“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.”

At this point of his Letter, the writer turns aside to combat the contention that, because Roman Catholics have in times past persecuted Protestants, therefore they must now be deprived of their civil rights.  If this contention be sound, the Protestant must, by parity of reasoning, be disfranchised.