conscience is the inherent right of all mankind-a right which cannot be taken away without injustice and oppression, nor surrendered without a crime.

We trust that the conduct of the Irish Catholics has entitled us to expect implicit credit for this statement of our avowed and published sentiments. But your attention may be diverted from the proofs we have already given of our opinions-you may be led away by general and abstract accusations, and you may be told, as you have been told, that the tenets of the Catholics are in themselves, and by their nature, friendly to despotic power, and that our faith is inimical to liberty of conscience.

We deny the truth of both of these allegations-we utterly deny their truth. We are Catholics-Catholics in all the sincerity of perfect and conscientious belief. We would not disclaim, or disown, or misrepresent, any one tenet of the Catholic Religion for all the world's wealth, or all that can exist of human power,evincing our sincerity by the constancy with which we endure privation, and bear with the more goading suffering which contamely and insult inflict on us. Sincere and conscientious Catholics as we are, we do solemnly, and in the presence of the Deity, deny the charges made against our tenets and our faith, and we do declare to you that the principles of our religion are most favourable to civil liberty, and to the practical exhibition of freedom of conscience.

Protestant Englishmen ! we do not ask you to relyalthough you may well rely on our assertions, without the aid of proof. But we appeal to history and to the evidence of facts to sustain our assertions.

Recollect that we assert two things FIRST, that the Catholic Religion is friendly to civil libertySECONDLY, that the Catholic Religion is favourable to freedom of conscience.

We do not mean to enter into theoretic reasonings in the first instance, in order to prove the truth of these assertions. We confine ourselves to matter of history—we will adduce historic facts sufficient to convince every reasoning and dispassionate man.

We take up the proof of these assertions in the order in which we have made them. We begin with the assertion "THAT THE CATHOLIC RELIGION IS FRIENDLY TO CIVIL LIBERTY." We adduce history as our witness to prove it. And first-Englishmen, history reminds you that you

owe all that you have of liberty to your Catholic ancestors. You owe to Catholic hands, the frame, form, and vital substance of that Constitution of which you are proud, and of which you would have still more reason to boast, if its practical details were more in unison with the free-born spirit of those Catholic times, when Parliaments were annual, when the public revenue was under the actual, not the nominal, controul of the real and not the virtual representatives of the people-of those Catholic times, when no single Justice of the Peace could decide on the liberty of an Englishman-nor could any Magistrate imprison an Englishman without the verdict of twelve of his equalsof those Catholic times when there was not one single barrack in all England-and before the name of standing army had been known to English ears, or tolerated by English usage.

Englishmen-you owe to your Catholic ancestors the institution of your hereditary Monarchy which gives fixity to private and individual property, by taking out of the lottery of faction or intrigue the greatest prize in human existence-and deprives lawless ambition of the greatest stimulant to insurrectionary exertion.

Englishmen-you owe to your Catholic ancestors the institution of that legislative and hereditary peerage, which whilst it is in its origin and intention, calculated to form the glorious and legitimate incitement to virtuous and patriotic action, stands secure from the impulse of sudden factious movements, or from the controul of hasty popular excitement.

But, above all, and we do say before all Englishmen, you owe to your Catholic ancestors the invention of practical popular representation. You owe to Catholics the institution of the House of Commons-emphatically the people's House of Parliament-not indeed as it now stands, disfigured by rotten boroughs and individual nomination, nor rendered almost permanent by legislative usurpation, but really representing the people, and elected annually, or for almost every particular occasion.

Englishmen-you owe to your Catholic ancestors the great Charter of your liberties, and the repeated confirmatory charters wrung by a Catholic people from successive Sovereigns, actuated as the people were by the genuine love of liberty which delights in controuling the excesses of supreme power.

You equally owe to your Catholic ancestors a defined and definite High-Treason Law; and the best protection of your lives at this moment, against any attempt by ministerial atrocity to destroy them, would be found in the statute framed by a Catholic Parliament in the reign of the Catholic Edward the Third.

You likewise owe to your Catholic ancestors all that is valuable in your judicial system-your Mayors, your Sheriffs, your Judges.

There remains one part of your judicial system of which the praise has been sounded more loudly and long than any other, and most justly-"The trial by Jury.' Το whom do you owe the trial by Jury? To your Catholic ancestors. It was Catholics who created the trial by Jury. The protection of the oppressed-the check of tyrannythe safeguard of the innocent-the shield of the persecuted in bad times-the consolation and the pride of the virtuous in times of peace and security-" THE TRIAL BY JURY."

Pause here with us, Englishmen and fellow-christians, and then answer this question coolly and dispassionately. Could the religion of the men be hostile to liberty who framed MAGNA CHARTA-who limited and defined the Treason Law-who invented legislative representationwho instituted the trial by Jury?

