DEAR ABRAHAM,—A worthier and better man than yourself does not exist; but
I have always told you, from the time of our boyhood, that you were a bit
of a goose. Your parochial affairs are governed with exemplary order and
regularity; you are as powerful in the vestry as Mr. Perceval is in the
House of Commons,—and, I must say, with much more reason; nor do I know
any church where the faces and smock-frocks of the congregation are so
clean, or their eyes so uniformly directed to the preacher. There is
another point, upon which I will do you ample justice; and that is, that
the eyes so directed towards you are wide open; for the rustic has, in
general, good principles, though he cannot control his animal habits;
and, however loud he may snore, his face is perpetually turned towards
the fountain of orthodoxy.
Having done you this act of justice, I shall proceed, according to our
ancient intimacy and familiarity, to explain to you my opinions about the
Catholics, and to reply to yours.
In the first place, my sweet Abraham, the Pope is not landed—nor are
there any curates sent out after him—nor has he been hid at St. Albans by
the Dowager Lady Spencer—nor dined privately at Holland House—nor been
seen near Dropmore. If these fears exist (which I do not believe), they
exist only in the mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; they emanate
from his zeal for the Protestant interest; and, though they reflect the
highest honour upon the delicate irritability of his faith, must
certainly be considered as more ambiguous proofs of the sanity and vigour
of his understanding. By this time, however, the best-informed clergy in
the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is
without foundation; and though the Pope is probably hovering about our
coast in a fishing-smack, it is most likely he will fall a prey to the
vigilance of our cruisers; and it is certain that he has not yet polluted
the Protestantism of our soil.
Exactly in the same manner, the story of the wooden gods seized at
Charing Cross, by an order from the Foreign Office, turns out to be
without the shadow of a foundation; instead of the angels and archangels,
mentioned by the informer, nothing was discovered but a wooden image of
Lord Mulgrave, going down to Chatham, as a head-piece for the _Spanker_
gun-vessel; it was an exact resemblance of his Lordship in his military
uniform; and _therefore_ as little like a god as can well be imagined.
Having set your fears at rest, as to the extent of the conspiracy formed
against the Protestant religion, I will now come to the argument itself.
You say these men interpret the scriptures in an unorthodox manner, and
that they eat their god.—Very likely. All this may seem very important
to you, who live fourteen miles from a market-town, and, from long
residence upon your living, are become a kind of holy vegetable; and in a
theological sense it is highly important. But I want soldiers and
sailors for the state; I want to make a greater use than I now can do of
a poor country full of men; I want to render the military service popular
among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible
exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years’ time will be
nothing but a mass of French slaves: and then you, and ten other such
boobies as you, call out—“For God’s sake, do not think of raising cavalry
and infantry in Ireland! . . . They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a
different manner from what we do! . . . They eat a bit of wafer every
Sunday, which they call their God!” . . . I wish to my soul they would
eat you, and such reasoners as you are. What! when Turk, Jew, Heretic,
Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against this country;
when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious persuasion; when
the population of half the globe is up in arms against us; are we to
stand examining our generals and armies as a bishop examines a candidate
for holy orders; and to suffer no one to bleed for England who does not
agree with you about the second of Timothy? You talk about the
Catholics! If you and your brotherhood have been able to persuade the
country into a continuation of this grossest of all absurdities, you have
ten times the power which the Catholic clergy ever had in their best
days. Louis XIV., when he revoked the Edict of Nantes, never thought of
preventing the Protestants from fighting his battles; and gained
accordingly some of his most splendid victories by the talents of his
Protestant generals. No power in Europe, but yourselves, has ever
thought for these hundred years past, of asking whether a bayonet is
Catholic, or Presbyterian or Lutheran; but whether it is sharp and
well-tempered. A bigot delights in public ridicule; for he begins to
think he is a martyr. I can promise you the full enjoyment of this
pleasure, from one extremity of Europe to the other.
