LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

MR. GLADSTONE AND. THE IRISH CATHOLIC OATH_ [TOTHE EDITOR OF TER"SPECTATOR..) SIII,—The Infallibility of the Pope is the most ancient and accepted tradition of the Irish Church. Antiquarian science has. hardly rendered a greater service to religious truth in my country than Dr. Graves's fine proof that the transcript of the well- known canon of St. Patrick in the "Liber Armachanus" is at least a thousand years old. It is our just pride that we have been in the strictest sense of the word a Papist Church. We- have paid a certain price of blood, eminence, and estate for the, honour, but it has never been grudged. On the other hand, surely it may fairly be pleaded that we afford the most striking instance in the history of Christendom that the power of transferring the civil allegiance of a nation is not so easily exercised as Mr.. Gladstone imagines by the Pope. The original title of England to the sovereignty of Ireland is a Papal Bull. That Bull contains, these terms :—" We do strictly charge and require that all the- people of that land, with all possible dutifulness and reverence, do- receive and accept you [Henry H.] as their liege lord and sovereign." Here is a case precisely in point seven hundred' years old. Mr. Gladstone will hardly complain that the Irish complied in a spirit of servile promptitude with the Pope's. demand upon their civil allegiance. No Irish Catholic has in truth ever admitted, or even imagined, that the Pope's Infalli- bility in spirituals was in any way engaged in that Bull. No Roman authority has ever 'so asserted. On the contrary, within sixty years after its issue, an Irish prelate was canonised at- Rome who for a long time had done his utmost to prevent the acceptance by his people of the authority which it imposed_ Theseventh centenary of the English dominion in Ireland lately passed without ostensible commemoration in either country. I had once fondly hoped that at the close of that long spell of blood and iron, the proud and happy words "Hibernia Pacata" might have been at last truly written on the scroll of Mr. Glad- stone's statue. There is a peculiar pang of despair in the feelings with which we Irish, with these ancient yet ever new facts of our history in our mind, see him turning from a policy meant to heal the wounds of Ireland's state, to waste his time and his fame in discussing the dangers that may arise to the Empire from the authority which the Vatican Decrees confer on the Pope in regard to the obligation of civil allegiance.

I have boasted that we are by tradition the most Ultramontane of nations. The Statute Law did its utmost to confirm our pre- dilection. It invariably designated us "Papists" and our religion "Popery." I think it may fairly be said that we might at any time have had peace from at least the severer species of persecution, retaining any ritual and system of divinity we pleased, provided we had only agreed to renounce the teaching and governing authority of the Pope. And so when the Penal Laws came to be in great measure repealed in Ireland, in 1793, it was to this point that the leaders of the Protestant ascendancy addressed their especial attention. The Irish Catholics were eager to concede all that they conscientiously could to satisfy the prejudices of a Parliament to which their claims were presented by such men as Mr. Grattan, Mr. Ponsonby, and Mr. George Knox, and whose privileges, even then menaced with extinction, they were anxious to perpetuate. Mr. Knox, on the second reading of the Relief Bill, moved, in conformity with the Catholic Petition, that Catholics should be admitted to seats in Parliament. Mr. Grattan many years afterwards alluded to this incident in the House of Commons in these words :—" On the day that the Irish Parliament rejected the Catholic Petition, on that day she passed the Union. Many good and pious reasons she gave, and she lies there with her many good and her pious reasons.' The goodness and piety of the Irish Parliament were at that time typified by Dr. Duigenan. One would need to combine the characteristic -qualities of the three great Protestant champions of the present day to attain to an estimate of Dr. Duigenan's character. Add to the immovable solidity of Mr. Newdegate's principles the vigilant exuberance of Mr. Whalley's energies, and the racy resources of Dr. Kenealy's rhetoric, and a somewhat rude image of Dr. Duigenan is the result. To Dr. Duigenan the Irish Parliament delegated the task of compounding the Catholic -oath. Dr. Duigenan knew perfectly well that the Irish Catholics would never renounce the doctrine of the Pope's Infallibility. He knew, too—I rather think he had been born a Catholic—that they might be made to declare it was not "an article of faith," —and for one legally sufficient reason, at all events, which I have before repeated, that no Catholic could, until 1870, declare upon oaththat the Pope's Infallibility was "an article of faith" in the strict Parliamentary sense of those terms. The debates in the English Parliament two years before had distinctly defined the line beyond which legislation could not pass, nor was it to be imagined that the Irish Catholics would agree to accept a declara- tion which the handful of English Catholics had manfully refused. I think I may venture to claim that in these difficult and compli- cated circumstances we acted with conspicuous candour and sincerity. We took every possible pains not to deceive the Par- liament which hated and feared us so mortally, and which we -would, despite itself, have saved. The memorable pastoral of Archbishop Troy, which F. Newman quotes, was issued on February 2, 1793. Mr. Hobart obtained leave to bring in the Bill for the Relief of the Irish Roman Catholics on the 4th. It 'was not read a first time until the 18th. Parliament had therefore brought under its pm-view, at the very moment when it was pro- ceeding to legislate, an exact account of the then state of Catholic -doctrine on the subject of Infallibility, issued by the most pro- minent ecclesiastic in Ireland. These are Dr. Troy's words, as F. Newman quotes them :- "' Many Catholics contend that the Pope, when teaching the uni- versal Church, as their supreme visible head and pastor, as successor to St. Peter, and heir to the promises of special assistance made to him by Jesus Christ, is infallible ; and that his decrees and decisions in that capacity are to be respected as rules of faith, when they are dog- matical or confined to doctrinal points of faith and morals. Others deny this, and require the expressed or tacit acquiescence of the Church, Assembled or dispersed, to stamp infallibility on his dogmatical decrees. Until the Church shall decide upon this question of the Schools, either opinion may be adopted by individual Catholics, without any breach ,of Catholic communion or peace. The Catholics of Ireland have lately declared that it is not an article of the Catholic faith, nor are they -thereby required to believe or profess that the Pope is infallible, without adopting or abjuring either of the recited opinions which are ,open to discussion, while the Church continues silent about them.'"

