After this bird's-eye view of the Papacy in Europe, let us inquire, What position has it obtained among ourselves? Great Britain is the head of the world; if the Papacy shall succeed in restoring its dominion in Great Britain, it will by the same act restore it all over the earth. This is its grand ambition, and at this hour it is within measurable distance of this supreme victory.
In 1829 the Papacy, which had been stripped of legislative powers by the revolution settlement, was again admitted into the British Parliament. Since that year it has made rapid strides towards political supremacy. It has more than quadrupled its agencies—its priests, chapels, congregations—so that there is not a city or town, scarce is there a shire or parish, that has not been brought under its influence, and is now a seat of its propaganda. This regular mechanism it has supplemented with a growing array of monasteries, nunneries, colleges, and schools. And in these last it is not the Roman Catholic youth only that are being educated; thousands of Protestant children have been drawn into these seminaries, and are being prepared to swell the popish population of the future. As if Rome's own action were not enough, we ourselves have grafted a popish ministration on every department of the public service. Paid popish chaplains are busy at work in our prisons, in our reformatories, in our work-houses, in our army and navy; these various departments are being utilized for the conveyance of Romanism over the empire, and the permeation of the body politic with an influence which, like a deadly poison, once received into the veins of a nation, inevitably kills it. A regular hierarchy has been established in the three kingdoms. Canon law has been proclaimed, and there is not a Romanist in England, Scotland, or Ireland who is not, through the confessional, made amenable to canon law, and ruled by it in his political and social acts, as well as in his religious duties. Canon law knows but one monarch, and to that monarch the undivided allegiance of every Romanist is due. This is an empire within an empire, if ever there was such.
5. If the Papacy has created an imperium in imperio in the nation, it has planted a parliament within a parliament in the legislature. A phalanx of eighty-four members represents it in the British House of Commons. These eighty-four men are united, inscrutable, resolute, defiant, and extort submission to their demands by the simple, yet formidable expedient of obstruction. Through them the Vatican has made itself the master of the cabinet, the terror of the parliament, and largely the ruler of the nation.
6. Moreover, popish provincial councils are of frequent occurrence. What is the function of these councils? They concert plans of political action applicable to emergencies, and their resolutions, countersigned at Rome, are binding on all Romanists, who must act on the lines chalked out for them, whatever confusion or calamity their action may cause, and whatever penalty it may expose themselves to from the law of the land. The nation against whose peace and unity these intrigues are being formed knows nothing of it all the while, till some outbreak or explosion proclaims on the house-top what the council had previously planned in secret.
THE IRISH FULCRUM.
7. Ireland is still the main fulcrum on which the Papacy rests its lever in its attempts to overturn the Protestant kingdom of Great Britain. The cherished policy of the Jesuits has ever been to keep Ireland ignorant, wretched, and agitated; to separate it from Great Britain, erect it into an independent kingdom under the rule of the Vatican, and to employ it for the destruction of British liberty and Protestantism. This scheme has already, twice over, been on the eve of accomplishment. It has been a third time revived, and more nearly carried to completion than on the occasion of the two former attempts. There is now a pause, but it will soon be over, and the work of overthrowing "Protestant ascendancy" in Ireland will be again resumed. Protestant ascendancy has been defined to consist in three things: (1) The Established Protestant Church in Ireland; (2) the Protestant landlords of Ireland; (3) the Protestant education of Ireland. Great progress has of late been made in destruction of all three. The Established Protestant Church has fallen. The Irish system of education has been revolutionized, and well-nigh wrecked. First, the Kildare schools were put down; next the national schools, and the queen's colleges were denounced as godless, abandoned by the Government, to be refashioned and refitted by the priesthood. And, last of all, a popish university was established, the effect of which has been to place the education of Ireland in the power of a popish conclave, and the schools in the hands of the Christian brothers, who educate their pupils on the principles of the syllabus; or, as Lord John Russell expressed it, minister poison to the youth of Ireland as their daily food.
The most ominous part of this business is the changes which have been effected in our statute book. The whole legislation of the past five hundred years has been diligently searched, and not an act or statute which could offer the smallest hindrance to the advance of Popery to place and power in the State, but has been weeded out and swept away. Upwards of forty statutes of this character have been repealed. All the securities embodied in the Emancipation Act of 1829, with one exception, have been abolished. All the securities in the revolution settlement, with one exception, have been swept away. All offices under the crown, the English wool-sack excepted, are now open to Romanists. The oath of the royal supremacy has been swept away. The oath recognizing the Protestant succession has been swept away. The act of settlement alone is left, the one barrier between us and a popish reign. If that solitary act were to share the fate of the others, we should speedily see a vassal of the Pope on the throne of Great Britain.—Rev. J. A. Wylie, LL.D., of Edinburgh.