if a heart full of the finest affections, if a mind matured in every manly accomplishment, in short, if every noble, public quality, mellowed and reflected in the pure mirror of domestic virtue, could entitle a subject to distinction in a state, Mr. O'Connel should be distinguished; but, it is his crime to be a Catholic, and his curse to be an Irishman. Simpleton! he prefers his conscience to a place, and the love of his country to a participation in her plunder! Indeed he will never rise. If he joined the bigots of my sect, he might be a sergeant; if he joined the infidels of your sect, he might enjoy a pension, and there is no knowing whether some Orange-corporator, at an Orange-anniversary, might not modestly yield him the precedence of giving "the glorious and immortal memory." Oh, yes; he might be privileged to get drunk in gratitude to the man who colonized ignorance in his native land, and left to his creed the legacy of legalized persecution. Nor would he stand alone, no matter what might be the measure of his disgrace, or the degree of his dereliction. You will know there are many of your own community who would leave him at the distance-post. In contemplating their recreancy, I should be almost tempted to smile at the exhibition of their pretensions, if there was not a kind of moral melancholy intermingled, that changed satire into pity, and ridicule into contempt. For my part, I behold them in the apathy of their servitude, as I would some miserable maniac in the contentment of his captivity. Poor creature! when all that raised him from the brute is levelled, and his glorious intellect is mouldering in ruins, you may see him with his song of triumph, and his crown of straw, a fancied freeman amid the clanking of his chains, and an imaginary monarch beneath the inflictions of his keeper! Merciful God! is it not almost an argument for the sceptic and the disbeliever, when we see the human shape almost without an aspiration of the human soul, separated by no boundary from the beasts that perish-beholding with indifference the captivity of their country, the persecution of their creed, and the helpless, hopeless destiny of their children? But they have nor creed nor consciences, nor country; their god is gold, their gospel is a contract, their church a counting-house, their characters a commodity; they never pray but for the opportunities of corruption, and hold their consciences, as they do their government-debentures, at a price proportioned to the misfortunes of their country. But let us turn from these men

dicants of disgrace: though Ireland is doomed to the stain of their birth, her mind need not be sullied by their contemplation. I turn from them with pleasure to the contemplation of your cause, which, as far argument can affect it, stands on a sublime and splendid elevation. Every obstacle has vanished into air; every favourable circumstance has hardened into adamant. The Pope, whom childhood was taught to lisp as the enemy of religion, and age shuddered at as a prescriptive calamity, has by his example put the princes of Christendom to shame. This day of miracles, in which the human heart has been strung to its extremest point of energy; this day, to which posterity will look for instances of every crime and every virtue, holds not in its page of wonders a more sublime phenomenon, than that calumniated pontiff. Placed at the very pinnacle of human elevation, surrounded by the pomp of the Vatican and the splendours of the court, pouring the mandates of CHRIST from the throne of the CÆSARS, nations were his subjects, kings were his companions, religion was his handmaid; he went forth gorgeous with the accumulated dignity of ages, every knee bending, and every eye blessing the prince of one world, and the prophet of another. Have we not seen him in one moment, his crown crumbled, his sceptre a reed, his throne a shadow, his home a dungeon! But if we have, Catholics, it was only to show how inestimable is human virtue compared with human grandeur; it was only to show those whose faith was failing, and whose fears were strengthening, that the simplicity of the patriarchs, the piety of the saints, and the patience of the martyrs, had not wholly vanished. Perhaps it was also ordained to show the bigot at home, as well as the tyrant abroad, that though the person might be chained, and the motive calumniated, religion was still strong enough to support her sons, and to confound, if she could not reclaim, her enemies. No threats could awe, no promises could tempt, no sufferings could appal him; mid the damps of his dungeon he dashed away the cup in which the pearl of his liberty was to be dissolved. Only reflect on the state of the world at that moment? All around him was convulsed, the very foundations of the earth seemed giving way, the comet was let loose that, "from its fiery hair shook pestilence and death," the twilight was gathering, the tempest was roaring, the darkness was at hand; but he towered sublime, like the last mountain in the deluge-majestic, not less in his elevation than in his solitude, im

mutable amid change, magnificent amid ruin, the last remnant of earth's beauty, the last resting-place of heaven's light! Thus have the terrors of the VATICAN retreated; thus has that cloud which hovered o'er your cause, brightened at once into a sign of your faith, and an assurance of your victory.-Another obstacle, the omnipotence of FRANCE; I know it was a pretence, but it was made an obstacle. What has become of it? The spell of her invincibility destroyed, the spirit of her armies broken, her immense boundary dismembered, and the lord of her empire become the exile of a rock. She allows fancy no fear, and bigotry no speciousness; and, as if in the very operation of the change to point the purpose of your redemption, the hand that replanted the rejected lily was that of an Irish Catholic. Perhaps it is not also unworthy of remark, that the last day of her triumph, and the first of her decline, was that on which her insatiable chieftain smote the holy head of your religion. You will hardly suspect I am imbued with the follies of superstition; but when the man now unborn shall trace the story of that eventful day, he will see the adopted child of fortune, borne on the wings of victory from clime to clime, marking every movement with a triumph, and every pause with a crown, till time, space, and seasons, nay, even nature herself, seeming to vanish from before him-in the blasphemy of his ambition he smote the apostle of his God, and dared to raise the everlasting Cross amid his perishable trophies! I am no fanatic: but is it not remarkable? May it not be one of those signs which the Deity has sometimes given, in compassion to our infirmity? signs, which, in the punishment of one nation, not unfrequently denote the warning to another;

'Signs sent by God to mark the will of Heaven:
Signs, which bid nations weep and be forgiven.”

