I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics you touch upon, relative to the religion of the king, and his coronation oath.  I shall conclude the observations which I wished to submit to you on this point by assuring you that I think you the most remote that can be conceived from the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between more and less,—­and who of course would think that the reason of the law which obliged the king to be a communicant of the Church of England would be as valid to exclude a Catholic from being an exciseman, or to deprive a man who has five hundred a year, under that description, from voting on a par with a factitious Protestant Dissenting freeholder of forty shillings.

Recollect, my dear friend, that it was a fundamental principle in the French monarchy, whilst it stood, that the state should be Catholic; yet the Edict of Nantes gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a complete civil establishment, with places of which only they were capable, to the Calvinists of France,—­and there were very few employments, indeed, of which they were not capable.  The world praised the Cardinal de Richelieu, who took the first opportunity to strip them of their fortified places and cautionary towns.  The same world held and does hold in execration (so far as that business is concerned) the memory of Louis the Fourteenth, for the total repeal of that favorable edict; though the talk of “fundamental laws, established religion, religion of the prince, safety to the state,” &c., &c., was then as largely held, and with as bitter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.

Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reason does not hold, when the religious relation of the sovereign and subject is changed; but they who have their shop full of false weights and measures, and who imagine that the adding or taking away the name of Protestant or Papist, Guelph or Ghibelline, alters all the principles of equity, policy, and prudence, leave us no common data upon which we can reason.  I therefore pass by all this, which on you will make no impression, to come to what seems to be a serious consideration in your mind:  I mean the dread you express of “reviewing, for the purpose of altering, the principles of the Revolution.”  This is an interesting topic, on which I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the ideas I have formed.

First, I cannot possibly confound in my mind all the things which were done at the Revolution with the principles of the Revolution.  As in most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the time, well or ill understood, from passion or from vengeance, which were not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most direct contradiction to them.  I shall not think that