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any inquisition into men's thoughts, nor to punish any man merely for his religion. It can have no power to make a religion for men, since that would be to dethrone the Almighty. I presume it will not be arrogated, on the part of the British Legislature, that his Majesty, by and with the advice of the Lords spiritual and temporal, etc., can enact that he will appoint and constitute a new religion for the People of this empire; or that, by an order in Council, the consciences and creeds of his subjects might be suspended. Nor will it be contended, I apprehend, that any authoritative or legislative measure could alter the law of the hy pothenuse. Whatever belongs to the authority of God, or to the laws of nature, is necessarily beyond the province and sphere of human institution and government. The Roman Catholic, when you disqualify him on the ground of his religion, may, with great justice, tell you that you are not his God, that he cannot mould or fashion his faith by your decrees. When once man goes out of his sphere, and says he will legislate for God, he would, in fact, make himself God.

But this I do not charge upon the Parliament, because, in none of the penal acts, has the Parliament imposed a religious creed. The qualifying oath, as to the great number of offices, and as to seats in Parliaments, scrupulously evades religious distinctions. A Dissenter of any class may take it. A Deist, an Atheist, may likewise take it. The Catholics are alone excepted; and for what reason? If a Deist be fit to sit in Parliament, it can hardly be urged that a Christian is unfit! If an Atheist be competent to legislate

for his country, surely this privilege cannot be denied to the believer in the divinity of our Saviour! If it be contended that, to support the Church, it is expedient to continue these disabilities, I dissent from that opin ion. If it could, indeed, be proved, I should say that you had acted in defiance of all the principles of human justice and freedom, in having taken away their Church from the Irish, in order to establish your own; and in afterwards attempting to secure that establishment by disqualifying the People, and compelling them at the same time to pay for its support. This is to fly directly in the face of the plainest canons of the Almighty. For the benefit of eleven hundred, to disqualify four or five millions, is the insole it effort of bigotry, not the benignant precept of Christianity ; and all this, not for the preservation of their property, -for that was secured, but for bigotry, for intolerance, for avarice, for a vile, abominable, illegitimate, and atrocious usurpation. The laws of God cry out against it; the spirit of Christianity cries out against it; the laws of England, and the spirit and principles of its Constitution, cry out against such a system.

SECTARIAN TYRANNY, 1812.--Henry Grattan. Whenever one sect degrades another on account of religion, such degradation is the tyranny of a sect. When you enact that, on account of his religion, no Catholic shall sit in Parliament, you do what amounts to the tyranny of a sect. When you enact that Lo Catholic shall be a sheriff, you do what amounts to the

tyranny of a sect. When you enact that no Catholic shall be a general, you do what amounts to the tyranny of a sect. There are two descriptions of laws-the. municipal law, which binds the People, and the law of God, which binds the Parliament and the People. Whenever you do an act which is contrary to His laws, as expressed in His work, which is the world, or in His book, the Bible, you exceed your right; whenever you rest any of your establishments on that excess, you rest it on a foundation which is weak and fallacious; whenever you attempt to establish your government, or your property, or your church, on religious restrictions, you establish them on that false foundation, and you oppose the Almighty; and though you had a host of mitres on your side, you banish God from your ecclesiastical constitution, and freedom from your political. vain shall men endeavor to make this the cause of the Church; they aggravate the crime by the endeavor to make their God their fellow in the injustice. Such rights are the rights of ambition; they are the rights of conquest; and in your case, they have been the rights of suicide. They begin by attacking liberty; they end by the loss of empire!

MAGNANIMITY IN POLITICS, 1775.-Edmund Burke. Born, 1730; died, 1797.

In

A revenue from America, transmitted hither? Do not delude yourselves! You never can receive it-no, not a shilling! Let the Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,

and they will cling and grapple to you. These are ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. But let it once be understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, the ce ment is gone, the cohesion is loosened. Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are wl.at form the great securities of your commerce. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools, as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, in fused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies, every part of the Empire, even down to the minutest member.

Do you imagine that it is the land tax which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! Surely no! It is the love of the People; it is their attachment to their Government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what

is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial ex istence, are, in truth, everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all ît can be!

ENTERPRISE OF AMERICAN COLONISTS, 1775.-Edmund

Burke.

Burke, the greatest of Irish statesmen, and unsurpassed as a writer of English prose, impaired his immediate success as a speaker by a badly-regulated voice and an infelicitous delivery. Grattan, his countryman and contemporary, wrote of him: "Burke is unquestionably the first orator of the Commons of England, notwithstanding the want of energy, the want of grace, and the want of elegance, in his manner. " 'He was a prodigy of nature and of acquisition. He read everything-he saw everything. His knowlege of history amounted to a power of foretelling; and when he perceived the wild work that was doing in France, that great political physician, cognizant of symptoms, distinguished between the access of fever and the force of health, and what others conceived to be the vigor of her constitution he knew to be the paroxysm of her madness; and then, prophet-like, he pronounced the destinies of France, and in his prophetic fury admonished nations."

For some time past, Mr. Speaker, has the Old World been fed from the New. The scarcity which you have