The fact is, we are a little impatient when we hear Protestants expressing in grave tones and with a serious face their apprehensions that the spread of Catholicity will tend to the destruction of American liberty. Considering what Protestantism is, and by what means it was introduced and has been sustained, it is too much as if Satan should express serious apprehensions that the spread of the Gospel may tend to the destruction of Christian piety and humility. We find among Protestants men, and not a few, who, when they speak of liberty, mean liberty for all men, for Catholics as well as for non-Catholics; but your true-blue Protestant, who is imbued with the original and genuine spirit of Protestantism, would seem unable to understand by liberty anything but his right to govern, or by religious liberty anything but his right to reject the papacy, abuse the Pope, calumniate and despoil the church, and exterminate or enslave Catholics. Who has not heard of 119 Tyburn, and who went there--of the infamous penal laws against Catholics of England and Ireland, to say nothing of other countries? And were not these same penal laws enacted and enforced in the colony of Virginia, and was it not a capital offence in Massachusetts for a priest to set his foot within the colony, or for an inhabitant to harbor or give him even a meal of victuals? Did not Massachusetts fit out and send from Boston an armed body of men, who shot down Father Rasle, a missionary to the Norridgewock Indians, at the head of his congregation as they came forth from Mass, and massacred them? Did not an American Provincial Congress enumerate among their grave charges against George III. the fact that he had granted freedom of worship to Catholics in the neighboring province of Canada? Was not Guy Fawkes’ Day celebrated in Boston with the usual anti-popery demonstrations down to the epoch of the Revolution, until protested against by some French officers, who came with the army from France to aid us in gaining our national independence? Yet Protestants do not blush to call Protestantism the friend, and Catholicity the enemy, of liberty!