tion.* This word Spiritual is therefore, in our Irish acceptation, a sort of vague legerdemain word, of dubious meaning which requires to be defined.

§ XVII. Why the Irish have been so grossly misled with regard to Spiritual power, notwithstanding their clear-sightedness on other points of National importance.

1. To what are we to attribute those strange, foolish, anticatholic, canting notions of Spiritual

* Papatum Romanum, et Regalia S. Petri, adjutor ero ad retinendum et defendendum. Jura, honores, privilegia, et auctoritatem S. Romanæ Ecclesiæ, Domini Papæ et Successorum ejus defendere, et augere, et promovere curabo. Neque ero in consilio, vel facto, seu tractatu, in quibus contra ipsum Dominum nostrum, vel eamdem Romanam aliqua sinistra vel præjudicialia personarum, juris, honoris, status, et potestatis eorum machinetur. Et si talia a quibuscumque tractari vel procurari novero, impediam hoc pro posse, et quanto citius potero significabo eidem Domino nostro, vel alteri per quem possit ad ipsius notitiam pervenire.

By this oath they pledge to be Spies and Informers, even against their own Countrymen, in case of any Machinations against the temporal power of the Court of Rome.For this is evidently a Feudal oath of obedience, by which they pledge themselves to maintain the Temporal titles, and Regalia, as well as the Spiritual rights, of the Pope!

power, prevailing in the minds of such a gallant and quick-sighted nation as the Irish, at the very door of England, and in the blaze of light, which has been thrown upon this subject by Bossuet, De Marca, Fleury, and hundreds of other most Catholic Divines? To what?-to religious dissentions between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics? Certainly not. I have already shewn, that no Religious war existed between the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland, until after the recall of Lord Perrot, in 1599; whereas we trace this abuse of Spiritual power, up to the reign of Tordelbach O'Brian, up to our first Legate Gilbert, Bishop of Limerick, and up to the Pontificate of Gregory VII.* It was not any religious disagreement

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* See above p. 64, &c.

Compare S. Barnard's excellent Tract De Consideratione, which he addressed to Pope Eugenius IV, with the authorities quoted in these pages, and with the lamentable history of our Country."Quis talia fando, Mirmidonum, Dolopumve, &c. temperet a lachrymis ?"-Fortunately there are English Statesmen, friends to Ireland, and to the rational liberties of mankind, who, without touching a single article of our faith,. will endeavour to hold the Ægis of law, between the abuse of Spiritual power, and the liberties of the Irish people.

between Protestants and Catholics, that induced the Pope's Nuncios, and their ultramontain Synods of Waterford and Jamestown, to excommunicate the Catholic Confederates, for concluding a cessation of hostilities with an Ormond, or with an Inchiquin. Those excommunications were fulminated against the best, and most zealous Catholics in the kingdom!

2. How then came it to pass, that the great body of the Catholic people of Ireland were raised en Mass against their own Generals, Nobles, Gentry, and against the most enlightened of their Clergy, who resisted those unjust excommunications, rejecting them with disdain, as the result of foreign intrigues?

3. My answer is simply this, that, by propagating false notions of Spiritual Jurisdiction amongst the people, from the pulpit and from the press,* our Ultramontain Bishops and Nuncios, suffered no promotion to occur in the Irish

*The Pope's Nuncio, Rinucini, had one press at Kilkenny, and another at Waterford. See the Bloody Irish Almanack, extracted from the Almanack, printed at Waterford, 1646, London, 1646, title page, and pag. 8, and 11.

Church, but such as might contribute to support foreign influence; and that, availing themselves of our national aversion to England, which drove us eagerly to adopt such doctrines as tended to separate both countries, they obstructed every effort to reconcile both, and to establish, on a permanent foundation of mutual benevolence, and forbearance in religious concerns, the tranquility and the prosperity of our country.

4. The Catholic Remonstrance of Trim had hardly been signed by our confederate Nobility and Gentry at Trim, on the 17th of March, 1642, when our Primate convened a Synod, which, on the 22d of that very month, excommunicated, as favourers of heresy, all those Catholics, and particularly the Clergy, who should seduce any of their communion, to enter into any agreement, confederacy, or cessation of hostilities. with Protestants; Thomas Deis, the Catholic Bishop of Meath, who had endeavoured to re-establish an amicable understanding between both parties, was expressly included in this excommunication; and O'Ferrall extolls the Primate,

in his Address to the Congregation of Propaganda, for the Catholicity of this holy exercise. of his Spiritual power.*

5. The ignorant are always easily misled; and, unfortunately for our country, the ignorant are the mass of our people: and therefore Lynch, the excellent and patriotic author of Cambrensis eversus, to whose authority no Irishman will object, justly laments, that on those occasions,

*"Multa decreta utilia in hac Synodo edidit cerca res bellicas. "Censuras tulit in fautores Hæreticorum, potissimum autem "in Clerum Politicum, seducentem Catholicos ad Hæreticorum partes, et nominatim in D. Thomam. Deis Episcopum "Medensem, ea in re convictum." See also Lynch's Alithinol. p. 69. Deis justified himself in a Pamphlet intitled Quære si, which is much praised by Lynch, ib. Supplem. p. 111.

Most of the fugitive Pamphlets of that period have perished. Can we wonder at it, when we find the learned Lynch, expressing scruples, whether he can read Sir Richard Belling's excellent defence of the supreme Catholic Council against the censures of the Roman Court, because that work was condemned at Rome!! Alithinol. p. 69, et Supplem. p. 65, et 131. And yet he acknowledges, that the facts contained in that book are unquestionably true; that not only the Pope, but even the whole Church is fallible in matters of fact, and that the Roman Courtiers, Anglici Romani, were more than fallible with regard to Ireland; because, from Political motives, they excited the old Milesian Irish against the Anglo-Irish, in order that they might Domineer over both.