V. * Not to be concerned in any thing prejudicial to the

* Pope or Roman Church ; but as far as they are able to pre- 1 vent the 6ame.' *
Such are the obnoxious clauses of the Bishops* consecra- tion oath, in the midst of which is inserted in express words, a saving clause which speaks the dignity of Catholic Bishops, and reconciles their allegiance to their respective Sovereigns with the canonical obedience due to their head pastor. Salvo meo ordine— Saving my order. This clause does away every difficulty, and leaves the sceptre in the Prince's hands, whilst it leaves the censer in the hands of the Pontiff.
The oath then is but an oath of canonical obedience due from an inferior to a superior, in every church that acknow- ledges a Hierarchy. But an oath of allegiance is due to Temporal Princes alone ; and doubtless the Bishops in the Pope's states can take both one and the other, for in those- states they have no other Sovereign.
When then they bind themselves to preserve, defend, en- large and promote the rights, honours, privileges and autho- rity of the Roman Church and its Pontiff! Catholic Bi- shops mean their just rights, their just honours, their just pri- vilege s, and their just authority, which do not nor can extend to the overthrow of states, nor to the usurpation of the just and lawful rights, honours, privileges, and authority of others.
For an oath is not a tie of iniquity : an unjust oath taken to God himself is not binding ; and an oath taken to one person to the prejudice of another is null and void. Hence the religious warrior in the Scripture, who in consequence of his oath offered up his daughter, offered to God a sacrilegious sacrifice'. Herod, who bound himself by oath to give the young woman who danced in his presence, whatever she re- quired, was guilty of murder in giving her the Prophet's head ; and the Bishops would be guilty of robbery, treachery, and profanation, if they bound themselves by their consecra- tion to dethrone their Sovereigns, plunder individuals, and disturb the peace and order of civil society, to defend, en- large, and promote the royalties of Saint Peter, which are merely confined to a Spiritual Supremacy, and extend to no superiority in temporals. Let the form of words be what it
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may, the Bishops never take that oath in any sense injurious to Sovereigns, nor to civil society. The Sovereign Pontiff knows they do not: before they are consecrated, they must swear allegiance to their respective Sovereigns, who are as jealous of their privileges as any Protestant Mo- narchs.
Oaths and laws are liable to interpretation; and one gene- ral rule prevails, that a greater stress is to be laid on the sense than on the words. The Bishops are not only the most com- petent judges of their own meanings, but moreover secure their own dignity, and the rights of their respective Sove- reigns, by an express clause ; Salvo meo online, saving my order, as a Bishop who receives his jurisdiction and the right of determining oh doctrinal matters by his consecration, and not as a vassal or vicegerent of the Pope. Salvo meo ordine, Saving my order, as a subject bound to give Caesar his due, and to pay allegiance to the reigning powers in whose states I reside. Salvo meo ordine, Saving my order, as a Minister of the Gospel, who is to preach the word, and who takes his oath in no other sense, than to prosecute by arguments, and impugn by persuasion, reason and good example, those who are of a different persuasion, and are willing to be con- vinced. Any other prosecution or persecution, let the term be what it may, is inconsistent with humanity, much more with the order of a Christian Prelate, who takes not, who cannot take the oath in any other sense. He cannot take the sword out of the hands of the civil magistrates, nor injure any description of men who are under the protection of the state.
Does die Lord Bishop of Cloyne mean to hold up the Ca- tholic Prelates all over the world, as a set of perjurers ? Are the Catholic Bishops in Germany, some of whom are Sove- reign Princes, with numbers of religious descriptions in their states, are they perjurers ?
This cavil at the Catholic Bishops' consecration oath, is but a dispute about words. They themselves know best in what sense they take it ; and no Catholic Prelate on earth takes it in the sense which the Lord Bishop of Cloyne intimates to the public.
When the Proctors of the Court of Arches are sworn into
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office, they bind themselves by oath, without any 4 Salvo or 4 reserving clause, never to impugn, diminish, or abridge the 4 rights, liberties, or privileges of* the church of Canterbury 4 in manner whatever.' Quoquo Modo.
JVunquam ad impugnationem, diminutionem, vel Itesionem juris, libcrtatis, vel privilegit Cantuuriensis, KccUsicb postulabo ; nee jus libertatem, vel privilegeiimi ejusdem Ecclesice quoQuo modo, impiignabo, &c. (vide statuto de arcabus, Stratford.) — Yet Oughton in his ordo judiciorum, De causis testamen- trus ; Titulus, 224, acknowledges that in certain cases they can decline the jurisdiction of the Court of Prerogative, though it is incumbent on them in such cases to proceed with, the greatest and most delicate sincerity, in order not to incur the guilt of perjury, ' JYotandum tamen est quod expedit pro- 4 curatori negaati jurisdicfionem curiae, prerogatives, bona et op- 4 timajide alias commit tit perjurium.''
It is well known, that the prerogative courts claim juris- diction in many cases in which the courts of Common law deny them jurisdiction ; yet it would be absurd to sav that the Proctors of those prerogative courts are enemies to the laws of the realm, or perjure themselves in consequence of their oath, as it is absurd to imagine that Catholic Bishops are by their profession hostile to the rights and privileges of their respective Sovereigns, or perjure themselves by taking an oath of Canonical obedience. In the Prelate's oath, there is an express saving clause. — In the Proctor's oath there is no reserve, but such as justice and reason im- ply: all oaths must be reasonable and just. And in the in- terpretation of them, the intention of the swearers and of those to whom they are taken, and the sense in which both parties understand them, are to be strictly attended to.
The Lord Bishop of Cloyne then might with propriety have spared himself the trouble of alarming the public with the consecration oath of Catholic Prelates; especially as his own consecration oath is not favourable if literally taken for want of the dignified saving clause inserted in the oath of Catholic Bishops.
R R
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COPY OF THE LORD BISHOP OF CLOYNE'S CONSECRATION
OATH.
(TAKEN FROM THE ENGLISH CARDINAL.)
The Archbishop's Interrogatory to the Bishop-Elect.
4 Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and 4 drive away all erroneous and all strange doctrines, contrary 4 to God's word, and both privately and openly to call upon 4 and encourage others to the same ?
Answer. 4 I am ready, the Lord being my helper.'
The reader may judge whether the above oath be not tantamount to prosecute and impugn Heretics and Schisma- tics. Nay, they go further ; for the Catholic Prelate uses the dignified language of Salvo meo online, and does not bind himself to call upon and encourage others privately and openly to the same. What an alarming comment would not malevolent writers make on the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's consecration oath in those Protestant and Catholic States, where free toleration is granted, if they were as active in ex- cluding the members of the church of England from na- tional confidence, as the Lord Bishop of Cloyne has been in excluding Irish Dissenters and Catholics; or Counsellor Dominick Trant, who calls them internal confederated enemies against the conMitution.
^ How these words privately encouraging others, would be tortured to the prejudice of the two Bishops, who were con- secrated the other day in Lambeth Palace, in order to in- struct their flocks in America, where unfettered conscience enjoys that innate freedom of which tests and penalties have deprived unhappy persecuted mortals !
The affinity of one oath with the other was so glaring, that it drew equal vengeance on the Bishops of the church of England, as well as on the Catholics, during those un- happy scenes which distracted England in the reign of Charles the First. Papists and Malignants were equally ob-
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 305
noxious to people who perceived such a thin partition be- tween both, and similarity of ceremonies, mitres, confirma- tion, consecrations and oaths, scarce discernible.
What is the meaning of the words, to ' banish and drive ' away all erroneous and strange doctrines, and encourage ' others privately and openly to the same ?' The Lord Bi- shop of Cloyne, who must believe that Bishops are jure divino, must believe the doctrine of the Dissenters strange V and erroneous. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne, who believes that two sacraments are necessary to salvation, must believe the doctrine of the Quakers strange and erroneous. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne, who believes the Catholics to be Idolaters, violators of faith with Heretics, must believe their doctrine enormously and horridly strange and erroneous. What is then the consequence ? That the Lord Bishop of Cloyne is bound to banish and drive away the Dissenters, Catholics, Quakers: in a word, all Adam's children who do not pro- fess his creed. His pamphlet shews it : his Lordship hints to a dispensing power in the Church of Rome, I most ear- nestly recommend a dispensation with any oath, which de- prives mortals of the rights to which they are entitled by nature, and which they have not forfeited by their personal crimes. He should then have left the consecration oath of Catholic Prelates, who in every age, have been an ornament to human nature by their philanthropy, their learning, and the purity of their lives; he should have left it where he found it, in an old Pontifical, on the shelf of a College Li- brary, and foreseen that his own oath would be sought for in his ordinal, when he would examine into the oaths of others ; if both are to be taken in the literal sense, they are very well matched, and should discover in each other's face a striking similiarity of features, such as ought to be between an elder and younger sister, to use the words of the ingenious Mr. Barber.
This affinity, however, has been very troublesome to the unhappy Catholics of England and Ireland, ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to this very day. In Holland and Switzerland, Protestants and Catholics live together in the greatest harmony : in some parts of Germany, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics, say their prayers in the same
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church, each in their turn. And doubtless a passenger or* earth may succeed another in a house of worship, to offer up a few prayers, as one traveller succeeds another at an Inn, and sits down at the same table on which another traveller had taken his repast an hour before. In Upper Alsatia, Protestants and Catholics study in the same University ; and in Paris, the youth of all nations and religions may study the sciences, and attend what lectures they think fit, in the Universities and other Seminaries of learning, where quick parts and a comprehensive genius are attended to. But where students' religion is no matter of concern to a professor, who explain to his hearers either the Justinian code, or Hippocrates's aphorisms, or Quintilian's institu- tions, what reason to assign for disputes about religion in this kingdom, I am at a loss ? ' Is the Pope more formidable « here than in Holland, Switzerland, and other places more 6 contiguous to Italy?' Is it on account of the difference of belief? The Catholic creed is the same all over the world : an Irish peasant believes neither more or less than a Fenelon or Bissuet. Is it on account of the Pope's all- dispensing power ? Is his Omnipotence more prevalent here than ejsewhere ? Because the Catholic Clergy of Ireland dq not choose to change their creed, does the Lord Bishop of Cloyne imagine they are so ignorant as to con- found a Legate's letter, or a Pope's decree with the doc- trine of the Catholic Church ? History informs them that a Pope was excommunicated after his death, on a suspicion of having favoured the doctrine of theMonothelites; that Pope John the Twenty-second, was obliged to retract the doc- trine which he preached at Avignon, where he asserted that the souls of the Saints were not to enjoy the beatific vision, or the clear sight of God before the last judgment; and that Popes were deposed by a Council, to put an end to disorder and schism : the Pope's infallibility then can be no part of their creed : they acknowledge him as the head pas- tor of their religion : but the pasturage on which he is to feed the flock, is not at his choice. The boundaries are pre- scribed, and under the controul of unalterable faith, and the Universal Canons of the church, he would not dare to re- move the land-marks : if he attempted to publish the Charter
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School Catechism, which (I am informed) was composed by, or compiled under the direction of the Lord Bishop of Cloyne, the Catholic body would depose him, and elect another in his room. Is it from dread of the Pope's deposing power, and the implicit obedience due to his mandates ? Who can name a prince deposed by the Pope, in virtue of his spiritual authority ? Can the prince be named who parted tamelv with his crown, and opened his gates when St. Peter sounded the trumpet and ordered him to surrender ? If in a memo- rable dispute between a Pope and an Emperor, about investi- tutes, the latter was worsted, it was a contest in which com- pacts and agreements were pleaded on both sides, and sup- ported by powerful parties ; but in this very contest have not Catholic subjects fought against the Pope in defence of their Sovereign? Have not the Catholic Barons and Clergy of England, with Archbishop Langton at their head, obtained the great charter of English liberty, in defiance of the threats, menaces, and excommunications of Pope Innocent the Third ? Is it for any degeneracy peculiar to the Roman Catholic re- ligion, which makes contemptible cowards of its votaries? The gallant Richard Cceur de lion, was the admiration of Europe and Asia ; where James the First, whom the Lord Bishop of Cloyne admires for his wise saying no Bishop, no King, used to shut his eyes whenever he drew the sword to perform the ceremony of dubbing a Knight : is it for want of valour and heroism ? The heroes of Agincourt and Cressi, who said their beads on the evening of those memorable bat- tles, which will immortalize them in the annals of the world, were as brave as Marlborough, who was obliged to make a declaration of war against the Virgin Mary, before he could draw his sword in Flanders. Is it on account of the alloy of slavery, peculiarly blended with their profession ?
When Attila flew over Italy like a vulture, a few Catho- lics, unable to resist by land, took shelter in the sea ; and like the Halcyon that builds his nest on the calm surface of the water, in that very element they laid the foundation of a Re- public, equally famous for preserving its liberties against the Popes of Rome, and the Turkish Emperors of Constanti- nople. Without any breach of faith, or rupture of Catholic communion, the keys of Saint Peter painted on the Pontiff's
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Tiara, and the crescent raised on the top of the Saracen's turban, are equally obnoxious to Catholic republicans, if either nodded at any attempt against their liberties. Where then can the Lord Bishop of Cloyne find the truth of his as- sertion, that despotic States have found in the Papal autho- rity a congenial system of arbitrary dominion ? Has not the Temple of Liberty (from whose very corners he endeavours to exclude the natives of these realms,) been erected by Ca- tholic hands, long before Langton could foresee that a Bishop would misrepresent his creed ? Have not Catholic States op- posed this Papal authority so congenial, according to the Lord Bishop of Cloyne, with the system of arbitrary dominion. Are not Protestant Monarchs as despotic as Catholic Kings ? Does not the small Republic of Ragusa change its governor every month, lest a longer continuance in office would ena- ble him to become the petty sovereign of a small territory ? Where is this congeniality of Papal authority with arbitrary dominion, so interwoven with the frame of a Catholic creed as to make them inseparable ? Or can a Bishop be so much a stranger to human nature, as to be ignorant of one of its most undeniable principles ? One man resembles another, and every one chooses to be free.
SECTION THE FOURTH.
Containing Cursory Remarks on the Lord Bishop of Cloyne 's
Pamphlet,
Had I not seen the Reverend Mr, Barber's pamphlet, and got information that strictures on the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's publication are sent to the press, by a gentleman of more distinguished abilities than I can pretend to, I would examine his Lordship's possessions in every section of his work. Others have exempted me from the task. And my principal design was to enter into a full vindication of the Catholic body, and of myself, whom his Lordship's work is
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 309
calculated to render peculiarly obnoxious to the reigning powers.
After having committed himself with the Dissenters and Catholics, he makes a peculiar attack on the regular clergy by an innuendo, that agitating friars and Romish missionaries may be sent here to sow sedition. I challenged his Lordship in the public papers, and in the course of my defence, to pro- duce one : he cannot : he hints that Theophilus may have some information of such. Let Theophilus appear, and he shall be branded as a lying witness. I am extremely sorry that his Lordship should mention such a slanderer in his pamphlet; as for my part, my ian.dlord, Mr. Augustus War- ren, a Member of Parliament, and a gentleman, who, at the very beginning of the disorders, took an active and honour- able part in suppressing them, is now in town; he would not honour me with his friendship, nor give me free access to his house and library, whenever I chose to retire from the bustle of cities, if he discovered in me a seditious tenant. The regular clergy of this kingdom are a part of the Catholie body, whom they instruct and edify under the directions of the Catholic Prelates.
Does the Lord Bishop of Cloyne intend to raise a perse- cution against them, and thus, through their sides, to wound the Catholics at large, with whom they are so closely con- nected by the ties of blood, and the mutual interchange of good offices ? They have not those fine gardens and rich monasteries which could excite the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's jealousy; and which the Emperor of Germany would sell to increase his treasury, as he has curtailed the revenues of such Bishops as are not foreign princes. The stricter their vow, the less cumbersome they are to society, as they are lite- rally content with what Saint Paul was satisfied, food and rai- ment; many of them have left good fortunes to their younger brothers: all have renounced their share of the inheritance; and such of them as had but a small dividend to share, made a generous sacrifice, when they renounced all earthly prospects. Should the contempt of the vanities of the world, and a disinterested heart, be deemed objects of cen- sure in ecclesiastics, they should not be held in such a view by a Bishop, who finds them recommended in the Scrip-
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tures. Neither will they ever be deemed such by the laity, who will esteem the clergy the more in proportion as they practise what they preach. 1 write here of the regular clergy of Ireland, who run the same career with the rest of the Catholic clergy of the kingdom, and whose common ancestors fell prostrate in the promiscuous ruin, occasioned by confiscations and forfeitures. If a revival of claims, so often mentioned in the senate, and bandied about in flying pamphlets, can tend to render them obnoxious, there is no doubt, but that they should be objects of jealousy with the rest of the Catholics, should those claims be ever asserted. For the Catholic clergy, both secular and regular, are de- scended from the same stock with the Catholic laity, and from ancestors who in their days were neither hewers of wood nor drawers of water. But those claims 1 have done away by scripture, canon and civil law, and reason, in my address to the common people, when the combined fleets were on our coasts, and a revival most likely to ensue. For, at that time, the unprotected Catholic had nothing to lose, and on each Catholic clergyman's head hung the naked sword of proscription. 1 had some time before confirmed the throne in his Majesty's family, against the claims of Stu- arts, Bourbons, and the House of Sardinia. This I have done in my Loyalty asserted, as far as a writer possessed of abilities, which have nothing to recommend them but the sincerity of the author, could confirm the throne of a prince, whose Catholic subjects are compared to a pack of hounds, impatient to run down the Royal Game.
The only reward I expect for my labour, is not to be in- sulted by any oblique insinuation, that I am sent here to sow sedition. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne softens the innuendo in these words, / do not say that Mr. O'Leary is sent here to sow sedition ; but, &c. If he did not say it, why mention my name as a dessert, after having regaled his reader with so many courses ? Sent here ! I imagined that St. Paul recom- mends hospitality to Bishops, and that a Prelate would be more generous than to envy an Irishman the liberty of breath- ing his native air. If Swift were alive,he would not be very thankful to the Lord Bishop of Cloyne ; but Swift would be at liberty to indulge his thoughts in their full latitude ; I
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 311
must be cautious, under the heaviest provocation. The Lord knows that it is hard for me ! I was not sent here ! I came here, after having been forced in my early days into foreign countries, for a small portion of education, which was re- fused me in the land of my fathers, because I would not couple Tully's Orations with a Charter- School Catechism.
I was not sent here to sow sedition : I returned here, not as a fellon from transportation, but as an honourable exile, who returns to his native land, after having preferred a vo- luntary banishment, to ignorance and the abjuration of the creed of his fathers.
I appeal to Richard Longfield, Esq. Member of Parlia- ment, whether, at the very beginning of the disturbances in the diocese of Cloyne, I have not given the sincerest proof of the most unfeigned determination to co-operate in the restortion of peace and tranquillity. That gentleman soon suppressed the tumults in his own district: because the humanity of the landlord gave an additional weight of respect and love to the authority of the magistrate. 1 say it not from flattery, to which I am an utter stranger : had all the gentlemen of consequence in the county of Cork, exerted themselves as Mr. Richard Longfield and Mr. Augustus Warren have done; had they, in imita- tion of the above-mentioned gentlemen, rendered their au- thority as amiable from benevolence to their tenants, as it was formidable from the powers invested in them by the laws, the disturbances would not have outlived the space of six weeks. Wherever the landlords were ac- tive and generous, and advised the people, either no disorders appeared, or were soon suppressed ; and had the Lord Bishop of Cloyne been as active in visiting his dio- cese, and publishing pastoral letters, as he was intent upon collecting materials for a pamphlet, to surprise the public on the eve of the meeting of Parliament, he would have contri- buted to the prevention or suppression of the tumults in con- currence with Mr. O'Leary.
