THE MARQUIS OF RIPON.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 84, 5 December 1874, Page 14

THE MARQUIS OF RIPON.

(From the 'Dublin Evening Post,' September 7.) Sxncb the conversion of John Henry Newman, one of the foremost intellects of the age, no event in the English religious world has created ouch a sensation as the conversion to Catholicity of the Marquis of Ripon. For our part, and we think we may speak in this matte*- for the Catholic body generally in these countries, we felt no inclination to indulge in any display of jubilation at the change in the religious opinions of th« noble owner of 1 Fountain Abbey. We, naturally, were pleased to learn that an eminent statesman, and able adherent of the political party of progress, and a nobleman of a high social position, should bave been willing to make serious personal sacrifices in order to embrace the Catholic communion. But we con•idered that the entire subject of the conversion of the Marquia of JRipon waß one that chiefly concerned the marquia himself. He had •imply exercised his undoubted right as a freeman, as a British subject, and, we will add, as a Protestant, when using his private judgment he left the Protestant and joined the Catholic Church. Protestants may think his decision erroneous, Catholics will, of course, approve of it ; but it is really not a question upon which Catholics and Protestants should quarrel. Every temporal inducement— social, political, and domestic— that could fairly be expected to influence a man in the position of the Marquis of Ripon, impelled his lordship to remain in the ctqed in which he was educated. The Catholic Church had no mere earthly attraction, no worldly temptation to offer him in exchange far what he was about to relinquish. Deliberately, and of his own free-will, he preferred social and political ostracism of a class, so that Ms conscience might be at ease, rather than the highest rewards a man of bis rank could hope for, with his spiritual cravings unsatisfied. What cauße has, therefore, been given by the Marquis of Ripoo, still less by the Catholics of the United Kingdom and their Church to justify the scurrilous and intolerant tirade against his lordship and the Church and religionists ho has joined, with which the ' Times,' < Globe,

XSJ« r en , ,? • H « hai i exercised that ri ? ht of private judgment, of religious freedom, of whose possession Englishmen are ofT,Z d l° fboa ? ia^ KhißK hiB *"***!>** murdered sLememb™ to*JS 7A7 A- embra^ d Monnonwm, perpetrated some dastardly act ™? wSj ? 18g *T nameandthe P eer *ge of England, he could Win. .of■ t- Wlth m ° r . e vehemene » he has been, for simply n!E ?• Christian communion which claims to be an offspring of the £2£S.° UrCh J T0V a th4t ? ar , ent Churah ' moßt of who 9 e P distinctive doctrines are part and parcel of the creed of all true Protestants. The difference m belief between, says Archdeacon Denison, a dignitary of B^ Qg - C^ n , e8t ° b A 19hm ? nfc ' andthe P resent creed of the Marquis of Kipon, is for less than the difference that exists between the belief of the High Church members of the Protestant Church and many Broad and Low Church members of the same communion. Had the Marquia ot Mipon become a Unitarian no objection would have been raised, and a paragraph in the fashionable intelligence of the « Times ' would probaoly be all the notification an indifferent public would receive of the lact. Yet a gulf exists between the tenets of Unitarian and of Orthodox Anglican Protestants inmeasurably deeper and wider than that which separates the latter from Roman Catholics. The « Time s' says that to become a Roman Catholic and remain a thorough Enelishman are almost incompatible conditions." It further adds that "a statesman who becomes a convert to Roman Catholicism forfeits at °?u c . „^ cm ? fid ° notc <> ot the English people. When a man in the prime ot his lite abandons the faith of Protestantism for that of Rome, his mmd must necessarily have undergone what to Englishmen can only seem a fatal demoralization." Well might the heroic Catholic barons and prelates of Runnymede, who wrested from a faithless despot the immortal Charter of British freedom, rise md gnantly from their graves to reproach the scribe who thus traduces their creed and memory, and falsifies the brightest page in English history. Was the faith of a Catholic incompatible with the loyalty of an Englishman, when Queen Elizabeth, at a terrible crisis in England's destinies, entrusted to a Catholic nobleman, Lord Howard of Effingham, the command of that British fleet which saved England from foreign invasion, and possibly from foreign subjection, and utterly routed that "invincible" Armada which his Catholic Majesty of Spain sent to crush her? Truly, fitting thanks have been rendered by the 'Times' to those Catholic soldiers and sailors who have borne in triumph the British flag ocr many a bloody field and through many a storm of battle. The Times, indeed, speaks the sad truth when it says that the prof6Bsion of the creed of 200,000,000 of Christians means in England political ostracism. Not one, English constituency is represented by a Catholic. The " Ultramontane bigotry "of Catholic Ireland has'not attained the perfection reached by "free, enlightened, Protestant England. We do not exclude men from political power because they kneel not before our national altara. May such a day never dawn upon us ! When Professor Tyndall lately shocked the religious sense of Ireland by his Belfast address, no Irish Catholic journal clamoured for his exclusion from those walls of science in which he has achieved such renown. Yet a distinguished statesman, like the Marquia of Ripon, is to be debarred in future from the exercise of his high talents in affairs of State, because his religious opinions and those of the conductors of the • Times ' and its following do not happen to be in accord. If such be English " liberality," give us, any day, the " Pagan."