and in which God has appointed your station and mine.  Let every man be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a negative religion, (such is the Protestant without a certain creed,) and at the same time to deny those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one positive doctrine which all of us who profess the religion authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe.  The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion:  our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs.  If we strip ourselves of that part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity.  If we drive them from that holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we better than to hold out to them terrors on the one side, and bounties on the other, in favor of that which, for anything we know to the contrary, may be pure atheism?

You are well aware, that, when a man renounces the Roman religion, there is no civil inconvenience or incapacity whatsoever which shall hinder him from joining any new or old sect of Dissenters, or of forming a sect of his own invention upon the most anti-christian principles.  Let Mr. Thomas Paine obtain a pardon, (as on change of ministry he may,) there is nothing to hinder him from setting up a church of his own in the very midst of you.  He is a natural-born British subject.  His French citizenship does not disqualify him, at least upon a peace.  This Protestant apostle is as much above all suspicion of Popery as the greatest and most zealous of your sanhedrim in Ireland can possibly be.  On purchasing a qualification, (which his friends of the Directory are not so poor as to be unable to effect,) he may sit in Parliament; and there is no doubt that there is not one of your tests against Popery that he will not take as fairly, and as much ex animo, as the best of your zealot statesmen.  I push this point no further, and only adduce this example (a pretty strong one, and fully in point) to show what I take to be the madness and folly of driving men, under the existing circumstances, from any positive religion whatever into the irreligion of the times, and its sure concomitant principles of anarchy.

When religion is brought into a question of civil and political arrangement, it must be considered more politically than theologically, at least by us, who are nothing more than mere laymen.  In that light, the case of the Catholics of Ireland is peculiarly hard, whether they be laity or clergy.  If any of them take part, like the gentleman you mention, with some of the most accredited Protestants of the country, in projects which cannot be more abhorrent to your nature and disposition than they are to mine,—­in