the ears of the rabble but rebellion;" to public and private life. The Popand common sense will say the same, ish labourer, who takes land on the whatever noble Lords in their folly, or condition of paying his rent and any other miserable hunters for popu- tithe, has only to find himself safe larity and contemptible echoes of Mr from the actual grasp of the law in O'Connell may think it. Even allow- refusing either, or both. The ing that such men can have no wish to priest comes to him, when his rent and see a rebellion, yet the mischief is the tithe are ready, and tells him that to same; the peasantry catch the word, pay the Protestant clergyman is against it is first their rallying-point, then the good of his church. "But it is the their war-hoop, and then come assas- condition of my lease," says the peasination, burning, and massacre. sant, "I made the promise voluntarily, and I am bound by the condition." “Are you a true son of the Church,” says the reverend father, “a worshipper of the Holy Virgin, and a worthy subject of his holiness the Pope? If you are, see this decree. No cath against the interests of the Church is binding. In the name then of the holy mother Church, I absolve you from any sin on the subject. Keep your money in your pocket." Requests of this order are too palatable not to be easily complied with. The pea sant keeps the tithe; he is summoned before the magistrate to pay; he shoots the bailiff who summons him. A night or two after he burns the clergyman's house. He then becomes a member of those hordes of nightmarauding villains, whom the Agi tator calls "hereditary bondsmen," and who are ordered to recollect that, "who would be free himself must strike the blow." The work of night soon puts an end to the labour of day. His farm goes to ruin. He is unable to pay his rent. The landlord, after many a day of sufferance, is forced to eject him, he serves a return to the writ, in the shape of a letter, "ordering the landlord to prepare his coffin” The letter is followed by shooting the landlord in the face of day, shooting the tenant who had been put into the farm, shooting the magistrate who had signed the writ, and shooting the witnesses who had seen him shoot the magistrate. This would seem monstrous in New South Wales, in Caffraria, in the American forests; but it is the every day work of Ire land. It exhibits itself on the face of the Government Gazette week by week. The grave has scarcely closed on the mutilated remains of Mr Keefe, a highly respectable man, a landagent and malster in Thurles, employing sixty men daily, who was thus murdered, and more than murdered, savagely mutilated, crushed, We say solemnly with full conviction, and not without the deepest regret, that it is most dangerous and most foolish to believe any Papist, let him pledge himself by any oath, however voluntary, formal and distinct, upon any public subject which he may find it desirable to violate. On this we have the most fatal evidence. Of course the Papist, in the ordinary circumstances of life, may be trustworthy. Nor do we doubt, that even on public matters, there are many Popish individuals of honour and manliness who will preserve their honour; but it is not with gentlemen that we shall always have to deal in these matters, it is not with gentlemen that we have to deal at this moment. We have hourly proof that they will fly out into the most open contempt of every obligation on the first opportunity. All may go on smoothly in smooth times; but let the emergency come, let the struggle be imminent, let the rabble of Popery be called into the contest, and from that hour all obligations disappear like chaff before the wind. The most solemn oaths are laughed at, and we are laughed at too for the shallowness of being duped by such notorious, habitual, and disgusting perfidy. What must in fact be the utter scorn of the validity of an oath among a set of low adventurers like the Popish tail, headed by a low adventurer like their present leader, and with this rule of their Church held up before their eyes “ "No oath, contrary to the ecclesiastical utility, is binding?" In the original, Juramentum contra utilitatem ecclesiasticum præstitum non tenet. (Decretal. Lib. xi., tit. 24, cap. 27.) "Ecclesiastical utility" confessedly meaning the interests of the Church. Let, then, the Protestant see what a boundless latitude is here given for perjury of every shape and shade. The "interests of the Church" may extend to every thing belonging battered and torn, as if by wild beasts, and not by men. It is but a short time since Mr. Stony, a man of fortune and a magistrate, who gave much employment to the peasantry, and bore an estimable character, was coolly attacked, while going at six o'clock in the evening to dine with a neighbouring gentleman. A fellow walked up to him with a lantern, which he held to his face; in the instant after thus making sure of their man, another ruffian fired a carbine at him, which left him for dead, with fifteen slugs in his body. And for deeds like these the priests give absolution, even if the murderer should not seek it. Every peasant is ordered to attend confession once a quarter; and in what instance do we ever hear that absolution has been refused? No, the blackest villain is as sure of getting it, on paying the proper fee, as the purest girl of fifteen. And this is Popery, practical, working, real Popery; and this is the horrid superstition, which, with all its horrors, we see forcing itself into England, absolutely controlling the legislature, and