In making the following political remarks, we venture on an undertaking to which we acknowledge ourselves committed—but to the proposed performance of which, we feel ourselves as much disinclined as we know ourselves to be incompetent-at the same time, as it was the practice in our first series to give a monthly review of public affairs, and as at the commencement of the first volume of our second series, we gave a sort of political synopsis of what had occurred during the last year, we now deem it necessary to adopt the same practice-desiring still, that our friends and readers will give us credit for being better Christian than political examiners; for in truth it has been always our anxious object to warn our Christian brethren against launching into the stormy turmoil of politics. At a season of peculiar excitement, we lifted our voice against the tendency that ecclesiastics evinced, of going with the turbulent current -and not small was the obloquy and discountenance we met with, when we did our best to keep back spiritual men from the indraught of such dangerous and giddy eddies. Therefore, it is with no small hesitation we now enact the part of clerical politicians; and were it not that our Church, as national and established, is necessarily connected with politics, it would be far from us, indeed, to touch at all on such matters.

The commencement of the year 1833 found Popish priests and demagogues banded in resolute conspiracy to extinguish tithes, and starve the Protestant clergymen out of their parishes. It saw a rural insurrection in the central parts of Ireland-whose object was to make that resistance to tithes, which the priest proclaimed should be passive, as active and as energetic as bloodshed and murder could make it. We confess, that before the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, all this was by us foreseen; we saw the Priests of the Church of Rome, as for life and death, active in promoting the agitation that succeeded in terrifying even a Tory Government into the measure; and we asked ourselves and others, cui bono, to what end did those priests act as with one mind in this matter. Was it merely

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that certain Popish lawyers, half ruined gentlemen, and ambitious graziers and grocers, should sit as members of the legislature? Was it that the Relief Bill should re-act on the Reform Bill, so as to make the former a stepping-stone to grasp the latter? No, certainly; for what is Democracy to the Priesthood more than absolutism. Dr. Hussey had long ago honestly confessed, that the workings of their mighty machinery was independent of all forms of government; and so it prospered, all would equally serve as its tool or its victim. No. The well adjusted polity that would allow her servants to be Republicans in Baltimore-Radicals in Manchester -Carbonari in Italy-Absolutists in the Peninsula, and intriguers every where; the same laxity of accommodation which allows them to be all things to all men, so that they may gain all men, could not have induced them to make the Relief Bill so vital a measure as to require a crusade to be preached up, as for life or death, heaven or hell, unless it was to be attended with consequences to their order, much more important than that of admitting some forty or fifty members to sit in parliament.

And, certainly, never were four years so eventfully favourable to the designs of Popery, as have followed since the passing of the Relief Bill. The concession, by the Wellington administration, of this great measure on the ground of expediency, and not of principle; the surrendering it, as it were, at the point of a threat. Then the retributive expulsion of these intimidated men from the king's counsels-and the coming into office, under the CA IRA of the battle of the barriers of Paris, of a Whig ministry, pledged to undefined innovations. Then the democratic revolution, which has been called reform, but by which the constitution has lost its adjusting ballance, and all its machinery is running down with rapid and ruinous velocity. Then the coalition to intimidate and controul the government, between the two sworn enemies of the Church-the delegates from the democratic and infidel population of the towns of England, and the priest-ridden and separation desiring population of Popish Ireland. The one pledged to overthrow the Church and aristocracy of England; the other the Church and the British connexion in Ireland. Then how many minor events have wonderfully helped forward and enhanced the political triumphs of popery; amongst which we may advert briefly to the vacillations in council, and the apparent differences of opinion amongst the ministers, with respect to the way in which the tithe resistance was to be met; some of the cabinet individually inimical to the Church-some neutralsome, however friendly, speaking and acting so as to give courage to the agitators, and induce the people to believe that they really had the rulers of the land on their side, and that it was the wish of Government that tithes should be EXTINGUISHED. We would especially advert to one important circumstance which has, in our opinion, been mainly instrumental in giving force and. effect to the Popish conspiracy against tithes-we mean the tithe composition act. This measure, deservedly hailed by all

