The charge is a serious one, and we make it knowingly. Instances and illustrations in its support may be found in nearly all the numbers of the Weekly for years past.
For its anti-Catholic operations, the Journal is used as a sort of tender to the heavy transport, the Monthly, which frequently gives its readers long, elaborate, and malicious articles, made up mainly of exploded calumnies, threadbare anti-Popery rhetoric of the school of Brownlee
and the early Know-Nothings, and the extraordinary lucubrations of a contributor whom we can only describe as Harper’s comic historian. This singular writer undertakes to demonstrate, for instance, that the Apostle of Ireland was not a Catholic missionary at all, but in religious faith a sort of Old-School Presbyterian, who went about distributing Bibles among the “savage Irish,” making strong “anti-Popery” speeches, and delivering lectures on popular education to the serfs of his day!
Absurd as these articles are from a literary point of view, they are yet full of inflammable material, and play as recklessly with fire as the more brutal incentives of the Weekly. For it must be borne in mind that most of these direct appeals to religious bigotry are intended not so much for home consumption as for their effect upon the general rural mind, and that their evident purpose is to arouse another Know-Nothing revival throughout the country.
There are, unfortunately, too many people thoughtless enough, or, perhaps, wicked enough, to respond to these incentives—people so far forgetting themselves as to imagine that their own religion, or something which they imagine stands for it, must be the state church in America, and that it is free to them to persecute and outlaw the professors of a faith which, in their ignorance, they despise and hate.
But we are satisfied that, on the other hand, there is too much intelligence, moderation, forbearance, and patriotism among American citizens to permit the success of schemes aimed at once against liberty of conscience, the peace of society, and the true freedom of our institutions.
And among these citizens we rank—by no means the last—the
CATHOLICS OF THE UNITED STATES.
We can only qualify as impertinent the coolness with which these scribes of the Messrs. Harper talk about “receiving” Catholics “hospitably into this free Protestant land.” When and how were these gentlemen constituted the dispensers of the hospitalities of this free country? When and how did this country become a “Protestant land”? At what period of the history of America were Catholics strangers here?