Dear Abraham--The Catholic not respect an oath! why not? What upon
earth has kept him out of Parliament, or excluded him from all the
offices whence he is excluded, but his respect for oaths? There is no
law which prohibits a Catholic to sit in Parliament. There could be no
such law; because it is impossible to find out what passes in the
interior of any man's mind. Suppose it were in contemplation to
exclude all men from certain offices who contended for the legality of
taking tithes: the only mode of discovering that fervid love of
decimation which I know you to possess would be to tender you an oath
"against that damnable doctrine, that it is lawful for a spiritual man
to take, abstract, appropriate, subduct, or lead away the tenth calf,
sheep, lamb, ox, pigeon, duck," etc., etc., etc., and every other
animal that ever existed, which of course the lawyers would take care
to enumerate. Now this oath I am sure you would rather die than take;
and so the Catholic is excluded from Parliament because he will not
swear that he disbelieves the leading doctrines of his religion! The
Catholic asks you to abolish some oaths which oppress him; your answer
is that he does not respect oaths. Then why subject him to the test of
oaths? The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why, then, he respects
them. Turn which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the
Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are; but no eel in
the well-sanded fist of a cook-maid, upon the eve of being skinned,
ever twisted and writhed as an orthodox parson does when he is
compelled by the gripe of reason to admit anything in favour of a
dissenter.
I will not dispute with you whether the Pope be or be not the Scarlet
Lady of Babylon. I hope it is not so; because I am afraid it will
induce His Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer to introduce several
severe bills against popery, if that is the case; and though he will
have the decency to appoint a previous committee of inquiry as to the
fact, the committee will be garbled, and the report inflammatory.
Leaving this to be settled as he pleases to settle it, I wish to
inform you, that, previously to the bill last passed in favour of the
Catholics, at the suggestion of Mr. Pitt, and for his satisfaction,
the opinions of six of the most celebrated of the foreign Catholic
universities were taken as to the right of the Pope to interfere in
the temporal concerns of any country. The answer cannot possibly leave
the shadow of a doubt, even in the mind of Baron Maseres; and Dr.
Rennel would be compelled to admit it, if three Bishops lay dead at
the very moment the question were put to him. To this answer might be
added also the solemn declaration and signature of all the Catholics
in Great Britain.
I should perfectly agree with you, if the Catholics admitted such a
dangerous dispensing power in the hands of the Pope; but they all deny
it, and laugh at it, and are ready to abjure it in the most decided
manner you can devise. They obey the Pope as the spiritual head of
their Church; but are you really so foolish as to be imposed upon by
mere names? What matters it the seven-thousandth part of a farthing
who is the spiritual head of any Church? Is not Mr. Wilberforce at the
head of the Church of Clapham? Is not Dr. Letsom at the head of the
Quaker Church? Is not the General Assembly at the head of the Church
of Scotland? How is the government disturbed by these many-headed
Churches? or in what way is the power of the Crown augmented by this
almost nominal dignity?
The King appoints a fast-day once a year, and he makes the bishops:
and if the government would take half the pains to keep the Catholics
out of the arms of France that it does to widen Temple Bar, or
improve Snow Hill, the King would get into his hands the appointments
of the titular Bishops of Ireland. Both Mr. C----'s sisters enjoy
pensions more than sufficient to place the two greatest dignitaries of
the Irish Catholic Church entirely at the disposal of the Crown.
Everybody who knows Ireland knows perfectly well, that nothing would
be easier, with the expenditure of a little money, than to preserve
enough of the ostensible appointment in the hands of the Pope to
satisfy the scruples of the Catholics, while the real nomination
remained with the Crown. But, as I have before said, the moment the
very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to
common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the
barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.
Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic
religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human
beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and intelligence, who,
if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of
France, and if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in
three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely
impossible. You speak of danger to the Establishment: I request to
know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche
was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts
of the Jesuits, were half so terrible? Mr. Perceval and his parsons
forget all this, in their horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may
be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense. They never see that,
while they are saving these venerable ladies from perdition, Ireland
may be lost, England broken down, and the Protestant Church, with all
its deans, prebendaries, Percevals, and Rennels, be swept into the
vortex of oblivion.
Do not, I beseech you, ever mention to me again the name of Dr.
