With this mover and this seconder agreed the whole House of Commons, the whole House of Lords, the whole Bench of Bishops, the king, the ministry, the opposition, all the distinguished clergy of the Establishment, all the eminent lights (for they were consulted) of the dissenting churches.  This according voice of national wisdom ought to be listened to with reverence.  To say that all these descriptions of Englishmen unanimously concurred in a scheme for introducing the Catholic religion, or that none of them understood the nature and effects of what they were doing so well as a few obscure clubs of people whose names you never heard of, is shamelessly absurd.  Surely it is paying a miserable compliment to the religion we profess, to suggest that everything eminent in the kingdom is indifferent or even adverse to that religion, and that its security is wholly abandoned to the zeal of those who have nothing but their zeal to distinguish them.  In weighing this unanimous concurrence of whatever the nation has to boast of, I hope you will recollect that all these concurring parties do by no means love one another enough to agree in any point which was not both evidently and importantly right.

To prove this, to prove that the measure was both clearly and materially proper, I will next lay before you (as I promised) the political grounds and reasons for the repeal of that penal statute, and the motives to its repeal at that particular time.

Gentlemen, America—­When the English nation seemed to be dangerously, if not irrecoverably divided,—­when one, and that the most growing branch, was torn from the parent stock, and ingrafted on the power of France, a great terror fell upon this kingdom.  On a sudden we awakened from our dreams of conquest, and saw ourselves threatened with an immediate invasion, which we were at that time very ill prepared to resist.  You remember the cloud that gloomed over us all.  In that hour of our dismay, from the bottom of the hiding-places into which the indiscriminate rigor of our statutes had driven them, came out the body of the Roman Catholics.  They appeared before the steps of a tottering throne, with one of the most sober, measured, steady, and dutiful addresses that was ever presented to the crown.  It was no holiday ceremony, no anniversary compliment of parade and show.  It was signed by almost every gentleman of that persuasion, of note or property, in England.  At such a crisis, nothing but a decided resolution to stand or fall with their country could have dictated such an address, the direct tendency of which was to cut off all retreat, and to render them peculiarly obnoxious to an invader of their own communion.  The address showed what I long languished to see, that all the subjects of England had cast off all foreign views and connections, and that every man looked for his relief from every grievance at the hands only of his own natural government.