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

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
affirms 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
has, 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.