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 OF mWATU 
 
 IN SIX LETTERS 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE 
 
 REV. NICHOLAS MURRAY, l). D, 
 
 Of EfcraABETHTOW.V, Jft 4, 
 
 HV :r' :/ r ; : " :-- ■ " 
 
 RIGHT REV, JOHN HUGHES, D. & 
 
 BISHOP OF NEW TORK- 
 
 
 THIRD EDITION* 
 
 NEW YORK:; 
 
 EDWARD DUNfGAN & BROTHER. 
 
 151 1? ETL TON-STREET* 
 
 MDCCCXtvm. 
 
 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates 
 
 https://archive.org/details/kirwanunmaskedreOOhugh 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 A REVIEW OE KIRWAN, 
 
 IN SIX LETTERS 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE 
 
 REV. NICHOLAS MURRAY, D. D. 
 
 OF ELIZABETHTOWN, N. J. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RIGHT REV. JOHN HUGHES, D. D. 
 
 BISHOP OF NEW YORK. 
 
 THIRD EDITION. 
 
 , NEW YORK: 
 
 EDWARD DUN 1GAN & BROTHER, 
 
 101 FULT 0 N - STRE ET. 
 
 MDCCCXLVIII. 
 
Hi 
 
 KIEWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 --- 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 So long as you wore a mask, which no hon¬ 
 est man need ever wear in a free country like 
 this, I was excused, on your own admission, 
 from any obligation to notice you. Now that 
 you have cast it aside, I feel no longer bound 
 j o adhere to my first resolution. 
 
 Your Letters purport to explain the reasons 
 ; ' why you left the Roman Catholic Church and 
 became a Presbyterian. The object of mine 
 will be to review those reasons. If I shall suc- 
 ceed in refuting them, and assigning others 
 . more in accordance with the facts of the case, 
 j I will not trouble myself with answering those 
 in your second series under the head of reasons 
 why you do not return. If the deserters from 
 the American flag in the Mexican campaign, 
 (among whom, I am sorry to say, were some 
 
 m 
 
 i 
 
 r o 
 VJ 
 
 i 
 
 © 
 
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 Vo 
 
 
4 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 Irishmen,) can justify themselves for having 
 fled from the ranks of their country, the world 
 will readily dispense with their reasons for not 
 returning.—The enemy, no doubt, received 
 them with that mingled feeling of joy at the 
 treason, and contempt for the traitor, which, on 
 the whole, is rather honorable than otherwise 
 in the character of human nature—whilst the 
 gallant army they had forsaken had the con¬ 
 solation to know that after their departure, it 
 contained in each case, at least one coward 
 less than before. But friends and foes would 
 take it as a matter of course that such persons 
 would have good reasons for not returning. 
 
 The Catholic Church, however, has a moth¬ 
 er’s heart, and not a warrior’s. If at any time, 
 moved by the grace of God, you should knock 
 at her gates, as a penitent, she would receive 
 you as such, and rejoice at your restoration. 
 Considering the importance which you attach 
 u vour going out from her communion, thirty 
 years ago, never, never, to return, you must 
 admit that she has borne your absence with 
 great resignation; in fact, amidst the numerous 
 defections from the faith which loneliness and 
 poverty entail on juvenile immigrants and or¬ 
 phan boys of Irish and Catholic parentage in 
 this country, an individual case like yours might 
 easily have escaped her notice. But you have 
 
% 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 5 
 
 taken from her the bliss of ignorance, in the 
 premises. “ Kirwan” tells her that you, Nicholas 
 Murray, now a Presbyterian clergyman, gave 
 her the cold shoulder, when you were quite a boy, 
 thirty years ago. Nay, more; he says that 
 one of the means employed by her for arresting 
 the progress of sin, was by you turned into an 
 opportunity of additional sinning ;—“ you al¬ 
 ways found,” he says, “ that you could play 
 your pranks better after confession than be¬ 
 fore.” . . . This inward reading of yourself, at 
 so early an age, should have convinced you 
 that already, and unknown to yourself, you 
 were a genuine Protestant book, done up, some 
 how, by mistake, in Catholic binding. 
 
 I honor the man who, under his responsibility 
 to God, has the moral courage to change his 
 religion, when, after mature investigation, he 
 conscientiously believes that he is passing from 
 error to truth. It is a great and solemn act. 
 When it is attended, as it sometimes is, by the 
 greatest sacrifice of worldly interest, and is 
 manifestly done for the soul’s, and God’s, and 
 Truth’s sake, it becomes, in my estimation, the 
 most heroic and sublime act that man is ca¬ 
 pable of performing on the earth. I do not 
 say that it is always insincere even when the 
 convert promotes his temporal interests by the 
 change. But, in the latter case, it loses much 
 
 1 * 
 
KIR WAN UNMASKED. 
 
 . 6 
 
 of the influence which, as an example, it 
 would otherwise exercise on the public mind. 
 Neither do I regard it as improper that he who 
 has experienced such a change, should assign 
 the reasons that brought it about. But in 
 assigning them, all serious men would expect 
 that they should be good and true reasons. 
 Now, I propose, in reply to your Letters, to 
 prove that the reasons assigned by you are not 
 good reasons in themselves, and that even if 
 they were, in the nature of things, they found 
 no place in the circumstances of your supposed 
 conversion from “Popery” to Presbyterianism. 
 
 Your Letters, so far as regards the grammat¬ 
 ical construction of phrases, and a correct and 
 almost elegant use of Anglo-Saxon words, are 
 not unworthy of the country which produced a 
 Dean Swift, or a Goldsmith. They are also 
 pervaded by a silvery thread of wit, which is 
 unmistakeably Irish, but which too often, in 
 your Letters, runs into profanity. As a Logi¬ 
 cian, you are entitled to little praise. As a 
 Theologian, even on the Protestant system, to 
 less still; whilst as an upright, candid adver¬ 
 sary, honestly laboring to overthrow doctrines 
 believed to be erroneous, you can lay claim to 
 none whatever. 
 
 Two things, at the outset, tell very badly 
 against you. You represent me as teaching a 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 7 
 
 doctrine which I do not believe, and yet, in 
 various unexpected forms, you profess to ren¬ 
 der me the homage of your respect. Now, dear 
 sir, let me say, that if you believe me to be a 
 deceiver of my fellow-Catholics, you cannot 
 have entertained any respect for my character, 
 unless your moral perceptions are too dim to 
 discover any difference between vice and vir¬ 
 tue. If you profess a respect, which you do 
 not feel, it is equally manifest that your stand¬ 
 ard of morals is artificial, subject to the control 
 of your will and your pen. In either case you 
 are inconsistent, and it is, perhaps, well for you 
 that you did not write your Letters under the 
 solemnity of an oath, in which case something 
 like perjury would come out on the cross-ex¬ 
 amination. 
 
 By what right, sir, did you assume that I am 
 not sincere in the profession of the Catholic 
 
 1 Faith ? And if you did assume it, by what 
 rule of hypocrisy and falsehood did you stultify 
 yourself by professing respect for my charac¬ 
 ter ? You could find the premises of such a 
 false and uncharitable conclusion only in your 
 heart, or mine. To mine you have had no ac¬ 
 cess, and you should have been cautious in pro¬ 
 claiming such discoveries as could have been 
 derived, only by analogy, from your own. 
 
 I believe the truth of the doctrines taught by 
 
8 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 the Holy Catholic Church as firmly as I do my 
 own existence. Nay, more. I believe that, 
 as containing the fulness of Divine revelation, 
 it is the only true Church on the earth—al¬ 
 though many true Catholic doctrines are found 
 floating about as opinions in the religious at¬ 
 mosphere of Protestantism. This is my pro¬ 
 fession of faith,, of the sincerity of which the 
 Almighty is my witness; and I am not aware 
 that I have ever given you, or any other human 
 being, reason to infer, by word or action, that 
 I believed otherwise. 
 
 I must decline, therefore, the tender of your 
 respect for my character. But I would not 
 have you on that account to regard me as an 
 enemy. On the contrary, I would be your 
 friend ; and the highest proof of this which you 
 have left it in my power to offer, is the sincere 
 declaration that, as a fellow-being, you have 
 my pity—and best washes withal. I shall be¬ 
 gin to analyze your reasons next week. 
 
 ■f* John Hughes, Bishop of New York. 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 9 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 The merit of your letters, if they have any 
 in the eyes of sincere Protestants, is in the 
 supposed fact that you were brought up and 
 instructed in the Catholic religion; and that 
 your testimony is more trustworthy, on this 
 account, than if you had been born and brought 
 up a Protestant. 
 
 This is, in fact, the ground which you have 
 taken. You speak of your self , of your know¬ 
 ledge and experience of the Catholic religion, 
 of your reasons for renouncing it, from the 
 beginning to the end of your letters. You 
 are the witness in the cause; you are the 
 hero of the romance; and it will be impossible 
 for me to do justice to the review, without 
 paying attention to the prominent personality 
 which you have established for yourself, in as¬ 
 signing the reasons of your conversion. 
 
10 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 The first position which I intend to estab¬ 
 lish then, is, that Ireland never produced a 
 peasant more ignorant of the Catholic, or of 
 the Protestant religion, than you were when 
 you renounced the creed of your fathers and 
 became an infidel. For the proof of this posi¬ 
 tion you shall be my witness. Turn to your 
 first letter and read your own words: 
 
 “ I first became an infidel. Knowing nothing 
 of religion but that which was taught me by 
 parents and priests, and thinking that that was 
 the sum of it, when that was rejected infidelity 
 became my only alternative/’—p. 11. 
 
 “ On reaching the years of maturity my 
 mind was a perfect blank as to all religious in¬ 
 struction.”—p. 30. 
 
 “ With my Missal I was somewhat familiar; 
 I said the catechism when I was confirmed, at 
 the age of nine or ten, and that was the amount 
 of my religious education. At the age of 
 eighteen years the catechism was forgotten, 
 and the Missal was neglected, and as my con¬ 
 science was uneducated, and my mind unfur¬ 
 nished with religious principles, the only test 
 of truth left me was my common sense.”— 
 p. 31. 
 
 This was precisely the age at which you left 
 the Church and became an infidel. Your 
 “ mind was a perfect blank as to all religious 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 11 
 
 instruction.” In other words, you were per¬ 
 fectly ignorant of the religion which you were 
 about to reject, and, if we can trust to your 
 own language, this ignorance was the only 
 reason going before and determining your con¬ 
 version to infidelity. 
 
