  Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into his personal background with alarm and suspicion. This was sensible enough in a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty with Protestantism, and therefore regarded Irishness as a likely pointer to popish subversion of its political values. Burke's argumentative stance always benefited Roman Catholics, but he never found a kind word for the Pope: his was a position which emphasized the priority of civil interests over denominational claims in civil society. Indeed Burke considered that ‘the truth of our common Christianity, is not so clear as this proposition: that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of it.’ (TPL, W &amp; S 1981–2015, ix.464). This was a political development of the centrality he gave to the claims of improvement, and of the obvious necessity of its free development for the bettering of the human condition. It also silently defused any papal claim to civil dominance on theological grounds and, more audibly, suggested that the penalisation of Roman Catholic beliefs was wrong if these did not cause Catholics to interfere with others' civil interests. Burke's presumptions about the priority of civil interests and a sense of the possible irrelevance of denominational opinion to civil society suggest a reading of Locke's Letter concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Government, the latter of which was common, though not prescribed reading at Trinity. It also implies that the proper terms in which to conceive civil interests are those of natural jurisprudence, because there people are considered without reference to any specific allegiances, religious or otherwise. Burke referred to natural law and natural rights directly when such reference advanced his own arguments, though he made no theoretical contribution to natural jurisprudence until quite late in life. His creative energies were mostly applied elsewhere.