CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR. WISEMAN.

The artifice to which Dr. Wiseman and Mr. Quin resorted, as stated in the beginning of the report, was only understood by the writer on the evening of the meeting, and will appear in the annexed letters, which were written that evening and published next day, August 3rd, in the Standard.

"To the Rev. Dr. Wiseman.

"August 3, 1836.

"SIR-It was not until I had sent an answer to your note last night, that I was aware of the base artifice-well worthy of the Church of Rome-to which you and some others had recourse yesterday to try and entrap me, on the platform in Exeter-Hall, into some inconsistency, which you would have trumpeted forth as falsehood and fraud. When I was just about to stand up to speak, the chairman said he had received a paper containing a requisition, signed by some Catholic gentlemen, to me, which he could not better use than by handing it to me. I took it and read it. I found it contained a requisition to me to inform these gentlemen of the date of a certain advertisement, read by me at the last meeting, purporting to be taken from the Correspondent newspaper in Ireland, and also the date of Dr. Troy's renunciation of the Bible with the Rhemish notes. As it was nothing to the meeting, nor could I conceive what the object of it was, instead of reading it out, I just wrote with my pencil underneath it the simple fact, "that I did not at the time recollect the dates, that I had not any of the documents there, but that I would send an answer to the gentlemen." This one would have thought enough to satisfy any persons professing to be gentlemen. One of your party, Mr. Quin, the editor of the Dublin Review, cried out before the meeting, "A direct answer, sir,—a direct answer." I said I had given a direct answer, the only one I could give, and then I stated to the meeting what the requisition was, and what the answer. This said gentleman again cried out, "You are afraid, sir—afraid." I replied-I have stated the simple fact; and the very man who says I am afraid called on me at my residence, asked to see the Bibles, and I showed him every document I had that he wished to see. This is a fact, which can be proved by my friend, Dr. Pidduck, at whose house I am, and by Mr. Seely, both of whom saw me show to Mr. Quin whatever he wished to see

VOL. II.

T

in my possession. The moment I reached my residence, after the meeting, while I was in the very act of changing my dress, a person brought me a letter from you as follows:

"5, Lincoln's Inn-fields, Tuesday.

"SIR,-In reply to a requisition placed in your hands this morning at Exeter Hall, signed by myself and several other Catholics, that you would be pleased to state the date of the advertisement respecting the Rhemish Bible, quoted by you from the Dub'in Correspondent, and also the date of Dr. Troy's disavowal,' you wrote, and publicly read, that you did not recollect the dates, and had not the documents there, but would give them to the gentlemen who wrote the requisition.' As you may not be aware to whom or whither your promised communication should be sent, I beg to say that if addressed to me, it will be considered by the other gentlemen an answer to them all. "I am sir, your obedient servant,

The Rev. R. J. M'Ghee.'

"N. WISEMAN, D.D.

"The moment I could take up the book from which I took the date, and look at my own speech as reported in the paper, to see if I had fallen into error, I sent you the following answer :—

"SIR,-I have been favoured with your letter, and should have answered it by your servant, but I was dressing when he came. You ask 'the date of the advertisement respecting the Rhemish Bible, quoted by me from the Dublin Correspondent, and also the date of Dr. Troy's disavowal.' I should have instantly answered the questions put by you and the Roman Catholic gentlemen in your requisition, but for the simple fact which I stated, that I did not recollect the dates, and had not any documents in Exeter Hall to refer to. The dates I now state I had not the Correspondent itself, but I quoted from Blair's Letter. to Wilberforce,' p. 219. The date as given there is July 3, 1817. The date of Dr. Troy's disavowal is October 24, 1817. I am not aware why you and the Roman Catholic gentlemen requested to know the dates from me. Having given them in my statement at Exeter Hall, as you will see in the report of my speech in the Dublin Evening Mail, in which, having given before Dr. Troy's letter with the date as it was written, and again put these two dates together, the following sentence is in my speech :

"But this first advertisement which I should have read was in July, 1817, as the date of the paper in which it appears, proves. This Bible was actually in the press in the month of October, 1817, under

his own patronage, while Dr. Troy was abjuring it in the public prints.' This, I am sorry to say, I consider a certain fact, and I can only add, that if in any statement I make I ever wrong a Roman Catholic, I shall feel happy to correct any error into which I might fall. I have the honour to be, &c. &c.'

