age, added to more than the persecutions of imperial Rome. But all this notwithstanding; the evil has been seriously diminished, and we may well say, has been altogether removed, though several persons still visit the place as an object of curiosityand many who feel themselves excited to devotion, pray there and in the vicinity with sincere piety, whilst we do fear that even as yet there may be sometimes, though seldom, found amongst individuals some remnant of that superstition, which was in troduced in days of that ruinous oppression and unprincipled confiscation which destroyed religion in the ravages of civil strife. But be it remembered that the remedy was applied ere Protestantism began, and it was rendered nearly inefficacious by those who, calling themselves reformers, prevented the timely exertion of that power which ultimately succeeded against their will. Be it also remembered that if the Irish Catholic is poor, his poverty has been caused by the confiscation of the possessions of his ancestors, for their adherence to that faith which they received from their fathers, and by the testimony of their reason; and because they would not follow the changes of an exasperated monarch who "spared no woman in his lust, and no man in his anger;" and of a debased Parliament, that cowered at his frown, and trembled before the menace of a daughter worthy of such a sire. It ill becomes the children of the parents who obtained their wealth by the accommodation of their consciences to the new creed, to taunt with their poverty those whom the most disgraceful code that ever darkened the pages of a statute book oppressed and ground down, because they would not swear that they disbelieved what their hearts cherished, and their judgments approved. But there is a disposition in a portion of the human race to increase the zest of enjoying the booty, by taunting those from whom it was taken! If this peasantry be ignorant; be it remembered that such ignorance was forced upon them by the men who enacted that if any person of their own church dared to give them instruction, or offered them a little learning except at the price of their creed, he should be treated as a felon. Can any conduct be more shameful than this? It was natural just now, at the moment when the sword had been wrung from its grasp, to expect some dying groan of desperate bigotry like the above paragraph from the Quarterly Review, that Corypheus of the Protestant Episcopal Church united to the British crown; but if upon such considerations, it might in its present circum stances be excused, was similar indulgence to be extended to the editors of the "Gospel Messenger," upon whom no attack has been made, who have been left undisturbed in the possession of all the benefits to which they are fully and fairly entitled by that constitution, to establish and to maintain which, the "POOR IGNORANT IRISH PEASANTRY," or emigrants and their sons, exhibited as much ardour, bestowed as much devotion, and poured out as copious libations of their blood upon the American soil, as did any other of the sects or sections which contended for the achievement of our liberties, from the plains of Abraham, where Montgomery fell, to the trenches of Savannah, in which Jasper composed himself to death in his Carolinian flag. There are in this country a set of writers for the religious press, who are so notorious for the character of their productions against our church, that it is not needful to notice them. They may, as far as we are concerned, continue such publications with impunity. There are others, amongst which we have hitherto ranked the "Gospel Messenger," which deservedly claimed a higher place. We were pained, latterly, to observe that the tone of its paragraphs against our religion was approximating to that of the journals to which we have alluded. From the Protestant Episcopal press we expected no praise, we looked for no quarter; but we said to ourselves, "Its conductors are gentlemen, its readers are considered to be high-minded. We shall find mistakes, but no vulgar abuse; we shall find argument to try and confute us, but no miserable efforts to bring into disrepute those whom they cannot answer." We have been disappointed. And we beg to add, for the information of the editors, that before we place them upon our "hopeless list," they shall, if they provoke them, have a few trials. Were we disposed to avail ourselves of every little piece of misconduct or folly of a few of the refuse of their communion, we could annoy them every week. But, God forbid that we should charge the misconduct of bad or of ignorant Protestants to the Protestant religion. Shall we charge upon their church the misconduct of the men of whom another Protestant thus complains within the last six weeks in NEW BRUNSWICK? "Orange Club.