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Among the most recent Romish efforts in Parliament, it is important to notice the attempts made to obtain the appointment of Popish Chaplains to our prisons and workhouses, and the payment of them with the public money; but which, providentially, have hitherto failed. This work is taken under the fostering protection of one of the members for Knaresborough under various pleas, but all intended to cover the ultimate view of advancing the party-interests of the Church of Rome. If this object were gained they know that it would be a most important step; for although they have secured to a large extent the pecuniary aid of this most elastic government, in no case have Romish ecclesiastics yet gained a footing or an endowment in England. Let her succeed in this, and it will not be long before she will make an effort to participate in the possessions of our Parochial Clergy, whose preferments she regards as stolen property. Few perhaps are prepared to expect such a claim as this, but we happen to know that at a recent period when one of our West Indian Colonies was divided into parishes by an Act of the Colonial Legislature, an application was actually made by a body of Roman Catholics to permit one parish to be assigned to them the subject was deliberated upon by the Representatives, and was happily negatived by a large majority.

Our battles must be fought in the place in which the Romish party in contempt of their oaths are carrying out their schemes of destruction to the Church established in this land. Let our conservative members in each House show as much resoluteness and pertinacity as that which is exhibited on the other side, and success must follow. Let our exertions be directed to the great objects of protecting our existing Institutions, and providing for the spiritual wants of our countrymen and fellow-subjects, and we shall then be enabled to stem the torrent of demolition which is directed against our Constitution, and to restore those outworks by which it was so long and so successfully guarded, for Protestant ascendency is, under God, the only safeguard from Popish tyranny.

PETITIONS OF THE LATE REV. WILLIAM HOWELS AGAINST THE ROMISH EMANCIPATION ACT, AND ON NATIONAL EDUCATION.

THE following masterly Petitions will explain themselves.

"The Petition of the Minister and Congregation of the Episcopal Chapel in Long-acre, &c.

"Most humbly sheweth

"That your petitioners have long beheld with grief and indignation the ceaseless endeavours of apostate Rome, to invade a constitution which Protestantism has consecrated to religion, to loyalty, and to

liberty; and to insinuate herself into the rights and privileges of a church whose doctrines breathe the primitive purity of the christian religion.

"That your petitioners are grieved to witness a most criminal indifference to the voice of God himself on a subject vitally momentous to Britain in the present crisis; and to hear it asserted and re-asserted, that concession to Papists is a measure simply political in its nature and effects; although a revelation from heaven has long since solved the question; and demonstrated that Romanism, in the guise of religion, is in reality a conspiracy to invade the prerogative of Jehovah ; to usurp the thrones of kings; to subvert every government founded in equity; and to debase and enslave the universe, by seducing, corrupting, and demoralizing mankind.

"That all equitable legislation must emanate absolutely from the Divine Being; the right of legislating, only as the minister and representative of God, being delegated to man by him who is supreme, by whom alone kings reign and princes decree justice.'

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"That the respective and reciprocal duties therefore of legislators, magistrates, and subjects, in enacting, enforcing, and obeying human laws, are all necessarily comprised in their common obligations to their great Creator and Governor.

"That Popery, as opposing itself to the nature, perfections, and truth of the Deity, must necessarily exclude all the positive principles of legislation from the bosom of its votaries; and render them invariably hostile to every protestant government, in the degree in which it approaches the only model of perfection-the government of God himself.

"That as a necessary consequence, the human mind, (however eminently endowed by nature, and elaborately cultivated by art,) under the baneful influence of Popery, must be incapable of comprehending the nature, and of appreciating the worth, of liberty, civil, political, or religious; invariably confounding it more or less with tyranny, with slavery, and with licentiousness.

"That as a further necessary consequence, the enemies of the Supreme Legislator, and, therefore, the enemies of all his subjects, as Papists eminently are, (if revelation be indeed Divine,) must be absolutely incompetent to legislate on the imperishable principles of truth and justice, wisdom and benevolence; not solely and exclusively for the enlightened Protestants of the British empire, but even for those who are only emerging into political existence from the barbarism of savage life.

