granted, (as by the pending Maynooth grant,)
this is in effect to furnish artillery for covering advances upon hostile
ground. This gives positive powers to Popery for propagating its errors.
That Sir Robert Peel should hold such a mode of collusion with falsehood
to be lawful--would be astonishing, were it not that he manifestly
confounds the case of promoting, a law by votes, or any mode of active
support, which is a true and substantial assent, with the case of paying
under a demand of the law. Now this is no assent at all, any more than the
surrendering your person passively to the arrest of a police-officer is an
assent to the justice of the accusation, or to the reasonableness of the
law under which you will be tried. To pay on the demand of the law is no
assent at all, but an abridged process of yielding to the physical
coercion of the law. You are aware of the steps through which the
compulsory action of the law will travel, and it cannot make any
difference as to the principle of your submission, that, for the sake of
saving time, you yield to the first step, instead of waiting for the last.
It is, therefore, no duty of a Protestant, in any circumstances, to abet
Popery by any mode of support, but only seems to be so by confounding
cases essentially different.

Next arises for notice, the very interesting question on the prospects of
Popery at this moment and its chances of a great restoration, by means of
combination with various forms of human power. One cause of error upon
this subject lies in the notion that conspicuous obscurations of civil
grandeur, jurisdiction, and wealth, which Popery has suffered of late
years in almost every state, have therefore, been absolute losses of
spiritual power. On the contrary, these losses are likely to strengthen
Popery. Precisely in the most bigoted of Popish kingdoms--Austria,
Bavaria, Spain, and Portugal--the Popish religion has been shorn, during
the last fifty years, of it most splendid temporalities. The suppression
of the Inquisition in Spain, &c., the extinction of religions houses on
so vast a scale, the limitation of the Papal rights in the disposal of
Bishops' sees, the confiscation or sale of church lands, to an amount
unsuspected in Protestant countries--these and other convulsions have
shaken the Papacy in a memorable degree. But it is certain that the vigour
and vitality of Popery, in modes more appropriate to a spiritual power,
are reviving. Popery has bene