num! In these very days, when Romanism is said to be rapidly developing itself in Germany and in England, whence comes its art? From Protestant converts, Pugin, Overbeck, &c. What is its philosophy? Mere eclectic sciolism, as far as we can see or hear, picked up from the great Protestant philosophers of Germany. The whole Neo-German movement of Romanism owes its life absolutely to the scraps which it has borrowed from its "heretic" enemy. Among its converts it cannot name a single first-rate man. A poor brain-sick, self-disgusted Werner; a shallow, brilliant Schlegel, perpetually mistaking fine words for deep thoughts; an ascetic enthusiast like Overbeck, who had no higher reverence for truth, no deeper insight into the history of art, than to say, that "he took the faith for the sake of the art which it had created." These are their trophies! But conceive Goethe turning Romanist, or Kant perhaps, or Fichte, or Herder, or any one, in fact, of the original thinkers of the Teutonic nations! As soon expect Luther's ghost to revive and make his solemn recantation! So it is with their own late conversions. Have we lost a single second-rate man even? One, indeed, we have lost, first-rate in talents, at least; but has not he by his later writings given the very strongest proof, that to become a Romish priest is to lose, ipso facto, whatever moral or intellectual life he might previously have had? Besides, who but fanatics attribute the movement to the Romish priesthood? They themselves talk of it as a miracle of Divine grace they stare in honest astonishment (well knowing their own inabilities) at the sight of English gentlemen and ladies converting themselves, and coming over to them by an entirely ab intra movement, ready persuaded to their hands; and they extol duly the enormous addition to their effete and threadbare order, of Protestant learning, Protestant vigor, Protestant experience, Protestant taste. truth, that "Jesuitry," which the mob may dread as a subtle poison, but which the philosopher considers as the deepest and surest symptom of moribund weakness? And yet these men are to convert England! But the priest is a subtle man of the world. How? Is a monkish education, a celibate life, likely to make men of the world? How much of the world young men must see at Stoneleigh! But their instructers have mixed in courts and camps- they know the hearts of Roman marchesas and Vienna diplomates. Really! The human heart must in this case be a shallower thing than prophets and poets, the much-loving and the many-sided of the earth, have fancied. No! If opera-worship and cicisbeism, foppery and profligacy, are the world if Italy and Spain now, if France under Louis Quinze, are specimens of the European world — in that society the priest may be strong. But can he cope with the earnest French democrat? And how will he cope with the English freeman - the English husband and father? Knowing only the darker side of men from the confessional, the casuists, and the merely vulpine and Machiavellian anthropology of his order; cut off from all human sympathies and ambitions, even from that lowest of all-money-making; looking at all the world through his narrow, pedantic, monkspectacles (not untinged with green, poor soul!); asking all human things but one question, “ Ultramontane, or not ultramontane?" who shall fear him? Be sure that, whenever he begins plotting, it will not require the practical sagacity and wide eye-range of the English layman to outwit him; he will outwit himself. Just when his cobweb seems most cunningly spun and stretched, some unexpected outburst of that strange, fathomless human nature, of which he knows so little, will sweep his web away, and leave him, where he has been periodically left for the last three centuries, expediency-mongering about the spinning of a new thread; upholding the old practice by truckling to the new principle; confusing himself into worse and worse imbecility, as the nations who need him no longer go on their way rejoicing. It was no false vision of Giant Pope, which John Bunyan saw in his Pilgrim's Progress. Nor was that a false vision either (and no offence to the author of Hawkestone) which Goethe saw in his Faust, of a worthy fanatic hunting Jesuits in the Walpurgis-dance itself, among the witches of the Brocken. This is a literary age, too, and a conquering party must be expected to show its strength in its books. What literature was ever at a lower ebb than the Romish at this moment? We owe an infinite debt to Michelet for having exposed boldly the miserable weakness, the vapid life-indeath of the Jesuit writings, with all their prurient prudery, their effeminate sentimentality, their ghastly conventional raptures. Even in Moohler himself what have we but the seven times exploded facts brought out again as if virgin and fire-new, the old sophism set up with Look, again, at the conduct of the Romish a new gilding, as if, perhaps, the world would priesthood in Ireland in these very days. What swallow it this time at last? Above all, in all is its distinguishing mark but intense foolishness? their authors, converts or indigenous, is there The folly of dreaming, as they do, of recovering not the same fearful want of straightforward | their confiscated lands and tithes; the folly (not to say wickedness) of keeping alive the old ha- | national lay spirit, which asserts the rights