-On the examination of an individual who was taken up on Tuesday morning last, for lurking about the house of Mr. Price, it was discovered that he had been attending the near this town, under suspicious circumstances, meeting of the Orange Club, at the house of That such a society should be in ex istence in this province we deeply regret, and sincerely lament that party spirit, either in religion or politics, should be transplanted from the soil of Ireland, (where it would appear to be indigenous,) to the peaceful shores of New Brunswick. No exertions should be spared to ferret out this noxious weed. The more odious when known to be fostered and watered by the disgraced individual to whom we allude in this article. In this colony, where his majesty's subjects are as free as any people in the world, it must be considered an evil gratuitously bestowed upon them, by a few ignorant, and we would almost say, unprincipled men. This attempt at establishing a society, the evils flowing from which would be greater than could be counterbalanced by all the charitable institutions ever devised by the most zealous philanthropist, should brand the names of the projectors with perpetual infamy. We intend to make inquiries, and endeavour to procure the names of the office-bearers, their rules and regulations, with the objects they have in view, together with the place of holding their orgies, and such other information, as may enable us to make an expose of their proceedings; and should we succeed we will lay them before the public, that they may receive such marks of disapprobation as effectually to stop their proceedings."-St. Andrew's Herald. of Rawdon, at which the principal portion of the Protestant inhabitants of the settlement attended. His lordship, the Bishop of Quebec, performed the ceremony, after which confirmation was administered to several persons. "To meet the spiritual wants of the settlers, his lordship, with the most praiseworthy zeal, encountered various difficulties in his journey thither, having had nearly three leagues of the woods to travel by night, without a single house in which he might obtain shelter; however, by means of a guide, who conducted him for the last league, he was enabled to reach the house of the Rev. Mr. Burton about one o'clock in the morning. This I mention to show how anxious his lordship is to promote the welfare of his flock, and to show also how little his zeal is supported by the conduct which followed on the part of several of the communion for which he sedulously labours. After his lordship's departure for Montreal on the afternoon of the consecration, the better and more respectable portion of his audience returned to their respective homes, fully impressed with the excellent advice and admonitions given to them. The main body, however, as if influenced by a different feeling, retired to the next tavern; where I am sorry to say, scenes of the worst and most riotous description took place. All the orgies of the Orange system were set in motion, and nothing was to be heard but toasts and imprecations which displayed anything but the mild tones of religion. In fine, under the influence of copious libations and noisy vociferations, all The men thus denounced are of that class which furnishes to the Quarterly, and to its aids the witness to convict us of the assemblage of ONE MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOU-the impressions of the morning were effaced. SAND pilgrims yearly at Lough Dearg!!! Take this other specimen of the character of the witnesses who testify against Popish superstitions in Ireland, from a Montreal paper of August 17th. The party became so drunk that several of them had to be conveyed home like sacks from a mill; his lordship took to bestow on them the blessthus showing how little they valued the pains ings of religious instruction. "C." Do the editors of the Gospel Messenger desire to continue in their course of misrepresentation? LETTER TO CHANCELLOR DESAUSSURE. [The following letter addressed to Chancellor Desaussure, in order to correct a singular misapprehension of his respecting the Catholic tenets in regard to the retribution of sins in a future state, appeared in the "United States Catholic Miscellany," No. 23 of Vol. VII., for 1827.] MISTAKES. To the Hon. Chancellor Desaussure, &c. MY DEAR SIR-I address you with sentiments of great esteem for your person and office, but from a deep sense of duty. I trust, therefore, that the freedom of my language will not be considered as intending to wound feelings which I respect. In a decree made by you in a case of partition, Elizabeth Fernandis and Sarah Hall vs. William Henderson, Union district, August, 1827, you have unintentionally done a serious injustice to the religion of the vast majority of the Christian world. No blame can be attached to you by them, for not having had it in your power to know their doctrines: nor was your intention to injure or to misrepresent them; on the contrary, you evidently sought to protect their civil rights, where you under a mistake believed them to be in jeopardy. Your act was therefore intended for their benefit; but, whilst I state this in justice to you, I must, in justice to myself and to my flock, endeavour to correct your mistake. In this case, it was objected that a Mr. Charles Jones was an incompetent witness, because he stated that, from his private