452 Popery, as it was, and will be. [May, 
on those things, the pope, or the pope at the head of a council, the 
right to excommunicate kings, to extinguish the scriptures, and to burn 
those who refuse slavish obedience to its worship? Not a syllable of 
those assumed rights of tyranny and blood has been erased from the 
code of the vatican. 
Are we to hear that persecution can never return, and has been vir- 
tually abandoned? We must demand how many native protestant 
congregations are there at this hour in Italy, Spain, or Portugal? We 
answer, not one. Where there are no victims there can be no fires. 
The foreign protestants in those countries are merely suffered ; are 
besides under the protection of their respective governments ; and what 
is the chief source of safety after all, they are the means of bringing a 
large addition to the court revenue. In France alone, the native pro- 
testants enjoy considerable privileges ; but those privileges were not the 
grant of popery. They were in the first instance wrung from popery 
by arms in the wars of the league. The subsequent power of popery in 
the seventeenth century was shown in the sudden disruption of all 
treaties, and the furious persecution that, after slaying tens of thousands 
of protestants, drove half a million into exile, with the utter confiscation 
of their property. This act of perfidy and horror, which threw the 
whole of popish Europe into paroxysms of joy, was revenged in 1789 
by the Revolution, which overturned the superstitious priesthood, the 
corrupt nobility, and the infidel court of France. But this fearful 
judgment, by a signal providence gave civil liberty to French protes- 
tantism ; a liberty which it still enjoys, though seriously thwarted by 
the jealousy of the court, and tormented by the restless irritation of the © 
priesthood ; a liberty which trembles, like that of every protestant 
congregation of the whole continent, on the fates of English protes- 
tantism. Let popery but once see popish influence active in the British 
legislature ; cardinals confronting protestant bishops, and the delegates — 
of the Irish priests laying down the law for the British people ; a steady — 
majority of a hundred furious devotees making the minister irresistible 
when he is for them, and impotent when he is against them: we shall 
then soon see how temporary has been the slumber of popery. We 
shall then have clearer demonstration than from books, that Rome is 
the same every hour since the triumphant days of the inquisition. We 
shall then hear the voice from the east, and from the west, from the 
north, and the south, lamentation and mourning and woe; and then 
shall we learn that the power of the prince of this world is come. 
It has been publicly declared that the opposers of popery are con 
temptuous of the authority of the past, and that history should teach 
them confidence in the new allies who have been brought to the honour 
and glory of the popedom in the British empire. One orator—may it be 
written on his grave—has told us, that in protestant hands history is only 
an old almanack: and a hundred orators equally honest, and equally to 
be relied on, have told us, that the horrid outrages which cover the 
popish history with blood, have had nothing to do with its spirit, have 
had nothing to do with its rulers, and have nothing to do with ou 
natural feelings on giving the professors of those revolting doctrines the 
ultimate power over ourselves. Our answer to all this eloquence is a 
single and straightforward appeal to the fact. Without wandering over 
the wilderness of history, we fix upon a distinct and unquestionable 
Sas ; ; ; 
crisis ; one, of which the horrors are unexampled, the treacheries pal 
