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LETTER

TO THE

DUKE OF WELLINGTON,

BY THE

REV. R. J. M'GHEE.

Third Edition.

LONDON:

Printed by A. Macintosh, 20, Great New-street.

PUBLISHED BY THE PROTESTANT ASSOCIATION:

AND SOLD BY MESSRS. NISBET; SEELEYS; HATCHARDS; BAISLER; RIVINGTONS; DALTON; SHAW; FORBES & JACKSON; AND MAY BE OBTAINED OF

ALL BOOKSELLERS.

M DCCC XXXIX.

No. XIV.

[Price 1d., or 7s. per 100.

LETTER,

&c. &c.

MY LORD DUKE,-The alteration produced in the Constitution by the Reform Bill, has placed even the first of British statesmen in such a position that they can no longer apply their individual energy or wisdom to the government of the nation on their own responsibility— they must be more or less under the power of that pressure of popular opinion, which has acquired such an ascendancy in the laws and the government of the country. Conscious, therefore, that no communication conveyed personally to your Grace could enable you to act even on any convictions which it might produce, I appeal through the press at once to your Grace and the British empire; and the solemn sense of duty to God and my country which prompts me to make this appeal, forbids an apology either for the act itself or the fidelity with which I humbly endeavour to discharge it. If there is one individual on earth to whom the Protestants of Ireland are warranted to look for protection against a subversion of their liberties, their properties, and their religion, I trust you will admit that that individual is your Grace. Prompted by what all will readily concede to have been a sense of duty, at a crisis which you thought demanded the experiment, your Grace exerted all your mighty influence to break down those barriers which the wisdom and the religion of our ancestors had erected to protect us from the treachery and cruelty of Papal policy and power, and to identify the British Constitution with the true worship of our God for ever.

Your Grace believed, in common with many wise and learned men, that Popery had improved with the progress of sciences and arts, and that it was incapable of concocting the deep-laid plots and perpetrating the bloody tragedies with which the pages of Europe's history had been ensanguined.

Mr. Pitt had consulted the foreign universities on the doctrines of perjury, sedition, and persecution, that had been attributed to Popery, and their solemn denials were on record. The Committees of both Houses of Parliament had investigated their principles on the canons of Constance and Lateran, on the obligation of oaths, on the persecuting notes of the Rhemish Testament, and on different bulls and decretals of their Church, which had been formerly the watchwords of

persecution and of slaughter; and the Bishops who had been examined evaded and denied them all. The Commissioners of education had made a similar investigation on a more extensive scale at the College of Maynooth-the Bishops and Professors had been examined on the laws, decretals, and canons of their Church, and similar denials and evasions had baffled every effort to fasten on them the doctrine of the Papacy. The English Vicars-apostolic and Romish Bishops came forward with a solemn declaration, disclaiming all the principles that had been imputed to them. The Irish Bishops all came forward with a similar declaration and an oath. The loud harangues of demagogues, complaining of penalties inflicted for principles that were disowned, the ceaseless agitations and increasing convulsions of the country, keeping a spirit of sedition and insurrectionary tumult up to the very letter, and scarcely within the letter of the law; all these and other causes convincing some, satisfying others, causing many to hesitate, unsettling, dividing, distracting, and agitating all, induced your Grace to make the experiment of repealing the laws of our Constitution which withheld political power from the Papacy. With what result your Grace is partly aware, and this letter shall develop the

rest.

I speak not of those consequences which are evident to all.

Your Grace enacted in this Bill that an oath imposed on Popish Members of Parliament was to be a security for our Established Religion -the violation of that oath is now a by-word in the nation.

Your Grace enacted a restriction on the influx of Jesuits into these countries; they are not only pouring in, but erecting places of worship, nunneries, monasteries, and schools-the future nurseries of sedition and treason throughout the British empire.

Your Grace enacted, that the Romish Bishops should not assume those official titles which belong to the prelates of the Established Church. Letters publicly addressed even to the very Minister of the Crown, whose office it is to punish the offence, proclaim to his face, by the contemptuous violation of the statute, either the inefficiency of the law or the nullity of its execution.

Some statesmen, as if desirous to anticipate the demands of Papal perjury and persecution, sacrificed one-half of the highest spiritual offices of our Church, hoping thereby to make with them the dishonourable bargain that they would permit us peaceably to retain the remnant; they have been justly and signally disappointed.

Not content with sacrificing the offices, they abandoned the fundamental principles of our religion, and sought to force us into a criminal compromise with their offence, by making it the only alternative of profiting by the funds for the public instruction of the children of our poor flocks, that we should subscribe to the base, anti-Protestant, and anti-Christian principle of excluding from that instruction the sacred word of our Creator. Thank God, my Lord Duke, that He has graciously preserved us from such a foul abandonment of our duty; thank God, that, through the Christian fidelity of the Bishop of Exeter and others, He has been pleased so to expose the falsehood of the principle and the iniquity of the system, that the same crooked policy

in endeavouring to continue its operation, is now exposed to the contempt and hatred of every man of true religion and public virtue in the British empire.

But now, my Lord Duke, we are all threatened with other consequences of this fatal experiment. I speak not of that Poor-law which is nominally a provision for the miserable paupers of our country, but which, without the possibility of effecting its nominal object, is really setting Popish Priests and Popish Commissioners to preside over the properties of the Protestant proprietors of Ireland; I speak not of that Municipal Corporation Bill now pending, which not only annihilates the means of protection for our Protestant institutions which ancient British wisdom gave us, but transfers into the hands of sworn Papal persecutors and traitors (I mean, and I shall prove them so to be, the Romish hierarchy of Ireland) additional means of promoting their persecuting and traitorous designs, both against our religion, our properties, our lives, and the laws of the British Sovereign of these realms. But I speak of that Church Bill with which we now are threatened as a concomitant of this Corporation Bill, and which, under the pretence of settling the tithe question, goes directly to extinguish the Protestant Church in Ireland-it goes to reduce the means of subsistence to the Protestant Church to such a minimum, that more than one-half the livings in the country will not be able to maintain men who can afford to acquire an education fitted to sustain the rank, and to discharge the duty of ministers of the Established Church, much less to maintain both rectors and curates for the population. It goes to supersede the necessity of any appropriation clause, for it goes to prevent the possibility of Protestant Clergymen accepting the situations which they never could maintain-and thus, by a gradual cession of the positions of Protestant instructors, leaving the Popish Priests in peaceful possession of the parishes in Ireland, and rendering it a matter of course that the law should confirm what a previous necessity had enacted.

But, my Lord Duke, it is not my object to dwell upon the destructive consequences of these measures, but to prove to your Grace, by plain facts, the blindness and infatuation of those who go on with these experiments, with the hope of conciliating Popery or promoting tranquillity, while, in fact, it is but whetting its appetite for crime, and affording it increased facilities for its perpetration. It is like an attempt to satisfy the wolf or the tiger, by saying you will give him a gripe of but one limb of his prey, while you are thus only stimulating his ferocity, and actually giving it all to him to devour.

Permit me, then, to call your Grace's attention to facts which the concurrent judgment of your Grace, and of all British statesmen of every class of politics, has long since pronounced not only worthy of your attention, but of vital importance to the very existence of the British empire.

Your Grace will readily admit, that if it could have been demonstrated to the satisfaction of British statesmen, that at the time when the Parliamentary Committees were investigating the principles of the Papacy, the very men who were examined before them-the very