been, as was too often the case, seized upon by the rapacious hand of the state, the government furnishes the necessary funds; but whence do they arise? From taxation. The burden of the impost is increased, that the governor may be able to support the college. It becomes, then, in some parts of Europe, a compulsory contribution, not made more light by the payment of the collector, nor more large by its passing through the hands of public officers of the state, nor more economically expended by the management of those who seek office for their support. You have the more meritorious and the more gratifying system of voluntary contribution, and the

more cheap and economical process of direct collection and direct expenditures.

What, then, remains for us to perform? To pursue, but with more zeal and energy, the path in which we have walked hitherto. To place our trust in God, to beseech his blessing, to place our confidence in him, whilst we exert ourselves; to sustain our institutions.

Allow me then to indulge the hope that, during this year upon which we enter, the Society of St. John the Baptist will, by the zeal of its members and the blessing of God, prove more beneficial than it has been in any preceding year to this diocess, whose necessities require all our united exertions.

Charleston, S. C., Oct. 8, 1825. BRETHREN-You and I profess the same religion, we are members of the same church; that church which has had its origin in Jerusalem, now eighteen centuries since and has made progress, from the river Jordan to the ends of the earth. Our fellow-Catholics are found in every nation in which the name of Jesus is known, and our clean and holy oblation is offered up from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof; whether we use the Latin rite, the Greek, the Sclavonic, the Syriac, the Coptic, whatever rites have been lawfully retained by those who believe in the same doctrines, who use the same sacraments, who are united under the same visible head, the successor of Peter, His Holiness, the Pope, Leo XII. We have followed in the footsteps of our fathers, as they have followed theirs, and long since the mighty leaders of our numerous host have passed the boundaries of earth, and we now know that the Apostles who have conducted our predecessors, have, together with many of their followers, been crowned with the glory of conquest, through the merits of our Saviour. No matter what is our language, or our country-we are brethren in faith, we march together under the standard of the

cross.

We should have a sympathy for each other. To exclude others from our charity or our affliction would be irreligious, but to

have sympathy for our brethren under affliction, is humane, generous, charitable. He who commanded us to love all men, inspired also his Apostle to write a preference in affection for the household of faith: and this glorions Apostle did himself manifest his zealous love for his brethren.

This principle is not confined to religion, though it is connected therewith; it extends to every bond of brotherhood in which men can be united, whether it be the link of fellowship voluntarily created or accidentally produced, the bond of marriage, the close union of the common land of nativity, or the strong and necessary social tie of common country and common government. According as those ties are multiplied, the claims for affection and sympathy become more strong.

A large portion of your fellow-Catholics and fellow-subjects, seven millions of the inhabitants of Ireland, lamentably persecuted for professing your religion, claim your sympathy. Many of you are led to believe that they are rather a discontented than an injured people, and you have been perhaps led by their enemies, to believe that if their conduct was as good as that of the Canadian Catholics, they would be as you perhaps are, without any ground of complaint. I believe they have been exhibited to you as not worthy of your sympathy, because of their turbulence and discontent; and you have been asked, "does

the British Government persecute you because of your religion?" When you answer "no," you were told, "That it was plain proof that there must be some cause different from that of religion, to call for the severity of your government against the turbulent Irish."

Inhabitants of Canada, many of you are Irish. Thousands of you are Irish Roman Catholics; you have in Canada the same dispositions that you had in Ireland. Why are you now free from persecution, at this side of the Atlantic? I will tell you it is because you are neighbours of our glorious republics.

Canadians, why were you not persecuted before the Revolution which separated these states from you? Because, between the time of the surrender of your fathers to Great Britain, and the period of the Revolution, you were people just taken from a powerful enemy, and it would be gross impolicy to outrage your feelings upon a sudden. But I am in possession of documents from the archives of the British government, to show that it was intended to subvert your religion as soon as it would be convenient to do so. But before that convenient time arrived, the American Revolution occurred, and the folly of some of the first revolutionists led them to place in the enumeration of the misdeeds of Great Britain, her toleration to your religion, for they had still much of English Protestant prejudice; you also recollected the petty religious warfare of the New England colonists, the shooting of Father Raffles, and other deeds of some of your southern neighbours-you adhered to Great Britain. When the United States were free and independent, it became necessary for Great Britain to treat you with lenity and kindness in order to conciliate your affection. Thus you have escaped the lash of the persecutor, and the fang of the tyrant, your situation has been that of the most favoured portion of the British empire, whilst the situation of the Irish Catholics has been the very reverse.