interpretation of the Scriptures, (the propriety of which mode, as the only rule of faith, is the great and I may almost say the sole cause of separation between the Roman Catholics and Protestants,) he did not believe in a future state of rewards and punishments, for the good and bad actions of mortals. Your statement is the following: "Witnesses were called, who attested that these were the avowed principles and opinions of the witness objected to, as well at the time of signing the will, as at this time: but, being aware how easily the opinions of men may be misap. prehended, or their principles misrepresented, I offered Mr. Jones permission to state his own creed on this point, if he should be disposed to do 8o. He expressed perfect willingness, and stated, (not on oath,) that he believed in the being and attributes of God; that he believed in the government of the world and of the affairs of man, by the Supreme God; that he believed in Jesus Christ, and in the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament; that he believed God would punish the evil and reward the good actions of men; but that the whole of these rewards and punishments would take place in this world, and in this state of existence, until the justice of God be satisfied: and not at all in a future state of existence after the natural death of man; that evil commenced in this life will terminate in this life, and of course the punishment of it; that at the resurrection, man will be raised to immortality, and the immortal will not be punished for the deeds of the mortal. Mr. Jones stated that he believed that every man was bound to speak the truth on all occasions, and that any deviation from truth would be punished by the justice of God in this world; that he derives these opinions from the Scrip. tures alone, and that he held them at the time of signing the will, as well as at this time; but he does not know whether the maker of the will, who called on him to subscribe the same, was acquainted with his opinions.' In giving your decision favourable to the competency of this witness, the following passage is what particularly attracted my notice: "What has made a great impression on my mind is, that the objection is of vast extent, the limits of which I cannot perceive. It might exclude all those from being witnesses, who do not believe in the eternity of punishments. It may exclude Roman Catholics, who believe the punishments in another world may be avoided altogether by absolution, or diminished by masses and prayers. In short, I know not where the objection would stop in its operation; and it would be more mischievous in this country than in any other, because the unbounded liberty of conscience enjoyed by our citizens, leads to many aberrations from the standard of belief which others think correct. The business of the court is not with opinions. The only ques tion is, whether there is reasonable ground to believe that we have such a tie on the conscience of the person offered as witness, as may insure his telling the truth. I think we have, in the case I am considering, and feel bound to admit the witness as competent." Do you mean to say that a Roman Catholic believes that, by receiving absolution, whatever might be his dispositions, he will escape in the next world the punishment which God inflicts upon the unrepenting perjurer? Do you mean to say that a Roman Catholic believes masses or prayers will the unrepenting perjurer from God's justice diminish the quantity of punishment due to in the other world? If such be your meaning, you are very seriously mistaken as to our tenets. If such be not your meaning, your passage has, I believe, no bearing upon the case you were deciding. I am not, I trust, captious in thus publicly addressing you, for the correction of this mistake: for I shall show you that we have already had our feelings sorely wounded, and our civil rights seriously jeopardized, by ignorance of our tenets in this very state. My friend, Judge Gaillard, told me that in York district, about two years since, an attempt was made in the criminal court to invalidate the testimony of the principal witness for the prosecution, upon the ground that he was suspected of being a Roman Catholic; very fortunately, the honourable judge was too well acquainted with our tenets, to admit for a moment the extraordinary supposition, that, during eighteen centuries, the vast bulk of the Christian world was incompetent to testify in a court of justice. I Put the supposition in this manner, as I feel that I could easily convince a mind like yours, trained and habituated as that mind has been to the nice discrimination of evidence, and the comprehensive view of a fine and important subject, that during those centuries the Roman Catholics did constitute that portion, as they now do constitute a body which is numerically more than four times as great as the aggregate of all the Protestants of the world: and comprising in that body its full share of the genius, the erudition, the talent, the wealth, the office, and the integrity of the civilized world. What, sir, must