 The reader may suppose that in proclaiming 
 your profound ignorance of religion, your 
 meaning is, that you understood the Catholic 
 faith, in which you were brought up, but that 
 you were as yet ignorant of the pure evangeli¬ 
 cal doctrines which you have since embraced. 
 But this would be a mistake. Your meaning is, 
 that you were entirely ignorant of the Catholic 
 religion, as well as of all others. For this also 
 we have your own testimony, in the following 
 words: 
 
 “ Some book or tract, now forgotten, gave 
 rise to some inquiries as to the Mass. I asked, 
 What does it mean ? I could not tell, though 
 for years a regular attendant upon it. Why 
 does the priest dress so ? What book does he 
 read from, when carried now to his right, and 
 now to his left ? What means those candles 
 burning at noonday ? Why do I say prayers 
 in Latin, which I understand not ? Should I 
 not know what I am saying when addressing 
 my Maker ? Why bow down and strike my 
 breast when the little bell rings ? What does 
 
12 
 
 KIR WAN UNMARKED. 
 
 it all mean? The darkness of Egypt rested 
 upon these questions —p. 33. 
 
 Never did man forsake one religion and join 
 another, who had contrived to be so profound¬ 
 ly ignorant of the forsaken creed as you, Nich¬ 
 olas Murray, prove yourself to have been, in 
 regard to Catholicity, when you renounced it 
 and became an infidel. Whatever you know 
 of it now, true or false, you have learned as 
 other Protestants do, outside of the Church 
 and from her enemies. 
 
 It is imputed to our countrymen that they 
 act first, and refect afterwards. I am sorry, 
 sir, that your conduct, when you renounced 
 the creed of your humble, but, I have no doubt, 
 virtuous and respectable parents, goes so far to 
 justify the imputation. It is certain, on your 
 own testimony, that when you ceased to be a 
 Catholic and became an infidel, the Catholic 
 religion might be true, or might be false, for all 
 you knew about it. It is equally certain that 
 when , in 1847, you published a series of smart, 
 if not learned, reasons for your conduct thirty 
 years ago, you have been again acting more 
 Hibernico —and sorry am I that during so 
 long a period, with the advantages of American 
 and Presbyterian training, you have not yet 
 outgrown the national weakness. But, sir, 
 no genuine Irishman would attempt to jus- 
 
Kill WAN UNMASKED. 
 
 13 
 
 tify his act by reasons which, in the order of 
 time, occur to his mind thirty years after the 
 act had been performed—as you have done. 
 A genuine Irishman would consent to be 
 
 O 
 
 laughed at, and would join in the laugh with 
 right good humor, rather than attempt the 
 trick of reversing the wheel of time, and as¬ 
 signing the reasons of 1847 as the motives of 
 his conduct in 1820. 
 
 The chronology of the events which make 
 up a case is oftentimes very important. Pre¬ 
 vious to your conversion you knew nothing 
 of the Catholic—nothing of the Protestant— 
 religion. The reasons assigned in your recent 
 Letters, may or may not be good reasons, but 
 whether good or bad, they had nothing to do 
 with your change of religion. You blundered 
 out of the Church and into infidelity, without 
 knowing why or wherefore—and your reasons 
 are all out of date. They might be styled 
 with great propriety, “ An Irishman’s Motives 
 for becoming a Protestant, arranged according 
 to the order imputed to his Countrymen, that 
 of acting first, and reflecting afterwards.” 
 
 You may blame your priests or your pa¬ 
 rents, as you please, for the peculiar absence 
 of religious knowledge which preceded your 
 conversion. But the fact of your profound 
 ignorance of all religion, at the period of your 
 
 2 
 
14 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 change, is the material point , and you have 
 been candid enough to establish that point be¬ 
 yond all dispute. 
 
 You seem to be troubled with a peculiar 
 weakness of memory—and this is a great mis¬ 
 fortune in a Christian man who writes for the 
 edification of the public. After what we have 
 just seen of your mental condition at the pe¬ 
 riod of your apostacy from the Church, into 
 what an awkward exhibition of yourself does 
 this short memory betray you at the end of 
 your first Letter, where you profess “to state 
 in a series of Letters to my Right Reverence 
 the reasons which induced you to leave the 
 Roman Catholic Church, and which prevent 
 you from returning to it.”—(page 11.) Now, 
 dear “ Kirwan,” we are told in logic, that, of 
 two propositions which mutually contradict 
 each other, one must be false. If your mind 
 was “ a perfect blank as to all religious instruc¬ 
 tion,” as you assure us it was, (page 30,) how 
 could you have had “reasons that induced 
 you to leave the Church?”—(page 11.) Have 
 you forgotten in the one page, what you had 
 affirmed in the other ? Now, however, that I 
 have called your recollection to the mistake, 
 pray be serious, and tell the public which of 
 these contradictory statements you would 
 have it to believe. Why, sir, your own great 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 15 
 
 stand-by, “common sense/' revolts at the in¬ 
 sult of religious “ reasons" offered from a mind 
 which, as to religious instruction, is a “ perfect 
 olank!!” 
 
 Some persons may think that you are quiz¬ 
 zing the public. I think not. Your memory 
 appears to have been but poor from your 
 childhood. And here allow me to pluck up a 
 nettle which you would have planted on the 
 graves of “ your parents and priests." Thanks 
 to their charitable efforts for your instruction 
 in the Christian doctrine, you “knew your 
 Catechism by heart, at the age of nine or ten 
 years, when you were confirmed."—(page 31.) 
 Now I would call this a good, almost an ex¬ 
 traordinary memory in a child of ten years. 
 It had taken in and retained the waters of 
 Christian knowledge which overspread the 
 pages of the entire Catechism which you knew 
 by heart. This was no trifle. But the first 
 subsequent evidence of its failure is the fact 
 that you have forgotten to tell us of the sad 
 catastrophe by which it became a cracked and 
 leaky cistern immediately after confirmation; 
 so that the “catechism itself was forgotten" 
 when you arrived at the jumping-off period 
 of eighteen years.—(Ibid.) Pray, might I ask, 
 whether it was this, your precocious talent of 
 forgetfulness which caused you to be “ even 
 
16 
 
 IvIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 talked of as a candidate for Maynooth ?”— 
 (page 31.) 
 
 But after all, dear sir, this memory of yours 
 puzzles me amazingly. I turn to page 98, 
 where having given me up, you address the 
 Irish Catholic Laity in such tones of winning 
 tenderness, that Blarney Castle never tipped 
 the human tongue with sweeter. “ Your pres¬ 
 ent feelings, as to your Church, I have had, 
 and in all their force. I can entirely appre¬ 
 ciate them. I have cordially hated Protestant¬ 
 ism and Protestants; and I have seen the 
 time when I regarded the man as my personal 
 enemy who would, utter a word against my 
 religion. But those w T ere the days of my 
 youth and of my ignorance. When I became 
 a man I put away childish things.”—(page 98.) 
 Why, this is queer. You had forgotten at 
 eighteen what the Church had taught you; 
 
 your ha¬ 
 tred, of Protestants, which she never taught 
 you at all! You remember that when you 
 became a man, you “ put away childish things” 
 and “became also an infidel.” Yet you forget 
 that you had told us before, that when you 
 became a man, there were no “ childish things” 
 left to be put away—that they had already 
 sloped from your memory—that at the early 
 age of eighteen you had “forgotten them,” 
 
 and you remember at nine-and-forty 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 17 
 
 and that, as to religious instruction, your mind 
 was a “perfect blank !!” 
 
 It is not my business to reconcile these flat, 
 palpable contradictions. I have established, 
 from your own repeated avowal, your utter 
 and profound ignorance of the Catholic reli¬ 
 gion, when you left the Church, and became an 
 infidel. You never came back to finish, or 
 rather to begin your Catholic education. Like 
 one of the winged messengers let loose from 
 the hand of the Patriarch, you found more 
 congenial sustenance abroad, and you returned 
 to the Ark no more. In all this you may 
 have been sincere, and if you were, in nothing 
 of this do I blame you. But I do blame you 
 for assuming a character which does not belong 
 to you. 
 
 When a man changes his religion he ought 
 to be serious and sincere. When he does it 
 with that direct reference to his account at 
 the bar of God’s eternal judgment, which leaves 
 no doubt as to the sincerity of his motive, then, 
 as I have said once before, I regard it as the 
 grandest and most truly heroic act of which a 
 rational being is capable on this earth. To 
 assign the motives for such an act is equally 
 fair and honorable. But, sir, I can conceive of 
 nothing more disgusting to an upright mind, 
 than to discover what is vulgarly, but very ex- 
 
 2 * 
 
18 
 
 lL.>* /VAN UNMASKED. 
 
 pressively called “ humbug” mixed up in the 
 assignment of such motives. This foul admix¬ 
 ture is what I charge upon your recent Letters, 
 and what I blame. 
 
 The American public are generous, and 
 credulous also, towards those who profess to 
 write for their amusement or instruction. Be¬ 
 ing chiefly Protestants, little acquainted with 
 the religion which you have forsaken and de¬ 
 nounced, they would be—they have been— 
 particularly generous and credulous towards 
 you. As an Irishman, it was unworthy of you 
 to take unfair advantage of these noble senti¬ 
 ments. 
 
 It is true, that if they read your pages with 
 a cold, impartial criticism, they would see 
 enough to put them on their guard. But your 
 profound ignorance of the Catholic doctrine, 
 when you became an infidel, which you assert 
 and repeat, usque ad nauseam , they will con¬ 
 strue, like yourself, as the reproach of your 
 parents and priests. On the other hand, your 
 introduction of yourself as one brought up in 
 the “ camp of the enemy,” was obviously in¬ 
 tended to deceive them. Here is your bow to 
 the public. “ I was baptized by a priest—I 
 was confirmed by a bishop—I often went to 
 confession—I have worn my amulets—and I 
 have said my Pater Nosters and my Hail 
 
Kilt WAN UNMASKED. 
 
 19 
 
 Marys, more times than I can now enume¬ 
 rate.”—(page 10.) 
 
 Now, this announcement of your competen¬ 
 cy to treat the subject, is sufficiently brief, and 
 sufficiently stupid.—Barring the “ amulets,” 
 Voltaire could have said the same of himself. 
 But ninety-nine out of every hundred of your 
 American readers would say on perusing this 
 —“ There, there, at length, is a man who 
 knows Popery from within, from personal 
 knowledge —a man who, with the modesty of 
 true genius, merely insinuates the extent of 
 his information, and thus avoids egotism and 
 the offensive display of his gifts.” 
 
 Such feelings on the part of the American 
 public ought not to be trifled with by you. Of 
 your own knowledge of Popery, as you call it, 
 you know nothing—and you have avowed it. 
 Then you are no more competent to speak or 
 write of it, than Dr. Brownlee was. What 
 you know of it, true or false, you, like him, 
 have learned from its enemies. But there is a 
 difference. Dr. Brownlee never had the chance 
 to learn and then forget the Catholic catechism 
 before the age of eighteen. 
 
