een rather singular
to have said to the inhabitants--'I heard you calling for water ten
years ago; why don't you call for it now?'"

* * * * *

"Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are
advocates for toleration; but then they think it no act of intolerance
to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is,
that all men scarcely like to punish others for not being of the same
opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only
species of persecution, of which the improved feeling and advanced
cultivation of the age will admit. Fire and faggot, chains and stone
walls, have been clamoured away; nothing remains but to mortify a
man's pride, and to limit his resources, and to set a mark upon him,
by cutting him off from his fair share of political power. By this
receipt insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked. The
gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded
from parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of
personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say that he lives in
the nineteenth, instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as
intolerant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in
his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit which wounds the pride
of a fellow-creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body
into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications
of the same principle? The minds of these two men no more differ
because they differ in their degrees of punishment, than their bodies
differ because one wore a doublet in the time of Mary, and the other
wears a coat in the reign of George. I do not accuse them of
intentional cruelty and injustice: I am sure there are very many
excellent men who would be shocked if they could conceive themselves
to be guilty of any thing like cruelty; but they innocently give a
wrong name to the bad spirit which is within them, and think they are
tolerant because they are not as intolerant as they could have been in
other times, but cannot be now. _The true spirit is to search after
God and for another life with lowliness of heart; to fling down no
man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no
pains on those solemn supplications whic