WE are far from thinking with those who deem the state of Ireland to be irretrievably hopeless. We think we can discern a spirit of reaction ascending from the dark abyss into which she has fallen, and we look upon its motions as we do upon the bow of hope in the clouds, as giving promise of brighter scenes and happier hours. There can now be no question of the fact, that men, competent to the task, are beginning to look the true evils of the country in the face, and to denounce, in bold and fearless language, the real sources of all the crime, and misery, and blood, and treason of this unhappy island, so that we now daily find sentiments broached and openly avowed which long lay concealed as it were under the misty veil of ignorance, or indifference, or timidity. The truth is spoken out, the authors of the evil are denounced, the streams of crime are traced to their fountains, and all things promise that ere long the true state of Ireland, with its evils and their remedies, will stand revealed and confessed before the world.

Our object in this paper is to assist this spirit of reaction which is abroad, and which is feeding upon the extended knowledge of the day, and which, though now like the little cloud of the prophet, small as a man's hand, will soon spread widely its borders and shake its shadowy and refreshing wings over the nations. Our desire is to open the inward parts, to raise the veil which hides the intima penetralia of the politico-religious state of the country, and to lay them naked and open to the eyes of the world. WE DENOUNCE THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD AS THE COLOSSAL CURSE

OF IRELAND. They are the promovents, either immediately or remotely, of all the crimes, and the misery, and the heartburnings, and animosities, and bloodshed, and treasons that darken the face of the land; and as they have made her weep tears of blood till she seems an awful spectre, to fright her sister island from her propriety, we hold it to be the undoubted policy

of England, the British government and the British public, to crush the power and influence of that priesthood, by using every honest effort which God and nature supplies for the total subversion of Popery in Ireland.

In proving that this country ought to be proselytised, [that it can be proselytised with a facility far greater than is generally imagined, we do know of a surety,] we feel ourselves bound to prove the policy and expediency, in a national point of view, of such proselytism. We are not viewing this subject in its religious bearings at all-we leave that to our theologians-but we desire to handle it as a question of national policy, just as we would discuss Catholic Emancipation, Constitutional Reform, Abolition of Slavery, or any other question in which the principles and general polity of the nation are involved. We would treat this subject in the same way, and we undertake to show that no great good can ever be achieved for this country, unless accompanied with the subversion of Popery, and that owing to the peculiar nature and operation of that system in Ireland, it should be the grand and paramount object of the British government and the British public to effectuate its extermination by every honest and Christian means. We advocate a system of PROSELYTISM on a large and extended scale, supported by the public and patronised by the government; and we do so in order to save these sister islands from separation, and the empire from desolation-to save Ireland from the awful horrors of civil war, in which, as an able statesman has said, the best blood of both countries would be shedto

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rescue our population from the degraded and degrading slavery of an Hierocracy-to preserve to the proprietary their present estates by the maintenance of the act of settlementto save the Protestant population from an exterminating persecution and universal expatriation-to redeem and snatch the Popish population from the burning vulcano, to the very verge

of which their priests have already conducted them it is for these goodly and most national purposes that we advocate a system of proselytism from Popery on an extended and general scale, well knowing that agrarian disturbances and midnight legislation-general agitation and local insurrection-factious politics and seditious sermons, can never be effectually suppressed till the whole system of Irish Popery and priestcraft be exterminated from the minds of the people of this island.

We shall point out those peculiarities of Irish Popery which render it the source of the evils of Ireland, and consequently a system opposed to the general prosperity and peace of the empire.

I. The first peculiarity of Irish Popery is its NATIONALITY. It is identified on the minds of the people, falsely but effectually, with visions of ancient glory, as an independent nation, and is associated with national hate and vengeance against the invaders of their country, who grasped her possessions and despoiled her independence. This peculiarity, as might be expected, is a most prolific fountain for disaffection towards any connection with England.