 Let the public, then, understand that you 
 are to take rank among those anti-Catholic 
 writers, who draw from such fountains as that 
 mammoth reservoir—“McGavin’s Protestant.” 
 
20 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 Anti-Catholic retailers like you may take from 
 that source theological lore to any extent, and 
 deal it out to those who have a relish for it. 
 It would seem that such persons are still nu¬ 
 merous enough to make the nineteenth centu¬ 
 ry ashamed of itself, if it were the age of light 
 which it professes to be. 
 
 In this Letter I have proved, on your own 
 testimony, that you were utterly ignorant of 
 Catholic doctrine when you left the Church 
 and became an infidel. In my next I shall 
 have the more pleasing task of tracing your 
 progress out of infidelity and into Presbyteri¬ 
 anism, which was a decided improvement in 
 your spiritual, and possibly in your temporal 
 condition. Meanwhile, I feel the same pity 
 and benevolence towards you as before. * 
 
 John Hughes, Bishop of New York. 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 21 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 You tell us that “ ignorance is the parent 
 of papal devotion;” (second series, page 86.) 
 How was it, then, that ignorance produced so 
 contrary an effect upon you? You appear to 
 have been rather a good boy, when you said 
 your catechism, at nine or ten years of age. 
 But at eighteen, your mind was a “ perfect 
 blank as to ail religious instruction.” Could 
 ignorance be greater than this ? How is it, 
 then, that instead of the Catholic saint, which 
 your rule of “papal devotion” should have led 
 us to expect, we find you at that period of your 
 life, as you have taken pains to tell us, “ an in¬ 
 fidel?” It seems that from ten to eighteen 
 years, as your “ignorance” grew more, your 
 “devotion” grew less —proving that, at least 
 in your case, “ ignorance is not the parent of 
 papal devotion,”' but rather of infidelity. 
 
 I insist, as you perceive, on determining the 
 
22 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 state of your intellect at the period of your 
 fall from the faith. Your subsequent acquire¬ 
 ment of knowledge and education, I have no 
 wish to question or deny. But the public will 
 be naturally interested in ascertaining the con¬ 
 dition of your mind, at the critical period, for 
 you, when you rejected the Catholic Church, 
 and embraced infidelity. A life so important 
 to the philosophical and theological world as 
 yours, requires to be divided into distinct and 
 successive epochs, and to have each of its pe¬ 
 riods considered separately from the others, if 
 one would do justice to the whole. 
 
 First, then, we must leave out the Fresbyte- 
 rian education, which you have acquired since 
 you became an infidel, at the age of eighteen. 
 Secondly, we must leave out the education of 
 the Catholic catechism, which you had forgot¬ 
 ten. Thirdly, we must leave out any know¬ 
 ledge which you might have derived from Cath¬ 
 olic devotions, for you tell us that you said your 
 prayers “ in Latin, which you did not under¬ 
 stand,”—(page 33.) Fourthly, we must leave 
 out all instruction by hearing, for you tell us 
 “ you never heard a sermon preached in a 
 Catholic chapel in Ireland ; nor a word of ex¬ 
 planation on a single Christian topic, or doc¬ 
 trine, or duty ,”—(page 29.) Now according 
 to your own statement this was the condition 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 23 
 
 of your mind when you left the Catholic Church: 
 —and I doubt whether Christendom could fur¬ 
 nish one other instance of such mental nudity 
 —such utter destitution of all Christian know¬ 
 ledge. 
 
 And now, forsooth, your “Reasons'’ for 
 leaving the Church! What reasons ? The 
 existence of reasons in such a mind, on such 
 a subject, was a metaphysical impossibility. 
 Reasons necessarily imply comparison ; com¬ 
 parison necessarily supposes knowledge of the 
 things compared ; but in your case, as we take 
 it from your own pen, there was no knowledge 
 of the things to be compared, and therefore 
 there could be no comparison; and therefore 
 no reasons,—that is, no reasons for a mind in 
 the condition of yours, as you have described it. 
 
 But you had, you say, “Common sense.” 
 I doubt it. “ Common sense” is by no means 
 so common as you seem to imagine. If you 
 take the term to signify the general opinion of 
 the age and country you lived in at the time, 
 it is evident that your renouncing Catholicity, 
 and becoming an infidel, was not, and could 
 not be called, an exercise of “common sense.” 
 If, on the other hand, you mean that intrin¬ 
 sic faculty of the human mind, by which a 
 man decides mentally according to the evi¬ 
 dences of the case, it is eoually clear in your 
 
24 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 case,,that common sense had no evidences to 
 act upon ; and although I do not deny its 
 existence in the abstract, yet its agency could 
 have had nothing to do with your real or im¬ 
 aginary conversion. Tell an African beneath 
 the tropics about ice , of what avail will his 
 “ common sense” be to him in determining the 
 truth or error of your statement ? 
 
 But supposing he admits the existence of 
 ice, will his “ common sense” enable him to 
 determine any of its properties ? Not at all. 
 His “ common sense” is just as likely to de¬ 
 cide that ice will burn, as that it will chill, the 
 hand, or other part of the body to which it 
 might be applied. Now your case and his 
 are equal illustrations of “common sense,” in 
 the absence of the elements from which its 
 office is inseparable, namely, knowledge of the 
 things to which it is applied. For you, reli¬ 
 gious knowledge, at the period of your change, 
 consisted of two parts ; the one Presbyterian 
 or Protestant, which you had yet to learn 
 the other Catholic, which you had forgotten, 
 or had never known. In the absence of both 
 these divisions of religious knowledge, were 
 you not much in the condition of the African, 
 deciding on the properties of ice, by the stand¬ 
 ard of “ common sense ?” 
 
 I think, sir, that you will admit this reason- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 25 
 
 ing to be conclusive. The premises are your 
 own, the conclusions are logically and fairly 
 deduced. And if so, then it follows that, at 
 the time of your pretended conversion, you 
 had not and could not have had any reasons 
 for your change of religion. And if so, it fol¬ 
 lows again, that in assigning those mentioned 
 in your Letters as inducing you to make the 
 change, you have been imposing on the good 
 faith of your fellow-beings, and exhibiting a 
 want of that regard for truth which would be 
 so becoming in a minister of religion, and es¬ 
 pecially one who professes so high a respect 
 for “ common sense,” and so intimate an ac¬ 
 quaintance with his “ unfettered Bible.” Does 
 the Bible warrant such statements as the fol¬ 
 lowing ? 
 
 You tell us how the priest used to question 
 you in confession, and how you used to an¬ 
 swer him, (page 20.) You complain that he 
 did “not speak to you in English,” but “in 
 Latin,” (same page.) You tell us a few min¬ 
 utes after that you “did not understand Latin,” 
 (page 33.) Now the difficulty is, how could 
 you answer questions in a language which you. 
 did not understand ? It seems that when you 
 went to confession something like the wonders 
 of Pentecost took place between you and the 
 priest. He spoke to you in an unknown 
 
 3 
 
26 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 tongue, and you answered him with the utmost 
 ease, although you did not understand the lan¬ 
 guage in which he addressed you ! ! There is 
 nothing more miraculous on record than this, 
 if what you say were true. But it is not true. 
 The priest spoke to you in English; you an¬ 
 swered him in English. Why then do you 
 “ bear false witness against” the priest, charg¬ 
 ing him with having spoken to you “ in Latin,” 
 which “ you did not understand ?” Does Pres¬ 
 byterianism require such services as this, at 
 your hands ? In former times you found “ that 
 you could play your pranks better after con¬ 
 fession than before —but after thirty years 
 of reading the Bible, might not one expect that 
 you would give up ‘‘ playing your pranks” al¬ 
 together ? 
 
 We have already seen that when you left 
 the Catholic Church your mind was, in your 
 own words, a “ perfect blank as to all religious 
 instruction.” The reader will be curious to 
 learn when and how you procured the neces¬ 
 sary outfit to cover the mental nudity in which 
 you forsook us, and to appear before t^ie public 
 (as you have appeared in your recent Letters) 
 decked off in the secondhand raiment of Cath¬ 
 olic Theology. . This is a natural and not un¬ 
 reasonable curiosity; and considering how 
 much your Letters are in the style of Auto- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 27 
 
 biography, I am surprised you did not account 
 for your Protestant knowledge as well as your 
 Catholic ignorance. Let me supply the omis¬ 
 sion as briefly as possible. 
 
 It seems that like other spars of Irish ship¬ 
 wreck you drifted to these shores at an early 
 age. You had the good or the bad fortune to 
 be picked up by Presbyterian patrons. You 
 were a stranger and they took you in. Wheth¬ 
 er they were gifted or not with that “ second 
 sight” peculiar to the children of the clouds , in 
 North Britain, it does great credit to their 
 penetration to have discovered in you (under 
 all the disadvantages of that ignorance and 
 infidelity to which you have so often directed 
 our attention) what poetry has called, 
 
 A gem of purest ray serene. 
 
 L T nder the influence of this benevolent anti¬ 
 cipation, they sent you to college. As your 
 mind was a “ perfect blank,” of course you had 
 nothing to unlearn. There was no popish 
 rubbish left from the ruins of the former edi¬ 
 fice. The foundations were unobstructed and 
 clear, and the new architects had only to pro¬ 
 ceed with their work and build you up ac¬ 
 cording to the approved rules of Presbyterian 
 “ constructiveness.” They did so build you 
 up, accordingly. And now, you are what you 
 are. 
 
28 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 In assigning reasons why you left the Cath¬ 
 olic Church and now cannot return, I am sur¬ 
 prised you have omitted all this. To most 
 Catholics, and indeed to many Protestants, this 
 reason alone would be quite sufficient to ac¬ 
 count for it all. 
 
 And yet, there is nothing in the poverty 
 which caused you to fall into such hands, of 
 which it would not be great weakness, on your 
 part, to be in the least ashamed. If circum¬ 
 stances had not placed you in a false position, 
 I think you would feel proud of the poverty 
 which you inherited from your Irish parents; 
 for it is the most incontestable evidence that 
 your Catholic ancestors were “ true men,” in 
 their generation. If they had been unprinci¬ 
 pled hypocrites, capable of betraying their 
 conscience and their God, at almost any period 
 within the last three hundred years, they might 
 have renounced their religion, and pocketed 
 the bribe which the Gospel, as “ by law estab¬ 
 lished,'’ had set apart as the recompense of 
 apostacy from the Catholic faith. But they 
 did not. They supposed that their posterity 
 would be worthy of them;—they supposed 
 that one Esau, selling his birthright for a mess 
 of pottage, was enough in the history of our 
 race; they submitted to be plundered of their 
 earthly goods ; they submitted to be deprived 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 29 
 
 of education ; the cruel edict of ignorance thus 
 enacted against them, was a Protestant edict; 
 they submitted to its penalties ; but, on the 
 other hand, they asserted the right and supe¬ 
 riority of glorious principle over base and 
 mercenary interest; they proved that the ma¬ 
 terial tyrant cannot vanquish the immaterial 
 and immortal mind ; they bore and defied his 
 torture, while they writhed under it; they 
 spurned and repelled his offered bribe of apos- 
 tacy, whilst to human view it was the only 
 alternative between them and ignorance, pov¬ 
 erty, starvation, and death. But they wel¬ 
 comed all sooner than betray principle or vio¬ 
 late conscience. 
 
