"Our Government is called essentially Protestant; but, if it be essentially Protestant in the distribution of office, it should be essentially Protestant in the imposition of taxes. The Treasury is open to all religions, Parliament only to one. The tax-gatherer is the most indulgent and liberal of human beings; he excludes no creed, imposes no articles; but counts Catholic cash, pockets Protestant paper, and is candidly and impartially oppressive to every description of the Christian world. Can anything be more base than when you want the blood or the money of Catholics, to forget that they are Catholics, and to remember only that they are British subjects; and, when they ask for the benefits of the British Constitution, to remember only that they are Catholics, and to forget that they are British subjects?
"_No Popery_ was the cry of the great English Revolution, because the increase and prevalence of Popery in England would, at that period, have rendered this island tributary to France. The Irish Catholics were, at that period, broken to pieces by the severity and military execution of Cromwell, and by the Penal Laws. They are since become a great and formidable people. The same dread of foreign influence makes it now necessary that they should be restored to political rights. Must the friends of rational liberty join in a clamour against the Catholics now, because, in a very different state of the world, they excited that clamour a hundred years ago? I remember a house near Battersea Bridge which caught fire, and there was a great cry of 'Water, water!' Ten years after, the Thames rose, and the people of the house were nearly drowned. Would it not have been rather singular to have said to the inhabitants--'I heard you calling for water ten years ago; why don't you call for it now?'"
"Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are advocates for toleration; but then they think it no act of intolerance to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is, that all men scarcely like to punish others for not being of the same opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only species of persecution, of which the improved feeling and advanced cultivation of the age will admit. Fire and faggot, chains and stone walls, have been clamoured away; nothing remains but to mortify a man's pride, and to limit his resources, and to set a mark upon him, by cutting him off from his fair share of political power. By this receipt insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked. The gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded from parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say that he lives in the nineteenth, instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as intolerant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit which wounds the pride of a fellow-creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications of the same principle? The minds of these two men no more differ because they differ in their degrees of punishment, than their bodies differ because one wore a doublet in the time of Mary, and the other wears a coat in the reign of George. I do not accuse them of intentional cruelty and injustice: I am sure there are very many excellent men who would be shocked if they could conceive themselves to be guilty of any thing like cruelty; but they innocently give a wrong name to the bad spirit which is within them, and think they are tolerant because they are not as intolerant as they could have been in other times, but cannot be now. _The true spirit is to search after God and for another life with lowliness of heart; to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no pains on those solemn supplications which, in divers tongues, and in varied forms, and in temples of a thousand shapes, but with one deep sense of human dependence, men pour forth to God._"