But the Lord Bishop of Cloyne was secure in the protection of the state. The peace of society was left to the other guardians : the people were wretched, miserable, and mad :
s s
;i!2 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
several gentlemen were not much concerned for the injuries offered to the clergy of either religion ; policy, which often expects benefits from popular commotions so destructive to the simple, might have induced others to remain silent and inactive in the prospect of providing for their adherents, under the extension of a general police bill ; a bill which was then expected in consequence of popular tumults, which adepts in political wisdom, were more active in magnifying than preventing. It was reported in the eity of Cork, that a certain Reverend Gentleman in the diocese of Cloyne* used to go in the night-time with armed men to sound a horn near a cluster of cabins, in order to make prisoners of such as would appear to gratify their curiosity ; an expedient well becoming a minister of the Gospel ! Bu| with some persons every expedient is justifiable, when Popish plots are to be contrived to give it a sanction : but every idea of such plots is done away, by the very re- solves of the Gentlemen and Freeholders of the county of Cork : resolves wherein they censure the inactivity and in- exertions of many magistrates and gentlemen of property, on the breaking out of the disturbances, and on the continuance of them. f
It would have been no difficult matter to have smothered them in their birth, as I remarked in my narrative. Firm- ness and humanity would have prevented the disorder. I recommended it in the beginning. For were I a man in power, I never would take for my guides, Rehoboam coun- sellors ; My father whipped you with rods, I will whip you with scorpions. I recommended it in presence of the present Earl of Carhampton, then Lord Lutterell. It was happy for the ill-fated Catholics that such a nobleman of his character, for honour and impartiality, was on the distracted spot. It was happy for them that the Representatives in Parliament for the County and City, and other members who reside in the South of Ireland, are acquainted with local circumstances, and well known for honour, justice and humanity. Other-
* Perhapsthe Author of the Letter found on the road from Cork to Clonaghkilty, aiad- addressed to Doctor O'Leary, by William O'Driscoll.
t County of Cork meeting, 7th December;, 1786.
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wise Government would have been imposed on, and the Catholics of Ireland would be in a worse state in the year eighty-seven, than they had been in the year forty-five.
The county of Cork meeting agreed to a resolution, which may serve as a rule well adapted to the times of commotions arising from distress. Resolved, that as we are determined to punish all violators of the public peace, so we are equally desirous to aid in redressing any persons who shall appear to us to be really aggrieved. Both wisdom and humanity penned that resolution. Had it been entered into, and carried into execution in the month of September or October eighty-five, instead of the seventh of December, in the year eighty-six, the county would have been quieted a long time before. Do not strike until you listen, was a maxim with an Athenian General. It is better to listen in time, than to strike when the mischief is done : it was my maxim from the beginning. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne would have acted in a manner more consistent with his character, in enforcing that maxim than in publishing a pamphlet, every page of which can be controverted by the Dissenters and Catholics of Ireland. Nay, his favourite plan about tithes and commutations is found defective by the most sensible writers of his own communion. From the beginning to the last line of his pamphlet, he cannot sup- port an argument without forcing the Catholics into his subjects. In the forty-seventh page, he describes the re-
ig 1 an exemption from the public taxes, and the civil jurisdic-
* tion of their own country; and avowing a subjection to a
* foreign pft\ver, were and are a natural object of jealousy 1 and apprehension.' Mr. Standish, the Hearth-money col- lector in Cork, can refute the assertion ; if I had his receipts in Dublin, I would place them in my appendix, with those of my landlord's and my tailor's bill ; for the money 1 get circulates amongst the public.
314 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
The Lord Bishop of Cloyne, in a catechism, ^printed under his direction, (as 1 am told,) impresses the tender and uncautious minds of foundlings with a notion that viola- tion of faith with and extirpation of heretics, indulgences for committing sins in the ensuing course of a man's life, and license for guilt, are articles of the Catholic faith. The compiler of such a catechism may misrepresent the regular clergy with every freedom. He must then certainly mean the regular clergy in foreign countries, of whose state he is as incompetent a judge as I am of the regulations of Westminster School, which I have never seen.
The regular clergy have no interest distinct from the ge- neral weal. They are as much interested in the preserva- tion of the state, from which they have got their lands and monasteries, as the Lord Bishop of Cloyne is interested in the preservation of Ireland, where he has very good livings. He would have, 1 suppose, the regular clergy of the church of Rome to shoulder a firelock, sound horns, and shoot Whiteboys. In every age since their institution, they have been engaged in a more glorious warfare, civilizing barbar- ous nations, diffusing the light of the gospel into remote re- gions, whither the Alexanders and Caesars had never car- ried their arms, contributing extensively to the culture of the sciences, and swelling the deep and majestic rivers of European literature, with their tribute of the knowledge of the histories, laws, customs and manners of the most remote and distant nations. I do not talk here of the Jesuits alone, who in the very centre of barbarism, amongst cannibals, feeding on each other's flesh, realize the sublime ideas of a Plato, a Sir Thomas More, or a Fenelon. Those great men only dreamt of those political institutions under which
* In that Catechism there is not one word of the commandments of God, nor ex- planation of any moral duty. The honour of the nation cries aloud to. the right honourable and honourable the Trustees of the Protestant Schools, to order some un- prejudiced person to compose another Catechism : for besides the horrid and un- christian doctrines falsely imputed to the Catholics, in that Christian doctrine there are two historical untruths.— First, that a hundred thousand Protestants were massacred in Ireland. — Secondly, that Protestants are not tolerated in Cathojic States. If thqt Catechism were seen in foreign countries, what an opinion would be formed of our enrly education !
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man could live happy, without the canker of envy or the stings of poverty. A branch of the regular clergy of the church of Rome raised the fabric, which procured them the compliments of Montesquieu, and the admiration of the world. Civilized and christian Paraguay, from a nation of Cannibals, became the only spot on earth where vice and want were equally unknown.
To this very day the Catholic religion is maintained in Turkey land, Abyssinia, and the remotest Pegtons, by the labours of men whom their vows and a generous contempt of the pleasures of this world naturalize to every nation and climate. Their method is quite different from that pre- scribed by the Lord Bishop of Cioyne for the propagation of the Gospel ; a method which exposes religion to the deri- sion of infidels, and renders the proposer vulnerable to every arrow which can be taken from the quivers of the learned. His Lordship informs us gravely that his religion will extend in proportion to agriculture. Bravo ! this is lite- rally planting the Gospel, and making it the religion of the land, in every sense of the word : Saint Paul says that god- liness is great gain. The Lord Bishop writes as if gain were great, godliness: he sanctifies the soil before he sanctifies the soul; pity that crows and pigeons have not the use of speech as they had in iEsop's time ! His clergy would have a great number of fellow-labourers in the Lord's vineyard. The feathered tribe would cry out to the peasant, my good man, sow the corn, and I will be with you next year to reclaim you from the errors of Popery.
The next method his Lordship proposes is an effort on the part of Government to bring the Irish language into dis- use, in order to save his clergy the trouble of learning it. This method is an insult to the natives, and cannot come w.'th any propriety from a prelate, who (if I be well in- formed) is indebted for his promotion to the descendant of Irish princes, in whose hospitable halls the tuneful lyre was strung up to Irish melody, so varied and harmonious that the lying Giraldus Cambrensis was forced to speak of it with rapture and ecstasy. But now, at the awful summons of an E.iglish prelate, the Irish harp must be suspended on the branch of some weeping willow, as the Israelites hung up
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their musical instruments on the mulberry-trees that grew on the banks of the rivers of Babylon. How can we sing (used they to say) the canticles of the Lord in a strange land? And the Irishman can say, How can I speak the language of my fathers in the land of my nativity ? His language must be abolished at the recom- mendation of the Right Reverend Doctor Woodward ; this language, the study of which the learned Leibnitz and Lhuid so warmly recommended to the curious inquirers into the monuments of antiquity; this language, studied by a learned stranger,* who has reconciled Mars with Minerva, in uniting the sword with the pen, military skill with literary powers, and by his learned labours has rescued from obscu- rity the history of a misrepresented nation, formerly the Athens of western Europe : thus Caesar studied astronomy in the camp, whilst the priests of Apollo snored in the tem- ple. A military gentleman studies the Irish language, to increase the store of the literary public. The prelate, whose function it is to sanctify the souls of the natives, re- commends the growth of their grain for the food of the cler- gyman's body, and the abolition of their language for the good of their souls.
Thus the Irish peasant must work double tides to sail for heaven. He must grow corn for an English pastor's body, and study this English parson's language for the good of his own soul, lest a pair of brogues would be too uncourtly a dress to appear in the antichamber of heaven. Badinage apart. Such a recommendation for the abolition of lan- guages should rather come from a leader of Goths and Vandals, whose glory it was to destroy monuments of lite- rature, than from the Bishop of a large diocese, in a philoso- phical age, when curiosity is on the wing, and the mind active in the pursuit of knowledge. The Lord Bishop's method then of propagating his gospel is the most extraordinary that 1 ever read of; to sow corn and ex- tend agriculture for the conveniency of the clergyman, and to oblige the peasant, after the toils of the day, to learn the clergyman's language, in order to know the way to heaven, which the clergyman would not
* Colonel Vallancey.
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take the pains of telling him in Irish. A true repetition of Erasmus's echo, Quid est sact.dotiam ? Echo. Otinm.
I have read of a Saracen emperor, who, from hatred to lite- rature, burnt the AkxanJrian library ; but I never read of a Christian prelate Intent upon the conversion of people by whom he was fed, who, instead of learning their language, recommended its disuse, unHi I read the pamphlet oi the. Lord Bishop of Cloyne. The present Bishop of Llandaff could not speak a word of Welch when he came to Wales. Instead of recommending to the English government to abo- lish the Welch language, he made the knowledge of it his pe- culiar study. But it is the unhappy and singular fate of the Catholics of Ireland to see their names held up as barbarous, their creed misrepresented, and the language of their ancestors threatened with entire disuse, for the gratification of a foreign prelate, who proposes, as the means of their sanctification, commodious houses and cultivated spots for the ease and con- venience of persons whom his Lordship dispenses with the trouble of even learning the language of the people who sup- port them.
This was not the manner in which the regular clergy of the church of Rome planted religion in all the nations on esrth where they preached the gospel. Neither was it the DfK hod which those who separated from the church of Eng- lar r!', adopted to establish their own doctrine, and formed . separate communions. They learned the language of the people, and brought them over to their way of thinking, be- fore they insisted upon commodious houses and glebe lands. Hence they became ministers of the world ; whereas, according to the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's plan, making re- ligion and agriculture keep pace with each other, he gives his readers to understand that the minister of religion is more the minister of the soil than of the soul: and that the old adage, which is become so current to the dis- grace of the priesthood, is verified, no penny no pater- noster.
But leaving the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's method of pro- pagating his doctrine by tithes, glebe-houses, and the anni- hilation of languages, exposed to the shafts of christian cri- ticism ; let us return to his charge against the regular clergy.
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His Lordship says, that they claim an exemption from public taxes, and from the civil jurisdiction of their own country, and avow a subjection to a foreign power.*
I am surprised that his Lordship would advance such charges in my neighbourhood. He cannot mean the regular clergy of Ireland. As to the regular clergy in Catholic countries ; they enjoy no exemption but what the state grants, as the Bishop of Cloyne enjoys no exemption but what the state grants to himself. Does he pretend to pre- scribe laws to Catholic states ; or to controul their power to grant what exemptions they think fit to the children, not only of noblemen and gentlemen, but to the children of princes ? For the annals of religion and the history of re- ligious orders can inform him, that from the days of Saint Basil to this very day, the regular clergy can mark numbers of such a description in their calendar. The regular clergy then plead no exemption but what he pleads himself; the exemption granted by the state wherein they live. He should not envy in others what he himself enjoys ; for I suppose it is from the state he enjoys the privilege of pleading the scan- dalum magnatum, when Richard Woodward, now my Lord Bishop of Cloyne, gives such a provocation to Arthur O'Leary, as to become the eulogist and apologist of a Theo- philus, who calls him a Friar with a barbarous sirname, and to recommend the disuse of the language of his ances- tors.
The regular clergy, whether here or elsewhere, avow no subjection to a foreign power : they live as corporate societies, under their peculiar institutions confirmed by church and state ; the boundaries are kept distinct : they give God what belongs to God, and to Caesar his due : whilst they live as a corporated society, they will plead their charter. Thence, the Pope himself, cannot in an arbitrary manner, either elect or depose their superiors, or interfere in their religious polity : he may annul their charter, but whilst they live as cor- porate societies, they will maintain their institutions which contain nothing obnoxious either to church or state: other- wise neither would give them a sanction. When they make their vows, it is not to become vassals to the Pope. It is to
* 1'asre 4S.
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gratify their own devotion under regulations, which at a competent age they have twelve months probation either to adopt or reject.
They avow no subjection to a foreign power ; and I call upon the Lord Bishop of Cloyne to prove his assertion. They are subjects of the state, swear allegiance to their Prince, and are as faithful as any other subjects. Trapolo, a regular, defended the privileges of his country, against Pope Paul the Fifth, and immortalized his name. Ximenes, a regular, raised the power of the Spanish monarchy, and paved the way for the splendid, conquests of Charles the Fifth. Father Joseph de la Tremblay, after quitting the bar, and becoming a regular, was forced from his cloister to di- rect the councils of Lewis XIII. He planned those measures in the execution of which Richlieu appeared as the ostensible agent, and which by humbling the House of Austria, and lopping off the heavy branches which made the tree of the French monarchy bend too much, gave it that erect posture and firmness, which ever since have been proof against so many storms. In Ireland, during the unhappy commotions which distracted this kingdom in the reign of Charles the First, who could have exerted himself with more constancy than Father Peter Walsh, mentioned with honour in the con- tinuation of Sir James Ware ? Did not he oppose Rimuccini, the Pope's Legate, who afterwards excommu- nicated him at Brussels ? Under his excommunication he remained unshaken in his loyalty. Or what is there in a re- gular clergyman's frame so hostile to his country, as to in- duce the Lord Bishop of Cloyne to hold him forth as avowing a subjection to a foreign power ? Is not a man's oath to be believed ? And when the regular clergy swear allegiance to their King, is not their oath to be relied on ? But the Lord Bishop of Cloyne has favoured us with a very nice distinc- tion. He acknowledges that in the ordinary transactions of life between man and man, the oath of a Catholic may be relied on ; but when his church is in danger, then he may slacken the reins and bear down the wounds of sincerity.
Where has the Lord Bishop of Cloyne discovered this distinction? Where have the Catiiolics taught that the
X T
320 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
work of Heaven is to be promoted by the agency of Hell ? Is the Christian religion to be promoted by fraud, profana- tion, and perjury? Does he really believe that the Catholics are ignorant of that maxim of Saint Paul, evil is not to be done that good may arise from it ? Non sunt facienda mala uteveniant bona. Or does he forget that the scandalous dis- tinction between the oath of a Catholic, in the ordinary transactions of life, and the oath in which his religion is concerned, has been condemned by the Catholic Church, ages before it could be foreseen that a Bishop or any other mortal would charge her with such a doctrine ? This very distinction was the doctrine of Priscillian, who taught his disciples that perjury on the score of religion was lawful : he was condemned by the council of Toledo, and burnt alive. Speaking of the Catholics he says, that men are better than their tenets. It may be so : in Sparta it was a tenet that every deformed child should be exposed and abandoned to his fates. Parental affection in some might have eluded such a rigorous law, and thus proved that they were better than their tenets. It was a tenet amongst the inhabitants of the Isle of Cyprus, that married women should prostitute them- selves once a year in the Temple of Venus. I doubt not but conjugal affection and female modesty, operated with some to such a degree as to induce them to detest the tenet ; but I do not believe that there is this day on earth, any sect of Christians half so good as their tenets. They may differ in speculative points, but the principles of mo- rality are the same. However, the Lord Bishop of Cloyne is best acquainted with his own tenets, and if they be as charitable as himself, his neighbours should entertain a good opinion of his rule of faith. However, if the horrors of violation of faith with heretics, &c. be articles of or- thodoxy, certainly not only some Catholics, but all Catho- lics, are better than their tenets; and without any dispa- ragement to his rank or dignity, he will find thousands amongst them as honest, upright, and honourable as himself, not only from innate principles, but from the very tenor of their creed.
He alarms the Dissenters with the apprehensions, that if they do not assist him in keeping the tithes, the Catholic
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 321
clergy will have them with the assistance of a foreign power. Mr. Barber ingeniously answers, that it is equal to him who has the tithes, whether it be Peter, Martin, or John, when thev are of no benefit to him either with regard to soul or body. If his Lordship be afraid that the Catholic clergy will deprive him of all the tithes, with the assistance of a foreign power : I can assure, him that he has nothing to apprehend : not from foreign powers, who will never invade Ireland in order to procure the tithes for the Catholic clergy : this in- deed, would be a war of proctors and tithe- canters. Fur- ther, I can assure his Lordship, that foreign powers are more inclined to reduce the revenues of their own national clergy, than to make war for the Catholic clergy of Ireland. But do not the Catholic clergy believe that tithes are jure divino ? By no means : whoever reads Father Paul, and Father Simon, upon benefices, will soon discover that tithes are not due to the Christian priesthood by Gospel law. These two were Catholic authors. Bishop Barlow and Selden, amongst the Protestants proved the same. I would not mention a word about them, had I not been forced into the field with the Bi- shop's foreign powers, and Theophilus's jure divino ; and shall say of them but very little : they were not known in the western church, until about the seventh or eighth century. The clergy had influence at that time to prevail on the French kings to give a sanction to the sixth commandment of the church ; Thou shalt pay tithes to the clergy : this was a law of discipline, liable to change with the times, and of no force but from the sanction of the secular power, for a moral and natural right founded on the words, the labourer is worthy of his hire; is all that a clergyman can plead. In the Greek church tithes are not known to this very day, and in the Afri- can church, Saint Augustine would not permit his own church to be endowed, foreseeing the bad effects of the riches of the clergy. However, in the west, the pious laity, with the sanction of the power of the state, endowed each church under the strict obligations that three dividends should be made ; one for the support of the clergyman ; the second, for the repara- tion of the church; and the third, for the relief of the poor. Such was the original institution ; some alterations must have been
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since made in the manner of carrying into execution the founder's intentions ; for the part that was originally destined for the relief of the poor, now goes to the proctor. And as to reparation of churches, had the Whiteboys burnt the new church, if the old church had not been left to them for a chapel, or hath both churches fallen to the ground, I am humbly of opinion that his Lordship of Cloyne would sooner apply for a parliamentary grant, than be at the expense of contributing the third part of his tithes towards the repair of the fabric. Many and refined have been the improvements on this simple institution of ecclesiastical revenues.
