[208] The declaration
against Transubstantiation and the oath of supremacy, certain
expressions in which were the obstacles which had hitherto kept the
Roman Catholics out of office and out of Parliament, were to be
repealed, and another to be substituted for them which should merely
bind him who took it to defend the King, to maintain the Protestant
succession, and to declare that "it was not an article of his faith, and
that he renounced, rejected, and abjured the opinion, that princes
excommunicated or deposed by the Pope might be deposed and murdered; and
that he disclaimed, disavowed, and solemnly abjured any intention to
subvert the present Church Establishment as settled by law within this
realm, and that he would never exercise any privilege to which he was or
might become entitled to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or
Protestant government in this kingdom."[209]
The second question was, it will probably be confessed, even more
important. Pitt, who had always contemplated, and had encouraged the
Irish Roman Catholics to contemplate, the abolition of their political
disabilities as an indispensable appendage to, or, it may be said, part
of the Union, had designed, farther, not to confine his benefits to the
laymen, but to endow the Roman Catholic clergy with adequate stipends, a
proposal which was received with the greatest thankfulness, not only by
the Irish prelates and clergy themselves, but also by the heads of their
Church at Rome, who were willing, in return, to give the crown a veto on
all the ecclesiastical appointments of their Church in the two
islands.
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