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feelings of men, whether friends or enemies, must vanish before that question what is due to truth? On that I take my stand; my path is plain, and I trust in the strength of God to be enabled to walk steadily through it. I have fallen into error, it is true; but, brethren, truth has not fallen: the God of truth is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." It is his province to educe good out of evil, and to overrule the weakness and folly, yea, the very sins of men, for the wise purposes of manifesting his own power and glory, so that while the pride of man is humbled in the dust, the wisdom of God shall be glorified and his cause advanced, in defiance of the weakness of the instruments who may be engaged in it. While I have cause to be humbled for my own error, I confess I rejoice in believing, that it has been overruled by Divine Providence for good; and that what no strength or wisdom of mine could accomplish has been providentially effected through my weakness and folly.

"The public mind on all sides has never been so thoroughly roused to the question. Protestants, criminally incredulous and indifferent as to the real principles and objects of the Church of Rome, are now excited by the apprehension that the cause of Protestantism has sustained a blow. Roman Catholics devoted to their church, but, I trust, many of them ignorant of its real character, are excited by the press to triumph in an imaginary advantage.

"The press itself, which is the most important point, has taken hold of this fictitious document, and has so paraded it before the nation, that it has excited an appetite which it will be forced to gratify, and has committed itself so thoroughly in the conflict, that it must go on. It cannot boast itself in grappling with a shadow, and shrink when it shall be called to engage with a substance; triumph in the pride of victory over an admitted fiction, and tremble in silence while it flies from the proof of fact. This is the state of the question produced by my unconscious error; and it is your duty and my duty to make it tell for the support of truth. I am sure I need not say we have need of a better wisdom than our own, affording, as I do, a flagrant example, that when left to our own weakness, we may fall in the midst of our best exertions. The question is then, how is this state of things to be improved?

"You will do me the justice to recollect, that I told your committee on the Monday before the meeting, that when I learned Mr. O'Connell would not stand forward to meet the case, I did not wish to bring forward the Rhemish notes, having another subject, which still remains untouched, and which I thought of more importance to lay before the meeting. Your committee was pleased to say, that having been pledged

to the public for that subject, you thought it my duty to bring it forward, and I bowed to your opinion.

"The season being so far advanced, and none of my Irish brethren who are familiar with these facts being here to support me, I gave up all idea of any further exertion in London to call the public attention to the subject; and having been requested to attend a public meeting in Bristol, I was determined to make that my way home this week. But now, having fallen into this error, if I were to leave town and bring forward any other documents, however important, either now or hereafter, on the subject, the press that maintains the cause of popery would say, that having been driven from London with one set of forged documents, produced in Exeter Hall, I was now bringing forward another set in some other part of the country, to impose on the people. Now, this shall not be. Here I am, and here I take my stand; and in the face of all this reproach, fearless, I trust in the confidence of sober truth, I will not, if it please Providence, quit the city of London, with your permission, till I lay before the Protestants of England the documents in my possession-documents the more valuable, because they are within the reach of those who can use them much better than I can.

And now it will be seen what the press which has taken up with such avidity a document which I rashly adopted on the supposed responsibility of another, will do with those documents which I shall bring forward on my own responsibility, and which shall defy the best powers of legal talent to vindicate or deny.

"It is not for me to dictate to your committee the mode in which you choose them to be brought forward. I am here at your service, and that of the cause of truth, in which, I trust, you are conscientiously engaged. If you choose to hold another large public meeting in Exeter Hall, though weak and exhausted, I am ready, to the best of my strength, to stand there; or if you choose to issue a circular letter to men of the first rank and ability in all departments of the city of London to hold a select meeting in the smaller room at Exeter Hall, I pledge myself that I shall lay before them facts and documents worthy the attention of every man in the British empire. I do not desire to taunt Mr. O'Connell with not meeting, what I believe he knows too well he cannot meet; but I say, that if Mr. O'Connell, Mr. Shiel, or any other Roman Catholic member of parliament, choose to volunteer to refute my statements, or question my documents, he shal have perfect liberty to do so.

"Committing, then, this to your judgment, and entreating your speedy determination, as my time is limited, and humbly trusting that

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God will overrule all things for the advancement of his glory, the good of his church, the honour of his most sacred majesty, and the safety and welfare of this kingdom,'

"I have the honour to be, dear friends and brethren, your faithful, though very unworthy friend and servant,

"R. J. M'GHEE."

In this letter the writer had given the committee the option of a large public meeting, or a select one, and on Sunday morning he received a letter from a friend, one of the members of the committee, which shows the difficulties that encompassed the proceedings at such a late season of the year, and lays the facts of the case more plainly before the reader:

"London, Saturday, July 23rd, 1836.