One would be disposed to believe that there was a certain magic in the number ten. The tenth lamb, the tenth pig, the tenth chicken, the tenth sheaf, every thing was decima- ted : every tenth animal that did not grow to the size of a calf, was consecrated to the clergy, except the tenth orphan. Peas, beans, all kinds of garden stuff, were surveyed in the name of God and the Church ; and the clergy were com- pared to the locusts of the revelations, devouring all kinds of herbs that came in their way, except such as were noxious. As theological disputes divided them in the interim, their divisions divided unluckily the flocks, and what was more, divided the affections of the people- Under various changes of creeds, the lucrative system remained unaltered. Pope Alexander the Third was the first who issued excommuni- cations for the recovery of tithes, and decreed that the labours of the industrious bee should contribute to the support of the Lord's anointed. He ordained that every tenth bee-hive should be sequestered for the use of the church. The clergy of the established religion in England and Ireland, who borrowed their pomp, their splendour and hierarchy from the church of Rome, declared from their pulpits, that the Pope was Antichrist. Yet in reforming the religion of Rome, they improved upon Pope Alexander's system, by- insisting upon the tithes of agistment ;* and thus raised the claim from a bee to a bullock. If Pope Alexander thundered out his excommunications on the score of tithes, they fired
* This barbarous word, so familiar to our Irish Canonists, is derived from an old French word, signifying to drive a beast into a field.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 323
blunderbusses in defence of those remnants of Popery ; and dead bodies were seen laid prostrate in fields, in consequence of contests for consecrated goods, which in former ages the pious laity had destined for the support of the living. What- ever the clergy possess by law, is certainly their right, and should be secured to them ; but when people argue, they should be careful not to advance paradoxes; and that the right to tithes is anterior to the title of any layman to his land, is a paradox indeed. The land was inhabited by the laity before St. Patrick preached the Gospel. W hat he and his successors got was a free gift of the donors ; and no man in his senses will deny that the supreme powers of the state have a right to alter any system, for the peace and good of the community : 1 shall discuss no further the sub- ject of tithes, as it has been already and will be hereafter discussed by abler pens: if I summed up in a few lines their rise and progress, it is to shew the futility of the charge that the Catholic clergy are intent upon recovering the tithes of this kingdom, with the assistance of foreign powers, as if they were due jure divino. Could such an idle thought oc- cur to any man who did not intend to sport with common sense ? Will any man of sense believe that the formidable forces of France and Spain would be poured, at vast ex- penses, into this kingdom, in order to reinstate a few Ca- tholic clergymen in the tithes of potatos, oats, hay, &c. I am ashamed to make further comments. The Catholic clergy resuming tithes with the assistance of foreign powers ! Lay-improprietors threatened with the loss of the abbey- lands which would revert to the regular clergy ! When the Reformation was but in its infancy, and no religion in Eng- land at the time, but veered at the breath of each succeed- ing Monarch, what became of the abbey-lands ? In the short space that intervened between the dissolution of ab- beys and the reign of Queen Mary, there was not sufficient time to found the title of prescription, which by the civil law requires a space of thirty years for immovables. When that Queen ascended the throne several of the abbots and priors whose monasteries had been dissolved were living. Were not all the abbey-lands confirmed to the lay-possessors by Cardinal Pole, with full authority from the Pope. And
324 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
now, under a Protestant Sovereign, after a lapse of more than two centuries, a prelate raises the alarm against per- sons who thought as little of depriving him of his tithes, or the lay gentlemen of their impropriations, as the inoffensive citizen thought of depriving of his life a suspicious prince, who, in his uneasy slumbers, dreamed that he cut his throat, and put the innocent man to death.
I am in no manner concerned in tithes, but I appeal to to his Lordship whether, at different times, they have not been the occasion of popular commotions ? Whether, at dif- ferent times, the cottager who plants the potato, and the farmer who commits the grain to the -earth, does not re- alize the fable of the man who sowed the dragon's teeth, which afterwards vegetated into armed men ? Whether an honour- able support, free from litigations and wrangles with pa- rishioners of every description, would not comport more with the dignity of the clerical profession? And whether this be not the opinion and wish of the most sensible cler- gymen of the established religion ? If I am asked the reason why I should interfere in tithes ? I answer, that the radical cause of the distemper being not removed, it may break out at some future period ; and that when the bram- ble shoots from the sod which will cover me, the wrangles of oppressed peasants may be construed into a Popish con- federacy.
His Lordship endeavours to refute the Bishop of Llan- daff's arguments by the disparity of circumstances, as the number of the Dissenters of both communions is greater in Ireland. I take the liberty of asking him one ques- tion— is it because there is less to do, that the salary of the labourer must be increased at the expense of the cot- tager ? Does he really believe that an honest Dissenter will be saved ? Does he believe that an honest Catholic will be saved ? If he does, why this zeal for conversion which alarms the nation ? It is equal to any state whether the hand that steers the plough crosses the forehead or not, provided the man be honest and industrious. He com- plains of the zeal of the Catholic Laity to make converts, and the supineness of the Protestant gentlemen in not con- verting Catholics. Will he have a Protestant landlord turn missionary, and invade the episcopal functions ? If his
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS- 32j
Lordship be so zealous for the salvation of the people, why not learn their language ? The Catholic missionaries who penetrated into the vast empire of China, learned the Chinese, though there are eight hundred letters in the alphabet, and each letter stands for a word. They con- verted millions of the people, translated the writings of their philosophers, and brought Europe acquainted with thp laws, customs and morals of that singular country. His Lordship is not under the necessity of travelling far to learn the language ; it is at his door : and an English pastor may as well learn the Irish as Colonel Vallancey, an English officer. His Lordship will excuse this free- dom— it is as a writer who called me forth that I address him throughout : my respect for a Bishop's character is a restraint which I would shake off, if a person of an inferior rank called on Government to bring into disuse the lan- guage of a country. It is what conquerors themselves sel- dom have done. The polished Frenchman has never at- tempted to abolish the low dialect of the Breton ; the grave Spaniard leaves the Biscayen to the use of his speech ; and the English have not abolished the Welsh or Erse : the Irish must have the badge of scorn. As to conversions made by the Catholic laity, I do not find it an easy mat- ter : fasts, confession of sins, the belief of mysteries which surpass and seem to contradict the very senses, penal laws and legal disqualifications, are no great inducements to conversion. Suppose that a Protestant, struck with the same arguments which made some German princes, Chil- lingworth and Dryden, to embrace the Catholic faith ; sup- pose a Protestant of any sect became a Catholic, the Lord Bishop of Cloyne, upon the very principles of the Reformation, which allows freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, could not in equity censure him. Every one is free to embrace the religion that seems best to him. It is the privilege of nature ; and a convert to the Catholic religion is sufficiently punished by a conformity that deprives, him almost of every privilege. Many a learned man has quitted the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's communion. The famous Whiston wrote to the Archbishop of York and Can- terbury, assigning the reasons of his separation from the
326 ailSCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
church of England. And not long ago Lindsay resigned his benefice, in order to offer up his prayers to one God in one person, and expunged the name of Christ from the collect. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne would make a more glorious conquest in reclaiming Doctor Priestly and Lind- say, than if he converted a hundred Irish peasants. 1 see no reason for alarming: the nation with the danger of the church. Little did the world imagine a few centuries ago that a sin- gle German friar would have shaken the pontifical throne, and brought about the most astonishing revolution that the world ever beheld. Ever since that memorable aera the Protestant religion, from a small beginning, is rapidly in- creasing. When there were Catholic kings on the throne, it gained ground. It is then very much out of season now to alarm three kingdoms with the news that at this mo- ment the church of Ireland is in imminent danger of sub- version.
The Lord Bishop of Cloyne believes two Sacraments ne- cessary to salvation. If he could gain over to the established church all the inhabitants of Ireland who believe that nei- ther is necessary to salvation, it would be a great acquisition to the established religion. His Lordship adverts to the total indifference of many foreverykind of religion. Could he but kindle the flames of piety and fervor in the breasts of such people, it would be of infinite advantage. And if he could keep within the pale of the established church, such as are willing to form modes of worship for themselves, or reclaim such as have quitted it within those many years without becoming Catholics, he would leave no room to complain of the majority of Dissenters. What a field is open here for pastoral zeal ! It is a Herculean task indeed, and worthy of a prelate of distinguished abilities. But want of Baptism, Deism, separation from the established church, and altar against altar, cannot draw forth the pen of the Lord Bishop of Cloyne. The stability of tithes and the downfal of Popery are his only themes. The wag on the stage received many a plaudit, who, on being asked his reli- gion, answered that he loved a pot of porter, and hated po- pery. Let a Theophilus abuse Catholics and revile Mr.
O'Leary; he is called an able writer in the beginning, and
Miscellaneous traces* 327
excused on the score of his apprehensions for the safety of religion at the end of a pamphlet* Cargoes of abstracts against popery are daily imported from England ; luckily they arrive out of season ; for the nation knows the purport of them. If violation of faith with heretics be the reason of the Lord Bishop of Cloyne's attack, the Catholics disclaim, it on oath. And whoever does not believe the oath of aa honest man, deserves no answer. There is address and in- genuity in laying so often a stress upon the word heretics* When mentioned by the Lord Bishop of Cloyne, it conveys an idea that the Catholics alone consider those who ares reared out of their church as heretics. His Lordship will, I hope, have the generosity to divide the imputation with* Mr. O'Leary. Does the church of England acknowledge that there are no heretics ? Have not her bishops pro- nounced them as such after a canonical trial ? Has not the civil magistrate, nursed in her bosom, doomed them to the fagot ? The inquisition could do no more : for the eccle- siastical judge barely confines himself to a declaration that such doctrine is heretical. The magistrate, armed with the power of the law, pronounces sentence, and sees it carried into execution.
Doctor Godolphin, a Protestant canonist, in his Abridge- ment of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, after Sir Ed- ward Coke, calls heresy a leprosy of the soul ,** and gives a description of no less than one hundred and thirty- seven he- resies. If he was now living he could add to the catalogue many new doctrines, which the Lord Bishop of Cloyne would declare strange and erroneous by his consecration oath. Human victims were seen marching to the stake with fagots on their backs to purge in the flames the pollution of heresy, under a Protestant Elizabeth and a Protestant James, as under a half Catholic Henry and a Catholic Mary. And. those strange and erroneous doctrines which the Lord Bishop of Cloyne promises by his consecration oath to banish and drive away, banished 3nd drove away effectually Dissenters
Godolpbin RppertoriMtn Canonicuro. U U
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and Catholics into the wilds of America, in the reign of that James, whom the Lord Bishop of Cloyne applauds for his wise saying, No Bishop no King. Those strange and erro- neous doctrines, banished and drove away the Catholic Lord Baltimore, into Maryland, for bowing at the name of Jesus ; and that great Penn, who deserved half the world, for teach- ing Sovereigns how to govern the other. They banished and drove away Penn into Pennsylvania, for not bowing at all ; for having rejected the ceremony of the hat, and wear- ing a few flit juttons on a plain uaornamented coat. Those two great tnen, persecuted for their strange erroneous doc- trines, and still diametrically opposite in religious principles, planted their colonies where they granted free toleration to all mortals ; and where is man now restored to the indelible charter, which the free-born mind is entitled to plead. They resembled the two brave soldiers, who were always quarrel- ling by the instigation of their comrades, without knowing why. A general rout came on, in the flight they both fell into a deep pit. Said one, if I kill you, what shall I benefit by your death? Your putrified body will stifle me. The other retorted in the same tone ; they saw the common danger, and agreed ; one leaped on the shoulders of the other, and reached the verge of the pit, out of which he helped his fellow sufferer. They both retired in peace, and lived ever after in amity. Lord Baltimore and Penn did the same.
The recollection of such melancholy scenes induces me to applaud my Lord Bishop of Cloyne, for declaring in his in- troduction, that it is not his object to enter into the defence of ecclesiastical establishments in general. It would be a heavy task indeed, since the beginning of ecclesiastical esta- blishments until of late, sovereigns seduced by the counsels of the clergy, became the executioners of their subjects. The ministers of a religion, one of whose principal laws is a law of eternal love, became the apologists of calamities, that swept fn>m the face of the earth, or oppressed to this very day, God's noblest images, upright, virtuous, and dauntless men. Like the warrior in the Scriptures, they stept into the sane-
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wary to grasp the barbarian's sword wrapt up in the ephod. The code of temporal laws, teeming with sanctions against robbers and murderers, was sweiied to the surprise and de- struction of mankind, with additional decrees against he- retics and papists. The inoffensive citizen, who from an apprehension of offending the deity, by acting against his conscience, was confined in the same dungeon, or doomed to the fagot or axe with the parricide, who iaid aside every restraint of moral obligation. The scriptures were adduced in justification of the sanguinary confusion. Out of every contested verse there issued a iury armed with a qiubbie and a poniard, who inspired mankind at once with folly and cruelty, and Europe became one wild altar, on which every religious sect offered up human victims to its creed. b\:> a are the effects of ecclesiastical establishments in a long suc- cession of ages. The effects ascribed to them by the right reverend author, as infusing morality as a collateral aid to the check of the law. would have been produced in a more heavenly manner, by religion uncontrouied by the terror of penal sanctions; and its rays never bhone brighter than when its ministers had no other sword to enforce it, but the two edged sword of the peaceful doctrine of its Author. It is not then to the lenity of ecclesiastical establishment, that men are indebted for the freedom they enjoy, but to the lenity of the state ; and to the exalted souls and enlarged minds of the illustrious senators, who have cast off the sable weeds of priestly bigotry, to put on the bright and radient livery of enlightened reason, which religion enlarges into an extensive asylum, instead of contracting into a narrow and favourite spot, which it is penal (but for a few) to look at. The gloom which the Lord Bishop of C'oyne's pamphlet has spread on every countenance, and the mutual distrust and jealousy which have succeeded the strictest sincerity? and amity since the publication of his performance, are no mighty recommendations of ecclesiastical establishments: The blood of fifty millions of men. cut off by the sword of persecution, since the state unsheathed it in defence of ec- clesiastical establishments : The oppression, banishment and imprisonment of many more ! The blood of the Jain cries under the altar, to the powers of the earth,- — Leave your
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subjects free. — Let the priests pray ; but do not draw the sword in defence of their prayers ; for they will never pray alike.
I should never have mentioned tithes, lest any of the esta- blished clergy should imagine I envied them what in former times belonged to the Catholic clergy, and which the laws now secure to the clergy of the established church; but when I saw in a pamphlet, of which the Lord Bishop of Cloyne becomes the eulogist, a heavy and infamous charge, that the Catholic clergy consider tithes due to themselves jure divino, and encourage the laity to plunder the Pretes- tant ministers for their own benefit, I gave a short account of their origin. In my addresses to the Whiteboys, the reader can see in what manner 1 enforced the payment of them. The Lord Bishop of Cloyne was unthankful to me ; in return, I paid my complements to tithes and ecclesiastical establishments. I consider both as oppressive in Ireland, and elsewhere. If I do not speak with all that softness of churchmen, with which I certainly would have spoken upon another occasion ; it is not certainly from any disrespect for the ecclesiastical profession. Severity regards such as have at different times abused their sacred characters from want of charity, or from want of disinterestedness, or both. The worthy are not to be confounded with the unworthy, no more than the chaff should be confounded with the pure and wholesome grain.
I wish the Lord Bishop of Cloyne had called me forth in more favourable circumstances, and in a general cause ; but he calls me forth under the heaviest provocations, after hav-? ing declared himself the apologist of a Theophilus, who ex- haust the glossary of Billingsgate in a personal abuse : — • 4 Whoever reads his Lordship's pamphlet, must consider the 4 Catholic prelates as perjurers; the laity as enemies to the 4 constitution, from a view to the revenues of the church, 4 with the assistance of foreign power : and Mr. O'Leary, 4 seditious with a train of agitating Friars and Romish mis- 4 sionaries.' If there be a plurality of worlds, I must have been born in the planet of Saturn, if I did not feel a certain warmth after such a provocation,
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It cannot be expected that I will lose the little time I have to spare from my own important functions, in answering anonymous writers, or even authors who may prefix their names to pamphlets. The only person that I shall take the trouble of answering, is the Lord Bishop of Cloyne.
APPENDIX.
Reverend JWr. O^Learyh Address to the Common People
of Ireland, particularly to such of them
as are called Whiteboys.
Brethren and Countrymen,
I addressed you before in the time of open war, when the enemies of your King and Country were within view of our coasts. Your prudent and peaceable conduct, at that criti- cal time, answered the expectations of your instructors, and procured you the countenance and approbation of your rulers ; the defenceless cottager was protected by the ho- nesty of his neighbour; order and tranquillity reigned all over the land : each member of the community was secure in his respective rights and property : and whilst the plains of America were d)ed with blood, and England was con- vulsed by the insurrections of the lower classes, who were either cut off by the army, or atoned on the gallows for the violation of the laws, you felt the happy effects of a quiet and orderly conduct.
Nature and religion, my brethren, recommend this peace- able and orderly conduct to man: to a peaceable and orderly conduct, nature annexes our happiness, and religion enjoins it as a duty. We are born with inclinations for order and peace, and we have the happiness to live under the wise laws of a Gospel, whose counsels and precepts, whose threats and promises, inspire the union of the hearts, and to do to others as we would wish to be done by.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. ' 333
Whence then those disturbances which oflate have been occasioned by some of you in the diocese of Cloyne, and which now beg-in to reach to the diocese of Cork? You will tell me, that your grievances are the cause : I doubt it not my brethren ; but still, under our grievances are we to forget that we are Christians ? Under our grievances, are we to forget that the Providence of God has made an unequal distribution of the goods of this life, reserving a perfect equality for the next? Under our grievances, are we to forget that when our distresses are not the effects of our crimes, or imprudence, resignation to the will of heaven becomes an indispensable duty ? Are we to forget that the way of the Cross is the road to the Crown ; and that although religion does not condemn these distinctions of rank, fortunes, and authority established by Providence, for the subordination of subjects, and the tranquillity of States, yet there are more promises made in the Scriptures, in favour of those who suffer, than in favour of those who live in ease and opulence. And although the gates of salvation are open to the rich who make good use of their wealth, as they are to the poor who suffer with patience, yet the Scripture declares that they are narrower for the former than for the latter. In this life there must be grievances which no human wisdom can redress : the inconveniences arising from them are counterbalanced by the expectation of a better, promised by the Divine Author of our religion, who has set us the example of patience and suffering. The soldier, led on by his General, encounters death with intrepidity in hopes of victory, which soon after vanishes as smoke. And shall a Christian, called to an immortal crown, refuse to fol- low his king, who rears up the banners of the cross, and cries out, Take up your cross and follow me in the paths of eternal life? To a worldling plunged in the luxuries of life, such an address will appear insipid ; but on you who are not lost to the feelings of religion, it will have a different effect. Per. haps when he comes to that part of it in which mention is made of crosses and sufferings, he will lay it aside, and say, Mr. O'Leary should write to those people in another style, and threaten them with curses, excommunications, halters, and gibbets. No, my brethren, curses and excommunications lose their effect, when lavished with too much profusion :
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truth must not be made odious by the harsh manner in which it is conveyed: the nature of man is such, that he is gained upon by example and sweetness, more than by rudeness and severity : he is apt to hate the hand that is raised up to strike him, though it be for his correction; but he loves the hand that is stretched out to cure him. Sweet- ness, tenderness, and charity should form the principle cha- racter of a clergyman, and become the predominant spirit of his functions — they were not lions, but lambs, which our Sa- viour sent to preach his Gospeh it is to their patience, their mildness, their prayers and sufferings, that we are indebted for the conversion of the world, and the propagation of our Mi- nistry. And I should be very sorry that you vvould derive no benefit from my instructions but a string of curses, which perhaps you would get by heart from no other view than to vent them upon your children in a fit of anger or resentment. As to halters and gibbets, the best way to restrain the hand, is to change the heart, which, when regulated by the Gospel law, will sacrifice the hand sooner than give of- fence.
