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24 women reduced to deplorable poverty: fathers lamenting their children in the bloom and pride of youth; and I said to myself, These people cannot afford to part with their religion. But, indeed, you cannot take it away: If, contrary to your first declaration, you choose to try the experiment of persecuting it, you will only make us prize it more, and love it better. Religion, true or false, is so necessary to the mind of man, that even you have already begun to make yourselves a new one. You are sowing the seeds of superstition, at the moment you fancy you are destroying superstition; and, in two or three generations, your posterity will be worshipping some clumsy idol, with the rites, perhaps, of a bloody Moloch, or a lascivious Thamuser. It was not worth while to have been philosphers, and to have destroyed the images of our saints for this; but let every one choose the religion that pleases him; I and my parishioners are content with our's; it teaches us to bear the evils your childish or sanguinary decrees have helped to bring upon the country."

The Rector turned his footsteps homeward, and the Convention looked for some minutes on one another, before they resumed their work of blood.

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