gone forth with a sinister zeal to collect his offensive materials, and behold he returns laden with much disputed comment, much doubtful text, much of executive decrees, and of such things as are become obsolete, because useless, and are little attended to, because very dull and very uninteresting, and wherein the learned gentleman may, for that reason, take many little liberties in the way of misquotation, or in the way of suppression; all these, the fruits of his unprofitable industry, he lays before you very kindly and liberally he does it, but of this huge and tremendous collection, you must reject a principal part, as having nothing to say to the question, namely, all that matter which belongs to the Court of Rome as distinct from the Church; Secondly, of the remnant after that rejection, you must remove everything that belongs to the Church of Rome which is not confined to doctrine regarding faith and morals, exclusive of, and unmixed with, any temporal matter whatever; after this correction, you will have reduced this gentleman of the fifteenth century to two miserable canons, the only rewards of his labour, and result of his toil, both passing centuries before the Reformation, and therefore not bearing on the Protestant or the Reformers; the first is a canon excommunicating persons who do not abide by a profession of faith contained in a preceding canon, which notably concludes with the following observation, that virgins and married women may make themselves agreeable to God; now I cannot think such a canon can excite any grave impression or alarm in this House, passed six hundred years ago, three hundred years before the birth of the Reformation, made by lay princes, as well as ecclesiastics, and never acknowledged or noticed in these islands, even in times of their popery. The other canon, that of Constance, goes to deny the force of a free passport, or safe conduct to heretics, given by temporal princes in bar of the proceedings of the Church. Without going farther into that canon, it is sufficient to say, that it is positively affirmed by the Catholics, that this does not go farther than to assert the power of the Church to inquire into heresy, notwithstanding any impediments by lay princes; and farther, there is an authority for that interpretation, and in contradiction to the member's interpretation, not only above his authority, but any that it is in his studies to produce: I mean, that of Grotius, who mentions that the imputation cast on the Catholics

on account of this canon is unfounded. Here I stop, and submit, that the member is in the state of a plaintiff, who cannot make out his case, notwithstanding his two canons; that he has failed most egregiously, and has no right to throw the other party on their defence; however, the Catholics have gone as far as relates to him gratuitously into their case, and have not availed themselves of the imbecility of their opponents, and they have been enabled to produce on the subject of the above charges, the opinion of six universities, to whom those charges, in the shape of queries, have been submitted: Paris, Louvaine, Salamanca, Douey, Valladolid, Alcala. These universities have all answered, and have, in their answers, not only disclaimed the imputed doctrines, but disclaimed them with abhorrence. The Catholics have not stopped here; they have drawn up a declaration of nine articles, renouncing the imputed doctrines, together with other doctrines, or views objected to by them; they have gone farther, they have desired the Protestants to name their own terms of abjuration : the Protestants have done so, and here is the instrument of their compact-it is an oath framed by a Protestant Parliament, principally manufactured by the honourable member himself, in which the Irish Catholics not only abjure the imputed doctrine, but are sworn to the State, and to the present establishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, and to the present state of Protestant property; this oath has been universally taken, and by this oath, both parties are concluded, the Catholics from resorting to the abjured doctrines, and the Protestant from resorting to the abjured charge; therefore when the member imputes, as he has done, to the Catholic, the principles hereby abjured, it is not the Catholic who breaks faith with him, but it is he who breaks faith with. the Catholic. He acts in violation of the instrument he himself formed, and is put down by his own authority; but the Catholics have not only thus obtained a special acquittal from the charges made against them in this debate, they have obtained a general acquittal also.

The most powerful of their opponents, the late Earl of Clare, writes as follows: "They who adhere to the Church of Rome are good Catholics, they who adhere to the Court of Rome are traitors"; and he quotes Lord Somers as his authority, in which he entirely acquiesces, and acknowledges their