But it is not in England alone that history proves that the Catholics were most favourable to freedom. Almost all the popular republics of the modern world were modelled by Catholics. Italy, before the Reformation, possessed ten or twelve Catholic republics. The Catholic republic of Venice endured fourteen hundred years, and of these near nine hundred were years of democratic liberty, domestic comfort, and foreign glory.

In more modern times still, the republics of Switzerland were distinguished into aristocratic cantons, and democratic -the aristocratic were Protestant, the democratic Catholic

cantons.

More recently still, Catholic South America has instituted, or is engaged in framing, more than twenty new republics on the broad basis of popular rights and universal emancipation.

We deem it unnecessary to enter into further details.Ignorance of history may excuse a man for doubting that liberty is a Catholic virtue.-But to him who will read the page of history with unprejudiced eye, the fact is manifest,

that it is to Catholics to whom liberty is principally, nay, almost exclusively, indebted for her formation on the basis of stability.

[To be concluded in the next.]

REMARKS ON SOME ARTICLES IN THE LAST NUMBER.

SIR, London, Feb. 12, 1828. MAY I beg the insertion of a few cursory remarks on your last number, among the interesting contents of which are some things that seem to me to lie open to criticism.

And in the first place, with regard to Mr. Wright's Letter to the Trowbridge Congregation; why publish it? It is the letter of a faithful minister of the gospel, but surely the reproof would have been quite as efficacious if administered in private; or if it was thought likely to be useful to other churches, why state for whom it was originally intended?

"Sir William Jones an Anti-Trinitarian." - In the closing paragraph of this extract, Clarke, Tucker, and Law, are enumerated as members of the Anti-Trinitarian and Anti-Calvinistic schools of Christian philosophers. All sects are fond of claiming eminent individuals as members, and I am far from finding fault with the propensity as long as it is kept within due bounds; but I do not like the exaltation of the purity of any one's opinions at the expense of moral character. The above-named individuals were clergyman, two of them dignitaries of the Church; and therefore the more they were Unitarian the less they were honest. Why, then, the anxiety sometimes exhibited to claim these, and such as these, as Unitarians? Does it not give a handle to others to represent our faith as deficient in moral efficacy?

"The Institution of Priesthood an Evil."-Mr. Higgins seems to labour under an anti-sacerdotal fever which has affected his memory and his understanding. The extract is, in fact, a tirade at once vulgar and indiscriminating. I am no advocate for an established church or an endowed hierarchy, and I admit that priests have many sins to answer for; but surely justice is due even to them, and facts should not be distorted to justify invective. All the misery of the Jewish state did not arise from the corruption of religion by their priests, nor did those priests seduce the

people into idolatry. Aaron did certainly make the golden calf, but it was at the desire of the people, (Exod. xxxii. 1,2); so that in this case the people seduced the priest. Jeroboam set up the golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and the princes, not the priests, of Judah, were the great patrons of idolatry.

Between Caiaphas and Pilate most persons will think there is little room for choice; the cowardly magistrate who doomed to death one whose innocence he acknowledged, and whom he was therefore bound to protect, incurred a degree of guilt not to be effaced by washing his hands; and seems by no means preferable to the interested, malignant, or bigoted accuser. Caiaphas was, however, a priest, and this in the eyes of many is sufficient to turn the scale against him. We are told to look at Spain and Ireland to see priests reeking with gore: but even in these unhappy countries, we shall look in vain for any such sight as the distempered imagination of Godfrey Higgins, Esq., has conjured up.

Your instructive correspondent N., in his "Thoughts on Passages in the New Testament," has, I think, rated the degree of learning needful for a minister too high. Surely a man of good understanding may be quite competent to conduct the devotions of a congregation, and instruct them efficiently in all the essentials of Christianity, with a knowledge of the Scriptures in his vernacular tongue, and a tolerable facility of composition or readiness of speech, I would not undervalue learning; I am well aware of its importance; but gentlemen who have had the advantage of an academic education, with subsequent leisure to augment the knowledge thereby acquired, are too apt to look down upon others, less favoured in this respect, but possibly as useful Christian teachers as themselves.

N. also objects to the wording of a notice, that "the Rev. W. Orme would preside at the Lord's Table." Where is the ground of the objection? Does not the officiating minister at the celebration of the Lord's Supper always preside at it?

Mr. Kentish's strictures on religious display evince too much fastidiousness. Public and oral discussions on theological topics are open to several objections; but they may sometimes be useful, and are sanctioned by the example of the Apostle Paul. As to the press, it is all very well to those who can afford it; but it must be remembered it is not every one who can do so. OBSERVER.