discretion than, in a
new and hasty assembly of unexperienced men, congregated under
circumstances of no small irritation. After people have taken your
tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be
marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous
persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not
to be surprised, if they fall into a passion, and talk as men in a
passion do, intemperately and idly.

The worst of the matter is this: you are partly leading, partly driving
into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious
principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an
invincible dike against that inundation. This you have a thousand
mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish. You make a sad story of the
Pope. _O seri studiorum_! It will not be difficult to get many called
Catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion. Never
doubt it. You have succeeded in part, and you may succeed completely.
But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter
yourselves that they will piously look to the head of our Church in the
place of that Pope whom you make them forswear, and out of all reverence
to whom you bully and rail and buffoon them. Perhaps you may succeed in
the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine and usages of
discipline amongst the Catholics; but what security have you, that, in
the temper and on the principles on which they have made this change,
they will stop at the exact sticking-places you have marked in _your_
articles? You have no security for anything, but that they will become
what are called _Franco-Jacobins_, and reject the whole together. No
converts now will be made in a considerable number from one of our sects
to the other upon a really religious principle. Controversy moves in
another direction.

Next to religion, _property_ is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here
many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the
Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics
desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext,
(though Protestants might suppose it just _possible_ for men to like
good places and snug boroughs for their own merits,) but that their real
view is, to strip Protestants of their property To my certain knowledge,
till those Jacobin lectures were opened in the House of Commons, they
never dr