The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1852-05-11 00:00:00

hers, large pla-

in the s

ts, and 8,000 or

10.000 1

')uted every week

the cle

Nor is this

o the city of Dublin ; for the testi-

men from all

,rts of Ireland, who

t the

Dublin to the number of at

out 500,
The

en toitsfoundat

Roman Catholic paper) confesses

success of the proselytisers is beyond anytbin

vings could have dreamt of;" cnd other

land." Nor must we esti-

e 34,01

is at the present moment in Ireland. For a
me of Mullen writes from America in the
imploring the Irish priests not to
people emigrate, as they nearly all

let of April 10th

turn Protestants on their arrival there—the Church of
Rome having lost, as he proves by facts and figures, Iwo
millions of her members in the United States during

the last twenty-seven years, including the emigrants
who ought to have been " Catholics." In fact, the

weir priests. Thousands of them are disgusted with
Popery, and rather than face persecution at home they
emigrate. It is no uncommon thing for those who have
settled in America to send money to their friends in Ire-
land to bring them over, accompanied by the strict in-
junction to bring no priests with them ; which the sad
priests, finding their occupation gone at borne, have often
been anxious to do. The priests' power, however, though
comparatively broken, is still very great over those who,
despising them at heart, are compelled to submit to them,
-nt being able to make up their minds to incur persecu-
s-; openly becoming converts. 'Were it not for this,
violent opposition to the converts would now be almost
unheard of, as the whole mind of Ireland has begun to
look so favourably towards Protestantism. However the
famine may have operated to convince the people that
their priests are only men, and not the best of men either ;
or however valuable may have been the labours of the
Irish Society in disseminating a knowlege of the Scrip-
tures; the movement is too universal to be attributed to
anything but the direct interposition of God : an interpo-
sition which is manifest in combining at the same time

I from t

just the three things which were necessary, humanly
speaking, for the evangelization of Ireland—the preparing
the hearts of the people to listen and enquire, the arousing
of the Irish clergy to do battle with Romanism, and the
awakening of English Christians to see the necessity of
assisting their brethren in the holy warfare. Mr. Dallas's
great work hasbeen discovering the preparedness of Ireland
to receive the Gospel, and bringing the subject promi-
nently before the British public. The Irish Society
(which is only one society, worked by two committees,
one in London and one in Dublin, and which has now
assumed a more open missionary character, to suit the
present crisis) and the Irish Church Missions (into which
Mr. Dallas has expanded) are now doing exactly the same
work—the former in the Irish-speaking districts, the
latter in the English-speaking districts ; and the Rev.
Denis Browne, who has visited all the missions, declared
the other day in Dublin, that he could not say which was
doing the most good. As to the denial, which some have
made, of the fierce persecution endured by the converts,
the fact has been too often proved in courts of justice,
nay is too unblushingly gloried in and instigated by the
Popish press, to require any proof here. And amongst
the other numberless oppressions, which the British Go.
• vernment, in days we hope now past, have perpetrated,
or allowed to be perpetrated, upon the Protestants of
Ireland, not the smallest has been the gross partiality of
too many magistrates and others in authority in favour of
the persecutors. Not many weeks since, at Pallasgreen,
county Limerick, a man was convicted of attempting to
stab a scripture-reader whom he found reading the Bible
to his mother in her own cabin. The two magistrates
said the reader had no business to enter the house with-
out being invited (although the woman had received him
willingly), and fined the intended murderer sixpence .1
Another magistrate, in Galway, when several persons
were brought up for hooting and yelling after the con-
verts in the streets of Tuam, said " they were only exer- '
cising a perfectly legitimate privilege." The priests always
take a leading part in such trials, and often make violent
speeches and browbeat the witnesses, while the Protestant
clergyman is not allowed to interfere at all. The question
of bribery, too, was now pretty generally understood.
The charge of wholesale bribery was lately made by a
speaker at a public meeting in Dublin. The Archbishop
of Dublin asked for his proofs : he could only allege one
case, which happened fifteen years ago, and the evidence
of which was very doubtful. The Rev. H. Wilberforce
has made the same charge. Mr. Dallas challenged him
to a public investigation, offering to pay the whole ex-
penses of it, if one single case of bribery was proved
against the Irish Church Missions Society. Father
O'Dwyer, of Doon, was another accuser, to whom Mr.
Minton had sent the following letter
Liverpool, May Ist, 1852.
" Reverend Sire—You have repeatedly asserted in pub-
lic, that the reformation in Doon was effected by bribery ;
and denied that it was accompanied by persecution.
" Having ascertained, by personal investigation, that
your charges of bribery against the Protestant clergymen
were totally false, and their charges of persecution against
you only too true, I called at your house last 'Wednesday,
candidly to tell you what I should say about you on my
return to Liverpool, and to ask whether you had anything
to say why sentence should not be pronounced upon you.
On coming home, and finding that I had called, you rode
out of the village, saying you would follow me to the
Glebe. After your display of moral courage in running
away from the Liverpool discussion last year, your people
would not be surprised to learn, the next morning, that
your heart failed you, as soon as you were out of sight of
the village.

