So the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ...

the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution.

So, too, his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built according to the general need.

Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong.

Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good.