up of individuals morally and religiously responsible; and as no individual Christian, who values his salvation, can knowingly prefer any temporal benefits however great to the strict line of his Christian duty; it is manifest that Parliament ought to reject the Catholic claims, even with the certainty of thereby provoking a civil war, if it be indeed a sin against God to grant them. I am therefore not only willing to consider the Question as one of duty rather than of expediency, but it is my earnest wish to do so. These are the principles on which it becomes a Christian to argue; and woe to him who for party, or even for national considerations, allows himself to lower the high standard of Christian perfection; to value civil privileges and political freedom beyond a single and unwavering devotion to the will of God.

It will be my endeavour then in the following pages to prove,

First, that it is the direct duty of every Englishman to support the claims of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, even at the hazard of injuring the Pro

testant Establishment; because those claims cannot be rejected without great injustice; and it is a want of faith in God and an unholy zeal to think that he can be served by injustice, or to guard against contingent evil by committing certain sin.

Secondly, that as the path of duty is the path of wisdom, so the granting of the Catholic claims, to which we are bound as a plain point of duty, will in all human probability greatly benefit the cause of Christianity; that it will tend to purify the Catholic Religion in Ireland from its greatest superstitions, and gradually to assimilate it more and more to Protestantism.

The principle of the first assertion, when addressing myself to conscientious Christians, I need not waste time in proving. No good man in our days would defend the practice of pious frauds, or of supporting the interests of his Church by persecution. If then the exclusion of the Catholics of Ireland from their civil rights be an act of injustice, or in other words if it be a sin when know

ingly committed, it is not a lawful means of advancing or defending the Protestant Religion.

Now in order to shew that this exclusion is unjust, it will be necessary to ascend to higher principles than those to which its advocates generally appeal; and to shew that these higher principles can alone in fact determine the merits of the Question. And it is here that good men are blinded, as we shall see hereafter, by an original error in their political opinions; which being in its very essence destructive of our notions of justice, distorts the view of every political question, and makes those who entertain it mistake habitually wrong for right and right for wrong.

Nothing has ever been more pernicious to the growth of human virtue and happiness than the habit of looking backwards rather than forwards for our model of excellence. The individual who should compare his life with what he himself was in his earlier years, instead of contrasting it with that high Christian standard which he never yet has

reached, but which it should be his daily prayer and labour to reach hereafter, would assuredly go back rather than improve in goodness and wisdom. And so on a larger scale is the improvement of civil society obstructed, by referring to its actual origin and past fortunes, rather than contemplating that hitherto unattained excellence, to which, if it rightly used its increasing experience, it should be approaching in every generation successively nearer. We might as well build our ships after the model of our forefathers' coracles, as endeavour to find the principles of wisdom and justice developed in our forefathers' government. Necessity or chance led to the first rude attempts at navigation: force and cunning were the predominant elements in the constitution of the earliest civil societies. The supremacy of strength and intellect over weakness and ignorance is no doubt sufficiently natural: so is selfishness natural; and nothing could be more in accordance with our unimproved nature, than that the strong and the wise should possess a pre-eminence and abuse it. Governments then being established some on the base of mere physical force, some on priestcraft, and others on a mixture of both these

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elements, the language of the laws which were framed by the governing powers was naturally adapted to the principles and interests of the framers. And as these principles were very different from those of justice and true wisdom, so the written or municipal law was also very different from that unwritten and universal law, whose "seat is in the bosom of God, whose voice is the harmony of the world.”

But the dictates of this divine law were never wholly unknown to men; and their excellence is such, that those who hated them most were often ashamed openly to dispute them. Those who suffered under the yoke of a tyranny grounded upon force or superstition, appealed to justice as the most powerful advocate of the weak against the strong: they gave currency to her language, and asserted her principles; and even when success had corrupted them, and made them inclined themselves to forget her, yet the good which they had done continued to exist in spite of them: the truths by which they had profited remained to instruct others also; the wisdom of which they had opened