of the citizen, the husband, the individual conscience. This battle has to be fought in every Christian country; the married laymen and the celibate priest may make truce for a time, but they are focs in grain. tred against the Saxon, who, if exasperated, has, after all, only to crush them, or, worse still, leave them to themselves,- the folly of keeping alive, as they do, in the minds of the laity, old traditions about land, knowing all the while that if the Utopian absurdity came to pass, and Ireland were once more parcelled out among its original owners, "faithful sons of the Church," nothing would be left for her, swept clean of her only capital-the Saxon's money and the Saxon's energy, but the miseries of a mock-feudal barbarism and hopeless poverty. Ay, but "the Catholic system" would be in the ascendant; and for that fixed idea the fanatic will sacrifice his country, his conscience, and, to do him justice, his own life itself. Englishmen should really read the sayings, and watch the doings, of these men, and not be deterred from speaking out their conclusions by any superstitious dread, either of "bigotry" or of "latitudinarianism," but say boldly, "These priests are a foolish generation; that is about the best and the worst we can say of them." We have nothing to fear from them—but we have every thing to fear from our own fear of them. We have made our bugbear, and now we tremble at it. We have told the priest that he was strong and cunning-what wonder if he has believed us? We have told him that he was conquering Protestantism what wonder if he has redoubled his attack? We have given him what he sought, not generously and spontaneously, but piecemeal, and in proportion to the bullying which he has employed — what wonder if he has grown confident and insolent? We have rewarded his sedition and calumny with illegal titles of nobility, illegal episcopal rank in dioceses already Protestwhat wonder if he mistakes our apathy for cowardice, and fancies, not that England despises him, but that she fears him? We have been teaching the young that the Jesuit is strong and wise, at the same time that we have been monstrously magnifying his evil purpose what wonder if some get disgusted at the exaggeration of his sin, and yet retain the fancy of his power; and so begin to listen with the same awe with which we used to hear our nurse speak of Number Nip, or Raw Head and Bloody Bones? Teach your children to pity the Jesuit for a silly pedant, and there will be no fear of their hereafter accepting him as a mysterious philosopher. ant --- The truth is, the only people who need defending against the Romish priesthood in England are the Romish laity. The real history of England, from Ethelbert to the Reformation, is the history of a struggle, issuing in the complete victory of the laity, the anti-national and hierarchic spirit being gradually absorbed by the Now the English policy toward the Romish laity for centuries overlooked all this. It identified them most wrongly with their own priesthood. It restrained them by similar penal laws, and so forced the two to make common cause. It coerced the priesthood just enough to enlist all the chivalrous feeling of the laity in their defence, while it had not the heart to carry out persecution to any practical result. By debarring the Romanist from his rights as a citizen, it crushed in him that very national lay spirit which it ought most to have fostered; it forced him into contact with Ultramontane influence by forbidding him any other; into loyalty to the Pope, by giving him no other centre of attraction for his natural and honorable desire for corporate life. If the Romish laity be really, as some say, inferior in intellectual development to the average of Protestants of the same rank, it is because they have been shut out from political life, a field absolutely necessary for the full development of a British mind. Those crushing influences happily are past, and we may hope better things for the future. The extravagances of certain Irish politicians on their first emancipation must not dishearten us. Another generation, and Romish members of parliament will have sobered down; the speaking their minds in the noblest assembly on earth will have lost the excitement of novelty. We may fairly hope, from the analogy of history, that in half a century more the Romish layman will have discovered a citizen's vocation to be nobler than that of a fanatic; that when he has once felt the genial and fruitful liberty of civic life, he will spurn the yoke of his confessor; that the same antagonism will arise between our Romish laity and their priesthood which existed among their forefathers from the Conquest to the Reformation; which now obtains in every state of Romish Christendom, except those in which all individual thought and conscience are crushed by the tyranny of an absolute government. Viewed in this light, the late conversions to Rome will do their share of good, in bringing the Romish laity more and more in contact with the Protestant; which of the two will mould and absorb the other by its superior vitality and strength it is not difficult to foresee. But in fact such a revulsion of feeling seems to be already taking place. The manly and upright remonstrances of Lord Shrewsbury and Lord Arundel to the Irish bishops shew that they at least have no Surely this is not the belief of the