mus know, is the genuine cant of a Mar-Preate Independer the same cant which brought Laud, and Charles I. to the block the same cant which overthrew the church and state in the grand rebellion. But what chiefly concerns my present purpose in this, the bishop's twice repeated quotation from Milton, is to observe that it breathes the whole persecuting spirit of the sixteenth century, and calls for the fines and forfeitures, dungeons and halters, and knives, of Elizabeth's reign, against the devoted Catholics; since, it is evident, that the idolatry of Popery, as it is termed, exercised in private, cannot be removed without such persecuting and sanguinary measures. The same thing is plain from the nature of the different legal offences which the Right Rev. prelate lays to their charge. In one place, he accuses the Catholics of England and Ireland, that is to say, more than a quarter of his majesty's European subjects, of " acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Pope, in defiance of the laws, and of the allegiance due to their rightful sovereign :" though he well knows, that they have abjured the Pope's jurisdiction in all civil and temporal cases, which is all that the king, lords and commons required of them, in their Acts of 1791 and 1793. Again, the prelate describes their opposition to the veto (though equally the Long parliament are execrable, for their regicide and anti-prelatic principies, as his poetry is super-excellent for its sublimity and sweetness. Four other English authors are brought forward, by the bishops of St. David's, to justify that persecution of Catholics, which he recommends. The first of these is the Socinian Locke, who will not allow of Catholics being toleraled, on the demonstrated false pretext, that they cannot tolerate other Christians. The true cause was, that his hands being stained by the blood of twenty innocent Catholics, who were immolated by the sanguinary policy of his master Shaftsbury, in Oates' infamous plot, he was obliged to find a pretext for excluding them from the legal toleration, which he stood in need of himself.-Bishop Hoadly, who had no religion at all of his own, would not allow the Catholics to enjoy theirs, because, he says: "no oaths and solemn assurances, no regard to truth, justice, or honor, can restrain them." This is the hypocritical plea for intolerance, of a man who was in the constant habit of violating all his oaths and engagements to a church which had raised him to rank and fortune, and who systematically purs ed its degradation, into his own anti-Christian Socinianisin, by professed deceit and treachery, as will be seen in the Letters.- -Blackstone, being a crown lawyer, and writing when the penal laws were in force, could not but defend them but, judge as he was, and writing a' the above mentioned time, he, in the passage following that quoted by Dr. Burgess, expressed a hope, that the time" was not distant, when the fears of a Pretender having vanished, and the influence of the Pope becoming feeble, the rigorous edicts aga nst the Catholics would be revised," b. iv. c. 4. ; which event, accordingly, soon took place. As to Burke, the last author whom the bishop quotes against Catholic emancipation, it is evident, from his speech at Bristol, his letter to lord Kenmare, and the whole tenor of his conduct, that be was not only a warm friend, it, in some degree, a martyr to it. 66 opposed in the appointment of their respective pastors by al. Protestant dissenters, who constitute more than another fourth part of his majesty's subjects,) as "treasonable by statute," p. 35. Now, every one knows that the legal punishment of a subject, acting in defiance of his allegiance, and contracting the guilt of treason, is nothing less than death. Nay, so much bent on the persecution of Catholics is this modern bishop, as to arraign parliament itself as guilty of a breach of the Constitution, by the latter of the above mentioned tolerating Acts; where he says: If the elective franchise be really inconsistent with the Constitutional Statutes of the revolution, it ought to be repealed, like all other concessions, that are injurious to loyalty and reli gion."-- He adds, " But it does not follow that because parliament had been guilty of one act of prodigality, that it should, therefore, like a thoughtless and unprincipled spendthrift, plunge itself into inextricable ruin," pp. 53, 54. Thus, my lord, though the prelate alluded to, after advertising, in his table of contents, A CONCLUSION, showing "the means of co-operating with the laws for preventing the danger and increase of Popery," when he comes to the proper place for inserting it, apologizes for deferring its publication, as being connected with the credit of the ecclesiastical establishment," yet, we see as clearly, from the substance and drift of the Protestant's Catechism, what his Conclusion is, as if he had actually published it; namely, he would have the whole code of penal laws, with all their incapacities, fines, imprisonment, hanging, drawing, and quartering, re-enacted, to prevent even the private practice of idolatry; and he would have the bishops, clergy, churchwardens, and constables, employed in enforcing them, according to the forms of Inquisition, prescribed by the Canons of 1597, 1603, and 1640. 