, and, for all the cruelties which the 
 former inflicted on the latter, our country is exercising a noble 
 revenge by filling England with its industrious Catholic em- 
 igrants, and silently bringing that fine nation back to the yoke 
 of the gospel. Witness, too, the progressive resuscitation of 
 Holland to the ancient faith, and the flood of light that is poured 
 upon Germany by the conversion to the Catholic Church of 
 many of the most intellectual of her sons; and lost France 
 herself, recovering from its lethargy of licentiousness into which 
 it had sunk after a revolutionary frenzy, aspires once more to 
 the glorious prerogative of the most Christian kingdom, which 
 it so long maintained. Yes, from its bosom are now coming 
 
 * Isaias, liv, 2. 
 
512 
 
 LETTER XCIV. 
 
 forth some of the most zealous defenders of the Catholic faith ; 
 and to its ancient city of Lyons are we indebted for the estab- 
 lishment of a society formed like the congregation of the 
 Propaganda in Rome, for aiding the pious missionaries who 
 devote their lives to the propagation of the faith all over the 
 earth. It is astonishing what success has already blessed their 
 efforts. 
 
 Individuals of all nations of Europe are enrolling themselves 
 under the banners of this society, and with their contributions 
 have given such a strong and steady impulse to the propagation 
 of the Gospel, that, with the Apostle, we may thank our God 
 that* “ the faith of Rome is spoken of in the whole world.’’ 
 
 This laudable association is one of the objects in which we 
 wish to interest you by the present letter. It has already 
 received considerable support in Ireland, and the bishops of this 
 province have come to the unanimous resolution of strenuously 
 recommending its object to the clergy and faithful of their 
 respective dioceses. It is in conformity with those resolutions 
 that we now address you, exhorting you to contribute your mite 
 according to your means to the glorious work of rescuing 
 thousands of your fellow-creatures from the darkness of idolatry, 
 and bringing them to the light of the Catholic religion. We, 
 ourselves are indebted to the noble disinterestedness of the 
 Propaganda, which contributed in the days of our poverty its 
 pecuniary resources to sustain the struggling confessors of the 
 faith in the wildernesses of Ireland. 
 
 For, when our predecessors in the ministry,! “ of whom the 
 world was not worthy, wandered about in want, distressed, 
 afflicted, in deserts, in mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the 
 earth,” they experienced the cheering and seasonable assistance 
 of those who are filled withj “ solicitude for all the churches.” 
 Let us now, by our contributions, aid them in the holy enter- 
 prise of extending the Gospel, and entitle ourselves to a share in 
 those spiritual treasures which the Father of the Faithful bestows 
 upon those who assist in the meritorious work. 
 
 But whilst we thus lend our co-operation to the efforts that are 
 making to enlighten and regenerate other countries, we must not 
 be indifferent to the spiritual and intellectual necessities of our 
 own. 
 
 After the repeated but abortive efforts that have been made 
 to deprive us of § “ the faith once delivered to the saints,” it is 
 consoling to witness in all parts of this extensive diocese the 
 revival of those monastic institutions which once covered the 
 jand, and spread, wherever they were erected, sanctity and 
 yearning. For these signal blessings we have been already 
 
 * Eomans, v, 8. J II. Corinthians, xi, 28. 
 
 f Hebrews, xi, 37, 38. § Jude, 3. 
 
LETTER XC1V. 
 
 513 
 
 indebted to the pious munificence of those true lovers of their 
 religion and their country, Sir Michael D. Bellew, of Mount- 
 Bcllew, Bart., and Martin Joseph Blake, Esq., of Brooklodge, 
 M.P., in the vicinity of whose respective residences, the people 
 are reaping the benefits of a purely Catholic education, and are 
 full of gratitude to their benefactors. The mercy of the 
 Almighty has at length visited the Mayo portion of the diocese, 
 and raised up a valuable friend to sound education, based on the 
 Catholic Religion, in the person of James Har diman, Esq., of 
 Galway, who has enriched the native literature of his country 
 by the publication of some of those minstrel relics, with which 
 our ancestors soothed their religious misfortunes, and illustrated 
 its local annals by the elaborate and classic history of his ancient 
 native town. Such seasonable interposition at a time when the 
 enemies of our creed were anticipating that learning was doomed 
 to languish here, only proves that the Almighty’s will shall never 
 be wanting to those who put their trust in him, and who are 
 resolved to protect from any impure mixture, the integrity of 
 the religious knowledge with which the artless minds of children 
 are to be imbued. Besides the monasteries of Mount-Bellew 
 and Kilmoylan, already alluded to, we have in operation, those of 
 Roundstone and Clifden, which will soon scatter their pious colo- 
 nies over the entire of Cunnemara. 
 
 Our monastery in Tuam, which is extending the blessings of 
 religious education to about four hundred children, is, thank God, 
 now in such a flourishing state as to serve as a model school, where 
 such masters as may require it will be instructed in a course of 
 mathematics and other branches of learning, as well as trained 
 in all the practical observances of the Catholic religion. Besides 
 the benefits which it will diffuse among the peasantry within its 
 own immediate circle, we purpose to dedicate this new monastery 
 to a similar object, that it may be a school of training in 
 science, as well as the practices of piety, to those whom the 
 clergy of that district, may place over the education of the 
 younger portion of their flocks. 
 
 The immediate erection of this monastery, is an object de- 
 serving of your zeal and charitable contributions. I know the 
 variety of claims upon you, but recollect, that in contributing to 
 these institutions you will be reviving the best and happiest times 
 of the Catholic Church, and affording unalloyed comfort to the 
 children of misfortune. It is much better to contribute something r 
 voluntarily towards these pious institutions, which will be entirely 
 under the control of yourselves, and regulated by the discipline 
 of the Catholic Church, without any interference on the part of 
 its enemies, than to be subject, as you otherwise would be, to an 
 arbitrary and indefinite taxation, enforced by Protestant patrons, 
 or some Catholics, perhaps, equally indifferent to their religion, 
 
514 
 
 LETTER XCIV. 
 
 and who, as we have already seen in the brief period of the 
 working of the systems of education and of poor laws, would 
 show the most reckless indifference to the poor, in their anxiety 
 to make extravagant provisions for expensive political retainers. 
 
 Not so with the humble followers of St. Francis, who are to 
 conduct these establishments. Under them you will have no 
 jobbing patrons, rivalling each other in their efforts to add to 
 the local taxation, and to obtain the sanction of higher officers 
 for the excessive imposts. Practising, with their other vows, 
 that of Evangelical poverty, their habits, and mode of living 
 will be so simple that, without any exaggeration, more than sixty 
 of those meritorious individuals will be supported for what would 
 go to one sinecure officer, under a system first recommending 
 itself by treacherous gratuities, but which, like all such systems, 
 terminate, after trenching on religious liberty, in grinding and 
 compulsory taxation.* You are all animated, we are sure, by a 
 pure zeal for protecting, at all hazards, your holy religion. You 
 are anxious to suffer the little children to come to you, of whom 
 it is particularly said that “ of such is the kingdom of God.”f 
 Aid, then, those rising asylums of faith and piety. In doing 
 so, you will be protecting not only your religion, but likewise 
 your properties, from arbitrary imposts. So true is the saying 
 of our Divine Redeemer, “ seek first the kingdom of God and 
 his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”J You 
 will not forget to offer up your humble and fervent prayers to 
 the Almighty, that he may pour choicest blessings upon those 
 individuals who have generously devoted a portion of their patri- 
 mony to the truly religious education of the poor, and the pro- 
 tection, as well as the propagation of the Catholic religion. 
 
 “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the charity of 
 God, and the communication of the Holy Ghost be with you 
 all, Amen.Ӥ 
 
 Your faithful servant in Christ, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 * To convince you of this important truth, I refer you to the Bill of the 11th 
 of June, 1835, entitled “ A bill for the establishment of a Board of National 
 Education, and the advancement of elementary education in Ireland.” I trust 
 the spirited editor of the Freemans Journal, devoted as it is to the interests of 
 the Catholic religion, will publish the entire of this awful bill, that all may see 
 the tremendous and despotic powers that are assumed, not only over the entire 
 education, but likewise over the properties of the people. 
 
 f St. Mark, x, 14. % St. Matthew, vi, 33. § II. Corinthians, xiii, 13. 
 
LETTER XCV. 
 
 515 
 
 LETTER XCV. 
 
 TO THE VENERABLE THE CLERGY AND FAITHFUL OF THE 
 ARCHDIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, March 1, 1810. 
 
 Venerable and Dearly Beloved Brethren — We are arrived 
 at the annual period of Lent, set apart by the Church for the 
 exercise of mortification, in order to make satisfaction for sin, 
 and appease the Divine vengeance. Among the various enemies 
 by which the Church of God is assailed, in her incessant warfare 
 in the cause of truth and holiness, there are some who deny the 
 necessity or existence of* any atonement for sin, and others who 
 would draw from the redemption of our Saviour himself a release 
 from every moral restraint, and convert the very source of grace 
 into a patent for the indulgence of sensuality. Guarded by the 
 influence of that “ Spirit of Truth,* which was promised to abide 
 with it until the end of time, and to keep it from straying into 
 the bye-paths of error,” the Catholic Church has ever maintained 
 the fulness and efficacy of thef propitiation for our sins made by 
 our Saviour, “that J he might sanctify the people with his blood ;” 
 and deduced from that signal example of God’s justice, the ne- 
 cessity of avoiding any transgressions, by which his anger would 
 be again enkindled. § Had we not been “justified gratis by the 
 grace of God, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” 
 our penances, however austere, would be ineffectual in satisfying 
 the Divine vengeance ; and without the most strenuous efforts on 
 our part to avoid sin, and to make penitential satisfaction for its 
 commission, we might be unfortunately deprived of the merits of 
 redemption. It is to this principle of the necessity of a corres- 
 pondence in suffering between the faithful and our Redeemer, we 
 may trace the cogent exhortations to penance, that are scattered 
 throughout the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles of the 
 New Testament. Such is the sentiment expressed in the follow- 
 ing words of the Apostle || : “For, as the sufferings of Christ 
 abound in us, so also by Christ doth our comfort abound.” From 
 it has, likewise, sprung the institution of this penitential season, 
 called Lent, which meets us at every step as we ascend in 
 
 * St. John, xv, 26. f I. John, ii, 2. t Hebrews, xiii, 12. 
 
 § Romans, iii, 24. || II. Corinthians, i, 5. 
 
516 
 
 LETTER XCV. 
 
 the history of the Church, until we arrive at the apostolical 
 times. 
 
 The observances of this, as well as other penitential periods, 
 may vary, according to seasons and other circumstances; but the 
 spirit of mortification and of penance shall not cease, in some 
 form, to pervade them for ever. The reasons that have swayed 
 us last Lent to relax the rigours of abstinence, with regard to 
 flesh-meat, are, probably, still more cogent this season; and, 
 yielding to their force, we have adopted the very same regula- 
 tions which we published in our pastoral instructions of last year. 
 Flesh-meat is to be allowed, except on Wednesdays, Fridays, and 
 Saturdays, and the entire of the first and last weeks of Lent. 
 Eggs are prohibited on Fridays, and milk and butter on Ash 
 Wednesday, Spy Wednesday, and Good Friday. While this 
 dispensation is granted, with regard to the abstinence, we 
 must express our deep regret at the indifference that often pre- 
 vails respecting the fast, in some persons who require no such 
 indulgence. It is a grievous infraction of the precepts of Lent, 
 for persons, who do not come within the ordinary exceptions to 
 the rule, to take their full meals at their collations ; and a still 
 more glaring violation of it to use eggs (as we have reason to 
 fear that some do), or even milk and butter, without any scruple, 
 as at other seasons. You will, dearly beloved brethren, labour 
 to remove this ignorance, or check this indifference, and admo- 
 nish such as need it, that the relaxations now granted leave en- 
 tirely untouched the general obligation of the precept of fasting. 
 
 At all times the precepts of charity and alms-deeds are 
 mingled with those of self-mortification ; and we are taught that 
 the “ retrenchments of abstinence should find their way to the 
 relief of the miseries of the poor.”* As yet they are labouring 
 under much of the severe privations which have been occasioned 
 by a scarcity of fuel. The mercies of the wealthy will, we trust, 
 be practically exercised in mitigating the peculiar hardships of 
 their condition during this very rigorous season. 
 
 But, above all, you will not fail to manifest a more than 
 ordinary zeal and benevolence towards that class, at once the 
 most helpless and valuable portion of society — I mean the rising 
 generation. A few years only elapse, and the adult pass away,f 
 as the shifting “ tent of a shepherd ;” the void is quickly filled 
 by the next succession ; and on the impressions stamped upon 
 their tender and susceptible minds, depend not only their own 
 religious destiny, but the prospective interests of faith and 
 morality, for future generations, perhaps to the end of time. 
 What an awful consideration for the pastors of the church ! It 
 is enough to make the most zealous souls to tremble. Well do 
 
 St. Leo, 
 
 f Isaias. 
 
LETTER XCV. 
 
 517 
 
 they merit man’s chiefest solicitude, to whom* guardian angels 
 are allotted in heaven, and for whom, on account of the untainted 
 candour of their faith and simplicity of their hearts, is destined, 
 in a peculiar manner, the kingdom of God.f On this chosen 
 portion of the Church of God, its enemies have been ever making 
 their chiefest assaults ; and it was for the protection of the same 
 the most heroic zeal and fortitude have been always displayed 
 by its sainted pastors. 
 
 For a series of years we have had to combat a variety of 
 such assaults, in alternate succession of force and fraud, until, 
 thanks to your piety, seconding our exertions, we have been 
 enabled to plant throughout the diocese schools of pure, un- 
 mixed, and unadulterated Catholic education. They are but yet 
 in their infancy, it is true — you will not fail to bring to perfec- 
 tion those nurseries of piety and morality, which yourselves have 
 erected. 
 
 There have not been wanting active emissaries of the enemies 
 of our faith, who strove to render some discontented, because 
 they were not sharing in the public funds granted for education. 
 However, their false commisseration was easily seen through ; 
 and it was not difficult to perceive that, in their hypocritical pity 
 for the poor, those interested agents were only lamenting their 
 loss of a profitable, pecuniary speculation. It is unnecessary for 
 us to state that we felt for your temporal necessities as much as 
 faithful and affectionate pastors could feel ; and that nothing but 
 the dread of exposing that faith, compared to which gold is as 
 dross, and the conviction brought to our minds, by subsequent 
 acts of annoyance, that that dread was well-founded, could have 
 induced us to give you counsel to rely on your own resources — 
 trusting in that God who never abandons those that never change 
 their faith from him. J 
 
 Our just expectations have, thank God, not been frustrated. 
 At the late meeting of the prelates of Ireland, overtures for an 
 accommodation of this great controversy were made, into which 
 we did not fail to enter, with the same charitable and pacific 
 spirit in which they were proposed. The result is consolatory : 
 after the subject was discussed, with all the patience which its 
 importance required, an arrangement, such as could not fail to 
 secure the integrity of faith and morals, as well as the free 
 and full exercise of the episcopal authority, was unanimously 
 adopted ; but, as the public grants depended on the will of the 
 government, it was deemed necessary to submit the adopted 
 arrangement to the Lord Lieutenant, with the view that, as the 
 prayers of a few Presbyterians had already found favor in that 
 
 * St. Matthew, xviii, 10. f St. Matthew, xix, 14. 
 
 X Tobias, ii, 18. 
 
518 
 
 LETTER XCV. 
 
 quarter, the unanimous arrangement of all the Catholic bishops 
 of Ireland would meet his Excellency’s sanction. Four prelates 
 from the different ecclesiastical provinces of Ireland waited on 
 his Excellency, who, in a written reply, refused to accede to 
 the proposed requisition. One paramount object, however, is 
 gained — the unanimity of the hierarchy ; and that unanimity 
 attests the wisdom, the justice, and the extreme moderation of 
 the proposed but rejected arrangement. 
 
 Though we have been disappointed in our hopes of sharing the 
 public grants on the proffered terms, it is no small consolation to 
 us to reflect that nothing was wanting on our part which prudence 
 or conciliation could suggest to secure to you, without any com- 
 promise of principle, a fair proportion of the parliamentary 
 funds. We were always of opinion that nothing but a separate 
 education of the people, left to the control of their respective 
 pastors, could ensure the blessings of religious sincerity and 
 social peace. In that opinion we are more strongly confirmed 
 by the result of the late episcopal deputation. One could not 
 but feel that, from the sort of control which his Excellency had 
 over the public finances, he seemed to draw the conclusion that 
 he should possess a corresponding control over the instruments, 
 such as books and masters, by which the faith of the people was 
 to be moulded. Such a natural prejudice, spontaneously spring- 
 ing from the principles of the Protestant church, could not excite 
 surprise. From the confusion and embarrassment of Protestant 
 divines, in fixing the limits of church authority accorded to the 
 crown, it is hard to measure the extent of spiritual obedience 
 that is expected; but, from the singular tone of ecclesiastical 
 admonition that pervades liis Excellency’s elaborate reply, it 
 would seem as if he addressed us more in the capacity of repre- 
 sentative of the spiritual, than as the viceregent of the temporal, 
 head of these realms. Our arrangements required no more than 
 perfect freedom in the fulfilment of the essential duties of our 
 office, as well as the necessary guarantees to secure that essential 
 independence, without being exposed to the caprices of changing 
 administrations. We sought but protection for our flock from 
 the contagion of bad books and immoral masters, in the control 
 over both, which inalienably belongs to us. Next, we demand 
 justice for all the districts by a provincial representation ; and 
 security for the faith, by the appointment of four Catholic 
 bishops as members of the Board of Education, who should be 
 uniformly recommended by the suffrages of their own body. 
 Yet, all these reasonable requisitions were denied. 
 
 We mention those things, venerable brethren, that you may 
 understand that, in our anxiety to conciliate, we have gone to 
 the last verge to which our trembling anxiety for the faith of our 
 flocks could authorize us to go. Had we gone further, we would 
 
LETTER XCV. 
 
 519 
 
 fear the fate of the unhappy bishops of Russia, who were a 
 stumbling-block to the people whom it was their duty to guide, 
 and whose fall is pathetically deplored in a recent allocution of 
 his Holiness, with which we most cordially sympathise. But the 
 unshaken fidelity of the Irish Church to the chair of St. Peter 
 forbids us to entertain any distressing anxieties ; and the solici- 
 tude of the pastors and people to hear his voice in the person of 
 his successor, is a guarantee that our faith will be as secure 
 against the intriguing machinations of the present, as it has been 
 against the persecutions of past ages. 
 
 The utter failure of the scheme that has been so insidiously 
 and perse veringly pushed on, only shows more clearly the es- 
 sential and eternal distinction between spiritual and secular 
 authority, It exemplifies the truth and wisdom of the words of 
 an ancient holy pontiff, Gelasius : “ There are two powers by 
 which this world is ruled — the sacred authority of pontiffs, and 
 those of kings. As to their relative obligations, those of the 
 priests are more weighty, since they must answer before the 
 Divine tribunal for the rulers of men.” Similar is the distinction 
 drawn between the two powers by Pope Gregory II., in his 
 letter to the Emperor of the East : “As the pontiff has no power 
 of looking within the enclosures of the palace, and disposing of 
 royal dignities, neither is it lawful for the Emperor to remove 
 the veil of the sanctuary.” 
 
 From those few references, so fraught with truth, you must 
 perceive with what jealousy the secular and spiritual authorities 
 were preserved in their respective spheres, without clashing with 
 each other. Their wisdom is proved by experience. The less 
 we concern ourselves with the political affairs of the court, the 
 better for the purity of religion, as well as the peace of society. 
 If we look into the enclosures of the palace, its inmates will, in 
 return, remove the veil of the sanctuary, to intrude into its en- 
 closures : there is not a step we take to its precincts for which 
 more steps will not be taken by them towards the entrance to 
 our temples ; and not a personal favor will they ever confer, for 
 which they will not strive to indemnify themselves, by a silent 
 encroachment on the public and religious rights and duties of 
 those whom they may succeed in laying under secular obli- 
 gations. 
 
 But, though disappointed in our expectations, we are neither 
 to indulge in discontent or despondency. Whatever be the 
 treatment we receive, we are ever to keep in view the holy pre- 
 cepts of being* “ subject to the higher powers, not only for fear, 
 but for conscience sake,” which the pastors of the Catholic 
 Church have ever inculcated with inviolable fidelity. We are 
 
 * Romans, xiii. 
 
520 
 
 LETTER XCV. 
 
 also to cherish the well-grounded hope, that our rulers will not 
 fail, in recompense for such unshaken fealty, to enable us to pre- 
 serve, pure and unmixed, that religious education of the youth 
 of our communion, to which the peculiar fidelity that charac- 
 terises Catholics is to be traced. You will, therefore, send forth 
 from every parish your humble, ardent, and persevering peti- 
 tions, to obtain such reasonable concessions from the wisdom and 
 justice of the legislature and the throne. It was by such legal 
 and peaceful means we have obtained the other benefits we now 
 enjoy ; and we are sure that petitions in favor of an arrangement, 
 having the solemn, and deliberate, and unanimous sanction of the 
 prelates of eight millions of loyal and devoted subjects, must be 
 crowned with that success to which they are entitled. In this 
 confidence we are strengthened by the experience of the past. 
 Is it not consolatory to witness what an array has already 
 gathered round the just cause of free and separate education, 
 since this important question was first mooted ? To what is this 
 owing, but to the providence of that God who never fails to 
 watch over that Church which himself has founded ; and who, 
 when it seems most bereft of human succour, interposes his sea- 
 sonable aid ? There are in the Church thousands of pure and 
 pious souls, whose secret aspirations, going forth to heaven, do 
 more in procuring those blessings for the Church than any mere 
 human instruments can achieve. 
 
 This is a season peculiarly set apart for the exercise of prayer, 
 as well as of penance. While, then, your temporal petitions are 
 sent to the legislature, let your spiritual prayers go forth to heaven, 
 beseeching Him who freed his apostles, to preserve the sacred 
 freedom of the pastors of his Church, and as the “ hearts of kings 
 are in his hands,” so to dispose them by his will as to lend a 
 gracious ear to the just prayers of their people. In the meantime, 
 you will allow no religious books into the hands of the children of 
 the diocese but such as have our approbation ; and you will cir- 
 culate, with peculiar care, the English and Irish Catechisms, 
 which have been just published for their use, and which so cor- 
 respond, that one, as far as the idioms of the two languages 
 permit, is an exact version of the other. The monastic schools, 
 already so flourishing under the peculiar blessings of heaven, will 
 be special objects of your fostering solicitude. Into no school 
 will you allow a master of corrupt faith or morals, recollecting 
 the awful denunciations of our Divine Redeemer against those 
 who “ scandalize one of the little ones that believe in him.”* 
 
 In conclusion, dearly-beloved brethren, let us exhort you, in 
 the words of the apostle, “to join with your faith virtue, and 
 with virtue knowledge, and with knowledge abstinence, and with 
 
 Mark, ix, 41. 
 
LETTER XCVI. 
 
 521 
 
 abstinence patience, and with patience piety, and with piety 
 brotherly love, and with brotherly love charity.” “ Wherefore, 
 labour the more, that by good works you may make sure your 
 vocation and election,” for so an entrance “ shall be ministered to 
 you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ.”* 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 [You are requested to read this from the altar, and explain it in Irish to your, 
 flocks,] 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 TO IIIS GRACE THE MOST REV. DR. MURRAY. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, March, 1840. 
 
 My Lord — The auspicious unanimity among their bishops has 
 been hailed with joy by the Catholics of Ireland. The same 
 happy event diffused among all the rancorous bigots of the land 
 feelings of corresponding terror and alarm. That the political sec- 
 tion of the board, including Protestants of every creed, and what 
 is called in courtly language liberal Catholics, should be deeply 
 mortified at such a result, is what might naturally be expected ; 
 but never was it anticipated that a Catholic prelate should feel 
 and express sympathy with those who, unless we concurred in 
 their assaults upon our faith, would rejoice at our disunion. 
 
 It is now fourteen years since your grace appended your 
 signature to a series of solemn resolutions, such as were adopted 
 at the late meeting, differing only in this respect, that the experi- 
 ence of the awful evils which this monstrous system has already 
 inflicted, required more explicitness in the resolutions, as well as 
 a more defined legislative guarantee for their prospective enforce- 
 ment. Your grace was the organ through whom our resolutions 
 were then conveyed to the commissioners of education inquiry, 
 as well as their communication to the assembled prelates. 
 On that occasion your grace seemed to participate in the just and 
 generous feeling, that pervaded the entire assembly on hearing 
 
 2 L 
 
 * II. Peter, i, v, vi, 
 
522 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 the insolent reply of the petulant officials, “ that they would not 
 suffer the resolutions of the bishops to obstruct that which they 
 were determined to pursue.” 
 
 We could not then imagine that the day would arrive, when 
 your grace would be found embarked in the same cause with 
 some of the very same insulting officials, equally regardless, not 
 only of the feelings but of the rights and duties of the episcopal 
 body, and determined, with an obstinacy that appears altogether 
 unaccountable, that no arrangement, however solemn or unani- 
 mously adopted by the bishops, will be suffered to cross that 
 path which they are determined to pursue ! Since that period, 
 your grace has become the panegyrist of the most offensive 
 calumniators of the Catholic creed, and the apologist of the 
 insidious and poisonous productions that were tainting the faith 
 of the flock, that were entrusted to our care. Support or oppo- 
 sition to the board seems now to be the only test of a continuance 
 or disruption of the episcopal relations, and towards all who are 
 prepared to do homage to that anomalous thing erected in 
 Marlborough-street by an anti- Catholic policy, all the ancient 
 and apostolical feelings of the bishop are forgotten, in the more 
 recent and secular connexions of the commissioner. 
 
 Without such a strong feeling of sympathy with the enemies 
 of our creed, springing no doubt from a confidence in their honor, 
 your grace’s last epistle would be altogether unaccountable. It 
 pretends to be a commentary on a passage in my pastoral instruc- 
 tion to the clergy and faithful of this diocese ; but though not 
 forbearing in insinuations, your grace does not deny a single 
 passage in that document which you were so studious to arraign. 
 One paramount object, however, is gained, the unanimity of the 
 hierarchy, and that unanimity attests the wisdom, the justice, and 
 extreme moderation of the proposed, but rejected arrangement. 
 This is the proposition that has elicited your “ grace’s displea- 
 sure.” Yet, not venturing to controvert its truth, you studiously 
 guard the reader against the dreadful inference of supposing 
 that the prelates deemed such an arrangement necessary. It is 
 not the first time, my lord, that your grace has attempted to 
 trifle with the deliberate and unanimous resolutions of the bishops 
 of Ireland. I am not surprised. Your grace no doubt would 
 prefer, as you have done before, catching their opinions by the 
 vague generalities of “ confidential circulars than in the precise 
 language that condenses” the result of collective and deep- 
 thought deliberations. Another advantage would accrue from 
 this system of separate catechising — that mysterious rumours of 
 all being favourable to the board could be industriously sent 
 abroad for some time, and that afterwards a few such opinions 
 might be published, and the opposite opinions all fortuitously 
 suppressed. 
 
LETTER XCVI. 
 
 523 
 
 But we are told that the arrangement was not adopted, but 
 acquiesced in, and that the latter was the term used. Yes, it 
 was used in the repeated but frustrated efforts of your grace to 
 have it substituted for the word adopted , which had passed the 
 meetings, and which is recorded on our resolution book, with the 
 signatures of the chairman and secretary. Nay, it is the word 
 used in the copy published in that journal which conveys your 
 grace’s letter. The word acquiesce , on which you lay an italic 
 emphasis, was not suffered to find a place in any of the resolu- 
 tions, nor should I advert to this circumstance, were it not for 
 the strange perseverance, now understood, with which you sought 
 to have one word substituted for the other. 
 
 But this is not the only inaccuracy as to facts that is to 
 be found in your epistle. Your grace insinuates that the 
 suggestion for an arrangement came from the opponents of the 
 board, in which the others acquiesced, in opposition to my asser- 
 tion, that “ we entered into the overtures of an accommodation 
 of this great controversy in the same pacific spirit in which 
 they were proposed.” As your must have believed that such 
 was the case, I would recommend an acquaintance with the facts 
 ere you incautiously publish such assertions. Your grace was 
 absent from our meeting when the proposition was first mooted. 
 During the entire of Tuesday, there was a total, and, as it 
 were, a studied silence on the subject ; and allow me to assure 
 you, that if our meetings had continued since, we, as far as I 
 could learn the sentiments of my brethren, never would have 
 proposed any modification in the national board. This important 
 overture was made by the primate of all Ireland, on Wednesday, 
 the 12th ; and, though we appreciated then, as we do still, the 
 sincere and pure episcopal spirit in which it was first proposed, 
 we, so far from signifying our readiness to rush into such a 
 measure, observed that we did not think ourselves competent to 
 bring now before our tribunal a weighty case, involving the faith 
 and morals of a national Church that was referred to the Pope. 
 It was only when it was mutually agreed on that our arragement 
 was to be subsidiary and subordinate to the deliberations at 
 Rome, that we consented at all to entertain this question. As 
 your grace has set the example of publishing our proceedings, at 
 which I sincerely rejoice, allow me, in return, to add the intro- 
 ductory resolution, which may be considered the key of the 
 entire proceedings : — 
 
 “At a general meeting of the Roman Catholic prelates of Ireland, held in 
 Dublin, on the 12th of February, the Most Rev. Dr. MacHale in the chair, 
 
 “It was moved by the Most Rev. Dr. Crolly, and seconded by the Right Rev. 
 Dr. Cantwell, that a committee of three prelates favourable, and of three prelates 
 unfavourable, to the present mixed system of education, be appointed to confer 
 together for the purpose of making an arrangement that would, if possible, 
 establish unanimity in the system of combined education amongst the prelates 
 of Ireland. “f Thomas Feeny, Secretary.” 
 
524 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 This clear and explicit resolution requires no commentary, 
 since unanimity amongst the prelates of Ireland, respecting the 
 system of national education, is its manifest and declared purpose. 
 Accordingly, three prelates, on either side, with the mutual 
 consent of all, proceeded to the task of making the proposed 
 arrangement. The primate and the bishops of Limerick and 
 Ossory represented the prelates favourable to the board. The 
 bishops of Ferns and Ardagh, together with your grace’s corres- 
 pondent, formed the representatives of those who are adverse to 
 its uncanonical constitution, and its most arbitrary regulations. 
 
 To show, further, that we were not the persons who signified 
 any intention to modify the board, I beg leave to subjoin our 
 proposition to the other bishops : — “ The prelates selected by 
 those who are opposed to the national system of education to 
 confer with the others who are favourable to it, deem it their 
 duty distinctly to state their conviction that a separate education 
 for the children of their flocks is that which is most conformable 
 to the laws of God and the Church, and the best calculated to 
 make them pious Catholics and faithful subjects ; and they feel 
 no doubt that a grant would be obtained for that purpose from 
 the justice and wisdom of the legislature, were the prelates 
 unanimous in such a petition. They, therefore, offer this principle 
 of accommodation, on which they were all unanimous in the year 
 1824, as appears by the petition which they then sent to parlia- 
 ment. It is not, therefore, without much anxiety for its results 
 that they would concur in any other.” 
 
 This proposition not being likely to meet with the general 
 concurrence of the prelates, the primate undertook the task of 
 drawing up an arrangement, which he prosecuted with zeal and 
 efficiency, aided by the hearty co-operation of the entire com- 
 mittee, who conducted this important business with a spirit and 
 temper worthy of bishops, and that breathed that love of 
 unanimity for which they were selected. The arrangement was 
 then submitted to the assembly, and, after the disposal of the 
 verbal choice alluded to, unanimously adopted , for the purpose of 
 being submitted to his Excellency’s consideration. 
 
 There is no doubt, then, but the arrangement was one on 
 which the prelates of Ireland were unanimous, as far as their 
 opinions were concerned, and on which they would act unani- 
 mously, if his Excellency had not refused to sanction its requisi- 
 tion. This is rendered incontestible from another important 
 part of our proceedings, namely, that the arrangement was not 
 only submitted to his Excellency, but likewise to his Holiness, 
 together with his Excellency’s answer, refusing to ratify that 
 arrangement. I am circumstantial on this subject, for the purpose 
 of impressing upon all the weight and importance of resolutions 
 which are attempted to be treated by the advocates of the board, 
 
LETTER XCVI. 
 
 525 
 
 as they have been wont to treat all the resolutions of the Catholic 
 bishops, with an air of indifference. Four prelates, from the 
 four ecclesiastical provinces, three archbishops, and the senior 
 suffragan of the province of Dublin, who represented likewise, 
 in equal numbers, those who were favourable and opposed to the 
 board, waited on his Excellency to present the arrangement which 
 was unanimously adopted by their brethren. The signatures 
 of the same four prelates authenticated to the Holy See the 
 genuineness of those two documents. 
 
 Let, now, the Catholics of Ireland who feel, as they ought to 
 feel, an intense interest in this great question, weigh all the 
 solemn circumstances attending the arrangement lately adopted 
 by their bishops, and judge whether it was too much to say, that 
 their “ unanimity attested its wisdom, its justice, and its extreme 
 moderation.” They cannot surely suppose that the assembled 
 prelates of Ireland would protract the discussion of a vital 
 question from Tuesday to the Monday following (with only one 
 day’s interval for the business of the College of Maynooth), in 
 order to adopt a foolish, or an unjust, or an intemperate arrange- 
 ment. When they consider, besides, that this arrangement was 
 adopted for the purpose of being submitted to the two greatest 
 authorities to whom they owed civil or religious obedience — 
 namely, the representative of her Majesty on the one hand, and 
 his Holiness on the other, they must be impressed with a still 
 stronger idea of the wisdom of their deliberations, and the 
 justice and moderation of their resolves. They cannot entertain 
 the notion that their sittings were a farce, their arrangement a 
 decent mockery, and their waiting on the viceroy a theatrical 
 pageant to amuse the simple-minded, whilst some commissioners 
 behind the puppits might be giving secret counsel to his Excellency 
 not to listen to the counterfeit prayers of some of the episcopal 
 deputation. As such an insulting idea could not for a moment 
 be entertained, I must repeat my assertion, that the unanimity of 
 the prelates attested the wisdom, the justice, and the extreme 
 moderation of their arrangement. If I should wrong my brother 
 prelates in so qualifying our joint resolves, I doubt if they 
 should feel much complimented by any who, at the expense of 
 their wisdom, their justice, or their discretion, would attempt 
 their vindication. 
 
