of all
the parties that composed it. In this manner these insolent and
profligate factions, as if they were playing with balls and counters,
made a sport of the fortunes and the liberties of their
fellow-creatures. Other acts of persecution have been acts of malice.
This was a subversion of justice from wantonness and petulance. Look
into the history of Bishop Burnet. He is a witness without exception.

The effects of the act have been as mischievous as its origin was
ludicrous and shameful. From that time, every person of that communion,
lay and ecclesiastic, has been obliged to fly from the face of day. The
clergy, concealed in garrets of private houses, or obliged to take a
shelter (hardly safe to themselves, but infinitely dangerous to their
country) under the privileges of foreign ministers, officiated as their
servants and under their protection. The whole body of the Catholics,
condemned to beggary and to ignorance in their native land, have been
obliged to learn the principles of letters, at the hazard of all their
other principles, from the charity of your enemies. They have been taxed
to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profligate relations,
and according to the measure of their necessity and profligacy. Examples
of this are many and affecting. Some of them are known by a friend who
stands near me in this hall. It is but six or seven years since a
clergyman, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither guilty nor
accused of anything noxious to the state, was condemned to perpetual
imprisonment for exercising the functions of his religion; and after
lying in jail two or three years, was relieved by the mercy of
government from perpetual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual
banishment. A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name
respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its concern,
was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among common felons, and only
escaped the same doom, either by some error in the process, or that the
wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person,--I
now forget which. In short, the persecution would never have relented
for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though with an ambiguous
example) the strict rule of their artificial duty by the higher
obligation of their conscience, did not constantly throw every
difficulty in the way of such informers. But so ineffectual is the power
of legal evasion against legal iniquity,