Were the navy of England powerless, or were Ireland as contiguous to France as you are to our union, Ireland would not have been scourged: a generous master protects his dependants, and exerts his strength in defence of those who are placed under him; a man of a different character is noted for oppressing the helpless, and for caressing those who have powerful friends, or are able to release themselves when they will from his bondage. Ireland is weak; you could easily join our union.

You are placed in that happy state, that if Great Britain should violate her contract

with you, she cannot prevent your obtaining instant redress. But I need not inform you that the Atlantic Ocean is wider than the river St. Lawrence. Believe me, though you should not advert to it, you feel the difference of position. May God preserve your happiness, and increase your comfort and prosperity.

You have been told that much was done for the Irish Catholics, and yet they were never satisfied. It is true, they are not now ground down as severely as they were when you first became a British people. Bishops are not now liable to be hanged. Priests are not hunted, and on their way to a prison, made a mockery of by the rabble. A Catholic might now even have a horse worth £100 without being obliged to give him to the first Protestant who paid him £5, that is one-twentieth of his value, as happened to the Bishop of Cork, since you joined England. A boy of twelve years of age, the youngest of his family, will not now be able to plunder his aged father and mother, and his brother and sister, of the paternal estate, because they are Catholics, and he has gone to a Protestant Church, and signed his name to thirty-nine articles, not one of which he understood, but to all of which he assented, for the purpose of legalizing his robbery and his disobedience. One cousin cannot now, as I have known to be done, and I am not as yet forty years old; after spending his share of the patrimony go and swear in court that, up to that period, he was an idolater, in order by his perjury to rob his industrious and conscientious cousin of the other moiety, which came to him by descent from their common ancestor; and were my father still living, he would not be under the necessity to which he was once driven in his youth, after seeing the last shred of the remnant of what his ancestors possessed taken away from his father, to fly from his native county lest he should be sent by a Protestant bishop for trial before a judge at the assizes, who must necessarily transport him as a felon, because he could not escape conviction upon a charge of having taught a whole book of Euclid's elements, without having forsworn the religion of all his ancestors, and of the great bulk of the Christian world. I acknowledge to you that now the Catholic is not persecuted, as he was then. Were Canadian Catholics ever persecuted in this manner by Great Britain? You will tell me "No." I tell you that since you were British subjects, those things, and worse than those have occurred in Ireland. You are not then at liberty to charge the Irish with discontent at being in a good situation, under a good

government, for that government which was obliged to treat you well, was at liberty to oppress them, and has most wantonly abused that liberty. I write what I know, I testify what I have seen. You are not then to argue from your comfort to that of your Catholic brother in Ireland.

The relaxations which Britain made in her worse than heathen code of persecution, were made through fear, without merit, with a bad grace, when she could not avoid making them. She acted without generosity, from mere self-interest, and she always endeavoured rather to change the mode of annoyance, than to desist from worrying her victim. I shall give you the testimony of Mr. Sheridan, the friend of your present king, upon the subject:

"The fact is, that the tyranny practised upon the Irish has been throughout unremitting. There has been no change but in the manner of inflicting it. They have had nothing but a variety in oppression, extending to all ranks and degrees of a certain description of the people. If you would know what this varied oppression consisted in, I refer you to the penal statutes, you have repealed, and to some of those which still exist. There you will see the high and the low equally subjected to the lash of persecution, and still some persons affect to be astonished at the discontents of the Irish. But with all my reluctance to introduce anything ludicrous upon so serious an occasion, I cannot help referring to a little story which those very astonished persons call to my mind. It was with respect to an Irish drummer who was employed to inflict punishment upon a soldier. When the boy struck high, the poor soldier exclaimed, "Lower, bless you," with which the boy complied. But soon after, the soldier exclaimed: "Higher, if you please." But again he called out, "A little lower." Upon which the accommodating boy addressed him, "Now, upon my conscience, I see you are a discontented man; for strike where I may, there's no pleasing you." Now your complaint of the discontents of the Irish appear to me quite as rational, while you continue to strike, only altering the place of attack.

Colonial Catholics, the British government having failed in its efforts to extirpate the Catholic religion by persecution, now seeing that they must ultimately yield to necessity, are occupied in endeavouring to subject that religion to their control, and to affix to emancipation, conditions which, viewed in the abstract, might appear speculatively harmless, but viewed in connexion with the circumstances of Ireland, would be practically destructive to our religious prin

ciples. So the Irish bishops, priests, and people have repeatedly declared.

