Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of the greater number of Christians?  It is a great truth, and which in one of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any Protestant Church, can survive that event.  Therefore my humble and decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of making it a blessing to the people who profess it,—­that it ought to be cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil.  If this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject.  I am the more serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion, (always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual barrier, if not the sole barrier, against Jacobinism.  The Catholics form the great body of the lower ranks of your community, and no small part of those classes of the middling that come nearest to them.  You know that the seduction of that part of mankind from the principles of religion, morality, subordination, and social order is the great object of the Jacobins.  Let them grow lax, skeptical, careless, and indifferent with regard to religion, and, so sure as we have an existence, it is not a zealous Anglican or Scottish Church principle, but direct Jacobinism, which will enter into that breach.  Two hundred years dreadfully spent in experiments to force that people to change the form of their religion have proved fruitless.  You have now your choice, for full four fifths of your people, of the Catholic religion or Jacobinism.  If things appear to you to stand on this alternative, I think you will not be long in making your option.

You have made, as you naturally do, a very able analysis of powers, and have separated, as the things are separable, civil from political powers.  You start, too, a question, whether the civil can be secured without some share in the political.  For my part, as abstract questions, I should find some difficulty in an attempt to resolve them.  But as applied to the state of Ireland, to the form of our commonwealth, to the parties that divide us, and to the dispositions of