English nation; but let not the Romanist petition, nor Mr. Gladstone's advice, be forgotten. It is time that men should have true and historic views on these subjects. The power of the hierachy in England, if not in Ireland, and in Rome itself, is blazing up, it seems, only to expire like a candle burnt down to its socket. thought of exalting the hierarchy above the de- | of the pope in civil matters!" Confess England mands of national law and order; and the treat- unable to rule herself! Are we come to this, ment which they have received in consequence then? What with expediency-mongering and proves better than all arguments the contradic- government from hand to mouth, Romanists may tion between the feelings and duties of a citizen in future spare themselves such useless petitions. and the demands of a priesthood. Those who Our Protestant Government assist them against are best acquainted with the subject assert pos- the Pope? Our Protestant Government itself itively that the power of the priests, even in Ire- requires the Pope's assistance! land, has been considerably shaken by the contrast between their conduct and that of the Protestant clergy during the late famine, and that the better class of laity boldly express their wish to be protected from their own priesthood; but independently of these facts (and facts they are,) a certain most significant petition, inserted in The Times of the 9th of February, sufficiently proves that a struggle is not impossible. This petition, which is said to represent the feelings of a numerous and influential body of Romanists, many of whose names are appended to it, was laid before Parliament in 1846, and "humbly prays the honorable House" for "protection for Roman Catholic congregations, incumbents, lay patrons, possessors of schools, chapels, and other objects of charitable donations and bequests;" and protection against whom? Against Protestant bigotry, against secular tyranny? No. Against "Rome and its agents;" against "the Pope's vicars-apostolic;" against "gross invasions of their temporal rights by power derived from the Pope and held at his pleasure;" against " uncanonical and illegal oaths imposed on the secular clergy, such as are not even known in Ireland, and suspension of priests who dare to accept incumbencies from lay-nominations; " against "being forced to seek redress in these temporal matters from Rome, which is contrary to their oaths as British subjects; praying," finally, that "the patronage and trusteeships of Romish chapels may be lodged, not in the Pope's vicars, but in one or more of the laity, under the protection of English law," so as to secure to the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical body, through the influence of persons of rank and responsibility, an antidote to disloyalty and disaffection towards the government and constitution of these realms." So speak true Englishmen, Romish as well as Protestant, and have done for centuries. This petition transports us back into the middle age. Here are the descendants of those who refused, in the sixteenth century, to share in our victory over the Italian monks, finding that they have now, after a lapse of three centuries, to fight the battle for themselves; let us hope and trust, with the same success and the same unexpected irradiation of spiritual truth which our forefathers gained for us. And yet in the face of this petition, Mr. Gladstone, in the House of Commons, is not ashamed to talk of "asking aid 99 66 66 The eyes of the Roman Catholic laity in England have begun to be opened to the real character of a large proportion of their priesthood in Ireland, and they have boldly remonstrated; and they have been answered, as was to be expected, first by quibbling, then by mere ribaldry and insult. As long as Lord Shrewsbury confined himself to accounts of Estatica and Addolorata sham-miracles, he was the very pillar of the church; no language could express his piety and excellence! But only let him speak out, as a loyal Englishman and humane Christian, and Romish prelates, and their organ the Tablet, inform him repeatedly, in the grossest language, that he has "not raised his character, either as a Catholic or a gentleman!"—in their eyes at least. And all this while what are the Romish clergy of England doing? What formal protest have they issued against the blackguardism (there is no other word for it) of M'Hale and O'Higgins, or the atrocious denunciations of M'Dermott and others? Not a word. On the contrary, the priests of the northern district of England have formally, by their vicar-general, expressed their extreme disapprobation of Lord Shrewsbury's conduct, "more especially in the instance of the very Rev. Mr. M Dermott," the denouncer of the murdered Major Mahon !!! The Pope's clear and manly, but cautious, rescript, has fallen like a shell among the Irish hierarchy; and a monk is on his way from Lord Shrewsbury to Rome, charged with those ugly things, facts, in evidence of the justice of his lordship's attack, and of the infamous misconduct of the priests. But what are Papal rescripts to us? The Irish altar-denunciators have offended against the spirit, if not against the letter, of English law - against the letter, as well as the spirit, of the laws of every other European nation. To law they are amenable; and if the existing statutes are insufficient to control them, it