The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore :: :: University of Virginia Library

“This clamour, which pretends to be raised for the safety of religion, has almost worn out the very appearance of it, and rendered us not only the most divided but the most immoral people upon the face of the earth.” Addison, Freeholder, No. 37.

Start not, my friend, nor think the Muse will stain
Her classic fingers with the dust profane
Of Bulls, Decrees, and all those thundering scrolls,
Which took such freedom once with royal souls ,

When heaven was yet the pope's exclusive trade,
And kings were damn'd as fast as now they're made.

No, no—let D---gen---n search the papal chair
For fragrant treasures long forgotten there;
And, as the witch of sunless Lapland thinks
That little swarthy gnomes delight in stinks,
Let sallow P*rc*v*l snuff up the gale
Which wizard D---gen---n's gather'd sweets exhale.
Enough for me, whose heart has learn'd to scorn
Bigots alike in Rome or England born,
Who loathe the venom, whencesoe'er it springs,
From popes or lawyers , pastry-cooks or kings,—
Enough for me to laugh and weep by turns,
As mirth provokes, or indignation burns,

As C*nn*ng vapours, or as France succeeds,
As H*wk*sb'ry proses, or as Ireland bleeds!

And thou, my friend, if, in these headlong days,
When bigot Zeal her drunken antics plays
So near a precipice, that men the while
Look breathless on and shudder while they smile—
If, in such fearful days, thou'lt dare to look
To hapless Ireland, to this rankling nook
Which Heaven hath freed from poisonous things in vain,
While G*ff*rd's tongue and M---sgr*ve's pen remain—
If thou hast yet no golden blinkers got
To shade thine eyes from this devoted spot,
Whose wrongs, though blazon'd o'er the world they be,
Placemen alone are privileged not to see—
Oh! turn awhile, and, though the shamrock wreathes
My homely harp, yet shall the song it breathes
Of Ireland's slavery, and of Ireland's woes,
Live, when the memory of her tyrant foes
Shall but exist, all future knaves to warn,
Embalm'd in hate and canonised by scorn.

When C*stl*r---gh, in sleep still more profound
Than his own opiate tongue now deals around,
Shall wait th' impeachment of that awful day.
Which even his practised hand can't bribe away.

Yes, my dear friend, wert thou but near me now,
To see how Spring lights up on Erin's brow
Smiles that shine out, unconquerably fair,
Even through the blood-marks left by C---md---n there,—
Could'st thou but see what verdure paints the sod
Which none but tyrants and their slaves have trod,
And didst thou know the spirit, kind and brave,
That warms the soul of each insulted slave,
Who, tired with struggling, sinks beneath his lot,
And seems by all but watchful France forgot —

Thy heart would burn—yes, even thy Pittite heart
Would burn, to think that such a blooming part
Of the world's garden, rich in nature's charms,
And fill'd with social souls and vigorous arms,
Should be the victim of that canting crew,
So smooth, so godly,—yet so devilish too;
Who, arm'd at once with prayer-books and with whips ,
Blood on their hands, and Scripture on their lips,

Tyrants by creed, and torturers by text,
Make this life hell, in honour of the next!

Your R---desd---les, P*rc*v*ls,—great, glorious Heaven,
If I'm presumptuous, be my tongue forgiven,
When here I swear, by my soul's hope of rest,
I'd rather have been born, ere man was blest
With the pure dawn of Revelation's light,
Yes,—rather plunge me back in Pagan night,

And take my chance with Socrates for bliss ,
Than be the Christian of a faith like this,
Which builds on heavenly cant its earthly sway,
And in a convert mourns to lose a prey;

Which, grasping human hearts with double hold,—
Like Danäe's lover mixing god and gold ,—
Corrupts both state and church, and makes an oath
The knave and atheist's passport into both;
Which, while it dooms dissenting souls to know
Nor bliss above nor liberty below,

Adds the slave's suffering to the sinner's fear,
And, lest he 'scape hereafter, racks him here!

But no—far other faith, far milder beams
Of heavenly justice warm the Christian's dreams;

His creed is writ on Mercy's page above,
By the pure hands of all-atoning Love;
He weeps to see abused Religion twine
Round Tyranny's coarse brow her wreath divine;
And he, while round him sects and nations raise
To the one God their varying notes of praise,
Blesses each voice, whate'er its tone may be,
That serves to swell the general harmony.

