You see by the paper[28] I take that I am likely to be long, with malice prepense.  You have brought under my view a subject always difficult, at present critical.  It has filled my thoughts, which I wish to lay open to you with the clearness and simplicity which your friendship demands from me.  I thank you for the communication of your ideas.  I should be still more pleased, if they had been more your own.  What you hint I believe to be the case:  that, if you had not deferred to the judgment of others, our opinions would not differ more materially at this day than they did when we used to confer on the same subject so many years ago.  If I still persevere in my old opinions, it is no small comfort to me that it is not with regard to doctrines properly yours that I discover my indocility.

The case upon which your letter of the 10th of December turns is hardly before me with precision enough to enable me to form any very certain judgment upon it.  It seems to be some plan of further indulgence proposed for the Catholics of Ireland.  You observe, that your “general principles are not changed, but that times and circumstances are altered.”  I perfectly agree with you, that times and circumstances, considered with reference to the public, ought very much to govern our conduct,—­though I am far from slighting, when applied with discretion to those circumstances, general principles and maxims of policy.  I cannot help observing, however, that you have said rather less upon the inapplicability of your own old principles to the circumstances that are likely to influence your conduct against these principles than of the general maxims of state, which I can very readily believe not to have great weight with you personally.

In my present state of imperfect information, you will pardon the errors into which I may easily fall.  The principles you lay down are, “that the Roman Catholics should enjoy everything under the state, but should not be the state itself.”  And you add, “that, when you exclude them from being a part of the state, you rather conform to the spirit of the age than to any abstract doctrine”; but you consider the Constitution as already established,—­that our state is Protestant.  “It was declared so at the Revolution.  It was so provided in the acts for settling the succession of the crown:—­the king’s coronation oath was enjoined in order to keep it so.  The king, as first magistrate of the state, is obliged to take the oath of abjuration,[29] and to subscribe the Declaration; and by laws subsequent, every other magistrate and member of the state, legislative and executive, are bound under the same obligation.”