 O, sir, they were glorious men and true, our 
 Irish Catholic ancestors ; I am prouder of them, 
 so far as I am concerned, than if at the sacri¬ 
 fice of truth, or honor, or principle, they had 
 bequeathed to me the titles and wealth of the 
 Beresfords. Nor can I believe that you, in 
 your heart, entertain any other sentiments in 
 their regard. You, like myself, have borne the 
 penalty of their constancy to truth and con¬ 
 science ; and in your pulpit in Elizabethtown, 
 in your most fervid and eloquent appeals to 
 your Presbyterian audience, if a recollection of 
 your heroic and invincible Catholic forefathers 
 should, perchance, flash across your memory, 
 
30 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 you will feel proud of them , and ashamed of 
 yourself. “ How came you there ?” If I held 
 you capable of other sentiments I should be 
 uttering a libel on the Irish heart in particular, 
 and on human nature in general. 
 
 Sir, I think you made a great mistake in 
 publishing your Letters anonymously; espe¬ 
 cially when you took the unmanly and unwar¬ 
 rantable liberty of blazoning forth my name in 
 connection with them, whilst you concealed 
 your own. But having done this, you have 
 made another great mistake in allowing the soft, 
 warm breath of thoughtless flattery to melt so 
 prematurely the waxen ties of your mask. 
 Your Letters have been compared to those of 
 Junius, but you have not imitated your model 
 successfully, in the important affair of keeping 
 your own secret. You have made another 
 mistake still, in weaving in your own biography, 
 your own personality , as the woof of your 
 polemical web. Another mistake still you have 
 made, in bringing in your parents to embellish 
 your pages. It would be wrong for you, I 
 suppose, in your new light, to pray for the soul 
 of your deceased father; but you might have 
 written a very clever book against popery 
 without invading his grave or disturbing his 
 ashes at all. The same may be said in gen¬ 
 eral of those little stories with which your first 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 31 
 
 Letters are adorned, about “ yourself/’ and your 
 “ house,” and your “ hall,” and the “ dark room 
 up stairs,” and the “ drunken priest” to whom 
 you ministered brandy, &c. &c. These “awful 
 disclosures” would do very well in the pages of 
 Maria Monk, Miss Partridge, or some of the 
 other vestals of their class, of whom the Cath¬ 
 olic Church is not worthy. Even in the wri¬ 
 tings of Monk Leahy, I do not say they would 
 be out of place. 
 
 But in the production of a scholar and a 
 gentleman like you, I am sorry to see them. 
 They have a kind of mean , “ tell-tale” appear¬ 
 ance—they are a betrayal of former friends and 
 associates, which, to my mind at least, indi¬ 
 cates the absence of manly, generous feeling, 
 as well as of elevated taste. But as you have 
 thought otherwise, I must review them some¬ 
 what at length in my next letter. Meantime 
 I remain with pity and good wishes as usual. 
 
 John Hughes, Bishop of New York, 
 
32 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 I think it has been clearly proved in my last 
 letter, and from evidences the more indisputa¬ 
 ble, as they are furnished by your own pen, 
 that you had no reason, either intellectual or 
 moral, for leaving the Catholic Church.—The 
 only reason, deduced by inference from what 
 you have written of yourself, will be found in 
 a thick, dark cloud of ignorance and infidelity, 
 such as, I trust in God, never enveloped the 
 mind of any other Irish Catholic peasant at the 
 age of eighteen, either since or before. 
 
 Yet, sir, I do not believe that your ignorance 
 of the Catholic religion, when you left it, was 
 so unmitigated as you pretend. It will be very 
 difficult for you, however, either to retract or 
 explain, in your real character, what you have 
 published of yourself under the duplicity of your 
 mask. 
 
 I know not what intoxicating influence flat- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 33 
 
 tery and self-complacency may have produced 
 on a mind and memory like yours. But I do 
 know that whoever writes under a mask, and 
 in a character even partially feigned, and es¬ 
 pecially if he writes on any grave subject, in 
 which mankind take a deep interest, does so 
 at the imminent peril of his own reputation. 
 He is nearly certain to be found out. And 
 when this happens, his attempts to reconcile 
 the discrepancies between his assumed and 
 his real character are sure to produce, in the 
 public mind, a feeling of ridicule not unmingled 
 with a feeling of contempt. 
 
 In the introductory note prefixed to your 
 letters I learn that they were furnished to 
 Samuel I. Prime, “under the injunction of 
 secrecy as to the author’s name.” If you lived 
 in Spain or Sicily, there might be some reason 
 for this unnecessary precaution. But if your 
 purpose was to tell “ the truth,” even “ the whole 
 truth,” and “ nothing but the truth,” in your 
 testimony for Presbyterianism or against Cath¬ 
 olicity, what motive could you have had in this 
 free country for this studious concealment of 
 your name ? Here the press is free, and writing 
 against Popery is even at a premium. Why 
 then, as an honest man, conceal your name ? 
 This looks badly. Mr. Prime, indeed, loaned 
 you his endorsement , whatever that may be 
 
34 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 worth. He introduces you to the public vouch’ 
 ing for your veracity in these words: “ . . . / It 
 is proper to say that the writer’s character is 
 an abundant guarantee for the fidelity of all 
 matters of fact here stated, and that he is pre¬ 
 pared to maintain them, if they should be called 
 in question.” Now, sir, there are some things 
 which you state as matters of fact, which I beg 
 leave most emphatically to call in question. I 
 hope you may be able to maintain them, or if 
 not, I hope Mr. Prime will be willing to forfeit 
 his recognizances. 
 
 I. You state, as a matter of fact, that nearly 
 at the age of manhood, “ on as full an exami¬ 
 nation of the subject as you could give it, you 
 came to the conclusion that you could not re¬ 
 main a Roman Catholic” —p. 12. Now, sir, 
 I refer to your own testimony, quoted in my 
 last letter, as proof that your mind “ was a per¬ 
 fect blank as to all religious instruction,” and 
 I insist that therefore you did not give the 
 Catholic religion as full an examination as you 
 could, for you could, at least, have revived in 
 yourself the knowledge of “ the Catechism” 
 which “ you had forgotten.” 
 
 II. You state, as a matter of fact, that “ in 
 one of the large interior towns of Ireland, 
 .... you resided in a house, and over the 
 store in which you ivere then a clerk.” —p. 13. 
 
Kin WAN UNMASKEr. 
 
 35 
 
 You then proceed to tell us about a drunken 
 priest, Father B., whom you helped out of the 
 gutter, and wind up the whole narrative with 
 the remark “ and young as I was.” This 
 phrase, in ordinary language, would refer to a 
 period as far back as memory goes—a period 
 in which reason was but in the dawn of its de¬ 
 velopment—say 8, 9, or 10 years of age; but 
 at that period, if we can believe you, you were 
 already a “ clerk in a store !” Pray, dear Kir- 
 wan, what kind of a clerk were you ? “ Young 
 as you were,” by your Qjwn account, you were 
 able “ to shut the store windows at night”— 
 you were able “ to help a man out of the gut¬ 
 ter”—you were able to “ clean off his Reve¬ 
 rence”—you were able to “ give him his brandy 
 next morning,”' and yet you were just in the 
 period of dawning reason and earliest memory, 
 in which you tell us that “ young as you were,” 
 all this made an impression on you. The cir¬ 
 cumstantial part of the story is still more won¬ 
 derful than the leading facts. For instance, 
 you could not see the man in the gutter, and 
 you were “ attracted towards him by a singular 
 noise.” Pray what kind of a noise is a singu¬ 
 lar noise ? And then, the night was so dark 
 that had it not been for the singular noise he 
 might have perished. But on the other hand, 
 it was light enough to recognise “ Father B., 
 
36 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 the miracle worker.” And instead of helping E 
 the poor man, as a decent “ clerk in the store E 
 should have done, you ran in blabbing to the lady jfl 
 of the house, that Father B. was drunk in the 1 
 street. And the “ lady of the house” gave the j 
 “ clerk in the store” “ a stunning slap on the 
 side of the face,” and “ the clerk in the store” 
 
 “ staggered under the blow, and then turned 
 found in the best nature in the world to assist I 
 in cleaning off his reverence.” Next morning 
 you “ gave him his brandy, and young as 
 the clerk in the store ^vas, all this made an im¬ 
 pression upon him. Sir, if the dullest lawyei 
 in the country had you under cross-examina¬ 
 tion on this subject, he could not fail to con¬ 
 vulse the gravity of the bench with irrepressi¬ 
 ble laughter. Observe, I do not raise any 
 question as to whether the priest was drunk or 
 not; I let that pass. I have myself seen 
 among the convicts of the penitentiary, indi¬ 
 viduals pointed out as having once been respec¬ 
 table Presbyterian ministers, and who were 
 there for crimes even more heinous than drunk¬ 
 enness. But no man of right feelings would 
 pretend to justify an opposite religion, or to 
 condemn theirs, on account of their crimes 
 and misfortunes. I beg leave, then, to call in 
 question the facts which you state in your 
 circumstantial evidence in this case. And I 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 37 
 
 direct your attention particularly to the con¬ 
 tradiction implied by the fact that you were a 
 child at the same time that you were “ a clerk 
 in the store.” 
 
 III. You state as a fact that, on your father’s 
 demise, your mother paid the priest money 
 enough to have his soul prayed for by name, 
 on every Sunday for two or three years. That, 
 when the money was expended, his name was 
 given out no more. That, when she inquired 
 the cause of this, the priest told her, that “ your 
 father s soul was still in Purgatory , but that 
 she had forgotten to send in the yearly tax at 
 the time it was d,ue .”—(p. 14.) You add, that 
 with this fact in particular, you are entirely 
 conversant. 
 