Such was the spirit, gently, grandly bright,
That fill'd, oh Fox! thy peaceful soul with light;

While free and spacious as that ambient air
Which folds our planet in its circling care,
The mighty sphere of thy transparent mind
Embraced the world, and breathed for all mankind.
Last of the great, farewell!—yet not the last—
Though Britain's sunshine hour with thee be past,
Ierne still one ray of glory gives,
And feels but half thy loss while Grattan lives.

The king-deposing doctrine, notwithstanding its many mischievous absurdities, was of no little service to the cause of political liberty, by inculcating the right of resistance to tyrants, and asserting the will of the people to be the only true fountain of power. Bellarmine, the most violent of the advocates for papal authority, was one of the first to maintain (De Pontif. lib. i. cap. 7.), “that kings have not their authority or office immediately from God nor his law, but only from the law of nations;” and in King James's “Defence of the Rights of Kings against Cardinal Perron,” we find his Majesty expressing strong indignation against the Cardinal for having asserted “that to the deposing of a king the consent of the people must be obtained”—“for by these words (says James) the people are exalted above the king, and made the judges of the king's deposing,” p. 424.—Even in Mariana's celebrated book, where the nonsense of bigotry does not interfere, there may be found many liberal and enlightened views of the principles of government, of the restraints which should be imposed upon royal power, of the subordination of the Throne to the interests of the people, &c. &c. (De Rege et Regis Institutione. See particularly lib. i. cap. 6. 8. and 9.)—It is rather remarkable, too, that England should be indebted to another Jesuit for the earliest defence of that principle upon which the Revolution was founded, namely, the right of the people to change the succession.—(See Doleman's “Conferences,” written in support of the title of the Infanta of Spain against that of James I.)—When Englishmen, therefore, say that Popery is the religion of slavery, they should not only recollect that their own boasted constitution is the work and bequest of popish ancestors; they should not only remember the laws of Edward III., “under whom (says Bolingbroke) the constitution of our parliaments, and the whole form of our government, became reduced into better form;” but they should know that even the errors charged on Popery have leaned to the cause of liberty, and that Papists were the first promulgators of the doctrines which led to the Revolution.—In general, however, the political principles of the Roman Catholics have been described as happened to suit the temporary convenience of their oppressors, and have been represented alternately as slavish or refractory, according as a pretext for tormenting them was wanting. The same inconsistency has marked every other imputation against them. They are charged with laxity in the observance of oaths, though an oath has been found sufficient to shut them out from all worldly advantages. If they reject certain decisions of their church, they are said to be sceptics and bad Christians; if they admit those very decisions, they are branded as bigots and bad subjects. We are told that confidence and kindness will make them enemies to the government, though we know that exclusion and injuries have hardly prevented them from being its friends. In short, nothing can better illustrate the misery of those shifts and evasions by which a long course of cowardly injustice must be supported, than the whole history of Great Britain's conduct towards the Catholic part of her empire.

The “Sella Stercoraria” of the popes.—The Right Honourable and learned Doctor will find an engraving of this chair in Spanheim's “Disquisitio Historica de Papâ Fœminâ” (p. 118.); and I recommend it as a model for the fashion of that seat which the Doctor is about to take in the privy-council of Ireland.

When Innocent X. was entreated to decide the controversy between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, he answered, that “he had been bred a lawyer, and had therefore nothing to do with divinity.”—It were to be wished that some of our English pettifoggers knew their own fit element as well as Pope Innocent X.

Not the C---md---n who speaks thus of Ireland:— “To wind up all, whether we regard the fruitfulness of the soil, the advantage of the sea, with so many commodious havens, or the natives themselves, who are warlike, ingenious, handsome, and well-complexioned, soft-skinned and very nimble, by reason of the pliantness of their muscles, this Island is in many respects so happy, that Giraldus might very well say, ‘Nature had regarded with more favourable eyes than ordinary this Kingdom of Zephyr.’”

The example of toleration, which Bonaparte has held forth, will, I fear, produce no other effect than that of determining the British government to persist, from the very spirit of opposition, in their own old system of intolerance and injustice; just as the Siamese blacken their teeth, “because,” as they say, “the devil has white ones.”

See l'Histoire Naturelle et Polit. du Royaume de Siam, &c.

