But unless circumstances are constant, it matters little how constant
tempers and tendencies may be; and the expectations which we found upon
the general action of avarice, credulity, bigotry, self-seeking, or
any of the debased forms of legitimate human impulses, will often
be disappointed by results. Prepare the favorite climate, moisture,
exposure of a foreign plant, imitate its latitude and air and soil: it
will not necessarily grow at all, or, growing, it will only surprise you
by some alteration of its native features. Results are better chemists
than we, and their delicate root-fibres test the ground more accurately;
we shall find them languishing for some favorite elements, or colored
and persuaded by novel ones. History must remember the constants of
Man and of Nature, but be always expecting their variables, lest her
prophetic gift fall into ill-repute.

Thus, give unlimited power to the Catholic, and he cannot anywhere set
up his old-fashioned absolutism, unless you can manage at the same time
to furnish him with Roman and Spanish people, and the fifteenth century.
Yet we, too, have trembled at the imaginary horrors of Popery. All the
power you can thrust and pile upon the Catholic in America will become
an instrument to further the country's tendency towards light, as it
drags the human impulses away from the despotic past. All the Jesuits,
and prize bulls by every steamer, relays of papal agents, and
Corpus-Christi processions in the streets of Boston, will hardly lift
the shoulders of the great protesting country, as it turns to stare from
its tilling, steaming, pioneering, emancipating task.

It is not difficult to see why the revolts of peasants in the Middle
Ages were marked by horrible excesses,--why diplomatic Catholicism
prepared a St. Bartholomew's Eve for Paris,--why Dutch and Scotch
Protestants defaced and trampled under foot ecclesiastical Art,--why
German princes proclaimed a crusade against budding Protestantism and
Pan-slavism under Ziska and Procopius in Bohemia,--why the fagots were
fired at Constance, Prague, and Smithfield, and Pequod wigwams in New
England. All dreadful scenes, by simply taking place, show that they
have reason for it. But will they take place again? A Black Douglas did
undoubtedly live, and he was the nursery-threat for fractious Scotch
children during several generations; the Douglas never caught one of
them, but the threat did. So we are plied with stock-phrases, su