Having for years no antagonists to contend with outside the pale of the
Establishment, it was of course natural that we should find opponents
within. But during the incumbency of Mr. Smith--the minister of the
parish for the first one-and-twenty years of my life--even these were
wanting; and we passed a very quiet time, undisturbed by controversy of
any kind, political or ecclesiastical. Nor were the first few years of
Mr. Stewart's incumbency less quiet. The Catholic Relief Bill was a
pebble cast into the pool, but a very minute one; and the ripple which
it raised caused scarce any agitation. Mr. Stewart did not see his way
clearly through all the difficulties of the measure; but, influenced in
part by some of his brethren in the neighbourhood, he at length made up
his mind to petition against it; and to his petition, praying that no
concessions should be made to the Papists, greatly more than
nineteen-twentieths of the male parishioners affixed their names. The
few individuals who kept aloof were chiefly lads of an extra-liberal
turn, devoid, like most extreme politicians, of the ordinary
ecclesiastical sympathies of their countryfolk; and as I cultivated no
acquaintance with them, and was more ecclesiastical than political in my
leanings, I had the satisfaction of finding myself standing, in
opposition to all my friends, on the Catholic Relief measure, in a
respectable minority of one. Even Uncle Sandy, after some little demur,
and an explosion against the Irish Establishment, set off and signed the
petition. I failed, however, to see that I was in the wrong. With the
two great facts of the Irish Union and the Irish Church before me, I
could not petition against Roman Catholic Emancipation. I felt, too,
that were I myself a Roman Catholic, I would listen to no Protestant
argument until what I held to be justice had first been done me. I would
have at once inferred that a religion associated with what I deemed
injustice was a false, not a true, religion; and, on the strength of the
inference, would have rejected it without further inquiry; and could I
fail to believe that what I myself would have done in the circumstances,
many Roman Catholics were actually doing? And believing I could defend
my position, which was certainly not an obtrusive one, and was at times
assailed in conversation by my friends, in a way that showed, as I
thought, they did not understand it, I sat down and wrote an elaborate
letter on the subjec