I hold Popery to be such a mean and
degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself
liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed
before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered
Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of
Babylon's mouth stopped with pleasure. But now that you have taken the
plaster off her mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see
the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in
Parliament. Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust,
with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk.
The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of
nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a
strong and rather unscrupulous politician--a moss-trooper in
politics--which Scott certainly was. He was thinking evidently very
little of justice, almost entirely of the most effective means of
keeping the Kingdom, the Kingdom which he loved. Had he
understood--what none of the politicians of that day understood--the
strength of the Church of Rome as the only consistent exponent of the
principle of Authority in religion, I believe his opposition to
Catholic emancipation would have been as bitter as his opposition to
Parliamentary reform.
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