The Sun.
London, England, 1836-11-24 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

We were once not without our alarm for the com-
merce and manufactures of the country ; but we are
now in a great measure tranquillized, not so much
from the favourable report of the Money Market given
by our City Correspondent, as from finding that the
alarm on account of Popery is again in the ascendant
in certain quarters. We have ourselves a tolerable
lhorror of Popery ; but some how or other we can only
afford to indulge it in a season of tranquility. When
bankers wear long faces, and partners from country
funs post to London to obtain specie for their pres-
sing wants, the fear of Popery is always at a discount ;
and we have generally observed that the most zealous
Protestants are more occupied with watching the
Money Market, than the intrigues of the Pope and the
machinations of priests for the overthrow of the Pro-
testant Church. As Popery is a chronic evil, and as
the country has existed in spite of it for some centuries,
we have a lurking suspicion that it is not, after all,
the most formidable of evils ; and knowing that a
priest can always be kept at due distance much
easier than a sheriff's officer, we confess we are
never sorry when the greatest danger impending over
the country happens to be Popery. In another article
we have bestowed some attention on the conspiracy re-
vealed yesterday to the world by the great luminaries
of Printing-house-square, in which Dr. Whately, his
Majesty's Ministers, and the Pope are parties. The
Archbishop of Dublin is proved by the Times to be
in an understanding with the Pope to shut the mouth
of a Reverend Mr. Nolan, who, if suffered to preach
in the Archdiocese of Dublin, might have charmed
the Catholics into an affection for tithes. It is no
doubt scandalous in Dr. Whately to betray the inte-
rests of a Church which pays him so well, merely to ad-
vance the interests of the Pope ; and it is to be hoped
that those who have at heart the interest of tithes
without any deduction for the moral and religious
instruction of those by whom they are paid, will
lose no time in transmitting to this country this burn-
ing and shining light Mr. Nolan, that the people
of England may be able to judge for themselves the
value of his services to the third reformation, and whe-
ther the period be yet arrived for girding on our armour
to reduce the Irish Papists to submission. Some cau-
tious persons may wish to watch the Exchanges for
some time longer, and ascertain the full extent of the
loss of orders to our manufacturers from the United
States, before they venture to abandon all uneasiness
on account of commercial matters, and give themselves
up in security to the chronic alarm on account of the
spread of Popery. We, however, think they may now
consider the latter the great danger. And here we
must endeavour to solve an apparent enigma in the
conduct of the Tories who are most distinguished by
their apprehensions from Popery. It has been said
how happens it that the Tories are so anxious to sup-
port the cause of Priestcraft in Spain and Portu-
gal—to say nothing of their sympathy with the par-
tipretre in France—and are yet so horror-struck
with the evils of Popery in Ireland ? How idle the
question ! If it be proved that the Popish supersti-
tion in old Catholic countries like Spain can be suc-
cessfully overturned, would not this tend to deaden
our apprehension of the evils of Popery at home ? It
is of the utmost importance, then, to the good cause at
home, that Popery should flourish abroad. What
have we to do with the evils of superstition in Spain
and Portugal, but to use them as a bugbear to recon-
cile the people of England to hostility against their
Catholic brethren, as men between whom and good
Protestants there can be no amity or good understand-
ing, and whom we can only hope to keep down, and
must keep down, by force ? The success of Popery
abroad is, therefore, clearly the downfall of Popery at
home ; and no surer sign can be given of an enemy to
the Protestant Church than an anxiety to enlighten
the minds of the inhabitants of Catholic countries as
to the errors of their creed, and to imbue them with
the love of civil and religious liberty.—Mornino-
Chronicle.

Every day brings with it some fresh ground of an
exultation, in which all good men may unanimously
join, at the rapid and gigantic growth of that spirit by
which alone Great Britain can be saved, if saved she
is to be—a spirit of ardent and affectionate attach-
ment to the institutions of our forefathers. We have
nowhere witnessed a more gratifying proof of the
spread and triumph of that wholesome sentiment than
in the Conservative meeting at Colchester the day
before yesterday. It is true that there may be por-
tions of the island where the Conservative cause stands
more in need of additional succour than the great
county of EsSex, which has already so distin-
guished itself by the great preponderancy of Con-
servative Members which it has returned to Par-
liament : but if Essex requires not such accessions
of strength for herself, she affords by them au
inestimable index of the progress of right prin-
ciple in other quarters of the realm. The public may
depend upon it, that if the numbers of the " Essex
and Colchester True Blue Club"—being the title of
that great Conservative Association of which we re-
ported the proceedings in yesterday's Times—the pub-
lic, we repeat, may depend upon it, that if the mem-
bers of that Society have increased within one twelve-
reonth—as is the fact—from one hundred to two hun-
dred and fifty—that if at the first Municipal Elec-
tion for Colchester, the populous and flourishing
county town of Essex, the burgesses excluded from
their Town Council all the Conservative candidates
without exception, but that at the registration of the
Ist inst., the Conservatives gained a majority of 60 in
all the wards ; and if, on the late election of six coun-
cilmen, every Church of England candidate was at the
top, and every political Dissenter at the bottom,
of the poll, in all the different wards, the country may
depend upon it, that however superfluous to the local
prosperity of the Conservative cause in Essex, such
facts as these may be considered, they are all important,
if taken as they ought to be, for the proof and measure
of a like amendment in other towns and counties of the
kingdom. It is not to be credited that similar causes
should not produce analogous consequences, or that the
middle classes in the north, the west, and south of
England, should not be affected by the same impa-
tience and disgust, at the sordid, selfish, and trouble-
some obtrusiveness of those intriguing Dissenters and
other plebeian tyrants whom the earliest stage of muni-
cipal agitation threw up like froth upon the surface of
so many boroughs, as is now made manifest in the
state of Colchester, and although,
indeed, we have
experimental demonstration of this truth in some of the
most important towns of Great Britain, still, as a cor-
roborative circumstance, the rapid and irresistible pro-
gress of constitutional feeling in Essex, where it was
already strong, is in no degree on that account the less
valuable. It is always satisfactory to see the " nail hit
upon the head." This was done with masterly effect at
the Colchester meeting, when the great question now at
issue was truly stated as one which involves the exist-
ence of the Church of England, the stay of the monarchy
and of civilized society, the sacred inheritance of the
poor and of their children, who, unpossessed of other
property, but secure of that, can never be wholly des-
titute or forlorn. The ablest speeches made—we mean
the
nothing invidious, for others were very able--or
amongst the ablest at this meeting, were those
Archdeacon Lyall, and the Rev. G. ffnell— of
fair
samples of that intellectual eminence which, together
vvith an exemplary discharge of the manifold duties of
their station, has distinguished the present race of
English Established Clergymen far above their pre-
decessors of the two last generations, and has propor-
tionably assisted in enabling the Church to withstand
the persecution of her revolutionary enemies, now fast
yielding to the awakened sense and virtue of the people.
The question involves a double alternative. Shall we
have the Reformed religion represented and promul-
gated through the ministry of the Established Church?
or, failing that, must we have a false religion in Ire-
land, and in England no religion whatever ? That is
the true state of the question or questions now at
issue between Conservatives of all denominations, and
all denominations of revolutionists, in these coun-
tries. We ought to consider well. The Dissenters,
who push themselves forward, and sputter and bustle
about the voluntary principle, are not really champions
of religious freedom. They are not (with rare excep-
tions) religious men, or believers in any Christian
doctrine. They are political adventurers, speculative
intriguers, dogmatical, intolerant, overbearing, turbu-
lent, seekers after power for the sake of profit. These