Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 424, February 1851

The great error of Protestants, in their legislation on Popish questions, is, to believe that the same rules of morality exist in the Church of England and in Popery. The pamphlet applies itself with full effect to the facts of the case, by giving the Papist oath, and contrasting it with the Papist performance.

"The essential items of the Papist oath of 1829 were – 'I do not believe that the Pope of Rome hath, or ought to have, any temporal or civil jurisdiction, power, superiority, or pre-eminence, directly or indirectly, within this realm. I disclaim, disavow, and solemnly abjure any intention to subvert the present Church Establishment, as settled by law within this realm; and I solemnly swear, that I never will exercise any privilege, to which I am or may be entitled, to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or Protestant government in the United Kingdom.'"

What must be the contempt felt for all Popish promises, when we see this oath, and see the conduct of the Popish body ever since it was taken! "With what feelings," says Mr Warren, "any one who has taken this oath, can peruse and approve of the Bull of Pius IX. and the Pastoral of his pseudo-cardinal archbishop, and contemplate with satisfaction what has been recently done by him and others in professed conformity with that Bull, I am perfectly at a loss to conceive."

And in this honest difficulty of conception every true Protestant will coincide with him. But let us look to the natural result of this palpable callousness of conscience.

The sacredness of oaths is essential to the existence of society: the man who is not to be believed on his oath is self-banished, self-disfranchised, self-excluded from all the rights of society; for the obvious reason, that, if all men were equally false, society must dissolve. Such a man is no longer entitled to the protection of law. And the same rule is inevitably applicable to any institution which thus sets itself at war with society. Popery is anti-social. This sentiment is the substance of a letter by the late Bishop Watson; a man of a rough and almost republican spirit – a bold advocate for liberality, almost to the verge of Liberalism – and, though a vigorous arguer against Paine and his infidelity, yet as sturdy a disclaimer of all submission to prejudice as any radical orator of our day. We quote the pamphlet.

In a letter to the Duke of Rutland, in 1784, the Bishop says – "I particularly agree with you in relation to the (Roman) Catholics. No man on earth, I trust, can have more enlarged sentiments of toleration than I have. But the Church of Rome is a persecuting Church; and it is our interest and our duty, on every principle of religion and common sense, to guard ourselves against her machinations." He then gives the expression of the great Lord Clarendon – "It is the duty of Catholic subjects in a Protestant country, of priests as well as the laity, to abjure the Pope's supremacy, ecclesiastical as well as temporal."

The Popish advocates lay great weight on the patronage afforded to their parliamentary demands by the Cabinet of Pitt; who evidently made the grand mistake of supposing that spiritual dominion could be disunited from temporal – a mistake as great as supposing that the command of the limbs could be disunited from the power of the mind. But the views of the Minister were founded merely on political objects, while the true question was one of religion. The argument is thus summarily answered: —

"Let me remind you that an illustrious statesman, William Pitt, in the very last speech which he delivered in Parliament, expressed himself on the subject of Roman Catholic emancipation in the following remarkable language: – 'I never thought that it would have been wise to throw down rudely the guards and fences of the Constitution. But I did think, that if the system I alluded to had been adopted, it ought to have been accompanied by those checks and guards, and with every regulation which could have given respect and influence to the Established Church, to the support and protection of the Protestant interest, and to the encouragement of every measure which could tend to propagate the example of the Protestant religion.'

"His splendid pupil, Canning, the most ardent friend of Roman Catholic emancipation, also thus expressed himself: 'Go as far as you can, with safety to the Establishment. Do not exact from them terms that are unnecessary, but be rigorous in imposing such conditions as shall free you from all real, I had almost said all imaginary, danger.'"

These are important opinions, which should teach us how to act. We have seen those guards and fences broken down; we have seen every protective condition accepted, and finally scoffed at, and we are at this moment at once insulted and injured by the cool and contemptuous violation of every promise which was required for the safety of the Church – of Protestantism.