 Now, sir, I question this “fact.” I deny this 
 “fact.” I pronounce it to be & fabrication 
 and not a fact. And if the courtesy of lan¬ 
 guage authorized it, I should feel bound to 
 designate it by a still harsher word. No priest 
 would ever dare to decide when, or whether 
 any soul was released from Purgatory. No 
 Irish mother, or wife, or widow, would ever 
 speak to a priest in the manner in which you 
 describe your mother as having spoken to him. 
 It is true she had not, like her son, the benefit 
 of a Presbyterian education. She bore the 
 penalty of her ancestors, and her creed. But 
 
 4 
 
38 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 she knew the principles of the Catholic faith 
 better than you do; and your superior general 
 information does not authorize you to envelop 
 her in this gross imputation of ignorance as to 
 her faith. I am willing to go to any reasonable 
 expense to prove this a fabrication, if either 
 you or Mr. Prime have the courage to meet me, 
 in a formal investigation. 
 
 IV. You state that “Father M. held fre¬ 
 quently his confessions at your house.” “ That 
 he sat in a dark room up stairs with one or more 
 candles on a table before him.” That “ those 
 going to confession followed each other on their 
 knees from the front door, through the hall, up 
 the stairs, and to the door of the room.” —(p. 
 19.) 
 
 Now, sir, your house is likely to become as 
 well known as Shakspeare’s. A relative of 
 yours has taken the pains to describe it, in a 
 late number of the Freeman’s Journal. Ac¬ 
 cording to him, it would be a building in the 
 primitive style of Irish architecture. The same, 
 very likely, which prevailed when the round 
 towers were constructed. Up stairs would be 
 up a ladder to what is called a loft. And if 
 Father M. heard confessions there, I can see 
 the great propriety of one or more candles on 
 the table. For according to the primitive ar¬ 
 chitecture of Ireland, light was received into 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 39 
 
 the dwellings, either horizontally, by the door, 
 or vertically by the chimney. The former was 
 made for the purpose of ingress and egress, and 
 the latter for the double purpose of always let¬ 
 ting the smoke out , and sometimes letting the 
 day in. If then, Father M. had heard confes¬ 
 sions in such a place, without one or more 
 candles on the table, what a beautiful theme 
 this circumstance would have afforded to a 
 morbid imagination like yours. 
 
 Sir, I feel somewhat humbled at being obliged, 
 as a reviewer, to notice this, as well as other 
 portions of your Kirwan’s letters, which, in my 
 opinion, propriety should have induced you to 
 leave under the protection of domestic privacy. 
 If you were still a Catholic, like yo#ir pious 
 albeit uneducated, mother, you would feel rather 
 proud than otherwise of what appears to be the 
 fact as regards the humility of your ancestral 
 “halls.” Poverty is not regarded, by those 
 with whom you now associate, as respectable. 
 And yet it has been ennobled by the example 
 of Our Redeemer and His Apostles. It is still 
 ennobled, in the estimation of the Catholic 
 Church, when it is selected by voluntary choice, 
 and is never dishonorable, except when it is 
 immediately connected with, or resulting from 
 moral guilt. 
 
 Our glorious Catholic ancestors were driven 
 
 i 
 
40 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 back into the cabins of Irish primitive life; and 
 Protestantism, in anticipation of the good things 
 of heaven, made sure also of the good things of 
 the earth. The churches, the glebe lands, the 
 monasteries, the castles and domains of our 
 Catholic forefathers, became the usurped in¬ 
 heritance of Protestantism, by right of legal 
 spoliation, from the period when the Reforma¬ 
 tion took the interpretation of the Bible into 
 its own hand—aided of course by acts of Par¬ 
 liament. 
 
 When, therefore, you describe the Catholic 
 “ Priests” “moving about as spectres, as if afraid 
 of the light of day/’ you trace a picture which 
 seems to call up to my imagination the lives ol 
 the Apos^es, and of their Divine Master, going v 
 about meekly and unobtrusively in the discharge 
 of their heavenly mission;—whilst the contrast 
 suggested by the antithesis as in favor of the 
 Presbyterian ministry, would suggest to my 
 mind the idea of an inflated clerical pedant ** 
 makes the avenues of life narrow wherever he 
 passes in bustling and gassy rotundity. But I 
 merely hope that you, judged by your own pen, 
 are not a fair specimen of the class to which 
 you now belong. At all events, I “call in 
 question” the description of “our house,” and 
 hope that you and Mr. Prime will maintain it. 
 
 V. You state as a fact, that “on your first 
 
RIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 41 
 
 remembered journey to Dublin, you passed by 
 a place called, if you mistake not, St. John’s 
 Well.” You tell me that I know it is one of 
 the holy wells. I answer that I know nothing 
 about it. But you appear all at once singularly 
 scrupulous, and I look upon the phrase, “ If I 
 mistake not,” as equivalent to the phrase, 
 “ Young as I was,” when you were already a 
 “ clerk in the store.” I cannot dwell on your 
 evidence respecting what was “called, if you 
 mistake not, St. John’s Well;” but I have no 
 hesitation in saying that the story is, either in 
 whole or in part, a fabrication. It is found on 
 page 21 of your first series, and I call your 
 attention to it, in the hope that you and Mr 
 Prime shall maintain what you have there 
 stated as facts. 
 
 VI. The story about the sun “ dancing” in 
 the heavens and in the chapels on Easter Sun¬ 
 day morning, and the attempt to produce a 
 delusive corresponding phenomenon in the 
 chapel by “ an individual managing concealed 
 mirrors, so as to produce the wonderful effect,” 
 (p. 27,) I pronounce to be equally a fabrication, 
 or a mere playful supposition, uttered for the 
 amusement of children. I hope that you and 
 your endorser will see to this matter also. 
 
 VII. Again : you tell us as a fact, that you 
 “ saw good papists eating eggs and fish and 
 
 4* 
 
42 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 getting drunk on these days, (Fridays and 
 Saturdays.) But that this was no violation of 
 the laws of the Church.”—(p. 32.) This, sir, 
 as far as regards what you call “ good papists” 
 and “ getting drunk,” and yet not violating the 
 laws of the Church, is a fabrication. 
 
 This same page records the turning point of 
 your life, the crisis of your conversion. You 
 came to the conclusion that as regards the 
 eating of meat on one day, and not on another, 
 God could not make it a sin by distinction of 
 days—so that if a man can plough on Thurs¬ 
 day, by your rule, God cannot make it a sin 
 for him to do so on Sunday. And here, in 
 point of fact, is the first, and perhaps the best, 
 reason which your letters furnish for your con- 
 * version. It seems that after mature delibera¬ 
 tion, you found that to forbid a man’s eating 
 meat on Friday is an unreasonable regulation, 
 and you rejected it. It would appear by infer¬ 
 ence that as regards meat, on such days, what 
 your conscience approved your appetite ap¬ 
 propriated ; and with singular naivete, you tell 
 us that “ as far as you now remember this was 
 your first step towards light and freedom .”— 
 ( P . 32.) 
 
 By-the-by, this calls up a period in the ca¬ 
 lamities of Ireland which had almost passed 
 into oblivion; and which corresponds more 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 43 
 
 or less with that of your conversion from Po- 
 pery. 
 
 About twenty-five or thirty years ago, Lord 
 Farnham, and other gentlemen of the evan¬ 
 gelical nobility, introduced into Ireland a reli¬ 
 gious movement called “ the second Reforma¬ 
 tion.” It was a season of distress among the 
 peasantry, such as succeeds, year by year, in 
 the history of our unfortunate native country. 
 Lord Farnham had almost obtained a patent 
 from the legislature for the efficiency, and ad¬ 
 mirable simplicity of the new contrivance for 
 converting the Irish. It was this. The kitch¬ 
 ens were turned into scriptural reading-rooms 
 for the starving population of the neighbor¬ 
 hood, once a week. The day selected hap¬ 
 pened to be Friday, in almost all cases. After 
 Bible-reading, soup was given out instead of 
 syllogisms, and the “ second Reformation” 
 went on admirably until the potatoes of har¬ 
 vest became mature enough for the people’s 
 use. Lord Farnham and his colleagues sup¬ 
 posed that if the landed proprietors and gen¬ 
 try could only succeed in establishing an ami¬ 
 cable understanding between the conscience and 
 the stomach of the “ lower orders,” Ireland 
 would soon become a Protestant country. But 
 I need not dwell upon it, as you are old enough 
 to remember how it was ridiculed by Cobbett 
 
44 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 and other writers wherever the English lan¬ 
 guage was spoken. 
 
 Now I do not say that you are a child of 
 the “ second Reformation/’ but the fact of your 
 having made the first step towards light and 
 freedom through the medium of something 
 like a Friday-beefsteak, looks very much like it. 
 
 See, Rev. Nicholas Murray of Elizabeth¬ 
 town, into what a position your “ playing of 
 pranks” behind Kirwan’s mask has betrayed 
 you! ! 
 
 Resides the bow which Mr. Prime has vol¬ 
 unteered you, you have made one for yourself 
 —still under the mask, however. You tell us 
 that, even before “ you took up your pen you 
 were not unknown to the men of our age, nor 
 unsolicited. . . .” “ The men of our age” (!!!) 
 
 —or of any age, are very few, and posterity 
 has reserved to itself, almost absolutely, the 
 right of determining who they are. To save 
 your modesty, therefore, I am obliged to sup¬ 
 pose that the printer has made a mistake here, 
 and that if one could have the benefit of a peep 
 at your manuscript, it would be found that you 
 had written, “ the men of our (vill)-age.” 
 
 Ah, sir, it seems that your misfortune through 
 life has been to have been under the influence 
 of bad advisers—since you tell us you were 
 “ solicited” to write against Popery. The cir- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 45 
 
 cumstance reminds me of an anecdote which 
 I have lately read in a London paper, and 
 which I trust will not offend you, as it has al¬ 
 ready been employed in a description of Eng¬ 
 land’s highest Protestant nobility. It seems, 
 a drover found it difficult to keep his cattle 
 together in the crowded approaches to the 
 English metropolis. And in his extremity he 
 called out to his neighbor, “ I wish you would 
 loan me a bark of your dog.” You know, sir, 
 that broad ridicule is the forte of the English 
 as compared to the French, and a Cockney 
 wit tells us that Lord John Russell has turned 
 the drover’s hint into the philosophy of poli¬ 
 tics, and that whenever his herd betray a ten¬ 
 dency to straggle from the whig path, he “ bor¬ 
 rows a bark” from Sir Robert Peel. However 
 this may be, I am satisfied that “ the men of 
 our age,” if there be any such, would never 
 have borrowed a bark of you. 
 
 This letter is already too long, and I must 
 bring it to a close. But in doing so, I cannot 
 forget how often you have told us that you 
 were once an infidel. There are evidences 
 scattered up and down through your letters, 
 which, to an unprejudiced and impartial read¬ 
 er, would make it appear doubtful whether you 
 are not still so. Some of these I shall present 
 in my next. I shall not venture to pronounce 
 
46 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 an opinion on the subject, as the Almighty 
 alone can penetrate the hearts of men. 
 
