use of them, than for the execution of the act to be repealed:  that it was better to unravel this texture from below than from above, beginning with the latest, which, in general practice, is the severest evil.  It was alleged, that this slow proceeding would be attended with the advantage of a progressive experience,—­and that the people would grow reconciled to toleration, when they should find, by the effects, that justice was not so irreconcilable an enemy to convenience as they had imagined.

These, Gentlemen, were the reasons why we left this good work in the rude, unfinished state in which good works are commonly left, through the tame circumspection with which a timid prudence so frequently enervates beneficence.  In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish, and of all things afraid of being too much in the right.  But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style.  They are finished with a bold, masterly hand, touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

Thus this matter was left for the time, with a full determination in Parliament not to suffer other and worse statutes to remain for the purpose of counteracting the benefits proposed by the repeal of one penal law:  for nobody then dreamed of defending what was done as a benefit, on the ground of its being no benefit at all.  We were not then ripe for so mean a subterfuge.

I do not wish to go over the horrid scene that was afterwards acted.  Would to God it could be expunged forever from the annals of this country!  But since it must subsist for our shame, let it subsist for our instruction.  In the year 1780 there were found in this nation men deluded enough, (for I give the whole to their delusion,) on pretences of zeal and piety, without any sort of provocation whatsoever, real or pretended, to make a desperate attempt, which would have consumed all the glory and power of this country in the flames of London, and buried all law, order, and religion under the ruins of the metropolis of the Protestant world.  Whether all this mischief done, or in the direct train of doing, was in their original scheme, I cannot say; I hope it was not:  but this would have been the unavoidable consequence of their proceedings, had not the flames they had lighted up in their fury been extinguished in their blood.

All the time that this horrid scene was acting, or avenging, as well as for some time before, and ever since, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cowardly darkness from their punishment, continued, without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of the populace with a continued blast of pestilential libels, which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in.