all human sanctions whatsoever, as far as they affect the conscience through the medium of oaths; he claims and exercises by himself, and delegates to others, an effectual, or supposed effectual, power of absolution. What fatal effects that power, as exercised by the Roman Catholic priesthood and applied to a credulous multitude, is capable of producing upon the civil and political condition of that community in which it is allowed to prevail, let the recent experience of Ireland during the late rebellion attest, where wretches, reeking with the blood of their murdered countrymen, have been purified from the guilt of past atrocities, and prepared for the commission of new, by the all-atoning virtues of Popish absolution; such a power as this over the conscience, engrosses and directs more than half the faculties and energy of the entire man, &c.-But, besides the spiritual power thus capable of being, and thus being in fact abused, the Ecclesiastical Power of the Church of Rome over its obedient Sous is enormous. It establishes and sustains, in the instance of Ireland, an Hierarchy dependent on the See of Rome as to the original nomination and subsequent control of its Bishops and Pastors, through the medium of which it enforces an obedience not in matters of faith only, but in temporal acts and concerns immediately connected with the duties and habits of ordinary life; not only in the payment of money for the maintenance of the local Ecclesiastical Establishment, or for such other purposes connected with their political œconomy as may be thought fit by the same authority to be enjoined, but in the performance also of rites and ceremonies, particularly that of marriage, from which all civil rites originate, and which they enjoin to be performed by their own ministers exclusively, thereby ousting the law of the land, and endangering or destroying the legitimacy of its subjects, and all rights of descent, inheritance, and representation founded thereon. The power of excommunication is, in the hands of their clergy, a

most powerful and dangerous engine, not of spiritual and ecclesiastical only, but of temporal power, It acts at once upon all the comforts of domestic and social life in this world, and upon all the hopes and expectations of happiness in that which is to come. With what harshness and rigour, and with what daring defiance of the established law of the land, this most operative power of interdiction has been recently applied, not to a few individuals only, but to large multitudes of people, a Noble and Learned Lord detailed to us on a former evening. Why such an enormous conspiracy in the several parties concerned, against the established laws and government of their country, has, if fully known, been suffered to pass unpunished, I am at a loss to conceive. I can only account for it on a supposition that some insurmountable difficulties may have occurred in the obtaining of witnesses who would venture to come forward and state such facts upon oath in the face of their spiritual directors, or that a distrust of the disposition in local juries to convict under such circumstances has prevented the institution of such prosecutions as would otherwise be proper for the correction of such crimes. Certainly these, or some other adequate reasons, must have operated to produce a temporary impunity, in cases where the safety of the State and the protection of its subjects, from the enormous excesses of illegal authority, seem to have so much required the application of immediate and exemplary punishment. I am persuaded it could not proceed from a want either of zeal or courage in those whose immediate duty it is to call forth and apply the energies of the law on such important occasions; for I am well assured and know, that the public spirit and manliness which heretofore distinguished the profession of the law in that country, has by no means expired in the person of Lord Clare.

These are a few, and but a few, of the practical

civil inconveniences which might be instanced as de

rived to the state and its subjects from the authority of the See of Rome, spiritual and ecclesiastical, as it is exercised over the sons of its church; producing as it does a distracted allegiance in the same person, acknowledging and living under the temporal power of one sovereign, and bound in faith and morals by the authority of another, claiming to be his spiritual guide and governor, his ecclesiastical sovereign, and in effect, in all matters of supreme conscientious concernment, God's vicegerent and representative on earth.

It is denied that the effect of this authority was at all mischievously felt during the late troubles in Ireland; and, on the contrary, it is asserted that the Rebellion in 1798 was the more effect of revoluționary principles, fostered, matured, and brought into action by republican leaders, who were not members of the Church of Rome.

I admit that the leaders of that rebellion, the Emmetts and O'Connors, were men of elevated views and conceptions, of minds too highly raised above the grovelling regards and credulity of the vulgar, to be subject to the weakness of this, or indeed of any other description of religious faith whatever.

I will grant, if it shall be so required, that they were superior to all infirmities of this kind, that they were graduates of the highest class in the schools of republican philosophy, by which I mean pure, genuine, unadulterated Atheism;" but the ranks of that army which their treasons brought into the field, were not so filled up. The Roman Catholic population furnished, as it must, the means, and the priests in many instances, in their own persons, both the inducement and the example of rebellion, by standing forward as officers amongst them in the day of battle, and imposing for some time upon their superstitious and enthusiastic followers the most extravagant fables of their own miraculous exemption from the perils of fire and sword. I admit that their atheist leaders wished at first to give the mis

chief a republican direction; but the religious frenzy of the multitude and of their immediate directors, soon gave it another, as some of the sanguinary and ferocious tragedies which were acted at that period too truly and too fatally testified. Any person who will take the trouble of referring to the history of that calamitous period, and will afterwards recur to the history of the rebellions of Tyrone and O'Neil, will find the transactions of these several periods but too genuine counterparts of each other, and too disgusting a resemblance prevailing between them both, as well in cause as effect. Both followed a period of extreme liberality to the Catholics, took place in a season of unsuspecting calm and security, and involved the country in more than the miseries and massacre which are usually attendant upon civil war. We were taught to expect, that far other consequences would have followed upon the liberal grants I have already alluded to. We were to have reposed with confidence upon the eternal gratitude of the whole Roman Catholic population of Ireland. Nothing however of this kind that I recollect, was exhibited in fact, beyond what appeared in a few public addresses of the day; a small return of mouth-honour; but neither the King nor Parliament which conferred, nor the immediate patrons of their cause, who induced Parliament to consent to confer these benefits upon them, were very long or gratefully remembered. Two of their first and most active patrons in 1778, had afterwards the unmerited misfortune to fall in the field by the hands of Catholic rebels.

Before we proceed to grant more, if more we could grant without a direct surrender of all securities of our Protestant Church and Government, it would well become us to consider how our past liberality and confidence have been requited. But we cannot grant more, particularly the boon which is asked, of the Admission of Catholic Members into ParliaParliament, without putting in peril the whole Protestant Church and its rights, as by law established.

The Act of Settlement has provided for the Protestant Succession to the crown of England; it has made the being a Protestant the indispensable condition upon which the Crown is to be worn by any prince claiming under the limitation in favour of the heirs of the body of Princess Sophia,-being Protestants.

"It has not only required the King to be a Protestant generally, but to be of that class of Protestants which joins in communion with the Church of England; and it has excluded Papists by industrious description; for it provides and enacts (Section 2.) That all and every person and persons who shall or may take or inherit the said crown by virtue of the limitation of the present act, and is or shall be reconciled to, or shall hold communion with, the See or Church of Rome, or shall profess the Popish Religion, or shall marry a Papist, shall be subject to such incapacities as in such case or cases are by the recited act (i. e. of 1 W. and M.) enacted and established.

" So peremptory is the tenor of these provisions in exclusion of a Popish Prince from the throne of these kingdoms, that if (a case which is scarce within the extreme limits of actual possibility) his Majesty himself should become reconciled to the See of Rome, or profess the Popish Religion, the crown would in that case, by the instantaneous effect and operation of law, fall from his august and revered brows; and he would stand amongst us a mere unprivileged individual, as wholly divested of the rights, functions, name, and character of sovereignty, as the meanest peasant of the land: and can it then be supposed that when such industrious pains have been taken by our ancestors to secure to the kingdom a Protestant Prince, that it should be left at large whether his Parliament should be Protestant

or