J827,] Irish Polemics. 247 



misapply, and draw the weakest conclusions from the falsest premises 

 the obstinacy with which each abounds in his own sense the saintly dia- 

 lect and jargon the papist brogue are traits to make the two philoso- 

 phers of antiquity change their parts, and laugh and cry in very spite of 

 spite. To imagine that such controversies can end in any thing but the 

 respective confirmation of each disputant in his own opinions, is to reject 

 the whole evidence of history : to expect that any solicitings to reform 

 will be listened to, when offered by the persecutor to the oppressed, is to 

 be ignorant of the first elements of human nature. Truth flies from such 

 ill-judged contests; and anger and blows, and jealousies and discontents, 

 are their only possible results. One very necessary effect of this intem- 

 perance of Protestant zeal has followed, from its tendency to excite the 

 Catholic clergy to reprisals. Considerable and successful attempts have 

 been made to convert the lower classes of Protestants ; and as the act of 

 protesting implies iutellectual strength, while obedience to authority is a 

 refuge for the weak, the Catholic has a decided advantage with the illite- 

 rate. There is, however, another consequence, which some will deem of 

 greater concernment than the souls of a few dozen of splapecns ; and that 

 is the political zeal which has been awakened among the Catholic priests, 

 by the inroads of reforming missionaries. To this cause we must, in a 

 great measure, attribute the rebellion which has been hatched among the 

 forty-shilling slaves against their Egyptian task-masters the elan which 

 has been given to Catholic associations the amount of the Catholic rent, 

 and, in general, the increased activity of the whole Catholic body, insti- 

 gated and encouraged by the irritated clergy. Those who could patiently 

 brook the tyranny of the British lion, could not endure with temper the 

 kickings of the missionary ass ; and those who were not to be stirred \>y 

 the obstinacy of (the for-once-undoubting) Lord Eldon, have gone off 

 like a sky-rocket, when kindled by a spark from the murky scintillations 

 of Messrs. Pope and Gordon. This unexpected reaction has aroused the 

 slumbering Orangemen, and reacted, in its turn, upon the establishment. 

 In the face of the King's conciliation letter, Dr. Magee has again buckled 

 on the armour of faith against his Catholic brethren ; and the virulence of 

 his hostility assumes as many and as various shapes and forms as the 

 materiel of a pantomime. The other day he followed up his far-famed 

 antithesis, with an order to revive throughout his arch-diocese the long- 

 obsolete practice of reading the gunpowder-plot service an idle and an 

 useless insult to the population which feeds him. Recently, too, he has, 

 it is said, been stopped in a pious attempt to cause the demolition of a 

 Catholic chapel, part of which he had discovered to stand upon ground 

 belonging in the old time to a Protestant cemetery. His spiritual warfare, 

 active and meddling, partakes of all the infirmity of his personal character. 

 Impetuous, splenetic, overbearing, and uncalculating, it is irritating even 

 when it does not injure and it annoys, where it does not compress. Per- 

 petually en evidence, ho seems urged by the memory of his former liberal- 

 ism, only to a more ostentatious display of high church pretension. We 

 may say of him, in the words of Rousseau, " je ne sais de combien 

 d'hommes il faisait le travail, mais il faisait toujours le bruit de dix ou 

 douze ;" and his noise has the additional demerit of being the more offen- 

 sive, on account of the eminence on which he stands. To the reaction 

 produced by the Catholic elections, must also be attributed the virulent and 

 tumid harangues of Doctors Millar and Robinson not to mention the other 

 less striking effusions of clerical fear and hate, emitted at the various 