is the right and the duty of Englishmen to demand such new statutes as shall protect the Irish gentleman from obloquy and murder. It | Christian ministers justify to their own conis not by peddling back-tairs influence with the sciences for a moment such means and such a Pope it is not by indicting the denunciators spirit as actuates M'Hale and Co. ? only when murder has followed, that the nuisance is to be suppressed; the offence is equally an overt act, and therefore the subject of law, whether the evil suggestion be followed up or not. It may be a difficult matter to legislate against words, but when lives are at stake it is a duty absolute, however delicate. Again, let us have no backstairs influence with the Pope. If the object of Lord Lansdowne's new bill be to establish with his holiness the diplomatic relations usual with other temporal sovereigns, so far well. But let them be the usual relations; let them be secular and international, and not ecclesiastical and anti-national, setting at nought self-government, the very root and principle, not only of the Reformation, but of national life itself, by calling in a foreign authority to keep English subjects in order. This limitation of an ambassador's powers at Rome, Englishmen have surely a right to demand; and if his lordship's bill is viewed with suspicion, who will have been the cause of it but its noble author himself, when, in the House of Lords, he alleged the "peculiar | authority of the Pope" as the reason for instituting "the usual diplomatic relations with him?" In merely ecclesiastic and spiritual matters the Pope is welcome, in heaven's name, to whatever wholesome authority he can exercise over the "unruly wills and affections of sinful men." But such an authority of his is not a subject of diplomatic relations. It would be just as absurd to have sent an ambassador to Joe Smith the Mormonite leader, because a colony of his sect had been misconducting themselves in England. There is a plain answer, an old one, and fallen into very bad repute, from the bad hands who have meddled with it. But a thing is not a whit less true for having been abused; and whatever nonsense may have been talked on this point, there is sense enough now, grave, temperate, and circumstantial, brought to bear on it by the National Club. This body has lately formally renewed the Exeter-Hall assertion, that the Bull "Cœnæ Domini," "excommunicating and anathematizing" all Protestant sovereigns and magistrates, and all who refer to them in ecclesiastical matters of any sort; and the comments on this Bull, and on others similar to it; tend to nullify the authority of the Crown over the Romish clergy, and to hold up to their execration all loyal Protestants; and that these Bulls, as found in Dens, Reiffenstuel, and other Maynooth classbooks, are now secretly in force in Ireland. This is their charge, made in a very different spirit from that in which it was made of old in Exeter Hall, and from what one might have expected from certain Orange names on their committee list, some of which are happily disappearing. The Club certainly has no mind to take it for granted that every Romish priest is a villain, heap upon him wanton insult and imputations of the basest motives, and then prove their case anyhow or nohow; they never rail, they are gentlemanlike and businesslike; their fault, if they have one, is being too mild; and one who is not a member of the Club, and differs deeply from them on many points, will not be suspected of puffery when he says that their matter-of-fact tone is one of the most hopeful symptoms of the Protestant cause. In the case of the Bull "Cœnæ," they have gone far towards proving it to be at the root of much Irish fanaticism, they have proved, at least, that the whole charge of the Bull's being in force requires a searching investigation, and a documentary and diplomatic denial not merely from worthy English laymen like Lord Arundel, but from the authority whence it originally emanated, viz. from the Pope himself, who is bound thus to prove an ordinary national relation to us before we can admit him to an ordi But how to explain the conduct of the Irish "political priests," and their approving brethren of the "northern district of England?" Even folly and fanaticism must have a fancied ground of right. It may be a mere frantic hope of a general scramble, in which they might regain their lost lands and tithes. Absurd as is the dream, it is the daily increasing hope of many Romanists; and Dr. Wordsworth's Diary in France, p. 183, asserts, that, In the principal's room at the College des Irlandais, Rue des Postes, at Paris, is a map of the estates of Ireland, as they were in olden time before they were confis-nary diplomatic one. cated. He pointed out to me the estates which had belonged to his own family." Significant, truly! It is notorious, again, that holders of confiscated land in Ireland are especially liable to denunciation and murder. There may be, not unlikely, a plot to frighten away all Protestant landlords, and leave the Brian Boru aristocracy triumphant and alone. But how do The dangerous tendency of the Bull may be judged of from Romanist testimony. Dr. Doyle, when before a select committee of the Lords in 1828, denied that the Bull was in force in Ireland, said that, "if it were, there is scarcely any thing which would be at rest among the Catholic