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,”
&c., &c., &c., 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!