m or not--I
have taken such measures as I know must always procure an immense
majority in favour of the Established Church; but I can go no farther.
I cannot set up a civil inquisition, and say to one--'You shall not be
a butcher, because you are not orthodox'; and prohibit another from
brewing, and a third from administering the law, and a fourth from
defending the country. If common justice did not prohibit me from such
a conduct, common sense would."

Persecution, Peter goes on to say, makes martyrs. Fanatics delight in the
feeling that they are persecuted for righteousness' sake; and, the more
they are harried, the more tenaciously they cling to their misbeliefs.--

"This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have produced. They
have fed Dr. Rees and Dr. Kippis;[41] crowded the congregation of the
Old Jewry[42] to suffocation; and enabled every sublapsarian, and
supralapsarian, and semipelagian, clergyman to build himself a neat
brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to the state of a
gentleman."

But, says Abraham, the King is bound by his Coronation Oath to resist the
emancipation of the Roman Catholics. Peter replies--

"Suppose Bonaparte were to retrieve the only very great blunder he has
made, and were to succeed, after repeated trials, in making an
impression upon Ireland, do you think we should bear anything of the
impediment of a Coronation Oath? or would the spirit of this country
tolerate for an hour such ministers and such unheard-of nonsense, if
the most distant prospect existed of conciliating the Catholics by
every species even of the most abject concession? And yet, if your
argument is good for anything, the Coronation Oath ought to reject, at
such a moment, every tendency to conciliation, and to bind Ireland for
ever to the Crown of France."

After a cursory reference to Abraham's fears about Popish fires and
faggots, and a reminder that "there were as many persons put to death for
religious opinions under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary,"
Peter concludes with these vigorous sentences--

"You tell me I am a party man. I hope I shall always be so, when I see
my country in the hands of a pert London joker[43] and a second-rate
lawyer.[44] Of the first, no other good is known than that he makes
pretty Latin verses; the second seems to me to have the head of a