It may be doubted whether any dispute has produced stranger perversions of history.

The whole past was falsified for the sake of the present.

All the great events of three centuries long appeared to us distorted and discoloured by a mist sprung from our own theories and our own passions.

Some friends of religious liberty, not content with the advantage which they possessed in the fair conflict of reason with reason, weakened their case by maintaining that the law which excluded Irish Roman Catholics from Parliament was inconsistent with the civil Treaty of Limerick.

The First article of that Treaty, it was said, guaranteed to the Irish Roman Catholic such privileges in the exercise of his religion as he had enjoyed in the time of Charles the Second.