The lines which 1 have italicised suffice to show that the Irish Catholics gave no pledge to the Irish Parliament, as Mr. Glad- stone endeavours to believe that they did, when the oath of 1793 was framed, which could in any way bind their own consciences, not to say the supreme authority of the Church, in regard to the ultimate decision of the long-pending controversy on this doctrine. There is another very remarkable passage in Archbishop Troy's pastoral, which appears to have escaped F. Newman's attention, but which I take leave to quote, because it fully confirms the -account I have given of the proceedings of the English Parliament in 1791, and because it supplies a further and very touching proof -of the unbending Ultramontanism of the majority of the English -Catholics in those days. He says :-

" The disavowal of the Pope's Infallibility as an opinion made a -part of an oath proposed to the English Catholics by private authority in 1791. A great majority of them objected to that and other clauses -of the oath, while others of rank and respectability adopted the whole. The British Legislature did not avail itself of this division to reject the petition of the English Catholics, but with a liberality and magnanimity to be ever remembered with most lively gratitude by all his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, generously substituted the oath which the Irish Catholics had approved and taken since the year 1773, in place of the newly-proposed one in England, that had caused an alarming division in the Catholic body of that kingdom."

There is a further reason why I should ask you to consider very carefully the sense of this remarkable passage. Dr. Troy had no -doubt an object in directing the attention of the leaders of the Irish Parliament to the "magnanimity and liberality" with which the British Parliament had acted towards the English Catholics two years before, and with which, I may add, it was in that very year proceeding to legislate for the Scotch Catholics. But while the British Parliament was guided in the way of wisdom and charity by great statesmen and benevolent prelates, the Irish Parliament allowed its policy in matters of conscience to be dictated by Dr. Duigenan. The contrast had its effect. From that time forth there was an influential, if not a very numerous body of the Irish Catholics who favoured the project of the Union. Every one who knows any- thing of our history knows something of the communications which passed between that party, of which Dr. Troy was the most conspicuous member, and Mr. Pitt, through Lord Cornwallis and Lord Castlereagh, at the time of the Union. I do not desire to be understood as asserting that there was any agreement in regard to the topic of Infallibility between those who represented the Irish Catholics in such negotiations at that time, and the statesmen who later became the executors of Mr. Pitt's projected Irish policy. But I think I am at least warranted in laying some stress on the undoubted historical fact that in every serious proposal for the further relief of the Catholics of the United Kingdom between

the date of the Union and the passing of the Act of 1829, it will be found that the Infallibility clause of the Irish Act of 1793

(though taken as a truism at the time) was nevertheless, for reasons sufficient to move the minds of statesmen, allowed to drop quietly out of each renewed amendment of the Catholic oath, until it was finally and for ever obliterated in 1829.

