And now let us look at THE COUNTRY AT LARGE. Judging from the tone of our popular literature, and from the spirit of the public press, which can only subsist by responding to the sentiments of the day, I cannot but think that infidelity and profligacy abound to an alarming extent among the reading classes. The Protestant church, it is plain, can have no hold on the disciples of Voltaire, of Hume, of Gibbon, of Paine, of Byron. She will never compromise her pure morality. In the bosom of the Mother of Harlots they may revel with impunity: _confession_, and _absolution_, and _extreme unction_, will reconcile them to her ascendancy. Among the paradoxes of the human mind, none is more common than the junction of profane scepticism with credulous superstition,—the impious reviler of the Bible making his last peace with heaven by taking his _viaticum_ from a popish priest. Popery is the religion for all men who would indulge the hope of heaven, after doing their utmost to convert the present world into a hell of impiety and crime. Already they are in political alliance with the man of sin. But there are others of less discreditable character than these, from whom the Protestant cause derives no aid in this day of trial. I mean that large class of easy, worthy, unsuspecting persons who have imbibed unguardedly the sentiments of modern liberalism, without its malignity, and in ignorance of its designs. They see Popery only in the mild and subdued form which it puts on while restrained by the usages and the laws of a Protestant community. They find nothing in their popish neighbours but what is humane and social, and, perhaps, intelligent, honourable, and devout; and, reasoning from what they see and hear themselves, they give credit to the idle tale that POPERY is REGENERATED,—that the lion is become a lamb, and the serpent a dove,—and that, under the future reign of the Papacy, no longer perfidious, intolerant, sanguinary, no materials will be supplied for another “Book of Martyrs”—let it therefore take its unmolested course! Add to these, many persons of aristocratic rank and fortune, whose principles are wavering, and who, on supposition that the Church of England must fall a prey to the motley gang of modern revolutionists, are prepared rather to side with Popery, which is essentially aristocratical and monarchical, than with Protestant dissent, which is plebeian, levelling and democratical. They know that the pretended liberalism of Popery means nothing more than that “_she stoops to conquer_;” and they will prefer her custody of their titles and estates, to that of a national convention of chartists or roundheads.