the Revolution was "all farther than ever from coming to good". For Drennan, the greater problem presented by the course of the French Revolution was not the violence but the impact on Catholic opinion of the overturning of religion. The Catholics, he advised Martha, "are still more religionists than politicians, and the Presbyterians more politicians than religionists". While Presbyterians might be enamoured of "general liberty and equality", for Catholics their creed was still their "first object". To her husband Samuel, Drennan suggested that this was the "true cause" of disunity between Presbyterians and Catholics: "the former love the French openly and the Catholics almost to a man hate them secretly. And why? Because they have overturned the Catholic religion in that country and threaten to do so throughout the world." In September 1793 he was of the opinion that Siberia might be "better suited to be a republic than Ireland". In opposition to "the supposed alliance" between the Presbyterians and the Catholics, he anticipated "a coalition of the Protestant gentry and the Catholics of consequence ..., an alliance to keep everything much as it is". In January 1795, in the hope of binding Catholics to the cause of reform, he went so far as to support a call to resist the French. Convinced that the object of many of the Catholic members was "selfish" (i.e. focused on emancipation rather than constitutional reform), with Thomas Addis Emmet, Drennan had promoted a secret "inner Society" in Dublin (the McTiers in Belfast were to tell no one) which was "Protestant but National". "The Catholics", he wrote, "may save themselves, but it is the Protestants must save the nation". In the Dublin Society, Drennan was equally suspicious of the party of Napper Tandy, regarding both Tandy ("always running to the Catholics"") and his plebeian following as unreliable. He also saw Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet, and Thomas Russell, leading proponents of a union with the agrarian secret societies, the Defenders, as "entwined in Catholic trammels". Drennan's creation within the Dublin Society of a "private junto" has been suggested as one of the reasons for the willingness of the Catholic printer William Paulet Carey—a committed democrat equally suspicious of the Committee Catholics—to testify (truthfully) in May 1794 to the physician's authorship of the Volunteer address. Appeal for "constitutional democracy" Drennan tried to revive his dwindling medical practice. He had become a licentiate of the Royal College