Another effort is about to be made by your Irish brethren to obtain redress of the manifold evils with which they are oppressed; and those evils are manifold indeed. They cannot be privy councillors, masters of the rolls, judges in the King's Bench, judges in the Common Pleas, barons of the Exchequer, secretary at war, lords of the Admiralty, lords in Parliament, secretary of state, chancellor of the exchequer, president or fellow of any college in any university, secretary for the colonies, governor of a colony, lord lieutenant of Ireland, attorney-general of England, or attorney-general of Ireland, solicitor general, king's counsel, member of any college of physicians in England, mayor of any city, chief magistrate of any town corporate, member of the House of Commons, sheriff of any county or city, director of the Bank of England, director of the Bank of Ireland, president of the Board of Trade-nor in either of an hundred other offices, which it would tire one to enumerate and you to read. They cannot endow any church, bequeath any property for any benefit to their religion, nor for any charity connected therewith. They cannot establish any glebe for the maintenance of their clergy, they cannot confer any literary degrees upon their children in their schools or colleges, they have no share in the management of the funds granted for the education of the poor, but those funds are uniformly placed in the hands and under the control of those hostile to the Catholic tenets, and who meanly use a variety of indirect and perplexing modes for drawing the poor Catholics, by their wants, to sell the religion of their children. The Catholic clergy are insulted and vilified on a thousand occasions, and in all party trials the Protestant sheriffs, who return juries not by ballot, but by selections, are generally charged with being partial.

I will mention to you an instance which came under my own observation.

The present master of the rolls in Ireland, is now a Protestant and a baronet. He was formerly a serjeant-at-law, which place he could not hold without being a Protestant. He frequently served Mass, and was examined in his catechism in the same parish church that I served Mass and was examined in. He was then a Roman Catholic. His younger brother, who is now a general, was a Catholic school-fellow of mine-he is now a Protestant. I know the other members of the family to be Catholics.

When this gentleman was a serjeant-atlaw, he led a prosecution in the city of

Cork. Two persons were to be tried for the same offence, under separate indictments. One was a Catholic the other a Protestant. They were separately arraigned, and both ready for trial. One of them, the Protestant, was indicted in a number previous to the Catholic-say No. 59-the Catholic, 60. In course No. 59 was placed at the bar-and the clerk of the Crown asked the sheriff for the list of jurors. The sheriff handed him what was called the long pannel, which contained about one hundred names. The list had not been called, when the judge, by the request of the lawyers, put No. 60 forward for trial in place of No. 59. Immediately, the sheriff called for the list, observing that he had made a mistake and given a wrong paper. He was sitting at a desk, where I was perhaps the only person in court who could observe what he did. I saw it-he gave back the same identical list. I could not yet observe what the mistake could be. But the mystery was solved as soon as I heard the list read over. I do not know whether the master of the rolls in his varied avocations can have any, even the most trivial recollection of me, nor do I know if he even then knew my name; I stood behind him, and in a low voice said, "Serjeant McMahon, one would imagine *

*

was to be tried for Popery." He turned to me and said the observation was incorrect and unfounded. I only remarked, "perhaps I have better reason to know what I say, than you suspect or are aware of." I am convinced that he knew nothing of what I saw, and probably does not to this day. I added, "I will warrant you the challenges and the settings aside will leave you a good jury for the purpose." Nothing more passed between us. The jury was formed after the prisoner had made his twenty peremptory challenges. Men against whom it would not be easy to show cause, came thick and threefold to pass upon him, but they were men who of all others he would not have chosen. He was however acquitted, for want of evidence.

The whole management was this: the list consisted of names written upon two separate sheets of paper pinned together. When the sheriff got it back he merely changed the order of the two papers. But by this simple contrivance after the list was called, I saw that the names were so arranged that it made a most serious difference as to the character of the jury-which paper should be first read.

What could be done? I saw the trick, but it would be useless to testify it. Any one who knows Ireland, would laugh at my

folly in exposing myself to ruinous persecution by a protected party, and no good could result.

Catholic Colonists, your state is not so wretched as this. You have no notion of the persecution which your Irish Catholic fellow-subjects endure.