 In the mean time, however, I remain, with 
 increasing pity, but with undiminished good¬ 
 will. 
 
 John Hughes, Bishop of New York. 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 47 
 
 LETTER y. 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 It is deeply to be regretted that the serpent 
 of infidelity was ever permitted to nestle in 
 your bosom;—for when I consider that you 
 reduce the standard of revelation to the test 
 of common sense—when I consider the loose¬ 
 ness of your moral principles, so far forth as 
 they are exhibited by your own pen—when I 
 behold the spirit of Voltaire and Thomas Paine 
 in the profanity and ribaldry with which you 
 treat every sacred subject which your common 
 sense does not approve, I am compelled to say 
 that even on the supposition that infidelity had 
 been expelled from your breast before the 
 writing of your letters, still, 
 
 “ The trail of the serpent is over them all.” 
 
 Your moral principles, as set forth by your¬ 
 self, even in my regard, are much more in 
 keeping with what might be expected from a 
 
48 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED 
 
 skeptic of the world, than from a clergyman 
 of any Christian denomination. You have the 
 grossness to impute to me that I am conscious¬ 
 ly a deceiver of my fellow-creatures, and yet 
 you do not hesitate to express respect for my 
 character. Is this a principle of Presbyterian 
 inculcation ? Or has it shot up through the 
 Confession of Faith from the older and deeper 
 root of your early infidelity ? 
 
 Again, you urge me to renounce the Catho¬ 
 lic religion, in which, you suppose, I do not 
 believe; and yet, with that loose morality 
 which would better become a professed infi¬ 
 del, you implicitly encourage me to persevere 
 in carrying on the supposed villany of decep¬ 
 tion ! The reader would hardly believe this 
 statement possible, so I shall quote your own 
 words to prove it. You say: “ And since in 
 the maturity of my judgment I have examined 
 this matter , I have greatly commended your 
 wisdom in withholding the Bible from the peo¬ 
 ple. If I were a Bishop or a Priest of your 
 church I would do the same.” —p. 29. So then, 
 dear Kirwan, you have the candor to avow on 
 principle, and in the “ maturity of your judg¬ 
 ment,” that if your lot had been cast among 
 villains, you would be as great a villain as 
 any of them. Is this avowal worthy of even 
 an infidel ? 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 49 
 
 That you should be where and what you 
 now are, is easily accounted for—by the ig¬ 
 norance of your youth which you have de¬ 
 scribed, and the poverty which you have not 
 described. Ignorance and poverty are mys¬ 
 terious dispensations of God’s providence. 
 And, on that account, I would treat with in¬ 
 dulgence whatever errors in your early life 
 are to be ascribed to either. But for the de¬ 
 liberate conclusions, uttered in your recent 
 letters, and in the “ maturity of your judgment,” 
 in which you avow yourself ready to act an 
 evil part with Bishops and Priests, on the mere 
 condition of your having been one of them, I 
 cannot but hold you immorally responsible. 
 
 Thank God, however, you are neither a 
 Bishop nor a Priest; and your once having 
 been talked of as a candidate for Maynooth, 
 w*as, happily for the Church, only “ talk” after 
 all. You are a Presbyterian minister in Eliz¬ 
 abethtown, where your ministry can do no 
 harm ;—for, if your creed be true, those who 
 are foreordained to eternal life, will be saved 
 with , as well as without, your pastoral offices. 
 
 In my last letter I showed, according to your 
 own account, that the prohibition to eat flesh- 
 meat on Fridays and Saturdays was the first 
 practical reason for your change of religion. 
 It was an “.unreasonable reguGtnn, and you 
 
 5 
 
50 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED 
 
 rejected it; and as far as you now remember, 
 this was your first step towards light and free¬ 
 dom.”—p. 32. On the very next page we find 
 you soliloquizing in a style of infidel rational¬ 
 ism, which Pagan Greece, or Protestant Ger¬ 
 many, could hardly have surpassed. “ I thus 
 reasoned with myself; God is a spiritual and 
 intelligent Being, and he requires an intelli¬ 
 gent worship. What worship I render him in 
 the Mass I know not,” (of course, since you 
 had forgotten your catechism,) “ my intelli¬ 
 gent worship only is acceptable to Him, and is 
 beneficial to me. I am a rational being, and I 
 degrade my nature, and insult my Maker, in 
 offering to Him a worship in which neither 
 my reason, nor his intelligence, is consulted.” 
 p. 33. Now, dear Kirwan, when we consider 
 the state of your mind at the period when this 
 pretended soliloquy occurred, “ a perfect blank 
 as to all religious instruction,” it becomes a 
 grave question, which I leave to the decision 
 of casuists in mental philosophy, whether or 
 not, in the higher ordinary sense of the term, 
 you could rightfully call yourself a “ rational 
 being.” 
 
 But I make the quotation for another pur¬ 
 pose. The whole passage betrays a strong 
 affinity to the spirit of Paine's “ Age of Rea¬ 
 son.” The high contracting parties were God 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 51 
 
 on the one side, and yourself on the other. 
 Both were intelligent beings —your Maker 
 would be insulted , and your nature would be 
 degraded , if you held the intercourse of wor¬ 
 ship with Him, except on the principle of re¬ 
 ciprocal intelligence. You had just tasted of 
 the forbidden food on the preceding page, and 
 acquired the knowledge of “ good and evil.” 
 You had partaken of Egypt’s flesh-pots, and 
 the manna had become insipid and distasteful. 
 For your mind, there was no “intelligence” in 
 it, and so, very naturally, you gave up—the 
 Mass. 
 
 But now, the floodgates of the knowledge of 
 good and evil being once opened, we may ex¬ 
 pect the mysteries of revelation to be inun¬ 
 dated by the deluge of your “intelligence,” 
 your “reason,” your “common sense.” Ac¬ 
 cordingly, the adorable mystery of the Chris¬ 
 tian Eucharist, in treating of which the Fathers 
 of the Church were struck with holy dread 
 and religious awe, is described by you as an 
 “absurdity.”—(page 35.) So it has always 
 appeared to the animal man. 
 
 I need scarcely inform you, sir, that the in¬ 
 fidels of all ages would have been quite 
 satisfied, if they had been allowed to construe 
 the Bible according to what they call common 
 sense. In reference to this standard, they and 
 
 / 
 
52 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 you appear to be perfectly agreed. Thus, 
 you make the Bible and common sense the 
 ultimate tribunals in the decision of religious 
 belief. Thus, in the exercise of common 
 sense, you no doubt deny the Divinity of Christ 
 implicitly, at least, since you call it “ blasphe¬ 
 mous'’ to designate the ever glorious and 
 Blessed Virgin Mary, “ as the Mother of God.” 
 If the Person of Christ was simply Divine, and 
 Mary was truly his mother, she is, and has 
 been always called, Mother of God, as well as 
 mother of man; and your denial of this can be 
 logically sustained, only by your denial of the 
 Saviour’s Divinity. In fact, I suppose your 
 “ common sense” has already pronounced 
 against the mystery of the Incarnation. Thus 
 also, you take sides with the infidels of the 
 Redeemer’s age, as well as of our own, and 
 you tell us, in spite of the evidence furnished 
 by Him in His human character, and assert 
 that God only can forgive sins. —(page 67.) 
 In the spirit of a true infidel, you describe the 
 priesthood of the Catholic Church, throughout 
 the world, and for eighteen centuries, as hav¬ 
 ing been actuated solely by the love of money. 
 —(page 70.) Again still, in the spirit of the 
 infidel, you sneer at the history of religion as 
 counter to your appeal to “ common sense,” 
 and tell us, that “ with you the authority of our 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 53 
 
 popes and councils are not worth a penny.”— 
 (page 70.) 
 
 The angel Gabriel saluted the blessed Vir¬ 
 gin Mary, as the scripture records, “ Hail, full 
 of gracebut you, the Presbyterian minister 
 of Elizabethtown, speak of her as you would 
 of a female selling candies at the corners of 
 the street, from whom you had just bought a 
 supply for the young Kirwans, and call her 
 the “ good woman” condescendingly .—(page 
 74.) The holy Eucharist under your “com¬ 
 mon sense,” you declare to be so “ absurd as 
 to defeat itself.”—(page 75.) You decide that, 
 the words, “'This is my body,” mean, this is 
 not my body, and with that swelling vanity 
 peculiar to an evangelical minister who takes 
 “ common sense” as his rule for interpreting 
 holy scripture, you exhibit your sleight of hand 
 with a puff of self-complacency, and call upon 
 us to admire—“just see how a little common 
 sense simplifies every thing.”—(page 76.) 
 
 Lest I should interpose' by venturing to 
 suggest that a thing ought to be received for 
 what our Saviour says it is, you warn me off, 
 and tell me in true arrogant style, that “ you 
 will have none of my nonsense about the sub¬ 
 stance contained under the species.”—(page 
 76.) Now, dear Kir wan, I have scriptural 
 authority for what you here call nonsense. 
 
54 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 The Holy Ghost descended on the apostles 
 under the species of “ tongues of fire he de¬ 
 scended on the Saviour under the species of 
 “ a dove/’ and you have decided that the dis¬ 
 tinction of the Evangelists between the species 
 and the substance is “ nonsense; . . . it is 
 ‘ darkening counsel by words without know¬ 
 ledge/ ”—(page 76.) I recommend your case 
 to the General Assembly. In fact, you have 
 become so enlightened in matters of dogmatic 
 theology, under the inspiration of “common 
 sense,” that you are almost fit for a residence 
 in Boston, where the Reverend Theodore 
 Parker will no doubt have the charity to ex¬ 
 tend to you the right hand of Christian fellow¬ 
 ship. 
 
 In reference to the Holy Eucharist, your 
 infidel principle of “ common sense” as inter¬ 
 preter of Scripture, prompts you to say that 
 “ nothing equals it in absurdity in all pagan¬ 
 ism.”—(page 76.) Pray, did it ever come in 
 the way of your extensive reading to have 
 seen a book called the “ Presbyterian Con¬ 
 fession of Faith, as amended and ratified by 
 the General Assembly at their sessions in 1821, 
 and printed by Tower and Hogan in 1827 ?” 
 If so, turn to pages 73 and 74, and you will 
 find it ruled that in certain cases men are 
 placed by their Creator in such a situation, that 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 55 
 
 if they do a thing they “ commit a sin against 
 God/’ and if they do not do it, they “ commit a 
 greater sin /” Here is a Presbyterian Doc¬ 
 trine to which you might apply your “ common 
 sense” with some advantage to your own 
 brethren. The rich theme of ridicule which it 
 would furnish for a pen of such profanity as 
 yours, will be obvious to you at a glance. 
 
