revolt to the king; declaring for a free parliament and loyalty, was all the cry. Now the question was, whether they should roll all their difficulties respecting the distribution of land upon the king, or whether the soldiers should return what had been granted, and the whole country be ruined.

CHAPTER VI.

"Thy soil is drenched with blood, thy pleasant fields laid waste."

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CHARLES II. was proclaimed King of Ireland and invited to go over, which was deferred till he was publicly acknowledged king in England. The catholics looked to him as the restorer of their lands, but they looked in vain; for he at once agreed not only to ratify what the Cromwellians had done, but agreed to exclude the Irish from the general act of indemnity passed on his arrival. All who had aided in the attempt to maintain Charles I. on the throne were expressly excluded," and a proclamation was issued confirming all the confiscations in Cromwell's time, and coolly declaring the Irish catholics to be "rebels," and that having been conquered by his majesty's protestant subjects, their estates and possessions had now become vested in the crown." He further added, that he held it to be his duty to God and the whole protestant interest, to command, publish, and declare, that all Irish rebels, other than such as by articles had liberty to reside in his dominions, and had not forfeited the benefits thereof, that should resort to England or Ireland, should be forthwith apprehended and proceeded against as rebels and traitors; and that the adventurers, and soldiers, and others, who were on the 1st of January last past put in possession of any of the manors, castles, houses, or lands, of any of the said Irish rebels, should not be disturbed in their possessions till either ejected by due course of law, or till his majesty by

the advice of parliament had taken further order therein." Charles then enforced all the expatriating laws previously made, forbidding them to go from one province to another to transact business; the nobility and gentry were forbidden to meet, "their letters were intercepted, and many of them were thrown into prison." The puritans, who had been the agents of the death of Charles I., were now taken into favour by the son. Those friends who had stood by him when in exile justly claimed that he should not abandon them in this time of need. Lord Roche, who had shared his pay with Charles when he had a regiment in Flanders, now trusted that Charles would restore to him his lost properties in Ireland, but he was rejected. The clamour now grew so great from the royalists that something must be done, claims must be heard from these confederates who had done so much for the king. And these claimants were divided into two classes-innocents and nocents; the first to be restored to their lands on the Cromwellian possessors being reprised or indemnified; the second was to be dismissed without remedy. No man was innocent who had joined the confederacy before the peace of 1648, or who previously had lived within the quarters of the confederates, though he might not have joined them, or had the means of living elsewhere; and none who had adhered to the Nuncio, &c. The commissioners upon these orders went to work, and the dismay of the king and councillors was great, when they found with all their precautions, that in the first sittings of court the innocents amounted to 200. The Cromwellians threatened to appeal to arms; and in order to prevent these claimants from being too numerous, they curtailed the sitting of the court; and of the 4000 claimants but 1000 were heard the court rose, and rose for ever. The confusion was great in the adjustment of the lands to the 200 innocents. Whole baronies had been assigned to soldiers in consideration of small pay. And finally, the Acts of Settlement and Explanation were prepared and pushed through parliament, and a protestant proprietary substituted instead of a catholic one.

What was now to be the religion of Ireland? Precisely what a parliament said it should be. The Scotch covenanters in Ulster, and the puritans of the south, had struggled to put down prelacy and to plant presbyterianism and independency in its place. But Ormond, always ready, urged Charles to pronounce the episcopacy and liturgy to be the legal establishment of Ireland: the ecclesiastical preferments were filled up, the bishops ordained with great pomp, and the puritans, who feared losing their estates, found their consciences quite yielding towards episcopacy, and they united heartily with them in compelling the Irish peasantry to pay for the support of the church.

What must be expected would be the state of catholic feeling under these unjust bonds that were fastened upon them; and to add to the weight, in order to exclude all catholics from power, the lower house of parliament resolved that no members should be qualified to sit in that house but such as had taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy; and to banish them from the upper house, "Primate Bramble," the speaker, procured an order to be passed there, that all the members should receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper from his grace's own hands.

