PREFACE.

In venturing to offer the following pages particularly to the notice of the clergy, my main object has been to correct this prevalent impression, that it may be wrong in a religious point of view to grant the Catholic claims, but it cannot be more than inexpedient to reject them. I have, therefore, argued the Question on the grounds of right: although I allow, that in the ordinary discussion of it, the topic of right is one which it is on many accounts better to wave; and where the opponents of the Catholics do not make conscience their plea for resisting the claims, it is enough to press them on grounds of political expediency. My particular object will account for my omission of many powerful arguments which are usually brought forward in favour of concession; and especially for my not noticing more at length the trite objection, that the measure now before Parliament is an inroad upon the constitution; whereas it is in fact the fulfilment of it, if by the constitution be meant a system for the government of the commonwealth on the principles of liberty and justice.

For my writing on the Catholic Question at all I need offer no other justification than the universal interest it excites, and the great misapprehension and irritation which exist concerning it. I write, because I wish to remove the one and allay the other amongst a class of men who require arguments of a different class from those commonly used in the political and Parliamentary discussions on the subject.

RUGBY, 1829.

CHRISTIAN DUTY

OF CONCEDING THE

ROMAN CATHOLIC CLAIMS.

THE political merits of the Catholic Question have been too often and too ably discussed, and the political authorities in favour of what is called Emancipation are too overwhelming, to render it necessary at this late period to state the grounds of national expediency on which that great measure may be defended. But the most respectable opponents of the Catholics, including, I believe, a large proportion of the Clergy of the Church of England, consider the Question in a higher light; they think that it involves more than political interests; that to admit Catholics to become Members of the Legislature would be most injurious to the cause of the Protestant Religion; and that therefore no views of worldly policy should induce a good man to compromise the service of God, and in effect to sacrifice his highest duty for the sake of obtaining a temporal advantage.

This is at once to put the Question on its true grounds: for as parties and public bodies are made up of individuals morally and religiously responsible; and as no individual Christian, who values his salvation, can knowingly prefer any temporal benefits, however great, to the strict line of his Christian duty; it is manifest that Parliament ought to reject the Catholic claims, even with the certainty of thereby provoking a civil war, if it be indeed a sin against God to grant them. I am, therefore, not

only willing to consider the Question as one of duty rather than of expediency, but it is my earnest wish to do so. These are the principles on which it becomes a Christian to argue; and woe to him who for party, or even for national considerations, allows himself to lower the high standard of Christian perfection; to value civil privileges and political freedom beyond a single and unwavering devotion to the will of God.

It will be my endeavour then in the following pages to prove,

First, that it is the direct duty of every Englishman to support the claims of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, even at the hazard of injuring the Protestant Establishment; because those claims cannot be rejected without great injustice; and it is a want of faith in God and an unholy zeal to think that he can be served by injustice, or to guard against contingent evil by committing certain sin.

Secondly, that as the path of duty is the path of wisdom, so the granting of the Catholic claims, to which we are bound as a plain point of duty, will in all human probability greatly benefit the cause of Christianity; that it will tend to purify the Catholic Religion in Ireland from its greatest superstitions, and gradually to assimilate it more and more to Protestantism.

The principle of the first assertion, when addressing myself to conscientious Christians, I need not waste time in proving. No good man in our days would defend the practice of pious frauds, or of supporting the interests of his Church by persecution. If then the exclusion of the Catholics of Ireland from their civil rights be an act of injustice, or in other words if it be a sin when knowingly committed, it is not a lawful means of advancing or defending the Protestant Religion.

Now in order to shew that this exclusion is unjust, it will be necessary to ascend to higher principles than those to which its advocates generally appeal; and to shew that

these higher principles can alone in fact determine the merits of the Question. And it is here that good men are blinded, as we shall see hereafter, by an original error in their political opinions; which being in its very essence destructive of our notions of justice, distorts the view of every political question, and makes those who entertain it mistake habitually wrong for right and right for wrong.

Nothing has ever been more pernicious to the growth of human virtue and happiness than the habit of looking backwards rather than forwards for our model of excellence. The individual who should compare his life with what he himself was in his earlier years, instead of contrasting it with that high Christian standard which he never yet has reached, but which it should be his daily prayer and labour to reach hereafter, would assuredly go back rather than improve in goodness and wisdom. And so on a larger scale is the improvement of civil society obstructed, by referring to its actual origin and past fortunes, rather than contemplating that hitherto unattained excellence, to which, if it rightly used its increasing experience, it should be approaching in every generation successively nearer. We might as well build our ships after the model of our forefathers' coracles, as endeavour to find the principles of wisdom and justice developed in our forefathers' government. Necessity or chance led to the first rude attempts at navigation: force and cunning were the predominant elements in the constitution of the earliest civil societies. The supremacy of strength and intellect over weakness and ignorance is no doubt sufficiently natural: so is selfishness natural; and nothing could be more in accordance with our unimproved nature, than that the strong and the wise should possess a pre-eminence and abuse it. Governments then being established, some on the base of mere physical force, some on priestcraft, and others on a mixture of both these elements, the language of the laws which were framed by the governing powers was naturally adapted to the prin