all sides. The
Protestant religion, in that violent struggle, infected, as the Popish
had been before, by worldly interests and worldly passions, became a
persecutor in its turn, sometimes of the new sects, which carried their
own principles further than it was convenient to the original reformers,
and always of the body from whom they parted: and this persecuting
spirit arose, not only from the bitterness of retaliation, but from the
merciless policy of fear.

It was long before the spirit of true piety and true wisdom, involved in
the principles of the Reformation, could be depurated from the dregs and
feculence of the contention with which it was carried through. However,
until this be done, the Reformation is not complete: and those who think
themselves good Protestants, from their animosity to others, are in
that respect no Protestants at all. It was at first thought necessary,
perhaps, to oppose to Popery another Popery, to get the better of it.
Whatever was the cause, laws were made in many countries, and in this
kingdom in particular, against Papists, which are as bloody as any of
those which had been enacted by the Popish princes and states: and where
those laws were not bloody, in my opinion, they were worse; as they were
slow, cruel outrages on our nature, and kept men alive only to insult in
their persons every one of the rights and feelings of humanity. I pass
those statutes, because I would spare your pious ears the repetition of
such shocking things; and I come to that particular law the repeal of
which has produced so many unnatural and unexpected consequences.

A statute was fabricated in the year 1699, by which the saying mass (a
church service in the Latin tongue, not exactly the same as our liturgy,
but very near it, and containing no offence whatsoever against the laws,
or against good morals) was forged into a crime, punishable with
perpetual imprisonment. The teaching school, an useful and virtuous
occupation, even the teaching in a private family, was in every Catholic
subjected to the same unproportioned punishment. Your industry, and the
bread of your children, was taxed for a pecuniary reward to stimulate
avarice to do what Nature refused, to inform and prosecute on this law.
Every Roman Catholic was, under the same act, to forfeit his estate to
his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a profession of what he
did not believe, he redeemed by his hypocrisy what the law had
transferred to