APPENDIX.

Page 63.

Alleged Cruelties of Protestants examined.

Ir has indeed been objected by Dr. Curry, and by my grandfather, in his letter to Hume, that the Irish were provoked to massacres by the forfeitures in Ulster; that the rage of the Inquisition was so boundless as to extend even to the dead; exhibiting a new species of contention, wherein the piety of one party exerted itself in stealing the remains of their deceased relatives to the tombs of their fathers, and the malignant zeal of the other proved equally vigilant to detect the theft, digging up those remains, as unworthy of Christian interment, and throwing them into pits made for that purpose near the highways, after driving stakes through their bodies; that friars and priests were so persecuted, that two of them hanged themselves in their own defence; and that the poor were so persecuted for the tax of one shilling on Sundays, as to fly for safety into dens and caverns, whither they were pursued by blood-hounds!-Countrymen! Is this history?'—

'To take advantage of the ignorance of mankind, for the propagation of falsehood, aggravates the guilt.'-'If any flatter themselves that they do not propagate falsehood by a mutilated and disingenuous disclosure of truth, they must be informed, that men who manage history in this Castabala way,' (Dr. Conor alludes to Dr. Milner,) are far removed from that simplicity of character which gives a favourable idea of their integrity; that they assume a studied appearance, which cannot escape the penetrating eye of a Hume; that they are supposed to have other ends in view, far different from those which they avow; and that he who does not declare the

whole truth must have a reason for concealing that portion of it, which he takes so much care to withhold.'—

'Now I maintain, that the forfeitures of Ulster were the consequences, not the causes of Rebellions; that Tirone, Tirconnel, Maguire, and O'Dogherty, had repeatedly violated their oaths of allegiance;' that those Irish who were not notoriously involved in their treasons were not expelled; that the forfeited lands amounted' to two millions of acres, and that not more than 250,682 were disposed of to the new planters, of whom many thousands were Catholics!' &c. &c. Lynch says, 'that whenever any material injury was offered to Catholics, Nugent, Lord Westmeath, inquired for a vessel to take him to England for redress,' and frequently went himself, for which he was invidiously nicknamed Nugent the messenger.

Those who exaggerate the partial and transitory gusts of passion of those times, seldom or never mention the provocations of the foreign-influenced clergy, in whose conduct and principles they originated; neither are they accurate in their dates; and in some instances they treacherously antedate the facts of which they complain, in order to make it appear that no provocations preceded them! insinuating that these persecutions were not provoked by any misconduct on the part of the Catholics, but owing entirely to Anti-papistical malignity. Thus they refer the Proclamation of 1629 to 1626 *, and they omit the provocations which caused it! In order to come at the truth, we must recur to originals, confront the Protestant with the Catholic, and mistrust both. Hammond l'Estrange is the first who mentions the story of two friars hanging themselves in their own defence; and this story, which he gives with a sneer, and Borlace from him, is gravely copied from the latter by Curry, as an Historical Fact! !' 'Some of the foreign-influenced clergy went so far as to threaten with *Curry's Dialogue, pp. 12, 13.

excommunication any Catholic who voted for a Protestant member of parliament; to administer oaths extra-judicially upon the altar; and to deny sacraments in civil causes,' &c.

'Nothing can injure a good cause more than a disingenuous manner of relating only one part of an historical fact, and suppressing the other. This is the Castabalaism of those scurrilous and calumniating libels, which have at all times characterized the foreign-influenced press, and brought such unmerited obloquy on the religion and the history of our ancestors.'

'The nobility were not persecuted; the gentry were not persecuted. The foreign-influenced friars and bishops, whose principles caused so much obloquy to their religion, were; but they provoked persecution by their conduct, and they inflamed hatred by their principles.'-Historical Address, &c., part ii. pp. 292-308.

After such admissions and exposures as these, who does not at once see how little confidence, independently of evidence rigorously required and examined, is to be placed in the statements made by Romanists of alleged persecutions or cruelties against their own communion? But how strongly do the foregoing representations recall to our mind the scene so graphically related by Tacitus, in the first book of his Annals, when a soldier in the Pannonian legions, taking the lead in a sedition, accused his commander of having made away with, and concealed, the body of his brother, in order to excite the compassion and indignation of his comrades! Answer me, Blæsus, where have you thrown the body? even an enemy does not deny the honour of sepulture: when I have indulged my grief with kisses and tears, order me also to be despatched;' and so he went on, inflaming the minds of the rest to acts of violence, till it was discovered that he had no brother; and then all became calm again; cap. xx. xxiii. But, in truth, our Roman Catholic brethren ought to begin to look a little after their own

credit, for it is at a very low ebb indeed, even with those who do not wish to be obliged to think harshly of them.

There is a passage, however, in Dr. O'Conor's work, which appears first in his Columbanus ad Hibernos, No. IV., requiring some observation of a less laudatory description. At page 100, he has adopted from Gibbon the calumny against Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, that falsehood may be used for a good end; grounding the charge upon the title of the 31st chapter of the xiith book of the Præparatio Evangelica. Ότι δεήσει ποτε τῷ ψεύδει ἀντὶ φαρμάκου χρῆσθαι ἐπὶ ὠφελεία των δεομενων τοῦ τοιούτου τρόπου. I presume the quotation, with its inference, was adopted from Gibbon, in whose Vindication, &c., in the fourth volume of his Miscellaneous Works, ed. 1814, page 630, it appears. That turgid and superficial, as well as unprincipled writer, has taken care not to allow the bishop the benefit of explaining his own meaning. Otherwise he would not have concealed from the reader the few words, in which Eusebius has adduced as examples from scripture, or the Pentateuch, the representations of the Deity, as moved by human affections, as being jealous, or angry, or sleeping, &c. Gibbon had a natural and most orthodox antipathy against the first ecclesiastical historian. He has vented it with some ingenuity and force in the conclusion of the last of his anti-christian chapters in his history. Great advantage is there made, as the foundation of doubt respecting the veracity of Eusebius, of the supposed discrepancy, between Paolo Sarpi and Grotius, in their account of the number of the victims of Papal persecution, a discrepancy for which the English historian is solely indebted to his own ignorance or oscitancy; for the writers are speaking of different subjects. Grotius has unfortunately used the larger number, and therefore becomes the fulcrum upon which the lever to destroy the credit of Eusebius is placed. But even upon the supposition of his exaggeration and the legitimacy of the inference, why should we bound the