But the whole system of concession was founded on ignorance, carried on by faction, and suffered by infatuation. That unhappy concession is the only blot on the tomb of Pitt, who made it in ignorance: it is the chief among the many blots on the tomb of Canning, who made faction his auxiliary, by first sacrificing his Toryism; and it covers with the indelible contempt, due to the traffic of principle, the whole paltry and perfidious generation who, subsequently, under different garbs, but with the same physiognomy of worldliness, have droned and drivelled and died off in the shadow of the Treasury. What the majority of those men thought, is a subject too low for memory; what they did, is to be seen in the scars of the Constitution.

But when the mighty orb of Pitt undergoes an eclipse, it must be by a body of no slight magnitude. His wisdom was actually thwarted by his magnanimity. Himself the soul of honour, he evidently imagined that Popery was capable of honour.

"What would William Pitt, what would George Canning, say?" exclaims Mr Warren, "were they still alive to read the Bull of Pius IX. and Dr Wiseman's Pastoral? and what would they do?"

We think that we can answer the question. If Pitt denounced the grasping ambition of French republicanism, if Canning lashed the low absurdities of Radicalism, with what indignant justice would they not have stript and scourged an aggression which unites more than the ambition of the one, with more than the absurdity of the other! With what lofty vengeance would Pitt have trampled down the haughty usurpation which dared to degrade England into a province! and with what sarcastic ridicule would Canning have stung the bloated arrogance with which, from a palace almost a prison, an impudent monk dared to control the liberties of England!

But what would the Papal assumptions be, if uttered by any other sovereign? Let us suppose that Austria ventured to send a dozen of her monks here to carve the land into dioceses. What would be the universal exclamation, but that Austria was mad; and that the first monk who made the attempt should find his only diocese within the walls of Newgate. What if France declared England a province? Can we doubt that our answer would be a declaration of war? And is a beggarly Italian – a fugitive from his own territory, a priest flying for his life in the livery of a footman – to offer this insult with impunity? But if we are told that Pius IX. is a different personage from his predecessors, a Liberal, a man of the new school – tempted, by misrepresentations from his emissary monks here, to make a usurpation against his nature – let us hear the pamphlet: —

"Let us go to the fountain-head. Pope Pius IX., who, on his elevation to the supreme Episcopate, addressed an elaborate Encyclical Letter to 'all patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops,' dated 9th of November 1846, and which, to the eyes of any person in whom exists a single spark of true protestant Christianity, appears surcharged with blasphemous presumption, falsehood, and bigotry."

In this document, the Pope solemnly and formally asserts his claim to be the Vicar of Christ on earth! declares that God has constituted the Pope a living authority to teach the true sense of his Heavenly revelations, and to judge infallibly (infallibili judicia) in all controversies on faith and morals, and that "out of the Catholic Church there is no salvation;" and he bitterly denounces our "most crafty Bible societies," (a denunciation simply against the Bible itself, for there are no notes of any kind in the Bibles thus published.)

In this letter, "the Pope will be found, in the year 1846, to use the essential terms of the Florentine Canon, which has been in force for four hundred and eleven years, and under whose sanction, consequently, have been perpetrated, by the Papal authority, all the enormous crimes and offences which history records against it during that long period."

Mr Warren then quotes, as illustrative of the Pope's assumed supremacy in temporals over the Papist everywhere, a conversation detailed in evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons. – 'I said to him, (a respectable Roman Catholic,) suppose the Pope and his Council announced that the King of England was a person who should be deposed – would you feel in conscience bound, as a Roman Catholic, to obey?' He answered, 'Certainly not, because it would be contrary to Scripture.' I asked whether he or his church was to judge of Scripture? He replied, 'His church.' I then asked, 'If the decree was so worded, that the Pope and Council affirmed it to be not contrary, but according to Scripture, that a heretical monarch should be deposed, how would you act?' He admitted, 'that he should feel himself bound by the decree, because it was for the Pope to judge of Scripture, and that, as a Roman Catholic, he should obey him.'

In this conversation we have a perfect specimen of Popish casuistry. The man is suffered to believe that he has a conscience, and that he is ever obedient to Scripture. But Popery still holds him fast, and if regicide should suit its purposes, he can give the blow with a safe conscience. What must be the religion when such is the morality?

