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1839.]. Truly, a beautiful reformation you have produced! You have delivered over a whole people (Ireland) for years to the dominion of Popery, and have brought your country backward nearly three centuries towards that gulf of superstition, ignorance, and infidelity. You have succeeded in obliging the successors of the Whigs of 1688 to desert a name which you have so vilely polluted, and to style themselves Conservatives of the principles of that Revolution.

The old English Whigs called those men Tories whom they accused of leaning towards Popery and high prerogative. They refuted the first of these accusations by joining the Whigs, or rather, along with the English Prelacy, by taking the lead in effecting the Revolution of 1688; but, for a time, they continued to regret the violation thereby produced of the hereditary line of succession to the crown, and hence the secular Tories regarded with favour the Scottish Jacobites.

Such has of late been the strange absurdity of Scotsmen, that while so many of the Campbells, Kennedys, and Hamiltons, who persist in patronising Popery, are styled and supported by you as Whigs, you oppose, as Tories, the old Whig Presbyterian families, the steadfast supporters of the house of Hanover and the Revolution of 1688, such as Lockhart, Scott, Douglas, Hope, Ramsay, and thousands of others, who, at this day, adhere to the faith of those Argyles who perished on the scaffold or fought at Sheriff-Muir, and of that Cassillis whose signature authenticated our first copy of the Westminster Confession.

Meanwhile, to Scotsmen who have assumed the name of Whigs, and at the same time have given their votes to the patrons of Popery and infidelity, I say, without hesitation, you have been miserably misled into gross inconsistency by the mere sound of a name, you uttered your own condemnation—you thereby became hypocrites in religion—enemies of the house of Hanover, and enemies of the liberties and the improvement of mankind. I can only trust and hope that you have been acting under that temporary but most strange delusion which, in 1828, so extensively diffused blindness over the nation. England has recovered. Wellington, Peel, Graham, Stanley—all men of intelligence and upright principle—have every where recovered. Is Scotland to continue dishonoured, and its inhabitants regarded as fallen from the high name they once possessed, as an enlightened people of trustworthy Protestant character? From the sacred remains deposited in their Greyfriars, churchyard, a fearful voice of reproach ascends against the men of Edinburgh; and to you, more especially, men of Dundee, Perth, and Fife, of Stirling, and Glasgow, once the chosen seats of the Protestant Reformation, are addressed the words prefixed to this letter; look back to them, ponder them well!

The author of Christianity sent forth to instruct mankind a few private persons to whom he had taught his doctrines, and whom he directed to submit themselves to the civil power and magistracy of their own and other countries. I have no intention to trace historically the progress by which, in the west of Europe, the successors of these first teachers became united into a compact and powerful body, under a prince or chief—acquired in many countries a large proportion of the landed property, and a title to a tenth of the produce of the remainder—how they gradually assumed a superiority over all kings, princes, nobles, and legislators—how they became intolerably corrupt and tyrannical—and how their strength was shaken by a schism, whereby some nations, under the name of Protestants, were relieved from their dominion, while they retained their power over other nations, and are now striving, with much apparent success, to resume it over all. I propose merely to state what the system of Popery actually is, as it has practically existed and received the solemn sanction of the great General Assembly of the leaders of the body, styled the Council of Trent.

In considering what Popery is, mankind roust be divided into two classea: First, the mass of the