by the payment of a fine, are correlative ideas. Practically this
custom often told with a barbarous inequality against those who were too
poor to purchase forgiveness; but it was otherwise both just and humane
in principle, and it was generally encouraged by the Church. For in her
eyes the criminal was guilty of an act of which it was necessary that he
should repent; this made her desire, not his destruction, but his
conversion. She tried, therefore, to save his life, and to put an end to
revenge, mutilation, and servitude; and for all this the alternative was
compensation. This purpose was served by the right of asylum. The Church
surrendered the fugitive only on condition that his life and person
should be spared in consideration of a lawful fine, which she often paid
for him herself. "Concedatur ei vita et omnia membra. Emendat autem
causam in quantum potuerit," says a law of Charlemagne, given in the
year 785, when the influence of religion on legislation was most
powerful in Europe.

No idea occurs more frequently in the work we are reviewing than that of
the persecuting character of the Catholic Church; it is used as a
perpetual apology for the penal laws in Ireland:--

"When the Catholics writhe under this wrong, let them turn their eyes
to the history of Catholic countries, and remember that, while the
Catholic Church was stripped of her endowments and doomed to
political degradation by Protestant persecutors in Ireland, the
Protestant churches were exterminated with fire and sword by Catholic
persecutors in France, Austria, Flanders, Italy, and Spain" (p. 92).
He speaks of Catholicism as "a religion which all Protestants
believed to be idolatrous, and knew by fearful experience to be
persecuting" (p. 113). "It would not be difficult to point to
persecuting laws more sanguinary than these. Spain, France, and
Austria will at once supply signal examples.... That persecution was
the vice of an age and not only of a particular religion, that it
disgraced Protestantism as well as Catholicism, is true. But no one
who reads the religious history of Europe with an open mind can fail
to perceive that the persecutions carried on by Protestants were far
less bloody and less extensive than those carried on by Catholics;
that they were more frequently excusable as acts of retaliation; that
they arose more from political alarm, and less from the spirit of the
religion