the indictment to do with the present case of Ireland? No toleration was then allowed by law. Toleration has been granted by George III. to Catholics. No oath of allegiance could then be agreed upon. An oath of allegiance has sealed the conquest of Ireland. A temporal power over Ireland had been once legally vested in the popes, and was appealed to by the despairing natives. That power iś now abjured and exterminated by oaths. The reformed religion was then in arms throughout Europe, and holding forth the gospel as its title to political independence. The Irish catholics. thought their own true religion as good a title as the reformers' true gospel. At that time, it was a received and acknowledged maxim on both sides, that christians of the true faith are bound to assist by arms one another, against the oppressors of their common faith. This maxim was pushed to the very utmost in the treaty between Elizabeth and James VI. of Scotland; whereby the contracting parties bound themselves to make war on all princes denying the free exercise of the true religion, any treaty of peace or amity notwithstanding. Such political maxims are now dead and gone.

The see

of Rome was then the rallying point for catholic

establishments

establishments in church and state, against the invading activity of the reformers. But now wars of religion have ceased throughout Europe. The foreign influenced bishops, according to Columbanus, wanted the temporalities of the sees and benefices. I am not surprised at that. For the dispossession was justified neither by prescription nor by law. I should not be surprised, if, in twenty years to come, some persons should be found claiming the temporalities of the late Gallican Church. But now our bishops have abjured that suspicion. At that time, foreign succour was the only hope of the natives against exter mination. At the present, domestic concord, constitutional liberty, freedom of conscience, oblivion, forgiveness are the only preventives of subjugation from abroad. Even for our church the independence of the British empire is the best safeguard, under which we may hope, that the catholic system shall not be finally enslaved,

I have travelled beyond my studies, and am satisfied to have demolished the haunted. castle of the addresser. A gentleman every way qualified for the task is to meet Columbanus

on

on the historical discoveries. Doctor Curry had written on the subject; it was easy for our addresser to have answered Curry, paragraph by paragraph. This would have brought the business to an issue. A more in genious resource presented itself to our Columbanus; namely, to disparage that work, to nauseate at his stile, to inform the public, that they are about to receive from himself the substance of twenty folio manuscripts. Folio manuscripts! Of what hand, of what authenticity, by whom compiled? By the accusers or by the accused? On this he is silent. When Columbanus had councils, and every day books to quote, he spares no mutilation, no interpolation, no falsification. Yet Columbanus expects credit for his substance of twenty folio nameless manuscripts, when he himself holds the Delphic sparrow in his hand. This is a good improvement on the law of criminal evidence. But has he not quoted strong texts? Yes; he has given the words of the accusers. Has he cited the defence? Not a syllable of that. Does he bring one text to shew, that the foreign influenced bishops were privy, or consenting

to

to the murders of 1641? Not a text. He even relates, that in 1643, the council of Kilkenny demanded an investigation of alt murders. In 1812 he accuses those bishops. They are absent. They are dead.

Why, lastly, is the massacre of 1641, dressed up in 1812, and reproduced on the stage? The centennial jubilee had passed away, half a century since. The manners are changed. The social principles are consolidated. There is now but one faith of the common safety. The great and glorious BURKE may help us to the explanation. In 1790, at Paris, on the stage, and in compliment to the liberality of the times, the massacre of saint Bartholomew was acted: the Cardinal of Lorraine, by a daring alibi, was brought out in his robes, blessing the daggers and preaching up extermination. With the voice of a prophet Edmond Burke denounced, in that tragedy, the design, that afterwards darkened the face of Nature in September 1792; the massacre of bishops and priests. The people had been tutored to contempt, by songs and by caricatures: on the day next after, the Septembrizing deluge of

blood

blood, the Moniteur justified the act on the score of such dangers, as Columbanus has been repeating these two years past, in funereal yell. He too has brought up for the stage and for Irish Septembrizers, such there still are, the massacre of 1641; and he connects it with that of Bartholomew's day. What ensued in France from the revival of that play, we all know, and I shrink from writing. What is to ensue from the play of Columbanus? I know not. May God save the country, and may ill recoil on them, if any there be, who take delight in meditations of blood!