1829.] The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. 451 
licly, and as our fathers rashly deemed, for ever, excluded popery from 
all influence in England. We bore all the characteristics of the favoured 
people of Providence, from the moment when we finally and unequivo- 
cally pledged ourselves, and bound our sovereign never to stain the 
nation with the admission of Romish slaves into our free state, and the 
conjunction of Romish idolatry with our pure religion. 
But now in scorn of experience, in the total absence of any necessity— 
fot the minister’s alarms were denied by himself, and scoffed at by every 
one else—in the face of the oaths which our legislators, one and all, have 
taken, that Popery is a superstition, and thereby a guilty and groundless 
absurdity, and that it is an idolatry, and thereby a direct enemy to the 
religion of God ; we have welcomed this superstition and idolatry ; we 
have volunteered the connexion, we have actually solicited the complete 
and final junction with this worship which all our men in authority have 
been pronouncing criminal for the last three hundred years. If the 
adoption of popery into union with protestantism be an act of guilt, 
never has the perpetration been more public, gratuitous and conclusive. 
We have even, for the obvious purpose of discountenancing at once all 
doubt on the completeness of the junction, and of casting off all appear- 
ance of reserve, ostentatiously abandoned every thing in the shape of 
securities. It is true that the king had declared that the most cautious 
and satisfactory securities should be given. But his Grace, the minister. 
subsequently found “ that he had never said one word about securities,” 
and that the true securities were to consist in there being no securities at 
all. Mr. Peel had the same song on his lips, and found that “ formal 
securities” were apt to give offence, and that “ the true security was in 
the thousands of petitions,” every one of which, as it happened, was a 
direct assault upon the miserable duplicity of that right honourable 
personage. Beyond this “ infringement of the constitution of 1688,” 
nothing further can be required in point of principle. We shall see the 
principle exemplified: in what shape a few years, probably a few 
months will tell; and we may well look with terror on the common 
fates that have long marked every popish kingdom of Europe. We have 
a large field of view before us ; Poland, with her furious civil wars, and 
her final dismemberment—Italy, with her contemptible tyrannies, her 
private profligacy, her priest-ridden people, and her foreign masters— 
Spain, with her perpetual civil tumults, her dismembered colonies, her 
ruinous invasion, and her hopeless slavery-—Portugal, with her civil 
war, her separated transatlantic empire, her guilty clergy, and her 
bitter and suspicious usurper—France, with the memory of her hideous 
revolution still fevering her blood, the perpetual scaffold, the confis- 
cation of hereditary property, the universal foreign war, the Vendée, 
that cut off half a million of men, the military despotism, and finally, 
that fierce concussion and trampling of armies, that was necessary to 
smooth the soil for the return of even that feeble and dubious charter 
at she was willing, after all her miseries, to accept as a substitute for a 
ree constitution. 
Those examples are irresistible evidence of the operation of popery on 
the freedom and civil happiness of states at this hour. But are we to 
hear that its perfidy and persecution are to be dreaded no longer. We 
must demand what part of the Romish code of treachery and cruelty 
thas been abrogated within the last three hundred years? Where has 
Rome abandoned, by any authentic declaration from the only authority 
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