I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you
can be: and no man who talks such nonsense shall ever tithe the product
of the earth, nor meddle with the ecclesiastical establishment in any
shape; but what have I to do with the speculative nonsense of his
theology, when the object is to elect the mayor of a county town, or to
appoint a colonel of a marching regiment? Will a man discharge the
solemn impertinences of the one office with less zeal, or shrink from the
bloody boldness of the other with greater timidity, because the blockhead
thinks he can eat angels in muffins and chew a spiritual nature in the
crumpets which he buys from the baker’s shop? I am sorry there should be
such impious folly in the world, but I should be ten times a greater fool
than he is, if I refused, till he had made a solemn protestation that the
crumpet was spiritless and the muffin nothing but a human muffin, to lead
him out against the enemies of the state. Your whole argument is wrong:
the state has nothing whatever to do with theological errors which do not
violate the common rules of morality, and militate against the fair power
of the ruler: it leaves all these errors to you, and to such as you. You
have every tenth porker in your parish for refuting them; and take care
that you are vigilant and logical in the task.
I love the Church as well as you do; but you totally mistake the nature
of an establishment, when you contend that it ought to be connected with
the military and civil career of every individual in the state. It is
quite right that there should be one clergyman to every parish
interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner, ruled by a regular
hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of haycocks and wheatsheafs.
When I have laid this foundation for a rational religion in the
state—when I have placed ten thousand well-educated men in different
parts of the kingdom to preach it up, and compelled everybody to pay
them, whether they hear them or not—I have taken such measures as I know
must always procure an immense majority in favour of the Established
Church; but I can go no further. I cannot set up a civil inquisition,
and say to one, you shall not be a butcher, because you are not orthodox;
and prohibit another from brewing, and a third from administering the
law, and a fourth from defending the country. If common justice did not
prohibit me from such a conduct, common sense would. The advantage to be
gained by quitting the heresy would make it shameful to abandon it; and
men who had once left the Church would continue in such a state of
alienation from a point of honour, and transmit that spirit to their
latest posterity. This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have
produced. They have fed Dr. Rees, and Dr. Kippis; crowded the
congregations of the Old Jewry to suffocation: and enabled every
sublapsarian, and superlapsarian, and semi-pelagian clergyman, to build
himself a neat brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to
the state of a gentleman.
You say the King’s coronation oath will not allow him to consent to any
relaxation of the Catholic laws.—Why not relax the Catholic laws as well
as the laws against Protestant dissenters? If one is contrary to his
oath, the other must be so too; for the spirit of the oath is, to defend
the Church establishment, which the Quaker and the Presbyterian differ
from as much or more than the Catholic; and yet his Majesty has repealed
the Corporation and Test Act in Ireland, and done more for the Catholics
of both kingdoms than had been done for them since the Reformation. In
1778 the ministers said nothing about the royal conscience; in 1793 no
conscience; in 1804 no conscience; the common feeling of humanity and
justice then seem to have had their fullest influence upon the advisers
of the Crown; but in 1807—a year, I suppose, eminently fruitful in moral
and religious scruples (as some years are fruitful in apples, some in
hops),—it is contended by the well-paid John Bowles, and by Mr. Perceval
(who tried to be well paid), that this is now perjury which we had
hitherto called policy and benevolence. Religious liberty has never made
such a stride as under the reign of his present Majesty; nor is there any
instance in the annals of our history, where so many infamous and
damnable laws have been repealed as those against the Catholics which
have been put an end to by him; and then, at the close of this useful
policy, his advisers discover that the very measures of concession and
indulgence, or (to use my own language) the measures of justice, which he
has been pursuing through the whole of his reign, are contrary to the
oath he takes at its commencement! That oath binds his Majesty not to
consent to any measure contrary to the interest of the Established
Church; but who is to judge of the tendency of each particular measure?
