Note 4 — Chapter XXIV · “THEY COMPLAIN THAT THE TWOPENNY TRASH IS READ.”

“When I hear the Dissenters complaining of persecution, I cannot help reflecting on the behaviour of some of them towards the Catholics, with respect to whom common decency ought to teach them better behaviour. But, whether I hear in a Churchman or a Dissenter abuse of the Catholics, I am equally indignant; when I hear men, no two of whom can agree in any one point of religion, and who are continually dooming each other to perdition; when I hear them join in endeavouring to shut the Catholic out from political liberty on account of his religious tenets, which they call idolatrous and damnable, I really cannot feel any compassion for either of them, let what will befall them. There is, too, something so impudent, such cool impudence, in their affected contempt of the understanding of the Catholics, that one cannot endure it with any degree of patience. You hear them all boasting of their ancestors; you hear them talking of the English Constitution as the pride of the world; you hear them bragging of the deeds of the Edwards and the Henrys; and of their wise and virtuous and brave forefathers; and, in their next breath, perhaps, you hear them speak of the Catholics as the vilest and most stupid of creatures, and as wretches doomed to perdition; when they ought to reflect that all these wise and virtuous and brave forefathers of theirs were Catholics, that they lived and died in the Catholic faith, and that, notwithstanding their Catholic faith, they did not neglect whatever was necessary to the freedom and greatness of England. It is really very stupid, as well as very insolent, to talk in this way of the Catholics, to represent them as doomed to perdition who compose five-sixths of the population of Europe; to represent as beastly ignorant those amongst whom the brightest geniuses and the most learned men in the world have been and are to be found; but still, the most shocking part of our conduct is to affect to consider as a sort of outcasts of God as well as man those who have, through all sorts of persecution, adhered to the religion of their and our forefathers. There is something so unnatural, so monstrous, in a line of conduct in which we say that our forefathers are all in hell, that no one but a brutish bigot can hear of it with patience.”—Register, xix. 1286.