[ 386 ] MINOR CORRESPONDENCE. POPISH ABSURDITIES. Mr. URBAN,-Some time ago I sent you an account of the Rev. Anthony Gavin, a volunteer convert to the Protestant faith, of the same class (though not so distinguished by learning and abilities) as Mr. Blanco White. I should be sorry to have him forgotten again. For his book, entitled "A Master-Key to Popery," in 3 vols. 12mo, really deserves its name; and is an excellent manual for Protestants, at this time, when so much fallacy is employed, so many jesuitical arts practised, to conceal the real deformities of that lamentably corrupt Christianity, which pretends to be the Catholic Church. Among other matters which his book contains, well worthy of notice, is his demonstration against that grand instrument of priestly avarice, Purgatory. Gavin denies, with other Protestants, and on the same grounds, the existence of such a place of torment. But he reminds Protestants that it is no place for them. No, it is a peculiar favour granted to Catholics! All heretics, (among whom we are the chief,) and unbelievers, go straight to hell, without the resting place appointed for Catholics, from which prayers and money, or rather money and prayers, may release them. Yet to crown the absurdity, as well as falsehood of the thing, he shows, from the representation of the Popes themselves, that, however much purgatory may exist, it must be an empty space; there not be one soul in it. None go there but Roman Catholics, and for them so many days of pardon exist, so many indulgences are granted by the Popes, on various occasions, that it is not possible for any soul to be left there! His mode of calculating this is curious, but very conclusive; because he makes the amplest allowance for every thing that can be stated against him t. can Having given these proofs, he thus winds up his argument: "So we may safely conclude, and with a Christian conscience say, that, if there is such a place as purgatory, it must be an empty place; or that it is impossible to find there any souls; or that the Roman Catholics take every year more souls out of it, than can go into it: all which being against the evidence of natural reason and computation made, it is a dream, fiction," &c. He expresses himself awkwardly, but his meaning is clear enough, and his demonstration undeniably sound. On the subject of the worship of the Virgin, and other Saints, &c. he is very luminous. But, in fact, how do the Roman Catholics know that any one of these persons can hear their prayers; or make inter *See Gent. Mag. 1827, pt. i. p. 126. + See p. 103 of vol. i. 3d edit. cession for them, if they did hear. We do KING'S COLLEGE.-A Constant Reader, referring to the remarks respecting the site of the King's College (p. 300), says, "I think that St. Saviour's would be a most eligible spot, for the following reasons: -The foundation would really be King's College, London, being in one of the City wards. The Church, next in many respects to Westminster Abbey, would be a most suitable appendage, and the parishioners would no doubt consent to an exchange, having once determined to pull it down, and erect a small fabric. The ground to be cleared away on the south would afford ample space for three sides of the great quadrangle, the Church forming the fourth. Other buildings might be erected westward, retaining the fine old Gateway, and there is a space between the Church and the river that would complete the site. There is also a Free School which might be incorporated with the College; and some, if not the whole of the land being property of the See of Winchester, a Charter confirmed by Act of Parliament would provide indemnity for the Bishop and his successors, as well as other venders, if such there be."- -We beg to inform our Correspondent, that the Committee entertain some expectation of being presented with a grant of land in another part of the town; but should they be disappointed, we consider the above site to be as eligible a one as could be chosen. Some unexpected circumstances have, however, transpired, which may for some time retard the undertaking. Mr. DUKE, a CLERK OF OXENFORDE, CYDWELI, T. T. &c. in our next.-G. M.'s conjectures on a device in a window of Fownhope Church, Herefordshire, are unfounded and fanciful. The inscription he has misread is Ave Maria. ERRATA.-Part ii. p. 44, 1, 5, for last, read 1827.-P. 183, col. 1, 1. ult. of text, read Lanrigg; col. 2, 1. 7, for 1800, read 1771.-P. 286, 1. 14, for Thimberg, read Charles Peter Thunberg.-P. 301, b. l. 8 from bottom, for runcival fig tree, read ruminal. THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE. NOVEMBER, 1828. ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. POPERY THE RELIGION OF SLAVERY*. GENTLEMEN, IN Nov. 12. N 1826, you issued an Address, earnestly recommending to the notice of your Protestant fellow-countrymen the celebrated Popish Declaration, signed by those ecclesiastics whom you call the " expounders of your faith;" which Declaration being founded on falsehood and evasion, we considered it a sacred duty to refute and expose. In your last meeting of the 10th inst. you have framed a petition to be presented to the Legislature, containing assertions equally at variance with truth and historical fact. From that petition it may be inferred, that you believe Popery to be the religion of political freedom; and believing it yourselves, you wish others to believe the same; for it is easy to believe that which we are anxious should be true. You state that the Romish religion "was the religion of the men who founded trial by jury, who traced the outline of our system of jurisprudence, who obtained the great charter, who created the two houses of Parliament, and, in short, laid all the original foundations, and erected the most permanent bulwarks of the British constitution." Among your orators, on this occasion, was the Rev. Dr. Wade, a beneficed clergyman of the Established Church, who, like an apostate to the principles which effected the glorious Reformation, chimes in with the above declarations; and gravely asks, "who gave England her boasted trial by Jury and Magna Charta but Catholics?" These assertions, unsupported as they are, would be considered unworthy of notice, were it not a fact that by remaining uncontradicted, they might, in course of time, assume the solemn air of truth. They are evidently borrowed, without reflexion, from the speeches of Irish papistical demagogues; and we feel astonished that English gentlemen should so far compromise their characters, as to "pin their faith" on such unsupported dicta. At the Penenden heath meeting, Mr. Shiel uttered (or at least wrote) similar declarations, which you appear to have servilely copied. He asks, in language equivalent, "Where do you find the elements of your Constitution? Alfred gave you the body of your common law, your judges, your magistrates, your sheriffs, your courts of justice, your elective system, and the grand bulwark of your liberties, the trial by Jury. Was Alfred a Protestant? or were the Barons of Runnemede Protestants? Who was it that gave the people the power of self-taxation, and fixed the representation of the people?" Now these questions were asked by an individual who disgraced himself by his fiendlike exultation over the expiring agonies of the late lamented Duke of York, whose only offence was that of having nobly spoken his candid opinion-a privilege in which the meanest Catholic can freely indulge. Yet this is the man whose sentiments the British Catholic Association have thought proper to adopta man whose very name should excite the honest indignation of every Englishman, and whose person (as even Cobbett, the advocate of Popery, says) should be an object of universal scorn. But to proceed with the subject of this address. There is certainly something novel in the friends of Catholic Emancipation attributing popular freedom to the spirit of Popery; when * "Lord Winchelsea says, my religion is the religion of slavery."- "In the face of clear and indisputable evidence, with Alfred and the Edwards, with Trial by Jury, with Magna Charta, and with Parliament before you, do not denounce the religion of your forefathers as the mother of slavery."-Mr. Shiel's Speech at the Penenden-heath meeting. 388 Popery the Religion of Slavery : (unfortunately for the cause of political liberty) national representation, trial by jury, and every popular right, to which the Catholics revert with apparent exultation, have become extinct, wherever Romanism maintains its sway as in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Sardinia, and other papal states. Then how idle to attribute the elements of the British coustitution to the spirit of Popery, because our Catholic ancestors enjoyed the benefits of it, not in connivance with, but in defiance of the Romish Church, and its persecuting hierarchy. Even in South America, the boasted land of Catholic liberty, the protestant religion is not tolerated; and if Dr. Wade, the advocate for Romanism, were to attempt there to promulgate the creed for which he is here richly paid, he would suffer no less a punishment than death! In Spain and Portugal, we need not inform him, he would meet the same fate. In answer to the groundless assertions of Mr. Shiel and the Catholic Association, just quoted, we will proceed to facts. "One fact (says Mr. Shiel) is worth a hundred arguments;" and there are a host of facts against them. Let us first glance at "Trial by Jury," as being almost exclusively the especial privilege of Protestant Eng land and her dependancies. From every historical record, it is certain that Juries were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies, their institution being ascribed by Bp. Nicolson (in his de Jure Saxonum), to Woden himself, their great legislator and captain. Hence it is, says Judge Blackstone, that we may find traces of Juries in the laws of all those nations which adopted the feudal system, as in Germany, France, and Italy; who had all of them a tribunal composed of twelve good men and true, " boni homines," usually the vassals or tenants of the lord, being the equals or peers of the parties litigant. Sternhook (de Jure Sueonum) ascribes the invention of the Jury, which in the Teutonian languages is denominated nembda, to Regner, King of Sweden and Denmark, who was contemporary with our King Egbert. But the truth is, *France, who has emancipated herself from the chains of Popery, and whose inhabitants are chiefly sceptical, if not infidel, mast of course be excepted from the list of papal states. [Nov. that this tribunal was universally established among all the northern nations, and so interwoven in their very constitution, that the earliest accounts of the one give us also some traces of the other. In England we find actual mention of Juries so early as the laws of King Ethelred, and that not as a new invention, but as