man cannot find the possibility of danger, then all human action is impeded, and no human institution is safe or commendable. The King has the power of pardoning,

and so every species of guilt may remain unpunished: he has a negative upon legislative acts, and so no law may pass. None but Presbyterians may be returned to the House of Commons-and so the Church of England may be voted down. The Scottish and Irish members may join together in both Houses, and dissolve both Unions. If probability is put out of sight and if, in the enumeration of dangers, it is sufficient to state any which, by remote contingency, may happen, then is it time that we should begin to provide against all the host of perils which we have just enumerated, and which are many of them as likely to happen, as those which the Reverend Prelate has stated in his Charge. His Lordship forgets that the Catholics are not asking for election, but for eligibility—not to be admitted into the Cabinet, but not to be excluded from it. A century may elapse before any Catholic actually becomes a member of the Cabinet; and no event can be more utterly destitute of probability, than that they should gain an ascendency there, and direct that ascendency against the Protestant interest. If the Bishop really wishes to know upon what our security is founded; it is upon the prodigious and decided superiority of the Protestant interest in the British nation, and in the United Parliament. No Protestant King would select such a Cabinet, or countenance such measures; no man would be mad enough to attempt them; the English Parliament and the English people would not endure it for a moment. No man indeed, but under the sanctity of the mitre, would have ventured such an extravagant opinion. Woe to him, if he had been only a Dean. But, in spite of his venerable office, we must express our decided belief, that his Lordship (by no means averse to a good bargain) would not pay down five pounds, to receive fifty millions for his posterity, whenever the majority of the Cabinet should be (Catholic emancipation carried) members of the Catholic religion. And yet, upon such

terrors as these, which, when put singly to him, his better sense would laugh at, he has thought fit to excite his clergy to petition, and done all in his power to increase the mass of hatred against the Catholics.

It is true enough, as his Lordship remarks, that events do not depend upon laws alone, but upon the wishes and intentions of those who administer these laws. But then his Lordship totally puts out of sight two considerations — the improbability of Catholics ever reaching the highest offices of the state and those fixed Protestant opinions of the country, which would render any attack upon the Established Church so hopeless, and therefore so improbable. Admit a supposition (to us perfectly ludicrous, but still necessary to the Bishop's argument) that the Cabinet Council consisted entirely of Catholics, we should even then have no more fear of their making the English people Catholics, than we should have of a Cabinet of Butchers making the Hindoos eat beef. The Bishop has not stated the true and great security for any course of human actions. It is not the word of the law, nor the spirit of the Government, but the general way of thinking among the people, especially when that way of thinking is ancient, exercised upon high interests, and connected with striking passages in history. The Protestant Church does not rest upon the little narrow foundations where the Bishop of Lincoln supposes it to be placed: if it did, it would not be worth saving. It rests upon the general opinion entertained by a free and reflecting people, that the doctrines of the Church are true, her pretensions moderate, and her exhortations useful. It is accepted by a people who have, from good taste, an abhorrence of sacerdotal mummery; and from good sense, a dread of sacerdotal ambition. Those feelings, so generally diffused, and so clearly pronounced on all occasions, are our real bulwarks against the Catholic religion; and the real cause which makes it so safe for the best friends of the Church to diminish (by abolishing the Test Laws) so very fertile a source of hatred to the State.

In the 15th page of his Lordship's Charge, there is an argument of a very curious nature.

'Let us suppose' (says the Bishop of Lincoln), that there had been no Test Laws, no disabling statutes, in the year 1745, when an attempt was made to overthrow the Protestant Government, and to place a Popish Sovereign upon the throne of these kingdoms; and let us suppose, that the leading men in the Houses of Parliament, that the Ministers of State, and the Commanders of our Armies, had then been Papists. Will any one contend, that that formidable Rebellion, supported as it was by a foreign enemy, would have been resisted with the same zeal, and suppressed with the same facility, as when all the measures were planned and executed by sincere Protestants? (p. 15.)