 But your grace fears that from these qualities I infer the 
 necessity of the arrangement, and by a gentle insinuation that 
 such could not be my meaning, labours to guard the readers 
 against such an inference. I always mean what I speak and 
 write, and I do confess myself totally ignorant of that diplomatic 
 refinement, so beautifully painted by St. Gregory in our divine 
 office as the boasted wisdom of the world, studied by wily 
 politicians who strive to “ conceal in the disguise of words the 
 
526 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 feelings of the heart, and then give to this perverseness of the 
 mind the name of urbanity.” Yet let us consider this very 
 inference of their necessity, to which your grace has been the 
 first to point attention. Ireland is torn by religious dissensions 
 which it knew not before, until in an an evil hour a monstrous 
 alliance of all creeds, unknown to this country or the Catholic 
 Church, and imported by strangers, was striven to be established. 
 As that alliance labours to gain ground, the reign of discord, of 
 which it is the centre, is widening in the same proportion. 
 The people are scandalized, and the prelates on all sides at length 
 take the alarm. They deliberate for the purpose of adopting 
 an arrangement, which, by securing unanimity, will arrest the 
 progress of the disorder. That arrangement must be confessed 
 to be wise, just, and moderate, or the prelates must be stigmatized 
 with unbecoming imputations : the arrangement is deemed so 
 necessary and essential by many, that without it they will never 
 sanction the new system within their jurisdiction. If, then, the 
 tendency of the evil complained of — the disunion of the prelates — 
 be hopeless, without a measure which is deemed just, and wise, 
 and moderate by all, I put it to your grace’s candour, I put it 
 to the good sense of every reader, whether it would be an infer- 
 ence at variance with sound moral reasoning, to pronounce such 
 an arrangemeut even necessary to meet the just requisitions of a 
 large portion of the Catholic bishops and clergy, to ’give con- 
 fidence to the laity, and restore peace to the Irish Church ? 
 
 Your grace, then, may have the full benefit of either acquies- 
 cence or adoption, I care not which, since the arrangement, use 
 what expression you will, is the registered result of the free, the 
 solemn, and the conscientious opinions of the Catholic prelates of 
 Ireland on a question deeply affecting the interests of religion, 
 and deserving, as such, the serious attention of any ministry 
 affecting a regard for the moral weal of eight millions of loyal 
 subjects, of whom these prelates are the chief pastors. Whether 
 it was treated with the respectful attention it deserved, let those 
 who are concerned determine ; and then lay their respectful 
 petitions for redress before the legislature and the throne. 
 
 Without expending any labour in reference to the divine or 
 ecclesiastical rights of the bishops, to which his Excellency’s 
 reply is at variance, let any dispassionate person put in juxta- 
 position their propositions and his answer, and then ask which is 
 best calculated to secure the sacred deposit of faith and morality. 
 Catholic Ireland has already come to a fair judgment on that 
 question. I am delighted, however, at the frank and unequivocal 
 tone that marks his Excellency’s stern refusal. There is no 
 attempt to throw dust into the people’s eyes, except through 
 the thin sophistry of the passage regarding “ the equal terms 
 among all sects and denominations of Christians!” But such 
 
LETTER XCVI. 
 
 527 
 
 phrases cannot impose upon any, while the unequal and unjust 
 monopolies of Trinity College, and the Establishment, attest but 
 too painfully the insulting inequality with which Catholics are 
 still treated in the land of their birth. Grants for educating the 
 poor of Ireland must then, necessarily, be almost for Catholics, 
 especially in three of the provinces. To be thinking of Pres- 
 byterians where there are none, is a superfluous expenditure of 
 paternal solicitude. They might have a fair share for them- 
 selves in the small corner to which their kirk is confined ; and 
 as for the children of the establishment, they should be, in all 
 conscience, suitably educated out of those enormous funds that 
 are too ample for the vanishing section of the Protestant popu- 
 lation. There is no error any longer about the right of appointing 
 or dismissing masters, which some ecclesiastics fancied they could 
 exclusively exercise. But how little they were to be under the 
 control of the local priesthood, and how completely to be the 
 servants of the board, appears from the interesting and instructive 
 letter of the Rev. Mr. M‘Swiney, in the diocese of Cork, well 
 worthy of the attention of the clergy of Ireland. Nor is there 
 any room for misconception about books, since his Excellency 
 candidly lets the bishops understand, that they cannot use what 
 books they choose in the schools in their own dioceses, though 
 they might exclusively consist of their own flocks ! ! All this 
 is plain, and manly, and dissipates much of that pleasing delusion, 
 by which some good-natured and easy-minded persons persuaded 
 themselves into opposite opinions. 
 
 In short, he reads us a lecture containing a summary of the 
 rules for our instruction, and hopes that the light of it will flash 
 upon our minds, will dissipate the darkness of our intellects, and 
 work in some of us, at least, a more docile disposition. It matters 
 to us little what such rules may be at any time, whilst there is 
 no check over the legislative powder of an arbitrary body that 
 may change, and has changed them according to their own 
 caprices. But as the climax of the consolation with which he 
 thought to fill us, he dwells with rapture on the zeal that has 
 characterized the members of our own creed, and wonders how, 
 with such sentinels watching over the system, we could feel any 
 alarm at the lectures that might be delivered in the model 
 schools. 
 
 His Excellency may, no doubt, be a pious man ; but his piety 
 is not the standard by which Catholic bishops are to square their 
 notions of books, or masters, or model schools for their flocks. 
 He eulogizes the Catholic members, and were any other Catholic 
 members to be more liberal in their opinions, and to approximate 
 more nearly to Protestants, they would not, on that account, sink 
 in his Excellency’s estimation. No doubt, Mr. Blake came in 
 for a large mental share of his Excellencys’s panegyric ; and that 
 
528 
 
 LETTER XCVI. 
 
 gentleman’s anxiety to maintain Protestant ascendancy, and to 
 abridge in Ireland the authority of the Pope, were not the least 
 valuable claims to his Excellency’s high and flattering con- 
 sideration. “I am myself a friend to Protestant ascendancy in 
 Ireland” is his solemn declaration ; and on being asked, “ Is it 
 not the interest of the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland to have 
 as little to do with the Pope as possible, and to connect them- 
 selves as much as possible with the established government — 
 the government of the country ?” “ I think it is.”* It is to 
 
 such political sycophants, then, holding such opinions regarding 
 the entire of Catholic unity, the bishops of Ireland are told to 
 hand over the divine trust of the instruction of their flocks ; 
 and they are treated to a courtly homily to rest secure, and leave 
 the pastors to the selection of such guardians. 
 
 I am not now surprised at the reluctance that was felt in 
 referring this question to Rome. But, after such stubbornness 
 on the part of the board to submit to any Papal interference, it 
 may excite surprise what has brought Mr. Hamilton Dowdal to 
 the eternal city at this seasonable juncture, as secretary for 
 foreign affairs, whilst his brother secretary presides over the 
 home department. 
 
 The overgrown influence of the Holy See has been long the 
 theme of the enemies of the faithful in Ireland. To circumscribe 
 it first, in order eventually to crush it, has been the study of 
 their sinister policy. The eventful history of the past twenty 
 years teems with facts illustrative of those designs. Hence, the 
 quaint observation of Cobbett, a shrewd observer of events and 
 characters, regarding the schemes of some men to erect a little 
 political Papacy in Ireland. What might have been but the 
 crude conceptions of others, the politicians of the board are 
 labouring to realise. It is no wonder — the men of many creeds 
 cannot well endure that power which is ever at war with error, 
 and I can well conceive how in that academy of Babel opinions, 
 the teachers of only one faith, and one way of salvation, must 
 be peculiarly obnoxious. Of this one thing I have now sad 
 proofs, that if there are any who have been remarkable for 
 their bigotry and hostility to the Catholic faith, the board is 
 become with them an object of peculiar predilection. I need but 
 name the notorious Achill colony, that is spreading the foulest 
 falsehoods regarding all that is holy in our religion. The patrons 
 of this body would feign be the patrons also of the national 
 schools, for the same identical hatred to our ereed, and actuated 
 by the conviction that the national board and the Achill colony 
 are leagued in one object, the gradual corruption and extinction 
 of the Catholic faith in Ireland, 
 
 * Minutes of Evidence, House of Lords, 1825. 
 
LETTER XCVI. 
 
 529 
 
 Your grace concludes by observing, “ that you abstain from 
 adverting to other passages in the letter which it would be painful 
 to notice.” How I must appreciate your grace’s forbearance. 
 It would be more satisfactory to point out those passages in the 
 pastoral letter, than thus wrap up your insinuations in vague 
 generalities. There can be no dispute about tastes. I trust, 
 however, that the most fastidious will not find there a phrase 
 opposed to Catholic discipline or Catholic orthodoxy. You, 
 it seems, felt no pain in recommending strenuously erroneous 
 books that are reprobated at Rome. We know not whether 
 your grace felt pain at the scandalous doctrines that were 
 published by one of your priests, insulting to the Apostolic 
 See, calumnious of the Catholic priesthood of Ireland — which 
 were tearing the unity of the Church, and filling the faithful 
 people of Ireland with soorow, and to check which the interpositon 
 of the same Apostolic See became necessary. Had you felt 
 and manifested more pain about those errors, so near home, 
 you might have been spared your superfluous solicitude about 
 the flocks of other pastors, or about the instructions which they 
 may deem it their duty to dispense, in order to guard them 
 against the insidious and daring assaults that are making on our 
 holy religion. Do then, my lord, confine yourselves in future. 
 “ to the care of that flock over which the Holy Ghost has placed 
 you,” and listen no longer to the counsel of those who would 
 feign give your grace a commission, which they have not them- 
 selves, of interfering in the religious concerns of others. To none 
 but one is the “ solicitude of all the churches” confided. After 
 the Supreme Pastor of the fold, none will now be allowed the 
 title of a universal bishop, more than in the days when it was 
 attempted, under the shadow of the secular power, to be set up 
 in Constantinople. 
 
 If I thought my advice would be effectual, I would adjure your 
 grace, in the name of thousands of pious Catholics in Ireland, to 
 retire from a connexion that has brought nought of consolation, 
 and that is inflicting fresh evils of incurred religious discord on 
 the country. You have now an opportunity of showing the 
 influence for good that is yet in your hands. If you leave 
 the vessel, down it goes — the faith is safe — Ireland will rejoice — 
 the education of its youth will be free and flourishing — and as 
 for those aliens to our creed and country with which it is being 
 filled, they will, by a timely flight from the sinking concern, 
 provide for their own safety. I do not yet despair to see this 
 happy consummation. Let us then all labour to cement rather 
 than loosen the unanimity that has been effected, and strive 
 to confirm it for ever. If we do, the generous clergy and 
 laity of Ireland will not be wanting in seconding our exertions. 
 Your grace is aware that the sole argument — I might say the 
 
530 
 
 LETTER XCVII. 
 
 only sophism — now in favour of the board is, that if its funds 
 were withdrawn, the youth of Ireland would be uneducated ! 
 Never was there a more foul or a more insulting calumny. 
 Ireland was in high literary character long before it was cursed 
 with the false religions of the Scotch or of the English. Even 
 since, it has risen in its intellectual might, and by the learning, 
 the eloquence, and the other high moral attributes, as well as to 
 the growing wealth and numbers of its children, it has achieved 
 a bloodless victory over the bigotry of religious foes unexampled 
 in the history of the world. And is it at a period like this, after 
 passing from bondage and arriving at the goal of triumph, the 
 Irish Catholics must put themselves in leading-strings to lisp the 
 elements of literature, and morality, and religion, under the 
 tutelage of Scotch and English as well as Irish sectaries, who 
 would not scruple to give a niche to Mahometanism in their 
 polypistic temple, provided it gave them a share in the catering 
 of the public money. The petitions of the clergy and laity of 
 Ireland, already so successful in obtaining important concessions, 
 will be crowned with equal success in demanding the just right of 
 separate grants for education. No matter what some interested 
 individuals, opposed to justice, may assert to the contrary, the 
 rightful petitions of the people must ultimately prevail. But 
 should our hopes be disappointed for some time, the people will 
 liberally provide for their schools, especially when they learn that 
 by so doing they will not only secure the faith and morals of 
 their children, but will save the districts from a grinding power 
 of arbitrary local taxation which would, under the management 
 of corrupt patrons, some of the bigoted landlords of the country, 
 be a bitter source of fresh oppression to the poor, and of sorrow 
 to the clergy, who, under the terror of the King’s Bench, would 
 find themselves constrained, as some have been already, to tolerate 
 corrupt teachers in the very bosom of their flocks. 
 
 I have the honor to remain, my lord, your obedient servant, 
 
 fcj* John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER XCVII. 
 
 TO HIS GRACE THE MOST KEY. DR. MURRAY. 
 
 Westport, March 25th, 1840. 
 
 My Lord — It is then true, according to your grace’s own 
 admission, that the arrangement which was submitted to his 
 
LETTER XCVII. 
 
 531 
 
 Excellency by the bishops, and to which he was pleased to give 
 a stern refusal, was in pursuance of a resolution “ unanimously 
 adopted, and was the positive act of all that the unanimity of 
 the hierarchy was obtained on that important point, can no 
 longer be contested. It is equally unquestionable, since their 
 resolution to submit the arrangement was unanimous, that his 
 Excellency refused to acquiesce in the unanimous prayers of the 
 Catholic bishops of Ireland. This appears clear from his Excel- 
 lency’s answer, who feels himself “ bound distinctly to state to 
 the deputation of bishops that no such changes can be made as 
 they desire.” It may, however, be more satisfactory to the 
 reader to be furnished with genuine copies of the text of our 
 acts , and the document now referred to, than to be detained by 
 any tedious or conflicting commentaries. I shall set down the 
 resolutions in the same order in which they were adopted : — 
 
 “ At a general meeting of the Roman Catholic Prelates of Ireland, held in 
 Dublin, on the 12th of February, the Most Rev. Dr. MacIIale in the Chair, 
 
 “ It was moved by the Most Rev. Dr. Crolly, and seconded by the Right Rev. 
 Dr. Cantwell, that a committee of three prelates favourable, and of three 
 prelates unfavourable to the present mixed system of education, be appointed to 
 confer together, for the purpose of making an arrangement that would, if 
 possible, establish unanimity in the system of combined education amongst the 
 prelates of Ireland. << f Thomas Feeny, Secretary.” 
 
 “At a general meeting of the Roman Catholic Prelates of Ireland, held in 
 Dublin, on the 14th of February, Most Rev. Dr. Crolly in the Chair, 
 
 “ It was moved by the Right Rev. Dr. Coen, and carried unanimously, that 
 the arrangement which was agreed upon by the above committee, consisting of 
 the Most Rev. Dr. Crolly, Right Rev. Dr. Kinsella, and Right Rev. Dr. Ryan, 
 on the one side, and the Most. Rev. Dr. MacHale, the Right Rev. Dr. Higgins, 
 and the Right Rev. Dr. Keating, on the other side, be adopted by this meeting, 
 for the purpose of being submitted to his Excellency’s consideration. 
 
 “f Thomas Feeny, Secretary.” 
 
 Then the following document was laid by four of the prelates 
 before his Excellency : — 
 
 “At a general meeting of the Roman Catholic Prelates of Ireland, held in 
 Dublin on the 14th of February, 1840, the Most Rev. Dr. Crolly in the Chair, 
 the following arrangement was proposed and adopted : — 
 
 “For the purpose of receiving the unanimous co-operation of the Roman 
 Catholic Prelates, in diffusing the advantages of National Education, it was 
 agreed on, that the subsequent regulations be respectfully submitted to the con- 
 sideration of his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant : — 
 
 “ 1st. That in every National School for the mixed education of Protestant 
 and Roman Catholic children, the Roman Catholic Bishop of the diocese, the 
 parish priest, or the Roman Catholic curate of the parish in which such school 
 is situated, may be a patron of said school, in order that he may prevent the 
 appointment of any teacher whose moral or religious conduct should be found 
 objectionable, and, if necessary, direct the dismissal of such teacher from so 
 important a situation. 
 
 “ 2nd. That no book or tract whatsoever for the religious or moral instruction 
 of the Roman Catholic pupils shall be admitted into a National School without 
 the previous approbation of the four Roman Catholic Archbishops of Ireland. 
 
 “3rd. That in every National School where the pupils are all of the Roman 
 Catholic persuasion, the Roman Catholic Bishop of that diocese, or the 
 Roman Catholic pastor in whose parish the school has been established, as 
 patrons of said school, shall have power to appoint or dismiss the teacher or 
 
532 
 
 LETTER XC'VII. 
 
 teachers, whether male or female ; and that said bishop or pastor shall have 
 access to the school at all times, for the purpose of giving religious or moral 
 instruction to the scholars ; such instruction to be given by the clergy them- 
 selves, or by persons appointed by them for that purpose ; and further, that 
 every book used in the school for the religious or moral instruction of the 
 Roman Catholic pupils shall be composed or selected by the Roman Catholic 
 Bishop of the diocese. 
 
 “4th. That in future, for the satisfaction of the Roman Catholics, and for the 
 greater security of their religion, the Lord Lieutenant be respectfully requested 
 to select two lay Roman Catholic members of the Board of National Education 
 from each of the four ecclesiastical provinces, and that, on the recommendation 
 of the Roman Catholic Bishops of each province, one of their body be appointed 
 a member of the Board of Commissioners by his Excellency. 
 
 * ‘ 5th. That the Lecturer in the Model Schools, appointed to instruct the 
 Roman Catholic teacher of National Schools the principles of religion, morals, 
 or of liistory (which is capable of being explained in an irreligious or offensive 
 manner), should be a Roman Catholic, with satisfactory testimonials of religious 
 and moral conduct, signed by the Roman Catholic Bishop under whose spiritual 
 jurisdiction he previously lived. 
 
 ‘ ‘ 6th. That it would be very desirable to have a Model School in each of the 
 four provinces when the funds of the National Board of Education might be 
 found sufficient for that purpose, as such an establishment would inspire the in- 
 habitants of the province with greater confidence in the system of national 
 education. 
 
 “W. Crolly, D.D., Chairman.” 
 
 To which his Excellency replied : — 
 
 “ Most Reverend and Right Reverend Sirs — I have considered your 
 memorial with the attention which I am always disposed to pay to any repres- 
 entation from your respected body, and with a sincere desire to secure, if I 
 could consistently with what is due to other parties, the unanimous co-operation 
 of the Roman Catholic prelates of Ireland in diffusing the advantages of a 
 national education. 
 
 “ You must, however, bear in mind that the diffusion of these advantages, on 
 equal terms, among all sects and denominations of Christians, is the fundamen- 
 tal principle of the system administered under the sanction of the legislature by 
 the National Board ; and that any departure from that principle would be a 
 violation of their duty, and a perversion of their trust. 
 
 “ In conformity to that principle, the National Schools are equally open to 
 Christian children of all denominations, and opportunities are equally afforded 
 to their respective pastors to provide them with religious instruction, subject 
 only to the condition of their not attempting to interfere with any, except those 
 of their own church. 
 
 “The Board has nothing to do with the selection of patrons, who are locally 
 chosen by those persons whose funds have been subscribed, or whose land has 
 been given for the establishment of schools. 
 
 “With them rest the appointment and dismissal of the masters, over which 
 the Board exercises no control, except what is absolutely necessary to secure 
 them being morally as well as intellectually qualified for the duties whieh they 
 have to perform. 
 
 “ No books are allowed to be used in any of the schools, at the time of joint 
 instruction, exeept such as are published by the Board, or such as have been 
 sanctioned by their authority, in cases where they are provided by local patrons. 
 
 “ The model schools at Dublin are under the immediate superintendence of 
 the Commissioners, subject to their frequent inspection, a duty which I well 
 know is not more assiduously performed by any portion of them than by those 
 members of your own church whose services have been devoted to the cause of 
 national education, with such honor to themselves and such benefit to their 
 country. 
 
 “This, surely, ought to be a sufficient security to you that the lecturer 
 appointed in these schools to instruct the Roman Catholic teachers in the prin- 
 ciples of religion, or morals, or history, would never explain them in an irre- 
 ligious or offensive manner. 
 
LETTER XCVII. 
 
 533 
 
 “ In thus briefly setting before you the manner in which, on the chief points 
 referred to in your memorial, the Board have carried out the great principles of 
 the national system, I cannot but express my regret at the opposition which lias 
 been given to them by some of your body ; and greatly, indeed, should I rejoice 
 if that opposition can be removed by a closer examination or more intimate 
 knowledge of their proceedings. 
 
 “ But, after the best consideration that I can give to the subject, I am bound 
 distinctly to state to you that no changes such as you desire can, in my opinion, 
 be made with advantage to the public, either in the constitution of that Board 
 who have hitherto worked so harmoniously together, or in the general regula- 
 tions under which they have acted, and which have enabled them successfully 
 to make head against all obstacles, and to diffuse more and more widely, in each 
 successive year, the blessings of moral and intellectual improvement, founded 
 on the precepts of Divine truth, among all religious denominations of the 
 people of Ireland.” 
 
 Such are the acts of the Catholic bishops of Ireland in their 
 annual meeting of 1840. They are now matters of national 
 record, and belong as much to the annals of the Irish church as 
 any on which the historian is entitled to pause. They are not 
 only the faithful transcripts of the zeal and piety of the prelates 
 of that period, but they will serve as so many landmarks to guide 
 their successors through the various perils which they will have 
 to encounter in their assertion of the faith. On those historical 
 acts, then, duly authenticated as the resolves of the bishops, and 
 not on contending glossaries, do I confidently rest in vindicating 
 the few and simple assertions that have been so strongly impugned. 
 For that “ paramount object,” the unanimity of the hierarchy, 
 which gave such umbrage to the advocates of the Board, I refer 
 the reader to the second resolution, unanimously adopted, which 
 has now for the first time been laid before the public. To 
 vindicate the “ wisdom, the justice, or the extreme moderation” 
 of an arrangement which was “ unanimously adopted for the 
 purpose of being submitted to the consideration of his Excellency,” 
 nay, which was afterwards laid before his Holiness, would be no 
 less offensive to the exalted authorities to whom it was submitted, 
 than to the character of those by whom it was adopted ; and that 
 no intimation came from the opponents of the Board of a wish to 
 enter into any such arrangements, “ but that we entered into the 
 overtures that were made for such an accommodation by its 
 supporters,” is placed beyond the reach of cavil by the first 
 resolution. Those acts remain untouched, bearing testimony to 
 the unanimity of the prelates in opinion, whatever may be the 
 diversity of their sentiments about their immediate practicability, 
 or the expediency of waiting until they may obtain his Excellency’s 
 sanction. His grace of Armagh may entertain the opinion that 
 there was as little of unanimity at the end as at the commencement 
 of our meeting. The Bishop of Ossory may “ agree on the terms 
 of an arrangement which he pronounces “ unnecessary and 
 unattainable.” Why his lordship deemed them unattainable, he 
 has not taken the trouble to explain. Of this, however, no doubt 
 can be entertained, that whenever the bishops were unanimous, 
 
534 
 
 LETTER XCVII. 
 
 in earnest, they, in union with a faithful people, obtained more 
 unattainable concessions from administrations apparently more 
 hostile to our holy religion. His lordship of Cork may be 
 impressed with a becoming sense of what the Lord Lieutenant 
 owed to his own dignity in publishing his reply to the episcopal 
 deputation ; and no doubt the Bishop of Limerick thought your 
 grace accurate in your sentiments until contrasted with the 
 authentic resolutions. The reader must still be at a loss to 
 ascertain how those and the like extracts can at all affect the 
 weight of the genuine acts of the bishops, or the truth of my 
 assertions, with which those acts are identified. Those prelates 
 are determined, until they obtain a purer system, to remain in 
 connexion with the board . 6 Does this impugn their unanimity 
 respecting the arrangement which they submitted to his Excellency, 
 or the wisdom, “ the justice, or moderation” of that requisition ? 
 It proves nought but the same sad necessity, or expediency, or 
 convenience which induced some prelates to tolerate to the last 
 hour of its extinction the Kildare-street Society, long after the 
 general sense of the Catholics of Ireland, as well as the petitions 
 of the bishops to parliament, had pronounced its condemnation. 
 It only demonstrates that while a better is refused, they submit 
 to a bad system, and that they are content to retain the troubled 
 waters of the board, until they are carried away by the purer 
 flood of an unmixed Catholic education. With this determination 
 of some of the bishops I have no concern. That is a matter 
 between them and their conscience. Since I am referring solely 
 to the arrangement which was the result of their deliberate and 
 unanimous resolves, I cannot then but wonder at the asseverations 
 of pain with which your grace parades such innocuous passages, 
 and your repeated declarations of an unwillingness to wound or 
 betray the secret apprehensions of one who seems to be conscious 
 that in the puny effort to inflict what he affects to deprecate, he 
 only hurts the hand by which such instruments are wielded. 
 
 But as the Bishop of Cork thought his Excellency called on to 
 publish his reply, it will not, I trust, be deemed presumptuous on 
 our part to think that the rest of the proceedings should be entitled 
 to a like privilege. A resolution of secrecy wa$ talked of ; the idea 
 of carrying it could not for a moment be endured, from the 
 conviction that it would be but a cover for the worst misrepresent- 
 ations. Besides the duty we owed to our respective clergy and 
 flocks, of making known to them proceedings so intimately 
 connected with their spiritual interests, it was observed that the 
 frequent and flagrant calumnies relative to our proceedings might 
 require vindication. Whilst engaged in our public sessions, some 
 of those journals that appear to be the hired advocates of the 
 board, published such gross falsehoods as to demand prompt 
 exposure. Witness their unblushing slander regaring the letter 
 
LETTER XCVII. 
 
 535 
 
 that was read in the meeting, and their studied silence relative 
 to the significant passage about the books of the board, which it 
 is no longer a secret are denounced in Rome. Scarcely were we 
 returned to our respective sees when the same shameless distortion 
 of our proceedings was repeatedly exhibited ; and though the 
 advocates of the board appeared anxious for silence, its organs 
 strove to turn it to their advantage, by boasting that this very 
 silence was evidence of the triumph of the system. But why 
 detain the public with an apology for adverting to this topic in my 
 pastoral instruction, when my apology should be for such long 
 silence and forbearance ? Had I, however, half the knowledge of 
 the intrigues, the deceit, the covert manoeuvres, nay, the per- 
 secution connected with this infamous and unhallowed scheme to 
 pervert the people of Ireland, that have come under my knowledge 
 during this visitation of my diocese, I should not have been silent 
 for an hour. Is your grace aware of any correspondence from 
 any quarter, connected or pretending to be connected with the 
 Board, with any one clergyman in this diocese, obviously intended 
 to make him unfaithful to his free, solemn and recorded pledge of 
 breaking off all connexion with the Board? Is your grace 
 insensible to the obvious tendency of such conduct to interfere 
 with the reverence and obedience of the bishop of the diocese, 
 promised at ordination ? Were the spirit that presided over the 
 publications of the board to continue, no doubt the next suggestion 
 of Mr. Commissioner Blake would be to expunge that passage out 
 of the pontifical, like the obnoxious passage in Challoner’s Works, 
 as interfering with the high authority of the board, and to 
 send down the expurgated edition at half price on her Majesty’s 
 service, in order effectually to banish all the good old editions 
 from the land. 
 
 Is your grace aware of the fine imposed by this Christian 
 board on a schoolmaster, for the crime of following the in- 
 structions of his ordinary regarding the pious practice, so generally 
 spread, of reciting the Angelus Domini at mid-day ; or of the 
 clergyman’s letter to the board, breaking off all further connexion 
 or correspondence ? Perhaps your grace is ignorant that Mr. 
 Duane, a pious and respectable Catholic in Connemara, was next 
 written to, to conduct or manage the school under the same 
 board, with which the parish priest became totally disconnected. 
 Mr. Duane, like a good Catholic, not infected with the leaven 
 which it is the study of this treacherous Prussian system to 
 propagate, wrote back that he would not lend his support to any 
 plan of education of which his spiritual superior did not approve. 
 Here, then, are obvious attempts to set laymen against their 
 clergy, and the clergy against their bishops, and to violate all the 
 sacred relations by which the pastors and the people are religiously 
 bound together. It is high time for all, then, to lay before the 
 
536 
 
 LETTER XCVII. 
 
 constituted* authorities their just complaints for such unhallowed 
 encroachments on their mutual duties. The rights of the people, 
 as well as the religion of the children, are all involved in those 
 manifest aggressions made on the sacred rights of their pastors. 
 His Excellency may listen with perfect indifference to the prayers 
 of the bishops of Ireland, as many of his predecessors did before, 
 but the petitions of the people declaring their want of confidence 
 in any administration that will not respect such prayers for the 
 protection of their rights and duties, will bring about the same 
 salutary change of sentiment of which they were often productive. 
 The other instances of a disgraceful and stealthy interference 
 with some school-masters to put themselves under the bondage of 
 the board, as well as their disinterested fidelity in resisting the 
 temptation, must be reserved for a special and more circumstantial 
 instruction. They are not, my lord, intended for any personal 
 correspondence with your grace, for they would, doubtless, be as 
 painful as any of the other topics connected with this subject, into 
 which you have shown such reluctance to “ wander.” From the 
 commencement of this most serious discussion until this moment, 
 your grace has exhibited a peculiar unwillingness to stir from 
 your new position, to take a view of the principles or practice of 
 the past ages of the church, in order to form some estimate from 
 that true standard of the strange maxims that are striven to be 
 now propagated. This may be called wandering, but it would be 
 a delightful and instructive excursion, and well remunerative of 
 the toil it might cost you in thus traversing past ages. We 
 should then get out of the mists that are collected round us by 
 the passion of the present generation, to stand on an elevated 
 position unobscured by their influence, thence contemplating those 
 holy sages, the disinterested champions of the faith, who are 
 renowned in the church of God, and inquiring what were the 
 pious maxims of their times. Among those who from the days of 
 St. Peter' to the present epoch, were eminent for faith and sanctity 
 in every gradation of the church, your grace will not find one 
 solitary individual to advocate such a monstrous system of 
 ecclesiastical Spinosism, as that of the common Christianity of 
 this speckled board, in which Catholics and Sectaries, truth and 
 error, faith and heresy, are all huddled together in hideous 
 confusion. In the mean time allow me to observe, that I was not 
 the first to obtrude any correspondence on your grace, and I am 
 ready to close it as soon as you abandon the system of gratuitous 
 interference with my fold. In this controversy if it has given, as 
 I am sure it must, aught of disquietude to the faithful, I deem it 
 my duty to proclaim to the whole world that I have not been the 
 aggressor. My task has been confined to a defence of my own 
 rights, that are essentially correlative with the defence of the 
 religion of that flock that has been confided to my care. Un- 
 
LETTER XCVI1I. 
 
 537 
 
 willing to trespass on any one’s jurisdiction, civil or spiritual, I, 
 too, must be permitted to ask of my encroacher : “ Why do you 
 fell my wood, and why cross my fountains ?” I subscribe to the 
 proposition that all prelates should adopt this maxim. But if any 
 should be parties to an uncanonical system, that strives to 
 supersede the episcopal authority, they cannot be released from 
 the heavy responsibility of such unchristian annoyance. Twice 
 your grace has ventured to interfere with my duties : first, by 
 your personal correspondence, and again, by your equally 
 unwarrantable and incorrect commentaries on my pastoral in- 
 structions. Let this unhallowed attempt to disturb the order of 
 my diocese cease, which, under the specious guise of education, has 
 for its object the support of an anti-Catholic and corrupt cor- 
 poration ; and then neither your grace nor the public shall hear 
 more of my personal correspondence. I shall then leave it to the 
 people to assert legally and peacefully their claims to.a just share 
 in all such public funds. I shall confine myself, in discharging 
 my pastoral duties, to the clergy and faithful of my own diocese. 
 But if your grace, or any other unauthorized person, should di- 
 rectly, or by lending yourself to an hostile system, come in the 
 way of the discharge of my solemn duties, it will not be expected 
 that I should be wanting in the becoming courtesy of a similar 
 salutation. 
 
 I have the honor to remain, my lord, your grace’s obedient 
 servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 TO THE CLERGY AND FAITHFUL OF THE DIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 Arranmore, Feast of Corpus Christi, 1840. 
 
 Venerable and Dearly Beloved Brethren — Though in 
 the course of our recent visitation through the diocese, it was our 
 lot to share some of those perils by sea which the apostle had 
 encountered, we have been more than compensated by the 
 consolation, deep and lasting, which that grateful labour has 
 afforded. It has given us not only the opportunity of witnessing 
 the salutary effects of those habits of temperance, which through 
 the special interference of the divine mercy, are now spreading 
 throughout the land ; but also of refuting some of those calumnies 
 which the indefatigable enemies of our religion, are neither tired 
 nor ashamed of promulgating. When we raised our warning 
 
538 
 
 LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 voice against the hateful and pestilential novelty of the National 
 Board, and you, impressed with the force of our reasons, withdrew 
 the children under your care from the foul contagion of the deadly 
 errors which that very board has been solemnly circulating, it 
 was natural to expect that we should be assailed, by unsparing 
 and continuous effusions of harmless vituperation. Accordingly, 
 we were not only denounced as the foes of education, because we 
 would not surrender its direction to the enemies of our creed, but 
 we were likewise accused of letting in worse errors, if worse were 
 possible, in our attempts to ward off the evils of the national 
 system. It could scarcely have been imagined that persons with 
 any pretensions to veracity, should rely for the support of their 
 cause on the notoriously lying reports of the Hibernian Bible 
 Society ; yet the advocates of the National Board have appealed 
 to such testimony, and, mortified at the exclusion of their own 
 pernicious system, have represented the province of Tuam as 
 teeming with scholars, who frequent the schools of the Hibernian 
 Bible Society. Having now traversed every district of this 
 extensive diocese, we have it in our power unequivocally to 
 state, and we owe it to your zeal and piety to manifest the truth, 
 that never, as far as this diocese is concerned — and we have 
 reason to believe the same of the others — has there been promul- 
 gated a fouler calumny. In the greater number of the parishes 
 of this diocese, such a thing as an Hibernian school is not to be 
 found, and where, as in the case of the few wretched national 
 schools, fraud and menaces were resorted to, to bring over 
 Catholic children, their efforts were completely abortive. 
 
 With copious and authentic evidence now before us of the state 
 of education in this diocese, we can assert, without fear of refuta- 
 tion, that out of its immense Catholic population not twenty chil- 
 dren frequent the schools of the Hibernian Society. In Westport, 
 on the suppression of the nuisance of the national schools, some of 
 the old and irreclaimable bigots of that town, thought to seduce a 
 few children to some obscure schools of the biblicals, but, thanks 
 to the zeal of the clergy and the people, their attempts were 
 a complete failure. At their joint request we sent some of the 
 monks of St. Francis, whose pious labours were already crowned 
 with such success in Mount Bellew, Brooklodge, Tuam, Roundstone, 
 and Clifden. No sooner were they arrived than they were hailed 
 as a blessing by the inhabitants ; the second day after its opening 
 witnessed the school crowded with two hundred scholars, and 
 instead of languishing under the withering influence of either of 
 the congenial systems of the Board or the Bible Society, the 
 schools are flourishing in the freedom of a pure Catholic education, 
 where the children will not be tainted with the breath of heretical 
 teachers, or the poison of heretical productions. Such is the 
 enthusiastic piety which the people of the vicinity of Castlebar 
 
LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 539 
 
 feel regarding the coming ceremony of laying the foundation of 
 the monastery at Errew, that they have thronged in numbers to 
 cut down a steep hill in order to smoothe the way to its approach. 
 These are but few instances of the gratifying progress of pure 
 education in this diocese ; and it must be as consolatory as 
 it is creditable to you to learn that, notwithstanding all the 
 discouragement thrown in the way of Catholic instruction in 
 Ireland by some few mistaken fanatics, and a greater number of 
 calculating and mercenary political schemers, we can number in 
 this diocese alone more than thirteen thousand five hundred 
 Catholic childron, partaking of the blessings of an untainted 
 literature, and an unadulterated Catholic education. 
 