leading the wretched Cabinet exactly wherever Mr. O'Connell, in his insolence, commands. captivity, if we suffered Popery once to be the law of England. And why shall we say that it will not be thus law? Look to what it has done in Ireland already. By the supineness of the successive Cabinets of England since the middle of the last century; by the poverty to which they doomed the Irish Church, and which paralyzed all its efforts; by the egregious impolicy of relaxing the penal laws with one hand, while with the other they actually thwarted the means and desires of the clergy to spread Protestantism through the people, and thus render their new liberty safe ;— The Papist thus obtained power without morals to use it; was released from the civil restraints, rendered of old essential by his spirit of rebelllon, before any attempt was made to extinguish that spirit of all evil; and thus what was meant as liberality was turned into license; what was meant as reconciliation was turned into revenge; and what was boasted of as securing perpetual fidelity, has secured nothing but a sullen, venomous, and unappeasable thirst of rebellion. Or, let us take the contrast between the Papist soliciting privileges and the Papist possessing them. Who ever It is now Radical and Revolutionist, heard before 1829 of a Popish demand and clamours as loudly as the loudest for Ballot, Universal Suffrage, or the Republican in England, France, or other mixtures of nonsense and atroAmerica, for the Ballot, Universal city which compound the Republican Suffrage, Short Parliaments, and all creed? No; all he asked was to have the other notorious instruments of the his humble share of the Constitution fiercest and most latitudinarian demo- as it was. His plea was "faith long cracy. Yet, what is this but a new proved" to that Constitution; his perfidy, a more scandalous attempt to pledge was "sincere, indisputable delude, a more wilful and sanguinary and voluntary allegiance" to the exallegiance to the father of all false- isting order of the country; his oath hood. The nature of Popery is ty- was to the most solemn avoidance of ranny, it hates freedom in every form, all trespass on the rights, titles, and it commands spiritual and bodily property of the Established Church! prostration before the most unreason- The Legislature were forewarned that ing and unmingled despotism that the this was all a desperate system of artiworld has ever seen; yet now it fice; that the supplication was for a clamours for more than freedom, surrender; that the humility was hyfor the madness of freedom! In pocrisy; that the voice of the beggar what other spirit does it stimulate the outside the door would be turned into populace into this frenzy than to the roar of the robber within. The work the downfall of the Constitution forewarning was supported by history, by the populace, and then clasp the by reason, and by scripture. It was exhausted lunatic in its chain? In disregarded. And now; we are fightthe name of our endangered religion, ing in the last ditch of the Constituin the name of our scandalized liberty, tion! in the name of our insulted GOD, we must resist this tyranny. Life would be but one long disgrace, one consummate misery, one hopeless The documents proving the pledges of the Papists are as numerous as their violations. Let us confine ourselves to one, the petition presented to both Houses in 1805. We give a few abstracts of this long, laboured, and incontrovertible bond. It begins by a declaration of their perfect allegiance to the Protestant throne ! "That your petitioners are stead fastly attached to the person, family, and government of their most gracious Sovereign (George III), and that they contemplate with rational and decided predilection, the admirable principles of the British Constitution." So much for those who now cannot exist without Universal Suffrage, &c. They then state their reverence for an oath. "Your petitioners most humbly state, that they have solemnly and publicly taken the oaths by law prescribed to his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, as tests of political and moral principles, and confidently appeal to the sufferings which they have so long endured, and the sacrifices which they still make, rather than violate their consciences by taking oaths of a religious or spiritual import contrary to their belief; as decisive proofs of their profound and scrupulous reverence for the sacred obligation of an oath." Now, let us advert to the argument which, more than all the rest, imposed on the Legislature. The Papist continually appealed to his refusal of the oaths required by the Test and Cor. poration Acts, and from this argued his fidelity to oaths of all kinds. Now, the Test and Corporation Acts demanded not the Papist's oath that he would abstain from doing any injury to Protestantism, but that he abjured the fundamental doctrines of Popery; in other words, demanded that, before he could be admitted to public office, he should prove that he was not a Papist, and this was done by abjuring the Pope's supremacy and the doctrine of transubstantiation, and receiving the holy sacrament in the manner of the Protestant Church, to confirm the fact of his being a Protestant. This was notoriously an oath which would bring down the censures of the Romish Church on him, and which therefore, no Roman Catholic, however careless of oaths to the safety of Protestantism, could dare to take. So that the Papist actually has the effrontery to expect that, on the mere strength of his oath to the