the pious and honourable
Roman Catholics who underwent the same fate. [6]

It was not only by the ignorant populace, it was not only by zealots in
whom fanaticism had extinguished all reason and charity, that the Roman
Catholic was regarded as a man the very tenderness of whose conscience
might make him a false witness, an incendiary, or a murderer, as a man
who, where his Church was concerned, shrank from no atrocity and could
be bound by no oath. If there were in that age two persons inclined by
their judgment and by their temper to toleration, those persons were
Tillotson and Locke. Yet Tillotson, whose indulgence for various kinds
of schismatics and heretics brought on him the reproach of heterodoxy,
told the House of Commons from the pulpit that it was their duty to
make effectual provision against the propagation of a religion more
mischievous than irreligion itself, of a religion which demanded from
its followers services directly opposed to the first principles of
morality. His temper, he truly said, was prone to lenity; but his duty
to he community forced him to be, in this one instance, severe. He
declared that, in his judgment, Pagans who had never heard the name
of Christ, and who were guided only by the light of nature, were more
trustworthy members of civil society than men who had been formed in the
schools of the Popish casuists. [7] Locke, in the celebrated treatise in
which he laboured to show that even the grossest forms of idolatry ought
not to be prohibited under penal sanctions, contended that the Church
which taught men not to keep faith with heretics had no claim to
toleration. [8]

It is evident that, in such circumstances, the greatest service which an
English Roman Catholic could render to his brethren in the faith was
to convince the public that, whatever some rash men might, in times of
violent excitement, have written or done, his Church did not hold that
any end could sanctify means inconsistent with morality. And this great
service it was in the power of James to render. He was King. He was more
powerful than any English King had been within the memory of the oldest
man. It depended on him whether the reproach which lay on his religion
should be taken away or should be made permanent.

Had he conformed to the laws, had he fulfilled his promises, had he
abstained from employing any unrighteous methods for the propagation of
his own theological tenets, had he suspended the operation of th