The Sun.
London, England, 1845-04-17 00:00:00

such as Strafford, Tyrconnell, and Pitt, would not have ob-
jected to; and who, when her Majesty's Ministers stated in
reply that concession had reached its utmost limits, backed
that opinion by an hostile vote. lie now, therefore, thought
it right to come forward, not shrinking from bearing his share,
humble and insignificant as it might be, of that odium to which
her Majesty's Ministers were subjected, and to vindicate to the
',PA of his power the course they were taking.—( Cheers. )
fie felt that in the present wreck of psrties, and the general
confusion of all classes of men, it was a matter 01 no ordinary
difficulty to form a definite and distinct principle of action, and
to carry that principle consistently into execution. But he did
net think it impossible to overcome that difficulty, and he would
endeavour to elucidate the position, which, as a member of the
English Church, he thought he could, consistently, take on
this question' and to reply to some of the arguments which had
been advances' against the Government proposal, with but one
great assertion, which combined in such an inharmonious
concert of opposition to this measure all classes of Pro-
testant Dissenters, he had no concern--he meant that
assertion that the Roman Catholic religion was the
religion of anti-Christ, and that, therefore, any support of
the College of Maynooth was treason against Christianity—
( Hear, hear.) Those who held that opinion were not only
rtglit, but were imperatively called upon to wage the war
they were waging against this grant. But as no reasoning
would have any effect upon such a conviction, he should pass
from that consideration, contenting himself with asserting that
the Church of England nowhere imposed so tremendous a
belief upon its members, and that he was altogether uninflu-
enced by it.—( Hear, hear.) The Noble Lord the Member
for Bandon had represented the Roman Catholic Church in
Ireland as in a schismatical position. But, even admitting it
was, he thought no one on looking to history could venture to
deny that it was they—the people of England, the Puritans of
Elizabeth and of Cromwell, the inventors of the penal code—
they who gave that nation an English-speaking clergy, and
who were at least venially responsible for that schismatical
position. It was in vain that he looked into history for a pre-
cedent to show that the Church of Rome in Ireland could now
be looked upon as guiltily schismatical; nor if he looked into
the formularies and doctrines of our Church, or read the
works of her greatest divines, did he find anything which should
make him think that he was acting disloyally towards her in
supporting the proposed grant to Maynooth.—( Hear.) That
Chureli regarded the Roman Catholic Church as a true, though
not altogether a pure branch of the great Church universal,
and he thought that the sentiment contained in the following
lines could not be too often repeated:—
Speak gently of our sister's fall ;
Who knows but gentle love
May win her at our patient call,
The surer way to prove ?"
( Hear, hear. ) But, to come to the peril in which the Irish
Church stood, which had been often alluded to in the coot se
of the debate, but by no one with such ability and manly
eloquence as by the Noble Lord the Member for Dorsetshire.
That the Irish Church should be imperrilled or her stability
endangered by this grant, he (Lord J. Manners) could not
believe; but, when he said that, he was far from denying
that he regarded the position of the Irish Church as one of
imminent and great peril. She was indeed in danger ; but
it was from herself—from her own children that that peril
had ariseno—(Cheers.) It was not from the Vatican; it was
nut from the Jesuits; it was not from Maynooth ; bat it was
from her own sons—from those who would have her separate
herself from the whole of Catholic Christendom, that the
Irish Church was endangered • and when he saw, as he did
see the other day, that venerable Prelate who occupied so wor-
thily the see which Jeremy Taylor had filled before him, com-
plaining openly that the faithful clergy over whom he pre-
sided were subjected by the Protestant laity to persecution,
to slander, and to tyranny, he was compelled, indeed, to own
that the Irish Church was in danger ; but whilst he thought
so, he was inevitably reminded of the dying words of Arch-
bishop Laud :—" Poor Church of England ! she bath lion-
ri-hed, and hath been a refuge for neighbouring Churches
when the storm was upon them ; but now she is in a storm
and strait herself, and God only knows whether or how she
shall get out ; and worse than a storm from without, she is
like an oak cleft to shivers by wedges made out of its own
body, and that Church, which all the machinations of
the Jesuits could nut ruin, is fallen into danger by
her own."—( Cheers.) Fur these considerations lie
felt free as a Churchman to vote either for
or against the grant. When lie coesidered the question on
the grounds of state policy, he refused to be precluded from
supporting the grant by the assertion of the exclusive Pro-
testantism cf the State. T hose who liked might refer all the
glory and renown of the old English monarchy back to the
Dutch conquest of 1638, which subverted it, but he claimed a
right to ascend higher, anti to consider it just as if William 111.
had died Stadtholder of Holland.—( Hear, and a laugh.)
