and vindicate themselves for the elect people of GOD.”  ’Tis so with all other superstitious sects, Mahometans, Gentiles in China, and Tartary:  our ignorant Papists, Anabaptists, Separatists, and peculiar churches of Amsterdam, they alone, and none but they can be saved. [6492]"Zealous” (as Paul saith, Rom. x. 2.) “without knowledge,” they will endure any misery, any trouble, suffer and do that which the sunbeams will not endure to see, Religionis acti Furiis, all extremities, losses and dangers, take any pains, fast, pray, vow chastity, wilful poverty, forsake all and follow their idols, die a thousand deaths as some Jews did to Pilate’s soldiers, in like case, exertos praebentes jugulos, et manifeste prae se ferentes, (as Josephus hath it) cariorem esse rita sibi legis patriae observationem, rather than abjure, or deny the least particle of that religion which their fathers profess, and they themselves have been brought up in, be it never so absurd, ridiculous, they will embrace it, and without farther inquiry or examination of the truth, though it be prodigiously false, they will believe it; they will take much more pains to go to hell, than we shall do to heaven.  Single out the most ignorant of them, convince his understanding, show him his errors, grossness, and absurdities of his sect. Non persuadebis etiamsi persuaseris, he will not be persuaded.  As those pagans told the Jesuits in Japona, [6493]they would do as their forefathers have done:  and with Ratholde the Frisian Prince, go to hell for company, if most of their friends went thither:  they will not be moved, no persuasion, no torture can stir them.  So that papists cannot brag of their vows, poverty, obedience, orders, merits, martyrdoms, fastings, alms, good works, pilgrimages:  much and more than all this, I shall show you, is, and hath been done by these superstitious Gentiles, Pagans, Idolaters and Jews:  their blind zeal and idolatrous superstition in all kinds is much at one; little or no difference, and it is hard to say which is the greatest, which is the grossest.  For if a man shall duly consider those superstitious rites amongst the Ethnics in Japan, the Bannians in Gusart, the Chinese idolaters, [6494]Americans of old, in Mexico especially, Mahometan priests, he shall find the same government almost, the same orders and ceremonies, or so like, that they may seem all apparently to be derived from some heathen spirit, and the Roman hierarchy no better than the rest.  In a word, this is common to all superstition, there is nothing so mad and absurd, so ridiculous, impossible, incredible, which they will not believe, observe, and diligently perform, as much as in them lies; nothing so monstrous to conceive, or intolerable to put in practice, so cruel to suffer, which they will not willingly undertake.  So powerful a thing is superstition. [6495]"O Egypt” (as Trismegistus exclaims) “thy religion is fables, and such as posterity will not believe.”  I know that in true religion