their scrupulous fidelity to their oaths and engagements, by pretending that in so using their power they are violating the declarations and oaths on the strength of which the Catholic relief bill was granted. It assumes that their determination is an act of aggression on the Protestant constitution and the church as by law established, which they had sworn not to disturb, and makes out what appears at first sight rather an awkward case against them. But who cannot make out a strong case when he is free to invent premises to suit a foregone conclusion?

It is not our province to criticise the declarations and oaths cited by the reviewer. We presume them to be such as a Catholic can take without heresy or schism, otherwise they would have been condemned by authority; but, we say for ourselves, personally, that we would be hung, drawn, and quartered before we would subscribe to them. Our Catholic friends, no doubt, deemed them not only allowable, but also prudent; and they may have judged wisely. We, however, are no friend to liberal concessions of what is not our own, and we regard it always as highly imprudent even to appear to restrict the power or province of the papacy in favor of the secular government. The arguments of our London contemporary only confirm us in this opinion. When hard pressed, men naturally concede every thing that they can in conscience, and if we cannot approve, we can at least excuse them; but the concessions they make seldom fail in the long run to return to their serious embarrassment. They narrow the ground we stand on, and if they leave us less to defend, they leave us less with which to defend it. When the question is an open one, we always prefer the higher and more comprehensive view as the more politic. It is sure to prove so in the end, whatever it may be for the moment. We have an invincible love for freedom, for that freedom which none but a Catholic can enjoy, or even understand; and we can never consent to give up one iota of it to Cæsar, let him storm and threaten as he may. His storming and threatening never frighten us, for we know that he has no power to harm us. He may bind or torture our body; he may hang, behead, burn, or cast it to the wild beasts to be torn and devoured; but that is no injury to us. It is rather a

benefit, nay, the greatest possible favor to us, if we remain steadfast in the faith and charity of the Gospel. So we always make it a point to defend even to the last the

most distant outworks of the church, sure that we have yielded too much if we have permitted the enemy to attack us in the citadel, although we know that to be impregnable.

The tendency of English Catholics, as well before as at the period of the so-called reformation, was to regard the pope as an Italian potentate, rather than as their own chief, and to restrict, as much as possible without falling into absolute heresy or schism, the papal authority in favor of the temporal sovereign. Indeed, what is termed Gallicanism might with far more propriety be called Anglicanism, for France borrowed it from England, as she subsequently borrowed from her her deism, incredulity, and sensist or sensualistic philosophy. This tendency prepared the way for Protestantism in England, as it did subsequently for infidelity and Jacobinism in France. The English Catholics cherished it, after the reformation, not only as in accordance with their national traditions, but as likely to render them less offensive to a Protestant government. Protestantism, is simply the assertion of the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual; consequently, Catholicity, which asserts, the precise contrary, must be regarded by the Protestant sovereign as high treason. It necessarily denies the royal supremacy, and Catholics in England, for a long series of years, were charged with treason, arrested and executed as traitors, simply because they were Catholics. It is not strange, then, that English Catholics should have sought to stay the hand of persecution by professions of loyalty, by disclaiming as far as they could their obligation to obey the sovereign pontiff, and asserting in very strong terms their subjection to the temporal prince. They seem to have imagined, that all that was needed to put a stop to the persecution they suffered was to prove that they could, as Catholics, be loyal subjects of a non-Catholic sovereign; and they went so far in the way of proving this as to support their prince against their spiritual father, as, for instance, under St. Pius V. and Sixtus Quintus. Hence we find, even down to the period of Catholic emancipation, English Catholics generally asserted the independence of temporal sovereigns; and in the spirit of a miserable Gallicanism, which, as we have elsewhere shown, conceals the germs of political atheisin, they drew up or accepted the declaration and oaths cited by the Quarterly Review as the condition on which the Catholic relief bill was conceded.

VOL. XVI-26

But the concessions of the English Catholics to the temporal prince did not save them from persecution; they were still fined, imprisoned, exiled, outlawed, beheaded, or hung, drawn, and quartered, and their concessions seem to have served no other purpose than to deprive them of the merit of confessors and martyrs. They were left with such a weak and sickly Catholicity as could not sustain them, and persecution, instead of strengthening them, as in the primitive ages, well-nigh exterminated them. The church is built on Peter, and those who love not Peter always wilt away before persecution. Latterly, English and Irish Catholics-for even Irish Catholics, after the establishment of Maynooth College, became infected with the same spiritappear to have discovered this, and a striking change has come over them, which gives them fresh life and vigor. There are propositions in the illustrious Dr. Doyle's evidence before parliament, which few Catholics in England or Ireland to-day would accept without important modifications. English and Irish Catholics have turned with renewed affection to Rome, and have drawn closer the bands which bind them to the chair of Peter. The pope is not for them now a foreign potentate; he is their chief, their loving father, to whom they wish to comport themselves as dutiful, submissive, and loving children. Hence their recent prosperity, and the great accession which has been made to their strength. The curse of leanness with which the English Catholics seem for so many ages to have been struck for their distrust of the papacy, their coldness to Peter, and their servility to the temporal power, seems to have been at length revoked, and we know no country in which Catholicity is more healthy, vigorous, or flourishing, than the noble old land of our forefathers. The secret of this change is, we firmly believe, in the fact that British. Catholics are becoming hearty, uncompromising papists. Hence the alarm of Protestants.

