gs. I want the whole 700,000 Catholics
of Massachusetts to believe what John Boyle O'Reilly believed,
and to love and reverence the Puritan founders of Massachusetts
as he did, and I think my way is the way to make them do it.
You don't, if I understand you. You think the way to make
good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to
Protestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters,
from all public employment and to go yourself into a dark
cellar and curse at them through the gratings of the windows.

I stated my religious faith and my ideas of the relation
of our religious denominations to each other, in an address
I delivered at Saratoga last year, of which I send you a
copy, and which I hope, as you have kindly volunteered to
send me so much of your opinion, you may perhaps be willing
to read. It doesn't become me to say anything about it myself.
I am deeply sensible of its imperfections. It fails to do
justice to what is in my own heart. But perhaps I may be
permitted to say that within a few weeks after it was delivered,
an eminent Catholic clergyman sent me a message expressing
his delight in it. The most famous Episcopalian Bishop in
the country said to a friend of mine that he had read it with
great pleasure and that it sounded to him like the old times.
A Baptist minister, bearing one of the most distinguished
names in the country, wrote me a letter, in which he said,
as he read it, "At every sentence, I said to myself, Amen,
Amen." An eminent Orthodox minister, Doctor of Divinity,
read it aloud to his parish, in full, instead of his Sunday's
sermon. And a very excellent and able Methodist minister
wrote to me and said, "If that is Unitarianism, I am afraid
I am a Unitarian." I think the time has come to throw down
the walls between Christians and not to build new ones. I
think the time has come to inculcate harmony and good will
between all American citizens, especially between all citizens
of the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

You quote some expressions which you attribute to Catholic
clergymen. If you don't get any nearer right in quoting
them than you do in quoting me, I don't believe that they
ever said any such thing. If they have, they never will
persuade any considerable number of Catholic laity in this
country, in this nineteenth century, to follow them. You may
perhaps induce the Catholic young men and women of Massachusetts
to believe there is something in wh