This question of Popery is just now of great importance. It is important in a religious sense, and no less in a political sense. To dispose of the lower question first. It appears to me that the Anti-Papal agitation and legislation have placed the integrity of this empire in at least as much danger as it ever has been in, since that remote period when a handful of Norman knights effected the conquest of Ireland. I apprehend no revival of the repeal cry, and still less any such absurdity as another Irish rebellion. Ireland is too crushed and depopulated, and worn out with chronic misery, to be anything but passive in the presence of a superior force. Lord Palmerston has great confidence in the loyal zeal with which the Irish peasantry would turn out to repel a foreign invader. That opinion is honourable to him; but considering how much more of his time has been spent amongst the English nobility than amongst the Irish peasantry, it is scarcely a solid ground for legislation. What a peasantry so wretched have to fight for, it would be difficult to show. At all events, the contingency is not one to be overlooked, that if a foreign army of any force could once be landed on the Irish soil, its reception might be different from what it would be in Kent or Devonshire. Such an event might render it necessary to line the whole western coast of England and Scotland with defences as strong as can ever be required on the south. Some will think these remarks imprudent. They may be so. But the case is a desperate one, and requires a desperate remedy.

Effect of the Anti-Papal Bill.

In view of these possibilities it is to be observed that, with a few most honourable exceptions, the chief public men of England did, not long ago, combine their efforts to place Ireland exactly in that state of just irritation British connection would most desire. man eminently deserving of respect. debted to him, but Ireland has not equal cause to be grateful.

which an enemy of Lord John Russell is a England is deeply in

He has done more than any one but himself could have done to destroy even the hope of seeing a moderate and liberal Catholic party acquire strength in Ireland. The measure directed against the Roman Catholic Church in that country did nothing for Protestant, but much for ultramontane principles. The Irish prelates were insulted, but they were in no way weakened. On the other hand, the Irish friends of Lord John Russell himself did receive a heavy blow and a great discouragement. Such an example could not fail to be followed. The Maynooth endowment has now become an embarrassment to every popular member of parliament who is intelligent and scrupulous respecting the relations in which the two countries stand, and further attacks are threatened by the present occupants of ministerial power upon the general policy of the last twenty years. All these things hang together. If the church of the Irish people is to be treated as an alien and dangerous power, the policy of repression should be carried out with vigour. The Anti-Catholic Bill ought in consistency to be followed by the hostile inquiry into Maynooth, or rather by the summary repeal of the endowment, and then by the break-up of the Education Board. Nor is there any good reason for stopping even at that point; for many of the old penal laws were adapted with great ingenuity to their purpose, and if this be the proper way of upholding Protestantism, it is a pity that such excellent weapons should lie by as mere historical curiosities. It is impossible to look at what is going on in any other light than as a warfare, carried on, indeed, with electioneering and parliamentary weapons', but still a warfare, both fierce and dangerous, between the two countries. I see no way of ending

While the last sheets of the present work are going through the press, the warfare has ceased to be confined within those limits. It has become a matter of grave doubt, whether it has not perverted the administration of justice; and it has led to extensive riot and bloodshed, under circumstances which promise to leave no doubt at all about the necessity of increasing the standing army, for if our present dissensions are continued, ten or fifteen thousand additional troops, at least, will be wanted, merely to keep the peace in the great towns throughout the north of England.

