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liberation, with no great violence of application, might have adopted the language of the chief Apostle and his companion, when, after having been unjustly imprisoned as well as punished, the attempt was dishonourably made by the magistrates secretly to dismiss them, — "They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily; nay verily, but let them come themselves and fetch us out." The effect was, that the magistrates became suppliants.[1] His holiness has made an equally intelligible confession of guilt.
This, and the other attempts of the friends of Rome, to wipe away the Vandalic blot, which her own ignorance and tyranny fixed upon herself, are little likely to succeed, when the self-interest of the procedure, and therefore its motive, may so plainly be discovered. If from a simple sense of justice and truth, and not from the pain of continued disgrace, she had thought fit to dismiss from her black book the names of men of science, the severity of censure in the intelligent observer would be disarmed. But when no other consideration seems to have stimulated the act, than that of
- ↑ Acts, xvi. 37-39.
