nowledge.'[313]

Until the last decade of the century, Roman Catholics were rarely spoken
of in any other spirit than as the dreaded enemies of Protestantism.
There was very little recognition of their being far more nearly united
to us by the tie of a common Christianity, than separated by the
differences in it. A man who was not a professed sceptic needed to be
both more unprejudiced and more courageous than his neighbours, to speak
of Roman Catholics with tolerable charity. In this, as in many other
points, Bishop Berkeley was superior to his age. He ventured to propose
that Roman Catholics should be admitted to the Dublin College without
being obliged to attend chapel or divinity lectures.[314] He could speak
of such an institution as Monasticism in a discriminative tone which was
then exceedingly uncommon. In Ireland he wisely accepted the fact that
the Roman Catholic priests had the heart of the people, and shaped his
conduct accordingly. His 'Word to the Wise' was an appeal addressed in
1749 to the priests, exhorting them to use their influence to promote
industry and self-reliance among their congregations. This sort of
Episcopal charge to the clergy of another Communion was received, it is
said, with a no less cordial feeling than that in which it was
written.[315]

Dr. Johnson, a man of a very different order of mind, may be mentioned
as another who joined a devoted attachment to the Church of England with
a candid and kindly spirit towards Roman Catholics. Perhaps his respect
for authority, and the tinge of superstition in his temperament,
predisposed him to sympathy. In any case, his masculine intellect
brushed away with scorn the prejudices, exaggerations, and
misconstructions which beset popular ideas upon the subject. He took
pleasure in dilating upon the substantial unity that subsisted between
them and denominations which, in externals, were separated from them by
a very wide interval. 'There is a prodigious difference,' he would say,
'between the external form of one of your Presbyterian Churches in
Scotland, and a Church in Italy; yet the doctrine taught is essentially
the same.'[316]

Many of the speeches made in favour of relief, at the time of the Irish
and English Emancipation Acts, were couched in terms which betoken a
marked departure from the bitterness of tone which had long been
customary. When the French Revolution broke out, the reaction became,
for an interval, in many quarters far stro