I am now to consider the Resolution of the Irish Bishops in 1810—the resolution of a meeting held in Archbishop Troy's house, and, I believe, under his presidency—in regard to which I have to complain that Mr. Gladstone has torn the passage he has quoted, not merely from the context of the sixteen resolutions which precede and follow it, but from the concluding sentences of the Resolution itself, which would suffice to show that not the ques- tion of Papal Infallibility, but an even more serious question, agitated and absorbed the mind of the Synod. It was a moment of terrible anxiety and panic throughout the Catholic Church, throughout the British Empire. Napoleon's power had reached its utmost height. He had just added Illyria, Austrian Gallicia, the

Pontifical States to the territories of the Empire. Poland, Holland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Rhenish Provinces were governed by kings or viceroys of his family. He had apparently annihilated the power of Prussia. He confidently expected, and it was expected in England as an almost inevitable calamity, that Spain and Portugal would before summer be swept clear of the British Army. It was the time in which the London Corporation, in a petition to Parliament, accused Sir Arthur Wellesley of the "rashness, ostentation, and useless valour" which he had displayed in the battle of Talavera. The Pope was a close prisoner, not merely deprived of his States, but cut off from

all communication with the College of Cardinals and the Churches of the world. The four Gallican Articles had just been proclaimed part of the public law of the French Empire. The divorce of Josephine was proceeding. An immeasurably more powerful despot than Henry VIII. seemed to the minds of men to be pursuing the same path, with the Vicar of Christ absolutely within his power. It is curious to remember that at this supreme moment of its destiny, though the principal reason alleged by Napoleon for his detention of the Pope was the friendship of his Holiness for England, the protection he had awarded a British Minister, the fact that he would persist in blessing and praying for heretics whom he ought rather to curse and excommunicate, never- theless England was, in the winter of 1809-10, in just as great a panic about the Pope as about Napoleon. No one in England believed in the sublime and indomitable firmness of

Pius VII. It was confidently calculated that he must succumb, and that his influence as head of the Catholic Church would then become an integral part of the power of France. An invasion of Ireland was anticipated as the next enterprise to Napoleon's hand after he had driven Lord Wellington to his ships,—and not with- out reason, for his correspondence contains the directions to General Clarke to prepare the plans for an invasion of Ireland in 1811; and Clarke, an Irishman himself, well acquainted with Wolfe Tone's brilliant and skilful schemes, was admirably qualified for the

task. Even Mr. Grattan, when introducing the Catholic Petition in the House of Commons soon after the Irish Bishops passed the Resolution, of which Mr. Gladstone has quoted the first sentences, was so appalled by the prospect as to exclaim :-

" Let me suppose the Pope to be made by Bonaparte, to bo a French subject, and to nominate by his direction Catholic Bishops for Ireland. If under that circumstance an invasion should happen, what would be our situation, with French troops and French bishops in our country ?"

I will now quote the Resolution of the Irish Bishops in full. Here is the part of it that Mr. Gladstone gives :—

" That said Oath, and the promises, declarations, abjurations, and protestations therein contained are, notoriously, to the Roman Catholic Church at largo, become a part of the Roman Catholic religion, as taught by us the Bishops, and received and maintained by the Roman Catholic Churches in Ireland; and as such are approved and sanctioned by the other Roman Catholic Churches."

Here is the part of it that Mr. Gladstone does not give :—

" So that it appears to us utterly impossible that any way is left to any foreign authority whereby the allegiance of Irish Catholics can be assailed, unless by that, which God avert! of open invasion, in which extreme supposition, as we will persevere by God's grace to do our duty, so we have certain hope that every true son of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland will eagerly prove how well his religion can stand with the most heroic allegiance."

Can there be a doubt in the mind of any man who reads this Resolution in its entirety, in the light of the times in which it was written, having regard to those to whom it was addressed, that its one paramount object was to make a profession of unhesitat- ing, unqualified allegiance, in view of the dangers that menaced the State ? But it will be objected that the Resolution says the oath of 1793 had become a part of the Roman Catholic religion as taught by the Bishops. The phraseology of this clause of the Resolution is certainly agitated and ambiguous. A Synod of Irish Bishops could no more make an oath taken out of an Act of Parliament a part of the Catholic religion than the Parliament of Natal could bind the British Empire by a resolution. This I may assume to be notorious to all educated persons, and especially to Mr. Gladstone, who still seems to doubt whether even a General Council can add to the defined dogmas of the Church. I say it in no spirit of irreverence, but the prevailing panic seems to me to have somewhat unsettled the etymology of the King's English among the gravest personages. I can no more justify these terms of the Irish Bishops in their strict sense, than I can justify the criti- cism of the Corporation of London on the tactical qualities dis- played by Sir Arthur Wellesley at Talavera. At a time when even Mr. Grattan's language grew confused, it may be imagined

in what hotch-potch Lord Castlereagh expressed himself. But after all, is not the real question at issue,—What did the Irish Bishops teach concerning the doctrine of the Pope's Infallibility, as referred to in the Oath of 1793 ? I have stated their teaching in 1793, when the oath was being settled, on Archbishop Troy's authority. Archbishop Troy was present in the Synod of 1810.

