nature? Here she stands unrivalled, and pre-eminent; here is one of her distinctive characters, one of those characters which cannot be mimicked, a character, to which no party, no sect, no heresy, no other body or society, no reformer from Simon Magus to Mahomet, not one among the whole tribe of subsequent innovators, ever did, or could, lay claim. They might soften the austerities of an unearthly religion, and hew · down the rough particles of an unaccommodating creed. They might soar on the buoyancy of Parlia mentary chart pleasantly to heaven, and tell the world they were conscientiously forwarding the work of God-but they could never shake off the imputation of novelty. Here, indeed, they all fell prostrate they all sunk down to pay homage to the perpetuity of the One, Apostolic, Roman, and Universal Church that church which they all found established, when they sprung into existence -that church, whose honours were thick and hoary around her that church which bears on her forehead the stamp of the Deity, the series of whose chief pastors has never been broken, whose eternal duration is the work of Omnipotence.

Dublin, March, 1824.

CLEROPHILOS. ›

BIBLICAL LADIES

OF

ANTIQUITY

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SIR,

Were the efforts of certain Associations directed to the physical improvement, to the amelioration of any one of the thousand ills that bear with such force on a hard-conditioned, long suffering people, we should hail with gratitude the generous exertion. But when misery is mocked by the prospect of relief, awaiting the barter of conscience and principle; when it is sought to introduce the horrors of a dark and gloomy fanaticism into the wretched huts of our wretched peasantry; when the Bible is given for food and raiment, to a ragged, squalid, and famishing creature, when his own private and fallible judgment is set up as the chart of his wayward course, through all the aberrations of wandering reason duty, conscience, every motive of propriety, and every principle of necessity and self preservation, oblige us to counteract a plan inimical to the peace and well-being of society, a plan, subversive of all

social order and religion, a plan which would rise on the ruins of the altar and throne, and which, if it should succeed, would lead to a violent and bloody revolution.

It should seem, indeed, as if this most wretched and ill-fated land was marked as the arena of man's degradation, as if it was destined to exhibit to the rest of the earth, a sad and solitary instance of the lengths to which the malignity of his creature can go, in traversing the benignant Lord of the creation. Stripped of existence as an inde pendent State, obliterated and effaced from the list of nations-strangled by a legal assassination-annihilated by a perfidy which extinguished her rights in the blood of her sons, extremes of ill have followed in succession so rapid and so disastrous, that the mind, overwhelmed at length, sought refuge from thought, in the stupor of exhaustion. Poor Ireland! Victim of force, of fraud, of base corruption, and heartless treachery, the day of thy life seemed passed for ever! a monotonous gloom marked thy course, the stillness of night hung on thy way, the torpor of death crept over thy frame, 'till a Biblical shock dissolved thy slumber! Such the fallen destinies of this cradle of genius, this

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nursery of heroes, this parent of wit, this fine, this fertile and unfortunate

Island! Betrayed and abandoned by her
heartless seducer, her senatorial ball be-
came a mart for money changers, her
nobles and commons dislodged by a calcula-
ting tribe, the voice of her patriot was no
longer raised, the inspiring sound of her
eloquent sons was drowned in the din of
arithmetical murmur. Her natural guardians
once swept from the soil, the life springs
which pervaded her fair metropolis, rushed
back to their source-disease and death filled
the void. Hospitals, Infirmaries, Elee-
up
mosynary Institutions in ghastly pomp espoused
their widowed and mourning palaces. O
Patria! ODivum domus Ilyum, et inclyta bello
Moenia Dardanidum! Her spacious streets,
and magnificent squares present to the eye
of an occasional stranger, a hideous array
of Porter houses, Drug houses, Tract shops,
Bible shops, Hotels, and Taverns! The
wound inflicted thus deeply on the head was
quickly felt through the distant members.
The mansions of our gentry untenanted, un-
occupied, dismantled, are courting decay and
pining in ruins.

Ο

But why enumerate misfortunes, where misfortunes are endless? Unfortunate Isle!

Have we not seen distress, and dearth, and squalid starvation, brood over thy fields, and with a licentiousness, rivalled only by that of the "atrocious gang," of confederated murderers that fatten on thy core drops, send pestilence and death through thy luxuriant pastures! Have we not seen the sacred emanations of the Lord God of nature made panders of iniquity -the child of his heart mar the sire, and the parental estate made the lure of apostacy! Have we not seen? Most unfortunate Isle! the first scene which arrests the virgin glance of thy slave born son-the mouldering fragment of thy hallowed temple, which falls on his sight in funereal grandeur, and which gives a sad relief to thy beautiful landscape, serves at once to mark his doom, and trace he march of desolating intolerance. Hard, indeed, and wayward the fate of thy Catholic offspring. Sad and lonely, and cheerless the course which his memory traced, as she poured her wail on thy fallen glories! All this have thy degraded progeny seen, and endured-taunted through life, and mocked in death, what temporal ills have they not endured! But that our children should be taught blasphemy, and apostacy from the word

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