 We trust that the success which has already crowned your ex- 
 ertions, will stimulate you to still further zeal in eradicating every 
 vestige of error from your respective parishes, and replacing them 
 by nurseries of faith and piety. We feel it the more incumbent 
 on us thus to renew our sacred admonitions, on account of a fresh 
 announcement of future hostility from those, who have hitherto 
 sought, under the specious guise of education, to throw down the 
 fences of your faith, by striking at the authority of your pastors. 
 We allude to the last report of the Commissioners of Education 
 in Ireland. Never has a document of more undisguised and 
 portentous menace, if its authors had but the power of mischief, 
 been laid before the Irish public. We shall pass over, for the 
 present, the insidious calculations and prophetic delusions — 
 elaborate evidence of a sinking cause — with which that document 
 abounds. W e shall not dwell on its manifest tendency to mislead, 
 and to impress upon readers that the board have flourishing 
 schools where they have utterly failed. Nor shall we point your 
 special attention to the clumsy device of talking of grants which 
 shall never be accepted — of schools which shall never be estab- 
 lished, or of thousands of visionary pupils, who will never enrol 
 themselves under the spotted banners of the board. Of such 
 shadowy things, however, consists much of their boasted and 
 unostentatious progress throughout some portions of our diocese, 
 as well as of their recent bounty, which, it must be confessed, 
 they are lately forcing upon the people, but which they are 
 so perverse as not to receive. This is like the bounty of the 
 parsons of the established church, who say that they are ready 
 to grant spiritual aid to the people, if they but receive it. These 
 are but a part and parcel of every scheme of delusion hitherto 
 devised for the purpose of filching their faith from the Catho- 
 lics, and enriching their deceivers with a portion of the public 
 money. Those self-constituted teachers, or who, rather, deriving 
 their mission from the Lord Lieutenant, labour to supersede 
 every bishop who contravenes their will, are pleased to take 
 special notice of us, and modestly insinuate that passion and pre- 
 judice arc the grounds of our opposition. Neither their assertions 
 
540 
 
 LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 nor their covert insinuations, shall deter us from the discharge of 
 our solemn duty. Were we to assert, in return, that those men 
 are not the obsequious tools of an anti-Catholic court, sharing its 
 temporal patronage as the reward of their servility, their assertions 
 and ours would be probably received with the like suspicion. It 
 is only right to inform you that, already, under an affectation of 
 zeal for foreign missions, some political intriguers, never tired of 
 mixing themselves in our ecclesiastical affairs, are labouring to 
 sacrifice the interests of the Irish portion of the Catholic church 
 to the cause of the Hindoo colonies, and to hand over, were it in 
 their power, the entire control over the religious education of the 
 youth of Ireland, to the governor of the day. For let them couch 
 their designs in the most specious and captious language, is it not 
 manifest that this supreme control is the object of the system, 
 after the Lord Lieutenant’s explicit declaration to the three arch- 
 bishops and senior suffragan of the province of Dublin, that 
 not a single change in the system sought by them in the name of 
 the episcopal body should be conceded? Sever since its origin 
 was cooler or haughtier contempt shown to the Catholic hierarchy 
 of Ireland. So far from feeling regret, we sincerely rejoice at 
 the publication of this singular manifesto, since it unfolds more 
 clearly than ever the secret venom of the system, and avows, 
 though with singular caution, the persecuting spirit of Stanley, from 
 whom it took its origin, and whose address to the Duke of Leinster 
 finds an appropriate place in this congenial composition. 
 
 With regard to the schools in this diocese that have severed all 
 connexion with this unholy thing, they say they are only waiting 
 until they appoint some other patrons. So, then, we have but a 
 truce or cessation of hostilities. Again, the campaign of per- 
 secution is to open with renewed vigour ; and, with the new-born 
 zeal which additional salaries, and a prospect of rising in their 
 graduated classes, will infuse into the newly recruited corps of 
 masters, they hope, no doubt, to bear down all opposition in this 
 diocese. Let them make the experiment. Little do they know 
 the energies with which a love of the pure faith of their fathers 
 inspires the Catholics of Ireland. Let them continue to send 
 round again and again their vagrant officials, as they have done — 
 all they will gain is weariness from their journey. Let them 
 employ a whole troop of clerks in importuning the pious Catholic 
 by their circulars, they will receive the noble answer with which 
 some of the laity have already rebuked their rash and irreligious 
 interference. They may succeed in forming a connexion with 
 some old bigots, whose days have been worn out in the persecution 
 of the Catholic faith and its pastors. When they shall have 
 failed in procuring the aid of any one Catholic of character, 
 perhaps they may at some future time add to the number of their 
 patrons or managers some two or three individuals, Catholics in 
 name, but whose public morals would be well suited to the 
 
LETTER XCVIII. 
 
 541 
 
 licentious tenets of the worst sectaries of ancient or modern times. 
 From efforts such as these no harm can be dreaded ; for such 
 schools would be looked upon as rocks of warning, not to approach 
 them, rather than as beacons of light to guide the young in the 
 paths of religious education, What a ludicrous spectacle, if there 
 was not something more melancholy connected with such a farce, 
 to see Catholic masters, the future teachers of Catholic children, 
 receive their inaugural lecture on the duties of morality in the 
 model school from the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodges of 
 Ireland ! France reads a melancholy lesson of the evils that 
 were poured upon it from the lodges of freemasonry. Our 
 teachers shall never imbibe their faith or morality from such a 
 source. The account that has just reached us of the providential 
 escape of our beloved Queen from the murderous attempt of a 
 fiend-like assassin, has filled our hearts with alternate feelings of 
 horror and gladness. We hasten, therefore, to conclude this 
 brief address by an earnest request — a request which will be 
 most grateful to your feelings of affectionate loyalty — to offer up 
 in every chapel throughout the diocese public thanksgiving, for 
 being rescued from all the horrors which the success of the 
 meditated stroke would have entailed upon the land. Catholics, 
 ever loyal from duty, even to those by whom they may be 
 persecuted, must feel additional joy in testifying their homage 
 and their fealty to so good and gracious a monarch, as now sways 
 the sceptre of this empire. Never shall Catholic education, 
 regulated by its own pastors, nerve the murderer’s arm against 
 the “ anointed of the Lord.” It is in the Germanic schools that 
 the youth have been trained to systematic treason and murder. 
 Well do we recollect the time when, under similar circumstances 
 and with the hope of cutting off the inheritance to the .throne, 
 one of the royal family of France fell beneath the hand of one 
 of those systematically educated regicides. He avowed the deed, 
 and was armed to its perpetration by the influence of the spirit 
 which he imbibed at those fountains of literature, which are 
 frequently pointed to as models for our imitation. We shall be 
 content with those schools that are placed under the control of 
 their own beloved pastors, into which none of those exotic 
 impieties, such as the Chartists of England are intoxicated with, 
 shall ever creep ; sapping the foundations of morality as well as 
 of social order. No, the children in our schools shall be taught 
 to “ Fear God and honour the King”* — “To give unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” f 
 We remain, venerable and dearly beloved brethren, your ever 
 faithful servant in Christ, 
 
 John, xYrchbishop of Tuam. 
 
 * 1 St. Peter, ii. 17. 
 
 f St. Matthew, xxii. 21. 
 
542 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 TO THE HONORABLE LORD CLIFFORD. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Lucia, 1841 , 
 
 My Lord — Through the kindness of a clerical friend in England, 
 a recent post conveyed to me a small pamphlet addressed by 
 Hugh Charles Lord Clifford, to the Right Hon. Lord Alvanley, 
 on his lordship’s recent production regarding the measures 
 necessary for restoring tranquillity to Ireland. What a rare and 
 rapid, as well as auspicious succession of literary lights, has thus 
 recently arisen on our country, to guide its unhappy destinies ! ! 
 One is not suffered to set, when another is seen in the same 
 quarter lending it a kindred twinkle ; and again appears a third 
 of the same class, threatening to eclipse his twin-brothers in his 
 own solitary splendour. There is something in this unusual 
 conjunction of strange and distant bodies that ought to forewarn, 
 if not to alarm. Three peers of England, suddenly siezed with 
 a nervous solicitude for the Irish Catholics and their hierarchy, 
 are running a race of benevolent zeal to come to their assist- 
 ance ! And what seems to be the danger that has so excited the 
 fears of your lordships — and what the remedy that is again to 
 restore you to the blessings of repose ? The fear of an irre- 
 sponsible power in Ireland — a power which has no existence save 
 in the heated imaginations of our enemies — is the phantom of 
 an evil which has put your lordships on a cruize of discovery for 
 a remedy, whilst the real and palpable evils of our country are 
 fastidiously and insultingly passed over. 
 
 On the existence of this irresponsible power in Ireland, and on 
 the necessity of its coercion, there appears to be a wonderful 
 harmony of sentiment between your lordship and the other noble 
 writers. After some pages of prefatory observations, you thus 
 proceed : — “ This being premised, I will commence with the first 
 page of the subject matter of your lordship’s (Alvanley’s) 
 pamphlet, and agree with your lordship, that some new and 
 more efficient line of policy must be adopted, which shall re- 
 press and put under control irresponsible power. I understand 
 your lordship — I think I do not misunderstand you, to mean 
 that the power now wielded in Ireland by Mr. O’Connell, and 
 by a certain portion of the Irish Catholic clergy, which refuses 
 to make the wise and unanimous declaration of all the Roman 
 Catholic bishops in Ireland, assembled together in 1832, the rule 
 of its conduct, should be repressed and put under control. In 
 
LETTER XCIX. 
 
 543 
 
 other words, that Ireland should keep the peace of Queen 
 Victoria, not of Mr. O’Connell, or of Archbishop MacHale.”* 
 Here is your lordship’s deliberate and authentic coincidence 
 in opinion with Lord Alvanley of the existence of an extensive 
 and irresponsible power in Ireland, as well as of the necessity of 
 some new and more efficient measures to bring it under subjec- 
 tion. After an attentive perusal of the entire of the pamphlet, 
 this appears to be the only master-grievance which, in your 
 opinion, requires redress. As for the tedious preface and ap- 
 pendix, which, as is sometimes wont, are far longer than the 
 book, they shall not occupy much of mine or of the reader’s 
 attention. The latter consists of extracts from the 'Writings of 
 Mr. Beaumont, and the early letters of Hierophilos, in which 
 your lordship discovers, or affects to discover, a marked differ- 
 ence between the opinions then advanced by me and those of my 
 subsequent writings. The former is devoted to the laboured 
 refutation of those enemies of the aristocracy who have asserted 
 or insinuated, that the House of Lords has recently undergone 
 the metamorphosis of the companions of Ulysses. With such 
 extravagant opinions, or the superstition of the poor English, 
 who believe them, I have no concern. The laws which were 
 gravely passed in the houses of parliament against witches might 
 possibly have contemplated the transfer of Circe’s Wand to that 
 proscribed race, and its exercise on the inmates of those houses, 
 in some such changes as those alluded to by your lordship. 
 However, I will not question the success of your arguments on 
 this topic ; nay, I will add, that your lordship has made it 
 equally clear that the same body is equally pooof against any 
 other transformation. Nor is it to be expected that I should 
 dwell on all the knightly courtesies that are so profusely ad- 
 dressed to my Lord Alvanley. The palm of chivalry is carried 
 away from Scotland, and if I am to judge from the array of 
 knights, and squires, and palfries, and gloves, and bugles, with 
 which your letters are crowded, its reality is again to be revived, 
 and if the rains of heaven were not as effectual in quenching its 
 spirit as the ridicule of Cervantes, the next tournament must be 
 resigned by Lord Eglinton, in order to grace the plains of 
 Lancashire. 
 
 Yes ; Catholic and Protetant peers of Britain, call on each 
 other to forget their ancient differences, and to adopt a new 
 language unknown to the ancient church, and the price of this 
 new and unnatural reconciliation is to be the perpetuation of 
 the misery of Ireland, the oppression of its people, and new and 
 more effectual fetters to trammel the spiritual freedom of its 
 hierarchy. It would be more in accordance with that ingenuous 
 and lofty bearing which your lordship affects so much to admire, 
 
 * Letters, &c., page 13. 
 
544 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 to announce to the world those feelings of enmity to Ireland, 
 which cannot be disguised, than to be screening them under the 
 cloak of a friendship, in which it is impossible we should any 
 longer confide. The same dark insinuations run through the 
 repeated assertions of an irresponsible power , as well as the new 
 and more effectual policy by which it is to be kept under control. 
 What is the meaning of this irresponsible power, on which so 
 much of unmeaning solemnity is wasted ? As irresponsible has 
 not reference to another life in the pamphlet of Lord Alvanley, 
 it must mean the existence of some power wielded in the state, 
 and placed beyond the pale of those sanctions of rewards and 
 penalties, By which society is bound together. I know of no such 
 body in this country ; nor do your lordships, with the most 
 capacious credulity in strange things in Ireland, believe in its 
 existence. Are not the Catholic clergy amenable to the laws of 
 the country ? Why then studiously propagate among the crowd 
 those vague and ambiguous phrases which, left to their crude 
 fancies to define, are sure to be shaped into the most hideous and 
 spectral forms ? The plain and obvious meaning of such language 
 is, that within Ireland there is a large body bidding defiance to 
 the laws of society. Nay, more, your lordship pointedly and 
 offensively contrasts the influence of that body with the subor- 
 dination that is due to the authority of our gracious queen. The 
 duties of the Catholics of Ireland, lay and clerical, may be 
 comprehended in the allegiance which they owe to the queen as 
 their civil ruler, and the Pope as the head of their church, and 
 successor of St. Peter. Will your lordship point out on the map 
 of the world a priesthood and a people who more clearly dis- 
 criminated, or who more faithfully fulfilled the relative duties 
 which they owed to those authorities, than the people and the 
 hierarchy of Ireland? And yet your lordships flippantly talk 
 of an irresponsible power, an agitating priesthood, and the 
 necessity of some more stringent state machinery to keep the 
 orders of society in their allotted places. Perhaps you would 
 find ample scope for the benevolent application of your lectures 
 at home, without wasting them on a country which needs not 
 their advantages. 
 
 The ecclesiastics of Ireland did not of old surrender their 
 spiritual rights to the throne, content to receive them back again 
 as its hired stipendiaries. They did not give unto Caesar the 
 things that were God’s ; nor were they, in punishment of their 
 courtly subserviency, doomed to walk through all the dark and 
 rugged ways of corruption and of error, tossed to and fro, as 
 they were moved by every popular breeze, and every legislative 
 impulse, until the honest and sincere among them, deploring the 
 wayward course which their predecessors ran, are now seen 
 sighing for a re-union with that rock, from which the anchorage 
 
LETTER XCIX. 
 
 545 
 
 of Ireland’s priesthood was never torn. They gave, at the same 
 time, unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar, and whilst the soil of 
 England was stained with the blood of one monarch, and strewn 
 with the fragments of the throne of another, Ireland exhibited to 
 the world the heroic spectacle of a nation, faithfully struggling for 
 the worthless member of a racp, whose cruelty was yet fresh in 
 the extermination of one province, and in the confiscation of the 
 fortunes of a large portion of the people. Well does it become 
 the inhabitants of a country familiar with such strange, political, 
 and religious revolutions, to lecture us on a political priesthood, 
 and an irresponsible power ! 
 
 But why withhold so long your kind commisseration and inter- 
 position ? Some new light must have broken on the intellects 
 of the English Catholic peers since the memorable period of 
 the Catholic Association, when the Irish nation, laity and 
 clergy, embracing almost the entire mass of the people, were 
 leagued in one great constitutional confederacy, to wring from 
 the injustice of England the rights of Emancipation. 
 
 Were your lordships’ remonstrances heard against the agitating 
 spirit of the priesthood ? O, no ! they were then hallowed 
 exertions, as long as their object, or at least effect, was to restore 
 to their parliamentary honors some few members of the English 
 peerage. I wonder how soon your lordships forget the noble 
 and peaceful exertions of those men, who, under the champion- 
 ship of him who guided this moral movement, lifted the prostrate 
 peers from their degraded condition — infused into their inert 
 souls a political vitality, of which they seemed unconscious — 
 loosened the fetters in which they were bound — undid the rusty 
 bolts that debarred them from their hereditary honors, and flung 
 them forward among the lords, who were frightened by the 
 sudden intrusion of so many strange apparitions. During this 
 heroic and eventful struggle, not a whisper escaped your lips 
 about the existence of an irresponsible power, or the necessity of 
 its control. But scarcely are you fixed in your seats, and your 
 Protestant companions restored to the propriety from which 
 they were disturbed, than you turn upon those to whom you ow r e 
 your seats and honors, and enter into overtures for an offensive 
 alliance with our ancient foes to fee the Catholic clergy to keep 
 her Majesty’s peace ! 
 
 Does your lordship forget the fate of Mr. Canning’s bill for 
 your contemplated admission into the House of Lords, or the 
 contumelies on your creed, which accompanied the rejection of 
 that measure ? You must be aware of the offensive oath that is 
 still taken by some of your lordship’s companions on the same 
 benches, associating with our holy religion the guilt of idolatry. 
 Yet, with these facts staring you in the face, you must adopt a 
 new and accommodating phraseology ; and, instead of styling 
 
546 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 yourself a Catholic, your letters are to be considered as “ ad- 
 dressed by a British Christian, in communion with the See of 
 Rome, to a British Christian not in communion with the See of 
 Rome !” 
 
 I, too, am for burying in oblivion the angry remembrance of 
 ancient bigotry, not, however, at the expense of altering the 
 ancient and apostolic language of the Church. Catholic is a term 
 hallowed in that creed which we lisp from our infancy ; it was 
 considered by St. Augustine as one of the most effulgent of the 
 characters of the Church. Your lordship will not forget, that 
 in Italy, of which you are so fond, Christian and Catholic are so 
 identified that to him who is not the latter, the phrase applied 
 by the people generally is “ non e Christiano and lest your 
 lordship should not deem popular phrases correct theological 
 standards, allow me to remind you of the language of St. 
 Cyprian, that “ he who is not in the Church of Christ is not a 
 Christian.” Far be it from me to dwell upon this topic for the 
 purpose of any exasperating controversy. Social intercourse 
 may be observed, and the duties of benevolence fulfilled towards 
 all, without disturbing the ancient landmarks. The old standard 
 language of the Church, like its ancient liturgy, have been to 
 many the palpable hand-rails which led them to the temple of 
 truth, through the confused labyrinth of errors by which they 
 were surrounded. You ensure no respect by their abandonment ; 
 you conciliate no friends by their surrender ; as you obtrude 
 your officious concessions, your stubborn companions will recede 
 until they are propitiated by fresh Sacrifices, and at length, 
 when you think you have given them the whole vocabulary of 
 your consecrated theology, they will turn round and claim the 
 name of Protestant as the proudest title in their creed, and 
 refuse you the name of Christian, as a person immersed in 
 idolatry. 
 
 When the Catholic peers and gentry, who, with a few noble 
 exceptions, were the most tardy and inert in their exertions for 
 Emancipation, are put in possession of the political advantages 
 which they did not earn, the people, who bore the brunt of the 
 struggle, are to be abandoned ; and what was the most hallowed 
 exercise of zeal in procuring for the aristocracy a feather or a 
 bauble, must be a violation of the sanctity of their priestly 
 office, if directed to the improvement of the condition of the 
 humbler classes. In aid of a selfish sophistry, too clumsy to 
 impose upon the most shallow intellect, are called in resolutions 
 which were passed in 1832 by the bishops of Ireland. What 
 veneration is affected for resolutions when they can be bent to a 
 sinister purpose ! How conveniently, nay, how slightingly, are 
 the stronger, nay, the unanimous resolutions of bishops got over, 
 if they stand in the way of political designers. Surely those 
 
LETTER XCIX. 
 
 547 
 
 often-repeated resolutions are not treated with the disregard 
 which your lordship imagines ; and, if they never passed, the 
 spirit of peace, and of abstinence from political intrigue and 
 turbulence, which they inculcate, is the uniform spirit that 
 animates the Catholic priesthood. When the bigotry of the 
 civil functionaries forbids the use of those edifices that should be 
 devoted to the benefit of the people by whose moneys they are 
 erected, the meetings that are held for petitioning parliament 
 are sometimes held in the chapel-yard under the canopy of 
 heaven. Surely there is no treason in that, or any approach to 
 civil commotion, which, under a constitution like ours, could annoy 
 the most fastidious. They are never held within the chapel 
 walls ; and were a meeting held in a chapel after the performance 
 of the solemn duties of religion, where resolutions would be 
 adopted to relieve the poor, or not to vote for one of those cruel 
 exterminators of the tenantry, who would again renew the penal 
 laws against our priesthood ; or not to sell his vote, his country, or 
 his religion for money, or not to defile his soul with the foul guilt 
 of perjury : there are many of opinion that it would be as much 
 in accordance with the high and holy ends of religion to devote, 
 in cases of great urgency, the house of God to the above 
 purposes, as to make it the centre of those fashionable and 
 ambiguous assemblies, where the spectator is at a loss to know 
 whether he is in a theatre or in a temple, inclined to the former 
 supposition from the group of disreputable females who are 
 denied the sacraments of the Church, and yet are heard and 
 seen mingling in parts of the solemn service. It is not from the 
 simple and touching music of the Vatican, that those incongruous 
 accompaniments to our liturgy were borrowed. No, they were, 
 with other things of worse taste, imported to us from England ; 
 and, should the rage of rivalry for their introduction spread, the 
 beautiful and majestic melody of the Gregorian chaunt will be 
 utterly banished from our temples, or buried under volumes of 
 unsuitable symphonies, whilst the performers illustrate the epi- 
 grammatic reproof of the French poet : — 
 
 Le matin dans l’Eglise, et le soir an theatre. 
 
 After thus learning my opinions upon the indecency of turning 
 the house of God into an arena for politics or theatricals of any 
 kind, and after my solemn approval of the spirit of those reso- 
 lutions to which your lordship refers, the reader, and probably 
 yourself, may wonder at the delusion under which you must 
 have penned the following passage : “ Never was there an 
 occasion in which a Catholic Archbishop so foully and mischiev- 
 ously belied the sentiments of the head of the Church, as 
 Archbishop MacHale belied the sentiments and feelings towards 
 England of Gregory XVI. at the Galway dinner, where he flew 
 in the face of the unanimous resolutions and of the published 
 
548 
 
 LETTER XC1X. 
 
 exhortation of all the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, himself 
 included , to the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland, in 1832. 
 Had Gregory XYI. suspected, in the most remote degree, that 
 the sentiments of Archbishop MacHale would have been so 
 diametrically in opposition to the sentiments of “ Hierophilos,” Dr. 
 MacHale would never have been coadjutor bishop, or afterwards 
 Bishop of Killala, still less would he ever have been Roman Ca- 
 tholic Archbishop of Tuam.”* 
 
 There is a deeper meaning in this brief passage than apparently 
 meets the public eye, and as far as I am personally concerned, I 
 should scarcely deem it worth while to unravel all the gross 
 fallacies of which the few lines are composed, were it not for 
 the unwarrantable, and unconstitutional, and unchristian terror 
 which, perhaps as unconscious engines in the hands of the 
 oppressors of the land, you and some other officious and in- 
 termeddling English gentlemen attempt to exercise over the 
 legitimate freedom of the Catholic clergy of Ireland. Yes, the 
 destiny of the Archbishop of Tuam is disposed of ; but let all the 
 young clergy of Ireland beware lest they forfeit all hope of 
 those dignities to which their virtues and habits might raise 
 them, if they should adopt similar political opinions. Perhaps, 
 you were not aware of the extent of your accusation, or the 
 numbers of characters it embraced. Having assumed that I 
 would have been excluded from any see, had my subsequent 
 sentiments been known to be so diametrically opposite to my 
 earlier writings, your lordship should have, in justice, stated in 
 what this opposition consisted. It would have been but right to 
 set down distinctly what these altered sentiments are or have 
 been ; and to mark the language, that the public may not be left 
 to their own imaginations in fancying any want in that duty of 
 allegiance to the throne, which, if it existed, should, I will allow, 
 exclude any individual from the episcopacy. If your lordship 
 cannot succeed in this, though you seem to have paid sufficient 
 attention to much of what I wrote, or was reported to have 
 spoken, you unwittingly charge the Supreme Pontiff with a 
 disposition to exclude from the episcopacy, on mere prejudice, 
 without the existence of any sure ground of political impeachment. 
 And finally, when it will mock your laboured ingenuity, or that 
 of such accusers, to find in my whole life or writings the least 
 tinge of disaffection to my sovereign, or disregard of the laws, 
 what is the consequence ? That Lord Clifford tells the people 
 of this country, and tells the world, that the Catholic clergy of 
 Ireland must compromise and dissemble their conscientious opinions 
 regarding political questions, with which faith or loyalty have 
 nothing to do ; because if they entertain those free and legitimate 
 opinions from a love of that country, which is dear to them, they 
 
 * Page 15. 
 
LETTER XCIX, 
 
 549 
 
 will be excluded from the high offices of the sanctuary in punish- 
 ment of their attachment to their religion, and their affection for 
 the people. Apostacy from everything dear in our country, has 
 been well pronounced to be the necessary qualification for civil 
 honours, and your lordship would fain extend the application of 
 the words of our immortal bard even to the dignities of the 
 sanctuary : — 
 
 “ Unprized are her sons till they learn to betray — 
 
 Undistinguished they live if they shame not their sires ; 
 
 And the torch that would light them to dignity’s way 
 Must be caught from the pile where their country expires.” 
 
 But, no — your lordship’s prophetic anticipation of the future is 
 as illusive as your historical relation of the past is erroneous. 
 
 First, then, my sentiments now are not diametrically opposite 
 to those of “Hierophilos.” This is an unfounded and gratuitous 
 assumption. 
 
 Secondly — I did not fly in the face (the polished phrase is your 
 lordship’s) of the unanimous resolutions of all the bishops, myself 
 included, on which phrase you are pleased to leave an Italic 
 emphasis. 
 
 Thirdly — I was not at the meeting in 1832, at which those 
 resolutions were adopted, either personally or by proxy, nor did 
 I authorize any individual to attach my name to the resolutions 
 or published exhortation. My sentiments regarding the resolutions 
 I have already stated: and as for the exhortation, I will candidly 
 own there are passages in it which never had, nor never would 
 have, my sanction. These objections, however, may be a matter 
 of mere taste that do not affect the just principles of the resolutions. 
 I refer to those terms of extraordinary eulogy that were lavished 
 on the Duke of Wellington for his exertions in our emancipation, 
 whom I consider to have been a mere instrument in the hands of 
 Providence, to achieve a measure, to which the whole tenor of his 
 political life and sentiments were in direct opposition. When one 
 owns that he does a great national service, on account of the 
 blessings of which it must be productive, then he is entitled to 
 merit and thanks for his good actions, though he, too, is an 
 humble agent in the hands of an over-ruling Providence. But 
 when I find an individual confessing that nought but necessity 
 would have induced him to consent to a measure to which his life 
 was opposed, he may deserve the praise of prudence in yielding 
 to that necessity, but he has just as much claim to public gratitude 
 for positive benefits, as many of those recorded in Scripture, 
 whom God made reluctant instruments in bringing about his own 
 measures. The Duke of Wellington was such an instrument, as 
 some other powerful and influential politician may shortly, in a 
 crisis of great difficulties, dissipate all the small sophistries that 
 
550 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 now cloud the intellects of English lords regarding a Repeal of 
 the Union, and restore her own parliament to Ireland, in order 
 to fix the stability of the throne and consolidate the strength of 
 the empire. 
 
 Fourthly — When that meeting was held, to which your lord- 
 ship refers, I was sojourning in the Eternal City ; and allow me 
 to add, that I had to labour to remove many erroneous and 
 dangerous impressions, which some officious gentlemen from your 
 country endeavour to fix there, to the disparagement of the Irish 
 hierarchy. Some of them, having no consideration at home, 
 strive to make themselves important, by an overweening officious- 
 ness in the business of their neighbours. Perhaps, you are not 
 ignorant what a distorted meaning is given at Rome by those 
 itinerants to the popular phrase — Liberal cause , so often used 
 in those countries, and what misrepresentation is heaped on 
 the supporters of “civil and religious liberty.” With a dexterity 
 of which none but dishonest intriguers could be capable, they 
 seize upon the ambiguities of language ; and, because the infidels 
 of France wore the mask, and used the language of liberality, 
 and because civil and religious liberty, in the mouths of the 
 monsters of the Revolution, meant nought but anarchy and 
 Atheism, the poor Catholics of Ireland, lay and ecclesiastical, 
 must be accused of meditating the same confusion, if, in the 
 language of the first Christians, they claim civil and religious 
 liberty, or freedom of conscience, against the atrocious persecu- 
 tions by which that liberty has been crushed. Never, in the 
 annals of national hate and logical disingenuity, have such dis- 
 creditable artifices been resorted to, to mislead and to injure. 
 Because, too, the press has been abused in France, to the injury 
 of religion and social order ; a similar discredit has been 
 attempted to be thrown on what is called the Liberal press of 
 those realms : although it is well known that it is resorted to as 
 a necessary engine against the religious persecution so long 
 directed against the Catholics of Ireland, and in carrying on 
 which, the English press was enlisted as a cruel auxiliary. But, 
 thank God, those misrepresentations are losing their force, and 
 the busiest in political scandal may now wear out their organs in 
 the “ Eternal City,” without making any serious impressions. 
 
 Fifthly — I was appointed coadjutor bishop in March, 1825 ; in 
 February, 1831, his Holiness was raised to the throne of St. 
 Peter. You may perceive, then, that your lordship indulges a 
 little in the license of poetical anachronisms, in confidently stating 
 that a fuller knowledge of my sentiments, as opposed to those of 
 “ Hierophilos,” would have prevented the present Pontiff from 
 conferring on me the episcopacy. 
 
 Sixthly — From that period, when I was appointed Bishop of 
 Maronia, no new appointment was necessary to the see of Killala, 
 
LETTER XCIX. 
 
 551 
 
 the bulls for the appointment to the one, and the right of succes- 
 sion to the other, being expedited at the same time by Pope 
 Leo XII., between whose reign and that of his Holiness Gre- 
 gory XVI., there was an intermediate Pontificate. The reader 
 must excuse those details, apparently personal, into which your 
 lordship has obliged me reluctantly to enter, but which are 
 important, as showing with what careless flippancy as to facts 
 noble peers can weave whole tissues of fallacies. 
 
 Seventhly — Your lordship will not infer, because I assign the 
 credit or the responsibility of my appointment to the Sees of 
 Maronia and Killala to him who conferred them, that I am un- 
 mindful of the deep obligations I am under to the present 
 Supreme Pontiff. It will be a consolation to the virtuous and 
 loyal ecclesiastics, whom you are anxious to terrify, though they 
 aspire not to honours, that my opinions were not unknown to his 
 Holiness when he raised me to the Archiepiscopal See of Tuam. 
 It is not necessary to recal to your lordship’s remembrance, at 
 least, that some officious persons did, on that occasion, exhibit, 
 not my real sentiments, but a highly-wrought caricature of them, 
 and that an attempt was made to alarm the Propaganda from the 
 promotion of a person, who was represented as not averse to civil 
 commotion. I shall forbear from entering farther into the history 
 of the distortions of sentiments that characterized that intrigue. 
 It was soon, however, set at rest ; genuine copies, and not the 
 distorted pictures of enemies, were demanded and produced. No 
 sedition or disaffection to the high legitimate authorities of the 
 land appeared. The result I need not follow up ; the busy inter- 
 meddlers were unheeded or rebuked — the legitimate and canonical 
 channels were alone consulted — and in thus ruling a principle of 
 suffering no interference, save that sanctioned by the rescript of 
 Rome itself, the Pope had, in despite of your lordship’s insinua- 
 tions, won the confidence of the Catholics of Ireland. 
 
 As this subject is now disposed of, allow me respectfully to 
 suggest the prudence of forbearing from such frequent allusions 
 to the court of Rome, or the line of policy pursued by its 
 authorities. If his Holiness has condescended to extend to me, 
 too, some small share of his apostolical regard, I value it too 
 highly to be parading it with indecent levity in every circle. I 
 feel the distance between our relative positions in the church and 
 in the world, requires that I should not be using insolent fami- 
 liarities with his station or his name ; and, above all, that I should 
 not affect such confidential knowledge of the secrets of his soul, 
 as to pronounce dogmatically what would have been his line of 
 conduct in certain contingencies. 
 
 Leaving, then, to your lordship the task of amusing yourself 
 with that conjectural knowledge of possibilities, which the divines 
 call scentia media, I content myself with the sober realities of 
 
552 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 unfeigned occurrences. As a great portion of your appendix is 
 taken up with passages from the letters of “Hierophilos,” to justify 
 your charge of a change in my sentimenfs, I may be permitted 
 to state that I then inculcated an allegiance to the throne from 
 which even misrule in its occupant should not release the subject. 
 I held the same opinions when promoted to the Archbishopric of 
 Tuam — I hold the same opinions now, and shall carry them with 
 me to the grave. In these letters I registered my distrust in the 
 motives, and my abhorrence of the schemes of the successive 
 proselytising societies that have been set on foot, under various 
 specious disguises, to pervert the faith of the Catholic people. I 
 held the same opinions at the period to which you allude ; time 
 and subsequent experience have only confirmed me in my earlier 
 convictions. Never was that hostile spirit to the faith of Ireland 
 more active than at this moment. It is assuming the shape of 
 persecution, and as long as a Protestant establishment continues 
 to be quartered at an enormous expense on a Catholic population, 
 it is clear its employment must be idleness, or, if active, it must 
 be in the work of perversion. Yet another Catholic peer gravely 
 asserts that the Catholics of Ireland have now no religious 
 grievances to complain of, and affects to wonder at their im- 
 patience under the weight of this establishment. Does he forget 
 that the priest cannot wear his stole in the very churchyard 
 without a penalty, when sent for by a Catholic to assist in 
 depositing the remains of his relative with the ashes of his fathers? 
 Our wrongs are, then, forsooth, fanciful, and should never be 
 felt as realities by the people, if the exciting harangues of Mr. 
 O’Connell did not kindle their susceptible imaginations. It is not 
 enough that the privations of the Irish peasantry are so severe, 
 but their misery must be still aggravated by those who hesitate 
 not to assert that their wants are fanciful, merely because their 
 own wants may be of their own impatient creation. 
 
