LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. GLADSTONE AND THE IRISH CATHOLICS.
[TO TUB EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
Srn,—There is an inaccuracy in my recital of Mr. Gladstone's statements concerning the Protestation which I desire, without delay, to correct. I was under the impression that Mr. Gladstone, in the first sentences of p. 48 of " Vaticanism," if he did not actually assert, intended to imply that the Act of 1791 contained an oath disavowing acknowledgment of the doctrine of Infallibility in the terms of the Protestation. I have reason to think that he only referred, in the passage of which I speak, to the terms of the Irish Oath of 1793, stating that Infallibility was not then "an article of faith." On the subject of the Irish oath, I .may have a word to say when I see whether the state- ments I have made concerning the Protestation can be con- tested. It is enough for me here to point out that before the (Ecumenic Connell of 1870 no Catholic, however personally convinced he might be of the doctrine, could swear that Infalli- bility was an "article of faith,"—using the word "article" in the sense which Protestants attach to it when they speak of the Thirty-nine Articles, and which was evidently the sense in which it was used and understood by Parliament. I have already alluded to this distinction in the last paragraph but one of my letter, where I say, "My own belief is that those who signed the paper (i.e., the Protestation) on trust or at random, did not at the moment discern the difference between saying that they did not 'acknowledge' Infallibility, and saying, what all Catholics did and could safely say before 1870, that it was not a defined 'article of
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