Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847

by Various

On this subject we speak with the utmost sincerity. There is nothing in historical experience to forbid the idea, that peculiar nations may have been appointed to separate purposes, and that they may be even divinely placed under the discipline most suitable to those purposes. If to ancient Greece was almost exclusively given the intellectual advancement of the world; if to ancient Rome was as exclusively given the preparative discipline for its government; there can be no doubt that to Judea was assigned the guardianship of religion.

The process may be diversified in later times; but the principle may remain. The rapidity with which the derelictions of duty in Judah were followed by punishments declaredly divine, finds a memorable counterpart in the annals of England, even down to the present hour. But we shall limit ourselves to the evidence in Ireland; and on this point we shall be as brief as possible.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Popery, hitherto kept down, became suddenly triumphant in Ireland, and began its habitual system of severity to the heretic. Confiscation and exile swept away the rights of Protestantism. The result was the national punishment by the scourge of civil war, a renewal of conquest, the expatriation of the Romish army, and the decay of all the sources of national prosperity.

Another era came. Under the government of Protestantism the country had recovered, privileges were successively awarded, and it enjoyed the peace and gradual opulence which belong to English government. But a parliamentary faction at length allied itself with Popery; parliament was subdued by clamour, or seduced by popularity, and the Popish population obtained the elective franchise. The elections instantly became scenes of national iniquity. Perjury was scarcely less than a profession, and that notoriously ruinous system of "sub-letting," which has covered Ireland with pauperism, became general, for the sole object of multiplying votes. This was followed by the foundation of Maynooth, a college expressly formed for the training of a Popish priesthood, whose tenets, every man who voted for this foundation, had sworn to be "superstitious and idolatrous." But when did faction care what it swore? The cup was now full. The priesthood of Maynooth had scarcely begun to learn their trade, when vengeance fell upon both Popery and the Parliament. Instead of the promise of popular gratitude, which had been so ostentatiously given by the Popish associations, and so ostentatiously echoed by parliamentary Liberalism, the first act of the Popish peasantry was to take up arms; a rebellion of the most treacherous and bloody nature broke out, in which the murder of Protestants was perpetrated in cold blood, and with the most horrid atrocity. Ireland was convulsed and impoverished, the rebellion was extinguished and punished by the sword, and at the cost of ten thousand peasant lives. The next blow was on the feeble and factious Parliament. The Irish Legislature was extinguished at a blow; and its fall was as ignominious as it was judicial. Its national pride and acknowledged talent gave way without a struggle, and with scarcely a remonstrance. It had already lost the respect of the nation. The mind of Ireland disdained the deliberations which had suffered the dictation of a mob. Parliament, existing without national honour, perished without national sympathy. Its own principle was retaliated on itself. The Papist sold it, the Borough-monger sold it, the Protestant sold it, not for the baser bribe of the populace, but for the prospect of peace; it was given over to execution, with the calm acquiescence of a sense of justice, and tossed on the funeral pile amid a population which danced round the blaze.

Popery now talks of its restoration. It is impossible. The very idea is absurd. As well might the ashes of the dead be gathered and reshaped into the living man. As well might the vapours of the swamp be purified by filling it with the firedamp. Every hour, since that time, has made the country still more unfit for legislation, more furious and inflammable. As well might the nakedness of the people be covered by rags, reeking with the pestilence.

We rejoice to escape from the subject. It can be no gratification to us to trace the progress of disease through the political frame which it first enfeebles, and then makes a source of contagion. We have no love for the history of an hospital, or those frightful displays of a "surgeons' hall," where every skeleton is connected with public crime, and where science is demonstrated from the remnants of the scaffold. But it is notorious that the morals even of the Irish peasant have been degraded in the exact proportion of his rise in political power.

Every favour of the English parliament, from the beginning of the century until the fatal year 1829, only furnished him with an additional weapon, to be used with a more seditious violence. In that year, the British Legislature was thrown open to him, and he entered it in a barbarian triumph.

From that moment, England and Ireland were sufferers alike. In England, Irish faction was an insolent mercenary, which openly and alternately hired its services to both sides alike. In Ireland it was a ferocious rebel, which, as the notorious preparative for broader hostilities, exercised its arms in midnight murder.

At length the final endowment of Maynooth came; and an establishment, solely for the Romish priesthood, without any admixture of laity, and allowing the means of an increase in the number of those pupils of Rome, and propagators of Romish doctrines, from about five hundred to double the number, was fixed on the empire for ever, taken wholly out of the further deliberation of the Legislature, and conferred, to three times the amount of its former grant, on a religion which professes the worship of a Creature, the Virgin Mary; which bows down to images; which assigns thrones in heaven to dead men, promoted by itself to nominal saintship; which offers weekly absolution for all crimes; which apportions the judgments of the eternal tribunal in a purgatory, and releases the supposed criminal on payment of money for masses; and which offers the most solemn adoration to a composition of flour and water, manufactured by a baker, distributed by the hands of a priest, and which it actually declares to be the Eternal God, whom "the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain."

These are doctrines utterly abhorrent to the feelings of all sincere Protestants; and unquestionably the encouragement of their teachers, and the virtual propagation of a belief which they pronounce desperate defiances of the truth, startled many wise and religious men with fear of the consequences. We leave the connexion of this most unhappy act with the subsequent events to the various contemplation of our countrymen.