GRATTAN IN THE IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 277

his gestures, and the apparent difficulty of his enunciation, served to confirm those fears; but it was but for a moment. After almost the first passage he was listened to with an intense and ever-increasing admiration, and when he sat down it was felt that he had more than justified his reputation. It was, indeed, one of his greatest speeches; a wonderful combination of reasoning, epigram, imagination, and declamation. Pitt, who made the first motion of applause, exclaimed, Burke told me that Grattan was a wonderful man for a popular audience, and I see that he was right.' Fox, in a private letter to Trotter, said, 'I am sure it will give you pleasure to hear that Grattan's success in the House of Commons was complete, and acknowledged even by those who had entertained great hopes of his failure.' The Annual Register' called the speech one of the most brilliant and eloquent ever pronounced within the walls of Parliament.' It was in the course of this speech that, in adverting to the first Catholic Relief Bill, he digressed into a eulogium of the Irish Parliament, and glanced at the services he had rendered to its freedom in a single sentence of touching and concentrated beauty: 'I watched by its cradle, I followed its hearse.'

The Union, making the public opinion of Great Britain the arbiter of the Catholic question, had entirely altered its conditions and, as it soon appeared, considerably increased its difficulties. There is reason to believe that in the first United Parliament a far larger proportion of the Irish than of the British representatives were favourable to Catholic concession. The disabilities of the Irish Catholics naturally did not appeal very strongly to English and Scotch members, for they were in reality considerably less than those of the British Catholics. The parliamentary suffrage had been granted on the widest terms to the Irish

Catholics in 1793, but the English and Scotch Catholics only obtained the right to vote for members of Parliament in 1829. Dublin University had thrown open its degrees to Catholics, but from Oxford and Cambridge they were rigidly excluded. In the army, Catholics in Ireland were allowed to rise to any rank up to and including that of colonel. In England Catholics could only be private soldiers, and were still by law excluded from all civil and military offices.

In 1805, Grenville in the House of Lords, and Fox in the House of Commons, brought the Catholic petition for emancipation forward for the first time in the Imperial Parliament, but they were totally defeated. The motion of Fox in the House of Commons found only 124 supporters, while 336 votes were given against it. Pitt both spoke and voted against it. He said that what was demanded could never have been safely given in an Irish Parliament; that he had believed, and did still believe, that the introduction of a certain proportion of Catholics into the Imperial Parliament under proper safeguards would bring with it no dangers, but that the circumstances that had led to the resignation of his own ministry made it improper to bring forward the question, and as long as these circumstances continued, he would never consent to a measure dealing with it. He added that in his opinion the prevailing sentiment among all classes and descriptions of Protestants outside the House was against Catholic Emancipation.

The death of Pitt in the January of 1806 brought Fox and Grenville into power, and no other English statesmen were more sincerely attached to the Catholic cause, but that cause gained nothing by their accession to office. Fox dissuaded the Catholics from taking any step on the ground that it could only injure their cause to bring it

ANTI-CATHOLIC MINISTRY, 1807

279

before Parliament. Grenville, after the death of Fox, without attempting to deal with the parliamentary representation, proposed to introduce a Bill which would have at least thrown open all military and naval posts to the Catholics. The King, who at first appears to have consented, was speedily alarmed. A part of the Cabinet supported him. The Bill was dropped, and then the King took the high-handed and utterly unconstitutional step of requiring the ministers to give a formal written pledge that they would bring in no further measures of concession to the Catholics. On their refusal they were dismissed from office and the ministry of Perceval and Eldon was called to power. The general election that immediately followed took place on a 'No Popery' cry, and it ended in a great majority supporting the King and pledged to resist Catholic concessions.

Perhaps the most significant proof of how much the Catholic question had gone back, and how subsidiary a place it now held in the calculations of statesmen, is to be found in the fact that the avowedly anti-Catholic ministry of Perceval was nominally presided over by the old Duke of Portland, who from the antecedents of his Irish policy should have considered himself more than almost any other living man bound to see justice done to the Irish Catholics, and that two of its most important offices were held by such powerful and decided advocates of Catholic Emancipation as Castlereagh and Canning.

Public opinion had, indeed, about this period taken a direction strongly adverse to emancipation. The Tory reaction which followed the French Revolution was still in full force, and it was accompanied and strengthened by a religious movement which had been for some time fermenting in England, and which had greatly intensified the Protestant feeling among the people.

It will be sufficiently evident to anyone who follows the history of the two creeds that their separation had reached its extreme limit when the Puritans were dominant in England, and Bossuet was ruling religious opinion in France. The Puritans represented Protestantism in its most exaggerated and undiluted form; while Bossuet, who exercised a greater influence over the lay mind than perhaps any theologian since Calvin, was maintaining the tenets of his Church with an almost unrivalled controversial skill. He was not, it is true, an Ultramontane, and he even entered into a correspondence with Leibnitz on the possibility of a compromise, but he asserted most emphatically the great distinctive principle of authority; he defined the points of difference with such a rigid accuracy that no evasion was possible; and in all his teaching he laid the greatest stress upon dogmas as distinguished from morals. After this period, for about a century, the two systems seemed rapidly approximating. If we compare the sermons of Massillon with those of Bossuet, we see the change in its commencement; if we compare the sermons of Blair or of Kirwan with those of the early Anglican divines, we see it in its completion. Dogma had formerly held the first place in the teaching of the pulpit, but it now in its turn gave way. The Christian preacher became at last little more than an expounder of morals. A well-regulated disposition, a virtuous life, and an active benevolence were represented as almost a summary of Christianity. The Bible was regarded as a repository of noble maxims and of instructive examples. The triumph of religion would be merely the perfection of order and philanthropy, the apotheosis and the completion of government.

This tendency may be in part ascribed to the natural reaction and fatigue that followed the fierce controversies of the preceding century; and it was also in a great measure

THE DECLINE OF DOGMA

281

due to the prevalence of scepticism in both Churches. In England sceptical opinions had been maintained openly by Bolingbroke and Gibbon and Hume; and if English light literature at the close of the last century was not Voltairian in its spirit, it was probably owing in a great measure to the extraordinary influence of Dr. Johnson. In France no such restraint existed. Voltaire and Rousseau towered far above their contemporaries, and never disguised their sentiments. The sarcasms of Voltaire turned the whole stream of ridicule and wit against the Church; while the burning eloquence, the impassioned earnestness of Rousseau fell with terrific effect on its tottering system.

6

The University of Paris issued an answer to the Vicar of Savoy,' but it is now almost forgotten. All the real talent of the country seemed ranged against the Established faith, and its defenders were compelled to adopt an apologetical and an evasive tone. It was quite true that all infants who died unbaptised were excluded from heaven, but then hell was an indefinite expression, and comprised a variety of conditions, and St. Augustine was not prepared to say that it would be better for those children had they never been born. Purgatory was undoubtedly a Catholic doctrine, but it was not necessarily the place of torment by fire which was portrayed in the pictures in every church. The priests who celebrated royal marriages in Spain by an auto de fe, the Pope who struck medals in commemoration of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the persecutors of Galileo, the legal or ecclesiastical decisions which consigned tens of thousands of Jews and heretics and alleged witches to the stake, and crushed for generations every vestige of independent thought, were no true representatives of the spirit of the Church. The doctrine of invincible ignorance was brought prominently forward. The doctrine of infallibility was interpreted in its broadest sense, and the attribute was