RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATIONS. THE PARABLE OF THE TWO DEBTORS-Luke vii. 88 90 91 .......... 92 OF THE SAVING FRUIT OF THE INCARNATION MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATIONS. THE IRISH BIBLE 96 ...... REFORMATION SOCIETIES, 97 CHRONOLOGY of the Life OF ABRAHAM-Gen. xi. 32 105 REVIEW. THE EPICUREAN, A TALE; BY THOMAS MOORE 108 NINTH REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF EDUCATION 125 140 NOTICES OF Books-Walsh on Antient Coins and Medals-A Collection of Religious Biography and History-Tables of the Horatian, and Greek Tra gedian Metres 142 ..... Questions on the Gospel of St. Matthew, proposed to Undergraduates, at the ... FOREIGN RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE DOMESTIC RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE. Annual Receipts of Religious Societies. Friend of Israel Society. Jews So- LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INTELLIGENCE, Works of the English and Scottish Reformers. Sanscrit Professor at Oxford. VIEW OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, POETRY-The incomparable Treasure of the Holy Scriptures". WILLIAM CURRY, JUN. AND CO. DUBLIN AND HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. LONDON: SOLD ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 143 151 155 ibid. 156 NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS. H. shall appear in our next. "Omicron " is under consideration. "Medico Clericus". has been received. We cannot give an opinion as to the "Trip" of our friend "Viator,” until we receive his promised continuation. W. B. on Episcopacy is under consideration. T. K. shall be inserted. The Review of Chalmers shall be inserted in our next. We shall be happy to hear from our friend who has promised to furnish notices of the books of devotion used by Roman Catholics, and extracts from the Breviary. In our desultory remarks on Maynooth in the last Number of the Christian Examiner, we believe that we expressed the sentiments of the Protestant population of Ireland; ours were deep regret that circumstances should have perverted a plan, conceived in mingled kindness and wisdom, to an end decidedly opposite to the wish of its framer; unfeigned pity for the victims of a system which supplants human by official ties, and the plain straightforward dictates of common sense, by the artificial dogmas of a sophistical and evasive school theology; and unmitigated feelings of abhorrence towards the system itself, which finds or leaves no difference between the subject of the Irish titular prelate and the fettered slave of caste on the plains of Hindoostan; no difference we mean in point of mental and spiritual servitude, subjection of intellect and subserviency of power. We confess that our feelings towards the working clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, have experienced a very considerable change since our perusal of the report. We had not before regarded them as so completely the creatures of system and machinery, as we now perceive them to be; we had supposed them to have been less the result of this moral organization than their own confessions have evinced, and had given them less credit for sincerity in error, than they seem to be entitled to. We own that we did not appreciate the mental slavery into which these subjects of Dr. Doyle and Dr. M'Hale, were initiated from their cradles, and we now think that in the course of implicit, intellectual, and bodily discipline, to which they are accustomed from the time at which they first regard their prelate, as the being whose favour is to confer independence and power, until the same prelate receives back the timid school-boy converted into the ready-formed polemic, we have a sufficient solution for all that perplexed us. We had wondered that men, evidently of acuteness and information, though the one was misemployed and the other limited, could have attended to the repeated confutations of their own trite arguments, without some feeling of defeat and confusion. We had wondered, that while the press teemed with publications in confutation of the ethics, the theology, the practices of the Romish Church, these should have scarcely provoked an answer, and more rarely produced any effect on the Romish clergy, the very body to whom they were addressed, and for whom they were intended; and we have wondered more exceedingly to have found respectable Roman Catholic clergymen, who had for years patronised or permitted a certain line of conduct, suddenly at the beck of their superior, one perhaps, not better acquainted than themselves with the theory or practice of their Church, veer round to the opposite quarter, vituperate their own formerly approved conduct, and subject to ecclesiastical censures the very individuals who only pursued the path they themselves had so recently trod. We think that the development of the system of education at Maynooth, accounts fully for these and every other moral phenomenon connected with the Roman Catholic priesthood, and if the remaining seminaries for their education, resemble that supported and endowed by Government, there are annually sent out at public and private expense, a set of men united but by slender ties to the Government,* and necessarily hostile to the religion of the State, but devoted to the service and obedient to the beck of the Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland, sufficiently educated