MR MCCARTHY has done a very admirable piece of work by placing in the hands of the Protestants of this country this book. We wish every person in the whole of the British Empire would read it, and would ponder seriously its contents. It contains twelve chapters of matters of the utmost importance to our nation. It is written with perspicuity, fairness to all accused in its pages, and in dignified language and style. Mr McCarthy gives chapter and verse for every charge against the papacy, kings and queens, and members of the British Cabinets. He begins the book by giving the “Act of Rights and Settlement,” passed in the first year of William and Mary, 1689. The part of the Act quoted is—”Every person that shall hold communion with the See or Church of Rome shall be excluded and for ever incapable to possess the Crown and Government of this Realm and the Dominions thereunto belonging, and in every such case the people of these Realms shall be and are absolved of their allegiance.” He proceeds to show how “Papal propagandists dinned into the ears of an uninformed public (1) that that Act was from the first purely an Act of bigotry; and (2) that even if there was at first some reason for it, there is none now, because the power of the See or Church of Rome is no longer to be feared.” In a very brief, but quite clear and convincing, way, he sums up his argument as follows:—”Who dare deny, in the light of the facts, that the great Act of Rights and Settlement was a measure of self-defence, amply justified and made necessary by all that the nation suffered during 136 years from Mary’s reign; through the Irish and Spanish wars waged by the Popes against Elizabeth; through the communion with Rome begun by James I.; through the marriage of Charles I. with a Papist Queen and the consequent English Civil War and Irish Rebellion; through Charles II. marrying a Papist and being himself a Papist in secret; and as the last blow, through James II. being an open Papist pledged to force the Papal religion on a Protestant people, who had so dearly purchased their freedom by their blood?”
* “The British Monarchy and the See of Rome,” by Michael J. McCarthy. London: Protestant Truth Society, 3 St Paul’s Churchyard. Price 2s net.
He then goes on to show how the Papacy by intrigues, using threats and flattery, got the Act of Rights and Settlement violated by the visit of King Edward VII. to the Pope in 1903, the change of the Accession Oath in 1910, and the appointment of the Envoy in 1914.
The revelations he makes of the treachery of Lord Salisbury, Mr Asquith, Mr Lloyd George, and Mr Bonar Law, and of the members of their respective Cabinets, and the bloody consequences that followed in Ireland until the Papacy got that most miserable country separated from British Rule, make very sad reading.
We give one other quotation from this book to which the attention of every true patriot should be directed. It is a statement made by Lord Carson in the House of Lords when the Bill setting up the Irish Free State was being passed. The quotation is:—”Pass the Bill, but put aside all this infernal hypocrisy by which you are casting around you a curtain to screen from yourselves the ignominy and humiliation facing you in every thing which you do and are ashamed to do. You have betrayed every man who tried to serve you in Ireland, and now you are trying to betray yourselves and your own consciences. What you do is the outcome of a base surrender.” Lord Carson meant by this statement that the Government of Britain did all within their power to place the Protestants of Ulster under the feet of the Papacy.—N. C.