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blood to be sbed in tbeir defence ; and tbe only practical consequence would be , that the House of Hanover would follow the House of Stuart . The Anti-catholic Dissenters do not know the men to whose rights they oppose themselves ; do not judge them charitably nor justly . They believe Mr . Ivimey , when he enacts the prophet , and says of the Catholics , " If they were to have political power , they would use it to deprive you of
your liberty to worship God according to your consciences . " This prediction was made to the Deputies three years ago , in company with another which is now repeated , although it has in the interval been distinctly falsified : «« They have not asked for your co-operation : they will not thank you for it . " They have since done both . They have done more ; they have volunteered their co-operation in our struggle for our own rights
They have assisted us to gain a large addition to those very privileges which we are told they are so anxious to despoil us of altogether . Here are facts against assertions ; good works to put in the scale against calumnies . Of civil liberty , as existing in the English Constitution , the broad foundations were laid , and most of the superstructure raised , by Catholic hands . Nor is there any body of men more distinctly or more solemnly pledged to the great cause of religious liberty , in the amplest sense of the words , than are , at this moment , the Catholics of Ireland .
But , as Mr . Ivimey tells us , most aged persons , among the Independents and Baptists , " still smell the smoke of the martyrs ; " and the fumes , no doubt , confuse their brains , dim their perceptions , and disorder their memories . It is hard to get such a scent out of a man ' s nostrils . Still that smoke ought not to " ascend up for ever and ever , " merely to blacken the name of Catholic . It is true they have persecuted ; often most bloodily ; and at times they have broadly avowed the principle of persecution . Had there been any singularity in this , it might fairly have marked them out for
legal jealousy and individual horror . But that principle has been as broadly avowed , and , under the corrupting influence of power , has been as promptly acted upon , by at least almost every other sect . The great founders of the Reformed Churches are deeply implicated in this guilt . They vigorously asserted their own right of private judgment ; but they as vigorously resisted that of others . Luther demurred to the capital punishment of heretics , but he maintained that they should be banished , be forced to silence ,
be confined as madmen . Calvin went further , both in principle and practice ; and the murder of Servetus not only illustrated his views , but elicited those of several of the most distinguished of the Reformers . Farell ai # l Bucer , Beza , and Melancthon , expressed their applause of that atrocious deed . Socinus was accessary to the imprisonment of Francis Davides . Cranmer consigned Anabaptists to the stake ; and Knox held the Mosaic denunciation of death for idolatry to be applicable to the worship of saints . Episcopacy has its condemning record in our statute-book ; in penalties
varying from fine to death for worshiping God in other ways than that sanctioned by her authority . It was the intolerance of Episcopacy which peopled America , and threatened to depopulate Scotland . The Solemn League and Covenant of the Presbyterians was the obligation of an oatri for the extermination of Popery and Prelacy ; and the Westminster Confession , to which their ministers yet subscribe , distinctly recognizes and invokes the power of the civil magistrate to preserve the truth and suppress blasphemies and heresies . The fugitives of the seventeenth century who founded the American States , though driven thither by persecution , with few exceptions ,
Untitled Article
Catholics and Dissenters . 589
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1828, page 589, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2564/page/5/
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