least, the Devil himself.  He who is without God cannot run into absurdities and blasphemies like these, whereas he who is with one cannot keep clear of them.  If consistent he must clothe Him with Calvinistic attributes.  To present Him stripped of foreknowledge, or omnipotency would outrage all just conception of that ‘Immense Being’ who brought his worshippers out of nothing.  And yet if we allow him these attributes there is no help for us, headlong we go into the dark and fathomless doctrine of predestination, than which no religious doctrine is so consistent or so revolting.  Receive it, and at once you find yourself bound heart and brain to belief in a supernatural MONSTER—­’a vengeful, pitiless, and Almighty Fiend, whose mercies are a nickname for the rage of hungry tigers.’

The believers in this terrible offspring of heated imagination, naturally aim at imitating, and thus rendering themselves acceptable, to Him.  Here is the source, whence for ages have flowed the bitter waters of religious intolerance.  If Calvin had not worshipped a cruel God, he never could have hoped to please Him by the murder of Servetius.  If Cranmer had wanted lively faith in a God who people’s Hell ’with millions of immortal souls,’ he never would have brought Joan Bocher to the stake.  Full of that Christian zeal, so ‘apt to tarn sour,’ these men lived like the hermit Honorius, ’in hopes of gaining heaven by making earth a hell.’

The savage bigotry of an Elizabeth or a Mary, naturally resulted from the notion that monarchs unquestionably ruling by Divine right, were called upon by every earthly, as well as heavenly consideration, to prove their zeal in the cause of God, by destroying His adversaries.  Heretics have been consigned to dungeon and to name, for His glory, and His satisfaction.  All inquisitors from St. Dominic downward, have indignantly repelled the charge that they have punished heretics just to glut their own appetite for cruelty.  Worshippers of a God who saith, ‘vengeance is mine,’ they have felt themselves mere instruments in His hands; of themselves, and for themselves, they did nothing; all was for God.  To please Him, the Jew and the Heretic shrieked amid the flames.  They are not ashamed, why should they? to perform His behests.  When the late Duke of York was about to leave Lisbon, its Inquisitor-General waited upon him, with a humble request that he would delay his departure for a few days, in order to make one at an Auto da Fe, where it was kindly promised, some Jews should be burnt for his diversion:  so cruel and so blind are the superstitious.

Queen Mary has long been the mark at which our most eloquent Protestant Divines have aimed their shafts, while of her no less ‘bloody’ sister’s reputation, they have been most watchful and tender.  With respect to her persecution of heretics, they preserve a death-like silence.  Fear of damaging Protestantism deters them from exposing the enormous abomination of Protestant monarchs.  Against the