ose fundamental principle on all
sides is to execrate, and abhor, and damn, and extirpate each other,
what choice has the magistrate left but to take part, and by rendering
one sect entirely prevalent, restore, at least for a time, the public
tranquillity? The political body, being here sickly, must not be treated
as if it were in a state of sound health; and an affected neutrality in
the prince, or even a cool preference, may serve only to encourage the
hopes of all the sects, and keep alive their animosity. The Protestants,
far from tolerating the religion of their ancestors, regard it as an
impious and detestable idolatry; and during the late minority, when they
were entirely masters, they enacted very severe, though not capital,
punishments against all exercise of the Catholic worship, and
even against such as barely abstained from their profane rites and
sacraments. Nor are instances wanting of their endeavors to secure an
imagined orthodoxy by the most rigorous executions: Calvin has burned
Servetus at Geneva; Cranmer brought Arians and Anabaptists to the stake;
and if persecution of any kind be admitted, the most bloody and violent
will surely be allowed the most justifiable, as the most effectual.
Imprisonments, fines, confiscations, whippings, serve only to irritate
the sects, without disabling them from resistance: but the stake,
the wheel, and the gibbet, must soon terminate in the extirpation or
banishment of all the heretics inclined to give disturbance, and in the
entire silence and submission of the rest.

The arguments of Gardiner, being more agreeable to the cruel bigotry of
Mary and Philip, were better received; and though Pole pleaded, as
is affirmed,[*] the advice of the emperor, who recommended it to his
daughter-in-law not to exercise violence against the Protestants, and
desired her to consider his own example, who, after endeavoring through
his whole life to extirpate heresy, had in the end reaped nothing but
confusion and disappointment, the scheme of toleration was entirely
rejected. It was determined to let loose the laws in their full vigor
against the reformed religion; and England was soon filled with scenes
of horror, which have ever since rendered the Catholic religion the
object of general detestation and which prove, that no human depravity
can equal revenge and cruelty covered with the mantle of religion.

* Burnet, vol. ii. Heylin, p. 47. It is not likely, however,
that Cha