 You tell us that “the manner of our public 
 worship is heathen, and was originally adopted 
 for the seducing of the Heathen to Christi¬ 
 anity.”—(page 82.) This idea would seem to 
 have been derived by you rather from Gibbon, 
 than from Voltaire or Thomas Paine. You 
 have the candor, however, to admit the high 
 antiquity of our manner of worship, when you 
 describe the use to which it was applied in the 
 primitive Church. The conversion of nations 
 has been itself regarded as a proof of the divine 
 origin of Christianity. You, however, have 
 discovered that it was owing to a system of 
 seduction , carried on through our Catholic 
 “ manner of worship,” by which the poor Hea¬ 
 then were “ seduced” into the new Religion! 
 Could any but an infidel give utterance to such 
 a sentiment ? 
 
 But detail is unnecessary. The high mys¬ 
 teries of the Christian faith you reduce to the 
 standard of “ common sense,” on almost every 
 
56 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 page. Thus: “ Extreme unction,” you have 
 already pronounced “ extreme nonsense.” Page 
 82. 
 
 . “ How simple and ‘ common sense’ is all this," 
 —(S. S. Page 27.) “ Blessed be God, you have 
 not turned your keys on the ‘ common sense’ ol 
 the world.”—(page 29.) Of your infidel rib¬ 
 aldry I will give but one specimen, which I 
 think can hardly be surpassed in the annals of 
 sneering skepticism. “ Your daily changing of 
 a wafer into the real body of Christ, and then 
 eating him, beats any thing St. Fechin ever did. 
 Your preparing an old sinner for heaven by 
 rubbing him with olive oil, and then opening 
 its gates to him by the keys which are only in 
 your possession, far surpasses Fechin’s turning 
 acorns to pork. We believe the swine them¬ 
 selves are constantly doing this in our Western 
 woods.”—(page 39.) You tell us that the re¬ 
 spect entertained by Catholics for relics has 
 the true relic for its object —and that, on Cath¬ 
 olic principles, “ it is all the same” that the ob¬ 
 ject of reverence or respect should be the head 
 of “ St. Paul” or the head of “ Balaam’s Ass ;” 
 and you add in your own name , and with a 
 sneer becoming an infidel, “ and I suppose the 
 difference, sir, is very little .”—(page 70.) So 
 then, Rev. Nicholas Murray, you regard the 
 head of an ass and that of an apostle with equal 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 57 
 
 respect; for the reason, no doubt, that in your 
 estimation, both are figuratively of the same 
 species, or perhaps that in this instance both 
 are scriptural subjects. 
 
 It seems the Tract Societies and Sunday 
 Schools have adopted your letters, and given 
 them a very extensive circulation. I do not 
 know a shorter method of turning the young 
 who may be subject to their training into in¬ 
 fidels, than by placing such a book in their 
 hands. Each of their pupils has as good a 
 right to explain the Bible according to what 
 he will call “ common sense,” as you have 
 had. But they will not be restrained in their 
 blasphemous ribaldry by the limits which a 
 black coat and a white cravat have prescribed 
 for your pen. 
 
 They will apply the arguments of “ common 
 sense” which you have wielded against Bap¬ 
 tism and the Holy Eucharist, to the antece¬ 
 dent doctrines of original sin, and the atone¬ 
 ment, and they will find no “ common sense” 
 in either. But why should I moralize for you 
 on such a subject, when I have no evidence 
 to prove that such a result has not been the 
 very object of your letters ; and that your 
 zeal against Popery is not merely the gild¬ 
 ing of the infidel pill which you would wish 
 to see swallowed by tract distributors, Sunday- 
 
58 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 school teachers, Sunday-school children, and 
 all. 
 
 Sir, the language and sentiment which I 
 have had to pass under review in this letter 
 are so unworthy of a man professing Christi¬ 
 anity, that I must withhold, at its close, even 
 the expression of my pity for you, whilst 1 
 cherish towards you as usual good wishes and 
 good-will. 
 
 John Hughes, Bishop of New York. 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 59 
 
 LETTER VI., 
 
 TO KIRWAN, 
 
 alias the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D., 
 
 Of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. 
 
 Dear Sir :— 
 
 The task which I imposed on myself at the 
 commencement of these letters is nearly ac¬ 
 complished. I wished to investigate the al¬ 
 leged reasons which induced you to forsake 
 the Church—and which forbid your return. 
 The result is before the public, and may be 
 briefly summed up. 
 
 You will observe that I have not pretended 
 to defend a single Catholic doctrine from your 
 coarse and profane.invective,—that I have not 
 raised the question with you as to whether 
 those doctrines are true or false; that I have 
 confined myself to watching narrowly the state 
 of your mind, your motives and movements, 
 as described by yourself, until I saw you clear¬ 
 ly beyond the bounds of the Catholic church 
 and landed in the cold, dark regions of infideli¬ 
 ty. If your own statements as to the utter 
 
60 
 
 KIR WAN UNMASKED. 
 
 ignorance of your mind in regard to any and 
 all religion when you became an infidel, are to 
 be relied on, it follows that in assigning the 
 reasons for your change, as set forth in your 
 letters, you have been attempting a gross im¬ 
 position on the credulity of your Protestant 
 readers. You give a double certificate of the 
 process of your conversion. One side attests 
 considerable religious information : the other 
 certifies bluntly that “ your mind was a perfect 
 blank as to all religious instruction” Both 
 are from your own pen. It remains for you 
 to reconcile the contradiction as well as you 
 can. 
 
 Allow me, in the mean time, to suggest the 
 only plausible, natural, and satisfactory reason 
 for the important event in regard to which you 
 have taken such superfluous pains to enlighten 
 the public. 
 
 It is understood that you arrived in this 
 country a poor Irish orphan boy. This was 
 not your fault. It might have been your merit. 
 Whether you were then an infidel or a Catho¬ 
 lic is best known to yourself. At all events 
 you attracted the charitable notice of certain 
 Presbyterian patrons. In the intentions of 
 their benevolence towards you, your renun¬ 
 ciation of Popery was a condition either al¬ 
 ready accomplished or necessarily implied as 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 61 
 
 a sine qua non of your education. Now what 
 could be more natural, under these circum¬ 
 stances, than that you should become a Protest¬ 
 ant, after the fashion of training provided, and 
 the creed professed by your patrons ? If in all , 
 this your conscience approved of what your 
 friends recommended, so much the better for 
 you. I only mention the circumstances to 
 supply a hiatus in your narrative. They are 
 quite sufficient to explain your conversion, 
 and the public would not be so unreasonable, 
 had you made them acquainted with all this, 
 as to ask for any other. It is now nearly thirty 
 years since these things took place. You be¬ 
 gin to be well stricken in years—you are ap¬ 
 proaching the confines of old age ; and the 
 same indulgent public would have dispensed 
 with your reasons for not returning now to the 
 Communion which you thus forsook in your 
 boyhood. It is admitted on all hands that, in 
 cases like yours, a wife and children are sub¬ 
 stantial objections to such a step. When the 
 husband and father is, moreover, a Protestant 
 clergyman, it requires an extraordinary grace 
 to overcome them. 
 
 I now leave it to yourself to say, whether it 
 was not unwise on your part, after having ap¬ 
 peared with your natural countenance so long, 
 to put on the mask in the fiftieth year of your 
 
 6 
 
02 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED 
 
 age ? Whether it was worthy of your rank 
 and station among the men of our age, to 
 weave a narrative of your conversion with 
 materials derived from imagination, while the 
 plain history of the case lay open before your 
 consciousness and memory? Yet when I re- 
 gard the profane spirit of your letters ; when I 
 consider that you imitate closely infidel tactics 
 against Christianity in your mode of assault— 
 that you ridicule where you cannot reason— 
 that where you pretend to reason it is not 
 against the Catholic doctrine, as Catholics hold 
 it, but against such doctrine misrepresented, 
 turned into burlesque, and thus fitted for your 
 purpose—when I reflect on all this, I am not 
 surprised that you constructed your laboratory 
 in the “ camera obscura,” and shunned the 
 open day—that you insulted the memory of a 
 fallen but not otherwise dishonorable priest, 
 by affixing his name to your letters rather than 
 your own. 
 
 You wish me to dispute with you on matters 
 of general controversy. I must beg leave to 
 decline the proposed honor. I cannot consent 
 to dispute with any man for whom I feel no 
 respect, and therefore I can enter into no con¬ 
 troversy with you; especially until you have 
 extricated yourself from the inconsistencies 
 and self-contradictions pointed out in this re- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 63 
 
 view. You suggest “the inference that I am 
 a devil.”—(p. 64.) You proclaim “ your high 
 respect for me.”—(p. 75.) Now, sir, I entertain 
 no respect for any man, and especially a Min¬ 
 ister of the Gospel , who can cherish and avow 
 “ his high respect” for “ a devil,” even by in¬ 
 ference. 
 
 You wrote your letters in the midst of the 
 awful famine which strewed the highways and 
 ditches of your unhappy country with dead 
 bodies, last year. Among them may have 
 been some of those for whom, Mr. Prime says, 
 you wrote your letters, viz : “ your kinsmen, 
 according to the flesh.” Now, it was not un¬ 
 common for persons, whose Irish heart had 
 not become withered by hostile seasoning, to 
 become insane, during that awful crisis—turn¬ 
 ed into maniacs by the news of an hour. Sec¬ 
 tarianism was forgotten—humanity was stirred 
 to its depths in the bosom of the entire Amer¬ 
 ican people—Jews, Christians, Catholics, Prot¬ 
 estants, Presbyterians, believers and unbeliev¬ 
 ers of every name, were vying with each other 
 in their efforts to send bread to the dying. 
 And they did send bread; they constructed an 
 historical monument of charity, glorious as the 
 land which reared it, and sufficient to atone, 
 in some measure, for the bigotries of a thou¬ 
 sand years. It was in the midst of this death- 
 
64 
 
 KIRVVAN UNMASKED. 
 
 struggle of your native land, that you had the 
 impiety to invent, and the inhumanity to apply, 
 the following profane and horrible pun, on the 
 words of our Saviour :—“ He that eats this 
 bread will never hunger. All that you (Cath¬ 
 olics) have to do, if your principle be true, is 
 to give your wafer to the poor, famishing Irish, 
 and they hunger no more !'—(page 77.) How 
 well this sustains Mr. Prime’s statement, that 
 in writing your Kirwan’s letters, you were 
 actuated by “ a sense of duty to your kinsmen, 
 according to the flesh, your countrymen and 
 brethren !” 
 