You have, where you dwell, perfect religious freedom. The Protestant dissenters in Great Britain and Ireland are also seriously oppressed, though compared with the Catholics their sufferings are trifling and light; yet they ought not to be subjected to any penalty or inconvenience for professing the religion of their choice. But to shut our eyes to the gross and ridiculous and monstrous tyranny of a Protestant government saying, that every man has a right to be led by his own conscience only, in matters of religion, and yet cruelly punishing men for the exercise of this conceded right. You will agree with me in the principle, that God gave to no government, spiritual or temporal, commission to inflict bodily or civil or political punishment upon man for mere religious error. He reserves the infliction of such punishment as the obstinate heretic or the criminal infidel may deserve, to his own tribunal. He gives to the church authority to teach his doctrine, to administer his sacraments, to regulate her disciplineand by spiritual censure to punish her refractory members. To people he leaves the right to constitute their government, upon the government he imposes the obligation of preserving peace and securing property. But to neither has he committed the decision of man's eternal destiny: this he reserves for himself; to neither has he given a commission to propagate his doctrine by cruelty, but to all he has given a command to love one another.

The Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland are anxious, not merely for emancipation for themselves; they desire religious liberty for their dissenting brethren, they desire to have their state in the mother country assimilated to yours. Surely you cannot but feel that humanity, charity, and justice require you to aid them. You can materially do them a service which is not in our power to perform: you need only to be told how you can aid them, and I feel confident you will eagerly avail yourselves of the opportunity to do so.

You have strong claims to the gratitude of Britain, nor is she very willing to displease you; when she was opposed to our states, you stood by her with singular fidelity, many of you made your bodies ramparts upon our frontiers for the protection of her possessions. Call upon your govern

ment to emancipate your brethren, call upon her for the sake of justice, of humanity, of religion, of policy, call upon her by the gratitude which she owes you, by her regard for her own character. She now, a cruel, shameless, persecuting nation! No! The nation is not. The people of Great Britain have led the way. The British Protestants have given to you a noble example-Colonial Catholics. Do British Protestants love Irish Catholics better than you do? Do the Protestants of this Union love Irish Catholics better than you do? The first have petitioned-the second cannot. We cannot approach a legislature upon which we have no claim, with which we have no connexion. Call upon your Protestant neighbours. It will be better if they join you-if they do not, the honour will be yours, the reproach will be theirs. Unite your voices entrust your petition to the patriotic Brougham, and in the lords you will have perhaps a difficulty of choice between the truly noble Duke of Sussex, the brother of your king, the truly venerable Doctor Bathurst, the benevolent Protestant Bishop of Norwich, and the steady friend of the Irish Catholics, the Earl of Donogh

more, or his gallant brother Lord Hutchinson, the personal friend of George IV.

My brethren, I have taken the liberty of thus addressing you, because I know the cause to which I invite your aid deserves your support, and I know your application will have great and deserved weight. Whe ther your good, pious, learned and venerable hierarchy will feel that this is a claim in which they are concerned, I cannot surmise; but this I know, that if they should vouchsafe to join in your application it would not detract from the esteem in which they are so deservedly held; it would draw closer the bands of brotherhood, between the prelates of the same empire at both sides of the Atlantic-it would diffuse heartfelt joy through many a bosom of the Irish under their charge, and tend to make the Canadian native, and the Irish emigrant one loving people, more than would any other measure that could be devised, and many of the people of these states would send up their prayers on their and your behalf, and none more fervently, brethren, than your sincere friend and respectful admirer,

JOHN, Bishop of Charleston.

BELOVED BRETHREN:-You are already aware of the awful dispensation of Divine Providence, by which nearly one-third of the city of Charleston has within a few years been reduced to ashes; the principal destruction having taken place towards the termination of the last month, leaving a melancholy token of ruin and of desolation to point out the former abode of industry, of wealth, of decoration and of happiness. You know that in the great conflagration, about one thousand of our stores and dwellings have been consumed within a few hours; and extensive sufferings and despondency have come upon families whose prospects were, on the very day previous, as cheering and as flattering as their enjoyment appeared to be secure.

You have not only learned that we have thus heavily suffered, but with generous ardour and with creditable emulation, you

have pressed forward to cast your offerings of benevolence and of affection into the fund whence relief has already been dispensed to numbers who have had no other resource, and will yet be given to alleviate the distress of many, who, without this aid, would sink under the weight of their calamity. In union with thousands, I earnestly beseech the Father of mercies and the bestower of every good gift, that he would give to you light and knowledge and docility and zeal for his service and for the salvation of your own souls, together with the blessings of abundance and of content upon this earth; and a recompense for the charity which you have manifested.

Beloved brethren, it would be on my part unpardonable obtrusion, were I in the first moments of the common grief and common suffering of the whole body of our citizens, to press upon you the consideration of a particu