usage of centuries in her favour? That she has the solemn and distinct pledge of the national faith we shall show presently. If all these things be of no avail, where is the property that will be held sacred? If all these titles be held as nothing when weighed against some vague and indefinite notion of the general good, or if they be beaten down at the bidding of popular discontent, it is time for the men of substance in the nation to see and make out some title to their possessions more certain and secure than these. If they cannot, they must be content to hold their estates upon the perilous tenure of liability to confiscation whenever it is expedient to apply their proceeds to purposes of national utility, or whenever it shall please the multitude to declare that it is so expedient.

We have said that the national faith is solemnly and distinctly pledged to the permanence of the church. The fifth article of Union provides, "that the continuance and preservation of the united church, as the established church of England and Ireland, shall be an ESSENTIAL and FUNDAMENTAL part of the Union.” Here, then, is the solemn compact entered into between the English nation and the Protestant parliament of Ireland. When the Protestants of Ireland surrendered their nationality, they stipulated that their church should be continued and preserved. Let us not be told that this stipulation is observed when the imperial parliament take upon themselves to adopt a principle of proportion, and settle according to their discretion where the church establishment shall be maintained. They have no discretion in the matter. The act of Union has placed it beyond their reach. King, Lords and Commons cannot touch the property of the Irish church without destroying an essential part of the Union, that is, virtually repealing the Union. We repeat it, this is a matter in which they have no discretion. They are bound by a solemn treaty that precludes them from intermeddling with the property of the Irish church; if it does not, the words are a mockery. If they do not violate that treaty by taking away any portion of the revenues, they would not violate it by taking away all. They

have the legal right to confiscate church property; but when they do so they actually repeal the Union, as they abrogate that which is an ESSENTIAL part of it. The act by which alone the imperial parliament has the right to govern Ireland, declares that when church property is interfered with, the Union is at an end. Where was the meaning of the stipulations contained in the articles of Union, if these were not to be regarded as settled beyond the power of the imperial parliament to touch. The moment they confiscate church property, no Irishman owes the imperial parliament any further obedience-the compact of the Union is violated-and the Union is, to all intents and purposes, REPEALED. Force may still illegally and unconstitutionally maintain it, but all justice will be on the side of repeal. We know the use that may yet be made of this declaration, but we believe it to be true, and we are ready to abide the consequences.

When that which is an essential part of any thing is removed, the thing itself is destroyed. This is the meaning of the word essential. The same authority that enacts the union between the two countries, enacts that the continuance and preservation of the Church establishment shall be an essential part of the Union. Surely, comment is superfluous. Let ministers beware how they place justice upon the side of repeal-how they make the authority of the Imperial Parliament a usurpation. Do we reason with a cabinet whose members once argued that Roman Catholics should be emancipated in accordance with the treaty of Limerick ? And shall the men who thus held that an ancient treaty of doubtful authority and of ambiguous import, made between the generals of two insignificant brigades, a treaty upon the faith of which the gates of a petty town were opened, was yet binding upon the legislature of Great Britain. Shall these men now utterly disregard a compact made scarce forty years ago, between the parliaments of two independent nations, and ratified with all the solemnities of legislative asseut-a compact upon the faith of which was surrendered the nationality of Ireland? Perhaps their respect for treaties is in the inverse ratio of their obligations.— There was an indefiniteness, an indis

tinetness, about an old armistice, concluded long ago, that lent it a charm in the eyes of the antiquarian; a great national compact made but yesterday has nothing of this kind to recommend it to the notice of refined and speculative intellect. It was something to dig out the treaty of Limerick from the rubbish and obscurity in which years had buried it. But the Act of Union, the compact upon which it was based, are subjects too recent and too plain to claim the attention of any but vulgar souls.

But these, alas, are not the days in which treaties, and compacts, or even oaths, will be permitted to keep back the multitude one moment from the gratification of their unruly will. All the solemn sanctions that have been hitherto held binding between man and man, are now held as nought The spirit of the age is one that tramples upon all obligation, and disregards every contract. Were oaths respected we would have little cause to fear for the safety of the Church. We are tired of denouncing those who have sworn to be her friends, and yet unblushingly exhibit themselves in the senate as her bitter foes. And yet their perjury has found its apologists, and the madness of faction has forgotten, that in destroying the sanctity of oaths, they were undermining the very foundations of our social system. How little need we fear in the House of Commons, if all its members kept their oaths; or need we speak of the solemn vow which our King has taken "to preserve all the privileges of the bishops and clergy of this realm, and of the churches committed to their care;" a vow, of which political Jesuits have endeavoured to evade the force by pretending that they can divide their King into two persons, and that the vows which he takes in one capacity, are not binding on him in another; as if the God to whom he swore -that God with whom there is no respect of persons, would regard kings, not in the simple and uncompounded character of individual human beings, but as broken into all the multiform and imaginary existences into which it may please the fancies, or suit the interests of statesmen to divide them.

