,
his organ is down upon the Protestant clergy in bitter and unrelenting
denunciations! I believe that _you_ are preparing to go over to the
Roman Catholics; and to justify your change, when the time comes, you
now assert, "in humiliation but in candor," you say, that the people
"have _ten thousand times more_ to fear from Methodists than from
Catholics." If you believe this, you ought to leave the Methodist Church
_instantly_, even without the formalities of a withdrawal or
expulsion--even though you should be denied admittance into the Catholic
Church! I deny that we have "_ten thousand times more to fear_" from the
_Devil_ than we have from the Catholics; and according to your argument,
_the Methodists are worse than the Devil_! This, their most bitter
revilers and enemies do not believe; and for obvious reasons. The
Methodist Church has no St. Bartholomew's Day, with its rivers of blood
staining her garments: she never indiscriminately slaughtered the
Albigenses, or Waldenses, or Huguenots: she never established an
infernal Inquisition: she never lit up the fires of Smithfield: never
burned the Holy Bible, and prohibited, upon pain of eternal death, the
printing and circulating of God's word; and last, but not least, she has
not sought to keep the people in ignorance. Wherever Methodism has been
planted, the people have become great and happy. If you please, wherever
_Protestantism_ has prevailed, the people have been prosperous and
happy. But look to Old Spain, Italy, the German Confederacies, Sardinia,
Naples, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Bavaria, Baden, South America, and
Mexico, where Romanism is the established religion, and the places of
her influence are a hissing and a by-word in the eyes of the civilized
world! Protestantism has done more for the world in the last hundred
years than the Roman Catholic Church has for the _eighteen hundred
years_!

Sir, the Puritans, of New England; the Hollanders, of New York; the
Quakers, Lutherans, and German Reformed, of Pennsylvania; the Baptists,
of Rhode Island; the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, of Virginia; the
Lutherans and followers of Wesley and Whitefield, of Georgia; the
Huguenots and Episcopalians, of the Carolinas; and the Seceders in
several of the States, who were the religious pioneers of these States,
were all Protestants and Know Nothings; and if they were living, they
would be ashamed of you and your teachings. They selected this
wilderness country as