gods,--to degrade you so, that you shall only not enter
the senate, or the privy council of the prince, or the judgment seat,
but not even the jury-box, or a municipal corporation, or the pettiest
edileship of Italy; nay, you shall not be lieutenants of armies, or
tribunes, or anything above the lowest centurion. You shall become a
plebeian class,--cheap bodies to be exposed in battle or to toil in
the field, and pay rent to the lordly Christian. Such shall be the
fate of _you_, the worshippers of Quirinus and of Jupiter Best and
Greatest, if you neglect to crush and extirpate, during the weakness
of its infancy, this ambitious and unscrupulous portent of a
religion.--Oh, how would Paul have groaned in spirit, at accusations
such as these, hateful to his soul, aspersing to his churches, but
impossible to refute! Either Paul's doctrine was a fond dream, (felt
I,) or it is certain, that he would have protested with all the force
of his heart against the principle that Christians _as such_ have any
claim to earthly power and place; or that they could, when they gained
a numerical majority, without sin enact laws to punish, stigmatize,
exclude, or otherwise treat with political inferiority the Pagan
remnant. To uphold such exclusion, is to lay the axe to the root of
the spiritual Church, to stultify the apostolic preaching, and at this
moment justify Mohammedans in persecuting Christians. For the Sultan
might fairly say,--"I give Christians the choice of exile or death: I
will not allow that sect to grow up here; for it has fully warned me,
that it will proscribe my religion in my own land, as soon as it has
power."

On such grounds I looked with amazement and sorrow at spiritual
Christians who desired to exclude the Romanists from full equality;
and I was happy to enjoy as to this the passive assent of the Irish
clergyman; who, though "Orange" in his connexions, and opposed to
_all_ political action, yet only so much the more deprecated what he
called "political Protestantism."

In spite of the strong revulsion which I felt against some of the
peculiarities of this remarkable man, I for the first time in my life
found myself under the dominion of a superior. When I remember, how
even those bowed down before him, who had been to him in the place of
parents,--accomplished and experienced minds,--I cease to wonder in
the retrospect, that he riveted me in such a bondage. Henceforth I
began to ask: what will _he_ say to this