 Neither at Galway, nor on any other occasion, have I swerved 
 from those sentiments, nor compromised the steady principles of 
 the Catholic Church. If I am guilty of transgression, it is for 
 too stern and rigid an adherence to its tenets, too unyielding 
 an assertion of its holy authority, and an utter aversion to that 
 easy flexibility of temper and of interest, which, under the name 
 of liberality, is ever ready to turn with every change of political 
 expediency, or of popular delusion. When your lordship names 
 a Galway dinner, in order to give the appearance of authenticity 
 to your statement, it would have been but just that you should 
 have designated the time, for the when, as well as the where, 
 is necessary to mark an identity. On more than one occasion I 
 had the honour of being a guest at public dinners in Galway ; 
 twice, I recollect, when he who deserves to be honoured, the 
 present Lord Mayor of Dublin, came to accept the hospitality of 
 
LETTER XGTX. 
 
 553 
 
 the people of Galway, as well as homage of the heart, which the 
 oppressors of the country cannot bear, because they are not the 
 marks of factious delusion, suddenly and artfully excited, but the 
 well earned tribute of long services which his country shall not 
 cease to appreciate. Yet, on none of these occasions have I given 
 utterance to any sentiments regarding his Holiness’s feeling 
 towards England; and as your lordship has referred to the 
 columns of the Freeman , I trust you will not fail to name the 
 date and number of that invaluable journal, in order to verify 
 the accuracy of your reference. 
 
 Whenever, and that was but seldom, I alluded to his Holiness, 
 it was in such terms of sincere commendation as his exalted 
 character as head of the church, as well as his policy as a wise 
 monarch, justly challenged. Allow me, then, for the removal of 
 the impression which your lordship’s vague reference is calculated 
 to produce, to transcribe a genuine version of what I said at one 
 of those Galway dinners : — “ The princely saloons of Torlonia 
 will not this year be thrown into confusion, by the sudden and 
 unseasonable apparition of a British envoy, nor will their splendid 
 festivities be saddened by the apprehension, that unless the Tory 
 chief rushes by forced marches to avert it, the mistress of the 
 world is to be again inundated from the north by a tide of 
 Radical barbarians. They will be left sufficient leisure to explore 
 the sacred city, and to compare the character of its Pontiff, and 
 the influence of his reign, with the pictures which their own 
 scribes have drawn of his Holiness, and when they will have 
 contemplated the pleasing panorama of all that is splendid in 
 science, fascinating in the arts, cheering in social intercourse, and 
 heart-lifting in religion, which it exhibits — all the creatures of its 
 slandered sovereigns — they will, no doubt, supplicate the forgive- 
 ness of the Holy Father, and will experience his indulgence, 
 notwithstanding all the calumnies with which they have caricatured 
 him. Humbled by the contrast, they will be the first to own that 
 the establishment in Ireland was not only useless, but pregnant 
 with mischief. Those evidences of the beneficial influence of the 
 Catholic Church on social happiness, will guide many a convert to 
 the truth which they so long combated, and, no doubt, they will 
 be the first to write the legislative epitaph of an establishment 
 which is already nodding to its fall by the subtraction of the 
 tithes, which are its only foundation. Its melancholy fate is a 
 proof that enormous wealth is not the means which its Divine 
 Author intended for the propagation or sustainment of true 
 religion. The flourishing condition of the Catholic Church, 
 spreading in the midst of poverty, is evidence of its being 
 supported by a different power. We require not the patronage 
 nor the wealth of the treasury, and I trust the day shall never 
 arrive when the ministers of the Catholic Church in Ireland, or 
 2 N 
 
554 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 the faithful Catholic people, shall consent, by any pecuniary 
 connexion of the former with the Exchequer, to sever that holy 
 and affectionate bond that has hitherto connected them together, 
 and cheered them, by mutual sympathy, amid their most dis- 
 astrousffor tunes.” 
 
 Such were the sentiments which I uttered at the Galway 
 dinner, which, without any reference whatever to the feelings of 
 his Holiness to England, do but justice to the wise policy with 
 which he rules his own states. The opinions which I then held 
 of the danger to our holy religion from any connexion whatever 
 with the British treasury, I still hold, with this difference, that 
 time is only confirming my conviction of the evil with which such 
 a measure would infallibly be accompanied. It is, fortunately, a 
 measure, which would not give satisfaction to any party, and 
 which if Lord Roden’s recent pamphlet may enable us to form a 
 correct opinion, would be viewed with as much aversion by the 
 high Tories as by the Catholics of Ireland. Lord Alvanley’s 
 labours, then, and those of his associates, for pensioning the 
 Irish priesthood, as a panacea for the evils of Ireland, may be 
 consigned to the same fate as those of many of his political pre- 
 decessors, who lost themselves in endless imaginings about a cure 
 for our grievances, whilst they closed their eyes to their obvious 
 source. It is not a fanciful, but a plain and practical grievance, 
 that any nation professing one religion should pay an enormous 
 amount of the national income or revenue to the teachers of an 
 alien establishment. It is not a visionary, nor an unreasonable 
 project to demand for Ireland, the same protection of national 
 legislation to which the most prosperous countries in ancient or 
 modern times are, or have been, indebted for their prosperity. 
 
 Nor have I, as your lordship would fain insinuate, advanced 
 opposite opinions in the letters of Hierophilos. The question of 
 a Legislative Union or its Repeal I did not at all discuss in those 
 writings. My object was to vindicate the fealty of the Irish 
 Catholics to the British government, against the repeated calumnies 
 of their accusers, and I insisted then, as I do now, that the mutual 
 interests of both countries are identified under the sway of the 
 same monarchy. This is the obvious meaning of the words : — 
 
 “ Non equidem hoc dubites amborum fcedere certo 
 
 Consentire dies, et ab uno sidere duci.” 
 
 To prove any opposition between the opinions which I then 
 promulgated, aud those more recent ones to which you allude, it 
 is incumbent on you to show that I then advocated the identity 
 of our legislatures, or that you since discovered an adoption of 
 the dangerous doctrine of a separation of the two kingdoms. 
 Either supposition will elude the keenest search, and to show 
 that I wrote with a wish of having nothing to erase, and that I 
 
LETTER XCIX. 
 
 555 
 
 have no fear of having my sentiments on the subjects which I 
 discusssed put in juxta-position, your lordship will soon have an 
 opportunity of comparing all the published letters,* and of recon- 
 sidering your hasty judgment on the supposed opposition or 
 inconsistency of the opinions which they inculcate. Our opinions, 
 however, are matter of little weight on a question in which the 
 happiness and prosperity of a great nation are involved. What- 
 ever you or I may think, justice and sound policy, and the deep 
 and silent workiugs of the national intellect, as well as the steady 
 course of events, will not be retarded ; and as well might those 
 peers who are writing pamphlets, imagine that their combined 
 weight would keep down the lordly oak of the forest, as check 
 the people of Ireland from peacefully aspiring to their native 
 rights, and of enjoying, under the security of an imperial 
 monarchy, the blessings of an Irish legislation. 
 
 It is astonishing what admiration of the ancient priesthood of 
 Ireland, has seized some of the most rancorous assailants of their 
 successors. It is not difficult, however, to appreciate the value of 
 those posthumous panegyrics. If the lives and virtues of those 
 men were so much admired, it should be expected that they should 
 have received the meed of their services at the hands of their 
 cotemporaries. But, instead of any gratitude while they lived, 
 they passed through a fiery ordeal of calumny and persecution ; 
 and now that they are no more, the most lavish encomiums are 
 heaped by their enemies on their memories. No one mistakes 
 the motives of those invidious contrasts of departed worth with 
 living virtue. The noble assertion of religion and of country, 
 which distinguished many of the older race of ecclesiastics, and 
 annoyed the bigots of their time, is not now felt ; and all the 
 vituperation that was heaped upon them, is now reserved for the 
 priesthood of the present day, who have improved the sacred 
 inheritance which has been left them. Let, then, those hypo- 
 critical scribes continue to eulogize those virtues which, had they 
 lived at the time, they would willingly have rewarded with the 
 same exile or martyrdom which then awaited them. The present 
 race will feel rejoiced that their predecessors were such men, as 
 to extort tardy and reluctant praise even from their enemies. 
 The persecutors of the living St. Thomas of Canterbury, were 
 the first to acknowledge his intrepid zeal and fidelity after his 
 death ; and the shades of turbulence and pride with which they 
 strove to darken his character, were softened into features of a 
 calm and unconquerable courage, which a deep sense of duty 
 never fails to inspire. 
 
 The passage in which your lordship does justice to the in- 
 vaders of our country, presuming that they were the barbarous 
 portion of the Irish population, does credit to your candour. 
 
 t *.The letters referred to will be found in this volume. 
 
556 
 
 LETTER XCIX. 
 
 Were the same tone of historical accuracy to mark the entire of 
 your small pamphlet, it would not have called forth any serious 
 animadversion. There is no doubt but the English invasion 
 plunged Ireland into anarchy and barbarism — a state which 
 has been since more or less continued, by the persevering denial 
 of those equal laws and rights which, if first extended to us, would 
 have spared the historian the ungrateful task of characterizing 
 the annals of Ireland, as an epitome of the uniform misrule of one 
 country, and the uniform sufferings of another. Your lordship 
 has also exposed another historical blunder, which some of the 
 recent pamphlet-writers have omitted — namely, that Ireland was 
 indebted to Spanish or other foreign missionaries. Our language 
 alone would have been an impediment to their success ; as it was 
 an insuperable barrier to the progress of the ignorant and ra- 
 pacious fanatics who were sent over by Queen Elizabeth to convert 
 the Irish people! Those early miscalled Reformers were loud in 
 their denunciations of having divine service performed in an un- 
 known tongue. But they did not escape the caustic ridicule of 
 the Irish people, whose playful humour forsakes them not amidst 
 all their suffering, and who reproached them with the folly and 
 inconsistency of striving to make converts by reading service in 
 a tongue more strange to them than the Latin language. Thanks 
 to the same penal policy, which has withheld from us equal laws 
 and equal justice, for the full preservation of that venerable lan- 
 guage which has been the vehicle, through which our religion has 
 been so purely transmitted. A more conciliating policy would 
 long since have consigned it to decay : it is not therefore unlikely 
 that it will continue to flourish for many centuries. As your 
 lordship appears to have a very literary turn, perhaps like Cato 
 or Valancey, you might be induced, at an advanced age, to turn 
 your attention to a foreign dialect. If so it will reward the task 
 of acquiring it, for even in its ruin it yields not to any other 
 language in Europe. I may be allowed to place before the 
 reader, in our native tongue, the entire of the beautiful passage 
 referred to in this letter, regarding the apostacy from principle, 
 of which honour must be the price : — 
 
 fflo puAjp b’A qp Aliqp, a cA^cpejtp r)A liqjbe, 
 
 ’<S at) cpO|8e cpobA bp^jxe n&p bpe]&jp a cUuqbeAb. 
 
 §A5cop? a qop-pljocc bejc polAjgce o’n c-fAO^Al, 
 <£>jp iy bap-bpe^c a co^auc ’f* ip bpiql’A cort)Ai) 5A1) bAojAl. 
 
 Tj'& a cIau 5A0 eAp ceApAp mup n-8^ApA]b qAb peAll, 
 rrmp b-cpuAill)5jb a qp|*eAp a] 5 pnrpo 5 16 jaII, 
 ai) qqllfe&n a ca a^5 Ia]*a 8 ce^me 5AC Ia, 
 
 QjIac p 5 ^obcAp ox) 5-CAppj A|p bpiql ^pe &’a cp^vbAb. 
 
 It is amusing to see with what zeal some lords of every shade 
 of creed and politics are coming forward to denounce the present 
 agitation about Repeal, whilst in reality they are pushing it 
 
LETTER C. 
 
 557 
 
 forward. Restlessness is a state of which but few are ambitious ; 
 and if the people of Ireland were to have a prospect of justice 
 they would gladly enjoy the blessings of repose. Whatever may 
 be their destiny, they know that hitherto they have been but 
 little indebted to the sympathy or the support of Englishmen ; 
 and whilst they will keep a steady eye on that duty which shall 
 ever bind them to their beloved sovereign, they will take care to 
 discard the officious counsels* of those men who, under the guise 
 of zeal for us, are labouring to promote their own selfish purposes. 
 
 I have the honour to be your lordship’s obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER C. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE DESTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. John the Baptist, 
 
 June 24 , 1842 . 
 
 Sir — It would be criminal to delay any longer to call the 
 attention of the Prime Minister to the starving condition of a 
 large portion of her Majesty’s people. I have during the last 
 month passed over many pressing applications to appeal to the 
 government in behalf of their suffering subjects unheeded. 
 Fearing there might be exaggeration in some of the harrowing 
 details that reached me, but fearing still more to excite hopes 
 that might not be realized, I was unwilling to add to their misery 
 the bitterness of disappointment. Plowever, to the cries of 
 hunger and starvation all such prudential calculations must give 
 way. The people from almost every district have become the 
 
 * Of the officious meddling, rebuked in this letter, the Irish people have had 
 often just reason to complain. My remarks have been less directed against the 
 noble lord than against some of his countrymen, who have, much to our injury, 
 indulged in such intriguing propensities. Lord Clifford is a benevolent and 
 charitable nobleman, and I have reason to know that he sincerely regrets his 
 interference in the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland, into which an utter perversion 
 of truth on the part of his clients, had betrayed his too kind and confiding dis- 
 position. His lordship’s virtues I respect; but we cannot suffer English travel- 
 lers who loiter at Rome, to trade any longer upon the most sacred interests of 
 religion in Ireland. 
 
558 
 
 LETTER C. 
 
 heralds of their appalling destitution. Hunger has found organs 
 for proclaiming its suffering and its power, far more eloquent 
 than any language could convey. Already have its irresistible 
 instincts been reducing to practice the theories of learned jurists, 
 on the community of property, in cases of extreme distress ; and 
 though there is no friend to social order that must not deplore 
 that necessity which would break down any of its fences, it is 
 but justice to the mass of the sufferers to declare, that on the 
 face of the earth there is not, I am convinced, any other people 
 who would endure the torments of hunger with such religious 
 resignation. Such magnanimous patience ought not to be abused. 
 It is a bad and dangerous practice to habituate men to the idea 
 of appeasing the cravings of nature by means beyond the laws ; 
 yet, at this moment, such is the pressure of famine, that those 
 violations are committed. But what is still worse, if the dire 
 distress that prompts them is not relieved, others will resort to 
 the same mischievous practices, without any plea of necessity to 
 offer in extenuation. 
 
 Their sufferings are, alas ! but too manifest. It is not necessary 
 to be coming at those facts by the slow and solemn process of a 
 commission of inquiry. Numbers in this very neighbourhood go 
 to bed without tasting a morsel of food during the entire day, 
 and some pass the second, doomed to the same experiment. In 
 this sad statement there is not a word of exaggeration on my 
 part, nor have I been the dupe of delusion. No, I have made 
 myself conversant with the details of misery, and though even 
 a sense of duty would excuse my absence at this season, I have 
 thought it a more imperative duty to stay at home, even to 
 encounter all the importunities of distress, and to soothe those 
 pangs of suffering which it is impossible to appease. There is no 
 deception. It is not on the awful tale which the tongue may 
 sometimes frame to deceive that I rest the evidence of this un- 
 exampled destitution. No, it is on the tottering steps of groups 
 of creatures returning from the fields where they have been 
 plucking unwholesome vegetables : their jaundiced and livid 
 looks bearing testimony to the scanty and poisonous nutri- 
 ment by which they are necessitated to sustain their wretched 
 existence. 
 
 Amidst this heart-sickening misery the poor are denied the 
 negative comfort of the poor-houses, notwithstanding that the 
 public funds have been so profusely expended on their erection. 
 They are to be opened, it seems, after the pressure of this hard 
 season shall have passed over. Have the enormous salaries of 
 the Poor Law Commissioners, with all the accumulated perquisites 
 of travelling, &c., been also adjourned to the same period ? If 
 we can rely upon the published accounts of the disbursements, 
 it seems that some sixty or seventy thousand pounds have been 
 
LETTER C. 
 
 559 
 
 already expended on those functionaries, and that other subordi- 
 nate officers are entitled to pay, whilst, in many instances, not 
 one particle of charitable relief has reached the poor of some 
 of the most distressed localities. Other bad institutions required 
 time for their development. The poor-law system is realizing its 
 unhappy fruits before its full maturity. In those munificent 
 asylums, which the spirit of the Catholic Church was wont to rear 
 for the alleviation of human misery, never was it customary to 
 make the comfort of the masses subsidiary to the interests of some 
 few individuals. As yet the poor-houses are untenanted, or in 
 some places where they are inhabited, they have become theatres 
 of religious dissension. Alas I that a measure cannot be passed 
 for the relief of the children of misfortune without having 
 mixed with it the bitter ingredients of religious annoyance ! 
 Who would have thought that it would have entered the heads 
 of these commissioners to force the consciences of the Catholic 
 inmates, by striving to make them work on holidays ? Yet such is 
 said to have taken place — nay, some of them, and men who wore, 
 when it was fashionable, the uniform of liberality , are said to be 
 so solicitous for the health of the Catholic youth, that unless they 
 consented to drink milk on Good Friday, they should practise 
 the rigid fast of the Catholic Church ! ! No doubt they are 
 emboldened to proceed in their career of bigotry by the experi- 
 ments that have been already made by similar bodies on the 
 religious freedom of the people, and if not met by a seasonable 
 vigilance, and constitutional resistance to their religious assump- 
 tions, they would soon revive the worst realities of the charter 
 schools. It is no wonder, therefore, that many, seeing them 
 productive of but little physical comfort, and much moral 
 danger, have come to the resolution of a passive resistance with 
 regard to the payment of the rate, letting the law take its 
 course. Indeed, here such a resolution is unnecessary ; for, with 
 the best dispositions to pay that rate in the coming month of 
 August, not twenty persons in a district — exhausted with famine 
 prices of provisions, aggravated with the burdens of usury — 
 could meet the tax, nor would the amount be sufficient for the 
 employment of men and horses necessary to carry away the 
 heavy pledges taken from the peasantry in lieu of payment. 
 
 With such rapidly recurring seasons of death and famine, in a 
 land teeming with exhaustless fertility — with measures totally 
 opposed in their practical operation to the benevolent preamble 
 by which they so often impose on the unthinking — can it be a 
 matter of surprise that the Irish people would constitutionally 
 exert all the energies with which nature has gifted them, to re- 
 move such anomalies of perpetual starvation in the midst of 
 plenty, and of perpetual small and teazing persecution under the 
 insulting names of enlightenment and liberality? Those who 
 
560 
 
 LETTER C. 
 
 are continually reproaching our people with their discontent, do 
 them much wrong, whilst they suppress the cause of this rest- 
 lessness. Is it just to expect that any people would be content, 
 who must part with the produce raised by the labour of their 
 own hands, and often, as just now, experience at the close of the 
 season, all the horrors of starvation ? 
 
 They may be, and are, thank God, almost to a miracle, reli- 
 giously resigned under their unheard-of privations. That is a 
 question into which I do not now enter — a question between their 
 conscience and their faithful pastors — a treasure which they are 
 enlightened enough to prize before all the animal comfort so 
 valued by the English people. Still, as a people, constituting 
 an important portion of the political strength of the empire, 
 conscious of the vast resources of their country, and of the little 
 of its choicest produce which is left them to enjoy, they would be 
 unworthy the name of a free people, were they content to become 
 annual national mendicants. Why should that which constitutes 
 the pride of the man become dishonorable to a country ? No 
 man with a spirit becomes a mendicant until every source of 
 industry has failed, and until all the honorable means by which 
 his fortune could be retrieved are exhausted. Why, then, should 
 Ireland consent to be a stated mendicant on the bounty of Eng- 
 land, imploringly stretching out her arm to send back some of 
 the superabundant produce which she imported, if by quiet and 
 constitutional energy in improving her legislative condition she 
 can spare herself the degradation of such eleemosynary requisi- 
 tions ? Behold, then, the unfailing spring of what is flippantly 
 called the agitation for a domestic legislature. It is one issuing 
 from the best, and purest, and most virtuous principles of the 
 human heart — a love of just and most honorable independence, 
 respectful to the rights of others, and equally jealous of its own, 
 and which must ever exalt the nation, as well as the individual 
 by which it is cherished. 
 
 Affect, therefore, no surprise at the deep-seated anxiety of the 
 Irish people for an Irish parliament under the undivided sway of 
 an imperial crown. In their anomalous condition it would be 
 more surprising if they did not steadily persevere in asserting 
 their rights to their only protection against ever-recurring 
 scarcity, in despite of every discouragement. No honest poli- 
 tician can wish the country to be doomed to perpetual beggary. 
 Were it blessed with ten times its present produce, and all the 
 discoveries of chemistry already applied to agriculture to be ex- 
 hausted on its cultivation, its only effect would be, by increasing 
 our exports, to increase the number of our absentees, who, by 
 coping in luxury with the proud patricians of England, are ren- 
 dered so needy, that no increase of rents or price of produce can 
 satisfy their rapacious demands ; and thus, while the dishonest 
 
LETTER Cl. 
 
 561 
 
 financier would be deducing from the exports of Ireland proofs of 
 its prosperity, the looker on might, alas ! as at this moment in 
 many parts of this district, have to weep in silent pity over the 
 slow, but certain starvation of the people. 
 
 The ordinary forms of such applications might require a delay 
 for an answer before publishing this communication. But the 
 awful necessity of the case must supersede those ordinary con- 
 ventional forms. Besides, were I to judge from the cold and 
 unfeeling manner in which his Excellency answered a pressing 
 application made to him from Castlebar, I could have but very 
 little hope of aid from the Irish government. 
 
 I must even candidly own that I could not look upon that 
 answer as an exponent of the policy which her Majesty’s govern- 
 ment would think it most wise to pursue, in telling a starving 
 people to wait for the showers and the seasons. The extent of 
 the distress will not, I trust, render callous that sympathy which, 
 in individual instances, it is sure to awaken. 
 
 I have the honor to be your very obedient servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER Cl. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE UNCANONICAL BEQUESTS BILL. 
 
 Dublin, Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin, 
 
 J uly 2, 1844. 
 
 Sir — I f further proof were wanting of the hostile spirit that 
 dictates the legislative enactments for Ireland, it would be found 
 in the treacherous and atrocious bill, entitled, “ An act to provide 
 for the more effectual application of charitable donations and 
 bequests in Ireland.” It is treacherous, because the Catholics of 
 Ireland have been taken by surprise, hoping that, if there should 
 be any new law on this important subject, it should be in accord- 
 ance whh Mr. O’Connell’s bill, which has been read, it seems, a 
 second time, in the House of Commons. It is atrocious, surpass- 
 ing, in its odious provisions, the worst enactments of penal times, 
 and developing a maturity of wicked refinement in legislation, 
 
562 
 
 LETTER Cl. 
 
 which the more clumsy artifices of the anti-Catholic code would, 
 in vain, attempt to rival. The penal code plundered Catholics of 
 the accumulated charities of their pious ancestors. This bill 
 strives to strangle the rising spirit of Catholicity in Ireland. 
 
 Why, I may be permitted respectfully to inquire, were not the 
 Catholic bishops of Ireland consulted on a measure so vitally 
 affecting the civil and spiritual interests of the people committed 
 to their care ? Or why were not drafts of the bill forwarded to 
 them, or to the eminent Irish Catholic lawyers, for their opinion? 
 Not only courtesy, but a regard for the public interests, dictates 
 such a course, when there is a question of any material alteration 
 affecting the rights and interests of any great municipal or com- 
 mercial bodies. Are the Catholic bishops of Ireland — the most 
 efficient guardians of the public peace, and the teachers of a pure 
 morality to eight millions of people — to be overlooked in the 
 framing of a law that reaches the very consciences of that vast 
 body ; nay more, to be insulted with a preamble of a bill utterly 
 at variance with its provisions, since, instead of being an amend- 
 ment of a bad remnant of the penal code, it becomes a frightful 
 aggravation of its enactments ? 
 
 Fortunately, the publication of the bill, which renders it now 
 accessible to all, spares me the necessity of any tedious commen- 
 tary. No, I shall let the world peruse it in the manner that 
 Protestants recommend the perusal of the Bible, quite assured 
 that it requires no elaborate construction to come at the conclu- 
 sion, which, on the consideration of this document, must fill every 
 religious man with horror, who has any concern for the interests 
 of his immortal soul. Yet even the preamble, calculated as it is 
 to mislead, reveals enough of the spirit in which this measure is 
 conceived, being, forsooth, to enable grants and devises to be 
 made in trust for Roman Catholic ministers in Ireland. Roman 
 Catholic ministers in Ireland ! ! What a sapient, and decorous, 
 and respectful designation of a body of men, the rightful and 
 hereditary owners of Christ’s imperishable priesthood, having 
 the uncontested impress of its sacred character in the continuous 
 and unbroken succession of their order ; and standing forth in 
 Ireland at the present moment as the most astonishing moral 
 miracle the world ever witnessed, and proclaiming the impotency 
 of penal laws and brute enactments, to strip them of the inhe- 
 ritance of that priesthood, which in vain has been attempted to be 
 usurped by others. 
 
 Roman Catholic ministers ! ! Pray, appropriate that designa- 
 tion to the officers of the Kirk, or the parsons of the Establish- 
 ment — the one being the elected ministers of the state, the other 
 of their congregations ; but do not call the Catholic bi^iops or 
 priests of Ireland by a name, under which their faithful flocks 
 could never know them, being imported with thdft alien establish- 
 
LETTER CL 
 
 563 
 
 ment, with which they have been taught to associate the worst 
 evils of Ireland ! What a torturing process does this inchoate, 
 and, I trust, frustrate, enactment resort to, which, instead of 
 naming, as it should, the Catholic bishops and priests of their 
 respective dioceses or parishes, resolves that “minister” shall 
 include all persons in holy orders, and “ district” shall extend to 
 any ecclesiastical division, according to the laws and discipline of 
 the Catholic Church ! ! But who are to be the judges of the 
 canonical qualifications of those new-fangled ministers ? Is it 
 their canonical superiors who are to attest, as in Mr. O’Connell’s 
 bill, the authenticity and continuance of their title and claims to 
 such charitable bequests and devises ? Let the recent melan- 
 choly cases of the colonies answer the question. Yes ; no matter 
 what might be the apostacy from the faith — no matter what 
 might be the scandalous profligacy in morals — a secular and 
 anti-Catholic tribunal would decide upon the claims of the 
 “ registered minister ;” and though the authentic instrument of 
 justly -inflicted canonical censures might be produced, no matter, 
 it would be a document of which the ministers of British law 
 could not, forsooth, take cognizance ; and those who, if I am 
 rightly informed, are now, in defiance of “ the constitution,” 
 invoking the interference of Rome, to exercise even a temporal 
 authority, to further their own ends, would be the first to expose 
 to ridicule, nay, to visit with penal infliction, the assertion of a 
 legitimate spiritual authority, derived from the same hallowed 
 source. 
 
 I shall not pause to animadvert on the strange effusions of 
 insolence and folly, to which Lord Beaumont is reported to have 
 given utterance. Not content with an utter forgetfulness of 
 what his lordship owed to gratitude and religion, he becomes the 
 parliamentary proxy of the Apostolic See, and labours under the 
 load of his delegated responsibility. Poor man ! I fancied that 
 those strange visitations, to which some of the peers of England 
 were subject, had long since passed away. It was to be hoped 
 that the idea of Saxon ascendancy should yield to the conviction, 
 that it was an Irishman that restored the degraded peer of 
 Britain to the privilege of insulting the nation of his deliverers ; 
 nor could it be imagined, that the emancipated slave could so 
 soon affect the airs of insolent patronage towards those, to whom 
 he owed such vast obligations. But as his lordship is evidently 
 uneasy under a burden of gratitude, which he is unwilling to 
 acknowledge, let me warn him not to attempt to associate the 
 Head of the Church with his own turbid schemes, nor let him 
 pretend to the least confidence on the part of the successor of 
 the apostles. Neither he nor any English junta must any longer 
 pretend to any influence at Rome, that would hurt the interests 
 of Ireland ; and, doubtless, his own mind will whisper to his 
 
564 
 
 LETTER Cl. 
 
 lordship, that were the Apostolic See in want of a confidential 
 adviser, Lord Beaumont would be the very last that would be 
 consulted on the spiritual concerns of Ireland, or any other por- 
 tion of the Catholic Church. 
 
 Imagine not to impose on the Catholics of Ireland, by the 
 insidious proffer of putting some “ discreet and proper person” 
 on the commission. What those “ discreet and proper persons” 
 may be, we may learn from the history of every apostate in 
 religion, as well as politics, who is ever ready, for the patronage 
 of the court, to barter the best interests of his country and his 
 faith. Of such “proper and discreet persons,” you might possibly 
 find a few among the trading politicians of Ireland, and, per- 
 chance, among the ecclesiastics, too, whose “ propriety and 
 discretion” would not fail to be secured by the “ seasonable 
 provision” that, if they were to dissent from the Protestant 
 commissioners, or to favour any great question involving the 
 best interests of their country and religion, their further services 
 would be dispensed with by the crown. Ireland already knows 
 too well the evil effects of such Machiavelian policy. This game of 
 delusion must be played no longer, to the injury of the country, 
 as well as of the Catholic religion. I have spoken to several of 
 the Catholic bishops of Ireland on the subject of this execrable 
 bill. Among them there is but one uniform feeling of alarm at 
 its hateful enactments. Let not my Lord Wharncliffe hope, as 
 he is reported to have expressed a hope, that the appointment of 
 certain “ proper and discreet” Catholics would win confidence in 
 that measure. What ! win confidence for a bill, which outrages 
 all maxims which the wisest jurists and holiest divines have laid 
 down as the laws that should regulate property and conscience. 
 A bill which would go to forbid the restitution of plundered 
 property, and would consign the death-bed penitent to all the 
 horrors of despair. A bill which would annul the testamentary 
 dispositions of the youngest and healthiest disposer of his pro- 
 perty, if he were seized by death before three months had 
 elapsed after the perfecting of such an instrument. A bill 
 which, contrary, to the sacred principles laid down by St. Paul 
 himself, requires a transfer of testamentary property before 
 the death of him who bequeaths it ; and, thus, its hatred of 
 Catholicity pursues man to the other world, and attempts to set 
 aside the great and sacred maxim of all wills, which the apostle 
 applied to the great mystery of our redemption, that no will 
 becomes valid until after the death of the testator. 
 
 Protestants, and Protestants alone, should be entrusted with 
 the management and appropriation of Protestant charities. 
 Dissenters, and Dissenters alone, should have the management 
 of their charitable devises. And, by the same rule of equity 
 and fairness, Catholics should have the exclusive management of 
 
LETTER CII. 
 
 565 
 
 their charities — all under the salutary influence of the High 
 Court of Chancery. I must respectfully, then, adjure you, as 
 you value the interests of justice and of religion, not to pass a 
 measure so fraught with injustice, and so abhorrent to the feel- 
 ings of Catholics. Nothing shall ever reconcile us to such a 
 bin. It is my firm conviction, that no ecclesiastic, possessed of 
 the least regard for the interests of religion, would ever consent 
 to become an agent in working a bill of such infernal machinery ; 
 and, if I could suppose such dereliction of duty to be possible, 
 that person who should be guilty of it would infallibly earn the 
 reprobation of all the Catholics of the Christian world. 
 
 I hope I have done my duty, in conveying, by this public 
 address, to the first minister of the crown, my own conviction, 
 and, I believe, that of all the bishops, clergy, and people of 
 Ireland, of the evils which would result from such a measure. 
 Nay, more, I write to as many members of the House of 
 Commons as the urgency of the time will allow, requiring of 
 them, in the name of their constituents, of their country, and 
 of their religion, to arrest a foul measure, which would be as 
 unworthy of the boasted freedom of the age, as it would be 
 insulting and injurious to the people of Ireland. 
 
 I have the honor to be your obedient servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE SAME BEQUESTS BILL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, July 24, 1844. 
 
 Sir — Through the zeal and kindness of some of the members of 
 the House of Commons, I have been just favoured with copies 
 of the “ amended” bill of charitable donations and bequests in 
 Ireland. That the original bill should have excited the strongest 
 alarm among the friends of freedom of conscience cannot be a 
 subject of wonder. It is equally natural that it should have 
 been welcomed as a boon by those who were jealous of the 
 
566 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 spread of the Catholic religion, and who recognized in the 
 hideous features of the projected law, a lineal descendant of 
 the despotic enactments by which it had been preceded. But 
 that the bill, amended in its present form, should have any 
 admirers or apologists among the honest and devoted friends 
 of the Catholic people of Ireland, is impossible, or if some 
 friendly-disposed persons affect to admire it, it must bespeak 
 a shallowness of intellect, quite on a level with the shallowness 
 of the changes, which it has only superficially undergone. 
 
 Has one fundamental principle of the obnoxious measure been 
 altered? Not one. The uncanonical, and, I will add for the 
 sake of the true liberties of misguided England, as well as of 
 misgoverned Ireland — the unconstitutional viciousness of that 
 bill — is, that it hands over the rights, the privileges, the 
 freedom, and the property in trust of the Catholic church, 
 and of every gradation of its hierarchy, to the jurisdiction of 
 a board of control, essentially hostile to the religion of that 
 hierarchy, and essentially jealous of any, the least accession of 
 property, by which its charitable institutions would be ex- 
 tended, and the decency, if not splendour, of its worship of 
 the Deity maintained. I am not surprised. Lord Wharncliffe 
 — if we are to credit his lordship’s reporters — reveals the 
 true principle on which the bad measure is founded. It is as 
 good a measure, we are informed, as is consistent with the 
 maintainance of the ascendancy of the Protestant Establishment 
 in Ireland. Pray what has the ascendancy of the Protestant 
 Establishment to do in controlling the natural, and civil, and 
 religious right of every Christian, and every British subject to 
 dispose of his property, according to the dictates of his free- 
 will and conscience? — or what claim can that unhallowed as- 
 cendancy put forward, to set aside the equally natural and 
 rightful fences, which the dying Christian recognizes in the 
 trustful pastors of his own faith, for the realization of his 
 testamentary dispositions ? 
 
 It is, alas ! this unjust and unnatural spirit of religious mo- 
 nopoly, that has so long cramped every effort at generous 
 legislation for Ireland, and still vitiates all its enactments. 
 Instead of the first inquiry that should suggest itself to every 
 legislator, what are the measures accordant with justice and 
 beneficial to the people ? — the question is, what will be their 
 influence on the Protestant Establishment ? and thus the in- 
 terests of a nation are uniformly sacrificed to the monopoly 
 of a small section of its population. Are you to wonder, 
 then, at the origin and progress and strength of the Repeal 
 movement in Ireland ? The ministry is the most powerful 
 force by which the action of that body is propelled, and it 
 is to the measures of that ministry its most signal success is 
 
LETTER CII. 
 
