ief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to
relax the strictly _political_ enactments of the penal laws, however
harsh these might appear. Had they been kept in vigour for another
half-century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all
but extinguished in Ireland. But he thought that after admitting
Romanists to the elective franchise, it was a vain notion that they
could be permanently or advantageously deterred from using that
franchise in favour of those of their own persuasion."

In his diary in 1829 he puts the same view still more strongly:--"I
cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question.
I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let
them snatch the meat off it. I hold Popery to be such a mean and
degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself
liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed
before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered
Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of
Babylon's mouth stopped with pleasure. But now that you have taken the
plaster off her mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see
the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in
Parliament. Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust,
with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk.
The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of
nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a
strong and rather unscrupulous politician--a moss-trooper in
politics--which Scott certainly was. He was thinking evidently very
little of justice, almost entirely of the most effective means of
keeping the Kingdom, the Kingdom which he loved. Had he
understood--what none of the politicians of that day understood--the
strength of the Church of Rome as the only consistent exponent of the
principle of Authority in religion, I believe his opposition to
Catholic emancipation would have been as bitter as his opposition to
Parliamentary reform. But he took for granted that while only "silly"
persons believed in Rome, and only "infidels" rejected an
authoritative creed altogether, it was quite easy by the exercise of
common sense, to find the true compromise between reason and religious
humility. Had Scott lived through the religious controversies of our
own days, it seems not unlikely that with his vivid imagination, his