first made, it was duly declared to come from the ‘Holy Ghost;’ so it was after its second polishing under Elizabeth.  To refuse the Queen’s supremacy was death; it was death to continue in that religion, which, at her coronation she had sworn to firmly believe and defend.  It was high treason to admit or harbour, or relieve a priest, and hosts of these were ripped up, for, in the piety of their hearts, risking all to afford the consolations of their religion to the Catholics of England.  Victim after victim came to the sacrifice, mostly from the college of Douay.  It is really horrible to read of these good and faithful champions of their religion being hung, cut down instantaneously, their bellies ripped up, their hearts cut out, their bodies chopped in pieces with every insult and indignity added to injury, all through this reign, and then to be talked to about ’bloody Mary,’ and the ‘Good Queen-Bess.’  Verily, countrymen, you are vilely deceived.  Taking into account the rippings, and burnings, and roastings, and hanging; the racks, whips, fines, imprisonments, and other horrors of the reign of this ‘Good Bess,’ there was a hundred times more human misery inflicted in her reign than in that of’ Bloody Mary.’ [82:1]

The second Catherine of Russia, though remarkable for rigid and scrupulous adherence to the ceremonial mummeries of her ‘true church,’ was at the same time as remarkable for liberality of sentiment.  It is said, that upon a certain occasion, being strongly advised by her ministers to deal out severe punishment on some heretics of Atheistical tendencies, who had given offence by rather freely expressing their opinions, she laughingly said, ’Oh, fie, gentlemen fie, if these heretics are to be eternally miserable in the other world, we really ought to let them be comfortable in this.’

Few religious persons are liberal as this empress, whose strong good sense seems to have been fully a match for her bad education:  that education was Christian.  She was taught to loathe the opinions, aye, and the persons, of heretics, under which denomination may be included all dissenters from religious truth as it was in her, or rather in the church of which she was chief member.  No other kind of teaching is accounted orthodox in our ‘land of Bibles’ than that of state paid priests of law established religion.  Look at the true Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles.  Do they not abound in anathema, and literally teem with the venom of intolerance?  Do they not shock the better feelings even of those who believe them divine?  The truth is, all priests teach religion which no wit can reconcile with reason, and very many of them make their followers believe, and perhaps believe themselves, that to villify, abuse, and hunt down ‘infidels,’ are acts acceptable in the sight of God.  The idea of compensating poor unbelievers in this world by an extra quantum of comfort for the torments they are doomed to suffer in the next, never enters their head.  Indeed,