od as carried, till my horse brings me to my
stable-door.... What am I to do with my time, or you with yours, after
the Catholic question is carried?"

To the same friend he wrote:--

"You will be amused by hearing that I am to preach the 5th of
November[93] sermon at Bristol, and to dine at the 5th of November
dinner with the Mayor and Corporation of Bristol. All sorts of bad
theology are preached at the Cathedral on that day, and all sorts of
bad toasts drunk at the Mansion House. I will do neither the one nor
the other, nor bow the knee in the house of Rimmon."

On the 5th of November 1828, he wrote to Lord Holland:--

"To-day I have preached an honest sermon before the Mayor and
Corporation in the Cathedral--the most Protestant Corporation in
England! They stared at me with all their eyes. Several of them could
not keep the turtle on their stomachs."

The sermon[94] well deserved the epithet. It glanced, as the occasion
demanded, at the civil grievances of the Roman Catholics, and then it went
on to lay down some simple but sufficient rules by which men should
regulate their judgment on religious forms and bodies with which they do
not sympathize.--

"Our holy religion consists of some doctrines which influence
practice, and of others which are purely speculative. If religious
errors be of the former description, they may, perhaps, be fair
objects of human interference; but, if the opinion be merely
theological and speculative, there the right of human interference
seems to end, because the necessity for such interference does not
exist. Any error of this nature is between the Creator and the
creature,--between the Redeemer and the redeemed. If such opinions are
not the best opinions which can be found, God Almighty will punish the
error, if mere error seemeth to the Almighty a fit object of
punishment. Why may not a man wait if God waits? Where are we called
upon in Scripture to pursue men for errors purely speculative?--to
assist Heaven in punishing those offences which belong only to
Heaven?--in fighting unasked for what we deem to be the battles of
God,--of that patient and merciful God, who pities the frailties we do
not pity--who forgives the errors we do not forgive,--who sends rain
upon the just and the unjust, and maketh His sun to shine upon the
evil and the good.

*