Not the King alone: it can never be the intention of this law that the
King, who listens to the advice of his Parliament upon a read bill,
should reject it upon the most important of all measures. Whatever be
his own private judgment of the tendency of any ecclesiastical bill, he
complies most strictly with his oath, if he is guided in that particular
point by the advice of his Parliament, who may be presumed to understand
its tendency better than the King, or any other individual. You say, if
Parliament had been unanimous in their opinion of the absolute necessity
for Lord Howick’s bill, and the King had thought it pernicious, he would
have been perjured if he had not rejected it. I say, on the contrary,
his Majesty would have acted in the most conscientious manner, and have
complied most scrupulously with his oath, if he had sacrificed his own
opinion to the opinion of the great council of the nation; because the
probability was that such opinion was better than his own; and upon the
same principle, in common life, you give up your opinion to your
physician, your lawyer, and your builder.
You admit this bill did not compel the King to elect Catholic officers,
but only gave him the option of doing so if he pleased; but you add, that
the King was right in not trusting such dangerous power to himself or his
successors. Now you are either to suppose that the King for the time
being has a zeal for the Catholic establishment, or that he has not. If
he has not, where is the danger of giving such an option? If you suppose
that he may be influenced by such an admiration of the Catholic religion,
why did his present Majesty, in the year 1804, consent to that bill which
empowered the Crown to station ten thousand Catholic soldiers in any part
of the kingdom, and place them absolutely at the disposal of the Crown?
If the King of England for the time being is a good Protestant, there can
be no danger in making the Catholic _eligible_ to anything: if he is not,
no power can possibly be so dangerous as that conveyed by the bill last
quoted; to which, in point of peril, Lord Howick’s bill is a mere joke.
But the real fact is, one bill opened a door to his Majesty’s advisers
for trick, jobbing, and intrigue; the other did not.
Besides, what folly to talk to me of an oath, which, under all possible
circumstances, is to prevent the relaxation of the Catholic laws! for
such a solemn appeal to God sets all conditions and contingencies at
defiance. Suppose Bonaparte was to retrieve the only very great blunder
he has made, and were to succeed, after repeated trials, in making an
impression upon Ireland, do you think we should hear any thing of the
impediment of a coronation oath? or would the spirit of this country
tolerate for an hour such ministers, and such unheard-of nonsense, if the
most distant prospect existed of conciliating the Catholics by every
species even of the most abject concession? And yet, if your argument is
good for anything, the coronation oath ought to reject, at such a moment,
every tendency to conciliation, and to bind Ireland for ever to the crown
of France.
I found in your letter the usual remarks about fire, fagot, and bloody
Mary. Are you aware, my dear Priest, that there were as many persons put
to death for religious opinions under the mild Elizabeth as under the
bloody Mary? The reign of the former was, to be sure, ten times as long;
but I only mention the fact, merely to show you that something depends
upon the age in which men live, as well as on their religious opinions.
Three hundred years ago men burnt and hanged each other for these
opinions. Time has softened Catholic as well as Protestant: they both
required it; though each perceives only his own improvement, and is blind
to that of the other. We are all the creatures of circumstances. I know
not a kinder and better man than yourself; but you, if you had lived in
those times, would certainly have roasted your Catholic: and I promise
you, if the first exciter of this religious mob had been as powerful then
as he is now, you would soon have been elevated to the mitre. I do not
go the length of saying that the world has suffered as much from
Protestant as from Catholic persecution; far from it: but you should
remember the Catholics had all the power, when the idea first started up
in the world that there could be two modes of faith; and that it was much
more natural they should attempt to crush this diversity of opinion by
great and cruel efforts, than that the Protestants should rage against
those who differed from them, when the very basis of their system was
complete freedom in all spiritual matters.
I cannot extend my letter any further at present, but you shall soon hear
from me again. You tell me I am a party man. I hope I shall always be
so, when I see my country in the hands of a pert London joker and a
second-rate lawyer. Of the first, no other good is known than that he
makes pretty Latin verses; the second seems to me to have the head of a
country parson and the tongue of an Old Bailey lawyer.
If I could see good measures pursued, I care not a farthing who is in
power; but I have a passionate love for common justice, and for common
sense, and I abhor and despise every man who builds up his political
fortune upon their ruin.
God bless you, reverend Abraham, and defend you from the Pope, and all of
us from that administration who seek power by opposing a measure which
Burke, Pitt, and Fox all considered as absolutely necessary to the
existence of the country.