In this whole proceeding, Simeon and Levi were brethren; the wicked insinuations of those fanatical preachers stirring up the cruelty of the soldiers, who, by force of arms, excluded from the house every member of Parliament, whom they apprehended to bear the least inclination towards an agreement with the King, suffering only those to enter who thirsted chiefly for his blood; and this is the very account given by their own writers:  From whence it is clear that this Prince was, in all respects, a real martyr for the true religion and the liberty of the people.  That odious Parliament had first turned the bishops out of the House of Lords; in a few years after, they murdered their King; then immediately abolished the whole House of Lords; and so, at last, obtained their wishes, of having a government of the people, and a new religion, both after the manner of Geneva, without a king, a bishop, or a nobleman; and this they blasphemously called “The kingdom of Christ and his saints.”

This is enough for your information on the first head:  I shall therefore proceed to the second, wherein I will shew you the miserable consequences which that abominable rebellion and murder produced in these nations.

First: The Irish rebellion was wholly owing to that wicked English Parliament.  For the leaders in the Irish Popish massacre would never have dared to stir a finger, if they had not been encouraged by that rebellious spirit in the English House of Commons, which they very well knew must disable the King from sending any supplies to his Protestant subjects here; and, therefore, we may truly say that the English Parliament held the King’s hands, while the Irish Papists here were cutting our grandfathers’ throats.

Secondly: That murderous Puritan Parliament, when they had all in their own power, could not agree upon any one method of settling a form either of religion or civil government; but changed every day from schism to schism, from heresy to heresy, and from one faction to another:  From whence arose that wild confusion, still continuing in our several ways of serving God, and those absurd notions of civil power, which have so often torn us with factions more than any other nation in Europe.

Thirdly: To this rebellion and murder have been owing the rise and progress of atheism among us.  For, men observing what numberless villainies of all kinds were committed during twenty years, under pretence of zeal and the reformation of God’s Church, were easily tempted to doubt that all religion was a mere imposture:  And the same spirit of infidelity, so far spread among us at this present, is nothing but the fruit of the seeds sown by those rebellious hypocritical saints.

Fourthly: The old virtue and loyalty, and generous spirit of the English nation, were wholly corrupted by the power, the doctrine, and the example of those wicked people.  Many of the ancient nobility were killed, and their families extinct, in defence of their Prince and country, or murdered by the merciless courts of justice.  Some of the worst among them favoured, or complied with the reigning iniquities, and not a few of the new set created, when the Martyr’s son was restored, were such who had drunk too deep of the bad principles then prevailing.