There never was a nation on which intestine strife and external conquest rioted more fiercely, or left more deepened traces of their power; they seem to have walked hand in hand through the island, and to have scattered wrath and ruin in their pathway of blood ;there was public and private spoliation -there was public and private bloodshed;-between the wild ferocity of native despots, and the necessary severity of foreign invaders, there was every crime that the gauntleted hand could perpetrate upon a wretched and doomed people. The native chieftains exercised a tyranny that was boundless, and the invaders exercised a power that could not be controlled. All these, however, were the crimes of the age, and not of the country; and it is the age, and not the country, that has to answer for them; for every conquest, in every region throughout those dark ages, was marked with the same features, and followed by the same train of sorrows and of crimes; they were truly the crimes of the age, and should be buried in the deepest profound of the waters of oblivion, with

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the age that produced them. happily, the remembrance of these things are still brought to mind by the craftiness of the priesthood, who will not permit them to fade away from the memory of the people; so that the fall of their ancient chieftains-the vanishing away of ancient imagined glories-the passing away of their gavel tenures, which would have supplied every man with that great object of an Irish peasant's ambition, a bit of land— the ruin of their ancient temples, and the shorn splendor of their church, are all carefully instilled into their minds, even through the means of their religious catechisms, while their young blood is yet warm in their youthful and generous veins; and they are thus led, from their earliest childhood, to ascribe all to the power of England, and of Protestantism. That which could remove the sting from the memory of these things is carefully concealed by the subtlety of the priesthood, namely, that these crimes, whatever they were, were perpetrated by Papists, and not by Protestants. There were then no Protestants in either country; it was previous, by some centuries, to the Refor mation, and it is therefore worse than unfair to lead the people to ascribe to Protestantism the crimes of Popery; yet this, aye! this is the subtle device of the priesthood imposing on the chaos of ignorance and passion in the minds of the peasantry, and instilling into them, even from the cradle, the most virulent hatred against us: they impute the crimes of that dark age to the spirit of PROTESTANTISM, and the genius of ENGLAND!

The fact should never be allowed to escape our recollection, that England was a Roman Catholic country at the time of her conquest of Ireland, and that she held this island within her sway for some centuries before the æra of the Reformation: thus both England and Ireland-both the invader and the invaded-the spoiler and the spoiled, professed one and the same religion of Rome, and that all the heart-burnings, and bitter animosities, and fearful burstings of party spirit—that all the strife, and commotion, and bloodshed-that all the awful massacres and fiendish atrocities that marked the various struggles and insurrections of this country during those centuries, must have sprung

from something different from religious partisanship. The fact is, that they sprung from national hostility. In those centuries alluded to, the spirit of party and of hate was burning between England and Ireland; it was between Englishmen and Irishmen-it was between the English interest and the Irish interest -it was thus a national, and not a religious animosity: religion had nothing to do with it, for both parties professed the same communion, and knelt at the same altar it was altogether a natural animosity on the part of the invaded against the invader-on the part of the native against the Sasenach.

The talismanic wand of the priesthood, however, soon effected a change in this particular. The land of the invaders abandoned the superstitions of Rome for a purer faith and a holier practice, and then this priesthood, subtle and lynx-eyed, perceiving that the fires of national animosity could not burn for ever, and were actually fading away already before the march of improvement, and being anxious to re-kindle those fires, so as still to maintain a national separation from the land of the Sasenach, availed themselves of the torches of religious discord, thus adding religious hate to national animosity. The separation of the Irish from the English has ever been, and still is, the grand object of the priesthood, though lurking under the various concealments of diverse names and softened appellatives; they feel that the restoration of their church and power to their ancient splendors can be effected only by a positive separation from England, whose power restrains them and whose religion scares them; they therefore labour with a virulence all their own, to alienate the affections and attachments of our population from England, and all connection with her power, her laws, her manners, and her religion; and they lose no opportunity of grafting_on the minds of the people, that to English power and the English religion are to be ascribed all the want, and the misery, and the sorrows of our wretched peasantry. They have thus laid hold on the demon of religious discord, and yoked it to their chariot-wheels as with a chain of adamant, and it is thus they traverse and riot through this ill-fated island. It is, unhappily, the very nature of uneducated and uncivilized

humanity that no personal or national wrong-no deep atrocity-no fiendlike crime-no streams of blood-that, in short, nothing whatever will create so marked a line of separation, or light up a torch of discord so bright and lurid, and wasting in its effects, as that which is kindled at the burning shrines and desecrated altars of religious hate. The priests availed themselves of this to accomplish their own ends; they longed to separate, without remedy, the two people, and, like so many fiends, they flung religious discord as an ingredient that would add a power and a sting to all the other dreadful ills that distracted the country, and separated the Irish from the English in this island; they have substituted the name of Protestant for that of English, and the name of Catholic for that of Irish; or, rather, have so identified each, by using them as synonimous, that they have effectually succeeded in adding all the bitter ingredients of religious animosity to the national hate that had previously existed. Thus when, like Prospero, they should strive to still the troubled spirits that walk to and fro through the land, they have only called into existence the demon of religious strife, and are hallooing it onwards in its infernal work of separation.

