hate which that assumption so scantly veils, the argument contained in it is briefly this, that its author, the
Cardinal Archbishop, comes after all merely as a dissenting minister, the head of a voluntary association, to take
the management of the spiritual affairs of the Catholics, and to assume nothing that a Wesleyan or Baptist
might not claim. But do the Wesleyan and Baptist reject every other christian? Do they treat as
nonexistent whatever exists not within their pale? Do they refuse to see anything in the land but their own
chapels, or to acknowledge a fellow citizen that is not subject to their Conference? Do they think it seemly
or right to insult a great nation in the very name of its greatest act of religious freedom, to trample on its
generous tolerance, to ignore its noble struggles, and for its good return evil, for its charity contumely?
There is no Protestant in England desiring with all his heart to live in peace with his Catholic fellow
subject, and to know him only as a fellow countryman, who does not from the very strength of that feeling
spurn and resist an aggression of which the manifest claim is to apply the rights of freedom to the
uses of tyranny, and convert an act of justice into a means of domination. Let us not be ashamed
of arguments in behalf of justice to the Romanists simply because we see them Jesuitically quoted to palliate
Romanist encroachment. It was quite within the power of the Pope to have provided for the spiritual
government of the English branch of his church without offence or insult. He was not called on to assume
that the entire country had just been rescued from heathenism and restored to the supremacy of the Papal
hierarchy. He needed not to have swept away the whole Protestant population to make room for the
hierarchy of something less than a million of his fellow-believers. He needed not to have revelled in the
anticipated fall of our national faith by way of exalting and aggrandising his own. One of the most intelligent
and liberal Roman Catholics in England, Lord Beaumont, has put the case unanswerably. "To send a
bishop to Beverley for the spiritual direction of the Roman Catholic clergy in Yorkshire," he remarks, "and
to create a see of Beverley, are two very different things: the one is allowed by the tolerant laws of the
country; the other requires territorial dominion and sovereign power within the country. If you deny that
this country is a fief of Rome, and that the Pontiff has any dominion over it, you deny his power to create a
territorial see, and you condemn the late bull as 'sound and fury signifying nothing.' If, on the contrary,
you admit his power to raise Westminster into an archbishopric and Beverley into a bishopric, you make
over to the Pope a power which, according to the constitution, rests solely with the Queen and her
Parliament, and thereby infringe the prerogative of the one and interfere with the authority of the other."
Nothing could more tersely express the dilemma in which the Papal aggression has placed the honest
English Catholic. It is manifest to him, as to every other rational person, that for all due purposes of
internal government in regard to the Roman Catholic ministry, the vicar-apostolic, or the bishop with a
title from his flock, was enough; but for purposes of spiritual government and domination, the territorial
and purple prelate, with his retinue of synods, dioceses, and indefinite powers, was needed; the entire Canon
Law must be inflicted upon us, even at the cost of the Queen's prerogative; and not alone the Roman
Catholic community, subject to spiritual penalties and pains for temporal fidelity, but we, the unenthralled
and free community of Protestants, are expected to submit to the infliction. The English people say they
will not submit, and who can blame them? Who can therefore charge them with bigotry or injustice? It is
no violence to the principles of toleration that a creed, to which not only liberty of conscience is yielded,
but also all reasonable means of promoting and propagating itself, should be denied such privileges of external
action as are utterly inconsistent with the rights of other beliefs. The very territorial titles assumed, the
claim of a disposal of the soil, the assumption to govern England by provinces and dioceses with local titles
and unlimited jurisdiction, constitute a temporal pretension to which the rules of temporal government apply.
Nothing of all this was required to meet merely the spiritual wants of the Roman Catholic population. Nothing
of it was implied in the compact with our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens at the period of the Emancipation
Act. Rome, says the authorised organ of Roman Catholic opinion, "has more than spoken. She has spoken
and acted. She has again divided our land into dioceses, and has placed over each a pastor, to whom all
baptised persons, without exception, within that district, are openly commanded to submit themselves in all
ecclesiastical matters, under pain of damnation; and the Anglican sees, those ghosts of realities long since
passed away, are utterly ignored." Was this the meaning of the compact of 1829? Is it within the limits of
any kind of allowable toleration, that a paramount spiritual authority derived solely from a foreign prince
should be permitted, even in name, to lord itself over the crown and constitution of England? Why, it is a
claim at this day rejected in every Roman Catholic country with the smallest title to independence; and
ought it to be suffered in a country emphatically Protestant? There is a Galilean Church in France; there
is a Catholic Church in Prussia, where education is free, and where prelates cannot be chosen without the
sanction of the sovereign; but, according to Cardinal Wiseman, there can be no such thing in England.
The assertion is a disingenuous artifice; nor is there anything more worthy of remark in the Appeal
than the manner in which important points of this nature are slurred, and others elaborately dwelt upon
which no one is disposed to call in question.

It is not the denial of the Queen's spiritual supremacy, nor is it even the creation of a hierarchy (supposing
a case of necessity made out for it), which we would refuse to the Roman Catholic. The Emancipation Act
may have led to both, as it certainly did to one. But in conceding to the Catholics what we believe to
be theirs, it did not surrender to them what we know to be our own. It warranted nothing offensive
or aggressive. It may have been simply an act of justice on the part of the State to extend frank
recognition to the Roman Catholic people; but after such an act the State should not have been ignored
by the class it had just raised and strengthened. Let the relative numbers of Catholic and Protestant in
England be compared; and the propriety of demanding for the minority an organisation co-extensive with
the wants of all, will be brought to a simple test. The insolence of the act did not even stop short, however, at
that monstrous inaptitude of means and ends. The vast majority of the nation has been treated as absolutely
non-existing, and authority over all baptised souls conferred without misgiving, as if the Roman Catholic
church were again predominant, and the privileges of Christianity denied to souls not baptised within its pale.
The question which arises upon this is a somewhat serious one. The most ardent friends of freedom have
to ask whether any sort of concession, directly leading to such encroachment, should have place in a scheme
of religious liberty. A State which has to care for the rights of many denominations, can have no title
to make concessions incompatible with the rights of any; or a perfect Roman Catholic freedom might
include a perfect Protestant subjection. If simply the claims of conscience were in question, the