However, my brethren, it is not in the nature of man to suffer under grievances which he can lawfully remove ; it is When the remedy fails, or cannot be lawfully had, that patience becomes our only and most salutary resource, and I appeal to such of you as have been guilty of any outrages, whether the steps you have taken to redress your grievances be either conformable to the laws of God or nature, or whether they can ever answer any other purpose than that of drawing on ourselves the vengeance of the law. Is it an effectual mode of redressing our grievances to crop the ears of your neigh- bour's horse, or to destroy a rick of corn, the only resource of a poor industrious farmer who has no other means to pay his rent, and who, thrust into prison by a merciless land- lord, will be for entire years, perhaps for life, viewing on the walls of a gloomy prison, the cruel marks of your barbarity ? Whence arose the savage custom of houghing the most harm- less and useful of animals, the horse, the cow ? We read of nations not enlightened by the Christian religion, yet figure to themselves a supreme Being, the fountain of tenderness and mercy. These people think it a sin to deprive any crea-
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS, 335
ture of that life which the Supreme Being has given it, and consequently never eat fish or flesh. To guard against the love of pleasure, and to check the desires which may arise from the sight of any object, some of them pluck out their eyes, alleging that if they have shut two doors against their passions, they have opened a thousand doors to wisdom by
Qualifying themselves for the undistracted contemplation of [eavenly things. The Gospel does not require such se- verity from you. But I appeal to yourselves if these Pagans will not rise up in judgment against the Christians who are guilty of acts of cruelty ? What, my brethren, have you forgotten the commandments of God, who takes your neigh- bour's ox and horse under his protection ? For when he forbids us to covet them, he commands us not to injure them. You will tell me that if you have cropped two or three horses and burnt some ricks of corn, the injury has been done only to Parish Proctors, those ieeches whom you con- sider as your greatest oppressors, who every season do you infinitely more harm : but this is a weak plea in the eyes of God, who commands us to love our enemies, and to do good to those who do us harm : who, after securing man's life and reputation by the fifth commandment, that, says, thou shall not kill; and his honour and domestic tranquillity, by the sixth, which says, thou shah not commit adultery, becomes himself the watchful guardian of his temporal substance ; by the seventh, which says, thou shalt not steal,, and stifles in the heart every desire of fraud and injustice by the ninth. The command- ment being general extends to all : hence he screens the poor from the oppression of the rich : forbids the poor under pretence of poverty to waste or plunder the property of the rich, and establishes the general and permanent peace of society on the love of our enemies, and that maxim of the law of nature, not to do to others what we would not wish to be done to us ; much less will the quality of a Proctor ex- cuse you in the eyes of the law, which punishes the crime without any regard to the quality of the injuries or in- jured.
I am happy to find that these disturbances have ceased af- ter a very short duration, and though mightily magnified at a distance, have been confined but to a few parishes in the
x x
33(3 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
dioceses of Cloyne and Cork, and that but few mis- , guided per>ons have been concerned in them. Bur 1 am so icy jou have adopted a new plan, which however ■ moderate, and though certainly founded on your pover- ty on one hand, and the oppressive manner of collect- ing; the tithes on the other, is very improper, and may prove of the most fatal consequence to yourselves. The following caution, which however it may involve your- selves m trouble, if carried into execution, yet will con- vince the kingdom, that the few breaches of the peace ,\vhich happened in this county, have not originated in a spirit of rebellion, as has been insiduously and scanda- lously insinuated. The following caulion, 1 say, has been, within these few days, affixed to the gates of parish Churches and Chapels:
Copy — 'You are hereby cautioned not to pay Minis- ' ters' Tithes, only in the following manner, viz. porta- i tos, 4s. per acre, wheat and barley, \s. 6d. per acre, 'oats and meadows, l.v. per acre — Roman Catholic * Cle»gy to receive for marriages, 5s. for baptism, Is. Qd. ' for anointing and visitation of the sick, Vs. for mass,, Is. ' for confession, Qd. : you are hereby warned not to pay 'Clerk money,* nor any other dues concerning mar- 'riages; be all sure not to go to any expenses at your ' confessing turns, but let them partake of your own fare/ It is needless lo remind you of what the Dublin Shop- keeper has already informed you of, that posting up no- tices is a misdemeanor punishable b> law, and that your imprudence may hurry you unwarily into several branch-* es of the clauses of the W hiteboy Act, that decree death against offences, which to you may not. seem of such importance. You may in like manner be led into the snare by imagining that this act is not now in force ; it is in full force until the month of June, in the year seven- teen hundred and eighty-seven. Many and severe are the clauses of that act; and though an English writer says that they are betier calculated for the meridian of Barbary, than for a Christian country, t yet the severer they are, the more you should be on your guard : con- sider the danger to which you are exposed from the lo-
* Those Clerks are such as attend on Priests. ■f See Young's Tour in Ireland.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
337
gic and eloquence of Crown Lawyers, the perjury of witnesses, or the prejudices of juries. ! am informed that the one who is to swear against some of you who are now in gaol, is one of the greatest villains in the kingdom, and escaped the gallows some years ago.
But to return to the caution. Fray, my brethren, what right have you to curtail, of your own authority, the income of the Protestant Clergy? I shall not go over the same ground trodden already by the Dublin Shopkeeper, on this subject : he proves, that if the tithes became the property of the laity, they would raise their rents in proportion : or is it because that, from the ear- liest ages of the world, those who believed in the hue God, have consecrated to him a part ol the fruits of ' he earth, you will think it an heavier burthen to pay same thing, because ii was in conformity to ihe law of God, that the laws of Christian slates have appointed it? You know that she rules of justice extend to all without exception, and that, to use the familiar phrase, every one should have his own, whether he be Fro ant or Catholic, lurk or Christian. It is more your in- terest than you imagine that the Protestant Clergy of this country should be maintained in their rights: for many ages you have been defenceless, destitute of any; protection against the power of your land. our
clergy liable to transportation or death. The mild and tolerating spirit of the clergy of the established religion has been the only substitute for all other resources. They trained up from their early days the Protestant Nobility and Gentry in the principles of morality and virtue. If they preached against purgatory* they en- forced charity : if they denied the real presence, they took special care to inform their flock, that whoever does injustice to any one, either in his property <>r re- putation, is unworthy to approach the Communion. If they denied that the Pope is head of the church, they taught their congregation that no man is lo be in- jured on account of his religion, and that Christianity knows no enemy. As by nature we are prone to \ of every kind, and that the earliest impressions are ue strongest, had it not been for those principles wii- h they instilled into the minds of their hearers, long be-
338 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
fore now jour landed proprietors in this country would have treated you as Turks, who think it no scruple to violate the beds of the Jews, and warn the husbands that if they come into their houses whilst they are doing them this injustice, they will cut off their heads.
Is it then to gentlemen of this description, the chil- dren of the first families in the kingdom, the instructors of the most powerful part of the community, the most moral and edifying amongst them, the most charitable and humane, that a handful of poor men are to prescribe laws, tending to diminish the support of their offspring, destined to (ill one day the most important offices in the State? What ! a Rev. Arcdeacon Corker, a Rev. Arch- deacon Tisdall, a Rev. Mr. Chetwood, a Rev. Mr. Weekes, a Rev. Mr. Meade, a Rev. Mr. Kenny, who spent his time and fortune amongst you, relieving your wants, and changing part of his house into an apothe- cary's shop to supply you with medicines, which your- selves could not purchase, mustfrom an apprehension of violence quit his house, at the threshold of which ap- peared so many Lazarus's with their sores not licked by his dogs, but fomented or bathed with his own hands ; not desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from his table, but replenished to satiate with his own fare ! Ma- ny more of these Gentlemen could I mention, and I ask yourselves whether you would benefit the more by hav- ing their property curtailed ? Still 1 know that you are oppressed and impoverished more than any set of the lower classes of people on earth. And by that notice you have posted up, it appears that it is far from your thoughts to overturn what is established by law, but lighten the bnrthen. It is not in the tithes themselves that the oppression lies, but in the manner of raising their value, and collecting them. The established cler- gy themselves, whose dignity and functions do not per- mit them to take on themselves the disagreeable office, and who, on the other hand, if they took your notes, which perhaps you would be unwilling or unable to pay when they would become due, would feel too much in being obliged to sue a set of poor people in a Court of Justice. The established Clergy themselves, I say, are perplexed : they are not inclined to oppress
MISCELLANEOUS TRACT3. 339
you on one hand, and none can expect that they will part with their rights on the other. And as for your parts, you cannot be judges in your own cause. The supreme power of the state alone is competent to de- termine the mode of redress, which is too intricate a matter for me to determine. It is doubtless the interest of your landlords not to have a wretched and beggarly tenantry. It is in like manner their interest to support amongst their tenants a due subordination to their re- spective Pastors. For the generality of mankind, can have no other rule, but their instruction, whereby to re- gulate their moral conduct. The impressions of religion, and the dread of an invisible Judge, the conscious wit- ness of our actions, are stronger than the terror of human laws, which are often eluded by privacy and several other ways; and when once we shake off the authority of religion, when opportunity offers, we are ready to shake off the authority of our masters. Present a memorial of whatever grievances you suffer to your respective land- lords, who, I should hope, will transmit it to their friends in Parliament: if Parliament cannot strike out a plan, you have no remedy whatever but that patience, which I before recommended to you, and which softens the afflic- tions of sufferers. In a word, without the interposition of the supreme power of the state, you must either bear with patience the grievances of which you complain, or suffer an ignominious death, or seek for a better situation in re- mote countries, where there is more encouragement, and where thousands of your Protestant fellow- subjects, less oppressed than you are, have taken shelter.
As to the regulations you have made with regard to the dues of your own clergy, it is a standing maxim with all States where there are several religions, and but one established by law, not to grant any legal redress for non-payment of dues but to the clergy of the established religion, such as the clergy of the church of England here and in England, the Lutheran clergy in Sweden, and the Presbyterian clergy in Holland, Geneva, and elsewhere. Free toleration of religion, and the volun- tary contributions of those of their own profession, are the only resources of the clergy who are not of the re- ligion of the state : I consider it your duty, nay your
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interest, to support them in a decent manner according to your abilities; and this support should appear to you the jess burthensome, as there is no compulsion, which in general makes the receiver disagreeable to those who give when compelled, and deprive the giver of the merit, of what he contributes, when he contributes more from compulsion than from duty and charity. On this head then, we can literally apply to the words of St. Paul, m his second Epistle to the Corinthians, chap. 9. Every man according us he purposetk in his heart, so Let him give; not grudgingly, or oj necessity : for God lovetha cheerful giver. Christ himself, who in every page of the Scriptures preached up the renunciation of ourselves, still declares that the iaboureris worthy of his hire. And St. Paul, the patron of disinterestedness and mortification, declares, thai those who serve the altar, should live by it, and that such as feed the flock, are entitled to a share of the milk. It is your own interest that jour Pastors be maintained with decency; that in a country where Gentlemen of a different religion esteem the Catholic Clergy more for their outward appearance and conduct, than for their profession, your Pastors should appear with decency ; and that in country parishes where even in the dead of the nigh t, they are obliged to go seven or eigh t miles, and perhapsmore, to relieve a dying person, they should have a horse, in order to be able to give you every assistance with the utmost expedition in these pressing moments, when (if ever) delays are the most dangerous.
Nor, my brethren, should you disregard my remarks on this subject, because 1 am a Clergyman: you know that for the space of fifteen years since my arrival in this country, weddings and baptisms are quite out of my line, yet I never ceased to exhort and instruct you to the utmost of my abilities.
My brethren, I earnestly entreat you to follow the advice of those who wish you well, who have your in- terest at heart, who foresee the danger that threatens you, and of which you are not sufficiently aware: you will find the advantage of p; ace ,md tranquillity ; none can w ish it with more sincerity, than your affectionate servant, A. O'LEARY.
Cork, Feb. 18, 1786.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 34 1
Rev. Mr. O'Learifs Second Address to the Common People of Ireland, particularly to such of them as are called H'luteboi/s.
BRETHREN AND COUNTRYMEN,
Far be it from me to oppose (were it in my power) the redress of your grievances ; but, \ repeat it, by your manner 0f redressing them, the remedy is worse than the disorder. I would rather pay my tithes, let them be ever so oppressive, than put my neck in the halter by dis- turbing the peace of society, and violating the laws of the realm, let them be ever so severe. No rulers on earth will permit any order of men to overturn estab- lished laws, by private authority. They will listen to the grievances of the subject, but they will reserve to themselves the mode of redress. They can neve make the people happy but by keeping- them subject to authority, and by making this subjection as easy and reconcileable to them as the exigencies of the state will permit. The multitude is too tickle and inconstant for governing it- self. St cannot be happy without subordination toorder and authority ; if it once strikes out of the path of obe- dience to the laws, there is an end of Government. Trou- bles, dissensions, civil wars, and impunity for the most atrocious crimes, must be the result. And in this state of convulsion, the man who complained of grievances be- fore, under the ruling powers, will feel heavier griev- ances from his neighbour, who, unrestrained by law, will become his murderer or oppressor. If we were prisoners of war in an enemy's country, we are bound by the laws of God and nations to behave in a peaceable manner, much more so when we form members of the same socie- ty, governed by the same Sovereign and the same laws,
But what surprises me most with regard to the notice you have posted up, whereby you caution each Parish- ioner not to give but so much for Tithes, and so much to the Roman Catholic Clergy, is, that you bind your- selves by oath to abide by this regulation. Had you en-
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tered into a resolution not to pay but four shillings tithes for every acre of potatos, &c. a court of justice would determine whether you were right or wrong. And in case you were cast at law, as in all appearance you would be, the payment of the tithes, and the costs of the suit, would be the onlydisadvantage you would labour under. But here, by one oath, you fall into a double snare : You perplex and entangle your consciences on one hand, and on the other you put yourselves in the power of the law. Upon a former occasion I explained to you the nature of oaths, and the horror of perjury. And although you have not perjured yourselves in swearing to your own resolutions, as it was not to a lie you swore, yet permit me to tell you, that your oath was rash, and so far a pro- fanation of the most sacred name of God. It is with the greatest reluctance a man should swear at all, even in a just cause, and from conviction. "We read in some Jewish authors, that the awful name of the Divinity was uttered but once a year by the High Priest, at the solemn Bene- diction, after purifying himself, and washing his hands in the blood of the victim that was offered up, before he entered the sanctuary. The veneration also of the Hea- thens for their false Gods, was such, that in the begin- ing no oaths were customary, from a reverence to the Deity. Princes ratified the most solemn treaties by join- ing hands: and in the ages of heroism, the warrior thought himself sufficiently engaged to his General by looking at the military standard erected upon an emi- nence, with the image of the tutelary God painted on the banners. Such was the veneration of all nations for the awful name of the Deity, and the sanctity of that maxim of holy writ, that we are not to trifle with holy things. Compare your conduct with that of the primi- tive inhabitants of the world, you who should be struck with a greater awe as having a more perfect knowledge of the true God, and yet make it a part of your Sunday's devotion to hand the book to each other in order to swear to what must be destructive to yourselves, and injurious to the rights of others — you will swear to the Lord your God, says the Scripture, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness, or justice. It is not sufficient for the lawful- ness of an oath, that whatever we swear to be true. It
\
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requires moreover that the oath be attended with judg- ment, that is to say, that the object of it be not rash ; there must be necessity and prudence. There must be also justice, otherwise the name of God is profaned, and the oath is not binding. When Herod swore that he would give his daughter whatever she would ask him, he was guilty of murder in giving her the head of John the Baptist, and of profanation in calling on God as the witness and sanction of his cruelty. You swear that you, will pay but four shillings for an acre of potatos, &c.
When St. Augustine lays down as a maxim that the laws of every state regulate the property of the subject, and that whatever we possess must be in consequence of the determination of the law ; when St. Paul commands us to pay honour to whom honour, and tribute to whom tribute is due, can the most learned Casuist determine that you are bound to pay no more than the precise sum of four shillings for an acre? Your oath then is the same thing as if you swore in the following manner: I swear by this book that I will do such a thing, whether it be right or wrong. Is such an oath just ? In lille manner let me sup- pose that after this oath, you may be sued at law for the tithes, and for non-payment be cast into prison, or have your little property distrained. What will be the con- sequence ? You must either break your oath, or remain in prison, or have your poor families ruined. Thus your oath is the same as if it were as follows : / swear by this book, that I will either break this oath, or rot in prison, or ruin my family . Is there judgment, is there prudence in this ? Add to this, that such persons as tender such oaths are in the power of the law, and will be treated with the utmost rigour. And on this occasion, I conjure the Gen- tlemen of this country who may read this letter, and be next Assizes on your Jury, to distinguish the wanton compellersof such oaths, and the persons who take or administer them from fear or compulsion. I say, take or administer them ; for, take and administer in the sense I allude to, are synonimous in the eyes of hu- manity and justice, when the motive, I mean for fear of grievous outrage to their persons or property, compels them to take the oath, or administer to others. And
Y Y
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when I make this request, you see, my brethren, how much I have your interest at heart, and with what sin- cerity I wish to prevent the effusion of your blood.
The same motives induced a Protestant Gentleman, an acquaintance of mine, to address six letters to you, in a style adapted to your understanding, under the sig- nature of a Dublin Shopkeeper. He had no motive what- ever but your welfare, as his property is not in the county. His humanity and benevolence alone induced him to point out the danger to which you were exposed, the imaginary and groundless prospects you figured to yourselves, and which you will soon see vanish as smoke : the various delusions to which the unthinking multi- tude are liable to fall victims, and the caution you should take against those misfortunes in which aeon- duct similar 1o yours has involved so many others, Several of whom were really innocent. To deprive his letters of the effect ihey should have on you, you were made to believe that they were written by some Clergy- man, interested in 'jthe preservation of tithes, or if a Roman Catholic, in the collection of his dues. I declare upon my conscience, that they were written by a Pro- testant Layman, and that I myself did not know the author, until after the publication of the first letter- They deserve your attention the more as they come from such a disinterested hand, and as I am equally unconcerned in these matters, Only as far as they re- gard your own safety, and the peace of the public.
I hope that this Address will deserve your attention, as it gives the sanction of religion to the maxims of pru- dence, laid down in that Gentleman's writings. 1 am confident that many of you have been misled by your ignorance of the laws, and that as these disturbances originated in the dues of the clergy, you did not forsee the consequences to yourselves. That Gentleman's let- ters deserve your most serious attention, as he explains all the laws which hang over you. On the other hand, it is a standing maxim, that it is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. It would be an act of humanity in the Associations, compost d of Noblemen and Gentlemen, for the suppression of tumults in the
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county of Cork, to get numbers of that Gentleman's letters dispersed gratis through the country. It is the opinion of a great and humane writer,* that every Member of Society should know when he is criminal, and when innocent. This cannot be done without a knowledge of the laws which affect the lives and liber- ties of the subjects. This knowledge is never suffici- ently communicated in this kingdom to the multitude at large, few of whom can purchase the ordinary vehi- cles of information, the Acts ; and even Newspapers, are prohibited from even inserting abstracts under the penalty of a prosecution from the King's Printer. In foreign countries when new laws, affecting the lives of the people, are enacted, they are posted up on the gates of the Churches in all the Parishes, and their non-pro- mulgation is pleaded in justification of the fact. This before-mentioned conduct corresponds with Beccaria's wishes, who says, that every citizen should have the code of laws which affect his life ; and that the conduct of Censors and Magistrates who punish the ignorant, is a kind of tyranny which surrounds the confines of political liberty. If the laws are made for the people, they should know them, and laws which affect the lives of the multitude, should not be confined to the Lawyer's library. 1 am confident that not one out of ten thousand of the country people, knows one clause of the Whiteboy Act. This is the time to make it as public as possible in a county hitherto the most peace- able in the kingdom. But to return from this digres- sion to you, my brethren, if you have any room to claim of the extortions of any of your Clergy, why have you not made application to your Bishops previous to those tumultuary meetings? Would Lord Dunboyne, as distinguished for his tenderness, his charity, the sweetness and amiableness of his manners, as he is by his high birth and exalted station; or would the pious and edifying Doctor M'Kenna permit the oppression of the poor under pretence of religion ? They, who are more inclined to relieve your wants than to add
* Beccaria.
