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., 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 5,000,000 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 50 years has increased in its population at the rate of
50,000 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present population of
Ireland at about 5,000,000, 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. Everyone
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!