Page:An address to the people of England, Ireland, and Scotland.djvu/21

 is undoubtedly laudable, because agreeable to the principles of justice and the rights of nature, yet the establishment of Popery, which is a very different thing from the toleration of it, is, for very just and wise reasons, altogether incompatible with the fundamental principles of our constitution.

I will, however, wave a subject which must ever be an invidious one while there are so many of us in communion with the Roman church, and which is perhaps impertinent, because it carries with it the appearance of a remote danger, while so many nearer mischiefs demand our present and our earnest attention.

It is not the establishment of the Popish religion in Quebec, even to the exclusion of a toleration to the Protestants except by favour of the crown, and this at a time when the test, and other arbitrary acts restraining the rights of conscience, hang over the heads of our own Dissenters, of which we