"1 now challenge you to a public discussion, either in
Dublin or in Liverpool, any day you like to choose, upon
the two points of bribery and persecution, at well as upon
the fact of your being a Roman Catholic priest. And I
hereby engage, that if on that occasion you can prove
yourself to be a true priest, according to the principles of
your own church, I will give you £5O for the poor of your
parish.—l am, Reverend Sir, yours, &c.,
" SAMUEL MINTON,
" Incumbent of St. Silas's Church."
Documents have, indeed, been published, purporting to
be signed by converts, who have been starved or perse-
cuted back to mass, to the effect that they never would
have turned Protestants unless they had been bribed.
But the value of such statements will be appreciated
when it is known that the relapsed converts are often
made to sign blank papers, which are afterwards filled
up by the priest with whatever he likes. This he (the
Lecturer) could bring witnesses to prove on their oaths.
Relapsed converts the priests call "split bowls," knowing
that a man whose eyes have once been opened to the
hollowness of Popery can never again become a Papist
at heart. Indeed, there have been no more unblushing
falsehoods publicly stated about the work in Ireland
than those which assert that the converts generally send
for a priest on their death-beds. There has only been
one such case in the district of Doon, and proportionably
few in other places. When a convert is too far gone to
resist or remonstrate, his Roman Catholic neighbours
often send for the priest to anoint him; and then it is given
out that he died a Roman Catholic. It was stated, too,
publicly and authoritatively, that the Rev. H. Wilber.
force had been on a missionary tour, preaching at Oughtc-
rarde, and that the converts came round him in great
numbers, with tears in their eyes, confessing their apes-
tacy, and imploring to be received back into the church ;
the fact being that not one convert relapsed on that occa-
sion, or even went to hear him. These cases show what
credence should be given to any reports about such
matters from such quarters.
The Lecturer then went on to speak more particularly
of the Reformation in Doon, on the borders of Limerick
and Tipperary ; in doing which, he distinguished between
the village, the parish, and the Irish Society's district,
of Doon. A few years ago, the whole neighbourhood
was one of the very worst parts of Ireland. Ribbonism,
seizing of arms by night, drilling large parties by mid-
night, faction fighting, murder, mid-clay assassination,
illicit distillation, and going to mass, were the pursuits of
the people. Such a state of things P- v f [I.

_ opery rosterea
iiow, in the altered lives of very many converts, who
are adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour, and in the
general peace and absence of crime throughout the entire
district, we can trace the work of our God, and infer that
the time for Ireland's regeneration, that is Ireland's evan-
gelization, has arrived." What bas been the instrument
in doing this ? The Irish Society. In 1845 it com-
menced operations there. During the violence of the
famine, (when, if bribery had been the mainspring, we
should have seen the largest number of apparent conver-
rersions,) there was not one convert made, and it was not
until the end of 1848 that the fruit appeared ; nor was it
intil Feb. 1850, when about 90 persons had come out of
Rome, and some, being turned out of their employment
n consequence, had actually died of hunger, that the
lergy saw the necessity of taking land in order to give
rork to the converts, several of whom, on their death
-
'prig_ 1i 1 apnt Cm. flu' vevr•

clergy m
f Lin he*,

mistaken fear of the charge

on which Is
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