The Press. — London, England, 1858-11-27 00:00:00

i THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 27, 1858. pertinent since the violation of the law imputed to Mr. POOLE was not the commission of some isolated act or acts, adopted ex post facto by the incumbent, but the practice of a regular system, set up by the Incumbent, and asserted by him to be consistent with the law, while the Bishop a ffirms it to be unlawful. By the refusal of that offer, coupled with the infliction of a sentence of extreme severity upon M . r. POOLE, the Bishop h a s, we fear, impaled himself upon the horns of this dilemma—that, either he has made an arbi trary and oppressive use of the discretionary power which the law vests in bishops over curates, or he has, in a matter which appeared to him to call for the most stringent application of the law, allowed the chief offender to go scot free while visiting a subordinate accessory to the offence with the heaviest penalty he was enabled to inflict. If the revocation of Mr. POOLE'S licence is no more than a just sentence, it is evi dent that the Hon. and Rev. Mr. LIDDELL ought to be deprived of his Incumbency. If no compe tent court of . jurisdiction would pronounce sen tence of deprivation against Mr. LIDDELL for the matters charged against himself no less than against his Curate, it is equally evident that the revocation of Mr. POOLE'S licence was an exces sive exercise of the Bishop's corrective power over curates. What, upon these various questions, which we content ourselves with indicating, may be the answer of right and justice, remains to be deter mined by the judicial inquiry which, we appre hend, will be the result of the application for a mandamus to the Court of Queen's Bench. And this brings us to the fourth point in issue in this complicated case. When the Legislature provided a check upon the discretionary power over curates vested in bishops, by giving to the curate who may deem himself aggrieved by the exercise of that power, an appeal to the Archbishop, was it the intention of the Legislature to afford to the humblest curate, upon appeal, the protection of those principles of justice and forms of judicial procedure which in free and constitutional Eng land extend their shield over the lowest criminal, or was it contemplated that the Archbishop should be deemed to have " fulfilled all righteous ness" by giving the aggrieved curate, after requiring of him security for costs, a note by the penny post, acknowledging the receipt of his petition of appeal, and informing him that he, the Archbishop, considers he has been " rightly served "? This is the question which has been submitted to the Court of Queen's Bench by the application for a mandamus, and upon which the emphatic exclamation of the Lord Chief Justice, " lir. MUST BE HEARD !" leaves little doubt what will be the decision of that tribunal to which Englishmen look for protection against the worst of civil wrongs, the denial of justice. EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS ACCORDING TO PAPAL PRACTICE. IT is evident from facts of too frequent occurrence that the Church of Rome has assumed, and is daily asserting, the Ultramontane type of the faith. Whether it be her last desperate clutch at power in her deepening sense of its rapid decay, or her persuasion that the day of her mediaeval supremacy Vs nearly spent, it is difficult to say. But recent conflicts in Italy and Ireland painfully prove that if she has lost in prestige, in popularity, and influence, she has grown in fanaticism and in daring assertion of her presumptuous and arrogant pretensions. In Bologna a lay menial baptizes a Jewish child, and the indelible character supposed to be imprinted, and the absolute subjection in soul and body to the Church implied, by the adminis tration of that rite, are put forward by the Pope himself as just reasons why the child's instinctive readiness to leap into the arms of a mother, and the mother's yearning to take to her bosom her offspring, should be ignored, or rather crushed and struck down. RACIIAEL weeping for her children is not a scene confined to the days of 'Num). A modern Pope re-enacts the tragedy in the name of the meek Saviour of mankind. An illustration of the same intolerant spirit of domination has just occurred nearer home. We allude to the case of the UMALLEYS, minors, in which an order was made on the 23rd of September last, on the petition of JANE ROBINSON. Iler petition, which was supported by her affidavit, stated, in substance, that the minors, being eight in number, were the children of the late JOHN O'MALLEY, and of ELLEN O'MALLEY his wife, sister of JANE ROBINSON. That the eldest child was twelve years of age, the youngest of the age of one year. That, so far as they had been capable of receiving instruction, they had been educated in the Protestant religion, with the consent and approval of both their parents. That their father died in March, 1857, leaving his wife ELLEN O'MALLEY surviving. That in June, 1858, ELLEN O'MALLEY was obliged to go into the workhouse of Tuam, with her eight children, and that all were entered as I'rotestants in the registry of the workhouse, where the mother died, leaving behind her the eight orphan children. That on the 11 th of August the petitioner, JANE ROBINSON, applied to the guardians of the Tuam union to have the children given up to her ; that she had made provision for their support ; that the considera tion of this was postponed by the guardians until the 18th of August. That on this latter day the guardians, disregarding a direction from the Poor-law Commissioners, refused to give her the children, but gave them up to their paternal uncle, the said WILLIAM O'MALLEY, a Roman Catholic, who expressed his intention to bring them up in his own faith, and that she was unable to obtain the custody of the children.