"It knows nothing," he declared, "of a race of sophists who, professing to know nothing about God, and law, and right and wrong, and conscience, and judgment to come, are incapable of giving to Christian or to reasonable men the pledges which bind their moral nature with the obligations necessary for the command of fleets and armies, and legislatures and commonwealths." Of the historic fact that the English people had once brutally persecuted the Quakers, but had latterly allowed them to dispense with oath-taking, he disposed by saying that they were allowed to affirm because they were known to be deeply religious, and therefore trustworthy:-- "But let no man tell me that this respectful confidence is to be claimed by our Agnostics; much less by those, if such there be, who, sinking by the inevitable law of the human mind below the shallowness and timidity of Agnosticism, plunge into the great deep of human pride, where the light of reason goes out, and the outer darkness hides God, His perfection, and His laws.... "There still stands on our Statute book a law which says that to undermine the principles of moral obligation is punishable by forfeiture of all places of trust (9 and 10 Will. c. 32, Kerr's _Blackstone_, iv. 34, 35, note), but there is no law which says that a man who publicly denies the existence of God is a fit and proper person to sit in Parliament, or a man who denies the first laws of morals is eligible to make laws for the homes and domestic life of England, Scotland, and Ireland." The whole article was in this strain, as far removed from political science as from the charity which is conventionally associated with the Christian name. And though all the while it was notorious that the ignorant and superstitious of the Cardinal's own Church are the least to be believed, whether on oath or without oath, of all _quasi_-civilised men, the rancorous rhetoric of the Romish priest counted for something with the class of Protestant bigots who, hating Rome, hate reason so much more as to be ready to work with even Rome against it. And yet Manning, in his work on "The Present Crisis of the Holy See," had declared that "England has the melancholy and bad pre-eminence of being the most anti-Catholic, _and therefore the most anti-Christian_, power of the world." Thus can fanatics manoeuvre.