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to them ? There is some exaggeration in your written notice, insinuating that your Pastors require more than you can afford, and that some of them are more atten- tive to your substance than your souls. Sure, my bre- thren, a Roman Catholic Clergyman, who in times of prosecution would be bound not to abandon you, but to share your sufferings, and undergo every hardship for the sake of your salvation; bound to appear as the pub- lic deputy of the people, at the foot of the altar, erected to a God, who died naked on the cross, and to wean your affections from the perishable goods and fleeting plea- sures of this short and distracted life, to fix them on Heavenly goods ; sure, no Roman Catholic Clergyman would make a traffic of the Sacraments, in extorting from an unhappy object, who has but fourpence a day to support a wife and a number of children, with a hand- ful of vegetables and a draught of water. We are rather bound to sell the sacred vases of the temple, if we had any to dispose of, sooner than slay the victim, already fleeced by oppressive rack-rents. It cannot be conceived that a Roman Catholic Clergyman, who pays the least regard to the dignity and decency of his character, would sit down in a barn or cabin , at the expense of the labouring man, and by intemperance, efface intheeven* ing those impressions of piety which he imparted to him in the morning. No, there is no such thing. But there is the mistake you have committed in the oath already mentioned. You have bound by the oath the opulent farmer, who is able and willing to give to your Pastors wherewithal to support them, and to afford yourselves some assistance in your wants. You have bound him in like manner not to give any more than a crown, &c. and this is an injustice under the solemnity of an oath. For, whatever a poor man may do with a trifle scarce competent to support himself, he has no right to controul the pockets of, or to prescribe laws to the rich. If there had been scandalous extortions of the kind, you should have preferred complaints to the Bishops, and these venerable Prelates would have ordered their Clergy to cry out from their Altars, v>ith!the Prophet Jonas, if it be %n my account that this storm is raised throw me overboard.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. &17
The oppression of the poor, and the love of sordid gain, are inconsistent with the character of personswhose min- istry is the condemnation of avarice, the contempt of riches, and the recommendation of charity. They are not disposed to bruise the reed already broken, nor to change the tender and inviting voice of fathers and pas- tors into the harsh language of griping tax-gatherers. Has not Mr. O'Kelly, have not others declared from the al- tars, that they require no more from you than what you are willing to give ? Let not then the sacred ministry be a pretext for the public disturbances, which in the end must prove destructive to yourselves. Let your griev- ances be redressed by the wisdom and humanity of your superiors in Church and State. Let public tranquil- lity be restored, and let yourselves enjoy the fruits and sweets of a peaceable conduct and innocent conscience, which alone can recommend you to, and procure you the protection of God and your rulers. No person can wish you every happiness more than your affectionate servant,
A. O'LEARY.
Cork, Feb. 21, 1786.
Rev. Mr. O'Leary's Third Address to the Whiteboys, par- ticularly those of the County of Cork.
Countrymen,
To such of you as still persist in setting the laws of your country at defiance, in opposition to the dictates of prudence, which suggests to man not to hazard rashly his life, nor the interest of his family, but rather to bear patiently with a slighter inconvenience to avoid a greater; to such of you as still pursue aline of conduct (misconduct I should have said) so destructive to your- selves, and subversive of peace and good order, I ad- dress myself at this critical juncture. For I shall not con- found those who first engaged in your cause, either from error or licentiousness, and are now reclaimed to their duty, with those who still march on in a road which, from sad experience, they will find to end in a precipice. At
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the first breaking out of these unhappy disturbances, you got every caution which religion, reason, and humanity could prompt men of compassion and feelings to give a multitude easily misled, and, according to the common course of human affairs, incapable of drawing the deli- cate line to which common sense points out, and of which it says, thus far you shall go and no farther. The dangers to which you were exposed from a disorderly conduct, the imaginary and groundless prospects you figured to yourselves, and which you now behold vanishing as smoke, the various delusions to which the unthinking multitude are liable to fall victims, the precaution you should take against the misfortune in which a conduct similar to yours had involved so many before. Every thing, in short, was explained to you. The maxims of hu- man prudence were strengthened, and enforced by the great principles of religion : and we had every room to expect, that in case religion had lost its influence over you as christians, at least your own preservation, as men, founded upon the first principles of nature, would in- duce you to expose your bodies to the rod of justice, or to the executioner's hand. W hen you imagined your- selves secure in your numbers, an anticipated list was made out of so many Whiteboys whipped, so many shot by the army, so many \Y hiteboys' widows and orphans reduced to beggary, from the misconduct of thejr former husbands and fathers. There was no inspiration requi- site, in order to foretel such future events: foresight and sense uttered a prophesy which you see now fulfilled, and theaccomplishment whereof you can readon the mangled backs of the companions of your former excursions. If you are wise then, return peaceably and without delay to your occupation and duty, and do not swell the cata- logue of suffering offenders : it is the advice of one who has your welfare at heart ; who, whilst he reprobates your disorders, pities your weakness, and who, in ac- knowledging the justice of the punishment inflicted for the crime, commiserates the man in the criminal.
But what will my pity avail, if you do not pity your- selves? How, or by what arguments to reclaim you, I am at a loss. I shall howeverpay this last tribute to humani-
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ty, and follow the advice of the Apostle who commands Ministers of the Gospel to rebuke, reprove, exhort the sin- ner. To be instant in season, and out of season. If my en- deavours should chance to be out of season with regard to the obstinate, yet they may be in season with regard to those whom 1 would fain preserve from the contagion of your pernicious example. I reclaimed some of your associates before, who now feel the comfort of having returned to the path of peace and good order. Happy for you, though late, if you copied after them. To at- tempt to reclaim you by the power and influence of re- ligion would, I am afraid, be an useless task. You have thrown off its restraint. And however orderly a well bred Deist who does not feel distress, but laughs at re- ligion, may conduct himself through life until the scene of delusion is closed, and death introduces him to the Judge, who says, Woe to you who laugh, &c. When the common people in any state throw off the restraint of religion, or become fanatics, they may like lions un- chained, who, if not opposed by force or stratagem, will devour their defenceless prey. Of this we have unhap- py proofs in the disturbances which have disgraced this province. When you minded your religion, grace and order reigned over the land. The w7eary cottager, after his labour and rural meal, slept secure, and acquired fresh strength for the toils of the ensuing day ; and if the neighbour was injured in his property by stealth and fraud, the dread of profaning the Sacraments was at- tended with restitution, and the purpose of amendment. But when, to the astonishment and scandal of the pub- lic, religion became a sport ; when the houses of worship were profaned by the tumultuary meetings, beginning their devotions with the solemnity of combination oaths, without inquiring whether they were lawful or sacrile- gious; when the flocks became deaf to the instructions of the pastors, dictating instead of obeying, and did with their own hands, what the most infamous Priest-catchers refrained from doing in times of persecution, I mean the nailing up of Chapels, and excluding from the house of God such as intended to offer up their prayers on that day appointed by all denominations of Christians for
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the worship of the Supreme Being, and held so sacred, that on that day the very administration of civil justice is suspended ; when without any intention to exchange the creed for another, but rather get rid of both, nor any intention to reform the morals, but rather to obtain impunity for licentiousness, you flocked to the Pro- testant churches, as the temples in former times were resorted to by those malefactors who intended to make of the house of God a rampart againt the pursuit of violated justice ; when this irreligious farce was at- tended with the notes of the flute, and the blasts of the bagpipe playing from one house of worship into an- other, a set of men combined against the clergy of both, threatening with destruction the respectable Catholics who refused to attend the procession of disorder in tumult.
In short, when religion lost its hold of people accus- tomed to revere and respect it, then the most peaceable county of the kingdom became a scene of anarchy, disorder, and confusion, and spread the contagion far and wide ; a brutal and indiscriminate vengeance was wreaked upon man and beast : and the excesses of the mad rabble who acknowledged Lord George Gordon for their President in the year eighty, have been in some measure copied by the followers of Captain Right in the year eighty-six ; the former burnt houses, and commit- ted singing birds to the flames ; the latter cropped horses, and burnt ricks of corn. — 0 foolish Galalians? says St. Paul, what hath bewitched you?
If you complained of grievances, was redress to be obtained by profanation, and inhuman and barbarous steps, which tend to defeat the very end you propose to yourselves, and to make you rather objects of detesta- tion than pity ? When you complained of the conduct of some of your own clergymen, as overbearing and rigorous ; to remove every plea for disorder and dis- content, your prelates assembled, and after declaring that a small stipend, the reasonableness of which they left to the decision of the public, was requisite for the support of your pastors; they enjoined them at the same time not to enforce a rigorous exaction of their
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dues, but to shew, upon all occasions, that spirit of mildness, lenity, and disinterestedness, so becoming their sacred cha- racter. What more could they have done ? You, on the other hand, not only bound yourselves by oath to withhold your usual support, but controul the opulent and well-dis- posed, who were willing and able to make up for what yourselves were unwilling and unable to give. Thus, under pretence of redressing grievances, you became the oppres- sors of your spiritual guides, and as to your causes of com- plaint from proctors and tithe-farmers, instead of waiting for that relief which the humanity and wisdom of the Parliament may in time and place suggest, you have arrogated to your- selves a power bordering upon life and death, by burying them up to their chins in graves, lined with briars and other materials of torture, leaving their life or destruction to the bare chance of being found or not found, by some pas- senger. Great God ! could you be so divested of feeling as to inflict such a punishment, or so devoid of common sense as to imagine that such a conduct was the best method of deserving the attention and compassion of your rulers ? The public considered these horrid barbarities as the effects of a temporary madness, which cool reason and the severity of the law would effectually cure. But what must not be their indignation and astonishment, if, after the steps which Go- vernment has taken, they see you not only relapse into your former frenzy, but work yourselves up to the highest pitch of madness !
After reforming the clergy, you now proceed to reform the state. By your new regulations, no labouring man is to go to another parish to save the harvest. This certainly shews your humanity and wisdom, on the eve of the severe winter, where every hand should be employed to secure the bounties of nature — and this I call a regulation of beggary and imprisonment. For the landlord will have his rent or your bodies, and if you refuse to work you must beg ; and the public will give no alms to persons who become idlers from wilful obstinacy.
You write threatening letters to the Civil Magistrate, or- dering him, under the severest penalties, to interfere no more in your proceedings, and are come to resolves about the
7. z
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hearth-money, which you intend to regulate by your owe standard ; and this regulation about magistrates and hearth-money, as more immediately affecting Majesty, is a regulation bordering upon treason or rebellion, and appro priating to yourselves a part of the revenues of the crown. To crown the work, you posted up a notice, or you wrote a menacing letter to a most respectable Protestant clergy- man, ordering him not to meddle with an old church in his parish, the materials of which are requisite to defray the expenses incurred by building a new one, but to leave it to you for a chapel. And this regulation, to me, is a regula- tion of surprise and astonishment. What a surprising tran- sition from profanation to devotion, from one extreme to another ! Some time before you nailed up the chapels, and would not permit your clergy to officiate therein. Now your own chapels will not suffice without having the church : not long since you carried the chapel to church ; now you will have the church come back to the chapel. This is a strange fit of devotion in a set of men who, not long ago, in derision of priesthood, gave but an Irish crown to the pastor, at a wedding, and collected eighteen shillings for the piper : but pray, if you obtain the church, who will be your chaplain ? For 1 am sure no Roman Catholic clergyman will be so mad as to obtrude into a church, of the established religion, under the banners of sedition. You must then ordain a chaplain yourselves ; and every person who at- tempts a reformation in the church and state, without an ordinary mission, commonly pleads a mission from Heaven. Captain Right may assume the power of ordination, as the German cobbler, who attempted the reformation of religion, pretended to impart the gift of prophecy to his disciples, by making them drink a pot of beer, and giving them on the head a stroke of a poker.
However, as this extraordinary message, purporting to give up a Protestant church to be changed into a chapel, is become the general subject of conversation, it is incumbent on me to make my remarks on it. I have read so many anecdotes of plots and roguish schemes, of which simpletons were the tools, and knaves the contrivers, that I am very ©autious. It is supposed that when you meet in your lurking
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holes, you all agree in the same measure, and that every de- liberation is the act of the whole corps, otherwise you woukl soon disperse. If then this message be really an act of your meeting, some artful incendiary, capable of working upon your intellects, stupified by watching and intoxication, has crept in among you, either to cause some confusion in the state, from motives best known (if not to himself) certainly to his employer, or from an expectation of obtaining a rewaid for swearing away your lives at the next assizes. For there is not the least shadow of probability, that a set oi night- strollers, cropping cattle and burning corn, after nailing up chapels and humbling their clergy, would expose themselves to martyrdom in forcing a Protestant clergyman to give up a church, to indulge a devotion. Moreover, you know that when a new place of worship is to be erected, the Parish Priest is always consulted ; for where there is no Mass, there is an end of the chapel. You know full well that no Priest would attend you in such a fit of frantic devotion, if you did not force him to ride bare-backed, Proctor-like, on Captain Right's grey horse, with the furze saddle under him, and the horn sounding before him. Give up then every thought of changing the church into a chapel, for you will never get any Priest to attend you there, without you drive him before you mounted, as 1 mentioned; and I am sure that the most ambitious of the clergy would not ride the Pope's mule in such an equipage. The message then, if it comes from you, is of a piece with the rest of your proceedings, as far as they are barely confined to nonsense; and if the churches and chapels were the anti-chambers of Heaven, they could never procure admittance into its inner apart- ments, whilst you lead a loose and licentious life, destroying your neighbour's property, and disturbing the peace of so- ciety. However, if you want to see the inside of that church, you shall be gratified on the following condition : — Appoint what Sunday you think fit, and that at soonest, and I shall go and meet you there, not to say mass, but to give you an exhortation, or a sermon, which ever you like. Colonel Mannix, or any of the neighbouring Magistrates will, I am confident, not refuse to attend ; after the exhortalion of which you certainly stand in need, the Magistrate will
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explain the law to you, listen to jour complaints, and if you make a solemn promise, which you can without any remorse, confirm with an oath, to return peaceably to your duty, and to disturb no longer the community, he will transmit your complaints to your Representatives in Parliament. A simi- lar affair happened already, and has been attended with success, for the people, on listening to reason, returned to the path of moderation and good conduct : all this is to be done with the consent of the gentleman to whom the old church belongs, for you know that it is not civil to force into another man's house. The pastor of that church is a sted- fast Protestant, and I am a stedfast Roman Catholic, believing seven sacraments, and every article that has been explained to you in your early days in your catechism. Yet we are both united in the same cause of charity and benevo- lence with several other gentlemen of different persuasions, as Members of the Committee for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors.
Our controversies turn upon the ways and means of keeping order and cleanliness in the gaols, of procuring the captive debtors a weekly allowance, of compounding with their creditors, and restoring them to their poor families. The very Magistrates who you threaten are subscribers to this institution : on the list of the relieved captives are numbers of your own namesakes and relations. This digression 1 make in order to remind you of your ingra- titude and delusion in meddling with the clergy of the established religion, many of whom deserve so well of the poor ; but that gentleman in particular, the martyr of charity, who bestows on them the portion of time and substance which he can spare from his functions and family. The proposal of meeting 1 make from my heart ; the subject of my sermon shall be the obligations which na- ture and religion impose on man to live peaceably and ho- nestly, both as a Christian and a member of civil society, and my text shall be these words of St. Paul, / exhort therefore that prayer and supplication be made for kings, and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all God- liness and honesty. 1 Tim. c. 2. May you conform your lives to the text ! Amen. But to return to the notice, or message ;
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It is most likely that some one who would not much scru- ple to tell a lie at the expense of your lives, has written the letter in your name, or posted up the notice, to make you more odious than you are, (though you are odious enough already,) and to hasten the vengeance of the laws which await you, by quickening the fears of the public. Every robbery and plunder will be laid to your charge, several se- ditious letters will be written in your names, and divine jus- tice will permit that even the malice of others will hasten to your ruin. And however I hate your proceedings, I really pity your madness in putting it in their power; and the more so, as, according to St. Augustine, no wretch is more to be pitied than the wretch who does not pity himself. One should think, that more than a twelvemonth's apprenticeship to licentiousness, besides the losses you have sustained, would have tired you in the road of iniquity; and little did we expect to hear any more of cropping horses and burning corn, much less depriving the cottager of the; use of his spade amidst the invitations of a copious harvest. Little did we expect to hear of attempts to deprive the landlords of their rent, to encroach upon the authority of Parliament, and to invade the risfhts of the Crown, bv arrosratino: to yourselves the power ot regulating the taxes of the state, after two assizes, and the lenity, impartiality and wisdom which Government has shewn upon the occasion; for what greater proofs of them could Government have given, than when the energy of the laws was to be supported by the military power, it appointed a General who unites humanity with valour, who condescended to appear in your complaints, prevailed on several gentlemen concerned in tithes to re- duce to the most reasonable standard ; copied after that illus- trious Roman, who, when the common people had thrown off the yoke of subordination, kept the sword in the sheath, and held out the olive branch, preferring in the first stajre of the political distemper, lenient to violent remedies : a Ge- neral, in fine, who, on hearing well-grounded complaints, would forget the warrior in the advocate of the distressed, if the complainers ceased to be licentious.
In the delicate circumstances which affected your lives, Government appointed a judge, endowed with extensive
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knowledge, penetration, and wisdom, which qualify him so eminently tor holding the scale in which the lives, the for- tune, and the honour of men are to be weighed; with inte- grity, proof against the attacks of power and interest, with humanity and moderation, which without loosening the veil wherewith justice is painted hoodwinked, can raise its bor- der to cast a glance of pity on the unfortunate : such were the two illustrious personages in whose handb Government lodged the sword of military power and justice, to sup- press the disorders to which you have given rise. I mean Lord Luttrell and Lord Chief Baron Yelverton. Wisdom and impartiality made a choice which humanity applauded ; but a longer continuance of your madness and folly must baffle their united eflbns, to your own inevitable destruction.
The honour of the country, the preservation of public order, the protection of the defenceless cottager, and the prevention of further disorders, will compel Generals to taark the progress of their march with your blood, and judges to stretch the laws to their utmost. Equally cruel to yourselves and unmerciful to others, if you have any grievances to complain of, you block up every road to re- dress, by the very steps whereby you intend to obtain it.
In a large country, and I may almost say a province, with- out arts or manufactures, where, in some places, in a range of fifty or sixty miles, scarce a wheel or reel can be met with for want of flax or wool to employ the house-wife, and where the very treasures of the ocean are become use- less for want of the means to improve the advantages of nature: in a place so circumstanced, where the poor cotta- ger must with five-pence a day support himself, a wife, and live or six children, more or less, and contribute his share to the support of the State, you attempt to deprive poor in- dustrious men of the liberty of earning the means of sub- sistance. Some of you can remember the great frost, and such of you as were not born at the time must know, from the tradition of your fathers, that Heaven visited the land with a famine, whose ravages amongst the common people were such, that for want of food, the living had scarce strength enough to bury the dead. Now Heaven is kind in granting you an extraordinary continuance of fair weather,,
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and a plentiful harvest, and the favours of Heaven you re- ject. Instead of practising the lesson which nature itself gives you in the example of the ant, the bee, and several classes of irrational beings, an example which Solomon re- commends to your imitation in the following words : Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise ; which having no guide, overseer, or rider, provideth her ?neet in the summer, and gathereih her food in the harvest. Instead of im- proving the fair weather to the best advantage in new thatch- ing your cabins, in minding your business, and laying in a stock for the support of yourselves and families against the ensuing winter, you exhaust your health in those nightly ex- cursions, the fruits of which must be the loss of life or liberty, or criminal weariness which disables you from working the following day. Under the pretence of redressing griev- ances, you confine the labourer who has no work at home, who at stated times goes to earn his wages in other parishes, and whose assistance is requisite for saving the harvest You confine him to his cottage, where he has nothing to be- hold but a wife and children perishing with hunger, and hm spade and shovel decaying with rust, because by the regula- tions of the Rightboys, he dares not to handle them in the parishes where he could get employment. Thus you op- press the poor; you distress the farmer, who at certain times wants an extraordinary number of hands; you will fill the gaols with insolvent debtors; and you begin to sow the seeds of scarcity and famine, which yourselves must in- evitably feel, as well as the innocent, which suffer but too often for the guilt of others. IC this be your mode of re- dressing grievances, the remedy is worse than the disease ; and if no other crime could be laid to your charge but this regulation only, this alone would expose you to the detes- tation of every honest man.
