The Warrington Examiner. — 1871-07-22 (Warrington, Cheshire, England)

THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER.  Sir,—Tho twelfth of July has again brought Orangemen to the front in various parts of the country, and they seem to get more outrageous every year. At the Pomona meeting, Manch ester, last Saturday, the Rev. S. G. Potter, of Sheffield, so outraged every feeling of common sense and decency as to suggest the doubt whether a Commission of Lunacy would not find a good subject in his case. _ _  It is Pitiable that Protestantism in the persons of its sensible adherents should have to share the odium of his doings, and that of some other (save the mark) reverends nearer home. I maintain, sir, Orangemen are not good Protestants; they do not understand its first principles; they are generally but men of inferior character; have little of either religion or morality about them, and to make up for their lack of the genuine article, make themselves violent partisans. Now for the proof of my assertion. The first great principle of Protestantism is—that every man's conscience is the supreme arbiter of his religious position as regards both the Almighty and his fellows. Orangemen would claim this for themselves, but deny it to others. They cannot see that Roman Catholics have as much right to this as themselves, and wherever they can, they are prepared to deny Roman Catholics common rights, and to uphold penal laws against them, or deny them equal privileges as citizens because they choose to take a creed which, in the exercise of their judgment, commends itself to their conscience. The true Protestant on the other hand wants nothing but a fair field and no favour' and has confidence in God and his principles, well knowing that, if true, his views will prevail. These Orangemen forget, too, that it is the so-called Church of England which has supplied the Roman Catholic Church with its strongest and most numerous converts, and not the Dissenting bodies in England, and it is because these Orangemen are members of a Church which holds (so equivocally) the doctrine of baptismal regeneration that its ablest members are divided upon the point whether that is its doctrine or not, and which has made it possible for teachers like Machonochie, and Bennett of Frome, to train so many of its adherents in Ritualism, which is but sham Roman Catholicism, and which has resulted in so many perversions, as they are called. Instead then of scurrilously attacking Roman Catholics, and bringing rioting, bloodshed, and murder into being in some parts of this or other countries every July, Orangemen would act wisely in joining true Protestants in reforming their own Church, which was but half accomplished at the Reformation, and bringing it into such a state as would prevent the Romanising going on. That the Church by law established does not produce tried Protestants, and that Orangemen are not such, and know nothing of real religion, is strangely proved by criminal statistics. In 1867, there was published, on the authority of Parliament, a return of the criminals in gaol in Ireland, with the religious profession of each convict, and that return proves very clearly what I have stated about Orangemen. Of course, all Irish Episcopalians are not Orangemen, but a large proportion is—a much larger proportion than in England. And what was the result ? For the convenience of comparison, the population of Ireland was divided into blocks of 10,000, and for every 10,000 Roman Catholics there were 65 persons in prison; whilst for every 10,000 Church people there were 52 in prison—not much to boast of here, considering that the Episcopalian sect had a, large proportion of the nobility, gentry, professional, and shopkeeping class in its midst. On the other hand, the despised Presbyterians had, for every 10,000 of their adherents, only 17 in prison, and other Dissenters a much less number still.  Orangemen may depend upon it, if they violate the spirit of the Gospel, which, wherever understood, makes men first just, then peaceable, sober, &c., they don't know much about it, and all their vapouring about blood and the arbitrament of the sword will only make them ridiculous. • And they may further learn that they violate the first principles of the Gospel as well as Protestar, tism, when they are willing to have their cause sustained by any other principle than that the Almighty has hid down for every Christian man's guidance, viz., that he has to do to another as he would have that other do to him.—Yours truly, A