The immediate and natural effect of all this was the identifying, in the minds of the people, national and religious feelings. This is so fully impregnated into the minds of the ignorant and superstitious peasantry, and is so fully mingled with all their notions, that they think a man cannot be purely Irish who is not also Popish. The two ideas of nation and religion are inseparably connected in their minds. On the other hand, those of England and Protestantism are also identified, indeed so closely, that they express the idea of an Englishman, and a Protestant, and a stranger, by the one and the same term -the SASENACH.

The result of this supposed nationality of Irish Popery is of a very dangerous character. It is this: it calls forth all the motives of religion-motives of resistless power over an excitable, an imaginative, and a superstitious people; and it summons them to the aid of national pride and national hate, and consequently adds the most powerful motives which impel the mass

of mankind, to awake their energies, to stimulate their exertions, and to excite their desires for a complete separation of Ireland from England-a separation which will give, as they vainly imagine, independence to their country, and splendour to their religion; but which will in truth, accomplish the utter and irretrievable destruction of the British empire. It is this peculiarity of Irish Popery, promising such awful results to our political state, that impels us to demand that every exertion may be made for its extermination from this island. It already threatens all our institutions; and under such softened names repeal of the union, the right of governing themselves, it has been working its way in high places; and unless some great effort, some great national effort be made by the British government, and the British public, to remove from among us the whole system of Irish Popery, we may expect, and we do expect, that before long it will be amply enabled to accomplish that great object of the priesthood-the separation of Ireland from the power and influence of England.

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II. Our second objection to the Popery of Ireland is THE POWER which it confers upon the priesthood-a power, which, lodged in the hands of any irresponsible person, is inconsistent with the well-being of the state, and especially when those persons, like the priests of Ireland, give no pledges to society, and are estranged from England, and whose order alone is their country.

The extraordinary power which these priests have compassed for themselves for their order for their own peculiar designs, a power, extraordinary, not only in its extent, but also in its character, is one of the most colossal evils of this country, and as it gives promise of yet wielding the fierce and untamed spirit of the whole populace at its will, and has a capacity of establishing a pure HIEROCRACY among us, it has become the duty of all good government to fling an iron chain over the monster, and either tame or destroy it. The priests have already established de facto in every district-in every parish-on every property, an imperium in imperio, so that at this moment every thing in the country is becoming pros

trate at their feet. By their admirable system of union among themselves, and of organization among their followers, they are enabled to set the government-the magistracy-the landlords at defiance, and are beginning to assert their power with an insolence of bearing, and an audacity of purpose that is conceivable only by those who witness it.

The means by which they have obtained this unnatural and dangerous power are easily traced, and it is because we have an intimate knowledge of the working of the system, that we demand with uplifted hands, the prompt interference of the legislature, and the British public, to make some mighty effort for the subversion of Popery in Ireland. The grand master-piece of policy, which these priests have accomplished, is, the flinging an air of religious feeling over every thing. Whether it be a measure of the highest national policy, as repeal of the union, or a mere question of local insignificance, as a turnpike road, it becomes forthwith invested with a religious character-it assumes all the importance and is arrayed in all accompaniments of a great religious question, in which all the religious feelings and prejudices of the populace are to be engaged-no matter how important, or how insignificant the measure itself may be-no matter how remote it may seem to be from partaking of a religious question, still every measure and petty local event receives, from the hands of these priests, the color of religious interest, and becomes the subject of religious discord. It is truly extraordinary, the extent to which this system is carried, so much so, that it not unfrequently occurs, that a landlord cannot distrain a tenant, or a magistrate arrest a felon a proprietor cannot assert his legal rights, or a public officer vindicate the laws without being prepared for the whole storm of religious feeling and prejudice being excited among the populace against him. We have frequently known the verdict of jurors, and the sentence of the judges of assize, treated by the priests in this way; so that by this subtle artifice, the priesthood is enabled always to command the passions and the powers of the whole populace, and to wield them for their own ends; and unhappily that populace is so steeped in igno◄