I appeal to yourselves, whether the unhappy persons who lost their lives by attempting a rescue, and thus impeding the course of justice, would not have done better to mind their business, than to cut off by a sudden death, and leave their widows and orphans without support ? To yourselves 1 appeal, whether such of your associates as have already undergone the just punishment of the law, or such as are
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now confined in order to take their trial at the next assizes* and who, besides their personal disgrace and danger, must feci for their families, destitute of their support, and dis- tressing themselves to support them in their confinement ? I appeal to yourselves, whether these persons would not have done better to mind their labour, and partake in common with their little families of the fruits of their ho- nest industry, than to be, as they now are, the unpUieel objects of wretchedness, labouring under present ano-uish, and haunted with the terror of future punishment, repre- senting to themselves the sword of justice hanging over their heads, and uncertain of their future destiny. Would you really wish to be in their situation ? Answer me. — I am sure you would not. If then you intend to avoid their fate, avoid their example, and learn a little wisdom from the folly of others, or rather avoid the punishment by avoiding the guilt.
Do you really believe, my brethren, (1 call you brethren, because 1 begin to soften from pity for the misfortunes you have already brought on others, and which you will inevi- tably bring on yourselves, for methinks I already hear the cries of your widows, or forlorn mothers, calling to me for alms to help them to buy your coffins.) do you really be- lieve that an obstinate perseverance in disorder, a repetition of conflagrations and outrages, and a gradual rise from one abuse to another, are the best means of disposing your rulers to lenity, and to a consideration of the causes of your complaints ? No, they only tend to give a keener edge to the sword of justice. You should rather dread, lest con- stant provocations on your part, and every effort to re- claim you to your duty, rendered fruitless by an obstinate resistance, may induce the legislature to make what is called a misdemeanor, capital felony, and that the same of- fences which in your associates have been punished with whipping or imprisonment only, may doom yourselves to the halter. What if you were declared public enemies to the State, and shot without further ceremony where- ever you would be met with after nightfall ? This is what you have to fear, and nothing to hope while you remain turbulent.
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No rulers on earth will permit any order of men to over- turn established laws, whilst they have power to maintain their authority. Much less will the rulers of this kingdom change one tittle of the laws, on occasion of any violence committed by a set of men who could be mowed down as so many withered weeds, by one single regiment. They will listen to the complaints of the subject when preferred to them in a decent, humble, and becoming manner, and through a proper channel. But they will reserve to themselves the* mode of redress, as well as the time for granting or refusing it. The multitude is too fickle and inconstant for governing itself. If it once strikes out of the path of subordination, tu- mults, dissensions, and the most atrocious crimes must be the result ; and in this state of convulsion, the man who com- plained of grievances before, under the ruling powers, wilL feel heavier grievances from his neighbour, who, unrestrained by law, will become his murderer or oppressor. Your con- duct justifies my remark ; the man who earned his four-pence or five-pence a day, slept secure under the protection of the law, and in the neighbourhood of the magistrate. Now, by the Whiteboy rules, he must starve in his cottage for want of liberty to earn his bread in a distant parish, or ride- the grey horse on a furze saddle, or to be buried to his chin in. a torturing grave. How to conclude this letter I am at a loss : if you have any regard for your lives, for your wives, for your children, for your fathers, or for your mothers, I con- jure you in the name of God, to desist without any further delay. Lord Luttrell, who, to his eternal honour, has in- quired into your complaints, is in possession of whatever is to be laid before the State of the nation, whose decision you, should wait for, with that submission becoming subjects, and that prudence which should hinder you as men from running to your final destruction. Your cause could not be in worse hands than your own : therefore throw yourselves on the mercy of your rulers, and do not force them to forget, in the multi- tude of your offences, whatever may be the cause of your com- plaints. This plain, simple, and candid advice is now your last resource : if you reject it, you are undone ; for you will not only have the laws and the army let loose on you, but all the nobility and gentry ; all the wise, peaceable, and Vir- tuous subjects, will consider you as public enemies, whose
3 A
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destruction is requisite for their own preservation. And as you are ignorant of the danger which threatens you, I request in your behalf, as a favour of the Printers throughout the kingdom, to copy this letter into their respective papers, and of the friends of humanity to make it as public as possible, by dispersing it amongst you. That it have on you the de- sired effect, is the wish of
Your's, &c.
Cork, Nov. 19, 1786.
A. O'LEARY.
REV. ARTHUR CTLEARY'S ADDRESS
To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Parliament of Great Britain : to which is added, an account of Sir Henry Mildmaifs BUI relative to Nuns.
Ma: Lords,
When I have the honour to address the most august Assembly on earth, and under the impression which injured honour must feel from an unmerited and horrid accusation that implies whatever can disgrace the human heart, and changes a Christian clergyman into an infernal being, even before he is stripped of the spoils of mortality, I cannot be ignorant of the delicacy of my situation, lest conscious, but defenceless rectitude should tempt me, even in the most agi- tated frame of mind, to make use of any unguarded word, which, though inadvertently, may give the slightest offence.
But in bringing the complaints of injured honour into the sanctuary of honour itself, I claim your Lordship's indul- gence if I presume to introduce myself under the designation which points out my person and character, to such members of your illustrious body as I have not the honour of being- known to.
I am a Catholic clergyman, a native of Ireland, well known in that kingdom for having inculcated loyalty to my Sove- reign, and subordination to the iaws, in the most critical limes, by my writings, my sermons, and example. For the truth of this assertion I could refer to the speeches delivered
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in the Irish House of Commons on a former occasion, and to the kingdom at large. Nor was my loyalty the effect of imperious necessity, or time-serving policy ; for in France, where, in consequence of barbarous and Gothic laws, 1 was forced in my early days to seek for a small portion of that education which I had been refused in the land of my fathers, where the youth of Europe had been instructed gratis, in the time of Ireland's splendour. In France, where the Catholics of Ireland had seminaries and convents, with full admission to all the degrees and honours of her Universities, I resisted every solicitation to enlist any of the subjects of these king- doms in the French king's service, though I had then every opportunity, being appointed to superintend prisons and hospitals, during the wars of fifty-seven, &c. until about the arrival of the then Duke of Bedford in Paris. It was my interest to recommend myself to the favour of the people in power, and consequently, more my interest to become a courtier than a moralist, bail it Paul calls God to witness when he asserts the truth, I can do the same when I assert that conscience was the rule of my conduct; and, whatever the uninformed may think of my creed, I would not perjure myself for all the Crowns and Sceptres on earth.
Thus far I thought it incumbent on me to say something of myself, in order to shew that not a single feature in my character corresponds with the picture, of the exhibition whereof, I have such room to complain. I have taken the oath of allegiance to his Majesty with the rest of the Catho- lic clergy of Ireland ; as then we are amenable to Govern- ment, and fulfil our part of the covenant, we think ourselves entitled to the protection of the laws both as to our persons and honour. Our persons have been hitherto secure from insult; how long they may be so is uncertain, if the public can believe that we answer the description given of us in a short publication to which the editor has prefixed the name of a very considerable person, who is presumed to know the state of Ireland, or who ought to know it better. For if our lineaments bear even the slightest resemblance to the portrait he is said to have drawn, we ought to be swept from society as serpents horrid to sight, and pests deadly to human nature.
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And as to honour, if what this publication sets forth, be true, we have by far less claim to it than the Cartouches, or Bagshots : for, the publication, after enlarging upon the civilization and other happy effects of the Union of Ireland with Great Britain, reckons, amongst others, the following remarkable one : • It will entice the Clergy to more con- ' stant residence, by which means the pernicious influence
* of the vagrant Catholic Friest, who goes about selling ab-
* solution for felonies, and all sorts of crimes, even murder
* itself, would be lessened, and in a great measure done 4 away.'
Horrid and barbarous accusation ! which describes the Catholic Priests of Ireland as the most detestable of the hu- man race, venders of sacrilege, profanation, murder, and felony ; and their flocks as so many licensed criminals and patentees of guilt, in purchasing their absolutions for the perpetration of the most horrid deeds. The vagrant Catho- lic Priests selling absolutions for felonies, all sorts of crimes, even murder.
I am as great a friend to the Union, and have reconciled, I believe, as many to it, as the person to whom the publication is attributed, i am a friend to it from, as I imagined, a well- founded expectation, that it will close the tumultuary scenes which have distracted my ill-fated country for ages ; and make the natives, of every religious description, happy : a people united, not in a league against Great Britain, but uni- ted with her and amongst themselves in interest, prosperity, and power ; by a free and equal participation of all benefits and advantages arising in the state, and by the removal of those jealousies which ever subsist between kingdoms or states, standing in the same relation to each other as England has stood hitherto with respect to Ireland-— the one subor- dinate to the other, and governed by viceroys, and both but half united. Divisions, jealousies, and their concomitant evils, must be the natural consequence. Such was the state of Norway, with regard to Denmark, until united. Such was the state of Portugal with regard to Spain, and of Flandera with regard to Austria, until separated. And such would be the state of Ireland with regard to England, until wedded together in the bands of a close and intimate
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union ; or divorced from each other by a solemn irrevocable deed of separation. For the calamities of Ireland are not originally and radically owing to difference in religious opi- nions. The kingdoms and states above mentioned professed the same creed. There is nothing unsociable in the charac- ter of Irishmen, any more than in the character of Germans; amongst whom, in some places, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics, perform their respective worship, on Sundays, in the same church. Amidst such a multiplicity of penal laws, some of which persecuted the dead body to the grave, in forbidding, under certain penalties, to bury any Catholic in the ruins of an old abbey, though built ages before bv his ancestors ; no Catholic could icarce have breathed outside the bars of a jail, had it not been for the liberality of our Protestant neighbours, who were too generous to enforce them. All the liberal-minded Protestants in Ireland are for the emancipation of the Catholics to this very day. And such as are under any bias now, would soon give up their prejudices, or rather, would never have indulged any, if the law had made no distinction.
Long before the magic sound of Protestant and Papist, like the Trojan trumpet, had given the signal to marshal them, as hostile armies against each other, on account of their creeds — an insiduous and destructive policy was at a loss how to divide the natives of Ireland, after they had sheathed the sword, and coalesced into one extensive and friendly family. It had not then the plea of difference of religion, for their religion was the same : nor the plea of interest, for it is the interest of the inhabitants of the same land to live in peace and harmony. At last it compassed, by playing on the passions, what it could not have effected by either religion or interest.
The Irish nobility and gentry of the Milesian race wore long beards, in which they gloried; the Government of that time got an act of parliament passed, called the Glib Act, whereby every Irish nobleman, of English or Norman extraction, was to forfeit the privileges of his orio-jnal coun- try if he did not shave the upper lip. Thus the warlike fools renewed the bloody contest, tor the splitting of a hair, with as much fury as the two famous factions, in the rei
364 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
Justinian, quarrelled on account of the colour of their clothes ; or, as the sectaries of Ali and Omar fight, to this very day, about the orthodox cut that should be given 1o a Mahometan's beard. And 1 consider such of the Protes- tant and Catholics of Ireland full as great fanatics and fools as the former, if their creed be the cause of their quarrel; not that I am such a latitudinarian as to believe all religions alike. But true religion, instead of inspiring hatred and rancour, commands us to love and pity those who are in error.
The fleecy beard, and the glib or smooth lip, were both forgotten a few years after the Reformation, in the appella- tion of Protestant and Papist ; and thus the same sanguinary system has been continued, with few interruptions, for too long a time, to the destruction of a kingdom, which, from its happy situation, the commodiousness of its harbours, the temperature of its climate, the fertility of its soil, the manly and generous dispositions of its inhabitants, would realize whatever poets have feigned concerning Fortunate Islands, and Hesperian Gardens. To do away the jealousy which may hereafter operate to the same destructive effect, by playing off the natives against each other, to their mutual provocation and obstruction to the happiness and prosperity of their common country, was the chief motive which influ- enced my mind in recommending the Union, as the only effectual preventive.
As to the happy effect of the Union, by making the resi- dence of the clergy a check on the pernicious influence of the vagrant Catholic priest, who sells his absolution for all sorts of crimes ; it is as fancifully imagined, as it is delicately expressed. The parson hereby assumes the office of an ex- ciseman to seize the contraband absolutions of the priest, who becomes a smuggler — a well conceived plan for increas- ing the revenues of Ireland, and refining the manners of her inhabitants! The Protestant and Catholic clergy of Ireland have lived together, for years, in the habits of freedom and friendship ; when, by the laws of the country, the latter were doomed to transportation for performingtheir religious func- tions, the clergy of the established church, never turned in- formers, nor applied to Members of Parliament, for the
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 365
purpose of swelling with new laws, the enormous penal code, on account of literary disputes. Jt is not from each other they have any thing to fear; but both have every thing to dread from the disciples of the New Philosophy, which has made a rapid progress amongst their respective flocks ; at the root of this system, and not against any branch of the Christian religion, which professes obedience to the laws, the axe of power should be laid : and nothing cherishes the growth of infidelity more than publications which tend to expose the pastors to the derision and contempt of those who were accustomed, and whose duty it was, to respect them.
It is needless to have recourse to France, where the pmests1 cassock began to be considered by the higher or- ders as an antiquated dress; and the lower classes, who afterwards burnt the castle, and shed the blood of these nobles, learned disrespect for their teachers from their example. Ireland has of late afforded but too melancholy an instance of the truth of this remark. The habit of respect and submission to their clergy, was in such a manner an earnest pledge of the obedience of the common people to the state, that amidst so many wars and rebellions, since the Revolution, until the destruction of monarchy in France, Ireland was not one single hour tainted with the spirit of rebellion. Lord Chesterfield, on his return from his Vice- royship, informed George II. that he had met in Ireland but two dangerous Papists of whom his Majesty should be aware — two ladies of the names of Devereux, who had danced at the Castle on the King's birth night. All the Viceroys of Ireland, from Lord Chesterfield to Earl Cam- den, could have made much a similar answer, if interrogated concerning what is called the danger of Popery.
If a number of the common people, in some countries, were seduced from the peaceable line of conduct, which they had hitherto pursued, the chief cause will, as it ought to be ascribed to their disobedience to their pastors ; in consequence of the industrious propagation of Tom Paine's pernicious principles, and the artifices of people of power and consequence, of a religion, if any they had, different from the Catholic persuasion. Other collateral causes can be
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assigned which it is the province of the impartial historian to detail, when he lays open the hidden springs of public transactions. But means were used to weaken the confi- dence of the people in their pastors, by representing them as so many impostors, leagued with Government for their oppression.*
In the American war, when the combined fleets of France and Spain were riding triumphant in the British Channel, almost all the English forces engaged beyond the Atlantic, and Ireland destitute of any regular defence, except a few dismounted dragoons, the loyal and peace- able conduct of the common people, attentive to the in- structions of their pastors, could be equalled only by the union and exertions of the higher orders for the protection of the kingdom.
Many instances could 1 adduce, in which the peaceful voice of the priest was more effectual to quell riots and dis- turbances, than the thunder of the cannon could have been. In proportion as this influence is weakened in a kingdom situated as Ireland is, the spirit of insubordination and infi- delity will strengthen. Remove the restraints of religion, from men of strong passions, irritable dispositions, and des- perate courage — let the influence of their priests be de- stroyed, they will become infidels. The kingdom will be then chiefly divided between the infidels of the South, who will have no religion, and the Dissenters of the North, whose religion breathes freedom and independence on hierarchial Government.
The maxim laid down by Doctor Law, a Protestant Bi- shop, equally eminent for learning and liberality, is by far more consistent with Christianity and sound policy. ' By far * the greatest part of my diocesans,' said this illustrious pre- late, ' are of the Roman Catholic persuasion. I cannot make
* This is so true, that the United Irishmen universally execrate the Catholic Clergy, ns concurring- both to disunite and prevent any accession of strength, by their sermons and pastoral instructions: and impute partly the frustration of their plans, to these very priests, so cruelly libelled by others, from whom more candour and justice might be expected. The clergy of both religions must stand or fall together. In all ap- pearance, had the rebellion succeeded, there would be none but Cousitulional Priests and Ministers, as immoral as their Republican flocks.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 867
c good Protestants of them, I wish to make good Catholics
* of them; and with this intention 1 put into their hands the
* Works of Doctor Gother, an eminent Catholic divine.'
If Doctor Law's maxim be followed — if, instead of having the people eternally harassed on the score of religion, every one rests in peace under his own vine and tig-tree, a Catho- lic priest, respected by his flock, will be a safer guard to a Protestant clergyman, than a regiment of the best disciplined soldiers.
4 Let us uncatholicise France,' said Mirabeau, ' otherwise 4 we can never establish a Republican Government.' It is then much safer for the state to continue the Catholic cate- chism in the hands of the common people, who are accus- tomed to it, than to expose them to the danger of having Tom Paine's Age of Reason substituted in its room. And his Majesty will bo more secure on his throne, when a Ca- tholic clergyman recommends him and the Royal Family to God, from the altar, than when a fifth monarchy man, after reading in his Bible, thou shall bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in fetters of iron, acknowledges no king but King Jesus ; or, when Regicides inscribe on the muzzles of their guns, Lord, thou wilt open my lips, and my mouth shall sing forth thy praise. The History of England affords but too many melancholy proofs of it.
As to the blessing's of civilization which are to be extended to Ireland by the Union, any insinuation, that the Irish stand in need of it more than their neighbours, must hurt their oride.
I suppose he means the lower orders of the people of Ire- land. All philosophical and unprejudiced travellers, who have observed with attention their customs and manners, acknowledge that they surpass the lower orders of any other country, in generosity, wit, vivacity, manliness and ac- tivity. It is not at St. Giles, or Wapping, where their man- ners and morals are vitiated by the contagion of example, that the character of the lower orders of the Irish is to be known. It is in the inland and mountainous parts of Ire- land, where bare-footed boys study the classics ; and where the civility of the common people to strangers, and to each other, distinguishes them as much from Dutch boors, and
3b
ob\i MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS,
th 6 rustics of other countries, as education distinguishes a
well-bred man from a clown. It is not civilization, but bread
and employment they stand in need of: and if it be true,
that language and music were the first civilizers that soften- er o . .
ed the savage manners of unpolished man ; it seems, from the inharmonious stile of the author of a publication, which identifies, by a grammatical apposition, a Catholic priest and a vagrant — that he has not such a stock of civilization to
o .... ...
spare, as to be enabled to divide it with others without im- poverishing himself, Though his rank in life entitles him to range in those circles, one of whose first rules is that oi good breeding, if the name which the editor has prefixed to the publication be not fictitious.
