Greatly exercised over events in France, Burke came to think of Christianity as the one force with enough cohesion to check the spread of the Revolution. Then in 1795 he wrote the _Letter to William Smith, Esq._ Here he described Christianity as “the grand prejudice ... which holds all the other prejudices together”;[32] and such prejudices, as he visualized them, were essential to the fabric of society. He told his correspondent candidly: “My whole politics, at present, center in one point; and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable; that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism.”[33] In a second letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, written in the same year, he could say: “In the Catholic Question I considered only one point. Was it at the time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens.”[34] Only once did Burke approach the question of religion through what may be properly termed an argument from definition. In the last year of his life he composed _A Letter on the Affairs of Ireland_, one passage of which considers religion not in its bearing upon some practical measure, but with reference to its essential nature. Let every man be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a _negative_ religion—such is the Protestant without a certain creed; and at the same time to deny those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one _positive_ doctrine, which all of us, who profess religion authoritatively taught in England, hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe.[35] It is not purely an argument from definition, but it contains such an argument, and so contrasts with his dominant position on a subject which engaged much of his thought and seems to have filled him with sincere feeling. We shall examine him now on another major subject to engage his statesmanship, the rebellion of the North American Colonies against Great Britain. By common admission today, Burke’s masterpiece of forensic eloquence is the speech moving his resolutions for conciliation with that disaffected part of the Empire, delivered in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775. In admiring the felicities with which this great oration undoubtedly abounds, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is from beginning to end an argument from circumstance. It is not an argument about rights or definitions, as Burke explicitly says at two or three points; it is an argument about policy as dictated by circumstances. Its burden is a plea to conciliate the colonies because they are waxing great. No subtlety of interpretation is required to establish this truth, because we can substantially establish it in the express language of Burke himself.