The Protestant ascendency, after the extinction of the house of Stuart, and of all pretenders to the crown to the prejudice of the present reigning family, came to the conclusion, that it had no longer any plausible pretext for maintaining the disabilities of Catholics, as it could have no fears of such Catholics as were content to subscribe to the four articles accepted by the French clergy in 1682. Protestants know perfectly well that Catholics of that stamp are quite harmless to them, that they make few con

verts, have no dangerous zeal, and will seldom, in case of conflict, hesitate to support the temporal authority against the spiritual. They may think them very silly, from a mere point of honor, to adhere to an old and proscribed religion, wholly incompatible with the light and spirit of the modern world; but upon the whole they think them, though a fantastic, a very good sort of people, not much inferior to Protestants themselves, at least not at all more dangerous to the state. But their feelings are very different towards the bold, energetic, and uncompromising papist, who asserts, without any reticence or circumlocution, that the spiritual order is supreme in all things, and that princes as well as subjects are bound to obey the law of God, and, if Catholics, are bound to obey that law as interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church, especially as interpreted by the pope, her supreme pastor. Catholics of this stamp they respect, indeed, but dread, because they are evidently in earnest, and present Catholicity in the sense in which it is the precise contradictory of the essential principle of Protestantism.

The pretence of the reviewer, that Catholics have violated the conditions on which emancipation was conceded, is unfounded. It is a mere pretext. The real thing that he wishes to oppose is this free, fearless, hearty, and vigorous Catholicity; for he knows that this is a Catholicity that does and will march from victory to victory, and that whereever it plants its foot Protestantism must disappear. The real aim of the Quarterly is to weaken the power of Catholies, by sowing divisions in their ranks, and frightening them out of this high-toned papal Catholicity. What it means to tell us is, that it was the low-toned Gallicanism which the relief bill emancipated, not the high and uncompromising ultramontanism in which English and Irish Catholics now glory, and therefore that in exchanging the former for the latter they have broken their engagements. He will not succeed. There are, no doubt, in England and Ireland, as well as in this country, some timid Catholics who retain their old prejudices, and who would feel themselves insulted if called papists. These may think such Catholics as Cardinal Wiseman and the archbishop of Dublin, with their true Roman spirit, are pushing matters too fast and too far; but though at times seemingly half prepared to give up Peter for Caesar, they are after all Catholics, and will follow those whom they would never have the pluck to lead. They may

grumble a little, but they will remain united with their brethren. As for frightening the others back into the Catholicity of the Gallican school, that is simply out of the question. They love, as well as obey, Rome. They know she is the centre of unity, and that the closer their union with her, and the deeper and more unreserved their submission to the Holy Father, the fresher, the more vigorous, and the more inexhaustible their Catholic life. They are and will be Roman Catholics. Both the English and Irish hierarchies are strongly attached to Rome, and will remain. so, both from principle and affection; and all the more firinly attached, the more violent the persecution they have to suffer from the ministry. The pastors will follow Peter, and the flocks their pastors. There are not many Norfolks, Beaumonts, and Ansteys, thank God, remaining in the British Isles, and the few there may be are of no account, for they can find sympathy only in the ranks of Anglicans, where, after all, they are despised.

This change, on which we congratulate our transatlantic brethren, does not in the least violate the conditions on which the Catholic relief bill was granted, for it must be presumed to have been a contingency foreseen and accepted by the government. The government may have hoped, and even believed, that English and Irish Catholics would, as a matter of fact, remain Gallican, but it knew that neither it nor any declarations of English or Irish bishops could bind them to remain so, because it knew that the ultimate authority in the case is Rome, not the national bishops, and that no declarations of the latter could bind, against the approbation, or even permission, of the Roman pontiff. Ültramontanism, as it is called, if not precisely of faith, is yet, as all the world knows, not only permitted, but favored by Rome, as the very name implies, and no Catholic can be forbidden to hold it, or censured for insisting on it. The government could not, therefore, grant Catholic emancipation without conceding to every Catholic the right to hold and insist on it if he chose. The whole question is a domestic question, with which those outside have nothing to do. To them ultramontanes and Gallicans are alike Catholics, and Catholic relief necessarily implies the relief of the one class as much as of the other. The attempt of the Quarterly to prove that Catholics have violated the conditions on which the relief bill was granted, because they do not in all respects coincide with the views set forth in certain declarations made