ABSTRACT
The author of this pamphlet is Bernard Clarke. At the time of the publication he was a poet and young schoolmaster in Navan, Co. Meath. In 1751 Clarke also published the four-part Collections of Poems upon Various Occasions.7 According to Chetwode Crawley, he is said to have been the uncle and teacher of Adam Clarke, the famous dissenting scholar.8 Patrick Fagan notes that he was apparently a Protestant writer.9 John Butler, the publisher of the pamphlet, worked as a bookseller and printer in Dublin on ‘Cork Hill’ between 1751 and 1754.10
The new papal bull generated a religious dispute in Europe. The responses to this second Catholic condemnation include Baron Theodore H. Tschoudy’s Etrenne au Pape ou les Franc-Maçons: response a la bulle, Pape Benedoit XIV, 1751 (The Hague, 1752) and a pamphlet entitled Les Vrais jugemens sur la société des francs-maçons où l'on raporte un détail abrégé de leurs statuts, où l'on fait voir combien ces maximes sont contraires à celles de la religion (Brussels, 1752).11 The latter came to the opposite conclusions of Bernard Clarke with regard to the papal bull. In 1782 Karl Michaeler, a Jesuit professor at Innsbruck University, also published a response to Benedict XIV’s decree, which highlights some illogicality in its argument. Freemasons continued to issue defences in the second half of the eighteenth century. These apologies include George Smith’s Defence of Masonry in General, but in Particular against Edicts, Bulls, Decrees, Condemnations, &c by Several Powers in Europe (1783) and Walter Burke’s A Defence of Free-Masonry: Containing the Censures Passed upon it by Six Doctors of Sorbonne and Two Popes with an Answer to Them (1787).12