"That had the advocates of expediency been conversant with legislation in its nature, origin, and obligations-had they seen how all the principles of true liberty and of good government wholly involve themselves in theocracy, as all the principles of art and science subsist only in the general laws of nature-and had they beheld, in the light of divine truth, the immutably corrupt and mightily elastic spirit of Popery; ignorance and eloquence, genius and folly, had never conspired together to stab the vitals of the country by advocating for the Papists the concession of the elective franchise.

"That as the legislative errors of others sink into contempt when contrasted with those of Papists, who, if admitted into the British Parliament, and true to their own principles, would vote and legislate, in corporate, systematic and persevering enmity against the spirit of the christian religion; and consequently in ceaseless, subtile, and mighty hostility to the best interests of Englishmen; your petitioners must deprecate, with horror, the awfully anomalous admission of Popish apostasy and Popish misanthropy into the bosom of a British senate, and into the citadel of a regenerate church.

"That your petitioners deem all reference to the conduct of their forefathers in the ruthless fangs of Popery, struggling only for a portion of secular freedom, on the principles of heathen Greece and heathen Rome, as altogether inapplicable to the shameless and the shameful demands of modern Romanists; for this obvious reason; that their ancestors, in the midst of all their struggles, were themselves the voluntary slaves of spiritual tyranny, and the bitter enemies of liberty in all its original and parental glories; THE LIBERTY OF TRUE RELIGION, INVOLVING IN ITSELF, AND IN ITSELF EXCLUSIVELY, DEITY IN ALL HIS PERFECTIONS, AND HUMANITY IN ALL ITS OBLIGATIONS.

"That the concession of the elective franchise has not only multiplied the crimes and aggravated the miseries of Ireland; but shaken likewise the very foundations of the glorious British constitution; the majority of Irish votes being virtually at the disposal of a demoralising, disloyal, turbulent, and traitorous priesthood.

"That the concession of the representative franchise would be productive of further and progressive evils; and enable Romanists either to prosecute a successful crusade for supremacy, or involve the country in all the horrors of a civil war.

"That the grant of the representative franchise would soon introduce into the British Senate such an influx of members from each side the channel, as would, by voting together on all cases of emergency, control your honorable house and the other estates of the realm; dictate to the ministers of the crown, and force them into any measure they pleased.

"That as long as Popery (necessarily to preserve its own existence) keeps the Irish peasantry in ignorance and idleness, in crime and wretchedness, the spirit of commercial enterprise and agricultural improvement cannot even breathe among them; while the best friends of their unhappy country will ever have presented to their view the most heart-rending of all spectacles, a corrupt religion preying on the human body as well as on the human soul; murdering at once the blessings of time and the bliss of eternity.

“That piety and loyalty, patriotism and humanity, enforce all their demands on the government, the hierachy, and the people of England, for the spiritual emanciption of the British Slaves of an ARCH IMPOSTER, (who according to the united testimony of Scripture and of fact, is now usurping the throne of God, and trampling to death the sacred liberties of the fairest portion of Europe) by diffusing from the pulpit and the press, and in every other feasible manner, the whole truth of Scripture, in the vernacular tongue of Irishmen, as well as in the English language.

"That the most plausible reason ever yet assigned for conceding the representative franchise involves in it a suicidal principle of action so justly and so awfully denounced in Scripture, Let us do evil that good may come;' and that all the arguments ever yet adduced by Papists themselves in support of their sacrilegious demands, ignominiously perish in the presence of divine truth.

"That as the ambition and the cupidity of Papists have never yet ceased to claim an exclusive right to the crown and to the church of England; and as they are toiling and smoothing their way to political power, not only to assert, but even to enforce their unhallowed claimsfor these momentous reasons, as well as for others far more weighty, Romanism ought to be watched in Britain with more vigilant jealousy than in any other country in the universe.

