"The outbreak was rather premature," calmly continued the Prelate, "but it has done us good. It has invested us with the light of martyrdom, the glory of persecution. It has drawn to us the sympathies of tens of thousands of Protestants, who, honestly disliking the assaults of the mere 'No-Popery' lecturers upon our church, as honestly entertain the amusing notion, that the Rulers of our church, look upon 'Toleration, Liberty of Conscience,' and so forth, with any feeling, but profound contempt." "Ah!" ejaculated the Legate, and a smile crossed his face, "deriving strength from the illimitable bitterness of the Native American and Foreign political parties, we already hold in many portions of the Union, the ballot box in our grasp. We can dictate terms to both political parties. Their leaders court us. Editors who know that we rooted Protestantism out of Spain, by the red hand of the Inquisition,--that for our faith we made the Netherlands rich in gibbets and graves,--that we gave the word, which started from its scabbard the dagger of St. Bartholomew,--grave editors, who know all this and more, talk of us as the friends of Liberty and Toleration--" "But there was Calvert, the founder of Maryland, and Carroll the signer of the Declaration of Independence, these were Catholics, were they not, Catholics and friends of Liberty?" "They were _laymen_, not _rulers_, you will remember," said the Prelate, significantly: "at best they belonged to a sort of Catholics, which, in the Old World, we have done our best to root out of the church. But here, however, we can use their names and their memories, as a cloak for our purposes of ultimate dominion. But to resume: both political parties court us. Their leaders, who loathe us, are forced to kneel to us. Things we can do freely and without blame, which damn any Protestant sect but to utter. The very 'No-Popery' lecturers aid us: they attack doctrinal points in our church, which are no more assailable than the doctrinal points of any one of their ten thousand sects: they would be dangerous, indeed, were they to confine their assaults to the simple fact, that ours is not so much a church as an EMPIRE, having for its object, the temporal dominion of the whole human race, to be accomplished under the vail of spiritualism. An EMPIRE built upon the very sepulcher of Jesus Christ,--an EMPIRE which holds Religion, the Cross, the Bible, as valuable just so far as they aid its efforts for the temporal subjection of the world,--an EMPIRE which, using all means and holding all means alike lawful, for the spread of its dominion, has chosen the American Continent as the scene of its loftiest triumph, the theater of its final and most glorious victories!" As he spoke the Atheist Prelate started from his chair.