sword, if you dare to offer sacrifice to the immortal gods,—­to degrade you so, that you shall only not enter the senate, or the privy council of the prince, or the judgment seat, but not even the jury-box, or a municipal corporation, or the pettiest edileship of Italy; nay, you shall not be lieutenants of armies, or tribunes, or anything above the lowest centurion.  You shall become a plebeian class,—­cheap bodies to be exposed in battle or to toil in the field, and pay rent to the lordly Christian.  Such shall be the fate of you, the worshippers of Quirinus and of Jupiter Best and Greatest, if you neglect to crush and extirpate, during the weakness of its infancy, this ambitious and unscrupulous portent of a religion.—­Oh, how would Paul have groaned in spirit, at accusations such as these, hateful to his soul, aspersing to his churches, but impossible to refute!  Either Paul’s doctrine was a fond dream, (felt I,) or it is certain, that he would have protested with all the force of his heart against the principle that Christians as such have any claim to earthly power and place; or that they could, when they gained a numerical majority, without sin enact laws to punish, stigmatize, exclude, or otherwise treat with political inferiority the Pagan remnant.  To uphold such exclusion, is to lay the axe to the root of the spiritual Church, to stultify the apostolic preaching, and at this moment justify Mohammedans in persecuting Christians.  For the Sultan might fairly say,—­“I give Christians the choice of exile or death:  I will not allow that sect to grow up here; for it has fully warned me, that it will proscribe my religion in my own land, as soon as it has power.”

On such grounds I looked with amazement and sorrow at spiritual Christians who desired to exclude the Romanists from full equality; and I was happy to enjoy as to this the passive assent of the Irish clergyman; who, though “Orange” in his connexions, and opposed to all political action, yet only so much the more deprecated what he called “political Protestantism.”

In spite of the strong revulsion which I felt against some of the peculiarities of this remarkable man, I for the first time in my life found myself under the dominion of a superior.  When I remember, how even those bowed down before him, who had been to him in the place of parents,—­accomplished and experienced minds,—­I cease to wonder in the retrospect, that he riveted me in such a bondage.  Henceforth I began to ask:  what will he say to this and that?  In his reply I always expected to find a higher portion of God’s Spirit, than in any I could frame for myself.  In order to learn divine truth, it became to me a surer process to consult him, than to search for myself and wait upon God:  and gradually, (as I afterwards discerned,) my religious thought had merged into the mere process of developing fearlessly into results all his principles, without any deeper examining of my foundations.  Indeed, but for a few weaknesses which warned me that he might err, I could have accepted him as an apostle commissioned to reveal the mind of God.