-legal and desultory toleration by connivance at particular cases, — this precarious depending on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned prerogative, — could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism. In fact — and a melancholy fact it is, — toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists.
Ib.
s. 104.
It was scarcely to be expected that the passions of James's age would allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who preferred the
mumpsimus
of their grandsires to the corrected
sumpsimus
of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emancipation Bill!
Ib.
s. 105.