450 Popery, as it was, and will be. [ May, 
We may see terrible days yet, miserable shame, and vast and various 
suffering ; and many wise, honourable, and pure, may be sufferers in the 
common calamity. But we shall see a majestic clearing up of the storm, 
the retributive thunders themselves sweeping away the national impu- 
rity ; and after the land has been relieved of its burthen, after the whole 
atrocious scene of crime, and corruption, wily perfidy, and headlong 
violence, has passed away with the rapidity and strangeness of a feverish 
dream, we shall see a new dawn summoning us to enjoy an atmosphere 
untainted by the night, and rejoice in a freshened and glorious face of 
society and uature. 
We speak this in the strongest and calmest impression of our minds. 
We have nothing to bias us. We are no man’s partizans, for party is 
actually extinguished, as much as a puppet show is extinguished. when 
the showman throws his actors into his trunk, and having gained all that 
he could by their mock loves and quarrels, walks off with them at his 
back. We are no worshippers of political personages and their systems ; 
for experience has made us sick of the name; and when we hear the 
word Statesman pronounced, we instinctively pronounce the word, 
Scoundrel. We are no religious traffickers in pretended sanctity, for the 
word Saint, has in our feelings assumed just the same synonym with 
Statesman, and while we have the power of pronouncing between right 
and wrong, between Christian truth and the vilest love of lucre, we 
shall not hesitate to think that the saint who makes his way to office by 
his supreme piety of face; who hunts for money through the dingy 
passages of the Treasury one day, and of the tabernacle the other ; and 
who, in his zeal for negro happiness, sends his assorted cargoes, layer 
on layer, of methodist tracts between new rum and Birmingham muskets, 
is a pest to society and a disgrace to religion. We are now neither Whig 
nor Tory, for now the names convey no meaning beyond that of the slave 
already purchased, and the slave waiting to be purchased. But we are 
lovers of our country, let her fates be what they will; haters of her 
enemies, whatever masque they may wear ; and lookers forward to that — 
high and illustrious day of restoration, when the land shall be roused 
from its depths by a voice which none can disobey—when the guilty and 
the great shall call even for the rocks and mountains to fall upon them, 
if they could but hide them from the presence of that hour of reckoning ;_ 
and when the long tried and forgotten sons of integrity shall be sum- 
moned from their obscure and humble rank among the corrupted race of 
mankind, to be thenceforth the guides and the lights of the globe. We 
are the more strongly convinced of the coming of some great consumma-~ 
tion, from the more complete guilt of the public abandonment of pro- 
testantism. In all those other periods of British history which exhibited 
protestantism in a state of depression, popery had been in some degree a 
necessary result of public circumstances. There had been a popish king 
urging his religion oa the legislature, or popish councillors urging their 
religion on a protestant king; or, as in the earlier reigns, popery had 
been so deeply wrought into the state and nation, that to relieve the 
constitution from its influence at the moment was found impossible. 
But, in our instance, all has been the direct reverse. We have had 
neither the popish king nor the popish minister, nor the popish parlia-— 
ment, nor the popish nation. We have had a country and a state cleared 
of all popish influence for a hundred years. . We have had the most sin- 
gular prosperity of any nation on record, from the time when we pub-— 