having been originally derived from our Pagan ancestors. Yet the Catholic Association, and their itinerant orators, have the unblushing effrontery to ascribe their origin, not only to Alfred, over whom the Vatican never had any influence, but to the spirit of Popery, which, they insinuate, dictated so admirable an institution. Now it is easy to show, not only that our Trial by Jury did not originate with Popery, but that it has always been rancourously opposed by the popish priesthood from their introduction into this country to the period of the Reformation; and, indeed, nothing but the determined spirit of freedom which actuated our laical ances tors to resist papal encroachment, could have saved it from utter annihilation. The Romish canon and Roman civil laws, have always been arrayed in opposition to the Common Law of the land, which admitted trial by Jury. King Stephen resisted the introduction of these papal laws by prohibiting the study of them, which was treated by the priesthood as a piece of impiety, the Common Law or Trial by Jury being despised, and esteemed little better than heretical. In the reign of Henry III. says Spelman, the episcopal constitutions were published, which forbade all ecclesiastics to appear as advocates in the courts of Common Law, the object of which was to bring Trial by Jury into contempt and desuctude. The spiritual Judges of these courts soon after withdrew, because they would not administer the law according to the judicial custom of the realm. "But wherever" they retired (says Blackstone), and wherever their authority extended, they carried with them the same zeal to introduce the rules of the civil and canon, to the exclusion of the municipal law. This appears in a particular manner from the spiritual courts of all denominations, from the chancellor's courts in both our universities, and from the high court of chancery; in all of which the proceedings are to this day in a 1828.] Addressed to the British Catholic Association. course much conformed to the civil. and canon law; for which no tolerable reason can be assigned, unless that these courts were all under the immediate direction of the popish ecclesiastics, among whom it was a point of religion to exclude the municipal law; Pope Innocent IV. having forbidden (A.D. 1254) the very reading of it by the clergy, because its decisions were founded merely on the customs of the laity." Is it not extraordinary that our Popish declaimers, with these historical proofs before them, should attribute our Common Law and Trial by Jury to the spirit of Popery, which, it is evident, has always sought their destruction? To behold the effects of papal legislation, we have only to refer to our chancery and ecclesiastical courts, where few can enter but at the loss of all they possess. But if we wish to see a papal court of justice in full perfection, where the Catholic priesthood are its administrators, as formerly in our own courts, let us refer to the glorious Inquisition-a tribunal with which those happy regions of Romish idolatry, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, have been supereminently blessed; and before which few ever appeared without the loss of both life and property. As a still happier specimen of Popish legislation, let us refer to that paragon of papal perfection, his "most Catholic" Majesty, not forgetting his worthy compeer Don Miguel. But to speak seriously, is it not dis ingenuous sophistry, and the most insolent mendacity, to represent that bulwark of British freedom, Trial by Jury, as the offspring and protegé of Popery? when her incessant object has been to crush it at every stage, precisely as she has done in every country where her baneful influence has unfortunately extended. As to Magna Charta, it is an insult to the commonest understanding, to assign its origin to the spirit of Popery. It was a political feeling alone that urged the Barons of Runnemede to enforce the charter from the priestridden John. In fact, it was nothing more than a conspiracy of feudal despots, who had life and death at their disposal, to resist the despotism of a papal tyrant, who was himself subject to the greatest of all tyranny, the tyranny of the Romish see. But what is there in Magna Charta equivalent 389 to our Habeas Corpus Act, which extends to the meanest subject of the realm? or what papal state enjoys the popular right which the Habeas Corpus Act conferred? Perhaps the Catholic Association will attribute this boon to Catholicism also, because it is suspected that Charles II. was a Papist! In truth, Magna Charta did not effect one earthly good for the labouring portion of the community, who were actually slaves liable to be bought and sold, bearing on their necks iron collars, with the name of the baron or abbot whose property they were. The villeins of the papal ages "could acquire no property either in lands or goods; but, if he purchased either, the lord might enter upon them, cast the villein, and seize them to his own use." Such was the system of oppression under papistical regime. We shall now consider how far our representative government, founded on popular rights, has originated from the spirit of Popery, and whether this spirit "created the two Houses of Parliament," as the Catholic Association and Mr. Shiel would insinuate. Representative governments were, both before and after the introduction of Christianity, the especial characteristics of all the northern