guided by the light of nature, in unison with that of political science; and, where they see natural principles of disunion, forbear to force an artificial combination! The men who, in this kingdom, compose the Roman Catholic and Protestant bodies respectively, are quite capable of being united; but, then, the process is, to make the men, either all Protestants, or all Roman Catholics; and not that of forming, what Bossuet (p. 147) would call, the "confusion of Babel," by making Roman Catholics and Protestants fellow-citizens-fellow-citizens, too, in England, and under English circumstances! Fellow-citizens, indeed, of motley groups, who, at the work of the great tower of the State, could not call to each other in any common language, to make their several meanings understood !-Every extravagance of that kind must fail:

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High Heaven with laughter the rash toil surveys,
And buries madmen in the heaps they raise!"

4. And, in corroboration of the advice of the Times, and for the further guidance of the Ro

man Catholics, and solution of what seems to appear to them a little contradictory, if not mysterious, I shall endeavour to explain to them why it happens that an "intercourse with Roman Catholics often leads Protestants to think that" men may be better than their tenets." Social intercourse is not conversant with tenets-and, further, the tenets in question have little to do with social intercourse. Amid the amenities of social and polished intercourse, the tenets referred to necessarily sleep. I say nothing of the personal disregard or forgetfulness of tens of thousands of the professed followers of all religions, and therefore of the real superiority which may often exist, of the men to their tenets, within the pale of the Church of Rome, not less than elsewhere, in cases where the tenets are objectionable: I say nothing of all this; first, because I am not talking of such as are only nominal Roman Catholics, and who (as can be no secret, either with Roman Catholics, or with any others, who are at all conversant with the world) are the real individuals intended by such as are "better

than their tenets;" secondly, because, in this argument, we are not to argue from individuals, but from the body, and must judge of the body, as well from tenets solemnly averred in the name of the body (the individual being always as from facts, notoriously developed; and and thirdly, because to protest against the tenets of the body, if they find or think themselves superior to them; that is, to renounce its name and connection), the tenets themselves perfectly as there is no difficulty in confessing, are compatible with a long list of social virtues; but they are not compatible with the civil interests of a Protestant Constitution of Government. The political question, therefore, is altogether different from the social, as it likewise is from the moral. No one disputes the personal character of a Roman Catholic as a Roman Catholic; the honour, the benevolence, the justice, the generosity, nor even, as to certain purposes, the loyalty of the individual, nor of the body; but every one ought to dispute the unqualified loyalty, the unqualified fitness, of that man to be a citizen of the State, whose known and declared principle it is, to

repudiate, and, we must believe, to repudiate conscientiously, the institutions of the State. Read, however, once more, Sir Francis Burdett's New Roman Catholic Oath, and see what that gentleman thinks of the unqualified loyalty, unqualified fitness, and even common veracity, of a British Roman Catholic!-And thus we come back to "insult."

But, if we cannot leave off "insulting" the Roman Catholics, where is the use of giving, to those whom we "insult" the power to chastise us? Is not the inevitableness of the "insult" one of the many conclusive arguments against the Emancipation? You see with how little patience the Roman Catholics bear the Protestant interruptions in France-where Roman Catholics are "uppermost," and where, as some might think, "as they are stout, they should be merciful."

There is, again, a still deeper mischief than all this, connected with the language of "insult" toward the British Roman Catholics and their religion. It persuades the superficial to believe

that the Protestant feeling of contempt for both is a sufficient safeguard of our Protestant Constitution. Protestant bigots, rioting in their stories of the "man of sin," and the "beast with the ten horns," and the rest, imagine that the country is in no danger, either of a return to Roman Catholicism, or of being tamed down to the endurance of Roman Catholic power!

See, too, the inconvenience of putting your trust in the effect of this Protestant religious animosity; this religious animosity, or, at the mildest, this religious censoriousness, to which the censured are so sensible, and the proneness of all mankind to which is one of the first grounds of the necessity of religious exclusions, distinctions, and disabilities in civil society! If this safeguard, as you esteem it, should really survive your Roman Catholic Emancipation, it will embroil you with the emancipated: if it should die under the change, you will be left at their mercy! And you are not to reckon too confidently upon its endurance. A passive consent to Protestantism belongs to the bulk of