 567 
 
 owing. We were promised an extension of the franchise, 
 which practically meant its restriction or annihilation. We were 
 promised a measure for the relief of the poor, which practically 
 means the appliances of military force in the abortive collection 
 of an odious impost which the people are unable to pay. A 
 system of education, called national, is yet so anti-national, 
 that it is converted into an engine to repress those aspirings 
 after legislative justice from a national parliament, which no- 
 thing but that justice can ever effectually subdue. Witness the 
 war of the Repeal symbol, now so fiercely waging between 
 the contending parties, that the buttoned urchins of those 
 government schools will be utterly triumphant, or must share 
 the fate of the Roman pupils, who were bound by their 
 heartless pedagogue, and handed over as hostages to the 
 enemies of their country. I must remark that to wear the 
 Repeal button, or to study Irish history, there is no interdict 
 whatever in the schools, which we sanction in this diocese; 
 and allow me to add, that in the universities of Oxford or 
 Cambridge, or in any other schools, the children would not 
 be more ready, than here, to lay down their lives, if neces- 
 sary, in duty to their beloved sovereign. The national mind 
 has outgrown the penal bandages, in which its infancy has 
 been swathed. 
 
 Since, then, this series of analogies warrants the supposition 
 that the practical construction of some parliamentary pre- 
 ambles is by contraries, it is not a rash inference to deduce 
 from the title of this “bill for the more effectual application 
 of charitable bequests,” that in its practical result, it would 
 be, to a great extent, “for the effectual misapplication” of all 
 such charities. This is not a hazardous, or an unwarranted 
 assumption. No, it is borne out by the melancholy evidence 
 of the past, as well as by the evidence of the transmigration 
 to our own times of the anti-Catholic spirit which dictated and 
 fostered our worst enactments. Else, why not adopt Mr. 
 O’Connell’s bill, and entrust to the Catholic parish priests and 
 bishops of Ireland, as a corporation of constructive perpetuity, 
 the bequests, donations, and hereditaments, with which, for the 
 benefits of their respective parishes and dioceses, the pious bene- 
 volence of living or dying Catholics may invest them. Were 
 Catholic ecclesiastics found unfaithful to the trusts reposed in 
 them, by the pious of former times — had they been less scrupu- 
 lous and less faithful, they would not have transmitted, for the 
 benefit of the poor, such ample funds, as to tempt the sacrile- 
 gious rapacity of the chief agents in the miscalled Reformation. 
 What, then, but the hereditary hate of the Catholic religion can 
 be brought as a palliation, for the subjection of an ancient and 
 apostolic body, who so invariably and uniformly fulfilled their 
 
568 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 trust, to shifting and fluctuating boards, the ephemeral creatures 
 of a day, or of an administration; and who, forsooth, are to be 
 relied on, because they are legally a responsible body. We have 
 had, to the great misfortune of the country, but too much of 
 inefficient legal, and too little of efficient moral, responsibility. 
 This is a position well worth the attention of statesmen to 
 ponder; and if, while they retain the antiquated terms of 
 intendment , &c., they brought back a little of the spirit of 
 ancient legislation, too, the country would not be involved in its 
 present accumulating difficulties. 
 
 The Protestant bishops and clergy of England and Ireland 
 form a legal corporation, enjoying and transmitting to their 
 successors their rights and privileges. And yet you deny this 
 right to the Irish people, in favour of an hierarchy, who, while 
 faithful to them, have never been wanting in fidelity even to the 
 powers that oppressed them. Nay, this “amended” bill — the 
 theme of the interested eulogies of hollow statesmen and false 
 patriots — thus registers its respect for Catholics and their insti- 
 tutions : — 
 
 “Provided always, that every such deed, will, or testament 
 shall be duly executed three calendar months, at the least, in 
 order to pass and to give a title to any real estate, before the 
 death of the person who shall execute or make the same:” — 
 “ Provided always, that nothing herein contained shall be con- 
 strued to render lawful any donation, devise, or bequest to, or in 
 favour of, any religious order, community, or society of the 
 Church of Pome, bound by monastic or religious vows, pro- 
 hibited by an act, passed in the tenth year of the reign of 
 George IV., intituled, ‘An act for the relief of his Majesty’s 
 Poman Catholic subjects,’ or to, or in favour of, any member or 
 members thereof.”* So far for the spirit of this bill towards 
 the monastic orders. Had any still existed, or been suffered to 
 revive, the country would not be groaning under the weight of 
 those horrid Bastiles, the poor-houses, which frown as monuments 
 of Whig legislation, and which must frighten that treacherous 
 party from looking for the confidence of Ireland. 
 
 Now, let the reader see whether, if it is not mitigated towards 
 the secular clergy, that mitigation be not the effect of a necessity 
 to which bigotry was forced to yield. 
 
 “ And be it enacted, that it shall not be lawful for any such 
 priest, or person, in holy orders of the Church of Pome, to 
 alienate, set, or let, or in any manner demise, for any period 
 whatever, such lands, tenements, or hereditaments, or any part 
 thereof, or in any manner whatever to charge or encumber the 
 same, or any property enjoyed by him under this act ; but that 
 
 * Section 13. 
 
LETTER CII. 
 
 569 
 
 all charges and incumbrances upon such lands, tenements, and 
 hereditaments, or other property, and all conveyances, gifts, 
 grants, demises, or subdemises of the same, or any part thereof, 
 made, or to be made by any such priest or person, shall be abso- 
 lutely void.”* 
 
 Had such a clause restricted the progress of agricultural 
 improvement in olden times, the possessions of the house of 
 Bedford, and others of the English aristocracy, would not now 
 have been so valuable. The recent debate in the House of 
 Lords, on the motion of the Bishop of London, revealed the 
 lamentable state of ecclesiastical properties in the metropolis, 
 respecting nuisances which the apostle forbids us to name. The 
 nature of the tenements with which those properties, especially 
 in Westminster, were encumbered, filled some few of the mem- 
 bers with sorrow, while it drew forth, it is said, at the expense of 
 the Protestant Establishment, which it is sought to exalt by this 
 bill, the convulsive merriment of the major part of the assembly. 
 In Ireland, the land of periodical famine, ecclesiastical fortunes 
 have been heaped on each other, to such an unchristian and 
 scandalous amount, that any minister, anxious for the prosperity 
 of the country, should have long since let loose, for the common 
 weal, those hideous monopolies, which the Establishment has 
 detained in injustice, and of which the ruinous condition of 
 the towns which they oppress, bear sad attestation. Nay, on 
 a late occasion, the auction programme of a dignitary of this 
 Establishment exhibited such rare and curious specimens of 
 foreign animals, as might, in their description, give employment 
 to the genius of Cuvier himself. No change is to be effected in 
 the London ecclesiastical property, of which the effects are 
 deplored by the grave, laughed at by the profane, and attested 
 by all. The parsons of the Irish Establishment may transmit 
 those hereditaments, so fruitful in exotic animals, that they 
 would be an accession to the menagerie of Dublin, and, no 
 doubt, illustrate some of the zoological lectures, with which the 
 Protestant archbishop occasionally seasons his orthodox addresses 
 to the disciples of his own schools. Yet, while the ample funds 
 of Catholic testators of past times are thus squandered, without 
 scruple on the one hand, or complaint or correction on the other, 
 the incipient bequests of real property, which Catholics, just 
 emerging from poverty and persecution, are enabled to make, 
 are to be clogged with such penal conditions, that their value 
 must remain stationary for want of a tenure to stimulate industry, 
 and their occupant must not have the franchise which the tenant 
 of every other property may enjoy. 
 
 Yet this is the measure which Lord Normanby and others hail 
 
 2 o 
 
 * Section 14. 
 
570 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 as a boon to the people of Ireland ! ! A boon, indeed ! The 
 Catholics of Ireland would be unworthy of the important position 
 which they occupy, by their numbers, their industry, their pro- 
 perty, and their intelligence, if they were not to repudiate, from 
 whatever quarter, such an officious and unauthorized sponsor of 
 their sentiments. In the scale of a nation’s feelings and convic- 
 tions, such light and fluttering opinions are scarcely a feather’s 
 weight, for they are sure to move in the direction of the political 
 breeze of the moment. 
 
 Is not the bill, in its amended shape, infected with much of its 
 original viciousness, requiring three months before death for the 
 validity of testamentary deeds bequeathing landed property ? 
 Thus the most important period of a man’s life — the short 
 interval that may be left him, to atone for his past injustices — 
 is attempted to be snatched from the mercies of the Almighty, 
 by a penal despotism, which inexorably forbids reparation, 
 plunging its tortured victim into all the agony of despair. Yet 
 this is called a boon ! Nothing but a deadly hate of the holy 
 influences of the Catholic religion could inspire a clause, which 
 thus deprives a dying man, guilty of injustice, of the ordinary 
 condition of pardon. This is manifest from the comparison 
 between the proportion of Catholic and Protestant charities 
 within the last year. In favour of the Catholics, it was nearly 
 in the proportion of four to one ; and as, no doubt, many of 
 those bequests were the fruit of dispositions, having reference 
 to the awful considerations of judgment and eternity, the be- 
 nevolence (!) of the law attempts to interpose, to secure to the 
 living, perhaps, some ill-gotten goods, at the peril of the sal- 
 vation of him, by whose frauds and injustices a portion of the 
 property may have been put together. It is a frequent and 
 malignant charge made against Catholic priests, that they 
 dispense pardon for sins, without reference to the disposition 
 of the penitent ; and yet if they require, at the approach 
 of death, the condition founded on reason, and laid down by 
 St. Augustine, that, “ unless restitution be made, the sin is not 
 remitted” — thus guarding the penitent against a fatal delusion 
 — they must be accused of troubling the repose of the infirm 
 with vain and superstitious terrors. No doubt, it is the alarm 
 felt at this disproportion between Catholic and Protestant 
 charities, that has suggested this execrable bill, for the purpose 
 of staying the current of a benevolence, as useful to .society in 
 alleviating the misfortunes of the forlorn, as it is conformable to 
 religion and to the inspired writings, in expiating, by alms’ 
 deeds, the sins of the benefactors. However, the Establishment 
 should feel no jealousy on this account, practised, as it has 
 been, in a shorter and more summary way of acquiring such 
 possessions. Of the ancient Catholic Church, the only portion 
 
LETTER CII. 
 
 571 
 
 that appeared sacred in its eyes was its gold. Its penances, 
 and its purgatories, and its masses, were thrown aside as the 
 stubble. The parsons, therefore, very astutely appropriated the 
 one, and relieved themselves from the other, thus revelling at 
 ease in all the benefits of the sacred property, and throwing upon 
 the priests the heavy burden of all of what they called its super- 
 stitious obligations. 
 
 Though I have read the amended bill with some attention, I 
 must confess I sought in vain for any valuable improvement, 
 such it seems as to have cast some of the Liberal peers into 
 ecstacy. The offensive word, “minister,” is, it seems, set aside, 
 and the bill recognizes the clergy as “ priests” of the Catholic 
 Church. There is something even in an approach, however 
 tardy and reluctant, to the language of truth and urbanity 
 towards the Catholic clergy, which was in vain to be looked for 
 in the detestable enactments of former times. Beyond this 
 philological improvement, with which it were to be wished some 
 “ arbiter eleg antiarum ’ ’ had more profusely seasoned legal docu- 
 ments, for the sake of the legislators themselves, I find nothing 
 in the amended bill deserving of any commendation. 
 
 But there is another, it appears, far more valuable modifica- 
 tion : it is the accession of five “ discreet and proper Catholics” 
 to the commission ! 1 ! It is this insidious, and, I will add, 
 insolent, modification against which I beg most solemnly to 
 protest, not only in my own name, but in the name of the 
 insulted rights, and privileges, and liberties of the Catholic 
 Church, which no member of its sacred hierarchy is free to 
 surrender. Is not Lord Beaumont called a Catholic ? What a 
 precious commissioner his lordship would make, in deciding the 
 rights of the clergy and the poor to testamentary property ! ! 
 They would as soon have the Dey of Algiers on the commission. 
 How many such “ discreet and proper Catholics” would not her 
 Majesty’s minister find this moment in Ireland, who, with the 
 pliancy of Sir Lucas Dillon, of former days, would not fail to 
 find for the crown, or the majority of Protestant commissioners, 
 against the legitimate claimants, and who, like him, would 
 deserve to be “ extraordinarily well dealt withal,” by giving 
 them a reversionary interest in the ample possessions which, so 
 “ properly and discreetly,” they might consent to alienate ? 
 Not one Catholic in Ireland, lay or clerical, would, for a mo- 
 ment, enjoy the confidence of the Catholic body, who would 
 consent to become a member of a board so ingeniously adapted 
 to all the purposes of religious annoyance and persecution ; and 
 I care not who or what he might be, I should look upon every 
 such person as a traitor to the sacred interests of the Catholic 
 religion. 
 
 If the public weal be the object, as it ever should be the 
 
572 
 
 LETTER CII. 
 
 object, of legislation, instead of having the Catholics in a 
 minority, while the amount of Catholic charities for the last 
 year was four times that of Protestant bequests, why not leave 
 the one and the other to the management and control of the 
 pastors of their respective creeds? It is not sought to elude 
 legal vigilance and responsibility ; on the contrary, it is courted. 
 Let the Protestant bishops and clergy manage their charities, 
 under the sanction and control of the legislature. Let the 
 parish priests of Ireland be incorporated for the same purposes, 
 under the same legislative control. If it should be deemed too 
 great a trust to vest in the parish priest, you can enlarge it to 
 diocesan trust, under the Catholic bishop of the diocese and his 
 clergy. If that still should seem too narrow a basis, you can 
 widen it to the boundaries of each ecclesiastical province, con- 
 stituting the bishops of the province, with a portion of the 
 parochial clergy, a corporate body for the management of their 
 respective charities. You can thus so extend its foundations, as 
 to secure the most rigid and conscientious exactness in the 
 application of the funds, and preclude all objections on the 
 score of sufficient responsibility. Are the funds of the College 
 of Maynooth mismanaged, or not properly accounted for ? The 
 only charge preferred against their management has been an 
 economy, which many have pronounced sordid, and to which 
 they scruple not to assert, the decencies of that establishment 
 have been frequently sacrificed. At all events, the strict inte- 
 grity of its trustees, mostly Catholic bishops, and of the bursars 
 of the establishment, stands unimpeached. 
 
 The fatal error of your policy, as well as that of the Whigs, 
 your predecessors in office, is a continual effort to encroach 
 upon the essential and inalienable rights and jurisdiction of the 
 bishops and clergy, in order to subject them to political combina- 
 tions of motley influences, which it would be a dereliction of 
 duty to recognize. This you have attempted, and are, no 
 doubt, meditating, on a more enlarged scale in your enlarged 
 schemes of education. Allow me, however, to inform you in 
 time — especially as your recent speech has given us a glimpse of 
 your contemplated policy, regarding academic education — that 
 nothing but separate grants for separate education will ever give 
 satisfaction to the Catholics of Ireland, and that whatever certain 
 individuals may report to the contrary, the prejudices against 
 your government scheme, called national, are justly deepening, 
 instead of passing away. 
 
 Nay, it is turned by bigoted patrons and other functionaries 
 into an engine of dire persecution. Having revealed enough of 
 your contemplated measures, to test the public feeling, 1 am 
 anxious to apprise you beforehand, that you miscalculate much, 
 if you imagine that we shall ever suffer the education of the 
 
LETTER CII. 
 
 573 
 
 people of Ireland to be planned or conducted by those who 
 seem to have taken upon themselves the exclusive office of the 
 directors of the national mind, and to whom — so well have they 
 yet accorded with your views — you seem anxious to entrust the 
 guidance of the youth of Ireland, and the laws and regulations 
 by which its academies, colleges, and universities are to be 
 governed. Before the next session of parliament we will have 
 petitions, with thousands of signatures, praying for a share of 
 the public funds for our people, in proportion to their numbers, 
 and their services to the state. We shall also petition for the 
 erection and endowment of Catholic provincial colleges, as well 
 as diocesan seminaries. It will be well to meet our just wishes, 
 for an average of two thousand pounds a week to the Repeal 
 Association shows the mighty resources of a people resolved to 
 be free. The yearly amount would throw into the shade your 
 increased grant for education. If the present contemplated bill 
 for a Board of Charitable Bequests, exceeding in anti-Catholic 
 spirit all its predecessors, be persevered in, after those solemn, 
 urgent, and repeated remonstrances, in the name of numbers of 
 the hierarchy and people of Ireland, it will meet with that 
 distrust and execration which it well deserves. There is no 
 pressing exigency for immediate legislation on the subject. On 
 so vital a measure the country should not be taken by surprise. 
 Spare, then, I implore of you, the faithful members, who are 
 ready to contest every inch of ground, by resorting to all the 
 forms of delay, the necessity of fatiguing a weary senate by 
 such necessary expedients for the safety of their country, and 
 adjourn the consideration of the bill to the next session, when 
 the collected deliberations of all classes of the clergy and people 
 of Ireland will enable the minister to form a more correct 
 estimate of the nature of the law which would best promote the 
 interests of religion and of the state, and be most in accordance 
 with the paramount rights and duties involved in the legislative 
 measure. 
 
 I have the honour to be your very obedient servant, 
 
 ^ John, Archbishop of Tuam, 
 
574 
 
 LETTER C11I. 
 
 LETTER CIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE BEQUESTS ACT. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, August 12, 1844. 
 
 Sir — Amidst all the fatigues and anxieties of office, you must, 
 doubtless, be cheered by the retrospect of the recent victories 
 which your policy has achieved in the House of Commons. Not 
 only have you subdued the mutinous members who, on the sugar 
 question, presumed to dispute your supremacy, thus reducing 
 them to a worse slavery than that of the Indians, for whose lot 
 they affected such hollow commisseration, but you have been also 
 so successful in taming the fiery patriotism of the Celtic Whigs 
 as to make them put on with the utmost equanimity the igno- 
 minious yoke of the Saxon Tories. By what magic can a minister 
 evoke such power as to overcome those formidable difficulties, it 
 would be beyond the range of my present object to inquire. I 
 know not whether there are any such romantic believers in the 
 mere influence of unassisted oratory as to ascribe your success to 
 your rhetorical powers of persuasion. Some think Pitt is the 
 great idol of your political idolatry. Others fancy they can 
 trace a nearer resemblance in yours to the policy pursued by 
 Walpole. But be the prototype what it may, it is certain that with 
 all the dexterous distribution of the treasures of the state, which 
 they so profusely squandered among their retainers, they could 
 never rival you in the winning ways in which you can make 
 converts, and rule an obsequious senate. 
 
 Never was the observation better verified, that “ no one can 
 serve two masters, 5 ’ than in the universal execration which the 
 Irish members have earned and called forth on this occasion. 
 They may have risen in ministerial favour, but they have pro- 
 portionably sunk in the estimation of the people. They were 
 sent to sustain, and not to sell, their interests. In provoking the 
 vengeance of ruthless landlords, by the exercise of their franchise, 
 to which devotion many of the once comfortable farmers of 
 Ireland have become victims and outcasts upon the world, they 
 fancied at least they should have the consolation of returning 
 Catholics to parliament who would watch over their interests and 
 protect their religion. They never dreamt that whilst voting 
 they were to be doomed to the two-fold misfortune of being 
 
LETTER (Jill. 
 
 575 
 
 driven themselves from their houses, and betrayed by their false 
 representatives. Yet, such are now the bitter reflections of 
 thousands of the honest freeholders of Ireland in witnessing the 
 recent apostacy of the Irish members. Their conduct admits 
 of no palliation. At the tail of the session, verifying the ancient 
 proverb of being fraught with poison, a measure clearly and in- 
 contestibly bearing on the face of it evidence of hatred to the 
 Catholic religion, is introduced into parliament, and, instead of 
 meeting with opposition from the professing Catholics of the 
 house, is hailed as a boon conferred on the Catholics of Ireland ! 
 They might have delivered their own individual opinions, and 
 poured forth their gratitude for the showers of ministerial 
 patronage for which they thirsted ; but they had no right to 
 misrepresent and insult the Catholic people. No time was allowed 
 for petition or remonstrance ; but even during the brief interval 
 in which the bill was hastily precipitated through the house, 
 there was more than sufficient of the public feeling manifested 
 to convince them, if they were not deaf and blind, that the bill 
 was universally execrated. Numbers of the Catholic clergy and 
 people petitioned against it. Many of the Catholic bishops from 
 the provinces, some in union with their clergy, and others as- 
 sembled in synod, sent forth in explicit terms their remonstrances 
 and their reasons against this atrocious bill. The Repeal Associ- 
 tion, the best and most unequivocal organ of the feelings of the 
 Irish people, denounced it. The public journals that reflect 
 faithfully the national mind were equally unsparing of their con- 
 demnation of this penal measure. The son of the great and 
 revered individual who is now paying the forfeit of loving his 
 country and his faith too well, found it necessary in defence of 
 his father’s insulted honour, whose name was attempted to be 
 treacherously mixed up with this odious transaction, to come 
 forward and repel the idea of any, even a constructive identifica- 
 tion, with a bill of which the accursed object is, to rivet again 
 the fetters which he was so successful in breaking. Thus, 
 through every channel from which the feelings of the people 
 usually find vent, was poured indignant condemnation of the 
 measure, and yet the recreant members for Ireland, it is unne- 
 cessary to point out the exceptions, persevere to welcome as a 
 boon a bill so universally stigmatized. Amidst the numbers of 
 bishops and priests who opposed it, not a solitary voice was raised 
 in its favour. Let it not be insinuated that any half or qualified 
 consent, such as might be construed into an index of political 
 coquetry, was whispered from any quarter. The insinuation on 
 which some members rest as an apology must be a downright 
 calumny. The Irish bishops are not, thank God! so timid or 
 time-serving as to suppress their opinions upon any great public 
 question vitally affecting the interests of their religion. This was 
 
576 
 
 LETTER CIII. 
 
 one ; and so manifestly unreasonable, irreligious, and persecuting 
 were the provisions of that enactment, that not one member of 
 the house, however disposed to trifle with episcopal authority, 
 would venture to affirm that it had the suffrage of even one 
 solitary bishop in its favour. 
 
 Never was the loss or absence of the Liberator of Ireland more 
 felt or to be lamented than on this unfortunate occasion. It was 
 a master-stroke of a terrible policy to strike first their great 
 political pastor, in order by the easy seduction of their other 
 more pliant representatives, to prostrate once more the civil and 
 religious liberties of the people. Had the ever-faithful and 
 watchful sentinel of Ireland been suffered to be at his post, you 
 would not have attempted, or would have attempted in vain, to 
 bribe the venal, and then bind in shackles the Catholic Church. 
 His seasonable letters would have conveyed lessons of awful 
 warning to the Catholic people. The tones of his indignant de- 
 nunciation would have rolled dismay along the benches of the 
 treasury, and checked the terrified minister from profanely 
 handling the sacred ark of our religion. His glance would have 
 rebuked into sullen duty the disposition to desertion, which often 
 before appeared among his own unfaithful troops. Time, which 
 at last does justice to all, is, even during his life-time, throwing 
 light upon his policy ; and when we consider the nature of the 
 instruments with which he had to work, we must wonder, not 
 that he was unable to effect much good, but that he was endued 
 with sufficient power to resist the course of evil legislation, into 
 which his political allies must have been perpetually dragging 
 him. And yet, heedless as they were of episcopal remonstrance 
 against this execrable bill, those Catholic members were most 
 anxious for episcopal aid in working out its provisions ! True, 
 the bishops might not understand it ; but though they could not 
 understand it in principle, they were for that very reason the 
 more fitting instruments to work it in practice. These gentle- 
 men are wise in their generation. It was not convenient to 
 attend to the remonstrances of the bishops in the debate, for 
 they well knew if attended to, the bill would have never passed 
 into law. But it was more convenient to share with bishops the 
 odium and the disgrace of working it, and to set up two or three 
 episcopal targets to intercept the execration which was sure to 
 fall upon the practical agents of so anti-religious a measure. 
 We were told until the repetition tired, that the board could not 
 give satisfaction, if it only consisted of laymen. Did it then 
 follow as a matter of course that it would give satisfaction, if 
 managed by crown-created episcopal commissioners ? As Catho- 
 lics, they should know that the objection against the one held 
 equally against the others, and that bishops cannot, more than 
 laymen, derive from the crown or parliament any power or com- 
 
LETTER CIII. 
 
 577 
 
 mission to manage and reduce to practice a law that strikes at 
 the root of the holiest principles of our faith, that blights with 
 its deadly poison the goodliest fruits which religion ever pro- 
 duced, and aims at producing schism, anarchy, and disorder in 
 the church of God. 
 
 These are the three positions to which I shall confine my present 
 letter. Why, it may be asked, introduce and persist in retaining 
 the damning clause of invalidating the will of an unjust spoliator, 
 should he not be fortunate enough to “ redeem his soul by alms,” 
 by disposing of his landed property three months before his 
 decease ? Let not the abettors of this bill affect to be shocked 
 at the epithet with which it is qualified. In the hands of God 
 alone is left the lot and j udgment of all his creatures ; but as he 
 has revealed to us that a reparation of injuries, the restitution of 
 ill-gotten property, and the liberal distribution of alms-deeds are, 
 in the dispensations of His mercy, among the most ordinary 
 channels of conveying the graces of pardon, I will calmly inquire 
 of the reader, who is it that is most disposed to trench upon 
 the prerogatives of the Almighty, and the strict right of all his 
 sinful creatures, he who would dry up, or he who would leave 
 untouched, those channels of mercy ? Hitherto they were sacred ; 
 some of the poor of Ireland have been refreshed with the bounty 
 of those channels. It is to be hoped that like the alms-deeds of 
 Cornelius, those benefactions were the means of drawing down on 
 their donors the grace of pardon and salvation. And yet the 
 heartless framers of this clause, expect that Catholic bishops will 
 become parties in closing the doors of comfort against the poor, 
 and of salvation against the wealthy. Perhaps you are not 
 aware of the strange expedients to which vanity prompts 
 numbers, in order to purchase property. To acquire what is 
 called a political position, or parliamentary influence in a county, 
 some scruple not to raise moneys, and plunge themselves into 
 embarrassments, in order to purchase an estate. If, in such cases, 
 debts should have accumulated, — if there were left no personal 
 or chattel property to meet these obvious claims of justice ; and 
 if besides — as often happens — there were no near or immediate 
 kinsman to whom injustice could appear to have been done, what 
 must be thought of the horrid cruelty of a law which would forbid 
 a poor sinner, in such circumstances, from disposing of his property 
 at his death in a manner which would fructify in the blessings of 
 charity or education ? Think you that bishops will be found to 
 put a seal on the insulting calumny, that the death-bed of the 
 wealthy is too often besieged by sinister influence ? It may be 
 useful to inform you that the reverse is often the case, that the 
 ministering priest is the best friend of the broken-hearted widow 
 and the orphan, and whilst he exhorts the heirless wealthy to aid 
 the institutions raised for the fatherless, there arc found number- 
 
578 
 
 LETTER CIII, 
 
 less instances where the pious and considerate clergyman is the 
 protector of the claims of the children and other kinsmen. 
 
 After thus striving to sever the religious links that bind God 
 and his creatures at the awful moment of death, it naturally 
 enough pursues those religious orders which have sprung from 
 the holy influence of those doctrines. And think you that the 
 bishops will subscribe to the unchristian policy first conceived by 
 a Portuguese minister, that dooms to annihilation some of the 
 noblest orders that ever flourished in the Catholic church ? Is 
 it thus you deal with the best promoters of public instruction ? 
 Are you really an advocate for free and enlightened education, 
 or is the profession of zeal for it only a mask to hide the minis- 
 terial despotism which aims at the subjugation of the mind and 
 intellect of the people ? I well recollect the parliamentary de- 
 positions of Mr. Anthony Blake regarding the religious orders. 
 The perfection of every character requires consistency, and, as 
 he would be no doubt a fit instrument to manage the new board, 
 he could not be forced to encourage those orders, of the value of 
 which he had given such creditable testimony. Besides, as you 
 have taken the National Board under your protection, it must 
 have no rival. The board is yet supported by a grant out of 
 the consolidated fund, until, like the military barracks or the 
 pauper Bastiles, the country is covered with the government 
 schools, where it is sought that no national sentiment should be 
 lisped, no national feeling cherished, and no national emblem worn. 
 By-and-by John Bull will begin to growl at the abstraction out 
 of his pocket of such an enormous amount of the consolidated 
 fund, and then to appease him the grant must be raised in the 
 shape of a county cess from a ground-down tenantry. Such 
 shall be the bitter fruits to the Irish people of your gratuitous 
 education ! ! These are not conjectures : the written plans of 
 some of those embryo ministers of public instruction are now 
 before me. They have been already realized in the plans by 
 which the constabulary of the country are supported. The 
 soldiers were paid out of the consolidated fund ; but when John 
 Bull protested against paying for the troops, the peasantry have 
 been oppressed with the payment of half the tax which came 
 before out of the imperial revenue. 
 
 To feed the poor with the spontaneous fruit of charity never 
 would have done without a mercenary staff of gentlemen paupers 
 to annex to the concern, and to enforce taxes for their relief. To 
 rear edifices for public instruction, and to endow them with the 
 spontaneous benefactions of the pious and the wealthy, would 
 not have answered the purposes of those who are aiming at 
 creating in Ireland the educational despotism that is crumbling 
 in France. Hence no religious orders are to be tolerated. Hence 
 no pious bequests, or charitable donations to sustain them. AY ere 
 
LETTER C11I. 
 
 579 
 
 they suffered to rear their heads in the country, and were they 
 to receive any support from legalized charities, the National Board 
 and its schools would become nuisances ; and all the employment 
 of its ministerial and mercenary agents would be for ever gone. 
 Therefore, the best instructors that ever reared and matured 
 the mind of a nation must be proscribed with penalties ; and the 
 sons of Ignatius, who have left no science unexplored, and no 
 field of literature uncultivated, whose zeal has travelled through 
 every clime, and to whose healing benevolence no human woe 
 has been a stranger, must be sacrificed to a ruthless, penal, and 
 inexorable law, which blows its pestiferous breath over the fairest 
 fruit that ever gladdened the Christian vineyard. Think you 
 that bishops can be parties to the diffusion of such a pestilence, 
 or that the Roman Pontiff could relish such a particiption in the 
 proscription of one of the best of the religious orders ? 
 
 But the more frightful, and daring, and revolutionary, portion 
 of the bill is yet to be noticed and execrated. Those crown 
 commissioners, no matter whether laymen or bishops, are to 
 adjudicate by their signatures on rights, privileges, liberties, and 
 duties, on which they have no more right to adjudicate than the 
 Emperor of Morocco. Think you that any bishops will, at the 
 bidding of the crown, undertake thus to usurp the rights of 
 their brethren, and of the Roman Pontiff? The bishop alone, 
 under the Pope, has the necessary and inalienable right to adju- 
 dicate who may be the legitimate pastors and dignitaries in his 
 diocese ; the Pope alone, who are the bishops and archbishops ; 
 and to attempt a decision on these points, without the consent of 
 the parties, would be an encroachment on their authority, and a 
 subversion of the essential discipline of the Catholic Church. It 
 is not difficult to imagine (other fresh instances, not yet alluded 
 to have occurred in the colonies) that the bishop would defend 
 the rights of the canonical pastor, and that some contumacious 
 pretender would appeal to the crown or the board of commis- 
 sioners. What would such an appeal be but the bringing of a 
 case from the sole, rightful judge to an uncanonical tribunal ? If 
 it should be urged by the Catholic slaves, who love the measure 
 for its patronage, that such a collision of judgment between the 
 episcopal commissioners and the ordinary, would not be probable, 
 and, therefore, should not be feared ; the answer is, the interests 
 of the Catholic Church do not depend on the contingencies of 
 personal feelings. What is wrong in principle must be wrong in 
 practice. To him, certainly, the volume of history would be like 
 an old almanac, who would not pronounce with certainty that 
 many such collisions would soon take place, and shake the repose 
 of the Catholic Church to its centre. Think you that bishops 
 will be found to lend their aid to such a schismatical concern ? 
 The principle is wrong, essentially wrong, and no one can advo- 
 
580 
 
 LETTER CIV. 
 
 cate a false doctrine in theory that is not prepared, if beset with 
 temptation, to carry it out to the most pernicious consequences to 
 which such a false doctrine can lead. 
 
 Haying thus disposed of those principles of the bill, its inter- 
 ference with the practical freedom of the most salutary doctrines 
 of the Catholic church, next its blighting influence on religious 
 education and morality — the fruits of those doctrines — and, 
 finally, its tendency to schism and anarchy in the Church, I must 
 adjourn some further considerations, illustrative of the bad spirit 
 in which it originated, and the incalculable mischief of which any 
 Catholic sanction of it would be productive. 
 
 I have the honor to be your most obedient servant, 
 
 * John, Archbishop of Tuam, 
 
 LETTER CIV. 
 
 TO THE VERY REVEREND AND REVEREND THE CLERGY AND 
 EAITHFUL OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 ON THE BEQUESTS ACT. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, First Sunday in Advent, 1844. 
 
 Venerable and Dearly Beloved Brethren — Appointed by 
 Divine Providence, and the favour of the Holy See, to rule,* 
 under the Supreme Pastor of the Church, this portion of his 
 fold ; and impressed with the severe account we must give of our 
 stewardship, so awfully set forth in the liturgy of this day,f we 
 beg to turn your attention to the imminent danger in which our 
 holy faith is involved, from the open and unblushing assaults 
 that are now made on its sacred discipline. Its discipline is one 
 of the most sacred fences by which the faith of the Catholic 
 Church is guarded and secured. When any serious inroads are 
 made on the one, the other suffers, and is often eventually de- 
 stroyed. When a false step is once taken, the descent is easy 
 and natural one abyss leads to another, and it is God alone 
 that can arrest the body rushing downwards in its fatal career. 
 
 You are not, beloved brethren, strangers to the various at- 
 tempts that have been successively made to introduce ruinous 
 changes into the discipline of our Holy Church, and to bring its 
 pastors under the unhallowed control of the ruling minister of 
 
 * Acts, xx, 28. 
 
 f Luke, xxi. 
 
 t Psalm xli. 
 
LETTER CIV. 
 
 581 
 
 the day. The change was once proposed in the form of a Veto, 
 to be given to the crown in the nomination of our bishops ; 
 another time, in the insidious offers of pensioning our clergy, 
 under the hypocritical pretence of relieving, as was pretended in 
 the case of the poor laws, the necessitous from the burden of 
 their support ; and now, under the treacherous guise of a Chari- 
 table Bequests Bill, a similar, but more dangerous inroad, is 
 attempted to be made on our holy discipline. Each and every 
 one of those projects had clamorous advocates among some pro- 
 fessing Catholics, members of the Catholic Church in name, but 
 who, for the base patronage of the ruling powers, were ready to 
 surrender the most sacred rights of their Church into the hands 
 of their enemies. Nay, such was the importunity of that noisy 
 and unprincipled class, and so plausible and flattering were the 
 professions of the courtiers of the day, that some of the vene- 
 rable prelates of the Church, fond of quiet, too confiding in 
 others, and unable to cope with wily and unprincipled diplo- 
 matists, were lured into a temporary support of some of the 
 same measures — a fatal mistake which they afterwards sincerely 
 confessed and deplored. 
 