nations, especially of our German or Saxon ancestors, as we learn from Tacitus and other ancient authorities of unquestionable veracity. In our own country a great or general council of the realm, as every antiquary knows, was held immemorially under the different names of michel synoth, or great council; michel gemote, or great meeting; wiltena gemote, or meeting of wise men. Instances of these representative meetings occur so early as Ina king of the West Saxons, A. D. 725, Offa, king of the Mercians, and Ethelbert, king of Kent. But when Christianity became corrupted, and degraded into Popery, then, and not till then, did national representation and popular freedom expire before its pestilential blast. Thus it may be truly said, that at the Norman or hierarchal era in England, the very semblance of representative government, as resulting from popular freedom, was annihilated by the universal and blighting influence of papal despotism; but shortly after the restoration of the Saxon line, at least in the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I., the ruthless spirit of $90 Popery the Religion of Slavery. Romish oppression received some salutary checks; and the representative government of our Saxon ancestors began to re-assume, in some measure, its ancient but almost obsolete form. Mr. Shiel has the effrontery to assert that where Protestantism Aourishes, there is nothing but tyranny; and where Popery prevails, there is prosperity and national freedom! "Look at Italy (says he), not as she is, but as she was." Yes, look at Italy, we reply; not as she is, but as she was previous to the introduction of Popery; when Campagna di Roma alone maintained a million of inhabitants, which now, under the petrifying breath of papal bigotry and oppression, can scarce support a thousand. At this time Italy, the finest country in the world, is but a by-word for contempt and political imbecility. Would this be the case, we ask, if she was under [Nov all ways be tried to justify him; if that be impossible, let him be chastised with greater noise than damage. If it be a subject that has assaulted a nobleman, let him be punished with the utmost severity." Yet Mr. Shiel most ludicrously exclaims, "Venice, Catholic Venice, rises up from the ocean with all her republican glories round about her!" And still, in the midst of her glories, she never tolerated Protestantism, though even a Mahometan or Jew might claim some of the rights of a Venetian citizen. We have now, we conceive, adduced sufficient to prove that Popery is the eternal enemy of political freedom; and, as Lord Winchelsea justly observed at the Penenden-heath meeting, "the religion of slavery." ΠΑΝ. DEING in possession of an early a Protestant government, with a Pro-B testant population? Even the Catholic Association must answer in the negative. When vaunting of the Italian states, Mr. Shiel refers, with exultation, to Catholic Venice, as a model of civil liberty. It is true that the republican citizens, for a short period, established a system of freedom'; but it was soon rendered a nullity by oligarchical oppression, and the baneful influence of the papal hierarchy. The Council of Ten, which took cognizance of state crimes, had the power of seizing accused, or even suspected persons, examining them in prison, and taking their answers in writing, which were brought as evidence against them. Any thing like trial by Jury, or the Habeas Corpus Act, was utterly unknown. But when Venice was under the minions of the holy see, in what did her boasted liberty consist? The tribunal of state inquisitors, consisting of only three members, had the power of deciding, without appeal, on the lives of every citizen belonging to the Venetian state. They had the right of employing spies, and issuing orders to apprehend all persons whom they thought reprehensible; and could try and execute them at their will and pleasure. But to form a just estimate of the Venetian laws, it will be sufficient to quote father Paul's maxims of the republic of Venice: "When the offence (says this Catholic writer) is committed by a nobleman against a subject, let printed book in the Italian language, entitled "Li Miracoli de la Gloriosa Virgine Maria," I venture to send a short account of this work, to shew what absurd notions prevailed among the Roman Catholics in 1505, the date of this volume. This work must not be confounded with that in the English language printed by W. de Worde in 1514, as the stories are different, and have no connection with each other. Besides the title and the frontispiece, the work consists of 81 pages, printed in double columns; also a table of sixty-one chapters, concluding with these words "Qui finisse la tavola de li capituli li quelli se contengono in questo opera cioe de li Miraculi de la Gloriosa Virgine Maria, stampato in Venesia per Bartolamio de Zani da Portes M.CCCCC.V. a di VI. de Novembrio. Registro ABCDEF, tutti sono quaderni: ecepto F. chi e duerno. Finis." The frontispiece represents two persons in conversation; one of whom is a disguised demon upon a horse. This frontispiece has a rich border of arabesque work, and to every chapter is a small but rude cut. To enumerate the heads of the sixty-one chapters might tire your readers; a few only are inserted to give some idea of the nature of this curious and scarce work; and to shew the idolatry in which the name of the Virgin Mary was held. "How the glorious Virgin Mary saved a |