The purpose of this address was to rouse the Irish people to a sense of their real misery, to point out that Catholic Emancipation and a Repeal of the Union Act were the only radical remedies for their wrongs, and to teach them the spirit in which they should attempt a revolution.  On the last point Shelley felt intensely.  The whole address aims at the inculcation of a noble moral temper, tolerant, peaceful, resolute, rational, and self-denying.  Considered as a treatise on the principles which should govern patriots during a great national crisis, the document is admirable:  and if the inhabitants of Dublin had been a population of Shelleys, its effect might have been permanent and overwhelming.  The mistake lay in supposing that a people whom the poet himself described as “of scarcely greater elevation in the scale of intellectual being than the oyster,” were qualified to take the remedy of their grievances into their own hands, or were amenable to such sound reasoning as he poured forth.  He told Godwin that he had “wilfully vulgarized the language of this pamphlet, in order to reduce the remarks it contains to the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry.”  A few extracts will enable the reader to judge how far he had succeeded in this aim.  I select such as seem to me most valuable for the light they throw upon his own opinions.  “All religions are good which make men good; and the way that a person ought to prove that his method of worshipping God is best, is for himself to be better than all other men.”  “A Protestant is my brother, and a Catholic is my brother.”  “Do not inquire if a man be a heretic, if he be a Quaker, a Jew, or a heathen; but if he be a virtuous man, if he loves liberty and truth, if he wish the happiness and peace of human kind.  If a man be ever so much a believer and love not these things, he is a heartless hypocrite, a rascal and a knave.”  “It is not a merit to tolerate, but it is a crime to be intolerant.”  “Anything short of unlimited toleration and complete charity with all men, on which you will recollect that Jesus Christ principally insisted, is wrong.”  “Be calm, mild, deliberate, patient....  Think and talk and discuss....  Be free and be happy, but first be wise and good.”  Proceeding to recommend the formation of associations, he condemns secret and violent societies; “Be fair, open and you will be terrible to your enemies.”  “Habits of sobriety, regularity, and thought must be entered into and firmly resolved upon.”  Then follow precepts, which Shelley no doubt regarded as practical, for the purification of private morals, and the regulation of public discussion by the masses whom he elsewhere recognized as “thousands huddled together, one mass of animated filth.”