who are much occupied by other matters, to choose the right path amid the rage and fury of faction:  but I give you one mark, vote for a free altar; give what the law compels you to give to the Establishment; (that done,) no chains, no prisons, no bonfires for a man’s faith; and, above all, no modern chains and prisons under the names of disqualifications and incapacities, which are only the cruelty and tyranny of a more civilized age; civil offices open to all, a Catholic or a Protestant alderman, a Moravian or a Church of England or a Wesleyan justice, no oppression, no tyranny in belief:  a free altar, an open road to heaven; no human insolence, no human narrowness, hallowed by the name of God.

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“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?’”

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