could for
his life determine whether the man before him belonged to idolatrous
Rome on the one hand, or the arch heresy on the other.

There they stood, exact counterparts, each a thousand times more anxious
to damn the other than to save himself. They were not long, however, in
discovering each other, and in a moment the jargon of controversy
rang loud and high amidst the uproar and confusion of the place. The
Protestant saint attributed all the iniquity by which the land, he
said, was overflowed, and the judgments under which it was righteously
suffering, to the guilt of our rulers, who forgot God, and connived at
Popery.

The Popish saint, on the other hand, asserted that so long as a fat and
oppressive heresy was permitted to trample upon the people, the
country could never prosper. The other one said, that idolatry--Popish
idolatry--was the cause of all; and that it was the scourge by which
"the Lord" was inflicting judicial punishment upon the country at large.
If it were not for that he would not be in such a sink of iniquity at
that moment. Popish idolatry it was that brought him there; and the
abominations of the Romish harlot were desolating the land.

The other replied, that perhaps she was the only harlot of the kind
he would run away from; and maintained, that until all heresy was
abolished, and rooted out of the country, the curse of God would
sit upon them, as the corrupt law church does now in the shape of an
overgrown nightmare. What brought him, who was ready to die for his
persecuted church, here? He could tell the heretic;--it was Protestant
ascendancy, and he could prove it;--yes, Protestant ascendancy, and
nothing else, was it that brought him to that house, its representative,
in which he now stood. He maintained that it resembled a watch-house;
was it not full of wickedness, noise, and blasphemy; and were there any
two creeds; in it that agreed together, and did not fight like devils?

How much longer this fiery discussion might have proceeded it is
difficult to say. The constable of the night, finding that the two
hypocritical vagabonds were a nuisance to the whole place, had them
handcuffed together, and both placed in the black hole to finish their
argument.

In short, there was around the good man--vice, with all her discordant
sounds and hideous aspects, clanging in his ear the multitudinous din
that arose from the loud and noisy tumult of her brutal, drunken, and
debauched votaries.