self astonished at the size of his volume, the
number of his sufferers, and the variety of the sufferings. "Shall the
church," says he, "not have the liberty to preserve the history of her
sufferings, as well as the _separation_ to set forth an account of
theirs? Can Dr. Calamy be acquitted for publishing the history of the
_Bartholomew sufferers_, if I am condemned for writing that of the
_sequestered loyalists_?" He allows that "the number of the ejected
amounts to two thousand," and there were no less than "seven or eight
thousand of the episcopal clergy imprisoned, banished, and sent a
starving," &c. &c.

Whether the reformed were martyred by the catholics, or the catholics
executed by the reformed; whether the puritans expelled those of the
established church, or the established church ejected the puritans, all
seems reducible to two classes, conformists and non-conformists, or, in
the political style, the administration and the opposition. When we
discover that the heads of all parties are of the same hot temperament,
and observe the same evil conduct in similar situations; when we view
honest old Latimer with his own hands hanging a mendicant friar on a
tree, and, the government changing, the friars binding Latimer to the
stake; when we see the French catholics cutting out the tongues of the
protestants, that they might no longer protest; the haughty Luther
writing submissive apologies to Leo the Tenth and Henry the Eighth for
the scurrility with which he had treated them in his writings, and
finding that his apologies were received with contempt, then retracting
his retractations; when we find that haughtiest of the haughty, John
Knox, when Elizabeth first ascended the throne, crouching and repenting
of having written his famous excommunication against all female
sovereignty; or pulling down the monasteries, from the axiom that when
the rookery was destroyed, the rooks would never return; when we find
his recent apologist admiring, while he apologises for, some
extraordinary proofs of Machiavelian politics, an impenetrable mystery
seems to hang over the conduct of men who profess to be guided by the
bloodless code of Jesus. But try them by a human standard, and treat
them as _politicians_, and the motives once discovered, the actions are
understood!

Two edicts of Charles the Fifth, in 1555, condemned to death the
Reformed of the Low Countries, even should they return to the catholic
faith, with this exception