Is

it in vain that we appeal to the justice

of ministers, and plead all the oaths, the vows, the compacts, by which the maintenance of our church has been so often and so solemnly guaranteed to us? Shall we then adopt the last reasoning which men apply to those with whom every appeal to higher motives fails, and address ourselves to their fears? No proposition can be more plain than this, that when an essential condition of the Union is violated, in justice and equity that Union is repealed. Do they know the moral force that right confers upon a cause? how it paralyses the opposition of its enemies? Have they calculated how many fully impressed with the danger of repeal, would yet cease to resist it when it would be just? The Act of Union is the grant to the Imperial Parliament of the right to make laws for Ireland, but that grant has its limitations. The preservation of the Church is the tenure by which that parliament holds its power; let them confiscate church property, and their tenure is, upon every principle of justice, at an end.

But apart from this-apart from all the moral power which will belong to the advocacy of repeal, when the iniquitous violation of the treaty of Union shall have made it a righteous causelet the British government be well assured that other elements will combine to add force to that cause. Let them beware how they detach the Protestant people of Ireland from British connexion. The Protestants have endured much, but what security is there that they will endure for ever?-and when the Irish Protestants join in the demand for repeal, repeal must follow. Let not ministers deceive themselves by the vain delusion that this question is set at rest-that the spirit of repeal is dead: "it is not dead, but sleepeth;" and terrible to British greatness will be the hour of its awakening, if the blackest treachery and the basest ingratitude have, meantime, lost for ever to the cause of Britain the power that was wont to hold its movements in check.

Once more we will quote the declaration of Lord Plunkett; we quote it in no spirit of reproach: it is not to mock with the bitterest of all satire his present apostacy. No! we quote it as the deliberate opinion of one who,

fallen and degraded as he is now, was once a statesman. Thus spoke Mr. Plunkett in 1824 :

"Sir, with respect to the Protestant establishment in Ireland, I think it necessary not only that there should be an established church, but that the establishment should be richly endowed. Sir, I wish that the establishment should be richly endowed, to enable the clergy to take their place among the nobles of the land. But, speaking in a political point of view, I have no hesitation in saying, that the existing Protestant establishment in Ireland is the grand bond of union between the two countries. If ever the unfortunate moment shall arrive at which the legislature shall rashly lay hands upon the property of the church, that moment will seal the doom of the Union, and terminate for ever the connexion between the two countries."

It certainly is not foreign to the subject upon which we write, to inquire what is the nature of the system, miscalled religious, to which ministers have determined to sacrifice the pure and tolerant church of Ireland. It is of the utmost importance to inquire what is the nature of that spiritual instruction, to the uncounteracted influence of which it is purposed to consign whole districts of the island. The commission which was issued under the great seal, directed the commissioners to report "such circumstances connected with the moral and political relation of the church establishment, and of the religious institutions of other sects, as might bring clearly into view their bearing upon the general condition of the people of Ireland." This certainly is information which the legislature should possess before they presume to decide the fate of our church establishment; but it was the folly of the commission to expect that this information could be procured by a few briefless and inexperienced barristers roving in their vagabond knighterrantry of spoliation. The effects of Popery on the condition of the people of Ireland, involve considerations on which the patriot dreads to reflect, and which the statesman trembles to approach. They may be read in the murders, and the outrages, and the barbarities which disgrace those districts where Popery prevails; they

Let

may be read in the blood-stained characters that write upon our island the fearful name, "the land of murder;" they may be traced in the perjuries, the awful disregard of oaths which characterises the whole popish population of Ireland, from the member of parliament who numbers himself among the thirty-five, to the peasant who swears himself the occupier of a freehold that he does not possess. Let him who wishes to see the effects of Popery, compare any county in Protestant Ulster, the land of peace aud order, with Popish Tipperary, where, in the short space of two years and five months, five hundred and fifty-six murders had been committed. him look to the late election for Carlow; let him look to the present state of that once happy but now distracted county. There the despotism of infuriate priests has trampled on alt the influence of property-has crushed all those relations of social life that interfered with its exercise-and ground down with the merciless cruelty of bigot tyranny all Protestant and all Roman Catholic independence. Two gentlemen of the highest moral worth, men upon whose characters all eulogy is superfluous, attempted to represent the county with which all their interests were identified. But the priests would have it otherwise; they put in nomination a stranger, a man whose religious creed appears to be strangely unsettled between Popery and Judaism: they exerted all the influence of priestly intolerance-they hallooed on the passions of a furious mob, and they triumphed-the fiendish triumph of ruffian agitation-the triumph of having disturbed the tranquillity of a county-the triumph of having prostrated all political independence of having set at variance all the classes of societyof having disorganized the whole social system-of having instigated to murder, by advice given from the altar of their God.