Romish Church (which he dares not violate without terror of her censure and eternal ruin), we are to rely on his oath to Protestantism, which he must violate, if he is true to his own Church, and which that Church fully allows him to violate. The rule being, that "no oath contrary to the interests of the Church of Rome is binding." To proceed. The petitioners declare that they pledge themselves to disclose, denounce, and put down all conspiracies and treasons, which may be found against the king and his successors, and further remind the Legislature, "that they have solemnly sworn that they will not exercise any privilege to which they are or may become entitled, to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or Protestant Government in Ireland." And this part of their bond they keep, as we see, in the daily record of murderings and burnings and the utter refusal, by the open authority of their bishops and leaders, of paying any part of the revenue due to the Clergy; the outcry for the total extinction of the Church property! And this is the way in which Papists boast of keeping oaths! The petitioners, "to make assurance doubly sure," in fact, to dupe the Legislature still more thoroughly, added this declaration : "Your petitioners most explicitly declare that they do not seek or wish, in the remotest degree, to injure or encroach upon the rights, privileges, immunities, possessions, or revenues appertaining to the bishops and clergy of the Protestant religion as by law es tablished, or to the churches committed to their charge, or to any of them, the sole object of your petitioners being an equal participation, upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects, of the full benefits of the British Constitution." Need we go further than this, or ask a deeper and more contemptuous condemnation of this atrocious system of falsehood, than to compare what the Papists are every where doing at this moment in the British empire, with what they have been swearing these fifty years? But they never want a subterfuge. They tell us that their foreign universities have abjured the doctrines of murdering kings whom the Pope has excommunicated and of not keeping faith with any whom they call heretics. But what are the declarations of their universties worth? Not the weight of a feather. Have the true authorities, the Pope, or the Pope and a council, abrogated those horrid laws? Not a syllable. They boast that the laws of Rome are immutable-and such they must be, so long as Rome pretends to be infallible. But what says the historian? We quote Hallam, (History of the Middle Ages) :-" Two principles are laid down in the Decretals-that an oath disadvantageous to the church is not binding, and that one extorted by force is of slight obligation, and may be annulled by ecclesiastical authority."-"As the first," says Hallam," of those maxims gave the most unlimited privileges to the Popes of breaking all faith of treaties which thwarted their interest or passion, a privilege which they continually exercised, so the second was equally convenient to princes weary of observing engagements towards their subjects or neighbours. Thus Edward the First sought at the hands of Clement the Fifth a dispensation from his oath to observe the great statute against arbitrary taxation." He adds, as to the deposition of kings who might happen to have provoked the wrath of Rome "In the Canon Law it is expressly declared that subjects owe no alle giance to an excommunicated monarch." Of course, if it should please the Pope to be bribed by Russia or France to excommunicate the British Sovereign to-morrow, from that moment no Papist would be bound to pay him any allegiance whatever. The Popish law, always superior to the law of the land, would bind him to revolt; and it would wholly depend upon his mere sense of convenience or personal safety whether he should or should not be a rebel. It is to be remarked that to this petition are appended the names of all the more stirring Roman Catholics of the time-Lords Shrewsbury, Fingal, Kenmore, &c., with Daniel O'Connell, Maurice O'Connell, Elias Corbally, and many others. In the very teeth of all these declarations we find the whole Papist body, now that they have gained all that they could gain by falsehood, trying what they can gain by force; and we find them enlisting degenerate Protestant officials in their cause. It was only in the last month that we find an individual, combining in his person an Irish Marquisate, an English Peerage, the Lord-Lieutenancy of an Irish Protestant county, and the office of a Lord of the Bedchamber to her Majesty, adding his name to a Papist requisition to Mr. Elias Corbally (a Papist, and, we presume, the signer of the petition just quoted), as High-Sheriff of the county of Meath, to convene a meeting for the "total abolition of tithes in Ireland!" In the personal instance of this very trifling Marquis we should not take the trouble of adverting to any opinion. The Marquis of Headfort's opinion upon any conceivable topic beyond his own ringlets or the polish of his boots, must be utterly unimportant, and perfectly worthy of his attainments. But the Marquis of Headfort, as a Privy-Councillor, a LordLieutenant of a county, and one of the Household, does, by virtue of his offices, though by them alone, exercise an influence which renders him accountable to his sovereign and his country. 