66 Before the writer passes from the present subject of loyalty and the laws, to others more congenial with his studies, and those of the prelate, he wishes to submit to your lordship's reflection two or three questions connected with it. First: Is it strictly legal, even for a lord of parliament, and is it edifying for a bishop, to instruct the public, especially in these days of insubordination and commotion, that the reigning king, and the two houses of parliament, have acted against the Constitutional Statutes, by affording religious relief to a large and loyal portion of British subjects; as king William, George I. and George II had afforded it to other portions of them? We all know what outcries are continually raised about violating the Constitution, and we know what effect these are intended to produce: now if a turbulent populace are made to believe that the presew legislature has acted illegally and unconstitutionally in some of its acts, is there no danger that they may form the same notion concerning some of its other acts, which are peculiarly obnoxious to them, and that they may rank these among the Fictitious Statutes, as this prelate terms the Acts of Parliament of three former reigns? Secondly: The writer wishes to ask your lord. ship, whether or no you think it is for the peace and safety of the sister isle, to alarm the bulk of its inhabitants with the threat of their being dispossessed of the elective franchise, which they have now enjoyed for a quarter of a century? In like manner, is it conducive to this important end, for a person of his lordship's character and consequence to assure this people, that the Pope's jurisdiction, and England's dominion over them, "were introduced into Ireland by the mercenary compact of the Pope and Henry II." p. 24, " founded on a fiction of the grossest kind, the pretended donation of Constantine," p. v. though, by the bye, this was never once mentioned or hinted at by either of the parties?—Lastly: The writer would be glad to be informed by your lordship, whether it is for the advantage of the established church so highly to extol John Wickliffe, who maintained that clergymen ought to have no sort of temporal possessions? And is it for the security of the state to hold up lord Cobham as a great and good man, and the martyr of Protestantism," p. vii.*, who was convicted in the King's Bench, and in open parliament, of raising an insurrection of twenty thousand men, for the purpose of killing the king and his brother, and the lords spiritual and temporal, and who was executed for the same, merely because he was a Wickliffite? How innocent was colonel Despard, compared with sir John Oldcastle, called lord Cobham! The writer has spoken of the object of the publication which has lately appeared, under the name of a Rt. Rev. bishop of the established church he now proceeds to say something of its contents. It professes to be THE PROTESTANT'S CATECHISM. From this title, most people will suppose it to be an elementary book, for the instruction of Protestants of every description, in the doctrine and morality taught by Jesus Christ: but not a word can the writer find in it about Christ, or God, or any doctrinal matter whatever; except that, They, who do not hold the worship of the church of Rome to be idolatrous, are not Proteslants, whatever they may profess to be," p. 46.; which is a sentence of excommunication against many of the brightes *See Walsingham's Historia Major. Knighton Leicest. Collier's Eo cles. Hist. Stow, &c. lights and chief ornaments of the bis op's own church. Nor does this novel Catechism contain any moral or practical lesson; except that, "Every member of parliament's conscience is pledged against the Catholic claims ;" and, what has been mentioned before, that as "Popery is idolatrous, it is not to be tolera ted either in public or in private," and that "it must be now thought how to remove it," p. 3. Had the Catechism appeared without a name, it might be supposed to be a posthumous work f lord George Gordon; but, had its origin been traced to the mountains of Wales, it would certainly be attributed to some itinerant Jumper, rather than to a successor of St. Dubritius and St. David. What, however, chiefly distinguishes The Protestant Catechism from other No Popery publications, is, not so much the strength