Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/163

PHILLIPS operation of the change to point the purpose of your redemption, the hand that replanted the rejected lily was that of an Irish Catholic.

Perhaps it is not also unworthy of remark that the last day of her triumph and the first of her decline was that on which her insatiable chieftain smote the holy head of your religion. You will hardly suspect I am imbued with the follies of superstition; but when the man now unborn shall trace the story of that eventful day he will see the adopted child of fortune borne on the wings of victory from clime to clime, marking every movement with a triumph and every pause with a crown, till time, space, and seasons, nay, even Nature herself, seeming to vanish from before him—in the blasphemy of his ambition he smote the apostle of his God and dared to raise the everlasting Cross amid his perishable trophies!

Another obstacle, the tenets of your creed. Has England still to learn them? I will tell her where. Let her ask Canada, the last plank of her American shipwreck. Let her ask Portugal, the first omen of her European splendor. Let her ask Spain, the most Catholic country in the universe, her Catholic friends, her Catholic allies, her rivals in the triumph, her reliance in the retreat, her last stay when the world had deserted her. They must have told her on the field of blood whether it was true that they "kept no faith with heretics."

Alas, alas! how miserable a thing is bigotry, 153