A refutation of the charge of religious persecution urged against the Catholic religion; being an abridgment of his fourth letter to a prebendary

Abstract

A Refutation, etc.

I have had frequent opportunities of observing, that amongst the many foul caricatures of the religion of our ancestors held up to public view, that which exhibits it as a sanguinary system, supported by swords and muskets, and surrounded with racks, gibbets, and fires, is the one which has been chiefly successful in inflaming the minds of Englishmen with hatred against it and its professors : a hatred which they do not entertain for the unbaptized Quaker, or the antichristian Socinian, and which has sometimes led them into the extremities of cruelty, from the mere hatred of cruelty. Those who feel an interest or a pleasure in exciting this odium, are fully sensible of its fatal efficacy. Hence, they are never weary with ringing the changes on the names of John Huss, and Jerom of Prague, on the massacre of Paris, and especially on the fires of Smithfield. For the same uncharitable purpose, we find the lying Acts and Monuments of John Fox, with large wooden prints of men and women encompassed with faggots and flames, in every leaf of them, chained to the desks of many country-churches, whilst abridgments of this inflammatory work are annually issued from the London presses, under the title of The Book of Martyrs. In the meantime, it is carefully concealed from the knowledge of the public, that Catholics have suffered persecution in this very country, to a much greater degree than they have inflicted it, and that even the various sects of Protestants have persecuted each other, on account of their religious differences, to the extremity of death... [Excerpt]