"That your petitioners must embrace the principles of infidelity, and trample under foot the volume of inspiration; or, as the only alternative; in the name of the God they fear, in the name of the King they honour, in the name of the country they love, and in the name of every principle which is or can be dear to them in life, in death, in time, and in eternity; they must protest against any further concession to Papists, not only as political empiricism, fraught with death to the constitution and calamity to the country; but above all, (to trace the evil to its origin,) as LEGISLATIVE TREASON AGAINST THE MAJESTY OF HEAVEN.

"That your petitioners have long beheld with filial sorrow and surprise, what truth is constrained to designate with painful emphasis, the Anti-Constitutional and the Anti-Christian munificence of their conscript Fathers and Protestant defenders, in their annual vote of nearly nine thousand pounds to the Popish College of Maynooth, so religiously and so gratefully devoted by Papists to the purposes of sedition and treason, and to the sublimation of enmity against God and man.

"That your petitioners fervently implore the wisdom of your honourable house to deprive the Roman Catholics of Ireland altogether of the elective franchise; to extinguish the Catholic Association; to suppress the Catholic Rent; to visit the ringleaders of agitation with condign punishment; to withhold all further pecuniary supplies from the College of Maynooth; and to banish the Jesuits (now poisoning the youthful minds of the future legislators and governors of Britain) from every part of his Majesty's dominions; as measures absolutely necessary to chastise and to tame into discipline the hitherto rampant spirit of Popery, and to establish on a firm and permanent basis the peace and prosperity of the whole empire.

"And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray that GOD will be pleased to direct and prosper all your consultations to the advancement of his glory, the good of his church, and the safety, honour, and welfare of our sovereign and his dominions.”

ON NATIONAL EDUCATION.

"That your petitioners would approach your honorable house as professors of that religion which alone teaches mankind to regard their legislators and governors as the delegates and representatives of Heaven. That your petitioners fervently deprecate any national system

of education which does not comprise the whole revealed will of God, for the following weighty reasons:

"That such a system would virtually prefer a charge of folly against infinite Wisdom, in having revealed more than was necessary for the temporal, spiritual, and eternal welfare of the human family.

"That the same system would necessarily involve an attempt to banish God from his human throne, to usurp his government, to curse rather than to bless mankind; and consequently to provoke the vengeance of Heaven."

ADDRESS FROM THE MAIDSTONE PROTESTANT

ASSOCIATION.

THE Committee of the Maidstone Branch of the Protestant Association, anxious to obtain the co-operation of their fellow townsmen, and of the Inhabitants of its environs, in the furtherance of an object, beyond doubt, of immense importance, involving, as it does, the religious liberty of every Protestant in Her Majesty's dominions, have resolved on circulating a brief outline of the nature of the Association of which they form a Branch.

I.—It is styled PROTESTANT, because its members are anxious to continue in possession of liberty of conscience from that yoke which the Papist imposes wherever he can exercise his usurped domination.

II. They would remind their fellow subjects, that their forefathers deemed this liberty of such moment as to be content to expire at that stake to which the intolerant bigotry of Rome had consigned them, if they, thereby, could hand down to us, their children, a blessing so invaluable. Hence the Society anxious to emulate the bright example furnished by their ancestors in shaking off the most oppressive of all slavery, the bondage of the mind, feel themselves bound to protest against the dark and persecuting superstition with which Rome is striving once more to enthral us; and also to aim at counteracting the evils pressing upon the nation from its machinations.

III.-This is felt by the Association to be the more necessary at the present moment, witnessing as they do the supineness which is evinced by our present Ministers, and their lax principles on religious subjects. They manifestly are pursuing a line of conduct marked out by expediency, rather than that of referring all questions to God's Word, as a Divine and consequently unerring rule, by which all matters, public as well as private, ought to be conducted, and in times past generally were. This once recognised, but now neglected standard, pronounces, with that infallible tone of authority which it justly claims, that whatever is wrong cannot, under any circumstances, be ultimately expedient. The members of the Association fully convinced of the soundness of this fundamental maxim, and seeing that it is altogether neglected by those whose duty it is to guard our Protestant Constitution, purchased for us at so dear a price, from Popish and Infidel innovation, have united with the sole view of supplying information, drawn from various sources, (many of which are furnished by the Papists themselves,) that they and

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