Treachery, cruelty, and all the lower passions, were called into vigorous exercise.
Even the Protestants, for their own sakes, were often obliged to connive at the evasion of laws so extremely severe, and which introduced much difficulty in their dealings with Catholics; but, when any Protestant wished to be revenged upon a Catholic, or to extort money from him, he found in these laws a ready instrument for his purpose.

By an additional Act, in 1726, it was ordained that a Roman Catholic priest, marrying a Protestant to a Catholic, should suffer death; and in order that legal redress might be still less accessible to the Catholics, it was enacted, in 1728, that no one should be entitled to practise as an attorney who had not been two years a Protestant." This is a clear and succinct epitome of the penal laws; true, much more might be added; but it is enough to say that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.

It is not by placing restrictions upon creeds or ceremonies that religion can ever be checked, much less extinguished.
Like the camomile plant, the more it is trampled on the more it will spread and grow; as the rude winds and the inclemency of the elements only harden and make more vigorous the constitutions of those who are exposed to them.

In our state of the world, those who have the administration of political laws in their hands, if they ever read history, or can avail themselves of the experiences of ages, ought to know that it is not by severity or persecution that the affections of their fellow-subjects can be conciliated.

We ourselves once knew a brutal ruffian, who was a dealer in fruit in the little town of Maynooth, and whose principle of correcting his children was to continue whipping the poor things until they were forced to laugh! A person was one day present when he commenced chastising one of them--a child of about seven--upon this barbarous principle.