Whether in sorrow or success, he has learned, in his own
behalf, the great lesson, that religious faith is the most valuable and
most sacred of human possessions; but, with this sense, there has come no
narrowness or illiberality, but a wide-embracing sympathy for the modes
of Christian worship, and a reverence for individual belief, as a matter
between the Deity and man's soul, and with which no other has a right to
interfere. With the feeling here described, and with his acute
intellectual perception of the abortive character of all intolerant
measures, as defeating their own ends, it strikes one as nothing less
than ludicrous that he should be charged with desiring to retain this
obsolete enactment, standing, as it does, as a merely gratuitous and
otherwise inoperative stigma upon the fair reputation of his native
state. Even supposing no higher motives to have influenced him, it would
have sufficed to secure his best efforts for the repeal of the religious
test that so many of the Catholics have always been found in the
advance-guard of freedom, marching onward with the progressive party; and
that, whether in peace or war, they have performed for their adopted
country the hard toil and the gallant services which she has a right to
expect from her most faithful citizens.
Pages:
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113