have appeared in reply to Columbanus.-But they may be all reduced to one short answer, which Rinuccini and his sycophant Bishops made to the Nobility, Gentry, and second order of the Irish Clergy, in 1647,-namelythat Bishops alone have a right to judge of these matters; and that those who will not implicitly and unconditionally submit to assert or to retract whatever they order, whether they are in or out of Parliament, however high or numerous they may be, shall be denied the benefits of Christianity, and treated as schismatical.--Here then is an avowed attempt, masked indeed, but clumsily, stupidly masked by religion, to render the Bishops at once judges and accusers, witnesses and parties, in all matters touching the Irish Catholic Church; to establish an unlimited dominion over the second order of the Clergy, which is not permitted even to the Pope,* which was proscribed The veryest Italian Theologians scout the doctrine of 'censures ad libitum, as fit only for the latitude of the Divan. See Contini's Dictionary of Heresies. Venice, cum licentia Superiorum, word Aerio, t. 1, p. 61, and Launoius's Epistles, as illegal, and resisted as intolerable in the most Catholic times! 2. However repugnant these pretensions may be to the doctrine of S. Paul," let your obedi"ence be rational," yet, could I make allowances for the waywardness of the human will, which always tends to despotism, and even for these strange publications, if I could discover in them, any one quality, which might render them palatable to a classical taste. Sometimes even the most impious doctrines come recommended by perspicuity; if the maxims are profligate, yet the language is terse; lack of learning may be supplied by a selection of the choicest words; by splendour of imagery; by vivacity and playfulness of wit. But in these publications, each sluggish line draggles, like a cart horse carrying lumber after his leader, with a stupid monotony of nonsense, vulgarity of epithet, and coarseness of calumny, which fol. p. 18, &c. with the second edition of Jus Belgarum, contra receptionem Bullarum Pontificiorum. Liege 1665. Dupin Traité de l'Excom. Biblioth. des Auteurs du 18me siecle, p. 58,59. exposes their writers to derision, and their abettors to disgrace! Here is neither theology nor history.- Assertion after assertion, followed here and there by a miserable non sequitur, seems to stare, like' an ideot, at that strange thing which precedes, and that stranger thing which follows it; and feeling itself out of place, and out of time, shivering with cold, starved with hunger, pinched with poverty, conscious of weakness, and looking round to every contiguous word for a portion of life, it seems with a beggarly tone to petition for a pittance of animation to save it from despair.. Columbanus would honestly acknowledge superiority, if not of truth and argument, at least of brilliancy and vigour, if he saw even the sophistry of his Countryman Celestius; if he could find falsehood screened by eloquence, or ignorance by style. Splendour of diction and fertility of fancy cover a multitude of sins. -But here is falsehood in all its deformity.In these effusions of dulness, and inventions of malignity, we find neither harmony of cadence, nor vigour of construction, neither truth in the premises, nor accuracy in the conclusions! However Irishmen may be accused of blundering in conversation-surely we are not such diggers of our own graves as to truckle to such blundering as this. Is Columbanus practised in the Mac-Sycophant art of booing and booing to such stupidity of intellect, such starvation of mind? He hopes not-He will not affect modesty where he is conscious of superior vigour; nor does he apprehend that he can, in the eye of any rational observer, be liable to the imputation of self-conceit, if, arguing from the incoherent and insipid effusions of indigested. malignity, which disgrace the sickly pages of the Vicar of Castabala,* he dares to assert that, having only such feeble opponents to encounter, he can walk at his leisure, and even loiter over the course. No-He will not disguise or disgrace his real character, by any fictitious appearance of * He declares that Columbanus has made him sick. Letters, p. 106.-The foulest stomachs most commonly require the strongest medicines. humility. Every hypocritical cry of religion in danger, every fradulent clamour of schism and heresy, every attempt to abuse the piety of the people, and to take advantage of their ignorance, Columbanus's heart swells with the generous eagerness of his Ancestors to oppose; and his pen is determined, in defiance of all calumny, to detect. : Most willingly would he overlook the errors of ignorance. Error is the common lot of mortality and he knows that error may be innocent, if it is sincere. But every man who entertains any sense of decorum will admit, that in recurring to slander, and to uncanonical censures, and in daring to refuse the Sacraments to his opponents, before they are convicted of any crime, the foreign-influenced Bishop of Castabala, impelled by passions which he ought to be the first to reprobate, and panting for a power which he pretends that no power on earth can controul, endeavours to overwhelm discussion by sanctified malice, to smother truth in its birth, as Herod destroyed the innocents, to raise a clamour of heresy where no heresy |