her
Joseph. This is a plague-mark upon the present century, and though a
plain case of retributive justice through the visiting of the sins of
the fathers upon the children, still the fact remains that the attempt
to bring _right_ of any multiple of wrongs, must always record a
failure.

A sufficient answer to the latitude of the age, is the fact that a
corresponding age gave us Plymouth, and not long after Penn's colony;
nor can the Spaniards claim the same justification for excesses as these
coincident colonists, all of whom had felt the lash of religious
intolerance. The Spanish Conquest, antedating the divisions that
followed the reformation, has no such covert for their lustful
excrescences.

Any system of religious ethics that severs human responsibility from the
domain of conscience, and furnishes a market for the indulgences that
cover all the excesses of the body politic, cannot be expected to bring
forth the best of fruit from a bloom so blighted by human lust, and so
blackened by human selfishness.

If, amid all of their intolerance and deceit, they had respected the
homely records and the grotesque landmarks of the nation they destroyed,
the cavaliers might have shown them as a slight palliation, and at once
furnished the historian the shadow of justification for their abuses;
but the mental caste that could adopt any, and every device of deception
and treachery to accomplish its ends, threw itself at once into the arms
of a priestcraft, if possible more implacable than themselves; and
obedient to their demands, tore down their landmarks, and ground their
records to powder.

Surely, there is no fanaticism like religious fanaticism, and no
licentiousness like that of the unbridled devotee of the Church.

Finally, as a whole, I feel confident that my effort will not fail to
create food for thought, and eventually justify the effort which called
it forth. To a nature partially Huguenot in its origin, and more so in
sympathy and inclination, I have tried to add the temperate element that
would impart freedom from undue prejudice and passion; but as the work
is of necessity vindicatory on the one hand, and repressive on the
other, I have been compelled to use good, plain Saxon words in the
closing pages, justified only by the verity of their signification.

The body of the work is given in decimeters, varying in only a few
cases where the expression seemed to require a different form.

I would rather not