But the Dean and Chapter of Westminster had actually attempted to break the slumber, by an address deprecating the appointment, as utterly unconstitutional. This occurred in 1848. It was heard of no more, and silence came again.
As his Lordship's Letter is probably to be regarded as a Cabinet minute, we shall give its chief portions verbatim.
It begins by referring to a letter of the Bishop of Durham, which termed the Bull "insolent and insidious," the latter epithet appearing to us to have no other merit than that of alliteration, the measure not being insidious at all—but, by a remarkable deviation from the customary craft of the Papacy, being one of the most open and audacious insults on record.
The Letter then proceeds to say, that its writer, having "promoted to the utmost of his power the claims of the Roman Catholics to all civil rights"—a fact with which the country was fully acquainted—thought "it right, and even desirable, that the ecclesiastical system of the Roman Catholics should be the means of giving instruction to the numerous Irish immigrants in London and elsewhere, who, without such help, would be left in heathen ignorance."
The latter sentence we do not profess to understand. Does it allude to any arrangement, by which the Papacy was to change the system of simple superintendence, and adopt Dr Wiseman as archbishop, after all? Is this the preliminary to further development, and is the common rumour on the subject the reverse of a mistake? How the kind of religion imported by the legions of Irish beggary into England was to be purified by a new episcopal staff, is wholly beyond our comprehension. Or why the Protestant people of England, after feeding the pauperism of Ireland at home, should be bound to provide for its heresy here—or how, for the further allurement of the superfluous rabble of Ireland, we are to provide, for either their poverty or their pride, the pageant of twelve Popish mitres, we must leave it to his Lordship to explain.
His next sentence is more intelligible.
"There is an assumption of power in all the documents which have come from Rome—a pretension to supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen's supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual independence of the nation, as asserted even in Roman Catholic times."
How this discovery should have been delayed till November 1850, in the apprehension of a public personage acquainted with the general facts of history, handling Popish concerns all his life, and an inveterate supporter of the Popish Bill of 1829, is not easily accounted for. But every man of common intelligence in Europe, (his Lordship excepted,) knew that Popery has existed in a perpetual struggle with all governments for temporal supremacy, under the pretence of spiritual; that it has attempted a constant usurpation of royal authority even in the Popish kingdoms; and that its restless appetite for power requires constant coercion, even by those governments, to render it compatible with any government at all. What is to be said, when Pio Nono has excommunicated the Sardinian government before our eyes? The next sentence is significant: "I confess that my alarm is not equal to my indignation."
Does his Lordship mean by this that we have been frightened by a shadow, while he has preserved his fortitude? or that the nation has been somewhat inclined to play the fool in its fright, while he has preserved his serenity through his superior knowledge? But he then proceeds to inform us what should be the true object of national alarm, and that is Tractarianism!
Without implying that his Lordship here employs that well-known species of diplomacy which substitutes conjecture for reality, we shall tell him that Tractarianism, though exciting much regret, and bringing much discredit on the laxity of discipline which has so long suffered its existence, is not the real danger; that, compared with Popery, it is but the "fly on the chariot wheel;" and that its influence is not to be named for a moment beside the systematic art, the vast extent, and the indefatigable ambition of Popery.