online version complete: May 4, 2009

Watson's
"Important Considerations"

or A Vindication of Queen Elizabeth from the Charge of Unjust Severity Towards Her Roman Catholic Subjects by Roman Catholics Themselves: Being Important Considerations in the Name of Certain Secular Priests,
Printed in 1601.

Originally published as "Important Considerations, which ought to move all true and sound Catholics, who are not wholly Jesuited, to acknowledge without all equivocations, ambiguities, or shiftings, that the proceedings of her Majesty, and of the State with them, since the beginning of her Highness's reign, have been both mild and merciful. Published by Sundry of us the Secular Priest, in dislike of many treatises, letters, and reports, which have been written and made in diverse places to the contrary: together with our opinion of a better course hereafter, for the promoting of the Catholic faith in England. Newly Imprinted 1601."

by William Watson

(1559-1603ad, Roman Catholic Priest, trained at Rheims)

1831 Edition with Preface and Notes by Protestant Rev. Joseph Mendham, M.A.

HAIL & FIRE REPRINTS 2009

HAIL & FIRE REPRINTS 2009

If you are unable to view content in the frame at right: Watson's "Important Considerations" or A Vindication of Queen Elizabeth from the Charge of Unjust Severity Towards Her Roman Catholic Subjects by Roman Catholics Themselves: Being Important Considerations in the Name of Certain Secular Priests, Printed in 1601. (1831 Edition with Preface and Notes by Rev. Joseph Mendham, M.A.)

TO THE KING'S MAJESTY.

Sire, As the present republication exhibits an illustrious Ancestor of your Majesty, to whom the British nation owes its completed Emancipation from Papal Despotism both temporal and spiritual, vindicated from the calumnies of Romanists by Romanists of less prostrate intellect and conscience themselves - and as your Majesty inherits, not only the throne, but the honoured name likewise, of another Royal Predecessor, William Henry the Third, a Prince, upon whom the Supreme Sovereign conferred the singular privilege of rescuing the nation from the re-imposition by the infatuated James the Second, of the enslaving yoke which she had shaken from her neck and trodden under her feet; and, of founding, in the memorable year of our Lord, One Thousand six hundred and eighty eight, a Constitution, which, to the lamented year of its infraction, One Thousand eight hundred and twenty nine, had preserved inviolate the Civil and Religious Liberty of Anglican Protestantism, and conveys to the Family of your Majesty its purest and most legitimate title to the Throne, which for so many generations that Family, conscientiously regardful of the sacred obligation of a national oath, has not ceased to support as well as adorn - no apology in dedicating a Work so appropriate as that contained in the following pages to the present Protestant Sovereign of the British Empire, can reasonably be required of

Your Majesty's Faithful and obedient Subject,
THE EDITOR.
August 8, 1831.

PREFACE

Should we suppose the volume of the New Covenant Scriptures, (in which the fate of the Old, for evidence, is included,) to have fallen from a cloud on an island of barbarians, possessing, however, and grammatically understanding, some language, in which language, the contents of the volume should, for the main, be made intelligible; the acquaintance which that volume discovers with the secret nature and operations of the human heart, independently of the proof arising from a trial of the mode therein prescribed for the eviction of its truth, and the successful result of that trial, would be sufficient to convince the natural rationality even of the lowest tutored mind, that the volume must, in its origin, be super-human, and on the assumption of the slightest conception of divinity, divine. Rationals, even of this measure, would be capable of receiving the religion described and inculcated in it, and so far justifiable in that reception, as to be inexcusable if they received it not. This, however, is Internal Evidence, and therefore not of the kind most exactly suited to the subject under present view, which is a question of fact; although capable of being added to it, and when so added of indispensable moment and value. It may likewise be observed with respect to External Evidence, that, in order, it is naturally prior, and is generally so in fact.

Assuming, then, from history the simple fact, that there exists a sufficient chain of legitimate information, quite distinct from tradition in its modern sense, since it might be exclusively and yet effectually supplied by adversaries to the result which it establishes, that the volume in question is a genuine production of its ostensible authors, and supposing, that the historic space intervening between the present time and the age of the document were otherwise a perfect blank - a bottomless and unoccupied chasm, save the narrow intellectual line connecting the opposite extreme points - all which is essential would remain to satisfy the inquirer, that Christianity, as professed by the whole body of Protestant Christians, is the genuine religion of Jesus Christ. We have supposed the intervening space unoccupied; but now letting in the whole and the real fact, whatever might be, the additional events known or unknown, by which the space were filled up, they could never annul or materially interfere with the conclusion, which has been previously and adequately established, in perfect independence of them.

Whatever therefore may have been the transactions and vicissitudes, through which the Christian Records with their evidence have travelled into the possession of the present generation of professing Protestants, those Records and that evidence are completely unaffected and undisturbed by them. We may admit without any real sacrifice, that the patrons and agents in our emancipation from the Italian domination and spiritual corruption were, for character, the foulest, and for motive, the most unprincipled or interested, that ever disgraced the human name. The position is untouched, that we have and profess, the religion of the gospel, as it was promulgated by its author and its first heralds. ... click to read more.