 Of all the insidious schemes that have been yet proposed to 
 change the discipline of the Catholic Church, to corrupt its pas- 
 tors, to alienate from them the affections of their beloved flocks, 
 and thus to subdue that Church which ages of persecution could 
 not conquer, none has been framed with a more elaborate inge- 
 nuity than that of the Charitable Bequests Bill, and none of the 
 other schemes has ever called forth so promptly such an array 
 of Catholic authority to seal its condemnation. Though stealthily 
 introduced, and hastily forced through the parliament, it met 
 prompt opposition from the people and clergy. After passing 
 into law, it was forcibly and numerously protested against by all 
 classes of the hierarchy. Two of the archbishops petitioned 
 against the bill, and more than half the other prelates of Ireland, 
 with about a thousand of the clergy from different parts of the 
 kingdom, have expressed their decided, unyielding, and perse- 
 vering opposition to this iniquitous penal law in a variety of 
 forms. 
 
 You may judge, then, of the continuous and deadly assaults 
 which the Catholic Church is destined to sustain, when, notwith- 
 standing such a host of opponents to this execrable bill, a rumour 
 has been industriously set forth, that some professing Catholics 
 — nay, that some of the Catholic prelates, are ready to become 
 commissioners to carry such a law into execution ! This must be 
 a gross calumny on the members of that body ; nor should we on 
 this occasion allude to this report, if this were a measure in 
 which any lay Catholic or any prelate, according to the dictates 
 of his conscience, could do so without invading the rights, usurp- 
 
582 
 
 LETTER CIV. 
 
 ing the authority, and encroaching on the essential and aposto- 
 lical jurisdiction of every Catholic bishop in Ireland. 
 
 We will not dwell with any lengthened detail on the several 
 enactments of this law ; suffice it to say, that its penal tendency 
 and anti-Catholic provisions have been set forth by one whose 
 zeal for his religion, and whose legal knowledge, are equally 
 beyond our praise ; and that so slight are the alterations which 
 this cursed bill underwent in passing into a law, that the strongest 
 objections urged against the bill remain in their full force. Not- 
 withstanding the manifest desire and interest of the government 
 to give to this penal law a more popular complexion, no lawyer 
 of name has ventured to combat the opinions given by Mr. 
 O’Connell to the venerable Bishop of Meath, the faithful guardian 
 of the sacred trusts that have been confided to him, on the 
 enormous and gigantic hold which this law gives through an ob- 
 sequious and dependent board, to an anti-Catholic government, 
 on all Catholic trusts for pious uses not as yet decided by a decree 
 in chancery. 
 
 This law transfers, or rather labours to transfer, to a board 
 dependent on the government, the power of adjudicating on who 
 is parish priest of such a parish, bishop of such a diocese, ques- 
 tions sometimes involving such a train of canon law, that it is 
 only the bishops, with regard to their own respective sees, and 
 the Pope with regard to all, that can finally decide them. Surely 
 the rumours cannot be true, that any bishops would undertake 
 an office so intrusive and usurping, especially in defiance of the 
 solemn and repeated remonstrances of so many of their brethren. 
 
 This law restricts every Catholic in this diocese from be- 
 queathing at his death-bed so much as one acre of land for any 
 pious or charitable purpose. There is not a Catholic in this 
 diocese who could not bequeath his whole estate, if not affected 
 by deeds or settlements, for any purpose, however profligate, or 
 profane, or impious, so little is the natural right of disposing of 
 property interfered with by the civil law ; it is only to intercept 
 charities towards the advancement of religion, as in his case, 
 it interferes. You will not, dearly beloved brethren, easily credit 
 the rumour that any Catholics, much less Catholic bishops, would 
 become parties to such an odious distinction regarding property, 
 which aims at the destruction of religion. 
 
 Finally, it follows up, with a persecuting consistency, the 
 odious enactment framed in the Emancipation Bill against the 
 religious orders, and renders null and void all bequests and 
 legacies made by the dying Catholic for some of those institu- 
 tions that have contributed much to support and adorn the 
 Catholic Church. We cannot credit the rumour that any Ca- 
 tholics, much less prelates, would lend themselves to the perse- 
 cution of the religious orders, and become, in the hands of their 
 
LETTER CIV. 
 
 583 
 
 enemies, the legal executioners of their unjustly proscribed 
 brethren. 
 
 But we will not pursue with fatiguing minuteness, the odious 
 particulars of this penal law, satisfied that, however odious and 
 cruel, it would, like its abortive predecessors, become utterly 
 harmless, on account of the public hatred, if it were not for the 
 unnatural machinery by which it is attempted to bring it into 
 operation. Yes, our enemies wish to make a reality of the dis- 
 graceful proverb so expressive of the readiness with which Irish 
 Catholics assist in the ruin of each other. The worst feature, 
 then, in this horrid law, compared to which its special enactments 
 are innocuous, is the construction of the board itself — bad in 
 principle as the former board, but framed so as to disguise in 
 part its destructive operation. Yes, it is the association of Ca- 
 tholics — nay, perhaps, of Catholic bishops, with the old and 
 inveterate enemies of our faith, detached from their brethren, 
 and acting against the interests of their religion ; dependent on 
 the crown, fearful of its displeasure, and fawning on its caresses ; 
 hearing the language of their new companions, and adopting, 
 with the zeal of proselytes, many of their perverse opinions ; 
 forming, in short, a new and anomalous connexion in alliance 
 with those influences that have been ever exercised for the de- 
 struction of the Catholic religion in Ireland. Oh, this is the 
 frightful and humiliating part of this law — dividing a body which, 
 were it not for the acid of the court, would have remained 
 united ; and exhibiting that hierarchy, once a goodly spectacle, 
 which was “ beautiful as the tents of Israel, and terrible as an 
 army in battle array,”* now about becoming disjointed, weak, 
 and deformed — an object of sorrow to the faithful, but of tri- 
 umphant derision and scorn to the inveterate foes of Catholic 
 Ireland ! ! But no, in despite of court intrigue, the Catholic 
 Church in Ireland will be united and triumphant. 
 
 We feel it our duty, dearly beloved brethren, in this hour of 
 darkness, of peril, and dismay, to raise our voice with all the 
 energy which the nature of the crisis requires, and to send forth 
 our warning to our beloved flocks, to arm themselves with vigi- 
 lance and fortitude, and to combat with success this fresh enemy 
 of their religion. Times of difficulty require more than ordinary 
 courage — times of seduction an unslumbering vigilance. Not 
 only is the wolf abroad,! but he is abroad in sheep’s clothing. 
 Oh, yes, as in France previous to the Revolution, a host of infi- 
 dels — some flushed with fresh enthusiasm, and some hoary in 
 practical indifference for religion — is threatened to be let loose 
 upon the country in the shape of collegiate instructors, mocking 
 the most venerated institutions, and setting up the vagaries of 
 
 * Canticles, vi, 9. 
 
 f St. Matthew, vii, 15. 
 
584 
 
 LETTER CIV. 
 
 their own shallow intellects as the idols of their adoration ; and 
 it is at a moment like this, when all the champions of faith, mora- 
 lity, and science, should be banded together to avert the same 
 horrors that followed in the train of the licentious literature of 
 France, you are called on to confide in a law conceived in the 
 spirit of persecution, annihiltaing the orders of the Jesuits, the 
 most faithful auxiliaries of faith and morality, as well as of lite- 
 rary and scientific education, the bishops ever had, in order that 
 impiety should run its unchecked career ; and yet bishops are 
 expected to be active agents in this league against religion and 
 social order ! “The abomination of desolation”* is not yet in 
 the “ holy place.” 
 
 These calamities we are called on by the nature of our holy 
 office to labour to avert, mindful of the words of the prophet : “if 
 the watchman see the sword coming, and sound not the trumpet, 
 and the people look not to themselves, and the sword come and 
 cut off a soul from among them, he indeed is taken away in his 
 iniquity, but I will require his blood at the hand of the watch- 
 man.”! This law is a calamity which, worse than sword or 
 famine, would bring a blight upon the land, by controlling the 
 living energy and freedom of the Catholic Church, which never 
 can be cramped in its benevolent activity, without social misery 
 and national wretchedness, as well as a languor of the moral 
 virtues, following as a disastrous consequence. 
 
 It is certainly painful to reflect, that while the people are 
 peacefully asking for bread, the legislature should give them a 
 stone ; and that, instead of a relaxation of the odious remnant 
 of the penal laws, the reward of their heroic fidelity should 
 be, to bind their religious freedom with heavier fetters. How- 
 ever, you will not, under any provocation, forget the lessons of 
 peace recommended by our Divine Redeemer, or those of 
 allegiance to our beloved monarch, so strongly recommended 
 in the writings, and illustrated in the lives, of the first teachers 
 of our holy religion. With the same noble freedom, however, 
 that characterized their conduct, you will petition, remonstrate, 
 and petition and remonstrate again, against the continuance of 
 this injustice, and impress strongly, but respectfully, on our 
 rulers, that it is a violation of the laws of good and impartial 
 government to deprive faithful subjects, as in this case, of their 
 civil rights, from a hatred of their religion. Implore, entreat, 
 adjure all of your own body not to be parties to those penal 
 inflictions on their fellow-members. Impress on them this duty 
 by the bonds of our common faith, by the memory of the 
 common persecutions which we have all sustained, and by the 
 hope of the common triumphs which, if we are still faithful 
 
 * St. Mark, xiii, 14. 
 
 f Ezechial, xxxviii, 6 
 
LETTER CV. 
 
 585 
 
 to our holy religion, must crown them. Pray that the reign of 
 our beloved monarch may be long and happy, and let all the 
 people recite on their knees a Pater, and an Ave Maria, and a 
 Creed, imploring of the Father of Mercies, through the interces- 
 sion of the ever glorious and blessed Virgin, Mother of God, 
 to send down on us, clergy and people, at this trying crisis, 
 an ample effusion of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost*— 7 
 “wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, 
 and the fear of the Lord.” 
 
 Your very faithful servant in Christ, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CV. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE BEQUESTS ACT. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Timothy, 
 January 24, 1845. 
 
 Sir — While you survey with singular satisfaction the wide extent 
 of spiritual bondage over Great Britain, you are, doubtless, 
 mortified by the painful contrast of the spiritual freedom of 
 Ireland ; and, anxious for the diffusion of this religious thraldom, 
 you fear that its reign cannot be permanent or secure until the 
 light of its Catholic faith is extinguished in a country so con- 
 tiguous as to be likely to become contagious. It is not the first 
 time that Ireland, an exception to the surrounding servitude, 
 roused the envy of the despots who doomed its liberty to 
 destruction. Such was the policy, which we are told by Tacitus, 
 Agrippa had in contemplation. He despaired of establishing the 
 dominion of the imperial arms over Britain and Caledonia, as 
 long as Irish freedom was, in the language of the ancient historian, 
 within view. And you, too, improving on his policy, despair of 
 perpetuating the worse despotism of heresy, under which the 
 once-favoured land of England groans, as long as the light and 
 freedom of the Roman Catholic faith burns with such steady 
 strength and lustre in the neighbouring island. 
 
 2 p 
 
 * Isaias, xi, 5. 
 
586 
 
 LETTER CV. 
 
 Hence the untiring exertions of that Protestant ascendancy, 
 still so hostile, to extinguish a religion which is a living reproach 
 to the revolting errors that disfigure the face of England. 
 Witness the lamentable fruit of those errors in the entire disor- 
 ganization, of what is termed the Church of England, and in the 
 hideous intestine discord by which the crazy frame is falling 
 asunder. Witness, too, the dreadful immorality which is their 
 offspring, and the prevalence of those unprovoked and gratuitous 
 crimes, which, in despite of the insolence of its journalists, and 
 the homage which wealthy nations are sure to extort, even unto 
 the palliation of their vices, have made the moral condition of 
 England, a word of warning over the civilized world. Are you 
 ambitious to sink Ireland to the level of the same degrading 
 social materialism? Should you succeed, instead of the occa- 
 sional outbreaks of revenge which humanity abhors, and which 
 would have been frequent were it not for the incessant influence 
 of religion and its priesthood, you would witness a fierce spirit 
 of national indignation, which not two, nor all the spare legions 
 within your command, could repress. So much is the tranquillity 
 of the country and the stability of the throne, beholden to the 
 pious and disinterested exertions of its calumniated priesthood. 
 
 The lamentable state of social disorganization to which I have 
 alluded, is felt and deplored by many of the English prelates, 
 who confess they are unable to apply a remedy. Witness, for 
 example, the ludicrous embarrassment of his lordship of Exeter — 
 to-day issuing his episcopal mandates for ecclesiastical uniformity, 
 and revoking them again, it is said, at the imperious requsition 
 of the minister of the crown. Such of the members of that 
 body as possess a tolerable share of learning, whose intellect 
 ranges beyond the small pale of the Anglican establishment, and 
 the brief period of its disastrous schism, surveying the social 
 happiness enjoyed by the nations when the Church was not the 
 chained hand-maid of the crown, are in a condition the most 
 pitiable. While their zeal is animated by the heroic fortitude of 
 the ancient champions of the freedom of the Church, they fancy 
 for a time that they can imitate their example. No sooner, 
 however, do they engage in the attempt, than they are obliged to 
 own that from the establishment, though retaining some of the 
 material features of a church, the spirit that animated and 
 informed it is gone; and instead of the holy vigour of an 
 Ambrose or an Anselem, who arraigned the cruel delinquencies 
 of royalty itself; they are silent on the crimes of the nation, 
 because they must regulate by the nod of a political minister the 
 nature of their pastoral instructions. 
 
 No doubt you are anxious to bring about a similar reform in 
 the Catholic Church in Ireland. If so, you must expect it will 
 be productive of the same disastrous results upon morality and 
 
LETTER CV. 
 
 587 
 
 order. It is as a step to this complete subjection of the Catholio 
 Church to the state, which no doubt is your aim, you have 
 introduced that fatal measure of the bequests bill, and by its 
 fruits you may judge of the wisdom of the policy which, in an 
 evil hour, you have adopted. You have avowed that your 
 difficulty was Ireland. Have you not increased and thickened 
 those difficulties by this disastrous measure ? Never, within the 
 memory of the oldest of its inhabitants, was Ireland in a state of 
 more frightful excitement. And why ? From the encroachment 
 you have striven, but I hope in vain, to make on the freedom of 
 the Catholic religion. And allow me to tell you in all sincerity* 
 that as you are now about meeting the parliament, your first 
 measure must be the repeal, the total repeal of that penal law, 
 root and branch, if you wish to restore tranquillity to Ireland. 
 I will not fatigue you or the public attention with the detail of 
 any of the arguments against this iniquitous law, that are now as 
 familiar as they are forcible. Whoever can resist the evidence 
 adduced by Sergeant Shee, and principally by Mr. O’Connell, of 
 the ruinouse ffects of that law, if unrepealed, on the best interests 
 of the Catholic religion, must have an understanding steeled by 
 prejudices which no argument can approach. The question has 
 been so far argued that persons the most illiterate, as well as the 
 more enlightened, are in possession of those arguments, and hence 
 an intellectual and religious opposition to the measure, deep, 
 wide — embracing all orders and all classes — laity, clergy, priests 
 and bishops, gentry and peasantry; in short, spread over the 
 entire country, and fast as the hold which their faith has on its 
 people. 
 
 When it was announced that three estimable and venerable 
 prelates were associated to the commission to carry this odious 
 act into effect, the public mind was stunned, and a sudden grief 
 fell on the heart of the nation. Their sorrow was intense ; they 
 felt that, by the novel connexion, the freedom of their church 
 was in manifest danger ; and the appointment, like a dam chafing 
 and fretting the current which it was intended to check, raised 
 it still higher and gave it further force. 
 
 There are not in the world a people who feel more veneration 
 for their prelates than the Irish people, and, therefore, you must 
 suspect that the measure must be bad which could produce 
 dissensions in a body, the members of which the spirit of 
 Catholic faith and concord keeps, in general, so closely compacted. 
 It requires no extraordinary sagacity to perceive that you, in 
 looking for the aid of Catholic bishops, sought not to support the 
 Catholic religion, or to exalt its priesthood ; but rather to buttress 
 the tottering fabric of Protestant ascendancy. If you meant, 
 as in policy as well as justice you should have done, to legislate 
 on a principle of common fairness towards the Catholics, why not 
 
588 
 
 LETTER CV. 
 
 recognize in law those canonical rights and apostolical jurisdiction, 
 on which this penal law incontestibly encroaches. Yet with the 
 attempt to injure and degrade, you and a few hollow encomiasts 
 take credit to yourselves for acknowledging, for the first time, 
 the rights and titles of the episcopacy in Ireland ! Yes, you ac- 
 knowledge .them to insult them, and even the honor you show has 
 in it all the bitterness of scornful derision. How do you honor 
 even those venerable prelates whom you have made members of 
 your ministerial board ? By giving them the titles of bishops, 
 without Sees, and emblazoning over their heads the sole and 
 exclusively legitimate titles of others to the same Sees which 
 their sainted and heroic predecessors would never have consented 
 to acknowledge. 
 
 There cannot be two lawful bishops of the same See. The 
 respective epithets of Catholic and Protestant might, if compro- 
 mise could be at all admitted, mark the distinct sources of their 
 apostolical or parliamentary jurisdiction. But instead of this 
 the Protestant prelates are blazoned forth as the Archbishops of 
 Armagh and Dublin, without any qualification, while, in insulting 
 and subordinate contrast, the Catholic prelates are announced as 
 archbishops — of — no where. But you give them a precedence, 
 a rank in society ! Yes, you strip them of their rights, as far 
 as in you lies. You amuse them with the shadow of ceremony, 
 which is unmeaning, but as far as it is significant of substantial 
 rights and duties ; and you humble them with the condescension 
 of your insulting patronage, such as you would exhibit to some 
 exiled and fallen dynasty, fixing on them more strongly the gaze 
 of pity, by the mockery of a homage of which you disown the 
 legitimate foundation. What would her Prime Minister think of 
 the respect of any individual for royalty, who would allow her 
 Majesty the name of Queen, withholding her rightful titles of 
 Great Britain and Ireland, on which it is founded ? Surely, the 
 recognition of her name could not disguise the want of fidelity 
 necessarily included in any such omission of her rightful title. 
 Of what inconsistency and confusion is not bigotry productive ! 
 You would fain confer on some of our bishops a parliamentary 
 jurisdiction which you are incompetent to give, and deprive others 
 of their apostolical jurisdiction, which you are as incompetent to 
 take away ! And, by way of indemnifying the one for the 
 indignity of master slaves, to which you labour to degrade them, 
 you give them a ministerial license of making a similar invasion 
 on the apostolical rights of their brethern. You expect that they 
 will do all this to prolong the existence of the anti-national and 
 odious establishment, some of whose prelates, their fellow- 
 benchers, poured forth but the other day their usual contributions 
 of orthodox hatred on the idolatry and tyranny of the Church 
 of Rome. But no; more valuable by far than the. degrading 
 
LETTER CV. 
 
 589 
 
 honors of the oppressors of the faith, are the confidence, the 
 attachment, and affection, of the devoted Catholics of Ireland, 
 who, instead of denying the titles, or the jurisdiction, of their 
 beloved bishops, will revere them as the only legitimate occupants 
 of the thrones, which some of the most eminent of the successors 
 of the apostles have adorned. 
 
 Immediately connected with this subject is the affectation of a 
 new-born reverence among the hereditary enemies of Ireland 
 for the rights of the Roman Pontiff. If you really revere the 
 centre of Catholic unity, why endeavour to strip the Catholic 
 bishops of their titles, which his Holiness has conferred, and 
 without which, and the spiritual influence they confer, none of 
 those bishops would be deemed worth a moment’s negotiation to 
 relieve the embarrassments of a prime minister. Perhaps this 
 feeling is like the prodigal’s appreciation of virtue, from the 
 habit of sinful courses, springing from the evidence of the dis- 
 orders into which a privation of that light which issues from the 
 Apostolic See, has so long plunged the population of England. 
 If so, then we should hail such a feeling, and help their faint 
 and tottering steps in returning to the light and merciful con- 
 solations of that paternal home from which they have been so 
 long straying. Oh, no ! it is the envious feeling of the fallen 
 spirit at the happiness springing from truth and union ; and their 
 tongue, like his, strives to dart forth in glozing flattery the venom 
 of destruction. They may spare themselves their officious solici- 
 tude about the conduct of the Catholics of Ireland. In their fight 
 for their faith, the Irish Catholics are no raw recruits. Thanks 
 to the persecuting policy of England, and the atrocious code of 
 her sanguinary edicts, the Irish Catholics, in defending their 
 faith, have been made the most practised champions upon earth ; 
 and they have not combated so triumphantly and so long 
 without the conviction that they owe their signal triumphs to their 
 unexampled fidelity to that Holy Chief, whom their Master placed 
 over the Church for their guidance. They will then cling — as 
 their pious ancestors have done — to the rock of Peter ; they shall 
 labour, too, for the peaceful recovery of all those rights, of which, 
 on account of their attachment to the chair of Peter, they have 
 been deprived — nor shall they suffer any power of parliamentary 
 creation to intercept one particle of that homage we all owe his 
 Holiness, or of that spiritual jurisdiction, of which he is the best 
 guardian. And allow me to ask you who are they who in 
 reality are making inroads on the power of the Pope, and 
 striving to make a mockery of his jurisdiction ? Is it we who 
 constitutionally labour for the repeal of the bequests act, which 
 is repugnant to the canons of the Church, and not in accordance 
 with the principles of the Catholic religion ; or those, who, without 
 consulting that Holy See, strive tyrannically to enforce so penal 
 
590 
 
 LETTER CV. 
 
 an enactment ? Before the commission was named we sought, as 
 was the duty of Catholics, that this question should be referred to 
 the decision of the Holy Father. We were told — why refer to 
 the Holy Father a question regarding temporalities? Such 
 was the unceremonious way in which the authority of Borne was 
 treated. The people meet, resolve, denounce the unconstitutional 
 encroachment on their civil rights. They are told that they 
 violate the obedience due to their spiritual superiors, by their 
 deliberating and resolving on a matter which they should leave 
 to a spiritual tribunal. Thus the Pope must not decide, because 
 it is a temporal matter ; the people must not decide, because it is 
 a spiritual concern ; and during this unprincipled and sophistical 
 shifting, the prophecy of a celebrated writer is sought to be 
 realised by the erection of a ministerial and political papacy in 
 our own kingdom, directed by the nod of the premier, dis- 
 regarding, on one hand, the authority of the Pope, and on the 
 other striving to crush the religious and political rights of the 
 people. 
 
 Whoever reflects on the career of Mr. Anthony Blake — his 
 evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, and his 
 being a member of this commission, must, unless the commission 
 be speedily dissolved, entertain serious fears for the continuance 
 of the Pope’s substantial authority in Ireland. When I consider 
 that he has been the old advocate of the Veto, and of every 
 measure for fettering the freedom of the Catholic Church — the 
 pliant and dexterous follower of every successive administration, 
 whether Whig or Tory — the self-appointed patron of Maynooth 
 College, in order to project, I suppose, with Mr. Thomas Wyse, 
 how far it may be feasible, by a little domestic concordat, to 
 effect some change in the system of the teaching of its faith, for 
 an increase in its finances — in short, the concoctor of a scheme of 
 a royal commission of bishops, to manage the payment of the 
 Catholic clergy, and to inflict the penalties of misdemeanour on 
 the others, who should not yield to the usurped powers ot 
 political bishops of the parliamentary commission ; when I 
 consider how, on that occasion, he trifled with the authority of 
 the Pope, recommending a course of penal legislation, and then 
 leaving the Pope to shift for his own authority the best way he 
 could ; when I reflect that much of what has been suggested has 
 been already done in establishing the commission of the bequests 
 act, I am only consoled by the reflection that the mischievous 
 projects of the man will be defeated by the pious zeal of the 
 Catholics of Ireland, in procuring a total repeal of the law ; and 
 were it not for this their zeal, I fear that as a public and political 
 character, history would have to record, that, since the disastrous 
 advent of Protestant ascendancy, a worse importation, or one 
 more fatal to the Catholic religion, than the same Mr. Anthony 
 
LETTER CV. 
 
 591 
 
 Blake was never wafted back to Ireland. To Lord Stanley this 
 gentleman would be a most valuable acquisition in the colonies. 
 How humiliating the prospect of the once glorious church of 
 Ireland, when its pastors allow their holiest rights and duties to 
 be invaded and usurped by such scheming political adven- 
 turers ! 
 
 I cannot, therefore, but deplore the misdirection of the 
 patriotic feelings of some ardent Irishmen, combating the 
 phantom of a foreign temporal power, while they are heedless 
 of the enemy that is threatening them at home. Instead of 
 being alarmed at the exercise of any undue power from abroad, 
 what is desirable is, to prevent any encroachment on the Pope’s 
 hallowed authority in protecting our church. Some are also in 
 ecstacies rather immoderate at the diplomatic announcement that 
 no negotiations are going forward on the affairs of the Irish 
 Church between the Holy See and the British government. 
 Even should there not, what grounds are there for congratula- 
 tion ? What need you require a concordat, if, even without one, 
 you can erect your commission at home, and delegate to it a 
 parliamentary jurisdiction to invade the rights of the Catholic 
 hierarchy ? What more do you require ? Lord Heytesbury 
 hopes, indeed, that the Catholics of Ireland will, therefore, be 
 contented! Yes, they will be less suspicious when the bequests 
 act is repealed, and the bequest board dissolved ; otherwise, his 
 Excellency’s proposition amounts to this : — “ Be not alarmed ; 
 we have only made a breach in the walls of your church ; hold, 
 forbear your meetings ; put confidence in us, your old and trusty 
 friends, and we will pledge ourselves to halt at the gates, and 
 make no further advance on your religion.” 
 
 It is also made a subject of similar congratulation, that should 
 a concordat be negotiated, all then would assist in averting such 
 evils from the Catholic Church. Instead of wasting our solici- 
 tude on distant and contingent dangers, we should be alive to 
 the imminent evils of the commission now established at home, 
 and labour to close the breach which has been recently made in 
 the bulwarks of its holy discipline. It will be enough to say : — 
 “Allow the present incipient usurpation of the rights of the 
 bishops to be firmly established, and in future they will obtain 
 every necessary assistance in repelling further aggression.” 
 Such is their mode of dealing with the evil, who talk of amend- 
 ments in the act, and the removal or modification of this or that 
 objectionable clause, while they allow the encroaching and 
 invading principle of the commission itself — the vigorous root 
 of the evil — to remain. No ; the successful step of letting any 
 portion of the act remain, would only prompt you or any other 
 minister to invite other prelates to join him in a fresh assault on 
 our liberties, by another new commission still more penal. The 
 
592 
 
 LETTER CVI. 
 
 example once given by good and enlightened men, of joining one 
 commission, in disregard of the known wishes and feelings of, in 
 general, the people, the clergy, and the majority of their 
 brethren, might be successively adopted, at some future day, 
 by others, improving on their models, until the citadel of 
 Catholicity would thus be surrendered, and almost all the sacred 
 functions of the hierarchy be usurped, by motley aggregations of 
 political and parliamentary commissioners. 
 
 Let, then, your first recommendation to parliament be the 
 repeal of an act, which the mischief already produced should be 
 a warning of the more awful calamities with which it is fraught. 
 A law so penal to religion, and so utterly repugnant to the 
 interests and declared will of the entire people, would, according 
 to all sound civilians and jurists, be downright tyranny to 
 enforce. You feared, if we are to judge by the mighty combina- 
 tions of law and armaments, to which you resorted to crush 
 them, the display of popular power exhibited by the monster 
 meetings. The malignant spirit of your bequests act has evoked 
 a far more formidable agitation. Yes ; the people of Ireland 
 and its clergy love their country. They are solicitous for its 
 prosperity, and will give every aid, compatible with their re- 
 spective duties, towards the restoration of a native legislature. 
 But they love their religion more — the one being a temporal and 
 the other an eternal interest. Indeed, so much are Ireland and 
 the Catholic religion bound up together in the system of English 
 domination, that it would be difficult to separate the interests of 
 one from the other. To the spoliation of their country’s rights, 
 religion has often reconciled the Irish people. Their history has 
 attested that they are a nation who, for that holy religion, are 
 ready to sacrifice their lives. — I am your faithful servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CYI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE INFIDEL COLLEGES. 
 
 Tuam, June 7 , 1845 . 
 
 Sir — The infidel, the slavish, and demoralizing scheme of acade- 
 mic education which you scruple not to proffer to the faithful 
 
LETTER CVI. 
 
 593 
 
 people of Ireland, is a proof that we should be more apprehen- 
 sive for the faith and liberties of this country during a period of 
 political cajolery, than during one of avowed persecution. Of 
 the imminent danger springing from rash and mistaken confi- 
 dence, the history of our unfortunate country furnishes a variety 
 of melancholy examples. Never was a more fatal blow aimed 
 at the rights and the prosperity of the Irish people, than when 
 the Duke of Portland, affecting to sympathize with our national 
 feelings, proffered, on the part of government, the vice-regal re- 
 sidence in the Phoenix Park to Grattan, who humbled that very 
 government by the declaration and the achievement of Irish in- 
 dependence. In the delirium of the national joy, the deep 
 designs of the viceroy were not sufficiently seen through, and 
 though the insidious boon was not accepted, yet the simplicity of 
 some of the diplomatists of that time was so over-reached, and 
 the cupidity of others was so dexterously assailed, that the 
 enemies of Ireland ceased not to push forward their first advan- 
 tage, until they at length succeeded in wresting from her all the 
 benefits which that illustrious patriot had gained. 
 
 We are now arrived at an analogous epoch. Often had peti- 
 tions been forwarded to the government for an increased grant to 
 the College of Maynooth, and as often were the eyes of states- 
 men, now so open to its wants, closed to the destitution which 
 they so pathetically deplore. At length the peaceful and legiti- 
 mate remonstrances of the clergy and people of Ireland, conveyed 
 through those safe and constitutional channels within which they 
 have been uniformly confined, brought to the ministry a convic- 
 tion of Irish wrongs to which before they were utterly insensible. 
 I need not remind you of Sir James Graham’s declaration, that 
 concession had reached its limit, and yet such is now his new-born 
 affection for the Irish people, that concession has only just issued 
 from its starting-post. Let it not be imagined that I wish to 
 diminish the grace of the Maynooth endowment. Far from it ; 
 there is a conventional courtesy due to statesmen even for the 
 tardy justice which it is not longer in their power to deny ; and 
 there is a refinement, as well as a generosity, in the Irish people, 
 which will not withhold a suitable expression of such conventional 
 acknowledgments for this trifling restitution of their plundered 
 rights. 
 
 It is from your miscalculation of the just standard of Irish 
 feeling regarding the Maynooth grant, that you have in an evil 
 hour been betrayed into the adoption of the scheme of infidel 
 education. You fancied that under the shadow of the Maynooth 
 endowment, you could steal on the country a disastrous and de- 
 moralizing measure, which would have neutralized all the advan- 
 tages of the other. And what is still more strange, it appears 
 you were sorely disappointed when this “ gigantic scheme of 
 
594 
 
 LETTER CVI. 
 
 godless education” met its merited condemnation from the Ca- 
 tholic hierarchy. The country is indebted to Sir Robert Inglis 
 for so felicitous a description of this huge impiety — a description 
 so just and characteristic, that it will become as memorable as 
 the description of certain trials by jury — “ a mockery, a delusion, 
 and a snare.” You could not, however, be so surprised at the 
 unanimous condemnation of the Catholic prelates of a measure 
 so dangerous to faith and morals, if you had not been imposed 
 upon by some of those unprincipled professing Catholics, by whom 
 the minister is constantly beset — who conceal their selfish ambi- 
 tion under an affected concern for the interests of the state, and 
 who not only misrepresent the sentiments of the Catholic people 
 and clergy, but are willing to lend themselves as the ready 
 instruments of any enactment, however odious, for enchaining 
 the liberties of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of those 
 faithful counsellors have borne evidence of their desire to thwart 
 and embarrass the Pope himself, by the measures of legislation 
 which they recommended ; and some of them are proving the 
 sincerity of that evidence, by their unhallowed attempts to 
 trample not only the authority of bishops, but that, too, of the 
 Supreme Pontiff, on the question of education. The spiritual 
 sword, which has been already drawn in defence of the freedom 
 of religion and education, and which henceforward will be more 
 extensively wielded, is now the fittest weapon for the times, 
 “ reaching as it does into the division of the soul and the spirit,” 
 and distinguishing the genuine practical believers from the mass 
 of “ common Christianity,” in which it is now esteemed the glory 
 or the shame of all its discordant sectaries to be huddled together. 
 It must be some confused idea of this unsightly amalgamation 
 that took possession of your mind, and that of the Secretary for 
 the Home Department, when you could fancy that it might find 
 favour with the sworn guardians of the Catholic faith. In the 
 discharge of all the moral, social, and domestic duties towards 
 their fellow-men, Catholics will never make any invidious distinc- 
 tions ; but the guardianship of their faith is a sacred trust con- 
 fided to their pastors, “and having nothing to do to judge them 
 that are without,” we have been, and shall be, contented to 
 confine our solicitude to the protection of the religious faith of 
 our own. 
 
 Every reader of the reports of the parliamentary debates has 
 been struck by the marked change which seems to have come 
 over the mind of the secretary, from his altered tone towards the 
 Catholic bishops. All the fervour of his former eulogies have 
 evaporated and cooled down to a smooth and polished affectation 
 of regard, of which the value, coming from such a quarter, cannot 
 be mistaken. While a few of our prelates unfortunately lent 
 their aid to the minister to carry out an uncanonical bequest law, 
 
LETTER CVI. 
 
 595 
 
 which is, and as long as it is unrepealed shall be, reprobated by 
 the Irish Clergy and people, language could scarcely furnish the 
 two right honorable baronets with adequate expressions to con- 
 vey your sense of the value of such episcopal support. But 
 again, when those same prelates are found in the compact array 
 of their brethren, condemning the ministerial scheme as dan- 
 gerous to faith and morals, you are alarmed and confounded — 
 nay, you confess your astonishment at what you deem their de- 
 fection, but what others must deem to be the discharge of what 
 their solemn duties require. While they were but a few opposed 
 to the great body of their brethren, their conduct was the theme 
 of ministerial eulogy ; but when they demand protection for 
 Catholic education in union with the same body of their brethren, 
 then their resolutions became absurd — their requirements became 
 unreasonable, and the entire of a body, of which a detached 
 fraction was so precious, loses all favour and estimation in your 
 sight. Truly this piece of the ministerial drama is not less 
 fraught with wisdom and with warning than many such incidents 
 which history records. It shows that no one can serve two 
 masters — it shows the dreadful extent of servitude, which the 
 world requires of its votaries. “ To have done” is nothing, as long 
 as any fresh demand upon further service is resisted : in vain are 
 religion and duty offered as an apology, and those who have not 
 the fortitude to make a seasonable stand, are often doomed to 
 lament, with the celebrated Wolsey, the world’s ingratitude, 
 which cast him off in his latter days, after having wasted health 
 and life in its service. 
 
