rmin, and cruelly pinched with the cold,
which removed by night the executioners who beat and tormented them by
day. Instead of a bed, they were allowed, sick or well, only a hard
board, eighteen inches broad, to sleep on, without any covering but
their wretched apparel; which was a shirt of the coarsest canvass, a
little jerkin of red serge, slit up each side up to the arm-holes, with
open sleeves that reached not to the elbow; and once in three years they
had a coarse frock, and a little cap to cover their heads, which were
always kept close shaved as a mark of their infamy. The allowance of
provision was as narrow as the sentiments of those who condemned them
to such miseries, and their treatment when sick is too shocking to
relate, doomed to die upon the boards of a dark hold; covered with
vermin, and without the least convenience for the calls of nature. Nor
was it among the least of the horrors they endured, that, as ministers
of Christ, and honest men, they were chained side by side to felons and
the most execrable villains, whose blasphemous tongues were never idle.
If they refused to hear mass, they were sentenced to the bastinado, of
which dreadful punishment the following is a description. Preparatory to
it, the chains are taken off, and the victims delivered into the hands
of the Turks that preside at the oars, who strip them quite naked, and
stretching them upon a great gun, they are held so that they cannot
stir; during which there reigns an awful silence throughout the galley.
The Turk who is appointed the executioner, and who thinks the sacrifice
acceptable to his prophet Mahomet, most cruelly beats the wretched
victim with a rough cudgel, or knotty rope's end, till the skin is
flayed off his bones, and he is near the point of expiring; then they
apply a most tormenting mixture of vinegar and salt, and consign him to
that most intolerable hospital where thousands under their cruelties
have expired.

_Martyrdom of John Calas._

We pass over many other individual martyrdoms to insert that of John
Calas, which took place so lately as 1761, and is an indubitable proof
of the bigotry of popery, and shows that neither experience nor
improvement can root out the inveterate prejudices of the Roman
catholics, or render them less cruel or inexorable to protestants.

John Calas was a merchant of the city of Thoulouse, where he had been
settled, and lived in good repute, and had married an English woman of
Fren