Could any statesman of the time imagine that the doctrine of the Irish Bishops in regard to the Pope's Infallibility differed in 1810 from what it was in 1793? I make bold to say, having read the debates in both Houses with some care, in the course of which, not the second resolution merely, but the whole series of sixteen, were carefully analysed and considered (I would refer Mr. Gladstone in particular to Lord Erskine's very remarkable speech), that the topic of Infallibility was never so much as touched upon. What the statesmen of that time really wanted was to get some security that the Pope would not, to repeat Mr. Grattan's phrase, nominate "French bishops." In order to obviate this danger, they wished the Irish Bishops at once to give the King the right of veto, if not of nomination. The Irish Bishops refused point- blank to consider any question concerning the supreme preroga-

tive of the Sovereign Pontiff while he was a prisoner, or even to recognise any Briefs purporting to come from him on such a sub- ject, until they had evidence that he was in the enjoyment of his absolute freedom. They were very much condemned at the time for standing so stoutly by the Pope when he was in such a hopeless strait. No one dreamed of supposing, as Mr. Gladstone seems to do, that they were taking advantage of such an occasion to disavow any part of the respect due to his Chair.

I pass from the Resolution of 1810 to the assurances said to have been given by Dr. Doyle and other prelates in evidence

before the House of Lords in 1825. I feel that I press unduly upon your space, but I can afford to be very brief upon this point. The House of Lords examined four Irish prelates in 1825,— Archbishop Curtis, Archbishop Murray, Archbishop Kelly, and Bishop Doyle. There was not a question addressed to the three Archbishops having any relation, direct or indirect, to the ques- tion of Infallibility. Dr. Doyle was asked (p. 387) " what was meant by the Infallibility of the Pope," and he replied :—

" There are so many divines who have written on the subject, and they have given such very long definitions of it, that I should do much better by referring your Lordships to them than by giving a definition myself. Melchior Cane has a long treatise on the Infallibility of the

Pope."

Again, when asked about the Gallivan Liberties, he says (p. 509) :—

" I cannot say to your Lordships that the Galilean Liberties, as such, were ever formally received or acknowledged in our country, but the substance of the doctrine taught in them is held by a great number of our divines."

Can any one read such questions and such answers and suppose that Parliament was seriously seeking and receiving assurances and guarantees on the subject of Papallnfallibility ? Some hasty expressions of Dr. Doyle have been quoted in the coarse of this controversy. It is not a part of my task either to vindicate or to condemn his language. But I may be excused for calling atten- tion to his true view of the authority of the Pope in matters of faith, expressed on a sufficiently serious occasion, in relation to a declaration of Mr. Robinson, then (1824) Chancellor of the Exchequer, afterwards Lord Ripon, in favour of a reunion of the English and Roman Churches :—

" I myself am probably one of the most moderate divines in the Empire ; certainly I would wish, with the Apostle, to be separated for a. time from Christ for my brethren, either Protestant or Catholic ; but I would, with the grace of God, suffer death a thousand times, were it possible, rather than assent to anything regarding faith which would not be approved of by the Successor of Peter. I am sure, I am certain, that the Pope is the Head of the Universal Church, and that the rejection•of his just authority is ruinous to religion."

I will now close the proofs I have offered in contradiction of Mr. Gladstone's main charge by a somewhat large statement, which, if I have not spent much pains in vain, will, however, remain uncorrected. I say, then, that if the whole correspondence on Catholic affairs that passed with Ministers of the Crown from the time of Mr. Pitt to the time of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel be read through, there will be found no apology, no undertaking, no assurance, no serious allusion even to the subject of Infallibility. So utterly unfounded end opposed to. fact is the assertion that we deceived the Crown and Legislature in any way as to this doctrine, by statement, suggestion of what was false, suppression of what was true, or by silence. I refer Mr. Gladstone particularly to the series of memo- randa by Dean Philpotts, who was the Duke of Wellington's principal adviser on matters of doctrine, in 1827 and 1828. Their spirit may be expressed in a sentence,—" Renounce doctrinal declarations against Popery ; get instead a pledge to maintain the Church Establishment." So it was that the clause in the Irish Act of 1793 by common consent quietly vanished in 1829. I need hardly say that after the great victory of the Clare election, the Catholics of -Ireland were not much in the mood to conclude• a capitulation on the question as to whether the Infallibility of the Pope was to be regarded as a doctrine or as a dogma. I say it in no vaunting spirit, that we should never have treated at that moment on such terms. We had marched into the Con- stitution with drums beating and colours flying ; and it is to the immortal fame of the English nation that when the contest of centuries so came to a sudden and a manly end, we were roc-dyed with more than the honours of war. I thank you with all my- heart for having allowed me to vindicate in your pages the good faith and fair fame of the Catholics of both kingdoms by clearing up these somewhat obscure passages of our common history.—