eir true signification, and they sound, as the other
will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ears of mankind.

This ascendency, by being a _Protestant_ ascendency, does not better it
from the combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale.
If Protestant ascendency means the proscription from citizenship of by
far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant
ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence. But there
is a deeper evil. By the use that is so frequently made of the term, and
the policy which is engrafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing
more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation
of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of
ascertained tenets of its own upon the ground of which it persecutes
other men: for the patrons of this Protestant ascendency neither do nor
can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word
Protestant. It is defined, as Cowley defines wit, not by what it is, but
by what it is not. It is not the Christian religion as professed in the
churches holding communion with Rome, the majority of Christians: that
is all which, in the latitude of the term, is known about its
signification. This makes such persecutors ten times worse than any of
that description that hitherto have been known in the world. The old
persecutors, whether Pagan or Christian, whether Arian or Orthodox,
whether Catholics, Anglicans, or Calvinists, actually were, or at least
had the decorum to pretend to be, strong dogmatists. They pretended that
their religious maxims were clear and ascertained, and so useful that
they were bound, for the eternal benefit of mankind, to defend or
diffuse them, though by any sacrifices of the temporal good of those who
were the objects of their system of experiment.

The bottom of this theory of persecution is false. It is not permitted
to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas
of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions. By making men
miserable in this life, they counteract one of the great ends of
charity, which is, in as much as in us lies, to make men happy in every
period of their existence, and most in what most depends upon us. But
give to these old persecutors their mistaken principle, in their
reasoning they are consistent, and in their tempers they may be even
kind and good-natured. But whenever a