The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-04-16 00:00:00

FRIDAY MORNING, APRIL 16, 1841

The Brindle will cause, which occupied so much I
time at our assizes, and which was settled so much to
the satisfaction, we doubt not, of the Rev. Tho Mas
Sherburne, popish priest, furnishes to our mind just
an additional and very striking proof of the grasping
and encroaching principle of Popery. If there be any
advantage to which the reverend legatee and father
confessor is entitled, personally, from the circumstance
of the heirs at law having given in without entering
into a rebutting case, we freely concede it to him. The
case, as made for Mr. Sherburne, was different from
what the public expected. There seems to have been
no fraud—no attempt to convert into an available tes-
tamentary paper an instrument that was not legally
such, nor any legal incapacity on the part of the testa-
tor: to make a will and leave a handsome estate of above
£460 per annum to Father Sherburne, a total stranger
to him by blood or connection, if so it were his mind
to do. On this head the counsel for the heirs at law
and the learned judge who tried the case, after hearing
a great deal of evidence, were satisfied, and an ar-
rangement was entered into which put an end to all
further litigation, and will secure Mr. Sherburne or his
church in the enjoyment of this piece of good fortune.
Thus far, we grant, the advantage is all on the defend-
ant's side. He has his bond ; the law awards it to
him, and he may not be denied the fruits.
If the issue had gone to the jury, the material ques-
tion for them to determine would have been, whether
Mr. William Heatley was of sound mind at the time
he executed the disputed will ? and on that point, we
allow, it would have been impossible (the evidence ad-
duced in support of the affirmative standing uncontra-
dieted) to have decided otherwise than in favour of the
will. But let us suppose that the issue had been a
little different, and that the question to be determined
were, whether the disposition of his property made so
largely in favour of the priest by the testator was, or
was not, attributable mainly to the " influence and as-
cendancy of popish superstition over his mind"

are much mistaken or the verdict would have been

such as to give new honours to the " acquisitiveness"
of that wakeful and amazingly self-enriching system.
The testator, though not deficient in ordinary busi-
ness, was, it seems, under strong impressions as to the
efficacy of Romish services for the good of his soul,
strict in the observance of all the ordinances of reli-
gion, and in the habit of entertaining priests pretty
frequently at his house. A band of monks and other
ecclesiastics used, as admitted by one of the witnesses,
to hold " conferences" thereat ; and it is certain that
he was a wealthy old bachelor. With these facts we
would submit to a discerning and enlightened jury an
exposition of Romish doctrines touching confession of
sins to a priest, absolution by the same, purgatory,
masses, prayers for the dead, and so forth; and, after
this, some thousand-and-one well-authenticated and
unresistible histories of actual acquisitions made by
that church with its immense corporation of bachelors
prowling about and seeking whom they may devour;
and, having thus arranged our case, and put it into the
hands of some able lawyer, such as Mr. Cresswell or
Sir W. Follett, we would with great confidence look
for a verdict in favour (if we may call it so) of the
Church of Rome ; that is to say, they would decide
that although in this case the attending confessor ob-
tained for himself, or his church, a snug estate, with-
out imputation of any actually fraudulent or unlawful
practice, (in common parlance,) he got it, nevertheless,
through that influence, and that alone, which popish
doctrines on the one side, and extreme credulity on the
other, enabled him to exercise, or placed at his com-
mand.

The Church of Rome possesses inexhaustible sources
of self-enrichment in various modes ; but this of in-
ducing her votaries to bequeath their wealth in her
favour in the prospect of death, has ever been one of
the most fruitful. The innumerable abbeys and reli-
gious houses, says Blackstone, which were built in this
country within a century after the conquest, and en-
dowed so amply, owe their origin to the due appliance

of the Romish ecclesiastics, who taught the overgrown
lords and their adherents in those times of civil tumult,
that founding a monastery a little before their deaths
would atone for a life of incontinence, disorder, and
bloodshed. And the doctrine inculcated was, "that
whatever was so given to, or purchased by, the monks
and friars, was consecrated to God himself; and that
to alienate, or take it away, was no lets than the sin of

sacrilege."

It is the inevitable tendency and effect of Romanism

to enrich the church and starve the people. Look to
Ireland at this moment, where this process is carried

on with the most lamentable success. There the Po-
pish ecclesiastics are acquiring immense riches, and
building magnificent chapels, whilst the unfortunate,
fleeced people are steeped in poverty to the very lips.
Their machinery for extortion is unequalled in any
thing ever before known in the world, and it is ever at

We may acquit Mr. Sherburne, then, on the evi-
dence in the Brindle will cause, of using any unlawful
means; but we certainly do not acquit his church of
being the great instrument by which he, a bachelor
priest, and a total stranger to the testator, obtained, in
preference to his two nieces, who had large families,
and with whom be (the testator) was on the most
friendly terms, an estate of £460 a-year and upwards.
And this fact only shows that if Popery rears its crest
once more in this country, it will do so with all its
ancient pernicious influences and powers.

It is rather a sore point with the free-trade agitators
that if the corn duties were lowered or abolished, wages
must be lowered in proportion. This is a proposition
which throws a stumbling-block in their way of no
small amplitude, and we find that they bestow a great
deal of indignation, if not of argument on those who
advance it. Yet it appears to us that there can be no.
thing more obvious or unquestionable. Mr. Charles
Holland contends that if we take the corn of foreign
countries, we must therefore send them our commodi-
ties in exchange ; but this is a non sequitur. There is
such a thing—in practice, at least, if not in theory—a 2
a "reciprocity all on one side," and we have experi-
enced it abundantly before' now. The foreigner, he
says, will not give us his bread for nothing. No, of
course not; but he will for hard cash; and this is just
what is to be apprehended. We should take his corn ;
but it is not a necessary sequence that he should take
our goods in exchange. Nay, the cheap-corn-men ac-
tually negative the idea of our holding out any induce.

man; to him: to are do; for the edy, shier brod, but
Can they Possibly be serious in ad-