 With no regard, then, to those necessary fences with which the 
 bishops of Ireland are resolved to secure the faith and morals of 
 the flocks confided to their care, you are determined to force 
 through the legislature your godless scheme of education. Nay, 
 in a toile, of which the irony is too transparent to be mistaken, 
 you tell the Catholics of Ireland to confide for the security of 
 their faith in the impartiality of her Majesty’s ministers ! ! Nay, 
 more, you refer to Belfast, and to the system of its Presbyterian 
 professors, and deduce from the example of that establishment 
 an argument for enlightening the minds and quieting the appre- 
 hensions of the Catholic bishops of Ireland. You mean, then, 
 to convert those anomalies in education, which persecution has 
 engendered, into a rule for general adoption. The Catholics of 
 Belfast, and other parts of the North of Ireland, are entitled to 
 great praise for the laudable zeal with which they have kept the 
 faith, amidst the terrible temptations to which it has been long 
 exposed. Because some have escaped unhurt, are we to throw 
 the youth of Ireland into a state of continual warfare, and are 
 we to bring others into contact with moral disease, because some 
 have been proof against the contagion? No, the education im- 
 
596 
 
 LETTER CVI. 
 
 parted by the Catholic Church to its children is guided by more 
 ancient laws, and guarded by a holier discipline ; and never shall 
 the mulish mongrel theology which has flowed from the Presby- 
 terian college of Belfast be the standard by which the clergy 
 and people of the Catholic province will regulate education. 
 Disguise it as you may, your scheme of academic instruction, 
 coupled with your repudiation of the resolutions and memorial of 
 the bishops, is only a fresh attempt, similar to that of the charter 
 schools, to bribe Catholic youth into an abandonment of their 
 religion. In the present state of religious feeling in Ireland, we 
 are plausibly told, that you have no other alternative than to ex- 
 clude from the sanctions of the law all religious discipline and 
 all religious instruction. Uneducated you must fancy the Irish 
 people, indeed, and entirely bereft of all intelligence, if you 
 could persuade yourself they were unable to penetrate through 
 the veil with which you affect to conceal the bigoted hostility of 
 your designs. 
 
 Were the irreligion of the plan to be impartially extended to 
 all, surely that would be no reason to justify the Catholics in its 
 adoption. But in reality, they are the only portion of the Irish 
 laity systematically in this novel piece of penal legislation. The 
 Protestant laity are amply provided with an education uniting 
 science and Protestant instruction at Trinity College. The Pres- 
 byterian laity are to have ample opportunities of being educated 
 in science and literature in the College of Belfast ; for, by a mere 
 accident, no doubt, the scheme is to be affiliated to the old Pres- 
 byterian institution. But in the colleges in Connaught and in 
 Munster, where, from the paucity of persons of either per- 
 suasion, there could be but few Protestants or Presbyterians, if 
 any at all, the Catholics must be content with science, entirely 
 divorced from religion or its holy discipline. Such is the boasted 
 impartiality of your plan, extending, as was the Wont of 
 English policy, to the favoured few also the advantages of their 
 creed, and proscribing the religion of the great body of the 
 people. 
 
 Yet you will find some unprincipled traders in politics and 
 religion the eulogists of such a dangerous and irreligious scheme. 
 The wisest statesman deemed religion and pure domestic morals 
 the best security for the stability of kingdoms. Now, even the 
 bitterest of their enemies yield to the Irish people the praise of 
 being unsurpassed, if not unequalled, in the practice of those 
 moral virtues by which human nature is exalted and refined. 
 Yet, instead of improving this state of things by an extension of 
 that religious education out of which those virtues have grown, 
 you would introduce an experiment which has been found in 
 other countries to spread like a cancer over the surface of 
 society, gradually destroying the vitality of the moral virtues by 
 
LETTER CVI. 
 
 597 
 
 which it is sustained. And you do this to second the selfish 
 schemes of mercenary infidels, who are springing up in the 
 country, and who, under the affectation of zeal for education, 
 would not hesitate to advocate Mahometanism, if it gave them 
 access to the patronage of the lords of the treasury. How soli- 
 citous you are for providing for the comforts and social condition 
 of the clergy! Yes, but through the channel of some board or 
 commission by which you would effectually control their free- 
 dom. How solicitous to subsidize, under the pretence of facilities 
 for education, a knot of noisy and turbulent socialists, who are 
 beginning to be a source of annoyance to the state, until quieted 
 by a share of the ministerial bounty. Yes, amidst all this affec* 
 tation of concern for Ireland, the people, the great foundation of 
 the social edifice, are neglected ; and though your own commis- 
 sioners have attested that their destitution and patience are 
 unexampled, yet no legislative provision is made to protect them 
 from a heartless tyrant, or to provide for the increase of their 
 comfort. As they are the first in importance, they are sure to 
 be the last to be considered in the legislative scale. It is because 
 the Catholic clergy feel intensely for their condition, and labour 
 for its improvement, they have arrayed their enemies in a deter- 
 mined combination to undermine their influence and injure their 
 religion, by those exotic schemes of infidel education which they 
 are striving, even with penalties, to enforce. But they will not 
 succeed. The public money may be squandered for a time in 
 the lavish distribution of useless or noxious patronage, as is the 
 case of the poor-houses, but the infidel lecturers will be shunned, 
 and their halls, like the same poor-houses, will be deserted. 
 The Catholic faith in Ireland has already come unhurt out of 
 the most fiery trials, and through the zeal of the clergy and the 
 devotion of the people, it is sure to triumph over this last and 
 deadliest of the persecutions it has yet been fated to endure. 
 
 I have the honor to be your very obedient servant, 
 
 ^ John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
598 
 
 LETTER CVII. 
 
 LETTER CYII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 ON THE INFIDEL COLLEGES. 
 
 Maynooth College, Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, 
 June 29 , 1845 . 
 
 Sir — It is difficult to reconcile your professions of respect for 
 the Catholic hierarchy with the pertinacity with which you are 
 pushing on your “ godless scheme of academic education,” in 
 defiance of their solemn resolutions. To every reflecting and 
 impartial mind it must appear evident that you are utterly in- 
 different to the opinions of that body, or that you hope gradually 
 to win over a passive and unresisting acquiescence in a scheme, of 
 the infidel and demoralising nature of which, they have unani- 
 mously recorded their emphatic condemnation. 
 
 Whether you are swayed in your purpose to persevere, by the 
 first supposition you alone are the most competent judge. But if 
 you entertain the hope of enforcing your Pagan plan, in despite 
 of the resolutions of the Catholic bishops, allow me respectfully 
 to predict that you will experience a sad and humiliating disap- 
 pointment. I am enabled authentically to inform you, that not 
 only have the prelates stedfastly clung to their recent resolu- 
 tions, but that they were unwilling to petition parliament on the 
 subject, lest they should again experience the repetition of the 
 contemptuous indifference, with which their appeal to the executive 
 has been treated. 
 
 If, with such a formidable opposition, backed, sustained, nay, 
 encouraged onward, by the zeal of an enlightened clergy, and the 
 piety of a devoted people, who never will endure the infidel pro- 
 ject, you fancy that you can sap the foundations of the Catholic 
 faith in the youth by the establishment of a system so univer- 
 sally execrated, I must remind you that you have read history, 
 and especially Irish history, in vain. In this very brief letter I 
 shall not dwell on the variety of convincing arguments, that 
 should persuade the most intrepid and stubborn statesman to cast 
 away for ever, all thoughts of endeavouring to vitiate by the 
 deleterious sophistry of infidel and inexorable empirics, the 
 hearts and understandings of a people who, amidst the infidelity 
 which now threatens to overrun some of the nations of Europe, 
 stand in the same proud and enviable isolation from its corrup- 
 tions, as did their ancestors formerly, when unreached by the 
 calamities that convulsed the entire continent. 
 
LETTER CVIII. 
 
 599 
 
 It is impossible for a Catholic prelate to touch upon the sacred 
 subject of academic education, especially in a college where the 
 hallowed influence of religion has been uniformly felt mingling 
 with all its exercises, and enlivening, hallowing, and exalting 
 those sciences, which, properly cultivated, are but as its so many 
 handmaids, bearing testimony to its evidence, and doing homage 
 to its dominion, without being pained at the anticipation of a 
 possible divorce between sciences which the Author of Truth 
 has so intimately connected. It is not for the clergy alone that 
 religion has been ushered into the world. JNo ; it is for all 
 mankind, and never does it appear with a more winning or at- 
 tractive grace, than when the sciences are seen, nay, felt, by a 
 young and susceptible auditory, to be captives to that heavenly 
 influence, whose service alone is the most perfect freedom. Let, 
 then, the Catholic laity, as well as Protestants and Presbyterians, 
 have their respective colleges, and the sciences taught by their 
 respective professors, under the sanction of their respective 
 pastors. You will find this more serviceable to religion, and far 
 more propitious to the public weal, than any attempt to draw 
 out to almost an infinite series that long and dismal succession of 
 charter-school projects, now of persecution, and again of fraud, 
 by which the inhabitants of Ireland have been so long and so 
 cruelly worried, and of which the uniform failure, affords striking 
 evidence that they never can succeed. 
 
 I have the honour to be your very obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CVIII. 
 
 TO THE EIGHT HONORABLE SIR ROBERT PEEL, BART. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Augustine, 
 August 28 , 1815 . 
 
 Sir — Were we not assured that there is nothing new under the 
 sun, and that the most extraordinary events of the present, are 
 often but like a transcript of those of the past times, the 
 Catholics of Ireland would be sorely perplexed, if not dismayed, 
 at the calamitous position, and more appalling prospects, of the 
 church in this country. The silence of a sudden surprise has 
 
600 
 
 LETTER CVIII. 
 
 come upon the nation, at the strange rumours that are indus- 
 triously sent abroad, that the godless scheme of education is to 
 find favour even from those, by whom it was condemned as 
 dangerous to faith and morals. The condemnation of this 
 impious scheme, formed the primary and emphatic resolution 
 of the assembled hierarchy of Ireland. The proposed conditions 
 were the provisional safeguards to be insisted on against the 
 obnoxious system — rather necessary securities, in case of being 
 arbitrarily enforced — than the free conditions of any arrange- 
 ment mutually entered into between the bishops and the legisla- 
 ture — for on that, as on the penal bequests act, the bishops were 
 not consulted. 
 
 But how little the feelings of the bishops, or the interests of 
 that religion, of which they are the constituted guardians, were 
 consulted on the occasion, is manifest from the contemptuous 
 insolence with which their resolutions were received. No sooner 
 was it announced, that no regard should be paid to the remon- 
 strances of the Catholic bishops, than a shout of exultation, if 
 we are to believe the reporters, is said to have shaken, with 
 prolonged and contending loudness, the rival parties of the 
 senate-house. 
 
 The provisional securities were embodied in a memorial to the 
 Lord Lieutenant unanimously adopted. His Excellency was 
 emphatically told that Catholic colleges for the Catholics of 
 Ireland, would be the institutions most in accordance with their 
 religion and their feelings ; and that, in any contingency, the 
 securities specified in the memorial were the minimum of safe- 
 guards, with which we could be content. And are we now to be 
 told by those busy and secret emissaries of some mysterious 
 influence, that are traversing every town and city of any note, 
 for the insidious purpose of seducing advocates to the unholy 
 scheme, that it is one that will have the sanction of some of the 
 hierarchy of Ireland ? The only amendment, the wicked act has 
 undergone, is one of a more stringent and comprehensive penal 
 operation. Until now the inmates of all good Catholic families, 
 with the freedom of citizens, might frequent any school or college 
 without any government license. Henceforward they are to be 
 placed under the surveillance, not of the bishop or of the paro- 
 chial clergyman — they must have a licence from the government, 
 in order that the faith and morals of Catholics should be secured 
 by such a pious Protestant as the Secretary for the Home 
 Department! I will not pause to animadvert on the political 
 despotism or encroachment on civil liberty involved in this hate- 
 ful enactment, which would appear to reconcile some to the 
 impiety of the entire measure. I will not stop either to point 
 out its obvious and perfect analogy to some of those foreign 
 infidel schemes of mixed education, of which the harmonious 
 
LETTER CIX. 
 
 601 
 
 effects are at this moment developing themselves in social and 
 religious contentions that are breaking up the very framework of 
 society in Germany — no, but I will confine myself solely to the 
 religious value of this police espionage to the interests of morality 
 and domestic virtue. Surely a Protestant government cannot be 
 more .solicitous for virtue and morality, in the large cities of 
 Catholic Ireland, than it is in Protestant England. The public 
 has not yet forgotten the awful details of profligacy connected 
 with one of those cities in which the universities are situate. I 
 trust you and the Chief Secretary will turn your attention to a 
 radical reform in those localities, before we can rely on the magic 
 virtue of a government license, in purging away all the moral 
 putrefaction, which repeated and accredited lectures on material- 
 ism or pantheism, now so fashionable, are sure to propagate. 
 
 Why not then, at once, with the boldness of Cecil, propose to 
 our gracious Sovereign to wage an open, instead of a covert war, 
 on the Catholic religion in Ireland ? You appear to possess all 
 the craftiness of that wily minister, without his courage ; and were 
 your policy against the freedom of the Catholic hierarchy to be 
 successful, you would render our beloved Queen as odious as ever 
 Elizabeth was, to the Irish people. Hence all the unprincipled 
 shifts that have been resorted to in carrying out this and the 
 hateful measures of the bequests act, and that are still made use 
 of to impose on the Catholic people. No design in the vague 
 appellation of the “ west” to decoy some of the inhabitants of its 
 various towns and cities to enter into a competition for colleges 
 as far as they might be safe ; and then turn round and bring up 
 the unwary and unsuspicious suitors as witnesses in favour of 
 your godless scheme of education which they never contemplated ! 
 No coincidence between the holdings of those meetings and the 
 profuse distribution of the honours and patronage of the treasury ! 
 Some gentlemen are tempted by these amphibious honours that 
 deprived them of the privileges of commoners, without investing 
 them with the judicial or legislative prerogatives of peer, and 
 ecclesiastics arc flattered with the compliment that they are near, 
 and that this very proximity will be quite sufficient to banish all 
 strange and heterodox doctrines from within their jurisdiction. 
 All these schemes may be authorized by the canons of political 
 casuistry, to which statesmen are trained ; but surely the abettors 
 of the infidel project have no right to drag the hierarchy and 
 priesthood, at least the body who arc unwilling to go with them, 
 into their unhallowed confederation. Your project stands con- 
 demned, irrevocably, irretrievably condemned, by the solemn, 
 deliberate, and unanimous suffrage of the assembled prelates of 
 the Irish church — that recorded judgment which is beyond your 
 power to reverse. You may encourage speculators in the prices 
 of town plots and farms, as well as speculators in the funds, to 
 
602 
 
 LETTER CIX. 
 
 hold their meetings, and pass their resolutions, and forward their 
 memorials for the preference of one of those colleges, of which 
 the fundamental principle is, the banishment of all religion. All 
 this can be well understood. It is the management of business 
 in a shrewd and business-like way ; and it is long ago that such 
 people were pronounced wise in their generation. But all this 
 bustle and all this mercantile and academic speculation combined, 
 are questions into which faith and morals never enter. Their 
 advocates have other game in view, and seldom are faith or 
 morals suffered to cross the path of their speculations. Let 
 them, therefore, pursue their object without industriously spread- 
 ing sinister rumours, that the Catholic Church of Ireland cheers 
 them on by a revocation of its most solemn decisions. Whatever 
 may be their other charges against the Church, let them, at least, 
 spare its reputation for a dignified consistency, in adhering to 
 those resolves which it has maturely and deliberately adopted. 
 Are its fixed decisions to be blown away as if they were chaff, 
 and their framers held up to the ridicule of the world, as so many 
 weathercocks, veering round with every change in the political 
 compass ? No ; you, and every other political functionary, will 
 find, that the Church of Ireland is not composed of such ma- 
 terials, as to be fashioned to his purposes by the plastic hand 
 even of a Prime Minister. The bishops and clergy of Ireland 
 stood by their faith and by the Catholic people, to whom it is 
 dear even beyond liberty and life, when it was assailed by 
 persecution. You will find them no less watchful against the 
 machinations of fraud which its ancient enemies, aided by the 
 accession of apostate allies, are carrying on against it. Were the 
 bishops and clergy those inconsistent persons they are represented 
 to be, rescinding, to-day, the resolutions of yesterday, and pro- 
 mising or courting patronage in those godless colleges, they 
 would not justify all the consequence that is now attached by 
 politicians to securing their political co-operation — their accession 
 to one side would be as valueless as their loss to the other would 
 be unimportant. No ; they have influence ; they possess confi- 
 dence in acting in unison and in accordance with the Catholic 
 Church, and in carrying out, in despite of opposition or defection, 
 those inflexible principles of attachment to the chair of Peter and 
 the centre of Catholic unity, which have made Ireland the envy 
 as well as the pride of Europe, and which will still secure her 
 against her present difficulties, far more formidable than any she 
 has yet sustained. 
 
 I have the honor to be, sir, your very obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
LETTER CX. 
 
 603 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 TO THE VEHY REVEREND AND REVEREND THE CLERGY 
 AND FAITHFUL OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF TUAM. 
 
 St. Jaelath’s, Tuam, February 20, 1846. 
 
 Venerable and Dearly Beloved Brethren — Having so often 
 and at some length laid before you the nature of the institution 
 of Lent, and the duties it required, we should have been content, 
 on this occasion, merely to refer you to the regulations of later 
 years, if it were not for the awful visitation of famine, with which 
 the Almighty threatens to punish the sins of his people.* This 
 calamity has been long threatened. But the very frequency of 
 the warning has had the effect, as it often happens, of rendering 
 some heedless and callous to the danger, until the fearful reality 
 begins to make itself felt in hunger and starvation over the land. 
 
 As the time of Lent is peculiarly set apart for the exercise of 
 penance, to appease the Divine anger which our sins have en- 
 kindled, we are bound in the coming season to increase our 
 austerities, and to redouble the fervour of our prayers, that the 
 faithful may not die “ by the grievous arrows of famine with 
 which the Lord threatens to destroy them.”f No matter how 
 scientific men may be occupied in tracing the causes and ex- 
 plaining the symptoms of this disease ; we are taught by wisdom 
 from a higher source, that every such calamity is a portion of 
 that vengeance which God has in store, and occasionally dis- 
 charges on account of the infraction of his holy laws. “ There 
 are spirits that are created for vengeance, and in their fury they 
 lay on grievous torments. In the time of destruction they shall 
 pour out their force, and they shall appease the wrath of him 
 that made them. Fire, hail, famine and death, all these were 
 created for vengeance.”:]: 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell longer on the illustration of a truth 
 so urgently enforced throughout every portion of the inspired 
 writings. If this famine and pestilence are a portion of the ven- 
 geance which God inflicts for sin, faith teaches us that the most 
 effectual means to avert them, must consist in those penitential 
 exercises of fasting, of humiliation, and of prayer, by which the 
 arm of the Almighty has been so often stayed. When such 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, xlviii, 2. f Ezekiel, v, 16. 
 
 X Ecclesiasticus, xxxix, 33 and 34. 
 
604 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 calamities become so general as to overspread an entire nation, 
 they are usually inflicted for some great national transgressions. 
 “Justice exalteth a nation, but sin maketh nations miserable.”* 
 Of signal chastisement brought on whole tribes and kingdoms 
 on account of national guilt, the inspired writings furnish us with 
 numerous and dreadful examples: “Therefore shall the land 
 mourn, and every one that dwelleth in it shall languish, and they 
 shall eat and not be filled, because they have forsaken the Lord 
 in not observing his law.”| 
 
 How similar the visitation with which our people are menaced ! 
 — the land mourning, the people languishing, their usual food so 
 diseased, as to have lost its usual power of nutrition, so that those 
 who eat of it are not filled, and literally verifying the awful 
 threats of the same prophet, “And I will be like a moth to 
 Ephraim, and like rottenness to the house of Judah.” { Those 
 and the like punishments were inflicted on the people occasionally 
 for idolatry, but more generally for having mixed up, with their 
 own worship, the impure rites of the neighbouring nations. And 
 is there not an analogy between them, and those who mix up 
 with the pure doctrines of the Church, some of the false maxims 
 of the sectaries ? The people of Ireland have not, it is true, yet 
 reached this dangerous and daring impiety. But individuals 
 have, and unless seasonably checked, there is a manifest forward 
 tendency to that liberality, which would discard their legiti- 
 mate wardens from the watch-towers of Israel, and resign their 
 custody to mercenary apostates and to strangers, § who would 
 soon infect with foreign mixture the faith, the worship, and the 
 morality of the Catholic Church. 
 
 Yes, there is spreading abroad the same jealousy of the holy 
 influence of religious orders, and the same rage to transfer from 
 them to laymen — nay, to heretics and infidels, mixed up with 
 apostate priests, if they can be purchased, the education of the 
 rising youth of Ireland, such as preceded the melancholy catas- 
 trophe of the French Revolution. There is ringing on our ears 
 the same jargon of liberality, and the same denunciations of a 
 distinct and exclusive creed, with which the true faith was then 
 sought to be annihilated. The consequences we need not detail ; 
 they are written in blood, and the courtiers and the ecclesiastics 
 who hailed the advent of this liberal education, and joined in the 
 condemnation of the bigotries of ancient times, lived to see their 
 own folly punished, in the ruins of the throne of a great kingdom, 
 and in the desecration of its altars. 
 
 The duties of charity — of an active, benevolent and practical 
 charity — you will, I trust, fulfil towards all, whatever may be 
 
 * Proverbs. f Osia, tv, 3, and 4. f Osia, v, 12. 
 
 § Ezecliiel, xliv, 7, and 8. 
 
LETTER CX. 
 
 605 
 
 their religious creed. For true faith enlarges and invigorates, 
 instead of contracting or enfeebling the practice of charity. But 
 listen not to the false and deceitful accents of those, who, under 
 the guise of liberality, would strip you of the precious inheritance 
 of your faith, and persuade you to expose it to peril, by evil 
 associations. Talk of the indiscriminate mixture of the education 
 of youth, without confusion of their respective creeds ! You 
 might as well pour forth different liquids into a common vase, 
 and expect they would remain distinct, as that faith and heresy, 
 truth and error, would not be co-mingled, when, by an indis- 
 criminate education, all the sluices by which they are kept 
 asunder, are taken away. Nor will you suffer yourselves to be 
 deluded by the specious and deceitful sophistry of those, who 
 will tell you that the difference in faith between your children 
 and those with whom they are invited to mix, may be but small, 
 and that Catholic Ecclesiastics may be found conducting this 
 speckled and leprous system of education. In neither circum- 
 stance is there any security. There has been no schism, how- 
 ever inveterate — no heresy, however deadly, of which ecclesiastics 
 were not found the abettors, from their infancy to their consum- 
 mation. And as for there being little danger on account of the 
 proximity of creeds, we may apply to faith what moralists apply 
 to chastity, in any taint of which there is seldom any lightness 
 of matter to plead its extenuation. No ; faith is the root of 
 morality ; it is the head : and hence some of the expounders of 
 Scripture tell us, that as the serpent guards his head when at- 
 tacked, leaving his entire body exposed, so Catholics ought to be 
 particularly alive in watching and averting the slightest assaults 
 upon their faith, deprived of which, the whole body of their 
 morality would soon expire. You may be surprised to hear that 
 St. Augustine, one of the brightest ornaments of the Christian 
 Church, compared schism to idolatry — nay, he asserts that it 
 surpassed idolatry in the enormity of its guilt. After this can 
 you think it harmless, to have your children indiscriminately 
 associated with those, who are divided by an inveterate schism 
 from Rome, the centre of Catholic unity — nay, educated, formed, 
 fashioned, in their notions of religion by schismatical masters ? 
 And such are often more dangerous than avowed infidels. Open 
 infidelity inspires a degree of terror that may forbid a confiding 
 familiarity. The infidel may be brought to feel more alarmed 
 by a sense of his own danger ; whereas heretics or schismatics, 
 who approach the confines of Catholic unity, may feel no alarm, 
 and become obdurate by their sins ; whilst the Catholic, seeing 
 in their counterfeit faith an imperfect image of his own, may on 
 that account be more easily caught in the snares of seduction. 
 
 Were I to refer you to the ample volume over which the 
 records of the Catholic Church arc spread, you would find it 
 
606 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 proved beyond the shadow of doubt, that in cases of heresy or 
 schism the Catholic found no particular security for his creed, nor 
 no toleration for its profession in the circumstances of the nearness 
 by which the sectaries approached his faith. Cross but once 
 the gulf which divides the kingdom of light — the Catholic 
 Church — from all the varieties of error that lie beyond it ; they 
 all become agitated as the elements of chaos, with this difference, 
 that those which are on the very confines, are always the most 
 mutinous and the most aggressive. Does not Providence, for 
 the instruction of the Catholics of Ireland, furnish a striking 
 example of this truth in the direful persecutions lately endured 
 by the consecrated virgins of Poland. The most heroic martyr- 
 dom recorded in the Church, not excepting those of St. Agatha 
 or St. Cecilia, do not furnish such evidence of atrocious barbarity 
 on the one hand, and heroic endurance on the other, as is 
 furnished by the revolting or edifying tale of those recent victims 
 of Russian persecution. 
 
 From whom did it come? From persons who approximate in 
 faith and doctrine more nearly to us, than those to whom you 
 are desired to entrust your children for their education. And 
 who were the chief agents of those hideous, and cruel, and count- 
 less enormities, which must shame the pretensions of our age to 
 superior civilization ? Apostate ecclesiastics, who sold their 
 country, their faith, and their God ; and who knew no law, and 
 acknowledged no obligation, but the ruthless and savage will of 
 a persecuting emperor. After this example set up as an awful 
 warning, will it be said that faith and morals are not endangered, 
 because the professors of your children may not be altogether 
 infidels, and because among their number, there may be found 
 some pliant and apostate ecclesiastics. Oh, no ; for you will 
 invariably find, and there are abundant proofs of it in the present 
 age, that ecclesiastics, so far from affording any protection against 
 the dangers of a bad system, are uniformly, like Siemasko — the 
 persecutor of the religious orders of Poland — the most inveterate 
 against their former brethren in the faith, and the most unscru- 
 pulous in pushing forward the encroachments of the secular power, 
 on the sacred liberties of the Catholic Church. 
 
 But what shall we say to those who advance, as an apology, 
 the money which such colleges will diffuse among the people ? 
 Surely it is not meant to justify Judas for selling the faith for 
 thirty pieces of silver. If arguments like those be deemed 
 sufficient to justify the endangering of our faith, they must bring 
 the reproach of folly upon our ancestors, who sacrificed money, 
 lands, nay, life itself, for its preservation. What strange and 
 humiliating inconsistencies ! The land mourneth, the people are 
 on the verge of famine, in punishment of the sins of their 
 infidelity, and the remedy that is suggested to heal the evil, and 
 
LETTER CX. 
 
 GOT 
 
 the means to which they have recourse to appease God’s anger, 
 is to lend themselves to an active co-operation in that very infi- 
 delity which so signally brings on them the chatisement of heaven! 
 What will the expenditure of a college avail to avert the coming 
 famine ? It would be as a drop in the ocean ; yet for this drop, 
 like the drop of honey,* which was almost fatal to Jonathan, some, 
 doubtless, may risk the death of their immortal souls. 
 
 We are now arrived at a period in the history of our Church, 
 in which apostacy or any faltering of our faith, would be doubly 
 criminal. Many ecclesiastics in the sister country, eminent for 
 their wisdom, talent, and integrity, are now returning to the 
 bosom of the Church of Rome, tired of the “ difficult and 
 troublesome ways”f in which they so long have walked. The 
 bishops of France, the glorious successors of those men who 
 earned for that kingdom the praise of “ most Christian,” are now 
 repairing the fences which impiety cast down. They are with- 
 drawing their flock from the fetid and poisoned fountains of the 
 university, of which those who drink, are inhaling death, and 
 slaking the thirst of the rising generation with the pure waters 
 of life, unmixed and undiluted with any error. And is it at a 
 period like this that we are to hand over the faith of the children 
 to be corrupted by apostate and infidel or profligate masters ? 
 Of these nations who are making such noble efforts to rescue the 
 faith from the dangers to which it is exposed, the sainted men of 
 Ireland were once the instructors. We must, therefore, hand 
 down to those who come after us the virgin faith, which in Ireland 
 has escaped contagion.| Seek first the kingdom of God and his 
 justice, and God, who provideth food for the ravens of the air, 
 will not suffer you to perish. Invoke his aid with fervent prayers 
 during this holy season. “ Rend your hearts and not your 
 garments, Ӥ in sincere sorrow for having offended him. The 
 regulations regarding the use of flesh meat on Sunday and three 
 days in the week will be the same as last year ; on Fridays there 
 will be abstinence from eggs, and the last week is not only to be 
 devoted to entire abstinence from meat and eggs, but likewise on 
 Wednesday and Friday, milk diet is to be abstained from — a 
 slight privation when we recollect the bitter chalice drained by 
 our Divine Redeemer. 
 
 Should the famine become terrible in its ravages, as it, alas ! 
 portends, send forth your humble and strong remonstrances to 
 your rulers, adjuring them to check the exportation of the food 
 that is daily sent away from your shores — use all legitimate 
 means to avert the horrors of pestilence and famine ; but whilst 
 you ask for bread accept not a stone, || and do not for a paltry 
 
 * Kings, xiv, 109. f Wisdom, v, 7. JLuke, xii, 31. §Joel, ii, 13. 
 
 1| Matthew, vii, ix. 
 
608 
 
 LETTER CX. 
 
 relief derived from the erection or endowment of infidel colleges, 
 suffer the worse religious pestilence and famine described by the 
 prophet* to desolate a land whose faith was hitherto untarnished. 
 If you do the consequences will, we fear, be too awful to antici- 
 pate. Some of the priests will be seduced from their obedience 
 to their bishops, to become the hired and mercenary conductors of 
 the system ; some of the bishops, backed by political power, will 
 disregard the remonstrances and invade the jurisdiction of their 
 brethren. Town after town will declare (as did recently Tesina, a 
 canton in Switzerland), that education is entirely to be withdrawn 
 from all spiritual control, and placed exclusively under secular ju- 
 risdiction ; and a foul stream of literature, darker than those that 
 have been said to flow through the infernal regions, will, as now 
 from the University of Paris, continue to issue from those putrid 
 sources, the infidel colleges, covering your clergy, your convents, 
 and your hearths, with their irreligious outpourings, and defiling, 
 as far as they can effect it, the sanctuaries of domestic life, and 
 the altars of God’s temple. 
 
 In a portion of this diocese, and in a few days, it is said, that 
 the sacred solemnity of Lent is going to be broken in on by the 
 strife and tumult of a contested election. We trust not. Such 
 scenes are only tolerable or justifiable when the conflicting 
 opinions of voters are supposed to be doubtful, or nearly balanced. 
 But in this case, there is no doubt or ambiguity, regarding the 
 convictions of the great body of the people. Those convictions 
 are fixed and steady, and cannot be shaken but by bribery, or 
 perjury, or coercion. All those are illegitimate weapons. They 
 are strongly condemned by the laws of God, and no one can be 
 an agent in bribing or coercing the people, or making them 
 commit the horrid crime of perjury, without being guilty of 
 grievous transgressions which no temporal honor or emolument — 
 not even the possession of a kingdom — could outweigh. All the 
 voters are freemen — not lots to be driven to a political market. 
 Their suffrage is and must be their own free, moral act, uncon- 
 trolled by any sinister influence of bribery or coercion. It is 
 our solemn conviction, that many of the public evils that we 
 have already traced to national sins, such as famine and pesti- 
 lence, are much aggravated by the crying sins of fraud and of 
 bribery, of force and of perjury, that are committed before 
 heaven at those elections. Nor is this conjecture; for if any 
 profane persons be sceptical on the subject, we refer them to the 
 book of Kings, f where it is said that a famine, not of a year, but 
 of three successive years, came on the land of Judea on account 
 of the wickedness of Saul, who, in despite of a covenant ratified 
 by an oath, had put to death the people of Gaba. 
 
 * Amos, viii. 
 
 | Kings, xxi, 1 . 
 
LETTER CXI. 
 
 609 
 
 We trust, therefore, that scenes so pregnant with proofs of the 
 Divine wrath will not be often repeated. Should a contest, 
 which is to be deprecated, take place on this occasion, it will be 
 the duty of all to oppose perjury, violence and bribery, and to 
 vindicate for the voters that complete liberty of acting and of 
 conscience, to which, as rational and responsible creatures, as 
 well as free subjects, they are entitled. 
 
 In conclusion, let us exhort you to conduct yourselves on this, 
 as on all occasions, without blame and without reproach, to seek 
 in your suffrage, like the peaceful and pious Simon, “ the good of 
 your nation,”* and to offer it, as St. Paul recommends the offering 
 of all our actions, to the honor and glory of God.j 
 We are your very faithful servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CXI. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, Feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, 
 
 August 1, 1846. 
 
 My Lord — Among the many and obvious grievances that press 
 upon the people of Ireland, requiring prompt and vigorous 
 measures for their redress, there is one which cannot brook 
 delay, involving, as it does, the lives of thousands of the inhabi- 
 tants. I have read with surprise, and with somewhat of dismay, 
 the report of a speech attributed to the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, announcing the fearful intelligence, that the relief which, 
 through the means of employment on public works, had been in 
 some instances tardily meted out to the people, was, from the 
 15th of August, to be withdrawn. That auspicious day has, 
 since the introduction of Christianity into this country, been a 
 festival, bringing joy and gladness to the people. Suffer it 
 not, then, to be dreaded as a monument of national mourning. 
 You might as well at once issue an edict of national starvation, 
 as stop the supplies which the feeble creatures are striving to 
 earn with the sweat of their brows. The scenes of jealousy and 
 discontent that are of daily occurrence, on account of the real or 
 fancied preference which some claimants for employment receive, 
 are evidence of the pressure of hunger; and never did a mu- 
 tinous crew pant more eagerly for the partition of a rich booty, 
 
 * Maccabees, i, 14. 
 
 f I. Cor. x, 31. 
 
610 
 
 LETTER CXI. 
 
 than the starving inhabitants of Ireland do at present, for the 
 miserable pittance earned on the public roads. 
 
 Allow me, then, in the name of a faithful and suffering people, 
 to implore of you, not only to stretch the present relief on an 
 enlarged scale into the middle of the month of September, but 
 not to suffer the great council of the nation to rise, without 
 adopting prospective measures for the similar but severer cala- 
 mity of the coming year. 
 