The argument, however, is taken from the bigot; and those whose consciousness taught them to expect what your loyalty should have taught them to repel, can no longer oppose you from the terrors of invasion. Thus, then, the papal phantom and the French threat have vanished into nothing.-Another obstacle, the tenets of your creed. Has England still to learn them? I will tell her where. Let her ask Canada, the last plank of her American shipwreck. Let her ask Portugal, the first omen of her European splendour. Let her ask Spain, the most Catholic country in the universe, her Catholic friends, her Catholic allies,

her rivals in the triumph, her reliance in the retreat, her last stay when the world had deserted her. They must have told her on the field of blood, whether it was true that they "kept no faith with heretics." Alas, alas! how miscrable a thing is bigotry, when every friend puts it to the blush, and every triumph but rebukes its weakness. If England continued still to accredit this calumny, I would direct her for conviction to the hero, for whose gift alone she owes us an eternity of gratitude; whom we have seen leading the van of universal emancipation, decking his wreath with the flowers of every soil, and filling his army with the soldiers of every sect; before whose splendid dawn, every tear exhaling, and every vapour vanishing, the colours of the European world have revived, and the spirit of European liberty (may no crime avert the omen!) seems to have arisen! Suppose he was a Catholic, could this have been? Suppose Catholics did not follow him, could this have been? Did the Catholic Cortes inquire his faith when they gave him the supreme command? Did the Regent of Portugal withhold from his creed the reward of his valour? Did the Catholic soldier pause at Salamanca to dispute upon polemics? Did the Catholic chieftain prove upon Barrossa that he kept no faith with heretics? or did the creed of Spain, the same with that of France, the opposite of that of England, prevent their association in the field of liberty? Oh, no, no, no! the citizen of every clime, the friend of every colour, and the child of every creed, liberty walks abroad in the ubiquity of her benevolence: alike to her the varieties of faith and the vicissitudes of country; she has no object but the happiness of man, no bounds but the extremities of creation. Yes, yes, it was reserved for Wellington to redeem his own country when he was regenerating every other. It was reserved for him to show how vile were the aspersions on your creed, how generous were the glowings of your gratitude. He was a Protestant, yet Catholics trusted him; he was a Protestant, yet Catholics advanced him? He is a Protestant Knight in Catholic Portugal; he is a Protestant Duke in Catholic Spain; he is a Protestant commander of Catholic armies: he is more; he is the living proof of the Catholic's liberality, and the undeniable refutation of the Protestant's injustice. Gentlemen, as a Protestant, though I may blush for the bigotry of many of my creed who continue obstinate, in the teeth of this conviction, still, were I a Catholic, I

6

should feel little triumph in the victory. I should only hang my head at the distresses which this warfare occasioned to my country. I should only think how long she had withered in the agony of her disunion; how long she had bent, fettered by slaves, cajoled by blockheads, and plundered by adventurers; the proverb of the fool, the prey of the politician, the dupe of the designing, the experiment of the desperate; struggling as it were between her own fanatical and infatuated parties, those hell-engendered serpents which enfold her, like the Trojan seer, even at the worship of her altars, and crush her to death in the very embraces of her children! It is time (is it not?) that she should be extricated. The act would be proud, the means would be Christian; mutual forbearance, mutual indulgence, mutual concession: I would say to the Protestant, Concede;' I would say to the Catholic, Forgive;' I would say to both, Though you bend not at the same shrine, you have a common God, and a common country; the one has commanded love, the other kneels to you for peace.' This hostility of her sects has been the disgrace, the peculiar disgrace of Christianity. The Gentoo loves his cast; so does the Mahometan; so does the Hindoo, whom England, out of the abundance of her charity, is about to teach her creed;-I hope she may not teach her practice. But Christianity-Christianity alone, exhibits her thousand sects, each denouncing his neighbour here, in the name of God; and damning hereafter, out of pure devotion! "You're a heretic," says the Catholic: "You're a Papist," says the Protestant. "I appeal to Saint Peter," exclaims the Catholic: "I appeal to Saint Athanasius," cries the Protestant: "and if it goes to damning, he's as good at it as any saint in the calendar." "You'll all be damned eternally," moans out the Methodist; "I'm the elect!" Thus it is, you see, each has his anathema, his accusation, and his retort; and in the end Religion is the victim! The victory of each is the overthrow of all; and Infidelity, laughing at the contest, writes the refutation of their creed in the blood of the combatants! I wonder if this reflection has ever struck any of those reverend dignitaries who rear their mitres against Catholic emancipation. Has it ever glanced across their Christian zeal, if the story of our country should have casually reached the valleys of Hindostan, with what an argument they are furnishing the heathen world against their sacred missionary? In what terms could the Christian ecclesiastic