Duigenan. I have been in every corner of Ireland, and have studied its
present strength and condition with no common labour. Be assured
Ireland does not contain at this moment less than five millions of
people. There were returned in the year 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000
houses, and there is no kind of question that there were about 50,000
houses omitted in that return. Taking, however, only the number
returned for the tax, and allowing the average of six to a house (a
very small average for a potato-fed people), this brings the
population to 4,200,000 people in the year 1791: and it can be shown
from the clearest evidence (and Mr. Newenham in his book shows it),
that Ireland for the last fifty years has increased in its population
at the rate of 50 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present
population of Ireland at about five millions, after every possible
deduction for _existing circumstances, just and necessary wars,
monstrous and unnatural rebellions_, and all other sources of human
destruction. Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and
the half of the Protestant population are Dissenters, and as inimical
to the Church as the Catholics themselves. In this state of things
thumbscrews and whipping--admirable engines of policy as they must be
considered to be--will not ultimately avail. The Catholics will hang
over you; they will watch for the moment, and compel you hereafter to
give them ten times as much, against your will, as they would now be
contented with, if it were voluntarily surrendered. Remember what
happened in the American war, when Ireland compelled you to give her
everything she asked, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner,
your claim of Sovereignty over her. God Almighty grant the folly of
these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public
affairs!
What are your dangers which threaten the Establishment?--Reduce this
declamation to a point, and let us understand what you mean. The most
ample allowance does not calculate that there would be more than
twenty members who were Roman Catholics in one house, and ten in the
other, if the Catholic emancipation were carried into effect. Do you
mean that these thirty members would bring in a bill to take away the
tithes from the Protestant, and to pay them to the Catholic clergy? Do
you mean that a Catholic general would march his army into the House
of Commons, and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr. Duigenan? or, that
the theological writers would become all of a sudden more acute or
more learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed? Do you
fear for your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the
English Constitution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly
absurd, that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it. Every
one conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general
panic, which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining.
Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are--you cannot get
rid of them; your alternative is to give them a lawful place for
stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them
to the House of Commons, they will hold their parliament in Potatoe
Place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they
would be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of
security as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament,
looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their
party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a
wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and
ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect
them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to
be done is obvious to every human being--but to that man who, instead
of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us and our
children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good old Priam
and his sons, become a legislator and a politician.
A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble noblemen
in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political
power; whereas, there is no more distinction between these two things
than there is between him who makes the distinction and a booby. If I
strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic, and give him twenty
stripes ... I persecute; if I say, Everybody in the town where you
live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices, but
you, who are a Catholic ... I do not persecute! What barbarous
nonsense is this! as if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily
pain or as severe poverty: as if I could not be as great a tyrant by
saying, You shall not enjoy--as by saying, You shall suffer. The
English, I believe, are as truly religious as any nation in Europe: I
know no greater blessing; but it carries with it this evil in its
train, that any villain who will bawl out, '_The Church is in
danger!_' may get a place and a good pension; and that any
administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into
power who, at a moment of stationary and passive piety, would be
hooted by the very boys in the streets. But it is not all religion; it
is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive spirit which delights to
keep the common blessings of sun and air and freedom from other human
beings. 'Your religion has always been degraded; you are in the dust,
and I will take care you never rise again. I should enjoy less the
possession of an earthly good by every additional person to whom it
was extended.' You may not be aware of it yourself, most reverend
Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same
principle that Sarah your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham
or a gooseberry dumpling: she values her receipts, not because they
secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her
neighbours want it:--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a
priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical
and execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom.
You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present prime
minister. Grant you all that you write--I say, I fear he will ruin
Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest
of his country: and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval,
and kind to the Master Percevals! These are, undoubtedly, the first
qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public
danger; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must
always be incompatible), I should prefer that he destroyed the
domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the
preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country.
The late administration did not do right; they did not build their
measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused
several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of
either religion; and the report to have been published with
accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had
been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provisions
of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we
are provided with, or as the Dissenters are now known to possess;
then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence,
and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the
Catholics are really human creatures, endowed with the feelings of
men, and entitled to all their rights. But instead of this wise and
prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his usual precipitation, brings
forward a bill in their favour, without offering the slightest proof
to the country that they were anything more than horses and oxen. The
person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the
precaution to write up--_Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real
quadruped_, so his Lordship might have said--_Allowed by the bench of
Bishops to be real human creatures_.... I could write you twenty
letters upon this subject; but I am tired, and so I suppose are you.
Our friendship is now of forty years' standing; you know me to be a
truly religious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like a
cockade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument of a party. I love
the king, but I love the people as well as the king; and if I am sorry
to see his old age molested, I am much more sorry to see four millions
of Catholics baffled in their just expectations. If I love Lord
Grenville, and Lord Howick, it is because they love their country; if
I abhor ... it is because I know there is but one man among them who
is not laughing at the enormous folly and credulity of the country,
and that he is an ignorant and mischievous bigot. As for the light and
frivolous jester, of whom it is your misfortune to think so highly,
learn, my dear Abraham, that this political Killigrew, just before the
breaking-up of the last administration, was in actual treaty with them
for a place; and if they had survived twenty-four hours longer, he
would have been now declaiming against the cry of No Popery! instead
of inflaming it. With this practical comment on the baseness of human
nature, I bid you adieu!