The Americans, with a sense of national right, of which it is a scandal to England not to have adopted the example, have insisted on having a chapel—a solitary chapel!—in Rome; while the English have been forced to run from one lodging to another, to hide in holes and corners, and to exhibit to the Roman rabble the sight of Protestants sneaking to a worship indebted only to connivance for its being suffered to exist at all! From 1815, the year in which we gave liberty to the Pope, their worship was held only in private rooms for the ten following years, even to which the English were prohibited from going in carriages. They must go on foot! From 1826, the condition of their worship is thus stated on the authority of the chaplain:—
"In that year, the English congregation migrated to a granary outside the Flaminian Gate. In the upper part of this huge building, a space, large enough for a congregation, was hired. It was reduced into shape by lath and plaster; it had a ceiling of canvass to hide the rafters and cobwebs, and carpets laid over straw, for covering the mud floor. The rats and mice ran races over the canvass above the heads of the worshippers; the pigs, in great numbers, squealed in concert in the story below; and sometimes the donkeys, laden with sacks of corn, disputed the common staircase with the congregation. On one occasion, the competition was more serious. The first story of the building was hired for a menagerie, and on a Sunday morning we found the wild beasts in previous possession."
Can any vulgar display of intolerance exceed this humiliation? There is not a beggar in Rome who does not stand on tiptoe, at the sight of the English going to their barn. There is not a saucy priest, who does not turn up his nostrils at the sight. And yet the population live on the English expenditure. If the English were to leave Rome for a twelvemonth, half their population—a population of lodging-letters and valets—would starve. We certainly can feel no compassion for any degree of contempt which can be heaped on the English residents, who desert their own noble country for the coffee-house life of the Continent. The men who can abandon their duties to England (and what man is not without his duty?) for cheap wine, gossip, and grimace—the race of sullen selfishness and perpetual vacuity—are justly punished by foreign ill-usage. But still, the insult is to the religion of England, and it teaches us the real feeling of Popery in power. Let the Protestant ever suffer the predominance of Rome in England, and he will then only know what Popish power is in its nature, its fierce recollections, and its grasping ambition. In the mean time, let him look at the Protestants creeping through the "Flaminian Gate" to their Barn, outside the walls of Rome!
What right can those have, who so loudly proclaim themselves the spiritual subjects of the Papacy, to demand here what they refuse there? Are they to insist on privileges, where their condescension only amounts to pigsties? What would become of their levees and lectures here, if we laid them under the Roman rule, which sends "controversialists to jail?" Is it not the fact, that no Protestant can be buried within the walls of Rome; and that no inscription can be placed on a Protestant grave, without being subjected to the Roman Censor; who scratches his pen over every syllable referring to the hope of a Resurrection?
Those statements have been repeated in every public journal of the empire. Who has contradicted them? Have we not, then, a right to demand the liberty which we give? or, if refused by the dwarfed and beggarly sovereignty of Rome, ought we not to act with the insulted dignity of the first kingdom and truest religion of the world?
The great error of Protestants, in their legislation on Popish questions, is, to believe that the same rules of morality exist in the Church of England and in Popery. The pamphlet applies itself with full effect to the facts of the case, by giving the Papist oath, and contrasting it with the Papist performance.
"The essential items of the Papist oath of 1829 were—'I do not believe that the Pope of Rome hath, or ought to have, any temporal or civil jurisdiction, power, superiority, or pre-eminence, directly or indirectly, within this realm. I disclaim, disavow, and solemnly abjure any intention to subvert the present Church Establishment, as settled by law within this realm; and I solemnly swear, that I never will exercise any privilege, to which I am or may be entitled, to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or Protestant government in the United Kingdom.'"
What must be the contempt felt for all Popish promises, when we see this oath, and see the conduct of the Popish body ever since it was taken! "With what feelings," says Mr Warren, "any one who has taken this oath, can peruse and approve of the Bull of Pius IX. and the Pastoral of his pseudo-cardinal archbishop, and contemplate with satisfaction what has been recently done by him and others in professed conformity with that Bull, I am perfectly at a loss to conceive."
And in this honest difficulty of conception every true Protestant will coincide with him. But let us look to the natural result of this palpable callousness of conscience.
The sacredness of oaths is essential to the existence of society: the man who is not to be believed on his oath is self-banished, self-disfranchised, self-excluded from all the rights of society; for the obvious reason, that, if all men were equally false, society must dissolve. Such a man is no longer entitled to the protection of law. And the same rule is inevitably applicable to any institution which thus sets itself at war with society. Popery is anti-social. This sentiment is the substance of a letter by the late Bishop Watson; a man of a rough and almost republican spirit—a bold advocate for liberality, almost to the verge of Liberalism—and, though a vigorous arguer against Paine and his infidelity, yet as sturdy a disclaimer of all submission to prejudice as any radical orator of our day. We quote the pamphlet.