to possess intellectual power over the peasantry; sufficiently informed in polemical divinity, to make a show of defensive warfare if attacked; partaking the political feelings of the people from whom they have been taken, and subject to the uncontrolled influence of their Episcopacy from whom they have emanated. Villars, in his ingenious and eloquent essay on the Reformation, divides the History of the Church into three eras, to which he gives the characters of Democracy, Aristocracy, and Monarchy, the last of which, despotic in its character, and unrestrained in its pretensions, he supposes still to continue identified with Rome. În Ireland, we think the Aristocracy has settled into an Oligarchy of Bishops, who use the name and influence of the Bishop of Rome as they may deem convenient, but who really govern their Church and its members with a despotism the more decided, by reason of the union that animates their councils, and forms the great characteristic of their measures. They move in a body, directed by the master spirit of the day, and seeing clearly+ *We have Dr. Doyle's word for more than this, not in one of his political pamphlets, or under his well understood incognito, but in a formal letter, signed by his own name, and directed through a member of Parliament, to the Legislature of the country. + Perhaps we are not quite correct in the use of this expression; the power of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy is founded on ignorance and dependence, and if those over whom it is exercised be raised in the intellectual scale, a change of measures may be necessary to maintain the very power that would seem to be menaced by such change. If it be true, as reported, that the Roman Catholic laity of Drogheda, recently presented to their Primate a petition, and subsequently a remonstrance very like a command, requiring that he should order his clergy to appear on the platform what is expedient, not aware perhaps, or not conceiving that such may not be what is right or honest. If our readers are not acquainted with the report of the Commissioners, they may not be aware of the extent to which the discipline of the College is carried, of the surveillance that attends equally the recreation and the studies of the students, and that so fearful are the Principals of the effect produced by the cessation or removal of this discipline, that even "vacations shine no holidays for them," as it is with difficulty the students are permitted to exchange the cold, and gloomy, and ascetic habits of their cloister, for the animating cheerfulness of their domestic fire-side, however humble it may be. Nor is the education of such a kind as is at all calculated to enlarge the mind from the thraldom it has been subjected to;→ we pass over as of little moment the earlier part of the course, imperfectedly taught, imperfectedly attended to, and confessedly not essential to the grand object for which the student visits Maynooth. The Roman Catholic priest's education begins with his theology, and to that he always devotes three, and sometimes seven years, the greater part of which time is given up to controversial studies, for it is obvious, that the course read is entirely of that kind. The moral theology is occupied with distinctions and subtleties at best trifling, and too often of a lax and dangerous character; and the dogmatic theology imbues the student with principles, not perhaps of an high Ultra-montane character, but of a decided polemical nature. All the weapons that, when the Reformation first assailed the Vatican, were forged by the skill and adroitness of the learned polemics of that day, are here committed to the aspirant, not scattered over ponderous folios, or locked up in black letter, but condensed into propositions accurately stated and fitted for dispute. And to this quantity of controversy, what solvent is assigned, how are the deleterious effects of so much human composition and human dissension neutralized, and converted into spiritual nourishment? Oh! how often should the controversialist, however experienced by time and sobered by experience, how often should he turn from the polluted streams of human imagination, and fill his urn at the primeval fountain of divine wisdom, thence drawing tranquillity for his ruffled spirits, love for of the Reformation Society and defend their religion, so openly and so severely impugned-if this be true, the power of the Popish Oligarchy will either be reduced within limits, or as often has been the case, will voluntarily retire to resume at a more convenient time the authority they had conceded. * We have already delivered at some length, our opinion on the subject of preparatory as distinguished from professional education, and if an example were necessary to prove the soundness of our views, it would be found in Maynooth, which imperfectly educating its students, except by the discipline of an ascetic institution, gives them over to the full influence of the habits and opinions of the profession to which they aspire. A sound, judiciously selected course of classical reading, joined to the lessons of moral and physical philosophy, must have a tendency by their accompanying enlargement of view and exercise of intellect, to protect from the absorbing and certainly not ennobling lessons of the Roman Catholic theology, founded on absolute submission, and defended by the subtleties of sophistical evasion and technical distinction. |