bring themselves to any persecution like this.  Strange it is, but so it is, that men, driven by force from their habits in one mode of religion, have, by contrary habits, under the same force, often quietly settled in another.  They suborn their reason to declare in favor of their necessity.  Man and his conscience cannot always be at war.  If the first races have not been able to make a pacification between the conscience and the convenience, their descendants come generally to submit to the violence of the laws, without violence to their minds.  As things stood formerly, they possessed a positive scheme of direction and of consolation.  In this men may acquiesce.  The harsh methods in use with the old class of persecutors were to make converts, not apostates only.  If they perversely hated other sects and factions, they loved their own inordinately.  But in this Protestant persecution there is anything but benevolence at work.  What do the Irish statutes?  They do not make a conformity to the established religion, and to its doctrines and practices, the condition of getting out of servitude.  No such thing.  Let three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading, scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the education they have received, and nothing more is required of them.  There is no system of folly, or impiety, or blasphemy, or atheism, into which they may not throw themselves, and which they may not profess openly, and as a system, consistently with the enjoyment of all the privileges of a free citizen in the happiest constitution in the world.

Some of the unhappy assertors of this strange scheme say they are not persecutors on account of religion.  In the first place, they say what is not true.  For what else do they disfranchise the people?  If the man gets rid of a religion through which their malice operates, he gets rid of all their penalties and incapacities at once.  They never afterwards inquire about him.  I speak here of their pretexts, and not of the true spirit of the transaction, in which religious bigotry, I apprehend, has little share.  Every man has his taste; but I think, if I were so miserable and undone as to be guilty of premeditated and continued violence towards any set of men, I had rather that my conduct was supposed to arise from wild conceits concerning their religious advantages than from low and ungenerous motives relative to my own selfish interest.  I had rather be thought insane in my charity than rational in my malice.  This much, my dear son, I have to say of this Protestant persecution,—­that is, a persecution of religion itself.