— JOHN O'MALLEY, the father of the children, was nominally a Roman Catholic. The mother was a conscientious and earnest Protestant. The chil dren were sent by their parents to a national school as Protestant children; they were regis tered as such by the master, a Roman Catholic ; they read the Bible, and were taught the Pro testant Catechism by the rector of the parish, and were also constant attendants at the Protestant church. The father himself taught the children out of the Scriptures and the Catechism in the l'rayer-book. The father died. The mother and children entered the workhouse as Protes tants. She died also soon after. The children remained for some weeks afterwards in the work house. JANE ROBINSON, sister of the mother, as already stated, applied for the children in order to teed, clothe, and educate them. At this point another and conflicting applicant appears—the brother of the father—who claims the children as being, what nobody ever suspected, Roman Catholics. The ostensible reasons were addressed to the Court of the Irish Lord Chancellor. The real reason lay in the background. What were the ostensible reasons ? First, that the father was a Roman Catholic—evidently in name only—and that Father COYNE heard him in his dying mo ments express his wish that his children should be brought up as Roman Catholics. The strik ing and suggestive feature in this last reason is, that the priest, from March, 1857, when the father died, to August, 1858, had never alluded to, or attempted to act on, this alleged declara tion, till the Protestant aunt affectionately under took to care for orphans the priest neither ex pressed nor took the least interest in. The mother also states that, after the priest left, her dying husband repeated what he had previously and often urged,—his desire that the children should be brought up in the Protestant faith. Lord Chancellor IqAPIER did not impugn the assertion of the priest—which we do not hesitate to impugn—but he added, what he eliminated from cases in point, that a quasi assent from the lips of a faint and dying man was not the solemn and deliberate act and deed on which stress could be justly laid—growing lan guor and incipient insensibility yielding an assent which a practised priest could very easily extract and turn to account. This was the ostensible reason. The real reason was in this case what it was in that of the llebrew child :MORTAR. The father had allowed his children to be baptized by a Roman Catholic priest. The mark of the Church was indelibly impressed; they were her subjects ; her authority was abso lute ; her jurisdiction over the soul and body of the baptized is entire, and to be upheld at all hazards. And it must be allowed that, in vindi cating this claim, the priests of Rome are most 1147 consistent and invariably firm. The Lord Chan. cellor gave his judgment on the merits of the case as set forth, ignoring, of course, as became him, all theological grounds. His Lordship re pelled with indignation the allegation of the priest, that the deceased Roman Catholic father had acted contrary to his faith for mercenary reasons, and nobly upheld a dead father's honour as his children's best heritage. He said, were the religion of the parties altered his decision would be the same. He gave judgment wholly un biassed by his own religious convictions, and refused the application, and upheld, as became a British judge, the dignity, the purity, and im partiality of the law. We do not wish to indulge in any censure of the Romish Church, or to interfere with the civil rights of her priesthood. But we warn them of the tendencies of their recent aggressive and Ilildebrandic policy. They are entering into conflict on British ground in behalf of Romish pretensions, popularly supposed to have been repudiated or dead. They may provoke a re action. They may stir to fervour a feeling, still, but deep and powerful, on which they do not calculate. From the Judges of this great land all such controversies and suits will always receive im partial and just decisions. But a Protestant nation may feel its temper ruffled and its for bearance exhausted by these incessant attempts to override the British Constitution by laws the intolerance of which is pardonable only as the creation of the middle ages, inspired by the spirit of ambitious and ignorant priests. THE FORCE OF COINCIDENCES. ONE of the nicest questions that can exercise the mind of an attentive observer whether of the moral or of the physical world, is the extent and the kind of connection which may, or may not, exist between phenomena nearly coincident in point of time. Before astronomers had, tracked the orbits, and arrived at certain probable con jectures as to the nature, of comets, any great public calamity, a pestilence, a war, or the death of some crowned head, happening about the time of its appearance, was sure to be laid at the door of the vagrant luminary. Three centuries ago the mightiest potentate of Europe was induced by the portent of one of those erratic bodies to abdicate his Crown and to shut himself up for the rest of his life within the walls of a monastery. And in this year of grace 1858, the heavenly visitant which for some time added such splen dour to our autumnal nights, although not blamed, as far as we have heard, for the virtual abdication of the King of Pitussf.t, has, like its famous predecessor in the year 1811, got credit, how justly we know not, for the superior excel lency of the year's vintage. That the inferences apt to be drawn from proximity of time are not always to be relied on, the history of supposed cometary influences sufficiently demonstrates ; but it does not follow, therefore, that all such in ferences are fallacious, and that the post hoc never is proper hoc. Whether in any given case there be or be not good ground for surmising a connec tion as between cause and effect between events which follow close upon each other, thus becomes a point for philosophic speculation. As the contribution of " mites " towards the advancement of " social science" is the fashion just now, we propose to contribute ours in the shape of a problem, which, however, we do not pretend to solve—few social philosophers go that length—but only to propose, leaving its solution to wiser heads than our own. About s►x weeks or two months ago the columns of the newspapers were filled, by the side of various notices of the progress of DONATI'S comet through the celestial firmament, with accounts of the progress on the political horizon of another eccentric luminary of considerable apparent magnitude, and, it is con jectured, like its autityps in the skies, of gaseous