 But supposing I were to enter into contro¬ 
 versy with you on general topics, it is mani¬ 
 fest that besides being a party, you claim to 
 be a witness, an advocate, and what is more, a 
 judge, in your own cause ! You profess to 
 teach me what the Catholic religion is, al¬ 
 though you had “ forgotten your catechism at 
 eighteen years of age,” and I take it for grant¬ 
 ed you have never looked into it since, except 
 in the same spirit and for the same purposes 
 which induce the infidel to read the scriptures. 
 If I pretend to know any thing of my religion, 
 you politely tell me that “ you will have none 
 of my nonsense.” Why then do you ask me 
 to enter into controversy with you ? Besides, 
 who would be the judge ? “ Common sense,” 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 65 
 
 you reply. But whose common sense, yours 
 or mine ? If you submit to mine, I condemn 
 your position at once. If you will not submit 
 to mine, what right have you to suppose that 
 I should submit to yours? To what tribunal 
 do you appeal ? That of history ? But its 
 authority with you is not worth a penny ! To 
 the Bible ? But the Bible by itself will give 
 no decision. It requires an interpreter , as 
 much as the constitution and laws of the coun¬ 
 try. Who shall be the interpreter ? Methinks 
 I hear you speaking of your “ common sense” 
 again for that office—so that we come round 
 the Protestant circle to the starting point. 
 
 If you say the appeal is to the “ common 
 sense” of mankind in general, (restricting the 
 term to those who profess Christianity,) the 
 verdict will not be unanimous; but it will be 
 in my favor by a majority of three to one. To 
 wffiat tribunal, then, would you be willing to 
 submit, in case I were disposed to join issue 
 with you in a controversy on the great ques¬ 
 tions on which Catholics and Protestants are 
 divided ? But the inquiry is purely hypothet¬ 
 ical ; for although I reserve to myself the right 
 of reviewing your labors, when I think proper, 
 depend upon it there will not, there cannot be, 
 any dogmatical controversy between us. If 
 your genius and inclination lie in the direction 
 
 6 * 
 
66 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 
 of profanity, you can continue to insult the 
 mysteries of the Catholic faith as you have 
 done. For this you have but to copy from 
 Protestant writers of your own class, who 
 have gone before you. But I see no reason 
 why I should undertake to discuss the reprint 
 of their opinions, found in your book, rather 
 than in the original text as found in their own. 
 As far as either come in the way of my sub¬ 
 ject, I shall do this at my own convenience, 
 in the sequel of those letters which I have ad¬ 
 dressed to my “ Dear Reader, 5 ' and not to you. 
 In the present review I purposed only to con¬ 
 sider those little incidents of waning faith, ac¬ 
 cumulated misgivings, and autobiography which 
 preceded, or were connected with, your tran¬ 
 sition from the Catholic faith to a Protestant 
 denomination. This portion of your letters 
 was your own, and was (what cannot be al¬ 
 ways said of works of imagination) perfectly 
 original. Having done this, it only remains 
 for me to assure you of my sincere good 
 wishes, and to say for the present, farewell. 
 
 And now I will take the liberty of addressing' 
 a few words to the general reader in connec¬ 
 tion with this subject. What advantage does 
 religion, of any name, derive from such books 
 as Kirwan’s letters ? Do they promote piety ? 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 67 
 
 Is charity increased by them ? Do they con¬ 
 vert Catholics ? Is the faith of Protestants so 
 weak that it requires the support of such but¬ 
 tresses ? The questions on which Catholics 
 and Protestants are so unhappily divided have 
 been discussed by able men on both sides, until 
 the argument has been exhausted. These are 
 considerations which address themselves to 
 sincere minds of all parties. Those who will 
 reflect a moment will perceive that the Catho¬ 
 lic religion has withstood and now withstands 
 such attacks, just as the pyramid does the as¬ 
 saults of the wandering Arab. If it were the 
 system which such writers as Kirwan repre¬ 
 sents, it could not subsist a single year. Good 
 men from within, who know what it really is, 
 would not stay; good men from without would 
 not come to it. Now a whole volume might 
 be filled with the names of illustrious converts 
 from the different denominations of Protestant¬ 
 ism, who, after mature deliberation, have joined 
 the Church within the last quarter of a century, 
 many of them at the sacrifice of their worldly 
 interests and prospects. How could this have 
 come to pass if Catholicity were what these 
 writers allege ? 
 
 Does not this single fact outweigh a ton of 
 such theory-books as the Key of Popery, or 
 Kirwan’s Letters ?—What are these books 
 
68 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 generally made np of? Assertion, party in¬ 
 vective, charges, sometimes entirely false, and 
 always grossly exaggerated. 
 
 Thus, such writers as I speak of will tell you 
 that the Catholic Clergy are a vast corporation 
 of swindlers.—But how will any man of even 
 moderate judgment reconcile this with the fact 
 that no other clergymen are so ready to en¬ 
 counter danger in the discharge of their min¬ 
 istry, whether in the cholera-hospitals, the 
 fever-sheds, or wherever it becomes a martyr 
 of charity to meet death? They will tell you 
 that the Catholic religion is the deadly enemy 
 of liberty. But then how comes it that all the 
 elements and principles of social right and civil 
 liberty are of Catholic origin, and that the best 
 lawyer among us would be somewhat puzzled 
 if requested to point out a single addition made 
 to them by Protestantism ? This is fact , in 
 opposition to theory. When Protestantism 
 came it found several Republics, and did not 
 find one absolute monarchy in Christendom, 
 except Russia, which was not in communion 
 with the Pope. They wall tell you that the 
 Catholic religion is an enemy to knowledge. 
 But the fact is that if you remove from the map 
 of Christendom, all the great institutions of 
 knowledge, in every department, founded and 
 endowed by Catholics alone, very little will be 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 69 
 
 left remaining. They will tell you that the 
 Church is the enemy of happiness. But the 
 fact is that nations appear to have been much 
 more happy, if apparent contentment be any 
 symptom, before the reformation, than since. 
 Religious and civil, not to speak of general, 
 wars, have followed each other in almost con¬ 
 stant succession in most of the countries of 
 Europe since that event; and if these be signs 
 of happiness, I am much mistaken. They will 
 tell you that poverty is a certain companion 
 and consequence of the Catholic religion.— 
 This, even if it were true, amounts to little; 
 for the Divine Author of Christianity did not 
 intend his religion for the special advantage of 
 bankers and stock-jobbers, as these writers 
 would lead us to suppose. And if the “ Gospel 
 was preached to the poor,” it follows that pov¬ 
 erty would be, if any thing, a sign in favor of 
 the true religion, rather than the contrary. 
 Italy and Spain may be called poor nations, 
 but yet I am not aware that any one is allowed 
 in those Catholic countries to die by the road¬ 
 sides of starvation. Protestant England, on 
 the other hand, is a country of great wealth 
 and great 'pauperism. But in England and 
 Ireland, such writers point to the contrast be¬ 
 tween the Catholics and Protestants. They 
 seem to forget, however, that by one thousand 
 
70 
 
 KIBWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 and one different ways, sometimes directly, at 
 all times indirectly, the Protestants of those 
 countries have been, legally till within less than 
 twenty years, helping themselves in the way 
 of worldly prosperity, at the expense of the 
 Catholics. Now this is the fact, and no 
 man of common information and candor will 
 deny it. 
 
 I might go on indefinitely in pointing out 
 the mutual contradiction between the facts of 
 history and the theories of your anti-Catholic 
 writers, of a certain class. But as regards 
 Ireland in particular, not only were the laws 
 made so as of a certainty to reduce the Catho¬ 
 lics to poverty, but if ignorance is an impedi¬ 
 ment to the attainment of wealth, the legisla¬ 
 ture determined that the Catholics should be 
 poor forever ; and with the stigma of so bar¬ 
 barous an enactment on the escutcheon of 
 Protestant Britain, it requires singular power 
 of face in such writers as the Rev. Dr. Mur¬ 
 ray, of Elizabethtown, to allude to the subject 
 at all. Let me contrast the facts of history, 
 in the very terms of the several statutes, with 
 the theory of our modern instructor. 
 
 “If a Catholic kept school, or taught any 
 person, Protestant or Catholic, any species of 
 literature, or science, such teacher was for the 
 crime of teaching, punishable by law by ban- 
 
KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 71 
 
 ishment—and, if he returned from banishment, 
 he was subject to be hanged as a felon. 
 
 “If a Catholic,, whether child or adult, at¬ 
 tended, in Ireland, a school kept by a Catholic, 
 or was privately instructed by a Catholic, such 
 Catholic, although a child in its early infancy, 
 incurred a forfeiture of all its property, present 
 or future. 
 
 “If a Catholic child, however young, was 
 sent to any foreign country for education, such 
 infant child incurred a similar penalty—that 
 is, a forfeiture of all right to property, present 
 or prospective. 
 
 “ If any person in Ireland made any remit¬ 
 tance of money or goods, for the maintenance 
 of any Irish child educated in a forei gn coun¬ 
 try, such person incurred a sim^arTorfeiture/ 
 
 Such were the laws. Kirwan’s forefathers, 
 in their day, and himself in his early life, were 
 their victims. Now, with these facts staring 
 him in the face, this man says—“ If the igno¬ 
 rance of Ireland has any thing to do with the 
 degradation of Ireland, I charge that ignorance 
 on Popery —(page 50.) The italics are his 
 own, and to judge by the statement one would 
 be led to suppose that he has not escaped from 
 under the edict against knowledge to this day. 
 
 No, no; let candid Protestants look for and 
 examine the true facts in all these cases; let 
 
,T 
 
 72 
 
 KIRWAN UNMASKED. 
 
 them judge for themselves, and they will be 
 surprised to discover how much that is true 
 has been held back from them on all such sub¬ 
 jects, and how much that is false, or falsely 
 represented, has been circulated among them 
 instead of the truth, by mere book-writers and 
 men of the shop. And as regards the Catholic 
 religion, if they wish to know what it is, even 
 for the sake of information, let them consult 
 authentic sources, and be slow to receive then' 
 knowledge of it from those who are seldom 
 either qualified or disposed to state it truly. 
 In my other series of letters I propose to state 
 it as it is understood by Catholics; to explain 
 its doctrines, where explanation is judged 
 necessary; and to sustain them by such proofs 
 from scripture, history, and reason, as are 
 most likely to have weight with men, whethe 
 Catholics or Protestants, who are not yet pre 
 pared to reduce the awful mysteries of Chris 
 tian revelation to the infidel's standard of 
 judgment—“ common sense." 
 
 John Hughes, Bishop of New York. 
 
 THE END.