The Sun.
London, England, 1868-04-25 00:00:00

THE "NO POPERY' CRY.

An abortive endeavour to revive that most
ridiculous of all cries, the cry of " No Popery,"
would actually seem to be the only device 0
sug-
ffestino• itself to the Prime Minister of England
0 •
with a view to the postponement, if possible,
for yet a little while longer, of the evil day
when the Irish Church Estliblishment must
be abolished. And it is not that the Pre-
mier has intimated thus much in a momentary
ebullition of temper under the excitement or
direct incentive of a heated imagination. His
declaration he has endorsed in cold blood. His
avowal at the close of an animated debate he
has reiterated with the pen in his hand, and
with the utmost deliberation. Related, as this
is, of a cool-headed tactician like the present
First Lord of the Treasury, the incident seems
to be the result of little less than a hallucina-
tion.

It appears; even now, almost inconceivable
that Mr. Disraeli, amonc, all our livinc, states-
men, that he; with all his undoubted sagacity,r'
should have failed so entirely to appreciate a
fact rendered sufficiently manifest, we should
have supposed, to the meanest capacity, by one
occurrence after another, recorded in our
national history, namely, that of all cries a No
Popery cry is, beyond any comparison, the most
ludicrous. For, in point of fact, what is its
significance? As well say—No sun in the
heavens at noonday ! No air that we breathe !
No earth under our feet ! As well cry aloud
"No mob," when standing in the midst of a
vast multitude ! It is for all the world like the
sweep of Mr. Podsnap's hand when he swept
everythinc, he objected to behind him and
utterly out of existence. It is upon a par in
its absurdity with those who are in the habit
of speaking of us Catholics as a sect—we who
constitute the bulk of the population of
Christendom. A sect, forsooth, of upwards of
200,000,000 ! Why, the only appropriate
leader or champion of this old fatuous cry of
"No Popery" that has ever been heard of,
was that poor crack brained Scotch lord who,
in 1780, set all London in a flame with his
incoherent fanati-cism. Seventy years after-
wards, namely, in 1850, when Earl Russell,
then Lord John Russell, penned his worse than
simply preposterous letter to the Bishop of
Durham—that document in which he hesitated
not to number the holy symbol of redemption
among " the mummeries of superstition"—
I that notorious effusion may be said to have
been- scrawled upon a leaf torn out of the
book of Lord George Gordon. But even that
malign effort to revive for party purposes the
spirit of fanaticism, proved only partially, only
very partially, indeed, successful. Instead of
any worse consequences being elicited, we had
the vials of Parliamentary wrath poured over
our heads in the Lords and Commons; we had
effigies akin to those of Guy Fawkes paraded in
the streets and afterwards burnt, here and
there in the suburbs, for the especial gratifi-
cation of the street urchins of the metropolis ;
we had scurrilous words scrawled against us,
or rather against all we hold sacred, upon the
walls and the hoardings and the pavements—
and, to crown all, we had that utterly futile
and abortive Act of Parliament called: into
existence which the Legislature is now, shame-
facedly, taking steps at length to obliterate, as
a senile evidence of spleen, from the statute-
book of "this realm of England !" Any
deliberate endeavour now to raise a similar
cry to that articulated in 1850, so feebly and
innocuously, by Lord John Russell, proves by
necessity abortive.
Years ago Mr. Disraeli spoke of the Whigs
as—an obsolete oligarchy. As happily, and
quite as accurately, he might, now, define any
enterprise such as the one indicated by him,
first of all viva voce in the House of Commons,
and afterwards yet more clearly in his epistle
to his reverend supporter down in Backing-
hamshire—a politico-religions anachronism.
That he, of all men should have stumbled
into this egregious blunder excites our pro-
found regret, while it quite as certainly passes
our comprehension. It passes our comprehen-
sion that the keen-eyed, large-hearted author
of " Sybil, or the Two Nations"—the heroine
of which romance Sybil to 'wit, is a Catholic,
as generously imagined, and as admirably
and gracefully depicted as the Haredales
Pere et fille" of Charles Dickens's " Barnaby
Rudge"—could ever have bungled thus into
this incongruous position in our regard. He
who stands in a manner almost entirely apart
among the Protestant statesmen of England in
(as we very naturally conceive it to be) his
wise and statesmanlike appreciation of the
rights, the sacred and inalienable rights, of the
Sovereign Pontiff. The attitude now assumed
by him in this matter of the Irish Church--
in general terms it might be said, in reference
to Catholicism—is so at variance with all his
antecedents, that, again we say, it passes our
comprehension, again we say, it simply appears
to us in the light of a bewildering and eccen-
tric hallucination.—Westininster Gazette.