states of Europe; and that they have been as solemn and earnest in protesting against it as we have been in any period in England." And | XIV., and canons of the fourth Lateran CounDr. M'Hale asserted that "his objection against receiving the Bull was, the collision which would be supposed to result from the publication of that Bull with the established authorities of the country." Again, the mere publication of the Bull, with its history, and the assertion that it was now in force in Ireland, was sufficient to elicit a letter from Lord Arundel, most creditable to his loyalty and kindly tolerance, in which he does not attempt to deny either the existence or the pernicious character of the Bull, but grounds his whole defence of the Romanists on arguments to prove that the Bull is obsolete. Now no one dreams that the Bull is anything but utterly obsolete in practice as far as regards the English Roman Catholic laity; but with regard to its obsoleteness in the abstract these facts are at least worth considering: 1. That the Bull (and this Lord Arundel does not attempt to deny) is unrepealed, remains part and parcel of the canon law, and has been published as such, with all possible authority and imprimatur in the Bullarium, Rome, 1835-44; Reiffenstuel's Canon Law, 1831-4; the notorious Dens, 1832; and in an edition of Bailly printed at Dublin expressly for use of Maynooth, 1828. 2. That the Bull itself and its commentators just mentioned, formally and at great length, take pains to assert its perpetual obligation, independent of its non-republication, or any customs, &c., to the contrary, which may be temporarily connived at by Rome," and quote it in various parts of their works as now in force. To this Lord Arundel answers, and, no doubt, with complete honesty of intention, that these canonists themselves are more or less obsolete,—that the priesthood who publish and recommend them do not thereby swear to all that they may choose to say. We must judge of that by their conduct, M'Hales and O'Higginses par exem ple. Again, Lord Arundel says that the Bull ceased to be published annually about 1745, and then became a dead letter. But, how, then, was it that Dr. Doyle confessed that the Bull had been declared to be in force in Ireland in the year of the Rebellion, 1793, — i. e. the very first time that there was any chance of practically enforcing it? How was it (and this fact is a new and important one) that at the Jubilee in 1800 the Pope in a rescript mentioned the Bull Cœnæ by name as then in force, and gave directions in regard to its censures? But, be it practically in force or not, what shall we say of the suicidal folly and pedantry of those who retain in their class-books this very Bull, and the still more obnoxious constitutions of Benedict cil, &c., when they know that these have been for centuries the bitterest causes of contention and mistrust between Protestants and themselves? If they are obsolete, in the name of peace let them be formally and in a written document repealed. If the competent authorities refuse to repeal them, who is to be blamed if he believes that they are retained in the Romish canon law for the purpose of reviving them at the first convenient opportunity? Who is to be blamed if he imputes to their teaching the disorders of Dr. M'Hale and his party, who have long since thrown to the winds their only original objection to the Bull, - namely, the "fear of a collision with the constituted authorities?" If valid, this Bull and its compeers are treasonable; if invalid, they are scandals, at once useless and ruinous, to the reputation of the priesthood. And, finally, (to return to the keynote of this article,) what a pitiable exhibition of the weakness of the Romish Church, that while Reiffenstuel, their most famous and authoritative canonist, writing about 1745, describes, and rightly, the Bull "Cone" as "almost the only remaining pillar and defence of the faith," Romanists are nowadays using all their endeav ours to prove that remaining pillar to be obsolete! Three things, then, must be done. A formal repeal of the obnoxious Bulls ought to be demanded and obtained. The Romish laity must be taught that we, too, believe them as much as Lord Arundel believes us to be "brethren, children of a common Father," our perfect equals in civil rights. Lastly, the Irish laity, both Romish and Protestant, must be defended from the denunciations of the priesthood, and from their excommunications also, wherever those excommunications are accompanied or followed by threats and curses, or injury in person, property, or trade. Toleration is a fine thing, but it is no god, as some people seem inclined to make it, in their truly superstitious cant about "liberality," perfect "religious freedom," &c. It has its limit, because no opinions can be tolerated which issue in violations of the universal human laws of morality, and in a disregard to human life. Lord Shrewsbury has implicitly acknowledged this same limit, and says that he wrote his first remonstrance from fears (evidently excited by the addresses of the National Club) that Government would think it necessary to interfere. The Romish and the Protestant laity, then, are now openly combined against the Irish priests. If a timid and truckling Government refuse to listen to their demands for justice, and continue to allow that order a license unknown in any |