66 But if we are to be told, he has only signed a petition and exercised a judgment, and what man has not a right to sign a petition and exercise a judgment?" What nonsense is all this! If any man signs a petition, for instance, in favour of any act of immorality, who can doubt the immorality of the petitioner's mind, or doubt that, with all his right to petition, he stamps himself as an offender? Suppose a prelate of the Establishment signing his name to a petition for the acknowledgment of Socinianism (and we may see that, too, before we are much older) who can doubt whether the petitioner, with all his right to petition, ought not to be divested of his mitre? Or, if we find that a man loaded with high responsibilities to the constitution, responsibilities which we may well wonder to have found settling on so weak a head, should put his name to a petition demanding the overthrow of a chief organ of the Constitution, what are we to say? Is the cloak of petition to cover the instrument of offence? Is the petitioner to be declared a true and loyal subject, because he perverts a great right into a great wrong? But we shall volunteer for him the only apology that can be made-he perhaps knew nothing of what he was doing. He perhaps looked upon his duty as Privy-Councillor, Lord-Lieu tenant, and Lord of the Bedcham- words "I am glad that the county ber, as simply comprehended in employing the best friseur, and exhibiting the most permanent smile in the neighbourhood of St. James's; in cultivating potatoes and rabble popularity on his Irish estates during the recess, and in keeping his places by hanging on at Mr. O'Connell's skirts, at all seasons, and being dragged through the mire by that master of marquises, petition in hand. All this may be the fact, and in that case we shall do the Marquis a favour, by enlightening him as to other facts. Meath has thus come forward to express its sentiments manfully on this subject, and to show the world that the people of Ireland will never be content until that hitherto bloody and detested impost (Tithes) be extinguished both in name and nature. . . . I wish to try the Voluntary system for the support of the clergy, and I wish to exclude the Bishops from the House of Lords. It is then, and then only, that we can expect to enjoy peace. Until the Bishops are put out, we cannot expect to have any question useful to this country carried through the House of Lords." The Queen of England holds her throne on the simple tenure of that principle which the plunder_of_the So much for the benefit of making Church in either Ireland or England Papists High Sheriffs, or any thing would inevitably abolish. The sove- which can give them the official power reign of England must be a Protestant. of doing mischief. This is one of The sovereign's even marrying a Lord Mulgrave's men, and one of Roman Catholic would be fatal to the Lord Plunkett's manufacture. He is diadem. This is the language of the evidently entitled to the highest faConstitution, of the laws, and of the vours of both those distinguished express oath taken by the sovereign peace-makers. He was succeeded by at the coronation. By the Church a Dr. Mullen who, in the discharge of that Constitution was made in 1688; his double functions as patriot and Paby the Church it has been sustained, pist, recommended that ministers and with that Church it will fall. The should be impeached for not having sovereign is personally, as well as po- carried the "Appropriation (or litically, sworn to uphold in all its (Church robbery) Act long ago." rights, properties and privileges, the Established Church of the United Kingdom. We have no fears that the present sovereign will forget the principle, or forfeit the pledge. And we must believe that such uninformed Lords as have still to learn this will thank us for communicating the knowledge, for apologizing for their absurdity, and for awaking them to the discovery, that to sign petitions for the extinction of the only property of the Church is to sign petitions for its ruin, and that the ruin of the Church would, by law, reason, and necessity, be the ruin of the Constitution. We recommend the Act of Settlement, and the Coronation Oath, its immediate offspring, to the perusal of this noble lord and his coadjutors equally in need of the lesson. The meeting, which the requisition called, took place on the 24th of October, Mr. Elias Corbally, the Papist High Sheriff, in the Chair. This peacemaker, depository of public authority, and loyal subject of a Protestant Queen, whose oath binds her strictly to preserve the Established Church, began by these perfectly plain-spoken The Lord of her Majesty's BedChamber, sworn to the maintenance of the Church as much as of the State, then spoke, among other desultory matter, as follows. After acquainting the meeting that "his principles in his boyhood were just the same as they are at this moment," which we fully believe, his principles being exactly those which we might expect from the nursery, the natural products of brains which neither time nor expe rience could ever mature, he proceeds with his rambling and rapid harangue. "I have always considered the Tithe question as intimately connected with the civil and religious liberties of this country. And the settlement of it should have been made a portion of the Catholic Relief Bill in 1829." This trifling lord, of course, does not know, or is not capable of comprehending, that the positive declaration of the whole Popish body was not merely that they never would, on any possible occasion, resist the pay. ment of Tithes, but that, moreover, they fully acknowledged the right of the Church to their Tithes; and, above |