What was the special form that the question then assumed ?
They found that for the last fifty years 7,000,000 of Irish Ro-
man Catholics had been ministered unto by a priesthood edu-
cated in Ireland, and so educated at the express desire of the
State. He had said " exprese desire" of the State ; but he
thought he might have made use of a still stronger expression,
and that he might have said by " the compulsion of the State;"
for not only by their penal laws, which forbade the education
of Roman Catholic priests abroad, but by every means which
the State could devise, was the foreign education of the Ro-
nrhoieraon;
e.
t) Cu
raT,
shhoewlihNe
?ophbrl
Noble
vie sLot
uos
Lord
ddpt
hemostrehAalpsees, dneubnleloirug
for
tyre
nLpi r‘s.:e vmr eperos toehd
hado.—n (n3tliloeevmaerd.,
bers of that House as to the extraordinary policy which the
English State thought it wise to pursue upon that subject.
TLey were now told, however, that Irish Roman Catholic
priests ought to be educated abroad. He wanted to know
if those who said so were prepared to show any funds and
colleges in existence by which that education could be
obtained.—( Hear, hear.) The returns to which he had
alluded would, he imagined, show that when at the close
of the late war a claim of 160,0301. was made upon the
French Government to compensate for the loss of funds
devoted to Roman Catholic educational purposes, that great
man who had been appointed referee upon the occasion—the
Duke of Wellington—was compelled to strike his pen through
that item, and to declare, that as the law of England then
stood, that sum of money must he altogether lost and con-
tisca'ed.—( Cheers. ) What were the arguments which were
adopted on the ground of state policy to prevail on them to
discontinue this grant? It was said, that the experiment of an
Irish education fur the priesthood had now been tried for 50
years, and that it had turned nut a failure. It was very easy,
however, to cry out that it was a failure, and it was very easy
to declaim again t the dirt and disloyalty of Maynooth, and to
draw striking camparisons between the education and manners
of the old foreign priests and of those of the prevent day; but
he (Lord J. Manners) doubted, in the first place, whether that
failure were so great and palpable as it bad been described ;
2 ly, whether, even if it were so great,.the Right Hon. Baroeet
at the head of the Government might not be justified in laying
the blame rather at the door of St. Stephen's than at the
door of St. Patrick's ; and, idly, he doubted whether the
course which the Right Hon. Gentleman proposed to take to
remedy that failure for the future might not be a wiser one
than that which the opponents of the grant advised.—( Hear,
hear.) But as to the failure ; what was it ? Why, that the
college in which they educated 400 young- men at 9,0001. a-
year did not possess all the learning of Padua, mingled with
all the graces of Paris ! It bad been said further, also, that
the Maynooth clergy were deficient in loyalty ; that they
did not inculcate those principles of passive obedi-
ence and non-resistance to the laws which they should
wish to sm. He (Lord J. Manners) denied that
that was the fact to any great extent, and those pas-
toral letters which this winter had proceeded from the
Titular Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin might, he
thought, be taken as some proof of the spirit which their
clergy inculcated, and of the doctrines which they taught.—
(Cheers.) He might be wrong in his supposition ; but he
believed that no harm would accrue either to Conciliation-
hall or to Covent-garden, if copies of those letters, written
in gold, were suspended in the most conspicuous parts of
those buildings.—(Cheers.) His firm belief was, that it was
not the doctrine taught at Maynoeth which prevented the
Roman Catholic presthood from being so successful as, he was
sure, all must wish that they should be in keeping down agita-
tion in Ireland; but, it was the struggles after life—it was
the sense of undeserved inferiority—it was the anomaly of
their position, which broke down, so to speak, the theoreti-
cal loyalty which they had learned in the poverty-stricken
cloisters of Maynooth, and which had compelled them, by
means which could not be approved, to seek, if possible, the
political regeneration of their country.—(Cheers.) He would
admit then, so far, that Maynooth might be said to have
failed ; but he would ask in all sober seriousness, could it be
said to have failed in the highest and most important objects
for which it bad been instituted? Had the priesthood of Ire-
land educated in Maynooth failed in their greatest anti holiest
functions? had the morality of the country suffered under
their tutelage? Were the men less sober—the women less
chaste, than under the old:regime ? Or were they, in spite of
all the circumstances of penury and want sander which they had
been educated, still fulfilling those holy and sacred functions
with a zeal and a devotion and a self-denial which could not be
otielpiyoeeaspvvruesewhs.di
pause before
euhbt
lloeodlfhwhof
eee:
teanhhr teta,rinedl
surpassed?—(Cheers.) Were they still, he would ask them,
in the words of his Hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury
to the Trials people—
The priests—those gentle priests and good, their fathers
'midstyti:n in
nshuwpdecoi andeotredpnloreoft
mhteaeplsyltwt
contemptuous
onodheutie:
depressing
theptrnirmltel
ses
:moiGceneocgonnudedpiieyrnic
circum-
stances they revere?"
