heir own
inordinately. But in this Protestant persecution there is anything but
benevolence at work. What do the Irish statutes? They do not make a
conformity to the _established_ religion, and to its doctrines and
practices, the condition of getting out of servitude. No such thing. Let
three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors
have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms
the most degrading, scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and
virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the
education they have received, and nothing more is required of them.
There is no system of folly, or impiety, or blasphemy, or atheism, into
which they may not throw themselves, and which they may not profess
openly, and as a system, consistently with the enjoyment of all the
privileges of a free citizen in the happiest constitution in the world.

Some of the unhappy assertors of this strange scheme say they are not
persecutors on account of religion. In the first place, they say what is
not true. For what else do they disfranchise the people? If the man gets
rid of a religion through which their malice operates, he gets rid of
all their penalties and incapacities at once. They never afterwards
inquire about him. I speak here of their pretexts, and not of the true
spirit of the transaction, in which religious bigotry, I apprehend, has
little share. Every man has his taste; but I think, if I were so
miserable and undone as to be guilty of premeditated and continued
violence towards any set of men, I had rather that my conduct was
supposed to arise from wild conceits concerning their religious
advantages than from low and ungenerous motives relative to my own
selfish interest. I had rather be thought insane in my charity than
rational in my malice. This much, my dear son, I have to say of this
Protestant persecution,--that is, a persecution of religion itself.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
People soon forget the meaning, but the impression and the passion
remain. The word Protestant is the charm that looks up in the dungeon of
servitude three millions of your people. It is not amiss to consider
this spell of potency, this abracadabra, that is hung about the necks of
the unhappy, not to heal, but to communicate disease. We sometimes hear
of a Protestant _religion_, frequently of a Protestant _interest_. We
hear of t