The Sun.
London, England, 1867-08-26 00:00:00

felt bitterly when he was compelled by a sense of
duty to resist the encroachments proposed in that
House by the Roman Catholics." We believe Mr.
Newdegate to be, after all, a man of the nineteenth
century, like the rest of us ' • but he is committed
to a party and to a line of political action which
compel him to talk of encroachments that he well
knows have no sort of actuality, about which he
cannot even plausibly argue that they exist. There
are (as every one knows) no encroachments on the
part of Catholics. If there were, the resistance to
them would not be left to Parliamentary oddities
representing nobody but themselves, and the few
other crotchetty individuals, the score or two of
fussy parsons, and the hundred or two of good
-hearted, but credulous old ladies who make up
the rank and file of the No-Popery party. If there
were any real danger of " Papal Aggression " in.
the sense that they mean it, no doubt the strength
of England would soon be aroused to sterner
action, the intellectual vigour, the moral energy,
and the physical stamina of the country would
bristle in battle array. Mr. Newdegate stands
pretty nearly alone when he professes to see such
a danger nigh at hand. Catholicism will shortly,
he thinks, unless his counsels are adopted, bring
about the state of things that existed in Spain
in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles
V. and of Philip 11. But that is a state of things
which did not exist at all universally, even in the
most palmy days of Catholicism, and notably never
in England, Scotland, or in Ireland, for even in
Queen Mary's reign the bishops were but the un-
willing agents of the lay government in the perse-
cution of Protestants. There is plenty of docu-
mentary evidence that Gardiner and Bonner were
coerced by the Marquis of Winchester and the
Council to do what they did ; and that they did as
little as possible. Those who can read history with
any superiority to the merest sectarian prejudices
know that the proceedings of Mary's reign exhibit
not the normal action of ecclesiastical authority,'
but that which is of all things most opposite to it,
namely, the "wild justice" of a triumphant faction
which had itself suffered the extremity of cruelty,
injustice, and persecution in the two preceding
reigns. Cranmer suffered neither more nor less
than just what he had himself inflicted on both
Protestants and Catholics under Henry VIII., and
what he was preparing, by a more formal and
effective ordinance, to inflict on Catholics, when
his tenure of power was interrupted by the death
of Edward VI. The circumstances of the time
were altogether exceptional. Before what Mr.
Newdegate affects to fear could become a reality
in England, before the nation could be subjected
to the exercise of temporal power on the part of
the Church, the majority of Englishmen must, of
course, have embraced cordially and enthusiasti-
cally the CatholiC faith. That would be the prl;
mary and indispensable condition. But would
that •be all that would be necessary ? By no
means, for there are nations heartily and loyallY,
Catholic where the Church exercises no temporal
power whatever. Wherever the Church has pes-
- temporal rule, it has been brought about 1)9
such a singular combination of political circany
stances and peculiarities of national character as
do not exist anywhere now, and can hardly be
expected to exist in this country at any future
period. We assert, then, that all these fears tniu
complaints about Catholic encroachment are tho-
roughly insincere. They are nothing else but the
thin veil which sectarian jealousy assumes when
it desires to crush—or, if it cannot crush, to coerce,
impede, and annoy, a rival system with which 1,
feels it hopeless to compete in the field of
argument, and in the comparative estimate wine':
ec
the public is forming upon what that public s:
for itself when it looks first on Establishmentariam
and then on Catholics.