A Bill was passed by the Irish Parliament in 1778, which greatly mitigated the stringency of the penal laws.  Moreover, in its preamble was recited, as a ground for this legislation, that for “a long series of years” the Roman Catholics had exhibited an “uniform peaceable behaviour.”  In doing and saying so much, the Irish Parliament virtually bound itself to do more.[88] In this Bill was contained a clause which repealed the Sacramental Test, and thereby liberated the Presbyterians from disqualification.  But the Bill had to pass the ordeal of a review in England, and there the clause was struck out.  The Bill itself, though mutilated, was wisely passed by a majority of 127 to 89.  Even in this form it excited the enthusiastic admiration of Burke.[89] Nor were the Presbyterians forgotten at the epoch when, in 1779-80, England, under the pressure of her growing difficulties, made large commercial concessions to Ireland.  The Dublin Parliament renewed the Bill for the removal of the Sacramental Test.  And it was carried by the Irish Parliament in the very year which witnessed in London the disgraceful riots of Lord George Gordon, and forty-eight years before the Imperial Parliament conceded, on this side the Channel, any similar relief.  Other contemporary signs bore witness to the growth of toleration; for the Volunteers, founded in 1778, and originally a Protestant body, after a time received Roman Catholics into their ranks.  These impartial proceedings are all the more honourable to Irish sentiment in general, because Lord Charlemont, its champion out of doors, and Flood, long the leader of the Independent party in the Parliament, were neither of them prepared to surrender the system of Protestant ascendency.

In order to measure the space which had at this period been covered by the forward movement of liberality and patriotism, it is necessary to look back to the early years of the Georgian period, when Whiggism had acquired a decisive ascendency, and the spirits of the great deep were let loose against Popery.  But the temper of proscription in the two countries exhibited specific differences.  Extravagant in both, it became in Ireland vulgar and indecent.  In England, it was Tilburina,[90] gone mad in white satin; in Ireland it was Tilburina’s maid, gone mad in white linen.  The Lords Justices of Ireland, in 1715, recommended the Parliament to put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland “but that of Protestant and Papist."[91] And the years that followed seem to mark the lowest point of constitutional depression for the Roman Catholic population in particular, as well as for Ireland at large.  The Commons, in 1715, prayed for measures to discover any Papist enlisting in the King’s service, in order that he might be expelled “and punished with the utmost severity of the law."[92] When an oath of abjuration had been imposed which prevented nearly all priests from registering, a Bill was passed by the Commons in 1719 for branding