toleration of error is a deadly sin.  In this respect the Church of Rome claims to differ toto coelo from the churches of the Reformation.  In Ireland she has passed through all the stages of ecclesiastical experience from the lowest form of disability to the present claim of supremacy.  In the dark days of her suffering she cried for toleration, and as the claim was just in Protestant eyes she got it.  Then as she grew in strength she stretched forth her hands for equality, and as this too was just, she gradually obtained it.  At present she enjoys equality in every practical right and privilege with her Protestant neighbours.  But in the demand for Home Rule there is involved the claim of exerting an ecclesiastical ascendency not only over her own members but over Irish Protestants, and this is the claim which is unjust and which ought not to be granted.  Green, the historian, points out that William Pitt made the Union with England the ground of his plea for Roman Catholic emancipation, as it would effectually prevent a Romish ascendency in Ireland.  Home Rule in practice will destroy the control of Great Britain, and, therefore, involves the removal of the bulwark against Roman Catholic ascendency.

The contention of the Irish Protestants is that neither their will nor their religious liberties would be safe in the custody of Rome.  In an Irish Parliament civil allegiance to the Holy See would be the test of membership, and would make every Roman Catholic member a civil servant of the Vatican.  That Parliament would be compelled to carry out the behests of the Church.  The Church is hostile to the liberty of the Press, to liberty of public speech, to Modernism in science, in literature, in philosophy; is bound to exact obedience from her own members and to extirpate heresy and heretics; claims to be above Civil Law, and the right to enforce Canon Law whenever she is able.  There are simply no limits even of life or property to the range of her intolerance.  This is not an indictment; it is the boast of Rome.  She plumes herself upon being an intolerant because she is an infallible Church, and her Irish claim, symbolised by the Papal Tiara, is supremacy over the Church, supremacy over the State, and supremacy over the invisible world.  Unquestioning obedience is her law towards her own subjects, and intolerance tempered with prudence is her law towards Protestants.  It is a strange hallucination to find that there are politicians to-day who think that Rome will change her principles at the bidding of Mr. Redmond, or to please hard-driven politicians, or to make Rome attractive to a Protestant Empire.  Rome claims supremacy, and she tells us quite candidly what she will do when she gets it.