And this view leads us to the true question on which the whole subject turns. In the eyes of the Tractarians, the controversy is simply between an old church and a new. In the apologies of the apostates, it is simply between Papal infallibility and private judgment. Thus, the whole is diluted into a mere metaphysical inquiry, while both suppress the entire practical reality of this tremendous superstition. In those tranquil subtleties and meek submissions they both labour to conceal the fact, that if they are to be Papists, they must be worshippers of the Virgin Mary; they must be worshippers of imaginary saints; they must be worshippers of stocks and stones, as the images of those imaginary saints; and they must be prepared to do the bidding of the Papacy, even though that should amount to the dissolution of society; for to this they must come. This is their yoke. To this every man who apostatises is bound for life: he must drag the whole length of the chain.

Strong curiosity is now excited by the approach of Parliament; and the inquiry into the measures contemplated by the Cabinet is intense. In the midst of the numberless conjectures hazarded at the moment, a letter from the Bishop of Durham to a body of his clergy has appeared; which, when we remember that the memorable letter of the Premier was addressed to the Bishop, and that a correspondence on the subject may have been continued, seems to throw a light on the Ministerial intentions, and probably has been written for the express purpose.

The Bishop, after observing that the question of religious liberty to the Roman Catholics could not possibly require "that a foreign potentate should be permitted to insult a great nation, trample on the rights of a sovereign secured by law, and disturb the peace and good order of the Established Church," proceeds to state his conception of the necessary measures of protection.

"In order to prevent such evils, it may be necessary to provide —

"Some restrictions upon the introduction and circulation of Papal Bulls in this island.

"To prohibit the assumption of Episcopal titles conferred by Rome, and deriving the name from any place in this country.

"It may also be desirable to forbid the existence of monastic institutions, strictly so called.

"Nor can the residence of any Jesuits appear otherwise than injurious among Scotch and English Protestants. This Order is well known to have shown itself so dangerous, that it was suppressed by Clement XIV., 1773, with the approbation of all wise and good men. What species or amount of merit may have brought them again into favour with Rome, I profess myself unable to determine. But I am sure you will agree with me that a body of men, whose principles and conduct have been so justly reprobated in (Roman) Catholic countries, cannot be looked upon as desirable neighbours among Protestants like ourselves.

"To some such measures as I have thus pointed out, it may in all probability be found necessary to resort; and they may not improperly be referred to in petitions presented to Parliament in the ensuing Session."

Of course it would be essential that, in the exclusion of Bulls, all documents asserting any similar authority over the Popish subjects of the realm, as "Apostolical Letters," "Rescript Ordinances," and, in short, every paper claiming a public right by the Pope to govern the Papists in England or Ireland, and in any portion of the British empire, should be distinctly comprehended. We must not suffer ourselves to be cheated by names. Similarly, it will not be enough to put down convents and monasteries, so called, but every institution in which Popish vows are taken, binding the rash and unfortunate people who take them, for life. Here, too, we must not be cheated by names. Similarly, we must put down not merely Jesuits, so called, but every Order of foreign monk-ism, let it hide itself under what name it will. Rome is all artifice, and we may be well assured that, whether under the name of Oratorians, or Preachers, or Brethren of the Spirit, the craft of Jesuitry will be exercised to make its way into England, and keep its footing here.

The Bishop's letter makes no direct reference to Ireland. But in Ireland there are two millions of Protestants; and if Protestantism is to be triumphant in England, it must be protected in Ireland. As to the right, the justice, and the necessity of those measures, and many more of the same kind, there can be no doubt on the mind of any rational being. Lords Beaumont, Norfolk, and Camoys, Roman Catholics, have openly stated that the operation of the Papal Bull, is incompatible with temporal allegiance to the Queen. The pamphlet from which we have quoted so largely, from a sense of its merits, disposes of the question in reference to the British Constitution; and the united feeling of the nation, which has already, in the purest spirit of Christian men, exclaimed "No Popery," must now, in the most determined spirit of Freemen, exclaim, "No Surrender!"

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"The official returns of the importations of grain, &c., into the United Kingdom have not yet been completed; but for the eleven months ending 5th of December 1850, the quantities were —

Which is at the rate, with prices at 39s. 9d., of 9,500,000 quarters a-year." —Morning Post, Jan. 7, 1851.

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London, week ending July 12, 1850.

Arrivals.

– Times, July 17.

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