Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845

But we Protestants, in paying to Maynooth, supposing that we made ourselves parties to the payment by consenting to the bill, feel that we should be wilfully abetting the propagation of error. It is true that the Papist finds himself in the same necessity of contributing to what he regards as heresy by contributing to the support of the Protestant Establishment. But if a Protestant resorts to a country, or acquiesces in a country where Popery is established, he does not complain that he falls under the relation of a tributary to a system which did not seek him, but which he sought.

There are other casuistical points, arising out of these practical relations to systems of religious belief, which are often unskilfully mingled with cases like this of Maynooth; but they cannot disguise the broad distinction between the principle in that question and the principle in the question of Catholic emancipation. There the object was purely negative, viz. to liberate a body of men from certain incapacities. Successive penal laws had stripped the Papist of particular immunities and liberties. These were restored by emancipation. A defect was made good. But no positive powers were created by that measure. Now, on the other hand, when a large revenue is granted, (as by the pending Maynooth grant,) this is in effect to furnish artillery for covering advances upon hostile ground. This gives positive powers to Popery for propagating its errors. That Sir Robert Peel should hold such a mode of collusion with falsehood to be lawful – would be astonishing, were it not that he manifestly confounds the case of promoting, a law by votes, or any mode of active support, which is a true and substantial assent, with the case of paying under a demand of the law. Now this is no assent at all, any more than the surrendering your person passively to the arrest of a police-officer is an assent to the justice of the accusation, or to the reasonableness of the law under which you will be tried. To pay on the demand of the law is no assent at all, but an abridged process of yielding to the physical coercion of the law. You are aware of the steps through which the compulsory action of the law will travel, and it cannot make any difference as to the principle of your submission, that, for the sake of saving time, you yield to the first step, instead of waiting for the last. It is, therefore, no duty of a Protestant, in any circumstances, to abet Popery by any mode of support, but only seems to be so by confounding cases essentially different.

Next arises for notice, the very interesting question on the prospects of Popery at this moment and its chances of a great restoration, by means of combination with various forms of human power. One cause of error upon this subject lies in the notion that conspicuous obscurations of civil grandeur, jurisdiction, and wealth, which Popery has suffered of late years in almost every state, have therefore, been absolute losses of spiritual power. On the contrary, these losses are likely to strengthen Popery. Precisely in the most bigoted of Popish kingdoms – Austria, Bavaria, Spain, and Portugal – the Popish religion has been shorn, during the last fifty years, of it most splendid temporalities. The suppression of the Inquisition in Spain, &c., the extinction of religions houses on so vast a scale, the limitation of the Papal rights in the disposal of Bishops' sees, the confiscation or sale of church lands, to an amount unsuspected in Protestant countries – these and other convulsions have shaken the Papacy in a memorable degree. But it is certain that the vigour and vitality of Popery, in modes more appropriate to a spiritual power, are reviving. Popery has benefited by the removal, however harshly executed at the moment, of enormous abuses connected sometimes with wealth, sometimes only with the reputation of wealth, but in either case with a weight of popular odium. The vessel has righted and become buoyant by the sacrifice of masts and rigging. A spirit of activity has again manifested itself in many directions. And with this has concurred a new body of hopes, arising from social accidents in America. Throughout the great central valley of North America, and along the line of the most recent inroads into the western forests, a great opening has arisen, of late years, for throwing a network of spiritual power over a vast territory that is rapidly unfolding its power and wealth. Through this opening has poured, for some years like a spring-tide, a huge host of Catholic missionaries. Such was the extensive demand for spiritual ministration amongst a population multiplying to excess, that any order of Christian clergy would have been welcome. Here is a basis laid for future magnificent development of Popish power. Rome itself has been stirred and agitated with the prospect of seeing its energies revive, and of reaping a malicious retribution by entering into combination with that Teutonic race, from whom, during the last three centuries, she had received her deadliest wounds. But a doubt arises, whether this very combination will not be more likely to impress a totally new character upon the Papal religion. The Saxon energy will be likely to strangle Popery, rather than Popery in the long run to pervert that energy. In England itself, through Oxford, unexpected auguries have dawned upon Rome, of a new birth for the pomps of Papal Rome. And exactly at this crisis of hope and unlimited anticipation, the splendid endowment of Maynooth, solemnly proposed and vigorously pressed forward by a cautious minister of England, coinciding also with the spasmodic throes of the Irish people to establish an independent nationality, have doubtless spread through the councils of the Vatican as much of what will probably be found visionary expectation, as through the hearts of our own Protestant countrymen, they have spread of what equally, we trust, will be converted by this national insurrection against Maynooth into visionary fear.