One of the unhappy results of the controversy between Protestants and Catholics, is the mutual exposure which their criminations and recriminations have produced. In vain do the Protestants charge the Papists with closing the door of salvation upon others, while many of their own writings and articles breathe the same uncharitable spirit. No canon of Constance or Lateran ever damned heretics more effectually than the eighth of the Thirty-nine Articles consigns to perdition every single member of the Greek church; and I doubt whether a more sweeping clause of damnation was ever proposed in the most bigoted council, than that which the Calvinistic theory of predestination in the seventeenth of these Articles exhibits. It is true that no liberal Protestant avows such exclusive opinions; that every honest clergyman must feel a pang while he subscribes to them; that some even assert the Athanasian Creed to be the forgery of one Vigilius Tapsensis, in the beginning of the sixth century, and that eminent divines, like Jortin, have not hesitated to say, “There are propositions contained in our Liturgy and Articles, which no man of common sense amongst us believes.” But while all this is freely conceded to Protestants; while nobody doubts their sincerity, when they declare that their articles are not essentials of faith, but a collection of opinions which have been promulgated by fallible men, and from many of which they feel themselves justified in dissenting,— while so much liberty of retractation is allowed to Protestants upon their own declared and subscribed Articles of religion, is it not strange that a similar indulgence should be so obstinately refused to the Catholics, upon tenets which their church has uniformly resisted and condemned, in every country where it has independently flourished? When the Catholics say, “The Decree of the Council of Lateran, which you object to us, has no claim whatever upon either our faith or our reason; it did not even profess to contain any doctrinal decision, but was merely a judicial proceeding of that assembly; and it would be as fair for us to impute a wife-killing doctrine to the Protestants, because their first pope, Henry VIII., was sanctioned in an indulgence of that propensity, as for you to conclude that we have inherited a king-deposing taste from the acts of the Council of Lateran, or the secular pretensions of our popes. With respect, too, to the Decree of the Council of Constance, upon the strength of which you accuse us of breaking faith with heretics, we do not hesitate to pronounce that Decree a calumnious forgery, a forgery, too, so obvious and ill-fabricated, that none but our enemies have ever ventured to give it the slightest credit for authenticity.”—When the Catholics make these declarations (and they are almost weary with making them), when they show, too, by their conduct, that these declarations are sincere, and that their faith and morals are no more regulated by the absurd decrees of old councils and popes, than their science is influenced by the papal anathema against that Irishman who first found out the Antipodes,—is it not strange that so many still wilfully distrust what every good man is so much interested in believing? That so many should prefer the dark-lantern of the 13th century to the sunshine of intellect which has since overspread the world, and that every dabbler in theology, from Mr. Le Mesurier down to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, should dare to oppose the rubbish of Constance and Lateran to the bright and triumphant progress of justice, generosity, and truth?

Strictures on the Articles, Subscriptions, &c.

Virgilius, surnamed Solivagus, a native of Ireland, who maintained, in the 8th century, the doctrine of the Antipodes, and was anathematised accordingly by the Pope. John Scotus Erigena, another Irishman, was the first that ever wrote against transubstantiation.

In a singular work, written by one Franciscus Collius, “upon the Souls of the Pagans,” the author discusses, with much coolness and erudition, all the probable chances of salvation upon which a heathen philosopher might calculate. Consigning to perdition without much difficulty Plato, Socrates, &c. the only sage at whose fate he seems to hesitate is Pythagoras, in consideration of his golden thigh, and the many miracles which he performed. But, having balanced a little his claims, and finding reason to father all these miracles on the devil, he at length, in the twenty-fifth chapter, decides upon damning him also. (De Animabus Paganorum, lib. iv. cap. 20. and 25.)—The poet Dante compromises the matter with the Pagans, and gives them a neutral territory or limbo of their own, where their employment, it must be owned, is not very enviable—“Senza speme vivemo in desio.”—Cant. iv.— Among the numerous errors imputed to Origen, he is accused of having denied the eternity of future punishment; and, if he never advanced a more irrational doctrine, we may venture, I think, to forgive him. He went so far, however, as to include the devil himself in the general hell-delivery which he supposed would one day or other take place, and in this St. Augustin thinks him rather too merciful—“Miserecordior profecto fuit Origenes, qui et ipsum diabolum,” &c. (De Civitat. Dei. lib. xxi. cap. 17.)—According to St. Jerom, it was Origen's opinion, that “the devil himself, after a certain time, will be as well off as the angel Gabriel”—“Id ipsum fore Gabrielem quod diabolum.” (See his Epistle to Pammachius.) But Halloix, in his Defence of Origen, denies strongly that this learned father had any such misplaced tenderness for the devil.

