gland; this he most unjustifiably argued, could not be
effected by peaceable means: 'Therefore,' he says, 'there must be more in
it, for he that was so earnest in that religion would not have stuck at
any violence to bring it in; he would not have stuck at blood. For we know
their doctrines and their practises, and we know well with what zeal the
priests push them forward to venture their own lives, and take away other
men's that differ from them, to bring in their religion and to set up
themselves.'

After speaking of the general ignorance of the Papists, and the general
diffusion of knowledge among the Protestants, 'insomuch that scarce a
cobbler but is able to baffle any Roman priest that ever I saw or met
with,' he goes on; 'and after this I wonder that a man who hath been bred
up in the Protestant religion, (as I have reason to believe that you, Mr.
Coleman, have been, for if I am not misinformed your father was a minister
in Suffolk,) for such a one to depart from it, is an evidence against you
to prove the indictment. I must make a difference between us and those who
have been always educated that way. No man of understanding, but for
by-ends, would have left his religion to be a Papist. And for you, Mr.
Coleman, who are a man of reason and subtilty, I must tell you, (to bring
this to yourself,) upon this account, that it could not be conscience; I
cannot think it to be conscience. Your pension was your conscience, and
your secretary's place your bait. I do acknowledge many of the popish
priests formerly were learned men, and may be so still beyond the seas;
but I could never yet meet with any here, that had any other learning or
ability but artificial, only to delude weak women and weaker men.

'They have indeed ways of conversion and conviction by enlightening our
understandings with a faggot, and by the powerful and irresistible
arguments of a dagger. But these are such wicked solecisms in their
religion, that they seem to have left them neither natural sense nor
natural conscience. Not natural sense, by their absurdity in so
unreasonable a belief as of the wine turned into blood: not natural
conscience, by their cruelty, who make the Protestant's blood as wine, and
these priests thirst after it. _Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum._

'Mr. Coleman, in one of his letters, speaks of rooting out our religion
and our party; and he is in the right, for they can never root out the
Protestant religion but they mu