The Catholic clergy of Ireland, my Lords, are not va- grants : they claim their descent from the most ancient and noble families in that kingdom ; and, though pride of birth attaches no consequence either to their persons or profession, in the eyes of the patrons of liberty and equality, yet it must have weight with your Lordships. For in Monarchies, where, according to Montesquieu, there must be gradation s of ranks, and nobles, like your Lordships, whose titles and privileges are descendable to their posterity, a certain re- gard must be paid to lineage and pedigree ; and if the day should ever happen (which heaven avert) when the gentle- man should be confounded with the clown, and the priest with the vagrant, away with the coronet and the armorial bearings. My name is Equality, said the late Duke of Or- leans : the unhappy man prophesied ! His head fell, with equal honour, from the edge of the guillotine into the same basket with the head of the sans-culotte. If then the au- thor of the worse than illiberal publication, alluded to in this address, be that man of consequence, whose name the editor has prefixed to it, he forgets himself, and the regard due to dignity of rank, and the rules of common decency, when he treats gentlemen of family, and of a liberal educa- tion, such as the Catholic clergy of Ireland, with millions of times less ceremony than it would be in his power to treat a pilfering crew of strolling gipsies. The vagrant Catholic priest selling his absolutions for all sorts of crimes, felonies f
&,'C. ${C.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 369
The ancestors, my Lords, of the Catholic clergy of Ire- land, had the religion which the Christian worid professed, and the estates and castles of their fathers, ages before Tu- dors or Stuarts had ascended the British throne. From the contemporary historians of their own and of other nations, and ancient monuments, daily rescued from ruins and wa- tery wastes, their character must be drawn : not from Hume, and similar historians, as unfaithful in their narratives with regard to Ireland, as tbey are infidels with regard to Revelation.
Amidst the various changes that happened in Europe, the descendants of those Catholics preserved their religion, which persecution contributed to rivet deeper into their minds; as, the more the wind attempted to strip the tra- veller of his cloak, the closer he held it. But their estates and castles they lost, rather than renounce their duty to God, and their allegiance to their kings; one of whom had the base ingratitude to confirm to Cromwell's soldiers, tinged with his royal father's blood, the lands of the nobility and gentry who had fought his father's battles and his own.*
In addition to our losses under the usurpation of Crom- well, and subsequent ones at the Revolution, our most invaluable privileges were swept away at a political game of hazard, played by Whigs and Tories, under the last of the Stuarts, without the slightest provocation on our part For the laws framed in Queen Anne's reign against the Ca- tholics of Ireland, are of so horrid a complexion, that it was never the intention of those who devised them to have them enacted: their very cruelty was the only motive for invent- ing; them.
Queen Anne, whose father had been a mendicant, sup- ported by the generosity of a foreign king, was suspected of wishing that her brother, a Catholic prince, should succeed her. The party, to whom her Ministers were obnoxious, intended to draw on them the odium of purposing to place the Pretender on the throne. With this view, they framed a code of laws, authorising the neighbour to plunder the neighbour, the brother to supplant the brother, and the pro-
* The wills and deeds of uumbers of these forfeitures are deposited io the British Museum.
370 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
fiigafc son to strip the father of his estate and to make him tenant for life, only by taking an oath of abjuration ; with a variety of other penal clauses equally cruel and unjust. The very severity of laws, clashing with those of God and na- ture, gave them every room to believe that they would be opposed by the court party, from principles of humanity and justice. And thus they flattered themselves with the success of an expedient, calculated to expose their opponents to the hatred entertained at the time against those who were deemed the friends of the Pope and the Pretender.
The shrewd courtiers, aware of the design of their anta- gonists, and, either willing to sacrifice justice and humanity to their personal interest, or flattering themselves that the laws would be but of short duration, in the event of the suc- cess of their plan, unexpectedly gave into the measure, to remove the suspicion of their design. It was too late for the other party to recede ; and thus, in the time of profound peace, in violation of a solemn compact, sanctioned by the Jaws of nations, the Catholics of Ireland, like balls in a ten- nis-court, struck with the rackets of both parties, were thrown over the walls of the constitution of their country, against the original intention of the state gamesters.
If rulers and statesmen, long since resolved into their original dust, have handed down to us restraints and dis- qualifications as a legal inheritance, it is their fault and our misfortune, but not a reason which authorises those to whom the destinies have been more propitious, to aggravate our calamities, by loading us with gross slander, and worse than degrading epithets, venders of murders, and purchasers of felonies ! Neither is this an age for the triumph of over- bearing contempt towards the descendants of the victims of the revolutions of former times, when Europe is threatened with a more extraordinary revolution than that which has reduced the Catholics of Ireland to their present situation.
Solomon said, in his time, nothing new under the Sun. About a century and a half ago, England's King was brought to the scaffold ; her princes and nobles, and other loyalists, emigrants in France and other countries, where they were hospitably received, as the emigrants of those countries are
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 371
now in their turn generously received in England, and in deri- sion of the peerage, draymen were placed by an usurper, in that very house where your Lordships shine with such lustre.
Little it was expected, about a century ago, when a prince of the House of Orange was seated on the British Throne, after having placed a guard over James the Second, his father- in-law, in the palace of Hampton Court, that his successor in the Stadtholdership of Holland, dethroned by his rebel- lious subjects, would be under the necessity of taking up his residence in the very same palace where a King of Eng- land hold been a kind of prisoner before : an awful instance of the vicissitudes of human affairs ; which should inspire princes themselves with humanity and compassion for the oppressed — when they not only know that they are doomed to die as other mortals, but moreover exposed, from the inconstancy of fortune, to survive their power. Go, said Ma- rius, once the master of Rome, and conqueror of the Cim- bri, go and tell the Governor of Africa, that you have seen Marius perishing with hunger on the ruins of Carthage, alluding to the instability of human grandeur, in the down- fal of such a powerful state, and the change of his own fortune.
When we see kingdoms and empires fall, as it were, upon one another — when we see kings and queens, a few years back the idols of their subjects, eclipsing in splendour the pomp and magnificence of Oriental grandeur — when we see them bleeding on scaffolds, and their bodies deprived of those funeral rites which decency owes to humanity, we are con- vinced that uneertainty, inconstancy, and agitation, are the proper portions of all sublunary affairs ; and the greatest abuse of power is to triumph and insult over oppressed inno- cence.
The Catholic clergy of Ireland should not then be singled out as objects of defamation and invective, for having fallen victims to those reverses of fortune to which crowned heads, princes and nobles are exposed. In their poverty they have birth and honour, which neither revolutions nor penal laws can affect : no immoral man is ever allowed to officiate at their altars : when their prelates, who are ever watchful over
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the inferior clergy, discover any who depart from the line of duty required by the sanction of their profession, they sus- pend or excommunicate them, and thus cut them oft' from the communion of the Catholic church.
The same laws that encouraged the son to disobey and strip the Catholic father of his property, encouraged the refrac- tory clergyman to set the injunctions and admonitions of his bishops at defiance, by taking the oath of abjuration : for, as an encouragement to outward conformity, the laws of Ire- land allow forty pounds a year to every priest who reads his recantation, whether he be a moral man or not.
In a word, nothing whatever is required to become an elect of the state, but the outward utterance of the oath of abjuration, whether it is believed by the person who takes it, or whether it belies his heart. All the punishments and legal disqualifications are reserved for the retainers of con- scious integrity, who sacrifice all worldly interests rather than swear against the dictates of their conscience, and thus do not choose to perjure themselves, and impose on their neighbours. In the very supposition that they err, (which is the supposition of others, not theirs,) they err in their ho- nesty ; for no road can be right to the man who walks in it against conviction. And this circumstance alone is more than an ample refutation of the impious and hell-invented charge of a Catholic priest selling absolutions for all sorts of crimes, felonies, and murders : for if there were priests who had such commodities for sale, and Catholics to purchase them, long before now the Catholic noblemen would have been seated in the House of Peers with your Lordships in legisla- ting for the lands. Every obstacle would be soon removed ; one single oath would be the ptnacea which would cure all disorders: we see ourselves excluded from all the dignities and places of emolument in the state. In consequence of this exclusion we see ourselves abused by the very dregs and lees of the peasantry of our country ; such as Doctor Duigninane,
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 373
Hie son of a peasant who had read his recantation to be schoolmaster to poor children in a charity school, now ranking with the senators in the land, and realizing in our days what Solomon complained of as one of the evils inci- dent to human nature — Another evil I have seen under the sun, I have seen servants or beggars on houses, and princes walking on the earth, or on foot, Ecclcsiast.es 10. Not that I won id reproach any man with the meanness of his birth, when I would see Apollo crown modest merit. But when a vulgar man, under the shield of penal laws, is continually insulting, in the grossest manner, the majority of an entire kingdom, as if they were a group of African slaves on a West India plantation, under the lash of a brutal driver — when, on the other hand, we are told in the most public manner, that we have dispensations and absolutions for the commission of all sorts of crimes, I feel such a conflict within myself, that I am obliged to summon up all my religion, lest I should yield to the temptation of hating a man I am bound to forgive. I am at a loss which to admire most of the two, either the power of conscience over the heart of man, or the unaccountable stupidity, the perverse and wilful blindness of any person who claims the slightest pre- tention to reason or good sense, and yet seriously thinks that unprincipled men, licenced by their religious princi- ples, and authorized by their clergy to commit all sorts of crimes, could hesitate one instant to have recourse to so slight a remedy as an oath to remove every grievance, and silence every obloquy.
The feelings of honour, the pride of rank, the allurements of fortune and dignities, every impulse of the human heart, and all the motives that influence man as a member of society, call aloud on us to remove the disgraceful restraints that expose us to such humiliations and obloquy. And yet, with the remedy in our hands, the churches open, and this pretended stock of absolutions, which, according to the report of slander, would sanctify all sorts of crimes, we keep at a distance from the temple of fame, power, and splendour.
When the Pagans accused the primitive Christians of
374 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
eating children at their religious assemblies, and rising after supper to conclude all in the confusion of incest, Tertullien addressed his apology to the Roman senate, and calls upon them to prove the truth of the fact. He appeals afterwards to the feelings of humanity, common to Pagans and Chris- tians, whether such crimes could be the religion of any so- ciety of mortals. O, said he, wliat immortal glory would a pro-consul gain, could he pull out a Christian by the ears, that had eat up an hundred children. But we despair of any such glorious discovery.
I call aloud upon the Viceroys of Ireland, their Secretaries, and the Judges of the land, to name or to recollect one single instance in which a crime, murder or felony has been com- mitted, in consequence of a priestly absolution. Where was the gallows erected, on the branches of which the absolved murderer and die absolving priest were suspended together — the one the perpetrator, the other the instigator of the crime ? Or where is that nation on earth, even in times of Paganism, where the religion of the people authorized the commission W all sorts of crimes ?
The Romans, who worshipped an adulterous Jupiter, yet punished adultery by the Julian law. The Senator who had offered incense to Bacchus, could not abide his wife when he discovered that her breath was too fragrant with the flavour of wine. The impure Venus was a goddess worshipped by the matrons of ancient Rome, yet Lucretia was chaste. The civil magistrate punished on earth the crimes that were wor- shipped in heaven. There exists then in the heart of man a law which points out to him, according to the Apostle, his moral duty — an innate principle of justice and goodness, by which, even in spite of the false maxims of his worship, the unregenerate Pagan condemned the immoral actions of him- self and others.
The Catholics of Ireland, natives of a nation of heroes and an island of saints, are they to form the most singular of all exceptions to the maxims of nature, by not only sanctifying crimes, but by also making them a saleable commodity ?
We who spend our time in enforcing the maxims of the
MISCELLANEOUS TRACES. 375
Gospel, one of whose principal laws is a law of eternal love : who teach our flocks to relieve the distressed, without dis- tinction of sects or countries, to return good for evil — to dis- cover a brother in the face of an enemy — to embrace afflic- tion—to smile under calamity — to pluck out the eye that gives offence— to cut off the hand that scandalizes — to re- nounce all the honours, riches, and pleasures of the world, when they cannot be attained but at the risk of the soul, and to consider death in grace as a passage to a glorious and blissful eternity.
Are we such monsters as to be slaves to tenets so abhor- rent to human nature ?
I imagined, my Lords, that the solemn oaths and decla- rations of the Catholics of those kingdoms, and their renun- ciation of these privileges and rights, to which they would be otherwise entitled, rather than swear against their consciences, had sufficiently refuted accusations, at which nature recoils and shrinks with horror : but to our astonishment and sur- prise, our creed is not learned from ourselves. More credit is given to a fanatical geographer called Guthrie, than to our oaths, or the writings of our doctors. In this theological sum, our divinity is chiefly studied, and Guthrie informs his readers, that he has extracted from a book called : Rome, -the Great Custom- House of sin, translated into Eng- lish 150 years ago, the fees of the Pope's Chancery for abso- lutions. He might have said, instead of translated into English, composed in English originally. I never read such a book in the canon law, nor such fees amongst the rules of the Pope's Chancery ; however, he classes the fees in the following order.*
For him who stole consecrated things in a holy place, ten shillings and six -pence.
For him who lays with a woman in a church, nine shillings. For him that killeth father, mother, wife or sister, ten shillings.
For him that layeth with his mother, sister, or grand- mother, seven shillings and six-pence.
* Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, sixteenth edition, corrected and cib.igei. London, printed 1796.
3c
376 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS.
This is the cheapest bargain a pious customer could ex- pect, and I think there is good profit in dealing with the Pope, as a great number of other sins are not taxed at all, such as sleeping with a neighbour's wile, stealing a fat ox, &c. These are only as a few grains thrown into the scale, when a person buys some pounds of sugar in a grocer's shop. They are but peccadillos or trifles. It appears, however, that the Pope's are but bad financiers in not increasing the custom-house duties in the space of about 150 years, whereas every article costs now treble what it cost then ; but espe- cially, as things rise in value, according to the rarity, the Pope's custom rates were ill regulated in not charging six- pence or a shilling more for the grandmother than for the sister or grand-daughter, as most certainly an old Hebe, the grandmother of the graces, is a greater rarity than a young woman or grand-daughter. In vain should we attempt to disclaim this ludricous and impious creed. The public are so iccustomed to slander and misrepresentation, that few will believe us.
The rules of the Roman Chancery, Regulce Cancellaricc, regard benefices, the temporalities of vacant bishoprics, and other ecclesiastical matters, partly spiritual, partly temporal, according to concordatums or stipulations between the Apostolical See, and Catholic Princes. The incests and sacrileges above mentioned, instead of being compounded for money, would be punished with death on the rack or wheel, after making the amende honorable, with a lighted taper held by the criminal, on his knees before the door of the church where the sacrilege had been committed. Sixtus Quintus condemned to the gallies, for the space of five years, a nobleman for raising the veil of a lady whom he met in the street, and giving her a kiss. And in vain did a polygamist plead that he was unfortunate in each of his wives, and for that reason changed them in expectation of finding one that would please him.
As it is so hard to please you in this world, replied the stern Pontiff", there are more women in the other world, you must go there to find one to your liking — ordered him to be tried and executed.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 37/
Thus, if Rome be the great custom-house of sins, a Lon- don printer's office is the great custom-house of false creeds and fictitious absolutions, for real absolutions can never be granted but upon sincere repentance, which requires three indispensable conditions : a sincere sorrow for past sins, a firm resolution to guard against future lapses, and every atonement in our power to the injured Deity and the in- jured neighbour. Without these conditions absolutions are no more than the mutterings of sorcerers, or words of incan- tion pronounced over a dead body, without ever impart- ing to it the genial heat of animation and vitality. The ministers of religion can do no more than God has an- nexed to their commissions; and the Scriptures declare, that God will never forgive the sinner without sorrow and repentance, which implies a purpose of amendment for life.
Sacramental confession then, and priestly absolution, in- stead of being an encouragement to sin, are in the Catholic religion the greatest restraints on the passions, The worst and most immoral Catholics are those who neglect them, because they prefer their passions to their duty. And if it be asked, why have recourse to those religious rites, whereas people may sin afterwards ?
The reason is : because man in this life is not impeach- able, on account of the changeableness and inconstancy of his will. All he can do is to form the strongest resolutions, to lay hold on the means, which in his belief, God has ap- pointed for his sanctification, and to recommend himself to infinite mercy. Hence the caution given by the Apostle, Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.
God has promised to receive the sinner whenever he would return, without limiting the number of times. Yet to sin in expectation of forgiveness, would be the most un- justifiable presumption. Mercy is not to be abused, nor is Divine Justice to be provoked by new prevarications and new crimes. For there are times when the measure is filled up, and fatal limits, beyond which paternal goodness does not extend.
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Were priestly abolution, which is founded on the power granted by Christ to remit sins to the penitent sinner, a license for guilt, it would be unjust to charge it on the Ca- tholics alone — Lutherans, Greeks!, Armenians, ah branches of the Christian religion, except Calvinists, and the modern sectaries sprung from that stock, acknowledge this power. The Church of England, in her liturgy, recommends, ac- knowledges it, and lays down the form of absolution in the very same words used by the Roman Catholic Church. The Jaws of the state sanction the inviolable secresy which is ob- served, when the sinner, loaded with guilt, lays open his hidden sores to his spiritual physician ; whereas the laws do not allow that what is toid in confession should be adduced in evidence on a trial ; and by a statute passed in the reign of James I. the minister is degraded for ever, if he reveals the confession of his penitent. But the ill-fated Catholic is the expiatory victim on whose head all the iniquities of the nation are laid ; and what is harmless in others, is criminal in him.*
It is painful in me, my Lords, thus to intrude on your time. It is the more painful, as after so many proofs of the loyalty, the piety, the zeal, and exertions of the Catholic prelates and pastors of Ireland, in the critical circumstances, when there was no room for dissimulation, or a trimming, fluctuating conduct, threats should be held out for the abo- lition of their priesthood, as the nursery of crimes, felonies, and murders.
In addition to these threats, by a man of consequence, on the eve of a union which they imagined was to close the penal code with the sevenfold seal of eternal silence ; and at the very threshold of the Temple of Concord, they and their flocks are justly alarmed to see the pages of the mysterious
* I do not write in this address hs a controvertisr, or polemical divine; I only ex- pound the Catholic belief, so often and so grossly misrepresented, and whose ministers are exposed to obloquy on account of pretended absolution.
The primitive fathers, in addressing their apologies to a pagan -senate, explained their belief, to vindicate it from misrepresentation. I have every confidence that a Chris* nan senate will not be less indulgent to a Christian Clergyman.
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book, in which, like that mentioned by the Prophet, are written so many lamentations and woes, unfolded by a mem- ber of the British House of Commons, for the purpose of knowing whether there be any more penal clauses wanting, in order to make up the deficiency, by enacting a new law which hereafter may afflict their children and relatives. I mean, my Lords, Sir Henry Mildmay's bill, relative to what is called Monastic Institutions.
From a coincidence of circumstances it seems to appear, that the idea has been suggested to that gentleman, in con- sequence of a very uninteresting dispute betweeu two very learned, and in all other respects very amiable ecclesiastics, Doctor Sturges, a prebendary of Winchester, and Doctor Milner, a Catholic historian, and member of the Society of Antiquarians, about Bishop Hoadley's writings.
Mr. Milner has published a very learned and curious history of Winchester, under the successive dynasties of British, Saxon, and English kings, from the earliest records of time, down to our days. As an antiquarian, he describes the monuments of worthies buried in the Cathedral ; as a historian, he draws their characters. It is too voluminous to read by any but a few rich, who can purchase it. It is out of the reach of the generality of the English nation, who would be more pleased with Fielding's Torn Jones, or Jo- nathan Wild : though it for ever ranks Mr. Milner in the first class of the literar v characters of the age, and should rather procure, him the thanks of the inhabitants of Win- chester, for having rescued the history of their city from the mist and rubbish of antiquity, and given such elegant en- gravings of their monuments, than the animadversions of some of its ecclesiastical dignitaries.
Unfortunately for some English ladies, who, in their early days, had made vows of celibacy in France and Flanders, and had taken refuge in their native land, from the poniards guillotines of French assassins, the antiquarian, after describ- ing the monuments of several illustrious men in succession, came to that of Bishop Hoadley. This prelate, to the ex- ception of his moral character, which was spotless, might have been called the Perigord or Gregoire of his time, with
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regard to his theological principles in ecclesiastical matters, submitting religion to the civil magistrates. &c. A repre- sentation was drawn up against him, and his writings, by the lower House of Convocation in 1717, as tending: to sub- vert all government and discipline in the church of Christ, and to reduce it to a state of anarchy, and confusion : and as making void those powers with which he himself was vested, and which he was bound to exercise in conferring: order?, inflicting censures, &c.