it except by a frank acknowledgment of error from the party which is in the wrong, and that party is England. I justify none of the violent language which has come from the other side; but the injury was done by England, for Ireland was in no way responsible for the assumption of those empty ecclesiastical titles by which the new penal law was provoked. But public opinion, when it gets into a passion, is more intolerant and unreasonable than any despot, and public opinion was not calm in England on the matter of the papal aggression. If it had been, it would have been seen that that aggression could only become important from the noise that might be made about it. It would have been seen that the pretensions of the Pope to carve out England into ecclesiastical sees were very fit matter for laughter, but not at all fit matter for resentment; and that intrinsically there was no more in it which should disturb the national composure, than in that celebrated assumption of the Khan of the Tartars, who, when his own meal was over, used to give public permission to all other sovereigns to go to dinner. But ever since the time of Titus Oates, England has been subject to fits of absurdity about popish hobgoblins; and on the last occasion, in combating with such ostentatious phantoms as the Archbishopric of Westminster, she contrived to fall foul of the real flesh-and-blood prelacies of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, which are things as solid as the monarchy itself, and with which the violent collision of the Government must always be in the last degree dangerous. The mischief thus done ought to be undone, by retracing the steps which led to it; and I do not give up the hope that the time will come when success will attend an appeal, if made by influential statesmen, from Philip drunk to Philip sober-from England fanatical or foolish, to England restored to her usual good sense and moderation.

Religious Aspect of the Papal Question.

But the pride and the Protestantism of England will resent the imputation that any wrong has been done; and many will think that the desolation of the empire itself is not too great a risk to be incurred, in order to check by any means what they regard as a pernicious superstition. Here is the true difficulty of the question. For it is by religious and not by political considerations that this fatal policy is sustained. It is necessary, therefore, to advert, though it can be done only very slightly and imperfectly, to the religious bearings of this question. I shall do so in no spirit of controversy with Roman Catholics, but solely for the purpose of showing the grounds upon which a Protestant may be satisfied that the Roman Catholic system is not really formidable, and that the old yoke of the priesthood never can, by any possibility, be reestablished.

The Roman Catholic Church has an immense history, and cannot be understood apart from it. That church is certainly not an invention of the dark ages, for a Protestant writer, inferior to none in learning, eloquence, or power of philosophic thought, Mr. Isaac Taylor, has shown the existence of Roman Catholic practices as far back as the times of Cyprian and Tertullian. Within about a hundred years from the death of the apostle John, celibacy had already become meritorious. The whole church system was in fact a gradual growth, taking in much from the ancient paganism, and much also from the belief and practices of the northern barbarians whom it converted. But with all these accretions of human error, the living spirit continued to work, and was long the main counterpoise to the evil passions of the feudal ages. The most masterly expositions of the working of the church during that period have proceeded from Guizot, a Protestant; Comte, certainly anything but a Catholic; and Neander, who, indeed, with all his Protestantism, was a Catholic, but a Catholic of that

stamp which, though it finds little favour with the churches of England, is blasted with every anathema of heresy by the Church of Rome. All, however, represent that church as the great instrument of civilization during many ages. Thinkers will differ as to the period at which its influence began to decline; but M. Comte appears to me to be exactly right in placing it at the commencement of the fourteenth century, that is to say, about two hundred years before the Reformation. The quarrel of Philip the Fair with Pope Boniface, and the destruction of the order of the Templars, are distinct evidence that a change had then set in for the Papacy, momentous enough to have made Innocent and Hildebrand turn in their graves. Since that time there have been various reactions, and especially that notable one at the end of the sixteenth century, which Ranke has so admirably depicted; but upon the whole the decay has been progressive, and, according to all analogy, no human power can arrest it. The view taken by Mr. Macaulay of the permanency and probable duration of the papal system, only shows that that glance, which is so keen and comprehensive in other departments of history, does not estimate with the same accuracy the phenomena of religion. It seems to me impossible that an impartial observer who studies the Roman Catholic Church as she was in the sixteenth century, should believe that at any subsequent period she has exhibited as much spiritual energy as she did at that time. The founders of the order of the Jesuits were never equalled by any of their successors, and though that church has lost many minds of a high order, it is doubtful whether, in the course of the last two centuries, she has gained one really great intellect, except that of Mr. Newman. The case of Freidrich Schlegel, who intellectually was much inferior to Mr. Newman, has always appeared to me to be truly described by Mr. Carlyle in a wellknown passage-it was the child rushing and clinging to the bosom of the dead mother.

In no country has Catholicism produced greater characters than in France. France is the country of Hincmar, of Gerbert,