We see no reason now to conceal or palliate our opinions. Popery is the curse of Ireland. The conspiracies of the peasantry are adopted at the instigation of the priests. Is there any one mad enough to believe that, with the boundless influence the priests possess with the knowledge they de rive from the confessional-the combi

nations among the peasantry-sworn to extirpate Protestants "from the cradle to the crutch"-could proceed without their knowledge. This appalling fact, even the liberal judge Fletcher, was forced to confess, in his memorable address when he passed sentence upon the miscreants concerned in the burning of Wildgoose-lodge. It is vain to deny that the popish conspiracies, which for years have made Protestant life and property insecure, are but the engine by which Popery wields the physical strength of a superstitious population to carry into practical effect her unrecanted, her unforgotten dogmas of intolerance; and the ecclesiastical persecution, which was once administered by the holy office, now finds its more irregular, but not less effective agents in the members of the lawless confederacy, and of the midnight gang.

If the commissioners have failed to illustrate the bearing of Popery upon the general condition of the people of Ireland, the accidental discovery of the standard text-book of the Romish priesthood, has done something to supply their defects. We shall endeavour as concisely and clearly as possible, to lay before our readers the case which has been made out, unanswered, and unanswerable, against the Romish priests of Ireland, with regard to their adoption of Dens' Theology as their standard book of divinity. Perhaps the more brief and plain is our exposition, the more easily it will be remembered and understood. Of the opinions promulgated by Dens, we shall speak presently; but first let us state the evidence by which his book is fastened upon the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland.

Mr. Coyne, the Roman Catholic bookseller to the College of Maynooth, publishes each year, in Latin, a priest's directory, or almanac, arranged by a priest appointed for that purpose by Dr. Murray, for the use of the Romish clergy. To this calendar, for the year 1835, this respectable bookseller appended a catalogue of works, among which he announced a new edition of Dens' Theology: stating that "at a meeting of the Roman Catholic Prelates of Ireland, assembled in Dublin on the 14th day of September, 1808, they unanimously agreed, that DENS'

COMPLETE BODY OF THEOLOGY was the best book on the subject that could be republished; as containing the most secure guidance for such Ecclesiastics as may, by reason of the peculiar circumstances of this country, be deprived of the opportunity of referring to public libraries, or consulting those who may be placed in authority over them ;-in consequence, an edition of the work was ordered to be printed by the PRESENT PUBLISHER, to the number of 3000 COPIES. The work is now very rare, and scarcely to be met with. And inasmuch as his Grace, Dr. Murray, Dr. Doyle, Dr. Keating, and Dr. Kinsella, have made it the Conference book for the Clergy of the Province of Leinster, the Publisher, as well to obviate the difficulty experienced by them in procuring the work, as also to advance the cause of Religion and Morality in the other parts of the Irish Church, is induced to reprint a limited number of copies." And in the Priest's Directory for the last five years, the questions for the conferences of the priests are all avowedly taken from Dens. In the year 1831, the questions are expressly headed "Dominum Dens auctorem sequentes * discutiemus." This is the evidence tending to fasten this book upon the priesthood. The exculpatory evidence that has as yet been offered, is all contained in two letters, one from Dr. Murray, the Romau Catholic Archbishop, the other from Mr. Woods, the priest who arranged the directory. Neither of these letters in the slightest degree contradicts the evidence of Mr. Coyne's statement. Dr. Murray states that "the publication of the work was undertaken by a respectable bookseller at his own risk ;" and this in answer to the question, did or did not this respectable publisher falsify a resolution of all the Roman Catholic prelates of Ireland-for this and this alone is the question. And, in the next place, he states that he “did not make it the text book for their theological conferences; for" adds the Doctor with a true Jesuitical naivete, "on such occasions we have no such book, if by this expression we are to understand the work of any writer whose opinions (when not already defined by the church as articles of faith,) the clergy are required, or in any manner whatever expected to maintain. In fact,