the learned men of our communion in other parts of the world think of the information of our state, when they find that such an attempt is made in our courts of justice? As an American citizen, I feel mortified; as a citizen of South Carolina, I deeply regret the obloquy to which our state would be exposed by the adoption of sectarian mistakes, for that knowledge which I once believed existed in every civilized country, but of which I now know several gentlemen, otherwise very learned, to be totally destitute. intentionally favoured, insist upon; and if the bond be firm in the ratio of the requisites for pardon of perjury, and if we require. more numerous and more severe conditions for pardon, the bond which we give is the best. We insist upon all that the Protestants demand, and thus our bond is equal to their best; further, we require confession to a clergyman, that he might judge, at the peril of his soul, instead of making the criminal his own judge; next, we require that restitution be made to compensate for any injustice which arose from the perjury; thus, in case Charles Jones, by perjury, caused William Henderson to obtain possession of what was really the property of Elizabeth Fernandis, and that Jones being a Catholic confessed this; the priest could not absolve Jones until he should have done all that lay in his power to have Fernandis put in possession of what she was entitled to receive; and should Henderson refuse to restore what he had through the perjury unjustly obtained, Jones would be obliged by the priest to compensate the injured Fernandis by a sacrifice of his own property, since the injustice was effected through him, and if the priest gave absolution without having insisted upon this restitution, such absolution would be invalid, and the priest would, by his neglect of duty, have now subjected himself to the obligation of paying to Fernandis what Henderson or Jones ought to have restored. Thus, sir, in the first place, we have your strongest bond of conscience, and we have the superadded bonds of the peculiar institutions which we have received from our blessed Saviour, and which your ancestors have cast away as being very troublesome and perplexing. When I address you, sir, I assure you I do not know to which denomination of Christians you belong; hence, when I select any denomination to exemplify my case, it is clear I mean not to depreciate that church. I will suppose that a Presbyterian or an Episcopalian commits perjury, and that what I have not always found to be the case with the members of those churches, this person believes in the eternity of punishment in hell; is there any room left for pardon from God, and for the escape of punishment? You will tell me, I presume, that pardon will be granted through the merits of Christ to the truly penitent, who will thus be brought to heaven. Can it be possible that you, sir, are under the impression that Roman Catholics believe they can obtain pardon by absolution without repentance? However reluctant I may be to believe this, I am driven to this conclusion by the following considerations. You do not deny the pardon of God to a Protestant penitent perjurer, and you consider that you have a bond upon his conscience by his belief that if he commits perjury, he will be condemned for ever in another world, unless he repents; you say that you have not so firm a bond upon the conscience of a Catholic, because he conceives that he might be pardoned by a different mode from repentance, viz.: by absolution. Unless this be your process of reasoning, it is to me unintelligible; and I therefore conclude that you believe our doctrine to be, that absolution without repentance, would release from punishment. If you are under this impression, I beg leave respectfully to state, that you are very seriously in error. From you I have experienced kindness, and more than polite attention; you have betrayed your duty, if you, believing that I taught the abominable doctrine that my absolution could save an unrepenting perjurer, and with this impression on your mind, have treated me with kindness. If I taught such a doctrine, I ought not to be tolerated in any civilized state, and you, a venerable judge, ought to have been one of the first to denounce a monster who would preach so destructive a tenet. My dear sir, we believe that perjury is a mortal sin which deserves the eternal punishment of God's justice in hell; we believe that no sin is forgiven, except through the The British government, in order to justify merits of our Saviour Jesus Christ, upon the or to palliate its tyrannical persecution of repentance of the sinner; thus, we stand, Catholics, invented the vile calumny, that at least upon as firm a ground as any Pro- they were not to be trusted upon their oaths; testant. If we require more than this, we and yet, as if to show the grossness of its demand more than the sects which you un-criminality, it offered to the Catholic the When we are conscious of being, if possible, more firmly bound by our oaths than any Protestants can be, what must be our feelings when we are