Another point we are bound to notice, as error generally diffused – though shocking to just logic. It is said, by way of reproach to ourselves – the England of this day – that we took all the splendid endowments of Oxford, Cambridge, and so forth, from Roman Catholics; which being so, we are bound to make some restoration of the spoils to the Catholics of this day. Was there ever heard more complex absurdity? Mark its stages:

1st, If you had taken them from Catholics of the 16th century, how would that translate any interest of property in the institutions to people of the nineteenth century, simply as professing the same faith? We took various spoils about 1780 from Hyder Ali, the sultan of Mysore: in 1799 we took others more costly from his son Tippoo: will that entitle some prince of Turkestan, or Bokhara, in the year 2000, to claim these spoils on the plea that he is a Mahometan? An interest of inheritance would thus be vested in the emptiest of abstractions.

2d, They were not Catholics, in a proper sense, who founded the chief colleges at Oxford, &c. The Roman Catholic faith was not developed fully at the period when many were founded: it could not be developed even as a religious system, until after the great polemic writers, on the one side and the other, had drawn out the differential points of doctrine. And when partly developed, or showing a tendency to certain conclusions, it was not fully settled until the Council of Trent. Next, as a political interest, it was not at all developed until between the beginning of Luther and the termination of Trent. Impossible it was that it should; for until a counter-pole existed, until an antagonist interest had arisen, the relations of Popery, whether political or religious, must have been indeterminate: as a kingdom surrounded by deserts and trackless forests, cannot have its frontier line ascertained.

3dly, If they had been Catholics, in the fullest sense, who founded our Universities, it was not as Catholics that they founded them, but as great families who had accumulated property under our system of laws; and secondly, as natives of the land. They were able to found universities, because they had been protected by English laws; they were willing to found universities, because they were of English birth, and loved their native land. The Countess of Richmond, for instance, or Henry VI., in his great foundations at Eton or Cambridge, or Baliol at Oxford, did not think of Popery under any relation to heresy. They thought of it, so far as at all they thought of it, in its general abstraction of spiritual loveliness; and under that shape it differed not at all from the Protestantism of the English church. The temper in which they acted, is a pledge that they thought of man, and the children of man, not in relation to those points in which they differed, but to those above all in which they agreed. They were compatriots of the islanders – they loved knowledge – and in those characters, not as Papists, they founded colleges.

4thly, Supposing that in the plenary and controversial sense they had been Catholics who founded our great mediæval institutions; supposing, next, that they had founded them as Catholics, and because they were Catholics; supposing, also, that from them, in that aërial character of "persons holding a creed," any rights of inheritance could, by leave of Thomas Aquinas, be imagined metaphysically to descend; lastly, and notwithstanding all this, their establishments had passed into the hands of other trustees by due course of law – that is, by legislation under the countersign of king, lords, and commons; that is, by the same title under which any man whatever, Papist or Protestant, holds any property whatever. Are we obliged to settle an annuity upon A B, because he can trace himself lineally to a man who held our lands under Edward the Confessor? Yet, by the supposition, A B can prove a relation in blood to the ancient owner, though none at all to the lands. But the Catholics can show no relation whatever either to the foundations at Oxford, or to the blood of the founder. Upon this conceit, if a man could trace his blood to an ancient Druid, he would have a lien in law upon all the oak-trees in the island! Risum teneatis?

Whilst this, however, is a mere vapour of the speculative brain, there is a final absurdity, less showy in its extravagance, yet in practice more misleading. We cannot allow ourselves, consistently with the rapid movement of our sketch, to do justice to this fallacy; but we will indicate its outline. Look back to all the pro-Catholic journals for the last forty years, and you will find it every where appealed to and relied on as a substantial argument – that, in many states on the Continent, Catholics and Protestants sit as assessors on the same bench of judgment; act harmoniously as officers, commanders and commanded, in the same regiment; meet daily as fellow-students in the same schools and colleges. The inference is – that mere partisanship, deeper bigotry, and no other cause whatever, has made it difficult or dangerous for English Protestants and Catholics to effect the same coalition. Having no room left for a fuller exposure of this delusive representation, we shall here content ourselves with an illustrative allusion or two. The Moors were expelled from Spain before any English Catholics became the objects (having wilfully made themselves the objects) of something like proscription under English laws. The chasm between the Moors of this day and their ancestors stretches over more than three centuries. Has that rent closed? Have those wounds healed? Is the reader aware of the figurative language, under the symbol of house-door keys, still hanging over Moorish hearths, &c., by which, to this hour, the Moors cherish for their children's ears deep vindictive remembrances of their ancient habitations in Spain, and their haughty vision of a bloody re-entrance? Does the reader imagine that an invasion by Moors of Italy or France would move under the same burning impulses as an invasion of Spain? The return of the Moors to Spain would be like the recoil of a catapulta. And, allowing for higher civilization, of the same deep memorial character would have been any re-entry of Roman Catholics upon power in England, had it been less gradual than the prudence of Parliaments made it. The deep outrages of Catholics upon English rights, under the troubled movements amongst the thrones of Europe during the century of strife, which made the temptations to treason irresistible for vassals of Rome, forced from the Protestants such stern reactions, as have left with both parties an abiding sense of profound injuries. Attainders to be blotted out, judgments to be reversed, burning records of shame for persons and for creed, sculptured in our laws, to trample under foot, are likely to stimulate the malice (calling itself the retribution) of lineal descendants, even if there were no estates to reclaim. And surely those fantastic persons who think, that merely to bear the name or classification of "Catholic" must confer upon one, pleading no shadow of a connexion with the founder of a college, some claim to a dividend upon its funds, are not entitled to hold cheap the very different sort of claims, resting upon acknowledged heirship, which are now lying amongst the muniments of thousands. It is a record of the political imbecility, it is to the high disgrace, of the continental states, that with most of them Catholics and Protestants could meet in this insipid harmony: it was a harmony resembling the religious toleration of people – tolerant, because careless of all religion. Had they, like ourselves, possessed a constitution of slow growth, a representative system, a popular mind, all stimulating to noble political feuds, – in that case they would have had high principles like ourselves; they, like ourselves, would have faced the action and reaction of endless contest; and their political progress, like ours, would have been written on every page of their history and legislation. It was because they slept and snored for ages with no instincts of fiery political life, that they were able, in modern times – Catholics and Protestants – to fraternise in effeminate raptures of maudlin sentimentality.