position,
s_tlLaonot
the priesthood of a religion which, he feared, from the lan-
guage that had fallen from some, they neither esteemed nor
understood.—( Hear, hear.) Then, it had been said, and
with great force, in that work from which he might be per-
mitted to say that so many of the arguments against this mea-
sure had been drawn—he meant the remarkable and learned
work of Dr. Christopher Wordsworth—(" Hear, hear," from
Colonel Sibthorp)—hat whereas by all other countries,
whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, in which the Roman
Catholic religion was acknowledged, and sanctioned, and sup-
ported by the State, every precaution was taken, and every
safeguard was devised, to secure the temporal supremacy of
the monarch against the Roman power—in these realms
alone no such precautions were taken, and that here alone
was " free trade with Rome." " The English nation," it
continued, " pays for Maynooth, and the Pope governs it;
shall not the nation either cease to support or the Pope to
rule it ?" " The priest takes a vow of obedience to the
lues eedeslteeot
Roman pontiff; the bishop swears to maintain the Papacy,
and to preserve the rights and royalties of St. Peter; the
archbishop may hot exercise his sacred functions till he
has received the pa/Una& of Rome. Priests, bishops, and
archbishops, are all the vassals of Rome, rather than the
subjects of Queen Victoria, and yet it is to them that we
make over the exclusive management of the establishments
for the education of the Roman Catholic priests." Those
were the premises. He ( Lord J. Manners) admitted them
to be true ; but what was the conclusion at which the
Rev. Gentleman and those who agreed with him arrived?
—to have nothing whatever to say to that enormous power
which they themselves admitted to be so greatly influential
and formidable. It was a case, in his opinion, for a course of
conduct totally different. He would say to these gentlemen—
" Admit frankly and freely into your union and inter-
surse that power which you acknowledge to be so great and
extensive. Accredit a Minister to the Vatican—receive a
Nuncio at St. James's—and see whether you cannot thus do
and childish weakness to ignore the existence of a Inc-
what you never can effect if you continue by the most misera-
blenarehy which was great before England was a kingdom, and to
which is yet permitted the exercise of such tremendous power
over over every portion of your vast dominions. —("ear'il him
eo)
Those were some of the conclusions which weighed with d
to that of many lion. Members, to
some
question, far oppose
to reply ; but
of whose arguments he had thus endeavoured
h
answer those arguments fur himself, e
while he had attempted to
ost cordial concurrence
in coming to a decision on that grave and most important
coul.i not refrain from expressing his m
favour of the grant. or
Newark of some of the arguments in
the grant b a
himself, he could say that he did not vote for. ee u e
would be to Protestantise Ireland, btlt he
he thought its effects . .
and confiding spirit to which the
in the repudiation of his Right lion. Friend the Merobervtor
did so in that frank, generous,
Right lion. Baronet had appealed; and whilst hp was on that part
Right Hon. Baronet must permit him ( Lord
J. Manners) toremind him that the Catholic lrish Roman Church
was not the only ecclesiastical body in this empire to which the
of his subject, that
English State should extend its support—to which it, were ad-
visfele that she shnuid be actuated in her conduct by a frank,
generous, and confiding spirit also.—( Hear, hear.l The Right
Hon. Baronet and the House might beliee,-e him ( Lor'd Nan-
ners), that the oppcs'stion and great resistance given to the pre-
Setif-grant by so large, and he admitted so reTeetahhi, a body
of the clergy of the Established Church was not the less deter-
mined, sustained and profound, because they felt and believed