Endowment of Popery.

From an Address by the Committee on Public Questions appointed by the United Presbyterian Synod.

The crisis has come at last. There is reason to fear that Popery will soon be endowed in Ireland. Such, at least, is the avowed intention of Lord John Russell; nor is he afraid, at the same time, to assure us, that all the remonstrances of this country against the Proposed scheme, will be “no bar” to his carrying it out into page 259 effect. The only serious difficulty he anticipates, is the reluctance of the Romish priests to receive State pay, and, should this impediment be once removed, he is prepared to set at defiance the resolute opposition of England and Scotland. We are now fully warned. No one can henceforth say that he was taken by surprise, should a motion of this nature be laid before Parliament at its next session. No one has a right to complain that he and others were denied all opportunity of organizing an extensive and determined opposition to the measure. It is our own fault if we are found unprepared for the contest. There are many reasons why this scheme should be resisted with all our might.

Popery (and we shall never cease to assert it) is the enemy of the Bible, of the Sabbath, of a free press and of free institutions, of individual habits, of social order, and of good government. It lays man, soul and body, under the polluted foot of a priest, and thus prepares a nation, silently but surely, for the chains of a civil despotism. It has long been the honour of this country, that she has refused to acknowledge the supremacy of “the Man of Sin,” by whom almost all continental Europe has been kept in thraldom, and that, in consequence of this, her free, enlightened Protestant spirit, Britain has become the centre of liberty, of knowledge, of commerce, of civilisation, and of sound religion to the farthest extremities of the earth. Is the crown of civil and religions liberty now to be torn from our heads? Are we to be thrown down from that eminence of grandeur which we formerly possessed? Are we already sunk so low, that it is no longer in our power to found colleges for general education, without their rules and regulations being first submitted to a foreign priest for his approval, or to govern Ireland without caressing the Pope for his patronage, and purchasing at the cost of millions a venal and and precarious loyalty from the Irish Catholic priesthood?