"Now what was the fact? In the evening a friend brought me the Courier of Monday, in which I am held up as a cheat and impostor, &c. &c. because I suppressed this date of July, as they say, and they gave two columns of an article from the Dublin Review, which they inform us is written by Mr. O'Connell, in which this supposed suppression of a date is made the whole ground of his defence, and then for the first time I see the object of your letter. So sir, I am held up in a journal which I could not have been supposed to see, and did not see, as guilty of a piece of gross fraud upon the public; and before I could even be aware of the charge brought against me, you, without informing me of the charge, without stating your reason or your object, come to me upon a public platform, at a moment when my mind was engrossed with the solemn task in which I was engaged, and you try, by a written question, to entrap me before the meeting into some acknowledgment which you could turn to my confusion as a confirmation of my own alleged guilt. Now, sir, I just publish the fact, because I think it an admirable comment on the principles of those who defended the Rhemish Bible. I gave Mr. O'Connelly sir, an ample opportunity to defend his bishops and himself, and he did not venture to accept it. He attempts, if we may believe the Courier, to make a miserable defence in an anonymous review; he assumes what is not true, as the ground of this defence, that I suppressed a date; and if I had inadvertently omitted it, I should only have lost additional proof of the iniquity of the Romish bishops and of Mr. O'Connell ; for suppose that the Bible was being printed in July, 1817, as it probably was, what was the fact? why, not only that Dr. Troy had patronized the edition of 1816, printed in Dublin, but that he was giving his patronage to another edition of the same work actually in the press and coming out in numbers, even while he was making this mock disclaimer of it, and that this edition was going on, coming out, and completed the next year, while his disclaimer never stopped one number, changed one note, or withdrew one signature, either his own or Dr. Murray's, or that of one single bishop or priest in the Church of Rome; nor did Mr. O'Connell dare to carry his motion in the committee against the will of his masters. The more the facts are sifted, the deeper and darker is the iniquity of that awful apostacy, from which, sir, that you and all involved in it may be delivered, is the sincere prayer of your obedient servant, "R. J. M'GHEE."

On the following day, August 4th, the following notice of Mr. O'Connell's letter to Mr. Page was written, and appeared in the Standard of the 5th :

"To Daniel O'Connell, Esq., M. P.

"London, August 4th.

"SIR-The subject of your letter to Mr. Page is too important to the Protestants and Roman Catholics of this empire to allow any paltry or personal considerations to prevent the exposure of your incompetence to defend yourself, your bishops, or your cause. My own character I shall leave to time and truth to vindicate-it is much too insignificant to trouble the public with any lengthened defence of it. At the moment you wrote the sentence that I uttered as true a malevolent forgery, knowing it to be forged'--you wrote what you know as well as I do, could not be the fact-neither you nor one of the editors of the London press, who have tried to fasten such a crime on me, ever believed that any man could be such a superlative compound of knavery and folly as to take a document which he knew to be fictitious, and attempt to pass it as true, in the most public place in London, on the most public occasion, where he knew every word he spoke was watched, and where he knew such a fraud could not pass undetected for four-and-twenty hours -you knew at the moment you wrote that sentence that you might as well accuse a forger of carrying his notes to the bank, or a coiner of taking his base money to the mint, as bring such a charge against me. But I let it pass.

"I now come to your case. The charge against you was briefly this: Your archbishops and bishops patronised the publication of a Bible with notes of the most flagitious character, to which they gave the authority of an infallible interpretation of the Scriptures; this Bible appeared in 1816. In October, 1817, when an exposure had been made of the character of these notes in the British Critic, your archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Troy, professes to renounce these notes in a formal disclaimer. You also came forward at the Catholic Board, and you made various statements as to these notes as historical facts, which had not one shadow of foundation in truth-as, for example, that they were condemned by the doctors of the College of Douay,' which they never were; that these doctors called for and received the aid of the Scotch and Irish colleges,' which they never did, &c.; and after several blustering liberal speeches on the subject, you, as I stated at Exeter-hall from Blair's Letter to Wilberforce, pp. 240, 241, having first moved 'that a committee of five be forthwith appointed to prepare a denun

ciation of the Rhemish notes,' then 'agreed to alter the form of your motion by instructing the committee to prepare an address upon the occasion of the recent publication of the intolerant notes to the Rhemish Bible.' It was then carried unanimously, and the following committee was instantly appointed :-' Mr. O'Connell, Mr. Mahon, Mr. Scully, Mr. M'Donnell, Mr. O'Kelly.' This is quoted from, I believe, the Dublin Evening Post of December 4; and now, as you have got an additional statement in the last number of the Dublin Review, p. 548, quoted from the Dublin Evening Post, Dec. 6, 1817, I take this statement on your own authority :

"Mr. O'Connell's motion was put and carried, the words being amended thus-" That a committee be appointed to draw up an address on the occasion of the late publication of the Rhemish Testament, with a view to have the same submitted to an aggregate meeting." "Here, then, are three statements of motions by you:

"First-That a committee be appointed to prepare a denunciation of those notes.

"Second-That a committee be appointed to prepare an address on the occasion of the recent publication of those notes, which was appointed.

"Third-The last and most amended form is this--that this committee be appointed to draw up this address, with a view to have it submitted to an aggregate meeting.'

"Now, sir, the charge against you is this-that after all this bluster, and all these speeches, and all these motions, and all these committees, you never did produce these denunciations of those notes; that after coming to the board day after day to beg time for your committee to prepare what five honest men could have prepared in five minutes, you let the board be dissolved, after, I believe, a month's delay, without ever giving the public any satisfaction on the subject. My assertion was and is, that while Dr. Troy was denouncing in October, 1817, these notes of the Bibles printed in Dublin, 1816, and while you were going on with this farce at the board in December of the same year, a reprint of this identical publication was then actually in the press, and had been so from July, 1817-that it was then coming out in numbers, under the patronage of this same Dr. Troy and eleven other bishops, including Doctor O'Reilly, your then Primate, Dr. Murray, the Coadjutor to Dr. Troy, and Dr. Murphy, then and now Bishop of Cork, the place where the book was being printed, under his own direction and that of his priests; and I say that Doctor Troy's mock disclaimer in October, 1817, did not withdraw one name of these bishops and patrons from this same book, nor his own name, but that in next year, 1818, the