 Some member of parliament is said to have remarked, during 
 the discussion to which I allude, that a people was not to be 
 familiarized to the practice of depending on government for 
 their sustenance, and that aid during an extraordinary season 
 was not to be converted into the rule of ordinary years. 
 Nothing could be more just than this principle, nor is it over- 
 looked by those who now appeal to the legislature for the 
 extending of its protection. Visitations, such as that we are 
 passing through, are not always confined to one season. Nay, 
 they sometimes continue for two or three successive years. That 
 the disease in the potato is of that character, is now, alas! too 
 evident from the melancholy occurrence of the reports, attesting 
 a more fearful failure in the crop than that of the last harvest. 
 But these are not vague reports. Having recently passed through 
 extensive tracts of country, and made a minute examination into 
 the state of the potato, I can bear testimony not only to the pre- 
 mature withering of the stalks, and consequent decay of the 
 roots ; but under stalks of which the leaves were still green and 
 sound, the roots were diminutive in size, and in a state of rapid 
 decomposition. The fact is then so, and to throw a people, ac- 
 customed for some time to meal diet, on potatoes, that are some 
 rotten and almost all unripe, would be to aggravate all the evils 
 of famine, with the horrors of pestilence. 
 
 It is not, then, on the miserable and peddling scale of levelling 
 hills on a mail-coach road, that the physical wants of a numerous 
 people are to be relieved, but by those extensive and necessary 
 improvements which, while they mitigate distress, will afford to 
 the government an adequate remuneration — such as the erection 
 of quays and piers along the southern and western coasts, by 
 which the existing misery would be relieved, and courage given 
 to the hardy natives along those coasts, to explore and cultivate 
 the rich and abundant fisheries, on which any benevolent 
 statesman could draw for supplying the wants of the people. 
 Those are public works which the people have a right to expect, 
 in return for the ample revenues with which their industry 
 enriches the exchequer. They know they are improvements 
 which an Irish legislature would not delay. You may perceive, 
 then, how the natural calamities of the country are furnishing 
 arguments in favour of justice, and as if rebuking the reluctant 
 
LETTER CXI. 
 
 611 
 
 tardiness of statesmen to consult for the prosperity of Ireland. 
 The pittance doled out this year for their relief, would form but 
 a small item in the millions abstracted without any return, by 
 absentees whom an Irish legislature would have kept at home, to 
 fulfil the duties, as well as to enjoy the benefits of property. Are 
 you, then, surprised, that while a nation is brought to the verge 
 of starvation, they are panting for the peaceful accomplishment 
 of a measure, which, even in years of scarcity, would supply them 
 with abundance, and in years of plenty, would enable them to 
 devote their surplus revenue to the cultivation of the arts, the 
 encouragement of science, and the foundation of beneficial 
 institutions. 
 
 The trying ordeal out of which the people are now passing 
 with such patience, notwithstanding the severe privations which 
 tliey still endure, has had the effect of imprinting more deeply on 
 their souls the necessity of a domestic legislature. Fear not, 
 however, that they meditate for that purpose either violence or 
 insurrection. No ; the weapons of their warfare are peaceful, 
 constitutional, and persevering remonstrance. They are resolved 
 to make known the hideous injustice with which they are still 
 treated, and determined to proclaim that the peace or discontent 
 of an entire nation, are interests too grave and too sacred to be 
 looked on as mere political signs to measure the degree of the 
 elevation or decline of the Whig or Tory factions. With the 
 advocates of physical force and sanguinary revolution, we disown 
 all sympthay. The impure sources from which they have im- 
 ported their dogmas of infidelity and disaffection we abhor. It 
 may be well worth the while of a profound statesman to pause 
 and consider whether, for the sake of vitiating the Catholic 
 religion, and weakening the influence of its priesthood, it is not 
 hazardous to erect infidel colleges for the propagation of an 
 infidel and revolutionary mania, which, should it succeed in 
 overthrowing the altar, will not spare the throne in its career of 
 demolition. Far wiser is it to provide for the starving and faithful 
 people, than propel such mischievous institutions — the hot-beds of 
 every moral and political vice, and waste the public revenues on 
 the sinecure salaries of professional idlers. Consequences must be 
 traced to their principles. The turbid stream is easily known 
 from its kindred and congenial source. The peaceful advocates 
 of Repeal are not for making experiments of violence or war. 
 They argue on the justice and necessity which even this year 
 illustrates, of a people being protected from hunger and starvation 
 by the care of a native and paternal legislature. This is a just 
 principle, and they rely on its progressing, in spite of every effort 
 to crush it. All connexion with the mischievous men, who are 
 for forcing into the country the educational despotism of France 
 and Prussia, with the dangerous dogmas which they strive to 
 
612 
 
 LETTER CXII. 
 
 spread, they entirely repudiate. Their confidence is in the 
 patriarchal patriot of half a century, who, with the peaceful 
 principles of the Catholic Church to guide him, has already 
 advanced Ireland to a pitch, to which no military success could 
 have raised her in the same time. In the same peaceful course, 
 and under his leadership, the people of Ireland are determined 
 steadily to push on their claims, until the monster evil — the 
 frightful anomaly of the Protestant Church Establishment, is 
 annihilated by the tardy justice of the legislature, and until no 
 obstacle remains to prevent the cordial union of all classes, in 
 bringing about a peaceful achievement of the Repeal of the 
 Union. This consummation may be delayed by the followers of 
 Mazini and Voltaire, but cannot be prevented. It well became 
 those who were clamourous for infidel colleges, to be next the 
 constant advocates of force and insurrection. The most profuse 
 and dexterous application of Whig patronage cannot divert the 
 people of Ireland from Repeal — the necessary goal of all pre- 
 vious reforms, nor could the most inflammatory effusions of the 
 parodists of “ Young Italy” ever drive them into rebellion. 
 Repeal they cherish ; their country they love ; but there is 
 another affection which winds closer round their hearts than 
 either — that of their religion. Between country and religion, 
 hitherto united in their love, a divorce is now insidiously 
 attempted by the enemies of both; they will find themselves 
 bitterly disappointed. For though the Irish people, free from 
 bigotry, and anxious for justice, will practise the social virtues 
 towards all, without distinction — nay, will not refuse the alliance 
 of those who, on perfectly fair and peaceful grounds, will advocate 
 the public good — they will still jealously watch the movements, 
 and sternly sever the partnership of all who would attempt, under 
 any guise, however specious, to debauch the principles of attach- 
 ment to the throne and to the Catholic religion, which, through 
 all its vicissitudes and disasters, have formed the chief glory of 
 Ireland. — I have the honor to be your very faithful servant, 
 
 ^ John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CXII. 
 
 TO THE EIGHT HONOEABLE LOED JOHN EUSSELL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, August 21 , 1846 . 
 
 My Lord — The brief interval that has elapsed since I found it 
 my duty to address your lordship on the frightful prospects of 
 the potato crop, has, I am sorry to say, more than realised our 
 
LETTER CXII. 
 
 613 
 
 worst and most desponding anticipations. The failure — nay, the 
 utter, the general, and undeniable destruction of that crop — the 
 only support of millions of human beings — is now a subject of 
 irrefutable notoriety ; and the only subject of doubt or specula- 
 tion is — what may be the ‘short period within which the celerity 
 of the potato rot will work its entire annihilation. This is a tre- 
 mendous crisis to contemplate. It has had already the effect 
 of unnerving the courage of the people. Something akin to a 
 feeling of despair has fallen on them; and, like mariners becalmed 
 in the midst of the ocean, whose provisions are gone, whilst they 
 are many days’ voyage from any shore, they look forward 
 through the terrible period of an entire year, without hope from 
 the ordinary resources of an abundant harvest. It is a prospect 
 at which humanity sickens, to see the people’s hopes thus en- 
 tirely frustrated, and the period which generally consoled them 
 for the privations of the preceding summer, turned into a season 
 of sorrow and despair. 
 
 It is, no doubt, a chastisement of the Almighty, and it is the 
 duty of us all to bow in submission to the chastening dispensa- 
 tions of a just God, and acknowledge the divine power by which 
 we arc stricken. Yet, far from sinking into apathy, we are all 
 bound to redoubled exertion, and our guilt will be only aggra- 
 vated if we fail to administer relief to a perishing nation. I am 
 rejoiced to find, that the report of the late parliamentary debate, 
 regarding the approaching famine, furnishes some faint hope to 
 the people. It is, however, but a faint hope, for if the measures 
 for our relief were to be restricted to the votes already passed, 
 they would prove utterly powerless in averting the threatened 
 calamity. I will not, for the present, dwell on the delays and 
 embarrassments which must render a portion of the projected 
 relief utterly unavailing. I merely content myself with acknow- 
 ledging that those votes, such as they were, proved the awful 
 truth of the approaching famine, as well as a certain degree of 
 sympathy for those who are its threatened victims. 
 
 But allow me respectfully to impress on your lordship, that 
 hunger and starvation are already at the doors of hundreds of 
 thousands, and that an enemy like this will not be subdued by 
 distant and doubtful measures of relief. The British empire 
 boasts, and with justice, of its measureless resources. Now is an 
 opportunity of exhibiting, as well the extent of its humanity as 
 of its resources. And what is the available sum that has been 
 voted by the munificence of parliament to avert the starvation of 
 millions ? Fifty thousand pounds ! ! Ten placemen partition 
 between them a larger portion of the public money. Let it not 
 be said that they arc as valuable in the scale of humanity, or 
 even of policy, as three millions of industrious inhabitants. Fifty 
 thousand pounds for a starving people ! ! It is not many years 
 
614 
 
 LETTER CXII. 
 
 ago since four times the sum was squandered on the pageant of a 
 king’s coronation. Fifty thousand pounds ! ! It is still fresh in 
 our memory when a few parsons were allowed twenty times that 
 amount — a million of money — from the public purse, to sustain 
 an artificial status in society ; and yet but the twentieth portion 
 given to that body to keep up their rank, is to be doled out to 
 keep multitudes, who are the sinews of society, from perishing. 
 Your lordship does not forget when twenty millions were heaped 
 out from the public treasury, to give liberty to the negroes of the 
 West Indies, a liberty which your political opponents accuse you 
 of jeopordizing by your recent measures regarding sugar. And 
 are the lives of the people of Ireland so much depreciated in 
 value below the liberties of the Negro Indians, that but fifty 
 thousand pounds — the four hundredth part of the sum allotted 
 to the redemption of the former from slavery, is to be given for 
 rescuing the latter from certain death ? One hundred thousand 
 pounds are voted for infidel colleges, condemned by the bishops, 
 priests, and people of Ireland ; and while a double sum is wasted 
 on an object that will only poison the minds of the people, and 
 subsidize apostate professors to do the work, will half the sum be 
 deemed sufficient for saving an entire people from starvation ? 
 
 I have not time, nor have I any inclination — it is too melan- 
 choly a topic — to expose the heartlessness of the sordid and un- 
 feeling economists, who complain that Irish misery is to be relieved 
 out of the English Exchequer. No. We only demand that Irish 
 misery should be relieved out of the Irish resources, that are 
 profusely and unfeelingly squandered in England. If there be 
 a real Union between England and Ireland, it should have the 
 reciprocal conditions of all such covenants — mutual benefits, and 
 mutual burdens. We want, then, no English money. We want 
 but a fair share of the other portion of our produce, I mean the 
 wheaten one, with which Ireland teems in abundance. Had we 
 our parliament at this moment, it is certain we should be free 
 from the apprehensions of starvation. It would infallibly supply 
 us with plenty out of an Irish Exchequer. We have, then, a 
 right to demand, on the score of the Union, without being be- 
 holden to England, that support in our destitution which our own 
 parliament, if not merged in that of Great Britain, would not 
 fail to grant. If, then, those economists persist in a course of 
 political casuistry, as wrong in principle as it is inhuman in 
 practice, let them, even now at the eleventh hour, vote back our 
 parliament, and we will dispense with their votes of money. 
 There is no evasion from either alternative ; the lives of millions 
 are not to be sacrificed to the sordid speculations of a few political 
 economists. — I have the honor to be your obedient servant, 
 
 >J<John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
LETTER CX1II. 
 
 615 
 
 LETTER CXIII. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, October 7, 1846. 
 
 My Lord — Short and rapid as is now the medium of commu- 
 nication, yet ere this brief letter shall meet your lordship’s eye, 
 hundreds, I fear, of the suffering people of this district will have 
 fallen victims to the horrors of famine. This will assuredly be 
 their melancholy fate, if not provided with employment and with 
 food. And yet, while starvation thus stalks through the land, 
 marking its progress with the victims it has already made, the 
 public is amused or insulted with cold and heartless dissertations 
 on the future consequences of the failure of the potato. 
 
 Parliament has legislated, in order to save the famishing 
 people. Magistrates and cess-payers have presented, in confor- 
 mity with its seasonable and humane requisitions ; and yet, by 
 a strange and unaccountabe fatality, the people are perishing, as 
 if no legislative measures had been interposed for their pro- 
 tection. The people’s hopes have been sustained by assurances 
 of prompt and efficient relief : their patience has been stretched 
 to a degree of endurance to which human nature is seldom sub- 
 jected ; yet, when they find the enactments of parliament in the 
 presentments of the sessions still abortive of relief, it is to be 
 apprehended that their suspicions of being made the dupes of 
 underhand intrigue, will goad them on to violence and outrage, 
 which may mock the powers of the clergy — who are preaching 
 patience — effectually to control. While we preach patience to 
 them, it is our duty to adjure their rulers not to suffer such a 
 tension of that virtue, as to endanger its breaking under the 
 pressure of hunger. 
 
 The question is not now about the preference to be.given to the 
 constructing of roads, or to the most remunerative labour. The 
 question — the pressing — the imperative question — is, about saving 
 the lives of famishing thousands. All the other speculations are 
 unseasonable, nay cruel, as long as the people are eagerly 
 stretching out their hands, and, in the name of humanity and 
 of religion, crying out to be snatched from instant death. All 
 your works, whether productive or unproductive, are only the 
 means to save the people’s lives, which are more valuable than 
 any property, and should not be sacrificed to the caprices of 
 those cruel speculators, who value property more than the 
 people’s lives. 
 
616 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 Similar was your- fatal error, and that of your colleagues, in 
 leaving the providing of food to mercantile speculations. This 
 would be just in the ordinary circumstances of society ; but, when 
 the price of provisions rapidly rises, as it is doing now, to famine 
 height, not to provide government depots, would be to abandon 
 the people to the merciless exactions of commercial cupidity. 
 But I must close, lest, while witnessing the famine that baffles 
 description, and menaces the uprooting of all social order, I 
 should be betrayed into anything like discussion of theories, when 
 the times call for the promptest and most extensive measures for 
 relief. I care not, while the people must otherwise starve, what 
 may be the nature of the works by which their lives may be 
 sustained, until time is afforded for further deliberation. Better 
 they should be making holes, and filling them again, than that 
 they should die, and in their death scatter pestilence among those 
 who may have no pity for their misfortune. Food is the first 
 requisite, and then employment — productive, remunerative em- 
 ployment, if you can, but, at any rate, employment, to save the 
 lives of the people. 
 
 I have the honor to be your obedient servant, 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 
 
 St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, December 15, 1846. 
 
 “ Dignus imperio si non imperasset .” — Tacitus. 
 
 ‘ ‘ Had he nQt the misfortune to rule, he would have been deemed deserving of 
 empire.” 
 
 My Lord — This sententious contrast between the hopes of the 
 aspiring Caesar and the disappointment inflicted by the reigning 
 emperor, is but too applicable to those statesmen whose talents, 
 so hopeful in opposition, seem to be blighted on their attainment 
 of political power. Within the brief interval of twelve months, 
 two remarkable letters have appeared, bearing your lordship’s 
 signature. The one boldly promulgated the sound doctrine of 
 free trade, and expressed a generous sympathy with the desti- 
 tution of the Irish people, which was but light, compared to 
 
LETTER CX1V. 
 
 617 
 
 the famine with which they arc now afflicted. The other was so 
 chilling, as to have filled those with despair whom it would have 
 been wisdom to console — among whom hunger now rages with 
 such terrible activity, that it is consigning to the grave its daily 
 victims. The one was the studied essay of a popular candidate 
 for the distinctions of office — the other was the cold and conven- 
 tional language which was borrowed from the political ritual of 
 preceding prime ministers. It was on the buoyant hopes inspired 
 by the language of the first, your lordship was borne to your 
 present responsible position ; and, should you persevere in a line 
 of policy, towards a suffering nation, accordant with the cold- 
 hearted sentiments contained in your second letter, it requires no 
 extraordinary prescience to predict that it will assuredly prove 
 the precursor of your political fall. 
 
 By one of those awful calamities with which Providence some- 
 times visits states and nations, five millions of people, forming an 
 integral portion of a flourishing and mighty empire, are entirely 
 deprived of food, and consigned to all the horrors of famine. 
 The prime minister is naturally and rightfully appealed to, to 
 relieve the suffering part with an equitable application of the 
 wealth of the entire body, and he replies to them, to look to 
 themselves, and to rely on their own resources. Self-reliance is 
 a fine theme when sufficient for any crisis ; but to tell a people 
 to supply themselves with food, when both food and the means 
 of procuring it are gone, appears like the requisition of the 
 Hebrews, to make bricks without materials. And does your 
 lordship, too, advocate, by this singular letter, the nullity of the 
 imperial union ? For forty-six years the people of Ireland have 
 been feeding those of England with the choicest produce of their 
 agriculture and pasture ; and while they thus exported their 
 wheat and their beef in profusion, their own food became gra- 
 dually deteriorated in each successive year, until the mass of the 
 peasantry was exclusively thrown on the potato. New improve- 
 ments in agriculture were projected — scientific reforms in the 
 rearing and feeding of cattle were discussed and adopted ; but 
 to the mass of the people the practical fruit of those improve- 
 ments was a fresh interdict of the use of flesh-meat or of flour r 
 and a further extension of the dominion of a less nutritive kind 
 of that same vegetable, to the exclusive use of which they were 
 inexorably doomed ! 
 
 No matter — a cry of Irish prosperity was raised by those who 
 ■were enabled to subject the growers of corn to the uniform con- 
 sumption of an inferior quality of food ; and the same cry wa& 
 re-echoed from the shores of England, gladdened with the abun- 
 dance with which its inhabitants were supplied, careless of the 
 misery of which that abundance was productive in Ireland, and 
 losing sight altogether of the dietary destitution which, during 
 
618 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 the spring and summer months, its people were uniformly fated 
 to endure. The English legislature was not ungrateful to the 
 Irish landlords for those exporting services, so beneficial to the 
 English population, and in return for the increased quantity of 
 the nobler food, which alone they would condescend to make use 
 of, it furnished them with facilities of seizure of crops and eject- 
 ment of tenantry never known before the Union ; so that if any 
 of the peasantry should become too fastidious for the use of 
 potatoes, or aspire to the interdicted food of flesh-meat or flour, 
 destined to swell the rent-rolls of the one, and feed the petted 
 population of the other, they were sure to be summarily driven 
 from their tenements, for not raising further food for export, and 
 reproached with utter ignorance of the very elements of agri- 
 culture. On the expulsion of the tenantry to the skirtings of 
 the moor, cattle shows became all the rage in Ireland, and meet- 
 ings were held to witness and applaud the successful zeal with 
 which Irish graziers could supply with still larger quantities of 
 beef, and pork, and mutton, the increasing demands of the Eng- 
 lish people. The animals were exhibited — not such an exhibition, 
 however, as when the animals passed in review before him, who 
 was constituted by their common Creator, the owner of the earth, 
 as well as of all its animal productions. In these exhibitions this 
 order appeared reversed, and whilst the neglected condition of 
 the poor peasantry showed the estimation in which they were 
 held, the unnatural dimensions of those pampered brutes would 
 indicate that they were looked on as the beings which shared, to 
 the greatest extent, the kindred sympathies of their owners. 
 Such, with a few benevolent exceptions, was the spirit that 
 guided those cattle exhibitions. 
 
 As long as the people of Ireland were thus draining it of its 
 necessary food into England, and enriching the landed proprie- 
 tors with its price, the blessings of the Union became a theme of 
 their joint commendation. Any allusion to the solicitude which 
 an Irish parliament would naturally exhibit for the Irish people, 
 was treated as a topic that indicated folly or sedition. More 
 produce and finer stock, according to these speculators in money, 
 were the only wants of Ireland ; at the same time that it was 
 certain, if the prudence and stock were four-fold, the millions of 
 the people, irrevocably doomed to the potato, would be equally 
 debarred from their participation. 
 
 At length their cries have reached to heaven ; and he who has 
 created the poor and the rich has answered : “Now I will hear ; 
 the time of retribution is come ; vengeance is already sweeping 
 the land verifying the words of the inspired writings : “ By 
 reason of the misery of the needy, and the groans of the poor, 
 now will I arise,” saith the Lord. In a great national chastise- 
 ment all must in some degree be involved ; and though many of 
 
ETTER CXIV. 
 
 619 
 
 the poor are made victims, perhaps from their want of due resig- 
 nation, and to teach them that there can be still deeper misery 
 than that which they endured, the entire destruction of the 
 potato crop reads an awful lesson of the cruelty, of which that 
 aliment has been made an instrument. It was intended by the 
 Almighty as a valuable adjunct of human sustenance to his crea- 
 tures — it has been abused by man as an instrument of rapacious 
 wealth — of dire oppression, and of national degradation. Its 
 destruction shows what some seemed ignorant of — that the inte- 
 rests of all are identified; that one class cannot permanently 
 flourish, and another be abandoned to decay, and that the people 
 cannot be pushed to the verge of starvation, without landlords 
 and rulers sharing in all the perils of their position. The perish- 
 ing potato is the most formidable agitator, the oppressors of the 
 people had ever yet to wrestle with. But though the transition 
 to the full harvest will be severe, it will become in the hands of 
 Providence, that caused the decay, the fructifying seed of our 
 national regeneration. 
 
 Such is now the frightful state of this country, brought on, as 
 it were, by a systematic collusion between the Irish landlords 
 and the English legislature, and to which Ireland never would 
 have been reduced, had she the protection of a native parliament. 
 The famine has not, it is true, directly sprung from the Union. 
 But severe as it is, it would not be so fatal, if Ireland had not 
 been rendered too feeble to cope with the calamity, by the ema- 
 ciating process to which it had been previously subjected. In 
 the year 1800, the first year of the disastrous Union, the pota- 
 toes sold for 18d. a stone, and meal brought even a larger price 
 than it is now sold for. Yet there was no starvation in Ireland, 
 nor any necessity to appeal for relief to the imperial exchequer. 
 No ; because the constitution of the country was yet sound. It 
 was not exhausted by the drainage of near half a century ; and 
 the vitality and vigour which it received from the free trade of 
 1782, not only sustained it through that trying crisis, but 
 were felt to a far remoter period. Let any dispassionate person 
 contrast those two years — the people during the former calamity 
 sustaining themselves, notwithstanding the pressure of higher 
 prices — and the people now as feeble and powerless as children, 
 faltering on the public ways, and many of them sinking beneath 
 a lighter scourge — and he must come to the conclusion, that the 
 only safety for the Irish people is the restoration of their own 
 legislature. Had we not, preceding this disaster, three or four 
 seasons of unprecedented plenty and prosperity ? Where are 
 their fruits now to meet the present exigency ? The temperate 
 habits of the people refute the slander that they were improvi- 
 dently wasted. No : the fruits of the first seasons were forced 
 from the tenantry in lieu of the arrears which preceding years 
 
620 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 of distress had accumulated ; and allow me to tell you, that 
 though, in all equity, the loss of a crop should be proportionably 
 sustained by the proprietor and the tenant, there is not a farthing 
 of arrears which might grow during this famine, tliat would not 
 hang over the poor tenants, even for ten years, to be rigorously 
 exacted, when heaven might bless them with a more plentiful 
 harvest. 
 
 This will account for the utter destitution in which this calamity 
 was to be encountered, notwithstanding the propitious harvests 
 of the preceding seasons. Alas! there was no Joseph to store 
 the abundant produce against its recurrence of distress. There 
 was no responsible body solicitous for the misery of the Irish 
 people, to lay by a portion of the revenues when they might be 
 told by the English minister to look to themselves and to rely on 
 their own resources. As it is, then, an incontestible truth that 
 it is to the Union our present unprepared and destitute condition 
 is to be traced, we have a strict right, without any imputation of 
 injustice or of mendicancy, to large grants, proportioned to the 
 crisis, from the imperial exchequer. Whilst we supplied you 
 with our abundant produce, we were as dear and as cherished 
 a portion of the empire as Yorkshire, or any other shire in 
 England. Nothing could exceed the indissoluble closeness, nay, 
 the affection of the Union. But when adversity comes upon us, 
 in consequence of this legislative identity — when famine-^walks, 
 like the destroying angel, through the land — and the instances 
 of death are now too many and too familiar to select one for 
 peculiar commisseration — then we are to be told — “ You have no 
 claim on us — we have no connexion with you — sink or swim, 
 look to yourselves, and rely on your own resources.” Would 
 such be the language to Yorkshire, in the days of a vengeful 
 visitation ? Is it thus the minister would repulse the cries of 
 the starving people of Northumberland ? Oh, no ; he would 
 not have heart to give utterance to such a sentiment — or, if he 
 should, Yorkshire and Northumberland would not tamely forego 
 their constitutional right to a share of the common Imperial 
 Exchequer, to the funds of which they had contributed. It is 
 only Ireland that can be flattered with the name of a Union, 
 when giving her heart’s blood to the prosperity of the empire ; 
 and then, in her inanition, to be abandoned to starvation. 
 
 But, perhaps, I do not read your lordship’s letter right. If I 
 am doing it any injustice, I shall furnish the glossary of a con- 
 genial and unprejudiced commentator — it is that of Sir Randolph 
 Routh, of commissariat celebrity. Perhaps your lordship is not 
 aware that he was waited on, in behalf of the starving people of 
 Achil, by the Catholic clergyman of the parish, who happens to 
 be as ignorant of the callous lessons of political economy as he 
 is versed in the warm and practical charity of the Gospel. His 
 
LETTER CXIV. 
 
 621 
 
 object was to press the necessity of establishing government 
 depots for food in that remote district, where not only the staple 
 food had perished, but where remoteness rendered any other 
 substitute almost inaccessible. The restilt of the conference 
 was, it seems, that, after the clergyman was lectured on free 
 trade and mercantile immunities, it was signified to him, that if 
 he had studied Edmund Burke he would not make so unreason- 
 able an application. No doubt this Sir Randolph Routh is a 
 well-paid officer ; and, to do justice to that great political party 
 — called the Whigs — they are never wanting in striving, by the 
 most profuse patronage, to atone for their delinquencies to the 
 just requisitions of the people. 
 
 Should we complain of such a lavish expenditure of the public 
 money on multifarious bands of officers without employment, 
 such as professors without colleges, and engineers without public 
 works to employ them, no doubt this learned member of the 
 commissariat would tell us that our impatience of such a stafT of 
 pensioners proceeded from our ignorance of political economy, 
 and of the blessings of taxation. And no doubt he would re- 
 commend the same Edmund Burke as his authority, who gravely 
 tells us that those enormous pensions of which the people so 
 ignorantly complain, are like the exhalations that gradually 
 rise from the earth, and are seen floating in masses of vapour 
 through the atmosphere, until they descend in golden showers to 
 gladden and fertilize the land that gave them. I doubt whether 
 the shrewd commissary could reconcile his own countrymen to 
 starve, by parading those rhetorical blessings of enormous pen- 
 sions and grinding taxation. But I am sure that he never can 
 reconcile the people of Achil, or of any portion of Ireland, to the 
 unchristian doctrine that the lives of the people are to be sacri- 
 ficed, rather than interfere with the cruel speculations of mercan- 
 tile monopoly. If your lordship, and your commissary, have 
 been so tender of the interests of that class, it is high time to 
 take a wider view of the more important interests of the great 
 mass of the people. The merchants had sufficient time to realise 
 large fortunes wrung from their distress. There are among 
 them some few men of the most enlarged benevolence ; but it is 
 well ascertained that, with the instinct that guides the sea birds 
 to the wreck, mercantile men are in the habit of speculating on 
 public calamities. Allow me, then, respectfully to tell your lord- 
 ship that it is the duty of government promptly and vigorously 
 to interfere between their cupidity and the lives of the people. 
 Your lordship is not ignorant of what occurred at the late siege 
 of Antwerp, in consequence of not interfering with commercial 
 monopolies. Its merchants were selling ammunition to the 
 French whilst its walls were bombarded. They obtained a higher 
 price from the enemy than they could obtain from their own 
 
622 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 citizens ; and if the towers of Antwerp were demolished with its 
 own balls, and the people slain with their own ammunition, they 
 had no right, it seems, to complain, since it was done on the 
 principle of not interfering with free trade or political economy. 
 
 But it is sickening in any Christian country to pursue and to 
 refute, either with seriousness or with irony, such cruel and in- 
 sulting paradoxes. Let the people starve if you will, but let not 
 their understandings be mocked by such hollow subterfuges, 
 which can impose upon no one. The people are heartily tired of 
 the shuffling of the public functionaries, to whom the preservation 
 of their lives is entrusted. The legislature enacts measures for 
 relief ; after, several delays are interposed, the conditions are 
 complied with ; employment — specific employment — is promised 
 and guaranteed in the most solemn manner ; the clergy preach 
 patience until they see people dying around them ; and at length 
 some of the public officers hesitate not to acknowledge that their 
 object is delay, and to save the property too rashly taxed — thus 
 interposing between the legislature and the suffering people, and 
 sacrificing the latter to their ill-timed solicitude for subordinate 
 interests. 
 
 We value property, but we value the peace of the country 
 and the lives of the people more. Nay, the most efficient 
 guardians of property are those who are solicitious for pre- 
 serving the lives of the people. They are not ignorant of what 
 the instincts of nature suggest, and the axioms of jurists lay 
 down on the rights of property, when life is becoming the 
 victim of starvation. For the patience they evince, society is 
 indebted to the sacred influence of religion. Yes, it is to the 
 hallowed teaching of the Catholic clergy the peace of the country 
 is due. What is their requital ? The exhibition of a rancorous 
 bigotry, which has been infused into the composition of relief 
 committees from high quarters. The curates, forsooth, are not 
 persons of sufficient consideration to be put on relief committees ! 
 Yet more than once, when all the influence of armed men and 
 stipendary magistrates had failed, have those very curates been 
 selected and sent forth to calm the stormy masses of the people 
 rushing for food with all the rage of hunger, chafing with any 
 opposition to their terrible instincts — instincts which it would hav& 
 failed any other influence on earth to appease. I need say 
 nothing of the marked exclusion from the benefit of the public 
 works of those sacred edifices from which such humanizing 
 influences go forth. It is better that they should rise and be 
 sustained by the poor people themselves, and, like the priesthood 
 who officiate in them, stand aloof as sacred monuments, free from 
 the desecration with which an official anti-Catholic patronage 
 would be sure to soil them. It is fortunate for the country that 
 its priests and temples are in this state of holy independence. 
 
LETTER CXIV. 
 
 623 , 
 
 For should your infidel colleges ever flourish, or the promiscuous 
 education which you patronise bring forth its natural fruits, you 
 would find that lectures on the rights of property in extremis, 
 would scarcely be listened to with the grave snd qualifying com- 
 mentaries of the bench or the pulpit. 
 
 Your protracting to assemble the parliament can scarcely be 
 accounted for on any other supposition, than total ignorance of the 
 awful extent and intensity of the present famine. Every village 
 witnesses, and every day records instances of persons dying of 
 starvation. The tragic end of the young girl, only sixteen years 
 of age, which lately occurred, is but one of the many extraor- 
 dinary deaths with which, in all their frightful diversity, our ears 
 are made familiar. Prompted by the cravings of hunger, the 
 poor b creature tottered her weary way to a neighbouring mill ; 
 regardless of the wheels being at work, she incautiously stretched 
 her hand for a little meal. She was instantly caught, and torn 
 to pieces by the machinery ; and, more fatal than the drop of 
 honey was to Jonathan — she found death in the little meal with 
 which she sought to prolong her life. 
 
 Your lordship has now a great destiny to fulfil — the rescuing 
 an entire people from the jaws of famine ; for nothing less than 
 millions from the imperial exchequer can avert the doom that 
 hangs over the Irish nation. Be prepared, then, to advocate 
 such an enlarged measure ; or, since your humanity would shrink 
 from the spectacle of a nation perishing by famine — you will 
 doubtless retire from the helm which you may find yourself 
 unable to guide. Such a measure of relief from the imperial 
 exchequer will be indispensible, notwithstanding all the aid which 
 may be lent by the Irish landlords. Their apathy and listless- 
 ness, their want of counsel and concert at a moment which 
 requires their united energies, are not among the least melancholy 
 of the misbodings, which our awful condition forces on every 
 reflecting mind. It would seem as if there were no aristocracy 
 in the country, or as if the confusion of “ the great ones of Tanis” 
 were come upon them. They seem altogether unmanned, and 
 shorn of those national attributes with which some of their 
 ancestors were endued. Their property is shifting away from 
 under their feet, and they seem seized with an utter inability to 
 arrest the ruin. They are clamorous for reproductive works, in 
 order to be relieved of the labour rate. They talk much of 
 remunerative labour, but little of remunerative tenure, utterly 
 forgetful that it was the tenant’s want of permanent security to 
 enjoy in substantial food the fruit of their improvements, that 
 consigned our population, as if they were wandering tribes, to 
 such a precarious root as the potato, and that without a tenure 
 which will make the labour reproductive to both tenants and 
 landlords, no agricultural improvements, such as the crisis de- 
 
624 
 
 LETTER CXIV. 
 
 mands, will ever be achieved. Let the security of tenure, then, 
 and a fair remuneration for improvement, form an essential part 
 of any amendment of the labour act, and it will be seen what 
 a magical effect it will have in drawing away the people to the 
 seasonable cultivation of their % own little farms. The landlords 
 are continuing too long with their arms folded. They seem 
 unwilling to meet in Dublin, and take counsel of each other. 
 Perhaps they are apprehensive lest some mighty conjuror in the 
 assembly should scare them away by evoking the unwelcome 
 apparition of a Repeal of the Union. Such fears afford sufficient 
 evidence that they who entertain them, whilst they listlessly 
 look on the ruin of their property, are not the persons who 
 would bring much of wisdom to the deliberations of a national 
 legislature. 
 
 But whether they meet and aid you by their counsel, or 
 whether they remain aloof in their isolated helplessness, the 
 prime minister cannot be absolved from the high responsibility 
 of providing for the public weal. The period that is assigned for 
 the meeting of parliament may appear near to the children of 
 opulence, and amidst all the charms and solace of society it will 
 soon pass over. But it will be a dreary and a long period to the 
 perishing inhabitants of Ireland. Deep snow is at this moment 
 covering the earth, and even the miserable day’s hire, which 
 could not afford half a meal in the twenty-four hours to all the 
 members of a wretched family, is, in many instances, withdrawn. 
 I shudder at the consequences. It is too painful to contemplate. 
 Unless you adopt more enlarged measures than throwing the 
 relief of the people on the landlords, who, whatever be their sins, 
 should be corrected and reformed rather than annihilated, your 
 ministry will be memorable in Ireland ; and if you are ambitious 
 of a monument, the people’s bones, “ slain with the sword of the 
 famine,” and piled into cairns more numerous than the ancient 
 pyramids, shall tell posterity the ghastly triumphs of your brief 
 but disastrous administration. 
 
 John, Archbishop of Tuam. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Dublin Printed by William IIoldkn, 10, Abbey- street. 
 
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