If I understand your former letter,
you didn't. You don't want a man who differs from you saying
or thinking such things. I want the whole 700,000 Catholics
of Massachusetts to believe what John Boyle O'Reilly believed,
and to love and reverence the Puritan founders of Massachusetts
as he did, and I think my way is the way to make them do it.
You don't, if I understand you. You think the way to make
good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to
Protestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters,
from all public employment and to go yourself into a dark
cellar and curse at them through the gratings of the windows.
I stated my religious faith and my ideas of the relation
of our religious denominations to each other, in an address
I delivered at Saratoga last year, of which I send you a
copy, and which I hope, as you have kindly volunteered to
send me so much of your opinion, you may perhaps be willing
to read. It doesn't become me to say anything about it myself.
I am deeply sensible of its imperfections. It fails to do
justice to what is in my own heart.
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