ong
to, and in which God has appointed your station and mine. Let every man
be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is
agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner
of civil privileges and advantages to a _negative_ religion, (such is
the Protestant without a certain creed,) and at the same time to deny
those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one
_positive_ doctrine which all of us who profess the religion
authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our
faculties, bound to believe. The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said)
have the whole of our _positive_ religion: our difference is only a
negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of _that_
part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that
holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which
you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we better than to
hold out to them terrors on the one side, and bounties on the other, in
favor of that which, for anything we know to the contrary, may be pure
atheism?

You are well aware, that, when a man renounces the Roman religion,
there is no civil inconvenience or incapacity whatsoever which shall
hinder him from joining any new or old sect of Dissenters, or of forming
a sect of his own invention upon the most anti-christian principles. Let
Mr. Thomas Paine obtain a pardon, (as on change of ministry he may,)
there is nothing to hinder him from setting up a church of his own in
the very midst of you. He is a natural-born British subject. His French
citizenship does not disqualify him, at least upon a peace. This
Protestant apostle is as much above all suspicion of Popery as the
greatest and most zealous of your sanhedrim in Ireland can possibly be.
On purchasing a qualification, (which his friends of the Directory are
not so poor as to be unable to effect,) he may sit in Parliament; and
there is no doubt that there is not one of your tests against Popery
that he will not take as fairly, and as much _ex animo_, as the best of
your zealot statesmen. I push this point no further, and only adduce
this example (a pretty strong one, and fully in point) to show what I
take to be the madness and folly of driving men, under the existing
circumstances, from any _positive_ religion whatever into the irreligion
of the times, and its sure concomitant principles of anarchy.

When reli