And so his Lordship means to infer, that it would be foolish to abolish the laws against the Catholics now, because it would have been foolish to have abolished them at some other period; — that a measure must be bad, because there was formerly a combination of circumstances, when it would have been bad. His Lordship might, with almost equal propriety, debate what ought to be done if Julius Cæsar were about to make a descent upon our coasts; or lament the impropriety of emancipating the Catholics, because the Spanish Armada was putting to sea. The fact is, that Julius Cæsar is dead the Spanish Armada was defeated in the reign. of Queen Elizabeth for half a century there has been no disputed succession the situation of the world is changed and, because it is changed, we can do now what we could not do then. And nothing can be more lamentable than to see this respectable Prelate wasting his resources in putting imaginary and inapplicable cases, and reasoning upon their solution, as if it had any thing to do with present affairs.

These remarks entirely put an end to the common mode of arguing à Gulielmo. What did King William do? what would King William say? &c. King William was in a very different situation from that in which we are placed. The whole world was in a very different situation. The great and glorious Authors of the Re

volution (as they are commonly denominated) acquired their greatness and their glory, not by a superstitious reverence for inapplicable precedents, but by taking hold of present circumstances to lay a deep foundation for Liberty; and then using old names for new things, they left the Bishop of Lincoln, and other good men, to suppose that they had been thinking all the time about ancestors.

Another species of false reasoning, which pervades the Bishop of Lincoln's Charge, is this: He states what the interests of men are, and then takes it for granted that they will eagerly and actively pursue them; laying totally out of the question the probability or improbability of their effecting their object, and the influence which this balance of chances must produce upon their actions. For instance, it is the interest of the Catholics that our Church should be subservient to theirs, Therefore, says his Lordship, the Catholics will enter into a conspiracy against the English Church. But, is it not also the decided interest of his Lordship's butler that he should be Bishop, and the Bishop, his butler? That the crozier and the corkscrew should change hands, and the washer of the bottles which they had emptied become the diocesan of learned divines? What has prevented this change, so beneficial to the upper domestic, but the extreme improbability of success, if the attempt were made; an improbability so great, that we will venture to say, the very notion of it has scarcely once entered into the understanding of the good man. Why then is the Reverend Prelate, who lives on so safely and contentedly with John, so dreadfully alarmed at the Catholics? And why does he so completely forget, in their instance alone, that men do not merely strive to obtain a thing because it is good, but always mingle with the excellence of the object a consideration of the chance of gaining it?

The Bishop of Lincoln (p. 19.) states it as an argument against concession to the Catholics, that we have enjoyed 'internal peace and entire freedom from all religious animosities and feuds since the Revolution.' The fact,

however, is not more certain than conclusive against his view of the question. For, since that period, the worship of the Church of England has been abolished in Scotland the Corporation and Test Acts repealed in Ireland and the whole of this King's reign has been one series of concessions to the Catholics. Relaxation then (and we wish this had been remembered at the Charge) of penal laws, on subjects of religious opinion, is perfectly compatible with internal peace, and exemption from religious animosity. But the Bishop is always fond of lurking in generals, and cautiously avoids coming to any specific instance of the dangers which he fears.

It is declared in one of the 39 Articles, that the King is Head of our Church, without being subject to any Foreign Power; and it is expressly said that the Bishop of Rome has no jurisdiction within these realms. On the contrary, Papists assert, that the Pope is supreme Head of the whole Christian Church, and that Allegiance is due to him from every Individual member, in all spiritual matters. This direct opposition to one of the fundamental Principles of the Ecclesiastical part of our Constitution, is alone sufficient to justify the exclusion of Papists from all situations of authority. They acknowledge indeed that obedience in civil matters is due to the king. But cases must arise, in which civil and religious Duties will clash; and he knows but little of the influence of the Popish Religion over the minds of its votaries, who doubts which of these Duties would be sacrificed to the other. Moreover, the most subtle casuistry cannot always discriminate between temporal and spiritual things; and in truth the concerns of this life not unfrequently partake of both characters.' — (pp. 21, 22.)

We deny entirely that any case can occur, where the exposition of a doctrine purely speculative, or the arrangement of a mere point of Church discipline, can interfere with civil duties. The Roman Catholics are Irish and English citizens at this moment; but no such case has occurred. There is no instance in which obedience to the civil magistrate has been prevented, by an acknowledgment of the spiritual supremacy of the Pope. The Catholics have given (in an oath which we suspect the Bishop never to have read) the most solemn pledge,