Mr. Fox, in his Speech on the Repeal of the Test Act (1790), thus condemns the intermixture of religion wih the political constitution of a state:—“What purpose (he asks) can it serve, except the baleful purpose of communicating and receiving contamination? Under such an alliance corruption must alight upon the one, and slavery overwhelm the other.”

Locke, too, says of the connection between church and state, “The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immoveable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in every thing, perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other.” —First Letter on Toleration.

The corruptions introduced into Christianity may be dated from the period of its establishment under Constantine, nor could all the splendour which it then acquired atone for the peace and purity which it lost.

There has been, after all, quite as much intolerance among Protestants as among Papists. According to the hackneyed quotation—

Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra.

Even the great champion of the Reformation, Melanchthon, whom Jortin calls “a divine of much mildness and good-nature,” thus expresses his approbation of the burning of Servetus: “Legi (he says to Bullinger) quæ de Serveti blasphemiis respondistis, et pietatem ac judicia vestra probo. Judico etiam senatum Genevensem rectè fecisse, quod hominem pertinacem et non omissurum blasphemias sustulit; ac miratus sum esse qui severitatem illam improbent.”—I have great pleasure in contrasting with these “mild and good-natured” sentiments the following words of the Papist Baluze, in addressing his friend Conringius: “Interim amemus, mî Conringi, et tametsi diversas opiniones tuemur in causâ religionis, moribus tamen diversi non simus, qui eadem literarum studia sectamur.” —Herman. Conring. Epistol. par. secund. p. 56.

Hume tells us that the Commons, in the beginning of Charles the First's reign, “attacked Montague, one of the King's chaplains, on account of a moderate book which he had lately composed, and which, to their great disgust, saved virtuous Catholics, as well as other Christians, from eternal torments.”—In the same manner a complaint was lodged before the Lords of the Council against that excellent writer Hooker, for having, in a Sermon against Popery, attempted to save many of his Popish ancestors for ignorance.—To these examples of Protestant toleration I shall beg leave to oppose the following extract from a letter of old Roger Ascham (the tutor of Queen Elizabeth), which is preserved among the Harrington Papers, and was written in 1566, to the Earl of Leicester, complaining of the Archbishop Young, who had taken away his prebend in the church of York: “Master Bourne did never grieve me half so moche in offering me wrong, as Mr. Dudley and the Byshopp of York doe, in taking away my right. No byshopp in Q. Mary's time would have so dealt with me; not Mr. Bourne hymself, when Winchester lived, durst have so dealt with me. For suche good estimation in those dayes even the learnedst and wysest men, as Gardener and Cardinal Poole, made of my poore service, that although they knewe perfectly that in religion, both by open wrytinge and pryvie talke, I was contrarye unto them; yea, when Sir Francis Englefield by name did note me speciallye at the councill-board, Gardener would not suffer me to be called thither, nor touched ellswheare, saiinge suche words of me in a lettre, as, though lettres cannot, I blushe to write them to your lordshipp. Winchester's good-will stoode not in speaking faire and wishing well, but he did in deede that for me , whereby my wife and children shall live the better when I am gone.” (See Nugæ Antiquæ, vol. i. pp. 98, 99.)— If men who acted thus were bigots, what shall we call Mr. P*rc*v*l?

In Sutcliffe's “Survey of Popery” there occurs the following assertion:—“Papists, that positively hold the heretical and false doctrines of the modern church of Rome, cannot possibly be saved.”—As a contrast to this and other specimens of Protestant liberality, which it would be much more easy than pleasant to collect, I refer my reader to the Declaration of Le Père Courayer;—doubting not that, while he reads the sentiments of this pious man upon toleration, he will feel inclined to exclaim with Belsham, “Blush, ye Protestant bigots! and be confounded at the comparison of your own wretched and malignant prejudices with the generous and enlarged ideas, the noble and animated language of this Popish priest.”— Essays, xxvii. p. 86.

Sir John Bourne, Principal Secretary of State to Queen Mary.

By Gardener's favour Ascham long held his fellowship, though not resident.

“La tolérance est la chose du monde la plus propre à ramener le siècle d'or, et à faire un concert et une harmonie de plusieurs voix et instruments de différents tons et notes, aussi agréable pour le moins que l'uniformité d'une seule voix.” Bayle, Commentaire Philosophique, &c. part ii. chap. vi.— Both Bayle and Locke would have treated the subject of Toleration in a manner much more worthy of themselves and of the cause, if they had written in an age less distracted by religious prejudices.