exhibited in public courts as of questionable credit? When we know that our tenets are misrepresented by our enemies, and not thought worthy of examination by a few well-disposed and otherwise well-informed men, in that small portion of the civilized word, where our lot is cast; and when those good men publish the most extraordinary mistakes as legal dicta, and these dicta are published with a morbid avidity by our sectarian opponents, what will well-informed men in other countries think of the literary acquirements of ours? test of an oath as the mode of his avoiding persecution; for if any man swore that he disbelieved certain tenets he was protected. Yet this test was administered to detect the Catholics, who, it was alleged, were not to be trusted upon their oaths, as they might perjure themselves by dispensation, or after perjury be absolved, and yet strange to say, the Catholics of whom this was said, would not swear, and were of course plundered and tortured because they would not swear! The pressure of circumstances in America, made it useful to conciliate the Irish Catholics, and this wise Protestant government offered a mitigation, provided they would swear that they were themselves credible upon oath; that is, swear that they would not perjure themselves-swear that they had not a dispensation for perjury. Do you not startle, sir, at this absurdity? And yet, sir, this is the source of your legal mistake. I respect and esteem you, sir, but I regret that British folly and calumny should have left so much of its worst prejudice in South Carolina. I have reason to be grateful for the kindness of my fellow-citizens, and I am the more grateful, as they have been kind to me even when they were misled. If they treated me with courtesy whilst they were under the erroneous impression that I taught this demoralizing doctrine, what would they not have done had they known the truth? The next position regards the diminution of punishment by masses and prayers. My dear sir, Roman Catholics believe perjury to be a mortal sin, they believe that whosoever dies in mortal sin is condemned to hell; they believe that persons condemned to hell receive no benefit from masses or prayers. Here, then, is another very serious mistake, which I should regret to see copied into an European paper, as made by a chancellor of South Carolina. Why, sir, the Spaniards, the Italians, and the Portuguese would ask in amazement, whether our judges knew anything of the history of the past ages, or of the state of the Christian world, or of the tenets of the Universal Church, were they to suspect that one holding so dignified a station, imagined their belief to be, that the soul of an unrepenting perjurer, could be aided in hell, by masses or by prayers. Could I address them, I would say, "My brethren, the judges of our state are very well-informed in the general principles of law; they are gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, of kind hearts, of liberal disposition, intimately acquainted with the laws of our country; knowing a great deal about the laws of England, and concerning the decisions of its courts, and most favourably disposed toward Roman Catholics; to me, several of them have been personally polite, but they know very little about our religion. I scarcely know one of them who has had any opportunity of knowing its first principles, and the notions which they have of its nature, are indeed curious, and were derived from our worst enemies, the English, whose yoke they have flung off, but many of whose prejudices against us they retain their knowledge of us being derived from British sources, then, you cannot expect that it should be accurate. Be not, then, astonished, if you find serious errors, when they mention us even in their solemn decisions, they do not mean to injure or to misrepresent us; but they act according to their knowledge; time will correct their mistakes." I should hope, sir, that in this address, it would be found that I had been more charitable than severe, and I would intreat of you to believe that upon practical Roman Catholics you have the most firm bond by an oath; for they believe that perjury is a mortal sin, deserving eternal punishment, from no part of which, absolution, prayers, masses, or penance, will deliver them, without true repentance through the merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I remain, dear sir, Your obedient, humble servant, † JOHN, Bishop of Charleston. Charleston, S. C., Dec. 5, 1827. IGNORANCE. WE can easily forgive a Hindoo or a Chinese who knows nothing of our political constitutions; he has had no opportunity of becoming acquainted with either their principles or details. We do not blame a Cherokee, or a Creek, or even a Catawba, if he is not able to tell the difference between a Congregationalist and a Presbyterian; but we are scarcely disposed to extend similar indulgence to the most enlightened portion of our fellow-citizens, if they will not learn of what materials another portion of that community is composed. A quarter of a million is certainly but a small section of |