And in this honest difficulty of conception every true Protestant will coincide with him. But let us look to the natural result of this palpable callousness of conscience.
The sacredness of oaths is essential to the _existence_ of society: the man who is not to be believed on his oath is self-banished, self-disfranchised, self-excluded from all the rights of society; for the obvious reason, that, if all men were equally false, society _must_ dissolve. Such a man is no longer entitled to the protection of law. And the same rule is inevitably applicable to any institution which thus sets itself at war with society. Popery is _anti-social_. This sentiment is the substance of a letter by the late Bishop Watson; a man of a rough and almost republican spirit--a bold advocate for liberality, almost to the verge of Liberalism--and, though a vigorous arguer against Paine and his infidelity, yet as sturdy a disclaimer of all submission to prejudice as any radical orator of our day. We quote the pamphlet.
In a letter to the Duke of Rutland, in 1784, the Bishop says--"I particularly agree with you in relation to the (Roman) Catholics. No man on earth, I trust, can have more enlarged sentiments of toleration than I have. But the Church of Rome is a _persecuting_ Church; and it is our interest and _our duty_, on every principle of _religion and common sense_, to guard ourselves against her machinations." He then gives the expression of the great Lord Clarendon--"It is the _duty_ of Catholic subjects in a Protestant country, of priests as well as the laity, to abjure the Pope's supremacy, _ecclesiastical_ as well as temporal."
The Popish advocates lay great weight on the patronage afforded to their parliamentary demands by the Cabinet of Pitt; who evidently made the grand mistake of supposing that spiritual dominion could be disunited from temporal--a mistake as great as supposing that the command of the limbs could be disunited from the power of the mind. But the views of the Minister were founded merely on political objects, while the true question was one of religion. The argument is thus summarily answered:--
"Let me remind you that an illustrious statesman, William Pitt, in the very last speech which he delivered in Parliament, expressed himself on the subject of Roman Catholic emancipation in the following remarkable language:--'I never thought that it would have been wise to throw down rudely the guards and fences of the Constitution. But I did think, that if the system I alluded to had been adopted, it _ought_ to have been accompanied by those checks and guards, and with every regulation which could have given respect and influence to the Established Church, to the support and protection of the Protestant interest, and to the encouragement of every measure which could tend to propagate the example of the _Protestant religion_.'