The ministry of the day, with whom Bishop Hoadley was a favourite, dissolved the Convocation, prevented the re- presentation from being carried to the Bishops in the higher house, and thus dispersed the clouds that were thickening over Bishop Hoadley's head.
In describing his menumeati as an antiquarian, it was na- tural for Mr. Milner to draw the prelate's character as a historian ; and to represent him in attitude analogous to his principles, with the Bible in one hand, and Magna Charta in the other; the mitre and the cap of liberty in contact; the crozier and the pike set in saltire, or crossing each other. Mr. Milner complaining that one of the pillars of the ca- thedral of Winchester, was cut too great a depth to make place for Bishop Hoadley's monument, adds, thus Bishop Hoadley, both living and dead, undermined the church of which he had been a prelate.*
Doctor Sturges, as he himself acknowledges, had been under particular obligations to Bishop Hoadley, and in all appearance had imbibed, if not all, at least the best of his opinions. Gratitude and friendship, two of the human vir- tues the most congenial to our feelings as men, but often hur- rying us into excesses which we cannot canonize as Chris- tians, warmed Dr. Sturges' breast in such a manner, that he imparted a congenial heat to the embers of the dead, and reproduced on the stage a character, who, notwithstanding the change of scenes, will ever and invariably play the same part, which to confuse and perplex, to have friends and foes, and to leave the following problem to solve : Whether
* Milaer's Survey of Winchester.
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he was really and in his heart, a professor of the thirty-nine articles, one of which determines with the Catholic church, the institution of Bishops, jure divino f Or whether he was one of those accommodating sages, who, like the philosopher of old, laid down as a rule, that a wise man should have two religions, one for himself, and another for the country and time in which he lives ? The solution of this problem, I leave to Doctor Sturges and Mr. Milner.
It is a problem, the solution whereof concerns no more the present generation than the religion of Grotius, on which the famous Bossuet has written a dissertation.
Few persons read Hoadley, whose style is so incoherent and unentertaining, that Pope, in allusion to the length of his periods, said Hoadley walks a mile. To it can be applied the remark of a Roman Kmperor on the style of Seneca : * arena sine calse, sand without cement.' Doctor Sturges, however, took offence at the character Mr. Milner had drawn of his favourite bishop, and instead of confining himself in point to the dispute, adopted the most effectual method of rallying round his standard a host of confederates, by making a general cause of it and publishing a work under the title of Reflections on Popery ; a theme so often enlarged on pro and con by the most eminent men the world has ever produced, that it is impossible to say any thing new on the subject.
Mr. Milner, as an historian, depicted the eminent men of religious orders, who had reflected lustre on the church of Winchester, in the same colours that any impartial Protestant historian would have done, as several of them have. He does the same justice to such of the Protestant Bishops of Winchester, as deserved to have their birth, education, learning, and virtues celebrated.
Doctor Sturges, inattentive to the labours and learning of the members of religious orders, who have preserved the literary monuments of ancient times from the ravages of Goths and Vandals — followed the sun in its course in con- verting barbarous nations— carried the light of the Gospel into those distant climes unknown to the conquerors of the ancient and new world — brought Europe acquainted with the natural productions, the laws, the manners, customs, religions,
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and geography of the remotest regions, and enriched the re* public of letters with the treasures of literature both ancient and modern. He overlooks the benefits they have conferred on the world, in their fasts and celibacy, which he attacks with as much vehemence and zeal as Salvian attacks the vices and disorders of his time,
The prayers, mortification, penance of monastic institu- tions, all must yield with Doctor Sturges to the irresistible impulse of nature. The impulse of nature — the source of all our disorders and miseries, which all legislators on earth made it their constant study to restrain by Jaws and punish- ments. What made an adulterer of David ? The impulse of nature. An incestuous of Amnon ? The impulse of na- ture. A rebel of Absolem ? The impulse of nature.- ■
A murderer of Cain? The impulse of nature. What
gives employment to the canonists and civilians of Doctors Commons, in arguing the cases of divorce ? The impulse
of nature. What peoples London with so many votaries
of the Cyprian Goddess ? The impulse of nature. What
is it that brought the impure spirit into the body of that man, concerning whom our Saviour said, there is a kind of devil which cannot be cast out, but by prayer and fasting ? The impulse of nature. His zeal against celibacy, and mortifica- tion, hurries him into such extremes that he blames Mr. Milner for being so lavish in his encomiums on the Pro- testant Bishops of Winchester, the most distinguished for their virtues, though Mr. Milner quotes their monumental inscriptions, recorded by Protestant authors, such as Bishop Andrews, who lived in a state of celibacy. Ccelcbs hinc, migravit ad aurlolam celestem, and Bishop Morley, amongst whose many virtues is reckoned the austerity of his life, eating but once in twenty-four hours, and rising every morning in the coldest weather and without a fire, at five o'clock.
He is never more eloquent, than when he declaims against fast and celibacy. In support of his arguments against celi- bacy, he quotes Lucretius, an Epicurinn poet and philosopher, who invokes Venus, the Goddess of lust ; and Walter de Mapes, an unchaste boa vivant, who wrote doggerel verses in latin in the twelfth century.
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 383
Mcum est pioposituui in taberna mori. Viuum sit appositum morientus ori.*
They are certainly the best authorities he could quote against virginal chastity, and the mortification of the senses. For he could not quote Saint Paul or the fathers against either one or the other. If Saint Jerome were living, he would write an epistle to Doctor Sturges with the same warmth, with which he wrote to Vigilanlius.
The Doctor has reserved Bishop Hoadley's apology for an appendix, in which he makes use of words, which, from Mr. Milner or me, would render us obnoxious to the Bishops of both persuasions.
They are the following :—As an Ecclesiastic, he (Bishop Hoadley) ivithstood the high pretensions of great part of the Clergy— pretensions unauthorised by reason, maintained by a violent party spirit, and often employed in the most tumultuary and factious purposes to which the cry of the church was made subservient. This cry, which he does not seem to approve in the hierarchy, soon became the cry of some of the preben- daries of Winchester, and from them the cry of the public papers.
On Mr. Milner' s reply, in which there is a dissertation on Bishop Hoadley's principles and writings, letters were writ- ten, and deputations sent to some Members of Parliament. Sir Henry Mildmay brings in a Bill for the suppression of Monastic Institutions, the very words of Doctor Sturges. One would imagine that there was a kind of confederacy amongst some of the editors of the public papers to ring the alarm. Not a single paragraph could I have seen in any of them in contradiction to exaggerated falsehoods. Two thousand of the common people, chiefly servant maids, were converted by the French Clergy in one part of London, in the space of two years ; that is to say, more than all the Catholic Clergy of England have converted since the reign of Elizabeth.
The French clergy, mostly half starved and half naked poor people, in spite of the generosity of government, on account of the smallness of their allowance, and the dearth of provisions, are ill qualified for making converts. They sleep five or six, or by trios, in poor places that cannot
* Others are of opinioD, that de Mapes is not the anther.
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afford to have servant maids : they do not know English- servant maids do not know French. These poor priests make their own beds, and cook their own soup and vege- tables. I have preached in the chapels in London near twelve years, and I have not reconciled one single servant maid to the Catholic Church. More of them are debauched in London in one month, than will be converted in ten thou- sand years. It were much better they were converted than cast on die town : and little v/ould the state suffer if a Lon- don cinder-woman embraced the religion of so many em- presses and queens.
Popery is increasing in the diocese of Chester, said another, where forty thousand three hundred and thirty-three persons never go to any religious worship. But Popery increases under the influence of fifty thousand Priests, all men of talents. That is to say, more Priests than all the Bishops of Europe have ordained in twenty years. Such are the methods used to prepare the way for the operation of a bill which has for its object a restraint on the freedom of the will of a Ca- tholic woman, who perhaps if she lived b the world would bring scandal on her family.
There cannot, my Lords, be any monastic institutions in England under the existing laws, if there were as many women who would live in celibacy as there are bad women in London. For a monastic institution requires a monastery endowed, and the sanction of the laws of the state to render the vows of the religious irrevocable ; as in Catholic coun- tries, where, if a priest marries, or a religious deserts his cioister, he is punished by the civil magistrate, or sent back to his superior to be punished as an apostate. Hence, when the monastic institutions were dissolved in England, the vow of celibacy still remained. And Henry the Eighth, who sent the Lady Abbess's gold cross to the mint, would have doomed her body to the fagot or halter, had he perceived the bridal ring on her finger.
The Legislature of ninety-one made this distinction in the toleration- granted to the Catholics: it removed the penalties which attached to those who would enter into any ecclesi- astical community of the church of Rome, but not to extend to monastic institutions ; that is to say, not to endow mo- nasteries, or incorporate their rules, such as they are in
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. &S5
Catholic countries, with the laws of the state, where they are never to marry, nor return to the world : whereas here they are at liberty to renounce their vows when they think fit, and sue for their share of their family inheritance, not being here as elsewhere, dead in law. What are then the few English nuns now in England, or the few Irish nuns in Ireland, for no ladies of any other country devote themselves there to a religious life ? What are they in the eyes of the law ? What are they in the eyes of any man who pays the slightest attention to the subject ? A few Catholic females, vjho, from devotion, form a resolution to die old maids, and, when tired of celibacy, can marry in spite of Pope or Bishop, as there are some clergymen in this kingdom and in Ireland, who, after officiating at Catholic altars, have taken wives to themselves, and exchanged sacerdotal cincture for the cestus of Venus.
If these ladies were ladies of pleasure seducing youth ; the gentlemen of Winchester would not give themselves the slightest concern about them. They are of the greatest use to the Catholic nobility and gentry, who send their daughters to be educated by them, on account of the strictness of their morals, their seclusion from the dissipations of the world, which affords them the more time to superintend the instruc- tion of their scholars, and the facility of observing the spiri- tual exercises peculiar to the Catholic religion, such as fasts, abstinence, confessions, communications, &c. which could not be observed at other boarding schools ; and which, though they may appear ridiculous to others, are held sacred by us. In Galway, in Ireland, there are ladies of this descrip- tion, since the conversion of the kingdom to Christianity in the fourth century. The parliament, however rigorous in angry times, never molested them, on account of their utility, by their instructions, besides the policy of spending their money in the country. For if there were not ladies of this description in the country, the Catholics would send their daughters to be educated abroad.
But the nuns of this country pervert the children of Pro- testants, and the French Clergy make converts.
Every inquiry has been made, and the challenge given to prove the allegation. The inquiry proved fruitless, and the challenge reiused. Upon inquiry it was found, that a Scotch lady and gentleman, going to some distant part,
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left their child in the care of these religious women, until their return. They could not have left her in better hands ; for some of these ladies make a vow to attend the sick, without distinction between Turk and Christian. Parents have a right to leave their children where they think fit. They take no Protestant boarders or scholars. They had at their school two young misses, whose father was a Catho- lic, and the mother a Protestant. A father has a natural right over his children. For this reason we never baptize the children of Quakers or Jews, without the consent of their fathers. If they were dying, beyond hope of recovery, we would not scruple to baptize, for death emancipates them. The father, whose name was Counsellor Sheridan, died last year : the mother took the children from Winchester, and sent them to a Protestant boarding-school. It was also found upon inquiry, that an Irish regiment, in which there are a great many Catholic soldiers, was quartered at Winchester. By an act of the Irish Legislature, the Catholics of Ireland can enter into the army, and make an open profession of their faith, and perform their religious worship. A brave man, who exposes his life for his king and country, is en- titled to the privilege of saying his prayers. The Abbot of Saint Galles, a Dominican Friar, and Sovereign Prince, has Caivinist regiments, and Calvinist chaplains in his service ; and as there are such numbers of Irish Catholics in his Majesty's armies, but especially in the navy, an edifying Catholic chaplain would contribute greatly to prevent amongst them the contagion of immorality and Jacobinism. For when they do not practise their own religion, they will practise no other. Upon those principles, a very worthy French clergyman, who has acquired some smattering of English, instilled into the minds of those Catholic soldiers the principles ofloyalty, morality, and good order. And such, my Lords, is the ground of all this clamour about Nuns, Conversions, and Popery.
As to conversions — one Catholic lady, of an edifying life and amiable manners in the world, would make more con- verts than ten thousand cloisters. And of all religions on earth the Catholic religion is the least calculated for making converts in these kingdoms, on account of the severity of its rules. It is not such an easy matter to prevail on a volup- tuary to fast and pray ; or a libertine to renounce his crimi-
MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS. 387
nal pleasures ; or a usurer, and others accustomed to accu- mulate a fortune by unlawful means, to make restitution of ill-acquired gain ; or a married man, who has an unfaithful wife, to live as chaste as a vestal in a cloister, until he buries or takes her back to his bosom. These and other sacrifices must be made, after being instructed in every essential point of the Catholic doctrine. All the sins which the new con- vert can recollect must be told in the tribunal of penance, where the concealment of one would be a sacrilege.
Let the sectaries who daily spring up preach this doctrine — their meeting-houses will be deserted. It is an easy mat- ter to work on the imagination, and to pass from one belief to another, when a person has no fixed standard or rule : but to change the heart, to triumph over the passions, to hate whatever we loved before, to love what we hated, is not a change so easily wrought. Let not then the Church of Eng- land, or the Prebendaries of Winchester, be alarmed with the number of conversions made by nuns, or Catholic mis- sionaries— we have more than enough to do, in keeping our own flocks attentive to their duty. And, unfortunately, with regard to several of them, we can say with the prophet, in vain have I laboured. Tom Paine has made more converts in the three kingdoms in three years, than the Catholic cler- gy will make in twenty thousand.
It would be happy for the kingdom if we could convert all the Infidels and fanatics that separate every day from the established religion, and who, if an opportunity offered, would bury it with the state in its ruins, as in Cromwell's time. In one place of worship Christ is expunged out of their creed. In another, the Father and Holy Ghost are denied, and Christ is all — the Father and Holy Ghost are but his attributes. The Catholic priest, who believes more of the Thirty-nine Articles, than all the sectaries in England, is doomed by law to death, if he makes of a Quaker a child of the covenant by baptism ; or prevails on an infidel to pray to Christ who died for him. If the Tiber overflows its banks, if the Nile sinks below its usual level, if the plague destroys, if famine devours, said Tertullian, the cry is, to the lions with the Christians.* — The Catholic is the only obnoxious being.
Ireland, my Lords, this instant resembles a sea agitated
* Chiistianos ad leoneni.
388 MISCELLANEOUS TRACTS,
after a violent storm. The most distant idea of the slightest penalty on the score of conscience, must alarm the Catholics of that kingdom ; and give an opportunity to others to repre- sent to them, that the British Parliament closing with a new penal law, is but the scene of a tragedy in which one act leads to another more distressing ; that is to say, that this is but a preliminary to some other law more oppressive, when the Imperial Parliament meets, and themselves are friendless on a distant shore ; whereas, if in the Irish Parliament there were members hostile to their interests, there were others who pleaded their cause ; and thus, instead of an enlargement of privileges they will have nothing to expect but an extension of penalties ; such will be the language of the enemies to the Union.
1 know not, my Lords, whether this paper will fall into your hands before the Bill is disposed of. If it be already passed into a law, I disclaim any intention whatever to cen- sure the proceedings of the Legislature of the land, but shall, as in duty bound, submit to its decisions. But if it be pend- ing before the house, self-defence will, I hope, justify me in deprecating what I think obnoxious, and will answer, in my opinion, no end but that of creating distrust and despon- dency.
In an age of profligacy, when so many wise and virtuous Members of the Legislature, intended to introduce a new law for the security of the marriage bed ; when divorces, in- stead of constant affection, are the frequent fruits of matri- mony : amidst so many seminaries of lewdness, and cities be- come, on account of vice and corruption, so many criminal Ninivites, which would require a Jonas to induce them to repent in sackcloth and ashes; streets infested with lewd females from the age of eleven to the period at which the effects of a crime that carries with it its own punishment, and the enormous number of which wretches, a magistrate who has written a book on the Police of London, computes at fifty thousand annually ! Amidst such scenes of vice, is the chastity of a few Catholic women an object of so alarm- ing a nature, as to deserve the attention of the first Senate on earth, especially as it is in their power to renounce their state of celibacy when they choose ? Perhaps not two hundred of them would bind themselves to a single life,
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in the space of fifty years. If their number were multiplied to ten times, or to a thousand times more, what are they when compared to the great number of the immoral and unchaste all over England ? About twenty or thirty atoms floating on the surface of an immense ocean. Rati nantes in- gurgite vasto.
Were it the custom amongst Quakers, Anabaptists, Mo- ravians, or any other sect or description of people, to have women of a solitary cast or disposition of mind amongst them, who from fanaticism or inclination, would choose to lead a retired life, and superintend the education of the females of their sects, Sir Henry Mildmay would rather admire than molest them. Why then harass, perplex, ex- pose to the insults of domiciliary visits, persons of the Ca- tholic persuasion ? Why, amongst such a variety of sects, single the Catholics out as the objects of persecution? There are now no Catholic Pretenders to the Throne ; when there were, not one of the Catholics of Ireland joined them, although they raised the standard twice in Scotland, to assert their claim to the British Empire. The Pope, from a temporal Prince, is reduced to his primitive state of a pious and edifying Bishop, when he was powerfully armed with Peter's keys in one hand, and Paul's sword in the other ; when in consequence of temporal claims, such as Peter's-pence, &c. the gifts of former Kings, the exercise and authority which seemed to encroach upon the civil power ; the Catholics of these kingdoms adhered to their allegiance, and repaired to the banners of their Sovereign. All former pretexts for persecution being done away, what cause is there for persecuting us now ? It must be this pretended creed which fanaticism or prejudice has fathered, and which our hearts and actions disclaim. Priests selling absolutions for all sorts of crimes, and millions of Catholics deprived of their civil rights on the score of conscience buying them. For where there is no purchase, there is no sale.
Are we not Adam's children ? Have not the Catholics the same sensations of pain and pleasure as other men? Their vices and virtues do not they run in the same channel with those of their Protestant neighbours ? Are they not animated with the same desire of glory — allured by the
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blandishments of pleasure — courted by the charms of riches — as earnestly inclined to the enjoyment of ease and opulence ? If perjury be their creed, if their clergy be endued with the magic power of sanctifying crimes, and wafting their flocks to heaven on the wings of unrepented guilt, why do not they glide down the stream of legal liberty, instead of stemming the torrent of oppression ? Why do not they qualify themselves for sitting in the Senate, and giving laws to the land, in concert with their country, men, instead of being the continual objects of penal statutes.
It is that they are diametrically the reverse of what they are represented. Their religion forbids them to sport with the awful name of the Divinity. They do not choose to impose on their neighbours or themselves by perjury. Were it otherwise — were their consciences of a more duc- tile texture, in three weeks or a month's time they would all read their recantations, and be on a level with the rest of their fellow subjects. Yet the archives of national justice can prove, that the Catholics of Ireland, reduced to the neces- sity of discovering against themselves, preferred the loss of their estates to the guilt of perjury, when a false oath could have secured them in their property. Notwith- standing this imputed creed, they prefer the smarting af- flictions of the body to the stinging remorses of the soul : and when worldly prosperities stand in competition with conscience, they rather choose to be its martyrs than exe- cutioners.
I have the honour to be, &c.
ARTHUR O'LEARY.
JVo. 46, Half-moon Street, Piccadilly. June 30, 1800.
Princeton Ttieologic
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