innocence in their adherence to the Church of Rome as distinct from the Court; a test, such as I have already mentioned, is formed in Ireland, abjuring the doctrine of the Court of Rome, and reducing their religion to the Church of Rome. This test, together with a number of other articles, is reduced to an oath, and this oath is introduced into an Act of Parliament, and this oath, thus legalised, is taken universally; here again are the opponents to the Catholic, concluded by their own concessions; by tendering an oath to Catholics, they allow an oath to be a test of sincerity; by framing that oath under these circumstances, they make it a test of pure Catholicism; and by their own argument, they pronounce pure Catholicism to be innoxious; but the honourable member has gone a little farther than pronounce the innocence of the Catholics; he has pronounced the mischievous consequences of the laws that proscribe them; he has said, in so many words, that an Irish Catholic never is, and never will be, faithful to a British Protestant King; he does not say every Catholic, for then he would include the English Catholics and those of Canada; nor does he say every Irishman must hate the King, for then he would include every Protestant in Ireland; the cause of the hatred is not then in the religion nor in the soil; it must be then in the laws, in something which the Protestant does not experience in Ireland, nor the Catholics in any country but in Ireland, that is to say, in the penal code; that code then, according to him, has made the Catholics enemies to the King; thus has he acquitted the Catholics and convicted the laws. This is not extraordinary, it is the natural progress of a blind and a great polemic; such characters, they begin with a fatal candour, and then precipitate to a fatal extravagance and are at once undermined by their candour and exposed by their extravagance so with the member, he hurries on, he knows not where, utters, he cares not what, equally negligent of the grounds of his assertions and their necessary inferences; thus, when he thinks he is establishing his errors, unconsciously and unintentionally he promulgates truth, or rather, in the very tempest of his speech, Providence seems to govern his lips, so that they shall prove false to his purposes, and bear witness to his refutations; interpret the gentleman literally, what blasphemy has he uttered? He has said, that the Catholic religion, abstracted as it is at present in Ireland from Popery,

and reduced as it is to mere Catholicism, is so inconsistent with the duties of morality and allegiance, as to be a very great evil. Now, that religion is the Christianity of two-thirds of all Christendom; it follows, then, according to the learned doctor, that the Christian religion is in general a curse: he has added, that his own countrymen are not only depraved by religion, but rendered perverse by nativity; that is to say, according to him, blasted by their Creator, and damned by their Redeemer. In order, therefore, to restore the member to the character of a Christian, we must renounce him as an advocate, and acknowledge that he has acquitted the Catholics whom he meant to condemn, and convicted the laws which he meant to defend. But though the truth may be eviscerated from the whole of the member's statement, it is not to be discerned in the particular parts, and therefore it is not sufficient to refute his arguments; 'tis necessary to controvert his positions-the Catholics of Ireland, he says, hate the Protestants, hate the English, and hate the King. I must protest against the truth of this position; the laws, violent as they were, mitigated as for the last seventeen years they have been, the people, better than the laws, never could have produced that mischief against such a position I appeal to the conscious persuasion of every Irishman. We will put it to an issue : the present chief Governor of Ireland is both an Englishman and the representative of English Government. I will ask the honourable gentleman whether the Irish hate him? If I could believe this position, what could I think of the Protestant ascendancy, and what must I think of the British connection and Government, who have been for six hundred years in possession of the country, with no other effect, according to this logic, than to make its inhabitants abhor you and your generation; but this position contains something more than a departure from fact: it says, strike France, strike Spain, the great body of the Irish are with you; it does much more, it attempts to give the Irish a provocation, it teaches you to hate them, and them to think so, and thus falsehood takes its chance of generating into a fatal and treasonable truth. The honourable gentleman, having misrepresented the present generation, mis-states the conduct of their ancestors, and sets forth the past rebellions as proceeding entirely from religion. I will follow him to those rebellions, and show, beyond his

power of contradiction, that religion was not, and that proscription was, the leading cause of those rebellions. The rebellion of 1741, or let me be controverted by any historian of authority, did not proceed from religion; it did proceed from the extermination of the inhabitants of eight countries in Ulster, and from the foreign and bigoted education of the Catholic clergy, and not from religion. The rebellion of the Pale, for it was totally distinct in period or cause from the other, did not proceed from religion: loss of the graces (they resembled your petition of right, except that they embraced articles for the security of property,) disarmament of the Catholics, expulsion of them in that disarmed state from Dublin, many other causes, order for the execution of certain priests; you will not forget there was an order to banish their priests in James the First's time, and to shut up their chapels in Charles the First's; these were the causes: there was another cause— you were in rebellion, Scotland was in rebellion; there was another cause, the Irish Government was in rebellion; they had taken their part with the Republicans, and wished to draw into treason the Irish freeholders, that, with the forfeiture of another's rebellion, they might supply their own. I go back with concern to these times, I see much blood, no glory; but I have the consolation to find, that the causes were not lodged in the religion or the soil, and that all of them, but the proscriptive cause, have vanished. I follow the member to another rebellion, which should properly be called a civil war, not a rebellion; it proceeded from a combination of causes which exist no longer, and one of those causes was the abdicating King at the head of the Catholics; and another cause was the violent proscription carried on against the Catholics by the opposite and then prevailing party: these causes are now no more, or will the member say there is now an abdicating prince, or now a Popish plot, or now a pretender? These are causes most certainly sufficient to alarm you, but very different, and such as can only be combated by a conviction, that as your destinies are now disposed of, it is not the power of the Catholics which can destroy, or the exclusion of the Catholics that can save you. The conclusion I draw from the history above alluded to, is very different from that drawn by the member, and far more healing; conclusion to show the evils arising from foreign connections on one side, and from domestic