y Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all
the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should
have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on
their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it.
Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect them? They are too
numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious
to every human being--but to that man who, instead of being a Methodist
preacher, is, for the curse of us and our children, and for the ruin of
Troy and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a legislator
and a politician.

A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble noblemen
in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political
power; whereas, there is no more distinction between these two things
than there is between him who makes the distinction and a booby. If I
strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic, and give him twenty
stripes ... I persecute; if I say, Everybody in the town where you live
shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices, but you, who
are a Catholic ... I do not persecute! What barbarous nonsense is this!
as if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily pain or as severe
poverty: as if I could not be as great a tyrant by saying, You shall
not enjoy--as by saying, You shall suffer. The English, I believe, are
as truly religious as any nation in Europe; I know no greater blessing;
but it carries with it this evil in its train, that any villain who
will bawl out, "_The Church is in danger!_" may get a place and a good
pension; and that any administration who will do the same thing may
bring a set of men into power who, at a moment of stationary and
passive piety, would be hooted by the very boys in the streets. But it
is not all religion; it is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive
spirit which delights to keep the common blessings of sun and air and
freedom from other human beings. "Your religion has always been
degraded; you are in the dust, and I will take care you never rise
again. I should enjoy less the possession of an earthly good by every
additional person to whom it was extended." You may not be aware of it
yourself, most reverend Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the
Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah, your wife, refuses to
give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling: she values her
receipts, not becau