566 The Brunswick Clubs. [Dec. 
and religion. That such a connexion with a foreign power should be 
suffered to exist under the British government, is one of those wonders 
of short-sightedness and contradiction which turn politics into contempt. 
Dearly has the country rued it already—more dearly still shall it rue it 
yet. A manly government would have at once appealed to the common 
sense of mankind, scorned to own the takers of such an oath among its 
subjects, and made the taking of it high treason by law. 
With the Romish clergy themselves the whole principle of their 
government is the most unqualified tyranny. The pope is by the 
constitution of popery bound by xo law whatever, except that of pushing 
the claims of his see to the utmost possible pitch. His will is the law. 
He has no assessor, no control, no code which he cannot abrogate at a 
word. His government is the most complete despotism ever known. 
He can impose whatever oath he pleases to-day—he can dissolve it 
to-morrow. ‘Treaty with him is absurd ; he can discover that it is not 
for the good of the church, at any time he chooses, and the treaty is 
ipso facto null and void. For the great standing eanon of the Romish 
system is, that all obligations injurious to the interests of the Romish 
see are, by their very nature, extinguished. If the pope at this hour 
were to sanction the abjuration of papal allegiance by his Irish clergy, 
he might abrogate his concession in the next. “But the impossibility of 
making the concession with any actual validity is so well known, that 
if the present pope, in dotage or fear, in corruption or conscience, were 
to make this concession, essential .as it is to the safety and prosperity of 
Ireland, no Irish priest could be found to avail himself of it, if any Irish 
government could be found mad enough to confide in it. For it would 
be a nonentity in the very act of passing, and the next pope would 
unquestionably dissolve the compact. The fact is, that by this oath a 
grasp is laid upon the British empire which no pope can relinquish ; a 
connexion is established by the Irish priesthood with Rome, and through 
it with foreign powers, which no Irish priest, in the prospect of prefer- 
ments, bishoprics and cardinals’ hats, will ever relinquish; and if the 
pope and the priests together were by miracle willing to abate the 
nuisance, it would be still secretly but irresistibly insisted on. by the 
popish sovereigns, who see in it at once the means of perplexing the 
British government, of keeping open a point of attack in case of war, 
and undoubtedly, to the minds of those bigotted and priest-ridden princes, 
an opportunity, not yet desperate, of bringing back to Romish idolatry 
the Protestant portion of a country, which lay once, like themselves, in 
the unbroken darkness of the most sullen and merciless superstition of 
the world. / 
The tyranny of the pope binds the prelate—the tyranny of the prelate 
binds the rector—the tyranny of the rector binds the curate. Of all 
those ranks not one man can indulge in a single act of human choice, 
but by permission of his supreme master. His meals, ‘his books, his 
hours, his habits, are all regulated for him by the ordinance of the 
church. He dares not eat, he dares not speak, he dares not connect 
himself with his country, serve his kind, or worship his God, but by the 
sullen and prescriptive mandate of a church, which propagates perpetual 
repugnance to lawful government, through the medium of perpetual 
submission to an Italian priest, and keeps its miserable adherents in the 
toils at once of slavery and rebellion. 