We apply this last topic specially to our conclusion: – In pointing to the yet unappreciated difference between our own feuds with popery and those of other nations – which foreign feuds, at the very best, (if they rose at all to the grandeur of civil strife,) moved through butchery and violence, as in France, not through laws and scaffolds – moved like the uproars of Afghans, not like the grand tribunitial contests of ancient Rome – we could only indicate a feature or two of the inexhaustible case. And naturally it was to England that we pointed. But now – but by this Maynooth revolution, it is not England that is primarily menaced. Ireland it is upon which that evil will descend, which, by the wisdom of Parliament, backed by the protesting tumults of the people, did not descend on England. For England, Parliament was cautious and retarding in all its steps. The "return of the Heracleidæ" was by graduated movements; and, had it even been abrupt, a thousandfold greater were the resources for combined resistance of Protestants against combined reaction of Papists. But in Ireland, deeper are the vindictive remembrances, more recent are the deductions of claims to property, and louder the clamours for wide resumption; from massacre and counter massacre, from Cromwell, from Limerick, from Londondery, from Boyne, from Aughrim, the wounds are yet green and angry; and the hostile factions have never dissolved their array. This is the land into which a Moorish recoil is now threatened. The reader understands us to speak of a return – not for the physical men – but for the restored character of supremacy in which they will be able to act with power.

notes

1

Etudes des Sciences Sociales. Par J. C. Simonde de Sismondi. 3 vols. Paris, 1837.

2

Viz.: —

just a seventh of the whole inhabitants, who are now about 28,000,000.

3

Committals for serious crime, in —

– Porter's Parl. Tables and Prog. of the Nation, iii. 172, 227.

From this table it appears, that from 1805 to 1842 the population of the empire has advanced from 158 to 273 – that is, increased about 70 per cent; while serious crime has increased from 8 to 56 – that is, 700 per cent. Crime, therefore, has augmented ten times as fast as the number of the people.

4

From χρημα – "money, riches."

5

Nicolai, dell' Agro Romano, iii. 167-171. Sismondi's Etudes Sociales, ii. 46.

6

Ibid, iii. 153. Ib., ii. 44. This part of Sismondi's work, which will be found Vol. ii, pp. 1-74, is highly interesting. We may perhaps, at a future period, give a detached account of it, under the title of "The Campagna of Rome."

7

The canal by which the waters of the river Guautitlan are carried through the mountains into the valley of Tula.

8

The Mexican Ceres, goddess of maize.

9

Tatli is an Aztec word, signifying father.

10

Monkish legend.

11

The dry season.

12

The best pulque is that of Tacotitlan. Frijolos are a species of bean which grows in great perfection in the Chinampas, or swimming gardens upon the lake of Chalco.

13

Tenochtitlan is the ancient name of the valley of Mexico. It is here used to designate the capital city.

14

The pique or nigua is a small but exceedingly noxious insect that abounds in some parts of Mexico, especially in the low grounds of Vera Cruz and Acapulco. It bores holes in the skin and lays its eggs there, causing a violent irritation and sometimes dangerous sores.

15

A term used in mining operations. A rich vein of silver, or, generally, success in mining.

16

In Mexican houses of the more opulent class, a woman-servant is kept for the sole purpose of preparing and baking the tortillas or maize cakes. She is called a tortillera.

17

Que se tenga por blanco. Let him consider himself white. The usual form of the emancipation certificates which the Mexican Audiencia was accustomed to sell at high prices to the coloured races. These certificates were originally confined to the quadroons and quinteroons, and other castes that had only a small admixture of Indian blood.

18

To dine with St Antonio – on bread and water.