It’s a settled belief with a good many pious people, who are as careful of their religion as of their best service of china--only using it on holiday occasions, for fear it should be chipped or flawed in working-day wear--it’s a belief with them that a Papist is a sort of human toad, an abomination in the form of man. Dr Croly has surely a notion of this sort. A few days ago he appeared on Covent Garden stage (I think his first appearance there since his comedy of “Pride shall have a Fall”), and called upon the Lord, with thunder and lightning and the sword, to kill His enemies--meaning Roman Catholics! And then the Doctor showed how Providence had punished all naughty kings who had cast an eye of favour on the Pope. Capping this, the Doctor more than hinted that George the Fourth, the first gentleman in Europe--for he had a greater number of coats than all the rest of the kings put together--was somewhat suddenly called from his loving people because he had passed the bill that ’mancipated the Catholics. Well, when we think how many Catholics there are in the world--when we remember the millions of ’em scattered about the earth--it does appear to me a little bold in a worm of a man (whether the said worm wears clergyman’s black or not) praying to the Lord to destroy, crush, burn, whole nations of men and women because he wasn’t born to think as they do. But so it is with some folks very proud indeed of their Christianity. Hear them talk and pray, and you would think that Satan himself, the father of wickedness, had been the creator of ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and it was the pure, elect, and lucky hundredth that religiously begged for the destruction of the ninety-nine. But all the noise is about the largeness of the sum--the £26,000. The £9000 was every year quietly voted--for I call the cackling of two or three Parliament geese as nothing--and still the Church stands unshaken on her foundation. By this it would seem that with some folks it is the money that wrong costs, and not the wrong itself, that is objectionable. Thinking after this fashion, drunkenness is not to be thought a vice if it be drunkenness gratis; it, however, increases in enormity with the increase of its price: thus gin-drunkenness is merely wrong, but burgundy-drunkenness is infamous to the last degree. Haven’t I read somewhere of an old Greek philosopher--if some of these chaps had lived in these times, they’d now and then have found themselves at the police-office--who felt mightily disposed for what was immoral, and only held back at the purchase-money! I think he said he wouldn’t “buy repentance at so dear a price.” Now, if he could have had the sin at a cheap pennyworth, the sin itself had been light, indeed. It’s the weight of money that makes the weight of crime.