of its acrimony, as the boldness of its paradoxes These, for the most part, stand in contradiction to all ancient records and modern authors, Protestant as well as Catholic being supported by the bare word of the bishop of St. David's and what is still more extraordinary, they sometimes stand in contradiction to the word of the bishop of St. David's himself; resting in this case, on the word of Dr. Thomas Burgess, J purpose exhibiting a few of the paradoxes I refer to. 66 The great and fundamental paradox of the Right Rev. Catechist is, that Protestantism subsisted many hundred years before Popery; at the same time that he makes its essence consist in a renunciation of, and opposition to, Popery! for his lordship lectures his Protestant pupils in the following manner: Question. Wha is Protestantism? Answer. The abjuration of Popery and the exclusion of Papists from all power, ecclesiastical and civil." p. 12. Question. What is Popery? Answer. The religion of the church of Rome, so called because the church of Rome is subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope." p. 11. "Question. When was this jurisdiction assumed over the whole church? Answer. At the beginning of the seventh century." The writer does not here refute the various errors of the . 15. 66 Right Rev. bishop on these heads; this refutation will be found in the following letters; he barely exhibits one of the bishop's leading parade xes. It may be here stated as another very favourite paradox of the prelate, since he has maintained it in a former work, that, because Venantius Fotunatus, a poet of the sixth century, sings, that "the stylus, or writings of St. Paul, had run east, west, north and south, and passed into Britain and the remote Thule," and because Theodoret, and author of the fifth century, says, that St. Paul brought salvation to the islands in the sea," (namely, Malta and Sicily, Acts xxviii. it follows that the British church was founded by St. Paul! p. 19. This paradox might be stated and even granted, for any thing it makes in favour of the bishop's object, which is to invalidate the supremacy of saint Peter. For it matters not which apostle founded this church or that church, while it is evident from the words of Christ, in St. Matthew, c. xvi. v. 18, and in other texts, and from the concurring testimony of the fathers, and all antiquity, that Christ built the whole church on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, he himself being the chief corner stone, so as still to ground it, next after himself, on the Rock, Peter. This will be found demonstrated in the following work, Letter xlvi. A third paradox of the prelatic Catechist is this: Having undertaken to prove that "The church of Rome was founded by St. Paul," p. 13, no less than the church o. Britain, he attempts to draw an argument from their different discipline in the observance of Easter; that the latter was "independent" of the former, p. 23. Hence it would follow that St. Paul established one discipline, that which the prelate himself now follows, at Rome; and another, "that of the church of Ephesus, and the eastern churches, in Britain,” p. 17. The truth is, his lordship has quite bewildered himself in the ancient controversy about the right time of keeping Easter. He wil! learn, however, from the following letters, that the British church originally agreed with that of Rome, in this, no less than in the other points, as the emperor Constantine expressly declares in his letter on that subject,‡ and as farther appears by the Acts of the Council of Arles, which the British bishops, there present, joined with the rest in subscribing. And when, after the Saxon invasion, the British churches got into a wrong computation, they did not follow that of the Asiatic Quarto-decimans, but always kept Easter-day on a Sunday, differing from the practice of the continent only once in seven years. A fourth paradox of the Catechism maker, is, that, admitting, as he does, the existence of our christian king, Lucius, in the second century, he, never The falsity of this inference and the weakness and unfairness of the bishop's arguments on the whole subject, have been well exposed by an able and learned writer, the Rev. John Lingard, in his Examination of Certain Opinions advanced by the Rev. Dr. Burgess, &c. 1813. Syers, Manchester; Keating & Brown, London + The Right Rev. prelate seems to have been forced out of his former cavil concerning the difference of gender between Isro έτους and Πέτρα in the text, Matt. xvi. by a learned colleague of his [Landaff from remote ages was a thorn in the side of Menevia] who has shown him that Christ did not speak Greek but Syriac, and on this occasion, made use of the word Ce phes, Rock, which admits of no variation of genders t Euseb. Vit. Constant. L. iii. c. 19. |