The Act of Settlement was carried into effect while Dublin was thronged "with widows robbed of their jointures, and orphans of their birthrights"-the catholics dispersed themselves over the continent, and afterwards to America, seeking everywhere, but in their own isle, their bread and their home. And now let every christian look with a christian eye and christian heart on the fearful state into which these people were cast; let him trace back the history of that nation to a few centuries before the invasion, and candidly tell us if he thinks that Ireland has been blessed by the planting of a nominal church, and enforcing its laws by coercion upon a people "robbed and spoiled from the beginning." Let him look upon that Act of Settlement,"-read how it was carried into effect. Let him further look at what is called the "Black Act," and the “ Magna Charta of

Irish Protestants, which debarred the "Innocents" from being heard in their lawful claims. By this " Act," which Ormond was vigilant in forwarding, his income swelled from £7000. per annum to upwards of £80,000. Charles, who was cruel in the extreme, and violated his promises, saw without any apparent remorse, thousands of the most respectable and ancient families doomed to hopeless ruin.

Let us as protestants, and as "christian protestants" too, look all this fairly in the face, and if we can look at it unblushingly, we are made of sterner stuff than Cromwell himself. It has been a favourite saying with us, that the "blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the church." What shall we say of the blood of Irish catholics? It has been shed, and it has been shed profusely, it has been shed maliciously and most cruelly; and where are the catholics of Ireland now? Have they dwindled away-have they shrunk from their religion? No. There they stand looking up in the face of all men, adhering to their "ancient faith," and though they endured the penal laws, yet at the risk of their homes and lives they secretly performed their worship, baptized their children into a church which they knew would keep them debarred from all temporal privileges, not even allowing them to teach a child to read; yet under hedges, and in mountain caves, there they are, subsisting sometimes on potatoes, sometimes on nettles and other herbs, learning their beloved language, which under the heaviest penalty they are forbidden to read! It must be said of the catholics of Ireland, that the more they have been oppressed, like the children of Israel, the more they have grown.

What does this imply? That the catholic faith is the true faith? Not so. But it proves that God hates oppression, and however great the sins of the oppressed may have been, yet there is a vengeance which belongs alone to God to render, and when man presumptuously takes this into his own hands, he seldom removes the cause, but increases the evil.

The protestants have been sacrificed to the false zeal

and bigotry of the catholics; their blood has been spilt, their bodies have been burned, and their ashes have been scattered to the winds of heaven; but what has this blood, and what have these ashes done? They have planted many a church, and caused many to look carefully into that "Book of books," which before had to them been a sealed one; and in proportion as they have been persecuted, so have they flourished. Thus with the catholics of Ireland. Not a suffering has been spared to people or priest by Elizabeth, Cromwell, Charles, and others, which an over-heated zeal could devise to annihilate them. Their lands have been confiscated; their houses plundered and burned; their bishops and priests have been hanged; their heads put upon the tops of castles and towers, or their brains beaten out; the poor have laboured in the fields of their "task-masters," without remuneration. Ah, yes!-and upon the very fields which were owned by their sires. They have been driven from their miserable hovels as the "filth and offscouring of the earth," to dwell in the "clefts of the rocks;" they have paid a tenth of their scanty crop to support a full-fed clergy to read one day in seven a compilation of prayers to a handful of worshippers, as devout and proud as themselves. And where are these hated ones of the catholics now? Starving and dying in mountain or glen, they are calling upon the "Blessed Virgin," they are boldly bending before their crucifix, counting their beads, and invoking some saint to carry their cries to heaven, that God may rid them from the hand of their oppressors. Their priests are in every parish, and they know all their flock by name, and they stand out together the frightful monument of an oppressed, enduring, always dying, ever-living mass of God's image, made and kept so by a religion called christian And, strange to tell, the question is urged and reiterated-" What is the matter with that miserable country, and what can be done to relieve it?" Do justice, and do it speedily, or consequences more fearful may follow.

The object of the past concise sketch of the history of