secret cruelty and crime, the well concealed theories of Priestly instruction, the lessons of deep and dark atrocity, that had so long filled the country with treason and with blood, were then dragged forth to light.

Perhaps a greater and a more universal interest never was excited in England by a single public meeting, than by the first that was held in Exeter Hall, and that solely by the subject, as the persons who brought it forward were men without name or influence with the British public. A second meeting was immediately demanded, and held in three weeks after the first; the more the evidence of facts was investigated, the more clear and convincing did the proofs appear. The criminals, the Popish Hierarchy, feeling they were detected, were silent all but Dr. Murray; he, necessarily compelled to self defence, afforded by all his sophistries, his denials, his equivocations, and his solemn appeals to his oath, only fresh materials for his own conviction; his weak and silly apologist, the compiler of the Priests Directories, involved him only deeper and deeper by establishing the proofs of his crime; their complaints of not being heard in their own defence, while they refused every opportunity offered them to appear: their charge against their accusers of going to a distance, while they refused every invitation to meet them at home, only served the more to convince the public mind of their manifest consciousness of the truth of every charge against them, and such was the anxiety of the public to learn the full statement of the case, that if the Editors could have acceded to all the applications they received to hold public meetings, they might have proceeded through the length and breadth of the United Empire.

The first of these Volumes, closing with the year 1835, is occupied with accounts of Meetings held in various parts of England and Scotland, and the intense interest and anxiety of the Protestant public to hear, the deep and earnest attention of the crowded meetings, and the voice of

loud acclamation mingled with expressions of astonishment, disgust, and horror, with which the various statements were received, could never be conveyed in any printed form.— At the close of the year 1835, a letter appeared in a newspaper, in which it was stated that a certain Bible printed in Cork, in 1818, contained the doctrines of Dens in the shape of a commentary on the Scriptures, of which some specimens were given in the letter, and that the names of the Popish Bishops were among the list of subscribers to this publication. This caused an inquiry-the identity of the extracts in the paper, with the notes of a celebrated Bible published in Dublin, in 1816, was at once perceived. It was well known that this Bible had been publicly abjured by the Bishops, that Dr. Troy had denied having given it his patronage, and had been convicted of falsehood by his own bookseller, that Dr. Murray had declared in his evidence in 1825, that it was not circulated under the authority of any Bishop or Priest in Ireland, and that, till then, no counter proof had been adduced against him. After some delay a copy of the Cork edition was procured, a comparison was instituted between them, they were evidently different editions of the same book, and the names of Dr. Troy and Dr. Murray appeared not only as subscribers but as patrons of the publication. The second Volume of this work commences with a comparison between the doctrines of this infamous commentary and Dens, instituted at a public meeting held in Glasgow, in January, 1836, where both editions were produced, and the iniquity, the falsehood of the Romish Hierarchy stand out still more conspicuously than before. Again Dr. Murray attempts to redeem his character by a denial of any knowledge of the fact, and again affords an opportunity for fresh exposure and conviction.

The facts are still more fully developed at a subsequent meeting, held in July, at Exeter Hall, and this period of the controversy was distinguished by an incident that served to

give new interest and deeper importance to the case. One of the Editors, through a mistake, which the detail of facts will render perhaps less inexcusable than it might at first appear, brought forward, not in evidence of the facts, but in an incidental illustration of the Papal power, a Bull which had come into his hands as is related, and which he conceived to be a genuine document, but which turned out to be fictitious and certainly not written with intention to deceive. The production of this fictitious document was the signal for one simultaneous burst of Papal and Radical indignation against the individual who produced it; the Press of the United Empire, as far as it pleads the cause of Popery, echoed the charges of wilful falsehood and forgery against him, and the admitted spuriousness of this one document was pleaded as a demonstration of the falsehood of every other.

One circumstance, however, then little dreamt of in the midst of this loudly vociferated triumph, served to make it but of brief duration; that circumstance was this, that the fictitious document professed to be a Bull, and while the shout of Papal acclamation over this fictitious Bull was ringing loudest in the ear of England, they little knew that a fresh detection and exposure of the crimes of their Hierarchy was ready to meet them in the midst of all their triumph.— The accession of political power which they had gained by perjuries, without measure and without number-abjuring all the laws and canons of their church that had been in former times the signal and the authority for treason, for confiscation, and for slaughter, had emboldened the Romish Bishops to bring those laws into active operation, on the consciences of the people in the confessional, which is the mode the Church of Rome has ever most approved, of making her laws of force and power in any country, and they accordingly had set up these laws in connexion with the republished Theology of Dens.

Through all their tissue of complicated perjuries, the plea the popish bishops had relied on to prove the total renunciation of these laws, was the fact, that they could not be in force, for they had never been published by their authority in the country; therefore, by their own admission on their oaths, the publication of those laws in the country had put them into force.

Their book of canon law, and its important references, had been examined. These laws were brought out immediately in another public meeting in London; and as will be seen in the results of the meeting held on the subject, the shout of short-lived triumph was turned into the abashed confounded silence of conscious and convicted guilt; and while to this day they strive to raise the public cry of forgery and of imposture as to the fictitious bull, to this day they do do not dare even to mention, much less to meet, the proof that they have set up the laws they had denied again and again upon their oath, and the laws which they bring to bear with despotic and irresistible power upon the consciences of the miserable Roman Catholic laity, to bring them into slavery, and to make them, when opportunity long sought and wished for may present itself, the instruments of treason, of insurrection, and of slaughter in unhappy Ireland.

There seemed no further development of Papal guilt to be expected, yet another discovery still more important than the last served to rend the veil for ever from the mystery of iniquity—the secret statutes of the Provincial Synod of the Bishops of Leinster, were discovered. By these, Dens, which had before been proved to be a guide for the priests, but only inferentially shown to carry its influence to the people, was now demonstrated to be the guide established by episcopal authority, for all the population of the Church of Rome; the priests were proved to be drilled in that standard by the bishops in the conference, to teach them to direct by it the consciences of the people in the confessional-the laws that had been added

to this atrocious system of theology, were placed beyond the reach of doubt, as to their tremendous use and destination ; and treason, confiscation, perjury, and murder were brought home to the very heart of the episcopal authority of Rome. The monster was fully now exposed to public view, that so long had preyed upon the wretched population of the land, and contrived, like the desolator of Arcadia, so to drag its victims to their power, as he dragged the cattle backward to his den, that the traces might seem to point away from the place of destination, so that they could not be tracked to a religion that was the real author of their crimes and misery. The detection and exposure of these secret statutes, in meetings at Exeter Hall and Bristol, held by the Editors, closes their present publication.

They have not omitted a single document on behalf of the Church of Rome, that was written by a single individual whose name was known, or that could give a shadow of weight to any effort to defend them.

They have omitted some correspondence of merely local interest connected with the Hereford Association, on the part of Thomas A. Knight, Esq. of Downton Castle, and the Rev. Maurice James, of Pembridge. The former of these gentlemen has passed away from this earthly scene; and they would not preserve a correspondence which might inflict unnecessary pain on individuals, and could not throw much additional light upon the facts of the controversy. The correspondence with Mr. James they omit for various reasons— it would swell these volumes without adding a tittle to their interest, and could convey no instruction to the reader, except the melancholy lesson, that when either false political prejudices, or a still more lamentable error as to the religion he professes, leads a Minister of the Established Church to undertake the defence of Radicalism or of Popery, he exhibits a miserable illustration of the cause he has espoused, that it is destitute alike of principle and of truth. It is well