well-thinking men, as beneficial to the clergy, and to the people, as a great act of restorative justice, which went to supersede the agistment exemption, which the squires of Ireland so long enjoyed, and by means of which they had shifted the burden off their own shoulders, and laid it on the necks of the poor. The tithe composition act has had, nevertheless, a most injurious. tendency in rousing a host of selfish, rancorous, and influential enemies against the clergy; enemies whose religious and political antipathies have been pointed by the sharpest selfishness. We allude to the grazing farmers of Ireland, a large, rich, and active body, who formerly paid little or no tithe, and who, by the operation of the composition act, have had their broad pastures viewed, valued, and submitted to a new impost. What was it to them that their poorer neighbours were relieved that the potatoe-garden and con-acre were in a manner exempted. No; the Avarus Agricola could not see, through the mist of selfishness, the humanity of the act; and so in the counties of Meath, Kildare, Kilkenny, Queen's County, Tipperary, Galway, and Roscommon, where the grazing farmers are mostly Roman Catholics, there was a new, virulent, hostile body, raised up against the Protestant clergy; and as these men were the principal supporters and entertainers of priests; as their reverences live mostly upon their bounty and hospitality, so now the feeling of both parties acted and reacted on each other, and produced that determined hostility, which first broke forth in the columns of the provincial papers, and which exhibited all its determination, and all its virulence, in the speeches of such graziers as Mr. Lalor, and others of that stamp, in the Queen's county and other portions of the central districts of Ireland. We are quite sure that in many cases the temperate Roman Catholic clergy (for undoubtedly there are such,) were forced against their wills to preach up tithe resistance from their altars, by the substantial graziers of their parishes. And so the poor tillage farmers, and the cottiers and common labourers were persuaded, as a matter in which their Church, and their own souls' safety were involved in, to join a crusade against tithes and in many cases to insult and maltreat the parson who had often proved their best friend, and often employed them, and supplied them with food and medicine.

When the year 1833 commenced, the resistance to tithes was in full operation. The system, as promulgated by the Popish hierarchy, and organized in the Popish chapels, was noised abroad by the Popish press; and while O'Connell from his tribune pronounced it patriotic, Dr. Doyle from his altar decreed that it was meritorious. The resistance was, it is true, as far as words went, to be UNBLOODY and PASSIVE. But when did ever the half savage Irish resist passively or unbloodily. No; never have Irish leaders, lay or clerical, recommended agitation, that bloodthirsty men did not arise, for whose acts their leaders disclaimed all responsibility; but of whose acts they were ever ready to take the advantage. Thus in the great rebellion, Roger

Moore and the Popish bishops disclaimed the atrocities of Sir Phelim O'Neil; thus did Father O'Leary, in the last century, blow to a white heat, the people's opposition to tithes in the south of Ireland, and then disclaim all participation with the insurgent Whiteboys; and thus have the lay and clerical agitators of the present day maddened the people by their speeches and pastorals, and then have they lifted up their eyes in horror at the misapplication of their views by the Whitefeet of Kilkenny, Tipperary, and the Queen's County; at the same time, good souls, they have not been backward in taking advantage of the results of this savage insurrection, whereby the Protestant clergymen have been worried and banished, their property destroyed, and their lives endangered. We confess we so shudder at the idea of any man sitting coolly in his study, penning a pastoral, or rising to speak at a charity dinner, to make a benevolent speech, with the intention of arousing the animosities of a savage people, and directing the pike and the brand against the lives and houses of unoffending people; for the honour of human nature we must acquit them of any such truculent intent---for the honour of the Christian religion, which they profess to believe, we must suppose that they miscalculated the motives, and misconceived the spirit of the people; and that no priest would accept the triumph of his Church over prostrate Protestantism, when his trophies were laid before him steeped in human blood. But this we must ever lament, that Popish agitation has always been attended by such rural outbreaks. So that as sure as the demagogue or priest speak or write, so sure the Whiteboys or Whitefeet organize themselves to murder and destroy; and in the mean time the desirable obect is attained, of terrifying the loyal, and perplexing the government---of arming the disloyal, and confirming the strength of Popery; and what if coersive legislative enactments are the necessary result; these only for a time, and in one peculiar locality, repress the insurrection; while the disaffection of the people is increased, and the demagogue is ready to point to the law, and say, let your hatred to it be as eternal as your love of justice, for what is it to you but an enemy and an avenger.

The year 1833 commenced with a state of affairs disgraceful to any government or any country. A body of clergy preaching up resistance to a payment which the law sanctioned, and a people so demoralized as to consider that not only might they withhold that which they had covenanted to pay, but that they might perpetrate murder in furtherance of their resistance---a government so vacillating as at one time, by a firm exercise of military force, terrifying the most disinclined into the payment of their tithe debt; and then after, as it were, thus tantalizing the clergy, pronouncing that tithe property should be beyond the pale of peculiar protection; and subsequently countermanding all future military assistance to put the law in force against an insurgent people; and then, to save the poor and terrified clergy from actual starvation, arising a sum of money from the empire at large, to be given as a