"REV. AND DEAR SIR-On the other side you have a rough proof of the notice we are now printing, and propose to issue on Monday. After you left us yesterday, we got into a discussion which lasted till four o'clock, and ended in an adjournment till this day, at which, after two hours more discussion, we resolved upon a plan.

"One party was for a second great meeting in the large hall; to this the objections were, that to arrange for it properly by advertisements and tickets, required more than a fortnight's time; that by the expiration of a fortnight, both houses would be up, and London empty; that thus we should have a thin meeting, without a single peer or commoner, and at this the enemy would triumph.

"The second plan, which was mine, was to occupy the small hall; to this Mr. was firmly opposed; he said, that in May he would gladly have had a second great meeting, but that seemed impracticable now; and that to a small meeting, he felt a great dislike. The enemy would crow over us, and say we were unable, or dared not, come forward again, &c. &c.

“I contended much against this, but on the evening's reflection I came round to his opinion, and devised the plan we are now acting on. I see, now, that a public meeting in any hall except the great one, would be a falling off, and would be so used by our adversaries. But this objection does not apply to a full committee meeting-the large committee-room holds 150, and I suppose we shall fill it, without any public announcement whatever.

"We judge it not advisable to print or give publicity to your letter; which seems likely to make a good commencement of your speech. The speech itself we shall, of course, have reported in all the papers that will take it.

"If you can draw up a short analysis of the facts you prove, the parties present may sign their names to a public statement to that effect.

"Yours," &c. &c.

The following was the copy of the circular adopted by the committee, as stated in the foregoing, and printed for addressing to the most influential men, whose attendance could be procured at Exeter Hall.

PROTESTANT ASSOCIATION.

"2, Exeter Hall, July 25, 1836.

"SIR-The Rev. Robert M'Ghee being desirous of detailing to the Protestant Association, before his departure from London, the facts recently discovered by him respecting the supplemental volume appended to Dens's Theology-which facts he was prevailed on by this committee to postpone to the question of the Rhemish notes, at the meeting held on the 14th inst. ; and it being obviously difficult to convene another public meeting during the limited stay of Mr. M'Ghee in London, it has been determined to hold an open meeting of the committee, at the general committee-room, Exeter Hall, on Friday next, the 29th inst. at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, at which meeting you are invited to be present.

"I remain, sir,

"Your obedient humble servant,

Secretary."

On the receipt of this letter, and more mature deliberation on the case, the writer was convinced that the plan suggested by the committee would fail of its effect-that the thinnest public meeting that could be convened in Exeter Hall, to which Mr. O'Connell and the Popish members of parliament were challenged, would be better than the

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most respectable private meeting that London could furnish, would prove an effective exposure of papal iniquity, and put a stop at once to their short-lived boast of a triumph, and at all events, effectually put it into his power, to bring forward the papal bulls to a great advantage in the face of all the rage of the press; for if they dared to attack the evidence to be adduced, then they should only propagate and substantiate the case, and, if when so clamorous on the false bull, they should be silenced at the production of the genuine bulls, that silence would imply not only guilt, but a consciousness of their iniquity. He, therefore, immediately replied to the committee; directed, at all events, for his own justification, the instant publication of his letter; and entreated them, under all apprehended disadvantages, instantly to issue notices and tickets for a public meeting. The committee at once judiciously and kindly responded to the appeal, and accordingly his letter was instantly published; and though at great expense and trouble, the committee issued advertisements and tickets for a meeting on the next succeeding Tuesday, namely, Tuesday, the 2d of August.

The rage of the Popish writers in the press, at the prospect of another public meeting, was exasperated, if possible, to a greater pitch of fury than before; there was no taunt that seemed half bitter enough, by which they could insult the Protestant Association, for identifying itself with such an individual as the writer, and no epithet by which fraud, or forgery, or falsehood, could be designated, that they did not try to fasten on him. Mr. O'Connell began to apprehend, that, however this style of attack might last for a few days, it would not, after all, endure against the power of truth, and feeling that even the clamour that had been raised against the false bull, had not altogether stifled the evidence against himself and his bishops in the Rhemish notes, he felt himself compelled to make an effort for his own vindication, and accordingly, on the very day of the meeting, the 2d of August, he published the following remarkable manifesto in the Morning Chronicle, in the shape of a letter to Mr. Page:

"To the Rev. Mr. Page.

Langham-Place, 30th July, 1836.

"REV. SIR-I doubt much whether I ought to take notice of any thing connected with the mountebank buffoonery of Exeter-Hall, degraded even below its natural level as that buffoonery is by the con

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