INFLUENCE OF POPERY IN IRELAND.
STANDARD—The ascendancy of Popery is always strictly commensurate with misrule and murder. The Popish journals, and Popish talkers in Parliament, it is true, tell us that party spirit is the sole spring of disorder. Here is their answer : wherever the spirit of Protestantism is able to make head, the average condition of the country is tranquil, and amenable to time laws. Indeed, the only explosions that take place in these districts arise from the aggressions of the fiend that desolates umiresisted the rest of the kingdom, and here bursts into open violence, because it meets a check. The Morning Chronicle, which labours under a monomania of Scotticising every part of the world, overlooks this fact in order to arrive at some demonstration of the advantages of public prosecutors and stipendiary magistrates. We shalt not encumber ourselves with the abstract question of the advantage of these institutions; they may be good or they may be bad, but whatever they are, they are fit only for a state of society reclaimed to civilization and peace; not for an anarchy like that which the evidence quoted below proves to prevail in the Popish provinces of Ireland. No; we may try as many species of police as ever entered into the brain of any half hundred pro- jectors—mould our constitution as frequently and violently, to please the fashion- able Jacobin taste, as the French did between 1788 and 1303 ;—all will not do, while Popery prevails all our efforts will be vain. There is no making bricks without straw ; and in a population in which the place that ought to be occupied by a principle of coherence is possessed by an elastic spirit of hatred and revolt, you never can permanently maintain civil institutions but by permanent and over- bearing force. Put down Popery, and then Ireland will be in a condition to receive institutions suitable to a government of law ; but not till then. And that Popery may be put down cheaply, easily, and bloodlessly, we know by the history of every country in which the attempt has been honestly and fearlessly made. The blunder into which men fah, when they suppose that strong measures employed against this pest would tend to confirm its votaries the more in their superstition ; this blunder, which is contradicted by the experience of all the re- formed nations of the earth, arises from the gratuitous hypothesis that Popery is a religion which rests in man's conviction. It is no such thing—it is a fraud sup- ported by juggling, conspiracy, and tyranny ; and inn every instance where the head has been struck at, where the juggler has been solemnly exposed, the con- spiracy broken up by authority, and the tyrant dethroned by act of the state the people have gone along with their rulers in shaking off their delusions and their chains.
MORNING CHRONICLE—We have no doubt that Popery might easily have been put down in Ireland, had the Government been honest, and had sincerely at heart the improvement of the country. Savages or half-savages are no great doctors, and very little skill is requisite to draw them over to any new religion. At the time of the Reformation it depended often on some trifling circumstance whether countries much further advanced than Ireland should be Catholic or Protestant. The Senate of Berne put it to the vote whether the State should adopt the Re- formed religion or not; and the Reformed religion having a majority of votes, it was formally established. When the Sovereigns of Sweden and Denmark saw that they might draw to themselves the power enjoyed by the Catholic Establish- ment, they made their subjects Lutherans. The seventeen United Provinces were once on the point of being all Protestant. A good story is told by Lord Eames of the conversion of the people of the Hebrides to the Protestant religion, by the laird ordering them to follow him as chief; and when he came to the Protestant church-doors, and they demurred to follow him, he took the foremost by the shoul- ders and pushed him in, and the rest followed like a flock of sheep, and:they were all good Protestants ever afterwards. But it is necessary that the people should have confidence in the good intentions of those who take such liberties with them. Wherever any Protestant clergyman in Ireland, like Bishop Bedel, sympathized with the natives, they bestowed their confidence on him; and there is good autho- rity for stating that the native Irish listened as willingly to Protestant preachers as to Catholic at one time, when the former were able to address them in Irish. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which had really at heart the instruction of the people, laid down a rule which it has always rigidly adhered to—that no Minister should be settled in a Highland parish who could not preach in the Erse or Irish language; if this rule had not been laid down, the Highlanders would have re- mained Catholics, like the native Irish. The Irish remained Catholics because no pains were ever taken to make them Protestants, and because those who oppressed them and robbed them of their lands were of the Protestant religion. But what an infatuation to suppose that Popery and anarchy must always be identical! We are not insensible to the benefits conferred in Europe by the establishment of an opposition church, which broke the power of the priests. But who that has looked into history does not see, that under the Catholic religion, there was a constant improvement going on in all the countries of Europe (in some more, in some less), down to the period of the Reformation, which was itself the result of the mental agitation produced by increasing knowledge ? The splendid systems of irrigation in Lombardy and Tuscany, the commerce, mechanical inventions, and beautiful agriculture of Flanders, from which we derived all that is escellent in our Own farming long after good farming was known among the Flemings and Brabanters- all attest the order and civilizatiou of Papists. Bishop Berkely, having seen the industry of Piedmont and Flanders, very candidly admitted that time backwardness of time Irish was not caused by their religion. We pounced upon the native Irish when they had not made the first step towards civilization—the having a property in land, and living in fixed towns ; and we kept them barbarous, by considering all beyond the pale as a sort of hunting-ground for profligate adventurers from Eng- land. The habits of the people are such as are to be met with in all people in the same state of civilization. In Ulster there is more civilization than in Con- naught or Munster,—partly, perhaps, because the Protestant religion tends to promote civilization ; but in a far greater degree because the Protestants there are the descendants of emigrants from provinces where the arts of life were better known at the time of the emigration, than among the native Irish.
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