I lay comparatively little stress on the number of converts openly professing themselves to be proselytes to Popery: the report may be exaggerated or it may not. I am not startled, as some are, by the increase of popish chapels, monasteries, and colleges. I fear nothing from the open teachers of popish doctrine, nor would I enter into a _fiddle faddle_ controversy with a Jesuitical priesthood, who are not bound by the laws of honourable warfare, and who, when defeated in argument, always take refuge in their insolent assumption of _infallibility_. The naked dogmas of Popery carry with them their own refutation. They originated in the dark ages of barbarian ignorance and public confusion, when the Roman empire had been swept by the northern hordes, and savage warfare left no leisure, no disposition, to cultivate those departments of knowledge which expand and invigorate the human mind. Popery can never make converts in an enlightened nation like England, but from among the most feeble in intellect or sordid in character, the uninstructed vulgar, nervous women, or intellectual profligates. True, she has advocates both subtle and learned; but they are men who were cradled in her errors, and whose early discipline and youthful associations—designed for the suppression of the manly mind—have combined, with the interested motives of after-life, to fix them in her faith. I give no credit to the more notorious of popish agitators for sincerity in their _religious_ attachment to the cause they serve. Popery is their stepping-stone to distinction and power. They laugh in their sleeve at that lucrative fable while they derive power, as political incendiaries, from the distresses and _superstitions_ of an abject people. But while naked Popery is simply despicable for its absurdities or detestable for its intolerance, I fear every thing from the unwearied and versatile genius of _Romish policy_, which, without having proselyted to the popish faith Protestant England, has contrived, by a series of manœuvres, so to dislocate the frame of British society, that instead of combining to crush, as they might easily do, the common foe, Protestant is arrayed against Protestant, while the only party really to be dreaded by all, is looked upon without suspicion and without fear. If the present course of events is suffered to proceed,—while one class of Protestants is tamely looking on, and another section is actively and zealously employed in seconding the designs of the papacy,—I see no impossibility that is to prevent the entire power of the State from falling, at no distant period, into the hands of the popish faction. And what use they will make of that power is not a matter of difficult conjecture. History is _not_ “an old almanack,” unless to fools and desperadoes; and history denounces papal intolerance in characters of horror and of blood.